I thanked him and apologized for my hysteria. “Good-by,” he told me and, as I retreated down the corridor, I could feel his eyes still on me.
As we drove back towards Boston, I ate one of the apples. My thorough enjoyment of its flavor and its frosty grain bitterly amused me: my perturbation was not of heroic enough proportions to kill my appetite; it was even likely, I thought, that I would sleep no worse than usual tonight. The satisfaction of my hunger urged me on to further practical action, and I proceeded to sound out for their utility the several impulses that came to me. My first and strongest was to go at once to Philip. It would be possible to tell him honestly why I could not live with my mother again, for he did not draw a sharp line between sanity and insanity but saw innumerable nuances between the two poles. But would a conversation with him now be as easy as in the old days, now that our incompleted gestures, their instigation unplumbed, were between us like a transgression that was not confessed because, having the appearance of accident, its premeditation on the part of either of us could not be proved? On the other hand, perhaps if I appealed to him now in my trouble and now that he had entered into a contract which precluded the maturation of that fumbling, dumb desire which had fled from the one of us as soon as it had made itself known to the other, perhaps now we could step backwards and, starting fresh, proceed as before. As before. But could I, in this darkness, find my way back through the détour where shaggy shapes misled the eye: the shapes of might have been and still might be? And where, at such an hour, would I find him? Even if he were at home in his three large rooms on Beacon Street, would it not be highly improper for me to call upon him there even for advice? But he would not be at home. He would be somewhere with his fiancée. They were undoubtedly already being fêted. Someone would have arranged an impromptu cocktail party for them and they would be there now, receiving congratulations. Even if I went to him, even if he had nothing else to do but listen to me, he would not be able to keep his mind on what I said.
Would it be better to warn Miss Pride at once? Should I go directly to her bedroom where she would be resting until tea time and beg her for help, telling her that she alone in all the world could give it to me? She was angry with me; she had made it clear this morning that she did not want to be troubled with me for the next three weeks. Another time she might be sympathetic, might even suggest some way to preserve the separation from my mother, but the marriage of her niece was of more importance to her now than anything else; my life, beside it, was a project like the memoirs which must be set aside for the time being. I could not risk it. I would wait until the wedding was over, and then some evening, just before she picked up the Boston Evening Transcript, I would say, “Miss Pride, may I ask your advice?”
Or should I now at this moment pick up the speaking tube and say, “Mac, turn around as soon as you can and drive me to New York.” When I was alone in the car, Mac gave in to his temptations and drove both fast and recklessly. While sometimes I recalled with terror the talk of the old ladies who declared that he had heart disease and might suddenly die at the wheel, today his speed and his narrow escapes thrilled me as if he were already obeying my command to take me far away and swiftly to a new life. But the squat shops and movie theaters of Mattapan were already huddled on either side of us and we slowed down with the thick traffic. Nudged on one side by an endless line of cars and on the other by the trolley that lurched slowly forward with loud ejaculations, at times we barely moved and I was gradually invaded by claustrophobia so insistent that the ligaments of my arms and legs began to ache as if I were actually cramped into a small space. How patiently our moral nature bides its time, how adroitly sets its stage, parting its curtains suddenly. As unprepared as Gertrude or her king, we willy-nilly witness our own villainy played out. It had not crossed my mind until I felt myself hampered, buried alive by the creeping machinery all about me that perhaps what the doctor had said was true and that my mother fully knew she was a prisoner whose release depended on me. Was it not the meanest beastliness even to think of flight? I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror above the wind-shield, and saw my black hair. What if I unpinned it some time as she did always in her frenzies? What if my own passions became hopelessly entangled in a desperate disorder and what then if Miss Pride cold-bloodedly, like me, disburdened herself by sending me off to an asylum and stopped her ears to my entreaties? For ours were not the kind of aberrations that Hopestill’s fashionable psychiatrist could cure.
I suffered from my punishment. But I made a bargain with my sense of duty: I said that the red room would be my refuge, that when the time came I would resume the battle on the condition that I might always return to it, as a warrior pauses to pray. The milder, though not sovereign, wardens of my being, granted me permission, and a little comforted, I sank back on the cushions as we pushed on.
The house would be silent and my room would be cold. I did not want to go home. I remembered Nathan’s invitation, and although it was not yet five o’clock, I directed Mac to drop me at the Copley Square subway station. My reason for going to him was no longer to find out how great a fool I had made of myself the night before. It was that I wanted company and I could think of no one more appropriate than my old friend whom I had used to watch reading on early winter nights.
4
The overwashed young man, his birthmark veiled in a shadow, was hard to establish in the surroundings of last evening and equally hard to establish in this cold, filthy, malodorous subterranean suite of two small rooms densely populated with furniture so shabby, fractured in so many places, that it seemed to be totally useless rubbish. I saw, as soon as I went in, that on his sick and sober awakening, Nathan had had no stomach for the visit he had suggested and that probably he had hoped I would not come. Not without irritation, he said, “Oh, it’s you. It’s only five. I thought I told you eight.”
“I know,” I replied. “I just had nothing else to do. I brought you some apples.”
