False Entry (36 page)

Six hours later, he left for Tuscana. There was no need for this kind of hurry, but after sending his telegram, he had spent the last four hours sitting on his bed, his packed bags between his ankles, and arrived at the One Hundred Twenty-fifth Street Station an hour and three quarters before train time. The station was deserted, as if only his being awake maintained it. Dawn came while he sat, misnomer here for a stir of air the color of bird droppings. Above the disordered sea bottom of these streets, houses appeared marine and wavering, as if already obscuring, liming with his absence, his banishment, in a beginning rain of invisible ash. Not yet aboard the train, he was already looking back with the paranoid glance of departure, in which cities crumple as we leave them, and the scenes of destination precede us into being one moment before we arrive. Already his was coming out to meet him along thread after thread, respun at a touch, that he had thought destroyed. Down there the house waited to puff into being at his presence, the smell of tea, arrack sweated from a thousand pots, in all its corners; from one of them his uncle coughed his exact and maddening interval; in another his mother waited with marionette patience, opening and closing her convex eye.

In the train speeding away from Grand Central, he told himself that he could still get off at the next station, but when it arrived there he did not move except to take out the letter, grasping it unreopened, as if it were an amulet to hold him down. As the car filled, he wondered how many others, in all trains, were consigning themselves by their own hand toward destinations which their very cells refused. Places were not upheld by sand and girders finally, but by the heart—that sometimes faltered—beyond that, to the last trump, by the memory that sometimes tricked but never faltered, that was the heart of life. To know this beforehand was the worst precocity of all.

A
T THE LAST DITCH
few of us have time for salutations. “You got my letter?” said his uncle, meeting him at the train, and he nodded, not knowing what else to do, because of what his mother had said in hers.
Later on I shall have to be in hospital
,
and would rather see you before. Rollins was wrong. The clinic in Denoyeville gives me about three months at the outside. George knows
,
but is not sure that I do
,
so we do not speak of it. Mind you do not. Better so for now.
God bless, she had said at the end, but no salutation. And as his uncle clasped his hand and looked into his face, he had his first sense of how people, huddled cipher to cipher on the embankment under the great, overarching span of death, might have no immediate use for names.

“You’ll find her changed,” said his uncle, and Pierre nodded again, unable to speak, finding his uncle so changed. His uncle’s face, even-featured to the point of anonymity, never in his remembrance sweated or flushed with drama, still persisted, but now it looked as if some gross amateur stagecraft had been at it, puttying at the cheeks, scoring lampblack under the eyes, making of it an anomaly beneath whose exaggerations the median man of fifty had disappeared, leaving the beholder in the wings to choose for himself whether this was an old man or a young. When last seen at this same train, his uncle, in a soiled shirt and tieless, nevertheless had had the air of a man caught short by a disaster with which he still felt able to deal. Now, in a dark suit and collar pin, his dress had the same excessive, finicky neatness of those houses, swept clean of every mortal odor, that wait for bereavement.

The car too, the same one, shone in the dark as they crossed the siding to it; she was still able to take a drive in it afternoons. There were no other cars waiting. Tuscana was no longer the main line. Eastward over the ridge there was a faint palpitation in the heavens that real newcomers might mistake for heat lightning, never suspecting, if arrived from the west instead of the north, the tremendous kingdom of light that lay beyond the hump of this one remaining hill. Once out on the main street, it would surround them, crowd them to the center of its fixed swarm, but here, on the old siding, Tuscana had remained to itself as it had in him, a pocket of darkness that had resisted everything but eternity. The car started painfully, needing to be coaxed. While they sat in it as it warmed up, his uncle fallen momentarily silent, crouched in the tender alertness toward mechanism that was his bond with the new world, every sluggish throb of gas-tinctured air breathed him, Pierre, back into his boyhood—if he loosed memory by one inch from its halter he would see, to the left, a line of cars advancing single in the starlight … careful, he must remember that he had seen them going, not returning … he would hear a boy’s voice exclaim, “You come through the backs?” As he had now. He had come through the backs of the present, always accumulating behind one; the place of arrival, the place of departure were reversed. He was here. Then the old engine caught firmly, with a powerful rejuvenated purr in which one could clearly hear the tappets, sounding louder, more capable than the quiet, city-serviced motor of the car he had driven only two days ago—ready to roll him once again along the streets of his valedictory walk. He waited, flinching. Instead, his uncle took his foot off the gas, letting the engine die to a pulse, remained for some seconds with his hands forgetful on the wheel, then turned and placed one hard palm on Pierre’s knee. The red signal blinked, reflected, a manic point of red in his still steady eye.

