Her body shook, for Lyle had never given her anything profound or warm. The veneer cracked on her mouth. He saw that she was as lonely and outlandish and simple as a cactus. Her kisses, to which he couldn’t respond, searched all over his face.
—Please, Helen, he said.
His monosyllable tinkled like ice dropped into an empty tumbler.
—But you need a woman, Hal, she said. You need love because you’re afraid of life. . . . You think you’re subscribing to ideals of nobility and selfishness. They don’t exist any more . . . if they ever did. People have become petty and horrid . . . if they ever were anything else. . . . This is the age of toothbrushes and war bonds and depilatories. Shakespeare and Dostoievsky are dead . . . spirituality was something to console people when they couldn’t buy medicine and life insurance. . . . If you don’t stop chasing shadows, you’ll go nuts. You’re far enough out of this world as it is. Very few can still get to you. I can . . . imagine that I love you.
—I know you do, he said, turning away his face.
—All right then, I do, she said. Do you think of yourself as some redeemer? If one were to show up in this day and age, he’d be crucified by more horrible methods than Pontius Pilate ever dreamed of. . . . Let go of yourself, for God’s sake. . . . You’re in a bad way.
He pulled himself from Helen’s arms and shut the door in her face. In his own room he looked again at himself in the mirror— the bright bar, the striped shield on his left collar. All he needed was an eagle to perch on his head. He took off his clothes slowly and lay down naked on his bed. His body stretched along under the sheets like a lank and flexible flagpole.
Then there came upon him the old vertigo of his childhood. Noises sounded ominous in his ears. The very air became a maelstrom of fear to suck him down. Even the whispering of his hair on the pillow promised a menace and a shudder too dark to contemplate. The final stage in the attack was that the darkened room shot backwards in his vision to one-quarter its size, as though he were looking through reversed binoculars. The chair by his bed was a piece of furniture for a doll’s house. Hal lay and trembled and tried to pray in the soft dialect of his mother.
While waiting for orders to sail from the New York port of embarkation, he worked at Brooklyn Army Base. But the eight hours of toil inside the area guarded by glistening MP’s was only a hiatus to his nights. He simply did what he had been taught to do at OCS and waited till 1630 hours, when he would slip by the white-leggined sentinels and take the subway from Brooklyn to Times Square.
Sundown was for him a time of passionate questing. After dark New York opened up like a sticky lily. He courted every stamen and pistil of this flower; he knew it with the loving horror of a naturalist who has succeeded in evolving a frightful fern which he keeps and fondles by moonlight. So after dark Hal could be seen slipping through avenues and squares of New York City from Central Park to Greenwich Village.
He was seeking something missing in himself, something like his own double, which would confront him with the image of something positive. He was always alone. He would listen to people at the Astor, at One Fifth Avenue, at little beer joints off the Bowery. They all had much to say, as most people have, and Hal would bend over them listening and smiling his shy brilliant smile and encouraging them to pour out everything that was in them. He’d drink two to their every one. Then he’d slide away from them and go out into the summer night. For it was the old story of his life: everyone discovered that Hal understood him and was elated, the way a man is when he buys a perfect mirror at an auction.
Hal usually wound up drinking beer and sucking pickled eggs in flyblown bars of the Village. Then he’d walk about from four o’clock in the morning until it was time to return to Brooklyn Army Base. Just before dawn in Brooklyn the air was sweetish with baker’s buns and the sweet brown smell of roasting coffee.
One day in July, 1943, Hal received ten mimeographed copies of a movement order by which he was assigned to permanent overseas station By Order of the Secretary of War. He looked at the purple dittoes of the adjutant general’s seal and signature, and something cool slithered in his spinal column. So he made his will on the quiet blank form, increased his insurance, and decided to make up his differences with his mother. It was a month now, this their latest spell of ignoring each other. She would have spent that month in her flat at Bayonne, sending out her mind in panic over the universe, and having it return to her lap like a whimpering pigeon. Two months earlier she’d been toying with the Catholic Church. This month she’d be convinced that Basic English was the solution to the world’s problems—and hers.