Perplexed, he took the paper bag from me; as he withdrew an apple, a shower of rose petals fell to the floor. “What the hell’s going on?” he said.
I looked brightly about his place, ignoring the question, and said, “Well, you’re cozy here.” He was anything but cozy. The only light came from two small, high windows through which I saw a steady parade of legs marching briskly past as if they had been amputated but had retained their power of locomotion. There was no rug on the cement floor and this accounted, I supposed, for the galoshes that Nathan had neatly fastened over his trouser legs. There was a couch, covered with a foul green blanket, burned and stained; two over-stuffed chairs with ruptured seats from which batting and horsehair indecently protruded; a desk, littered with papers, orange rinds, dirty cups, soiled handkerchiefs; a bookcase; a standing lamp with a paper shade decorated with a sailboat on a blue sea as flat as a table top. In the corners there were bundles, the wash or merely rags I could not tell, and stacks of magazines and pasteboard cartons full of trash. The air was damp and weighted with a strong odor comprised, I thought, of stale cigarette smoke and scorched coffee and fried meat. And yet the occupant of this squalid cell was cleaner than I had ever seen him. I thought at once of the young man, Mr. Garvin, whom I had met at the Countess’ and who had impressed me because he gleamed so brightly with soap and water. I said, looking from Nathan to the unsightly blanket on the couch, “Do you sleep here?” and he turned down the cover to show me a pair of clean sheets.
“At present personal cleanliness is my principal fetish.”
“Do you know a person named Garvin?” I asked.
“Certainly. And you knew I knew him. He reported to me at once that he had seen you at that fat German’s house. And, yes, you’re quite right, I got the washing habit from him.”
“She’s not German, she’s Viennese,” I said. “He did tell you he had met me? Why didn’t you look me up?”
He shrugged his shoulders and with his old, still breathtaking
gesture, drew his long fingers over his cheek. “Our last meeting—I mean in Chichester, not last night—didn’t leave me with the feeling that you would want to see me again.”
“But you misunderstood me!” I cried.
“I had hopes that that was the case, but since you never tried to explain, I assumed you didn’t want to explain. And there’s no use in your doing it now, because I have other fish to fry.”
I was irritated that he thought I had come to resume our adolescent flirtation. “And what makes you think I haven’t? You’re as vain as ever, I see.”
He did not reply. I sat down on the couch and for a time we were silent while he ate his apple. When he had finished he wiped his lips with the back of his hand and reaching down behind the desk brought out a gallon jug. “I suppose you want some of this? I haven’t any glasses but I have some teacups. It is sherry, the poor dipsomaniac’s drink. Well?” I thanked him, forgetting Miss Pride’s admonition. He went on. “Yes, I am glad to see you. The past, that is, the past prior to that aforesaid encounter, comes back rather pleasantly. The fog, for instance. I hadn’t thought of it for months.”
His eyes narrowed dreamily to show that he was thinking of it now with enjoyment. Likewise, to me, the past came back, for he had presented me with the brilliant cheek and my fingers tightened round the handle of the teacup, restraining themselves from reaching out to touch the skin.
“Oh, rest assured I didn’t forget you. I merely set you aside as something completed, the way I did when I finally had to admit that your father wasn’t coming back.”
“You said last night you hadn’t been in Chichester. Why not?”
“Why should I? Oh, I probably neglected to tell you my family moved to Lynn. But my family would never be a reason for my going back there anyhow. I did go back though, twice, just out of curiosity to know what the dump looked like. The first time it was in the summer and all I did was get a bottle of Moxie at Bennett’s and get out as quick as I could. There was one of those Barstow hags in the store buying a stick of camphor ice. But the next time I went it was in the winter and it made me sort of nostalgic to walk past your house late in the afternoon. At first I thought I saw a light in the window but it was only a reflection of the sun. Does your mother live there by herself?”
“No,” I said. “No, she isn’t there any more.”
He did not press me and while I longed to tell him where Mamma was, I checked myself and instead poured out to him the story of my meeting with Miss Pride last night and this morning, putting into my account all the feeling I had about my talk with the asylum doctor. Nathan, at first surprised that I had taken my scolding so seriously and then disturbed because he felt he was to blame, comforted me with sincere little speeches which I applied privately to my future with my mother rather than to the one with Miss Pride. He said such things as, “But it will all be over and forgotten,” “No one in the world is that important,” or “Things will be the same as ever in a little while.”
“But you don’t know,” I said. “You don’t know her.”
“Why do you care so much? She sounds like a bitch. May I have another apple?”
“Certainly. I brought them to you.”
“They’re good apples.”
As he ate, the fresh odor reached me through the other smells, and I said suddenly, almost without plan, “Look here, can I come to see you every Sunday?”
He looked at me over the apple in surprise. “That’s a very peculiar request. How do you know you will want to come here or that I will want you to? Why Sunday? It’s a very inconvenient night for me as I have an early class on Monday.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, blushing. “I don’t know why I said it. Do forgive me.”
“But what is there to forgive? You’re very much odder than you used to be.”
“Perhaps I am, but it’s also odd of you to tell me so.”
