False Entry (50 page)

Holding on to my wet thigh to keep the faint from me, I wondered why she did not speak to me. Then, my eyes clearing, I understood. Darkness had fallen—she could not see me.

Before I could make myself known, she spoke again, from her side of the dark. Over and over it came, that ululation.

“One of them is moving. One is. Oh God, oh God. Speak to me. Who is there? Who?”

I had to answer her somehow, from my side of the dark. Out of the depths, I gave her my lifelong answer.

“I.”

F
OR THREE NIGHTS SINCE,
I have sat here and written nothing. Confession, one assumes, will be like coming in out of a great wind. Instead, mine blew me on in a continuous circle. Over and over, my mother and I were taken to hospital, where my contemptible wound was dressed, where, toward morning, as soon as the sun affirmed an indifferent world, different to her, she died of hers. With every cell corrupted, she died upright, conscious, grieving. Over and over, I sat by her bedside, watching to what end might come, would come, that power of which I had inherited my dram’s worth. And over and over, Dobbin, waiting, my bags in hand, in the anteroom, plucked me from the still room and drove me ninety-five miles through the just glinting countryside, to the safety of a train. There, until it began again, the round ended.

Last night, hoping to stop that haggard marathon, I broke the promise made to myself—not to read back. It did as I hoped. Even a memoir does not stand still. I was not the person who had first sat down.

What have I learned, then.
What have I learned
? That we live between certain arcs, not self-imposed? Looking backward, as commemoration only, is not good enough. Death
is.
Tragedy resides not in the facts of existence, but in the mutations between. Change is the tragedy. Where else can we find hope then, except there?

While I wrote, the telephone rang, at the same odd hour. It’s almost four. Ruth is back from London, then, with my letter. She rang at this time, so that I might know it was she. Also, because she too has her struggles, perhaps even her mystery. I’ve lost enough arrogance now to admit even that. I don’t refer to the commonplace that every human unit is a mystery. What if there should be something special which—how else could she have been so knowing, so drawn toward me? “You are so …” she said. And I asked “What?” and got my reply. “Honest.” The lives of others always look so active, so competent, so lacking in the specious—to ourselves. What if, all the time I have been monologuing here, she in her turn … ?

Vade retro.
I must keep to my line. Looking backward in itself is nothing. There is still the whole chapter of devices that my life has been since. The phone rang, but I didn’t answer it. I wasn’t ready for her. Not yet. Not quite.

W
HAT I REVEAL NOW
is indeed a chapter of devices twenty years long—all to be summarized as briefly as possible except the last. From the outside, this second half of my life would certainly be chosen as the important one, bright with all the tangible events of manhood—war service, a career of sorts, a thin chain mail of affiliation with society—all that increasing clutter which we call maturation. Only I came to know, gradually and in secret, how the first half, bulging as the forehead of a fetus over the tentative face beneath, always overhung the other. For a long time I didn’t know this fully.

When I returned to a New York still emptied by summer, I went directly to a small, cheap theatrical hotel I knew of in the West Forties, had my trunk transferred from the fraternity house to the hotel basement, and sat down at my narrow window facing the fire shaft, to consider. Life with no goal, in a small hotel room of that kind, on a round from bureau, to closet, to hall toilet, on a circuit of exits and returns for eating, can itself be obsessive. For two weeks, with such intermissions, I sat there, writing no letters, making no phone calls, the room’s buzzer never sounding for me except by mistake. No one known to me knew where I was. Against habit, I took no great walks, did not even read. If I had an obsession, it was that I might meet the two in New York from whom I had absconded—Serlin, even though long since gone to New Hampshire—and Lovey. Therefore, though I knew it was foolish, I kept to the immediate district, avoiding the main library and shops, the garment section where Bijur’s was, and one nearby street, devoted to hats and artificial flowers, which Lovey sometimes frequented for bargains. These two had been my sole intimates; graduation and school dispersal had relieved me of most acquaintance. Those other two who had known me best were dead, my need for them numbed forever by the manner of their death, my role in it. Or so it seemed. I was as free of ties now as might fill any man with hope—or despair. No one knew where I was; no one here knew
who
I was. I was free to contemplate, if I wished, my identity. But this interim was the reverse of those three days before I had first left Tuscana, during which I had first dealt with that simple, cosmic drop into space, down whose shaft one falls soundlessly asking, “Who am I?” I’d my identity now, and my glands were choked with the bitter thing, my head split with it. I knew what I was now, and who. Or, in my innocence, so it seemed.