He left Pennsylvania Station for Bayonne. At first he thought he might go carrying his new carbine so that his mother could see the facts for herself when she opened her door. But then, she had a Viennese instinct for disaster, by her unaided imagination. He knew his father would still be at the office. So he went directly to the apartment, having armed himself with a bunch of jonquils and sweet peas at a corner florist’s. He rang the bell, let out a sigh, and drew himself up to his six feet two.
His mother was wearing her housecoat as she answered the door. She’d always wanted him to call her Eugenie, but her name somehow never reached his lips—only her function. She’d once been beautiful but the weight of his father’s body and of his father’s personality gave her the appearance now of a lily snapped in a press. Eugenie was so tiny that Hal wondered how anyone as big as himself could have come out of her. He kissed her cheek and then her hands, which she most often wore folded on her breast. This gave her an attitude of a piety counterfeiting her inner resignation, because no other pose availed her anything. He knew she hadn’t nursed a hope since he’d left her breast.
—Mother, Hal said, I’m going overseas. You know we aren’t allowed to tell exactly when.
—And I had a feeling you would come today, she said. Traces of her Viennese dialect still remained.
She relieved him shyly of his flowers and led him into the parlor. She had a Jacobean piano covered with shawls, and pictures of himself at all ages on the shawls. She never opened the piano when she played Grieg songs and Strauss waltzes, so her music whimpered like her voice. By the tea caddy he observed a pot and two cups.
—Are you expecting someone, Mother? he asked.
—You know who, she answered and seated herself to pour him tea.
Her eyes floated before him like flowers in oriental rice paintings. She tucked up her little feet under her housecoat and pulled on the cigarette he offered her. The loose bracelets by her wrists tinkled to her elbow.
—I’d like a shot with my tea, Hal said turning to his father’s cupboard. How’s Dad?
—It’s his ulcers again. And he has eight new deals . . . is that the word? . . . and talks with his mouth full at table.
Hal stirred whisky into his tea. There was a secret odor of his father’s tobacco through the flat. He remembered that same whiff when he used to reach up to his father’s knees and cry; that same bittersweet pungency that seeped under the door of his parents’ room when they lay awake after midnight and shouted at one another about the rent and the difficulties of the English language. Hal’s father’s tobacco was Hal’s father, gross and mordant. Even now he saw the saliva bubbling about his father’s mouth as he smoked his after-dinner cigar. He saw the jut of his father’s stomach under those rich pencil-striped vests; he heard that grating voice scolding in his ears:
—Dummkopf, was nun? . . .
—He talks much about you lately, Eugenie was saying, stirring her tea with a waferlike spoon. Oh how proud he was of your commission! The other night he had some people in to supper. . . . He said that the reason why his son was not here was because you couldn’t leave Fort Hamilton.
—He never thought he’d have a second lieutenant in the family. He thinks this is his reward for making me play basketball at the Y. He’s made an American man of me finally . . . one that a stockbroker needn’t be ashamed of.
—If you c
ould leave a picture of yourself in your uniform . . . with your visored cap and green blouse . . . I think it would please him.
—I’ll have one taken, he said, swallowing the tea and whisky.
—Habe dank, she replied.
The whisky gave him an almost instantaneous lift. He got up and walked to the bookcases. Eugenie belonged to all the monthly book clubs and got limp boxed Shakespeare and classics with ornate covers and illustrations. His father read only the papers. His mother had even taken a subscription to the Sunday afternoon concerts at Carnegie Hall. She’d been seen entering the auditorium fearfully in her pince-nez and studying her program notes in the intermission. She was always alone. He’d heard too that she used to jump out of her seat at the Beethoven sforzandi. And Hal remembered her too when they still lived in the Village, sliding through the streets with her shopping reticule, out of reach of the gangs playing baseball up the alleys. In those days she still spoke German, and she seemed to hold for support to the tenement walls as she walked along. Sometimes she would take aside a crying Italian child and slip it a piece of candy. . . .
