Testing the Current

by William McPherson

  “Anarchy? What’s that,” Tommy had asked her.

  “Disorder,” she replied, checking her cookies. “Chaos. Nihilism. Nothingness.” She looked stern. Tommy didn’t pursue the subject. He didn’t feel comfortable, and he left.

  Mrs. Steer liked their custom of the Thanksgiving hymns, probably more than the hymns themselves, being an atheist, and she sang them along with everybody else. When she was there, she observed the customs of Tommy’s house, the carols at Christmas as well as the hymns at Thanksgiving. Customs kept the world in its orbit, the river in its course, and Tommy in his bed in the night, but he wasn’t sure their customs were strong enough to sustain all that: the freight was so heavy and the thread so frail. Without customs it seemed to Tommy there would be no family, and without a family he would have to live in the Evelyn MacCracken Children’s Home, he supposed, on top of MacCracken Hill, with the other orphans. At least it would be fun to slide down the fire chute from the second-floor window to the ground, if that were allowed. That would be one good thing about the MacCracken Home, and the thought made him smile. He’d always wanted to slide down that chute. As his father had often said when he was having a good time, “You can’t beat fun.” He’d heard him say it once that very day, the kind of occasion—full of people and drinks and food and laughter—that he liked to orchestrate. Nonetheless, Tommy preferred to be in his own familiar house, following his mother to the big piano in his own living room where, he knew, she would soon begin to play one of the familiar Thanksgiving hymns as the company gathered around. He couldn’t remember which she played first—there were five of them, and the order never varied—and then—oh, yes!—the familiar words and music:

  Praise God, from whom all blessings flow;

  Praise Him, all creatures here below...

  The chords of the Doxology thundered from the piano, and the voices—even his father’s, who didn’t sing very well and usually avoided it in church—rose in a swell, filling the house with sound that mixed with the smell of spices and roasting turkey from the kitchen. If Tommy listened closely he could single out each person’s voice, and tell who was not singing, too. He remembered clearly his grandmother’s voice, her singing voice more than her speaking voice, and he thought of how she could also whistle, which was something Tommy had not yet been able to master though his brother David said he’d learned to whistle when he was still in his crib. Tommy could distinguish Cousin Maud’s shrill, papery tones and Cousin Gertrude’s voice on a tune of her own, Mrs. Sedgwick’s fluting soprano—she sang as if she were in an opera—and Mr. Hutchins’ deep bass, Mr. Sedgwick’s monotone something like his father’s, Emily’s high, nasal voice that seemed to match the expression on her face, as if she were especially pleased with herself and her place in the world, and Mrs. Steer’s rich, throaty sound, although she didn’t know the words very well. Tommy’s mother said that Mrs. Steer had a deep contralto voice; his father said it sounded more like a baritone to him. Tommy liked those words: contralto, baritone. His father also said that Mrs. Steer’s being an atheist was just part of her being against the government—“like you,” he said to Tommy. Tommy figured his father meant that because he didn’t always want to do what his father wanted him to do, that was being against the government; but it was difficult to know just what his father did want him to do, since he hardly ever told him. One thing his father wanted him to do, which he did, sometimes with a little prompting, was to stand up when his elders entered the room, and another was not to interrupt, but while he tried not to, he often failed at that. Frequently it seemed to Tommy that interrupting meant stating his own case, or coming to his own defense. “Yes, but,” Tommy would say, and his father would exclaim in exasperation, “Yes, but! I don’t want to hear ‘Yes, but’ coming from your mouth again!” And Tommy, the response springing automatically to his lips, would blurt out before he knew it, “Yes, but”—and all hell would break loose, as John would say. However, that hadn’t happened today. His father was in a good mood and Tommy was trying hard to behave.

  The Doxology was followed by “O beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain...” Tommy loved to watch his mother play the piano. She often played when she and Tommy were alone in the house. Her hands looked as if they had a special relationship with the keys, as if they belonged there, hands poised and fingers tripping the cascade of sound. Tommy marveled that her fingers could strike so many notes so fast when they had trouble opening the clasp on a new handbag. Sometimes Tommy had to show her how it worked, and how to fasten her jewelry, too, and the lesson often had to be repeated several times. “I’m not very mechanical,” she would say. His mother’s hands were small, and except on special occasions like today, she wore only one gold ring, her wedding ring, which she never took off. Her knuckles had grown too big and she couldn’t get the ring off her finger. It was strange, Tommy thought, that such clumsy hands, hands that could never manage even to put on her own rubber boots—Tommy’s father always did it for her, or his brothers; she had tried to teach Tommy to do it, but he wasn’t very good at it—that those hands could slam a golf ball a hundred and seventy yards down the fairway, and hit all the notes in “America the Beautiful.”