He smiled and filled our green teacups again. “I’ll confess to you now—now that I don’t feel the same way any longer—that I hoped you were so drunk last night you wouldn’t remember that I asked you to come. I woke up thinking, Now I’ve done it again, got myself involved with the past again when it’s all I can do to stomach the present. But I’m glad you did remember. And I’m touched by the apples. The rose petals mystify me, though.”
I wanted to tell him how I happened to have the apples; I wanted each Sunday night thereafter, through the winter and the long spring, but I was kept silent by indecision, for I did not know how my words would sound to him, whether they would elicit fear or sympathy, or how they would sound to me, whether I would be ashamed or comforted. Though the hours before I came to his apartment remained my secret, so that Nathan was still a stranger to one half of my life, nevertheless to me he became connected with it just as a landscape will seem to be inextricably involved with a remembered event although, at the time, it was hardly noticed. It was as if by giving him the apples that my mother had fingered and had not understood, I had joined them in an alliance which, for all its artificiality, consoled me. It was not that I had felt any disappointment in my mother’s not welcoming the apples, nor that I appreciated, by contrast, Nathan’s enjoyment of them. It was not in my power to please my mother. It was more, also, than the comparison I naturally made in coming from a madhouse into the presence of a normal person. It was, in effect as a symbol, that I saw the execution of this kind of duty to be worthless both to the agent and to the recipient, for my mother derived no benefit from my gift and had I not brought it, she would not have been aware that I had failed to fulfill my promise. And I, being commissioned to bring the following week essentially what I had brought this week (smaller apples and yellow instead of red) was walking a treadmill. This was what I had wanted to convey to the doctor, but I had known that I would never be able to make him understand and therefore the only hope I had lay in the verdict handed down to myself by myself: whether the obligation, imposed upon us all by the Fifth Commandment, was to be taken literally or was to be interpreted. But since I knew of only one kind of action which could follow if my decision finally was that I owed my mother no more years of my life, that action being the flight I had thought of as we drove home, I could not tell anyone of my debate. For flight, no matter how it may be justified, no matter how necessary it may be to the maintenance of life, is an act of cowardice. One’s alternative is protest; but to protest without fear, one must be convinced that right will win, and if it does not, must accept, at least temporarily, the triumph of wrong. The conscientious objector to war is generally regarded as a moral man, if too philosophical, and immune, through some strange means, to the infectious patriotism that sweeps his country in time of war; he may be criticized but only a few will call him a coward. But the man who kills himself, the man who hides himself away in the mountains or in the swamps to escape conscription, is abhorred by everyone. Yet it is possible that his refusal to fight is neither out of the fear of danger nor the dislike of regimentation, but that it stems from the same moral principles as those upheld by the objector.
I was not certain of this argument; yet, as I sat that afternoon with Nathan in his dirty room, I laid the foundation for the edifice that would please me, not the one that was sure to be the soundest. I was persuaded that when the time came, my decision would be impartial, that in the end I would not favor myself, but that in the meantime I was entitled to play with the idea of going away, as unconditionally as my father had done, as far, perhaps, as Nathan was going.
“What are you going to do in Paris?” I asked him. “Write?”
He laughed savagely. “I’ve got that nonsense knocked out of me. What a pipe-dream!”
“What are you going to do then?”
“You really want to know? It’s not nice. It’s a damned colossal bore.”
“I do want to know.”
“I’m going to study Old French and I’m not going in the fine, careless,
romantic, high-spirited way I let on last night. I am going on a fellowship and it is my thrilling ambition to make a critical study of Bernard de Ventadour. On my return to America, one year later, I will present this study as a thesis for the degree Master of Arts. Then, oh, then, dear friend, I will be ready for that next step to glory, the Ph.D. And after that, if I am very well-behaved and keep my nose clean, I may get a job teaching beginning French to the boys and girls of the Chichester high-school.”
But what had happened to his earlier plans, those he had made on the steps of the Barstow in the fog. “I just grew up,” he said sorrowfully. “But this has its compensations. I get a certain sense of power making footnotes on my papers on various medieval subjects: ‘Ysonde,’ I write learnedly, ‘is a rare Scottish form of the name, usually rendered Ysolt or Isolt, or sometimes Iseult.’ You know I wanted to go in for Mittelhochdeutsch and work on Walther von der Vogelweide just as an excuse to go to Germany, but that’s out now, of course. I’ll show you what the University of Heidelberg sent me last year.” From an untidy drawer, he produced a prospectus containing photographs of the baroque Alte Gebäude half hidden by flowering lime trees, of the Castle in its massive decay, of the Old Bridge spanning the river, and of the Protestant cathedral with bookstalls stuffed between its buttresses.
“There are hills on either side of the river, you see,” he said. “Garvin spent a summer there a couple of years ago. The first thing I would do would be buy a rucksack and take a long walk. Or maybe before I did that I’d buy a bicycle and go to Heilbronn. I know the map of South Germany by heart and just what the distances are and just where I’d stop overnight.” He broke off and took the prospectus from my hand. “It makes me Goddamned sore that I’ve got a name like mine. Do you think I look Jewish?”
Boston Adventure Page 48