After Hal had walked around the room once, it seemed to him that his father was following him, telling him not to break anything because it cost dear. His father’s conversations had always been inventories of prices, admonitions of what boys not to speak to at school, and lectures about young men who’d Got Ahead in America. They’d never once talked to one another.
Hal sat down beside his mother on the couch and reached for her hand. A smile came to her lips as though there were some stricture in her left breast that made her catch her breath. And he remembered that when his father had first started to make money, she’d taken himself for little treats to the movies—uptown. And coming home in a wild enthusiasm she’d sometimes suggested that they splurge and take a taxi. Settling back in the seat with her eyes closed, she’d nearly always reached over for his hand. She used to run her fingers along the hair on his wrists. So this was the first time Hal had ever actively caressed his mother, other than in greeting or in parting. . . .
—I have a feeling, he said smiling and forcing a bubble into his voice, that I’ll see Vienna before the war is over. . . . What would you like from there, Mother?
—You must just write and tell me how the city is . . . a long long letter on how the people are dressed. You can write such good letters.
—I’ll write every day when I’m overseas, he said ponderously.
—And so will I, she said, closing her eyes.
If he felt an agony of emptiness when he walked about the outside world, looking handsome and omniscient, Hal knew only a flatulence in his own home. He’d rarely come there since he’d left CCNY and had gone to work for Standard Oil in Bayonne. And every time he entered this apartment, he seemed to run square into the big stomach of his father. His father’s hats always bulked on the rack. And once having fought through his father’s abdomen, he’d meet another image bumbling around the walls by that candle-light that Eugenie always preferred to electricity. It was a moth with a woman’s face. It flew around his head in tenderness and terror, beating its own antennae with its wings. Often it would swoop at him and he would recoil in childish horror, to discover then that the moth was at the other side of the room, thrashing against the wallpaper. . . .
His mother held tightly to his hand. Her fingers went tentatively a little way up his wrist.
—I have never seen you look so hübsch, she said. There’s something in your face that’s improved by the severity of the uniform.
—The melancholy appeal of the warrior leaving for the wars?
He felt sorry he’d said it and took away his hand as softly as he knew how and went and poured himself some more of his father’s whisky.
—You’ll stay to dinner? she asked. When something told me you were coming, I went wild with all my red points. Mr. Liedermann is very good to me at the market.
—I shouldn’t even have left Fort Hamilton, he said, to come here. We’re what they call alerted. . . . I can’t stay, Mother.
The cruelty that was forever rising between them strangled him. They were constantly groping toward one another. But everything they could say had a smothered overtone of: Oh, what’s the use? We were together for nine months, and we never can be that close again. . . .
—I understand, she said, putting down her teacup to go to the piano.
She began to play.
—Mausie, schön warst du heute nacht, ha, ha, ha, ha! . . .
Hal watched her from the doorway. It was the last musical comedy she’d seen before leaving Vienna. Eugenie’s back was toward him. And remembering that her eyes were shut while she played, Hal decided that he’d go now. He knew that was the way she expected it to be.
Leaving New York harbor and easing out to sea in blackout to join the convoy, Hal had a sense of something being lifted from him, as though his umbilical cord were cut anew. He seemed at last a free agent, responsible to no one. He put out his cigarette and went up on deck. The East River had a slow humming in it. He could smell the oil on the water and hear the fumbling of the tugs. He looked up at the stars and leaned his head against a davit. The ship trembled under him, but he couldn’t see the water that buoyed her up. Atavistically he felt that he must have experienced this same security and warmth when he lay on his mother’s lap, when thinking was only a registering on his brain of the first impressions of his five senses. Now this concept of ocean made his mind go faint and blank in annihilation, the concept of the mother.