“I curse Rollins,” said his uncle. “I curse him eternally.” That was his confidence. Then he removed the hand.

There had been no stroke, he said, at least not one detached and causative in itself. She had a growth on the spine, now inoperable, that must momentarily have encroached on the neuromuscular systems back there three years ago, then receded, and was now dexterously busy impairing one vital function, releasing it to pursue another, on its ultimately single-minded path. These last weeks, in a miraculous recrudescence of strength, she had risen from her bed and taken over the household, but the clinic had warned him that this kind of change often occurred in such cases, where the heart and other organs were strong; he was not to hope. It was the last flare-up, in which the body, dominating its damaged parts, held its shape together for one bright image of itself before it fell; she was being consumed.

I curse Rollins. His uncle, rousing the car again, drove them off without repeating the words, but Pierre, hearing their echo, heard Johnny’s in their trek up the hill, blaming Semple, hanging the whole cathedral of the town’s evil, the angel-gargoyle framework of any town anywhere, or all good-and-evil, on him. This was the human mind, simple or profound, unable to face the matrix of causation, gagging at the sight of the crisscrossed inflections covering what should, must be the central absolute, hunting down some Judas to bear the monotheistic blame. It was
she
…
he
…
they;
curse
him.
And when all else failed, then came that last cry from the depths, from the dark workings before priests were heard of:
mea culpa
, curse me. Poor Johnny, poor uncle—poor Rollins, who must every day be confronted with blame to assign. Where his own mother might assign it—whom she would choose—he must hold himself in readiness to bear.

So he came home, heeding those streets for whose pattern he had been preparing himself all the long train ride down. The street leading to their own was dark as they approached the long line of houses, but as they turned left, a yellow neon sign, far down to the right, imprinted itself as it flared backward: the Bantam
Café.
Not as he had dreamed it, the return, never as one dreams it—the wild image treasured or feared. But it had come to be. He was home.

One house was widely lit—theirs. “You have awnings?” he said, incredulous, even with a jealous twinge of resentment because the house he had been so reluctant to see no longer jibed with his memory of it.

“She asked for them this spring,” muttered his uncle, then, as they drew up, gave one of the exclamations, half resigned, half impatient, with which the tenders of the sick meet the vagaries of the ill one. His mother was standing in the door. Above her the awnings, striped mascara and white, one to a window, projected the house forward with a tropic falseness; beneath them, around the door, a trellis had been erected, in the center of which his mother’s figure, tiny in its usual dark habit, one hand resting on the latticework, the vine shadows clambering over her face, seemed that of a soubrette about to sing. As he came up the steps, the porch light was on his face, the trumpet-shaped shadows quivering on hers, but one glance at her dress, upright almost of its own stiffness, told him all he needed. Plain as her clothes were, each of them had always fitted her to the quarter-inch; it was her one vanity. Now her collar, once round and tight, slumped on her breast and fell inward; the cuffs of her sleeves, doubled in circumference, enclosed wrists that dangled within them like a child’s. Glancing down without meaning to, he saw stockings hopelessly girdling legs like canes, and quickly averted his eyes. Two steps above him, she bent her head toward his, chin thrust forward, mouth turned down at the corners.