  When they were alone, Tommy would sometimes sit under the piano, feeling the boom of the tingling strings, watching his mother’s small feet pumping up and down on the pedal, listening as she sang. She often sang as she played. He thought of that now as his mother began playing

  Now thank we all our God,

  With heart, and hands, and voices...

  Who from our mother’s arms

  Hath blessed us on our way,

  With countless gifts of love,

  And still is ours today...

  and he was carried back to his mother’s comforting, encircling arms pressing him to her soft bosom, a bosom, she said, that had nursed him until he was a year old. The thought made him squirm. He couldn’t imagine such a thing, and he didn’t understand how it worked. “Mothers produce milk for their children,” she had said, as if that explained it, but Tommy didn’t know how, though he did know where. He thought of the wolf in the Courthouse Square. The thought not only made him squirm, it was actually embarrassing—miracle, as his mother called it, or no—that his mouth would have been buried there in the flesh and folds of her body that she took pains to conceal. Once in her bedroom when she was dressing to go out in the afternoon, she had drawn the shade of the window that looked toward the Slades’ house, and Tommy asked her why. “So Mr. Slade won’t see me,” she had said, although it seemed unlikely to Tommy that Mr. Slade would have been home at that hour or that he could have seen her across the distance if he’d tried to. “What would happen if Mr. Slade did see you?” Tommy asked, his mind working slyly as his mother emerged in a slip from her closet, which was almost as big as Tommy’s bedroom. “Why, I’d be mortified,” his mother replied, surprised, as if the answer should be obvious. Tommy didn’t know what mortified meant. No, Tommy was glad he couldn’t remember his mother’s nursing him, and what did nursing mean, anyway? A woman in a white cap? Sick people? His grandmother had had a nurse for a while. The story in his book of heroes about wounded soldiers and Florence Nightingale? If he’d remembered that business, he would have had to do something about it. He would have had a choice, and his choice would have been to drink Mr. Matson’s dairy’s milk from the battered silver cup with ANDREW THOMAS MACALLISTER and the date of his birth, 9 MARCH 1931, engraved on it, the cup that his teeth had stippled and that was gold inside, the cup that he’d once peed in and then peed in again, several times in all. He remembered how his own yellow water had looked against the pale gold of the cup. He didn’t know why he’d done that; he’d just felt like it. He felt now like being under the piano again, and he eased along its curvature and nestled in the hollow. He looked over at his cousins. Charlotte and Julie were standing behind his mother, singing along, but Steve didn’t know the words yet. He looked down at the great solid rounds of wood, at the ma
ssive black legs of the piano that had been turned like the spools Mr. Steer made on his lathe and that were ridged along their length. He liked to run his hands over those mighty pillars, feeling the bumps and ridges and the cold black wood; they contrasted so with his mother’s own slim legs, sheathed in auburn silk hose. Pretty as a girl’s, Tommy thought, smiling quietly to himself. “Why, Mother,” he wanted to say, “look at your little legs! They’re pretty as a girl’s.” Of course, he didn’t say it. There were remarks that were better kept to himself, and this was one of them. His mother didn’t shave her legs. Women don’t have hair on their legs, she had said to Tommy, although there were some hairs on hers, not black and thick like the hair on his brother John’s but hair nonetheless. Sometimes she took the hair off with a cream that smelled terrible. He could see the hairs now, through her stockings, as her foot moved up and down on the pedal and she began “We gather together to ask the Lord’s blessing.” He remembered those times when he was little and his mother had him bathe with her, how he had to sit in front of her in the steaming bathtub, cramped and uncomfortable but curious, trying to avoid looking at her—he knew he shouldn’t, yet how could he not?—while her hands fluttered in vague awkward attempts to hide herself. It was hard to hide if you were in a bathtub together. He didn’t think he wanted to be. It wasn’t big enough for the two of them, and the water was too hot. He didn’t want to wash her back or like her to wash his; he could reach his own well enough. If his father liked her to wash his back, well that was his business, and at least she didn’t get into the tub with him. Besides, his father usually took a shower. Tommy wanted to take his bath by himself, and he coaxed his mother to let him, but if she was in a hurry she didn’t give him a choice. In those days, before he’d started school, he would have his bath early in the afternoon, before the arrival of Rose and the time for his nap, and then his mother would go out shopping or to the country club for lunch and bridge or golf. That was a long time ago, of course, but he remembered, and he knew that underneath her silken hose his mother’s naked legs were white as alabaster, with blue rivulets of veins here and there like lines on a map. He turned away at the thought. Actually, Tommy thought, his mother’s legs looked much prettier with stockings. In fact, his mother looked much better with clothes; every old person he had ever seen naked did. Not that he had seen many: his mother, sort of; his father a few times because he never wore the bottoms to his pajamas; his grandmother almost, though she would always slip her nightgown on over her underclothes, and then pull her corset and her long cotton underpants out from underneath. His brothers didn’t count; they weren’t that old. In his mind’s eye Tommy saw Mrs. Aldrich sitting on the dock at the Island. He had looked up her dress. He couldn’t help it, the way she was sitting. Maybe he could. He didn’t keep from staring anyway, and his eyes kept being drawn back to penetrate the deep blackness between Mrs. Aldrich’s legs, until finally she shifted position and he couldn’t see anymore. He wondered if she could feel his stare. He was afraid she would, but she never said a thing. He wondered if she was wearing a foundation. Women had to wear foundations because they were women; the garters held up their stockings. His grandmother wore a corset, but it looked the same. Men didn’t need them. Although his father always wore garters, he wore them around his legs, just below the knees. It was all very mysterious. With Amy Steer it was different. He had pulled up her dress once, although he didn’t really have to. After the first time she was eager enough to pull it up herself as long as he pulled down his pants. It was quite astonishing, that little slit, and the smooth white skin around it. He didn’t understand where she peed, but she said it was no problem. When Amy touched him with her cold hand on his funny little sack with the two tiny eggs that hurt if you squeezed them, it gave him goose bumps and his sack wrinkled up tight. Usually it hung down loose. She asked him what it was. Tommy didn’t know what it was; nobody’d ever said. He told her that it was his, that’s all. Once his mother almost caught them like that, in the back stairway off the kitchen, but they had heard her coming and their clothes were pulled in place by the time she opened the door and asked what they were doing. Tommy said they were looking for an apple. That’s where they were stored. He wondered if Amy, standing there next to her mother, was thinking about that now.