Everything passes, a pendulum statement, neither good, neither bad. In people, this quality is shamefacedly called “contrariness” or worse, since we like to think of ourselves as faithful even to a bad situation, but it is often as much of a spur as ambition, and more often a part of the natural equipment. My scholarship money was almost gone, and jobs were still not to be had for the picking in 1939. Breaking from anonymity just long enough to apply to the college’s job bureau for whatever they had in the way of summer leftovers, I was surprised to find a niche that just suited: twenty-five dollars per week as one of a corps of all ages and status, both student and permanent, which was working on various encyclopedias, classical dictionaries, a vast project of all sorts of compendia, under the tutelage of a man as unusual in some ways as his name, one A. B. C. Lasch. Mr. Lasch had no personal monies to expend on omniscience, but was of that breed of devotee whose religious energy attracts backers, one of whom had deeded the large, slightly dilapidated Westchester estate in which the establishment was housed. Over it Mr. Lasch presided year after year—it was rumored that he was now a sixty who looked forty—a testimony of the contentment to be found in the quiet routines of a madness intelligibly pursued. Such a place, staffed inevitably with the “special,” who were then isolated morning after morning with the intangible, should have been prey to all the coterie ills—but these either melted away or were banished under Mr. Lasch’s arbitrary, impersonal, always light hand. He seemed to have effected some of that harmony whose will-o’-the-wisp certain colonies have pursued by theory; perhaps because, beyond the assemblage of fact for its own sake, he appeared to have no theories whatsoever. He had the advantage, of course, of excesses focused on a kind of norm—dictionaries need no excusing. But fact was king here; one could never get from Mr. Lasch any kind of
a priori
remark, personal or general, that preceded it. Surely he had his own story, but I, already something of a master, could never collect his, even as to whether his initials were the result of his
idée fixe
or its cause—a routine tease that merely drew his smile. It was clear that he spent all his juices of mind, sex, and heart on his compilations. Such a wine-squeezing should have left him
sec
as a centipede; instead one found a man as round and rubicund as some good abbot, genial without prattle, silent but not taciturn—happy.

And of course, such talents as I happened to own suited him mightily; one could have thought, from his pleasure, that all my history had portended my arrival here—as perhaps it had. After a short time, I was invited to leave my furnished room in nearby Mt. Vernon and join the small circle of resident staff. At end of summer, when other student aides left but I did not, he was surprised, then thoughtful. Clearly he was greedy for me to stay. When he heard that I would, he didn’t press for my reasons, only saying, “Stick with us, then. You shan’t lose by it.” Nor, in a way, have I.

That first stint, I stayed for some eight months. My decision not to return to college seemed to me already fixed at the time when I had failed to mail a letter of explanation to Serlin, as absolute as a formal resignation, and one that it never occurred to me was not irreparable. Probably this was the one purely romantic gesture of my life—if one takes romanticism to be, as I do, those lies one tells not to others but to oneself. I told myself that the serene course of my college life to date, the approval which had been slowly accruing, was neither my fate nor my style; not that I felt myself unworthy, rather that real worth ought not to come along so gently, giving no trouble, into that enclosure where so many others already were. Probably that is true, in the large. Actually, I felt relieved to be away from the temptations of that enclosure. I gave up college exactly as I had once tried to discard Demuth’s chocolate. I could not bear to be helped.

After a few months, I did communicate with Dobbin, to whom I had given power of attorney, after he had pointed out to me, during the course of that long ride, that my uncle had predeceased my mother, and that I was my mother’s heir. More months went by before I had a reply, under the heading of the Boston law firm of which Dobbin was a partner. They were very glad to hear of my whereabouts, since the house had been sold and the estate was shortly due to be settled. With the sale of the house added to my uncle’s savings and a small account of my mother’s, the total would amount to some fourteen thousand dollars, which, after the proper formalities, they would remit, along with a box of effects that had been held for me. Mr. Dobbin had been overseas since October last, moving from place to place, and was likely to continue so in view of conditions in Europe, but had left word before going that he was to be notified of my address as soon as found, since there were certain matters of which he preferred to write personally. This had been done. Meanwhile, also at his suggestion, they were to consider themselves at my disposal for any future legal services I might require.