He felt his long thick thighs against the railing of the ship, twined about the metal in loving support. And he thought about the current of his life, which had not yet been quickened thirty years earlier. He thought, This world and this sea aren’t so very much bigger than I. They’re all inside this head of mine. They didn’t exist thirty years ago when I was not. And some time in the future they’ll all go out again for me, like a moving picture when the arc lamp fails. . . . I can have a profounder influence on my world than I have hitherto had. Since the whole thing is nothing but a shadow in my brain, there must be some secret how I can make the reflections dance the way I want them to. . . . I should like to meet the Man with the flashlight. . . .
He spent the endless days in the convoy reading and taking sun-baths on the officers’ deck. His body got to be the smoky hue of coffee except for the small white circles around his eyes where he wore his sunglasses. Hourly changing the position of his body as he sprawled on his GI blanket stenciled with his name and serial number, Hal read and read the New Testament, especially the Gospel of Saint John. From this evangelist he got the taste of a bright sweet fruit such as he’d never experienced from allowing anybody to make love to him. And at nights he began to dream of a love not to be found in the bodies of men or women, but a love going forth from his own mind to all the human beings in the world, since actually they existed only in himself. For him to refuse to love them would be as cruel as if God were to shut off the sun and sit back to watch the results. To Hal in his sleep there came often a line that would cause him to start up from the bed in his stateroom, tingling with sweat as when he was fourteen:
—I am the Resurrection and the Life. . . .
One Sunday in the middle of the Atlantic the transport chaplain took to his bunk with a bout of seasickness. The merchant marine master of the ship canvassed all the officers aboard for a volunteer to conduct church service. Hal heard his own voice lifted. So on a foredeck while the gun crew looked down from their nest Hal addressed several hundred GI’s and officers who had nothing else to do but come to church. They sat around him on the tarpaulins in a big half-circle with their hands clasping their ankles.
He was nervous and exalted as he talked. He put his hands behind his back and paced about in a tiny ring. Often he had to lift his voice because a starboard wind kept blowing his words out into the Atlantic. Everyone was keyed up because the convoy had been tacking all night long. The escort destroyers had been zigzagging, a
nd the depth charges had been thudding below them. They hadn’t slept without their life preservers. Hal spoke to them of the power of prayer and of the mind of God, in which everything is beautifully ordered (even if it wasn’t to them), and the delicate discriminations God made between a sparrow’s falling in the air and an airplane’s diving to the ground. He told them that each had a little of God in them, and how some, by using that inkling of something beyond them as a firefly to guide them, got closer to God than others did. Finally he spoke of the mystery of death, of how we were all afraid of it instead of being resigned to it.
—Imagine, Hal said, and he found that his voice was choked, that you’re all just drops of rain. I know you all think you’re pretty wonderful. But a drop of water isn’t much, is it? But maybe a drop of water has its thoughts too. The important thing (and he waved his hand toward the plunging bow of the ship) is the sea itself. It’s just as easy to die as to be born. . . .
After his sermon he left them quickly, for he’d moved himself farther than he’d intended. He couldn’t bear to face anyone. He walked swiftly to the open space below the bridge and watched the water swell and scud under the bow. Presently someone came and stood beside him.
—Thank you, suh, for that sweet message from the Spirit. Just as movin as any ah ever got at revival meetins in Shelby, South Calina.
It was a small freckled pfc, wearing his helmet liner against the sun. He kept peering at Hal and running his tongue over his goat-teeth, a rich mocha from chewing tobacco.
—Pahdon, suh, said the pfc, but ah you a minister of the gospel?
—No, Hal said. I’m not. And in South Calina they’d say I drink too much.
—Well now, that’s sin, the boy said winking and seeming to be fighting a temptation to nudge an officer. You git you there some of that mountain dew and then you git you a nigger gal, and fore you know it, you have to confess Jesus Christ as your savior. . . . When ah’m thirty ah too am gonna git saved by confessin Jesus Christ as mah savior. Jest now ah figure ah’m a lost sinner. But ah read a piece in mah Bahble every night.
The Gallery Page 10