“Yes, yes,” she breathed, “yes”; as if he must mourn with her the worst—the terrible collapse of her neatness. Gazing up, he held his own breath, thinking that he must never again for one second let her see him flinch from the sight of her—the hooded eyelids swollen to casques, lips the color of veal. One step up and he had enclosed her, and circling almost nothing, still sought her. Under his nostrils he smelled an odor that no orris could cover, never met before, instantly known to the full in an animal opening of all his senses. He knew what he held—he held mortality in his arms.

There was no scene; what it came to was that, still upright, every faculty erect, she had faded too far back for one. She had no more perspective, or only one; therefore all was clear. The great fact, for her, was the general scene; she could scorn, or perhaps had even forgotten, those fragmentary intensifications of it with which others tried to thrash themselves free of the dull prospect before them. Every day, as she diminished, she knew more incontrovertibly where she was. And what dignity spread from her because of it; one could almost understand from the sight of it why a man might spend his life walking this way, that, around the question of where was he. “This was the mercy,” Pierre told himself later, “that we had read of, had heard accounts of as descending, in their last days, upon the dying, but its heights, if such they were, were too sore for us. In the aphasia of living that was our own daily mercy, we gathered dimness warmly around us, and told ourselves that she was ‘fading.’”

That evening she gave them one flash of it—one strike of the match to show them in their darkness where she was, then no more. It was after dinner, after they had eaten all they could, watching her not eat, had listened to her find questions for them when they could speak no further.

“Let’s not pretend,” she said suddenly, and put her hands forth on the white dinner cloth, then withdrew them, perhaps because of what they now were. He could have told her, had there been any way to say it, that he had already grown used to them, that because of the infinitely adjustable lens he had just discovered we all carried inside us, even the mask she now wore was once more his mother. His uncle, sitting stiffened in his chair, made him hear her words, delayed.

“Let’s not pretend,” she said. “It’s too much for us. Each of us not knowing for sure what the other knows. A waste, too.” She leaned forward. “George … you know. They told you.” She paused. His uncle sat motionless. “And
he
knows. I wrote him. To New York. That’s why he’s here.”

Would she never name him? But she was gesturing to herself, drawing a hand down the whole length of her from shrunken bodice to ankle, forcing them to survey her. She looked at them both with pity. “And I know,” she said.

In the silence that followed, a great embarrassment stretched between them, as if the three of them were a childish gang caught out by authority in a joint misdeed. Then his uncle, that strange man of actions so few, reached out for her hands and put them back on the table. They lay there like the purest drawings, anatomized by life. The very cloth whitened beneath them, as if it had a piece of truth lying upon it. Then he covered them with his own. “When did you know?” he said.

She smiled, grinned rather, for in the way of people who die of attrition, the contracting flesh of her upper jaw was daily starving the skull into sight. Looking at that impish, still delicate protrusion, all their triangular pretense, every pretense could fall away, even into a kind of rest, as if health were only a long lapse of memory, now repaired, behind which she was showing them the one certainty that gave life—even joy—its character. “When I asked for the awnings,” she said. “They had them in France, when I was a girl. In hot summer, there’s nothing makes one feel so cool, so rich. I always wanted them. So, when I asked them at the hospital how much time I had, and they told me, I thought—‘I’ll have the awnings.’”

And in the weeks after, it seemed to Pierre that it was objects she clung to, not in the way of a person who could not bear to leave her hoard behind, but as if their positive presence were a help in delaying hers. The house had never been so polished, so serene, so stopped in every crevice. The servant Lucine, a quiet yellow woman with convent manners, came daily, and between them they restocked the household linen, rivers of it flowing beneath their hands, as if his mother meant to leave behind her a trousseau of all the things men would never think of, enough to last them forever. In the evenings after dinner, Pierre sometimes caught her scrutinizing the room, almost chairbound as she now was, in the thoughtful way that women did in the springtime, and one of those evenings, his uncle being absent at the “pub,” kept to that habit at her insistence, she made Pierre rearrange all the furniture in the parlor, saying exhaustedly when it was over, “There. That will be a better light for your uncle. Yes. There.”