Dobbin was overseas. This was what the letter really brought home to me. I have had the luck always to be able to treat money pretty concretely, hanging no extra symbolism on what already had enough effluence as it stood. The sum impressed me, and had its deep, associative pangs, but I went through no “blood money” attitudes about it; almost at once it receded to a certain distance, as something beyond my expectations, that until I had a need for it or found one, would not be quite mine. But Dobbin was overseas, and had been since October.

The sun, where I stood with the letter under one of the horse chestnuts, striped Lasch’s dead, yellow lawn with chipmunk black. While I stood there, it went in and out several times with a pale Cheshire smile and finally took itself off altogether behind the gray clouds muddled above the chimneys of the long sham-Tudor house, leaving a fresh cold through which the pure smell of leaf smoke twisted from a few hedgerows away. I had come to like this place mildly for its heavy 1900 virtues of wood, stone, and fumed-oak interior colors blazoned here and there on corners of arranged, fake dark that would not terrify a child. It was comfortable, at my bachelor age, to live among the drabs and absurdities of a bygone taste, released, as in a hotel or boardinghouse, from any exertions of my own. We lived then, Lasch and a few others of quiet persuasion, several physically handicapped, all single, behind mullioned windows, hard to open or repair, whose shared nuisance imparted a light sense of family, in winter lunchtimes (Lasch ran no commissary) appropriately knocking the snow from our boots against the tarnished greaves of several suits of armor which stood about the hall. It was one of those satisfactorily dim places of employment, rapidly vanishing from a world that seemed all “outer,” which gave one a sense of being able to stay on in it forever, and more than one drawn here by his own peculiarities had been soothed into that intention. Much the youngest here, I meant to linger in this backwater only until my own intentions declared themselves, not yet awhile perhaps—soon. The letter in my hand, whipped by the wind, flapped like a pinwheel, more active a paper than those dailies which entered the house each morning like tabbies, deposited communiqués already dead, and were gone again at nightfall. I looked up at the horse chestnut waving its branches above me, already dropping new husks on some of last year’s satiny brown fruit at my feet—a genus of tree first seen here, but long since mingled for me, in the fast-blotted reference map of my generation, with its forebears on the Bois (Odettes now behind the Maginot Line), with its collateral cousins steadily and impartially growing a fragrance of
wunderschönen Monat Mai
(I knew my Heine now also) as
auf wieder
to men goose-stepping away from Unter den Linden. Where was Dobbin, “moving from place to place,” now?

The house, on a rise of land at a squire’s distance from its own pillarbox, withdrew in its own Anglophile light, gathered back like a house in an engraving, although I knew that distance also to be slightly faked. Nevertheless, we were farther behind the lines there than even the rest of the country; as many newspapers as entered it did so more to be clipped than to be read, and I already felt a young man’s distaste for people who could be so quickly antiquarian with life. Even our one refugee, a Viennese librarian named Schott, was a queer exemplar of martyrdom—a handsome man in his forties who gave us no help in our heavy “sympathizer” discussions, breaking in on them, eyes rimmed with
boulevardier
red, to tickle the nape of our younger female resident (a lame girl named Delphine Smith) with a pointed nail that each time crept toward more meaningful areas. Schott was a professed opportunist, openly amused at our puritan need to see him morally all of a piece with his martyrdom, who meanwhile busily engaged himself in testing the stuff of his new American existence with a trader’s thumb. A man eager and didactic on the subject of rich acquaintance, already a weekender in the environs, he kept inviting me to tennis on the courts of his new cronies and had only yesterday proposed a whorehouse, not for information—he was already the patron of a good one—but for the fresher luster of my company, since, as he said, tossing his head with a strawberry-lipped laugh at the drama young men made of these visits here, surely the European custom of going regularly with one or more good companions was more civilized, and on these occasions he disliked the company, rich or not, of the old. I meant to go with him. But meanwhile, the British had declared war in September. The letter blew from my hand and I retrieved it. “Overseas,” it said, not the civilian “abroad.” The wind that blew it was a March wind. And meanwhile Dobbin, who for all his “theme” saw the law with a politician’s squint, who in August I could have sworn to be Ambition walking, must have put his judgeship aside and had been overseas since October.