  Everyone was singing, “The wicked oppressing now cease from distressing. . . .” Tommy joined in the hymn. They were getting to the funny line: “Sing praises to His Name; He forgets not His own.” Well how, Tommy always wondered, could God possibly forget his own name? God was everywhere and knew everything—too much, Tommy thought. Once, when he had talked back to his mother, God made him bang his elbow. That’s what his mother said, that God was punishing him for his sauciness. So if he knew all that, and more and worse besides, it was preposterous that he might forget his own name. Tommy certainly never forgot his. He wasn’t allowed to. And it wasn’t the Andrew or the Thomas that was important; it was MacAllister. MacAllister was his father’s name, and he was lucky to have it. It meant something, but it wasn’t an easy name to have and to have to live up to.

  The hymns were coming almost to an end:

  Let Thy congregation escape tribulation:

  Thy Name be ever praised!

  O Lord, make us free!

  Tommy was glad they would soon be sitting down to dinner; the smells were making him hungry. Tommy loved the final hymn, “Come, ye thankful people, come.” His mother always played it through once unaccompanied while Tommy handed out the words she had printed herself so people could sing all four verses, and Rose—and Ruth, too, who had been borrowed from Mrs. Sedgwick for the occasion—opened the big oaken doors of the dining room. Then his mother rose from the piano, taking Mr. Sedgwick’s arm, and led the way to the feast, followed by his father and Mrs. Sedgwick, the other grown-ups and children trooping behind, all singing the rousing lines,

  Come, ye thankful people, come,

  Raise the song of harvest home:

  All is safely gathered in

  —by that time they were gathering in the dining room, finding their seats from the name cards that were placed in the slots of the little nut dishes—

  Ere the winter storms begin.

  The table, long and rounded now only at its ends, was laden with dishes, as was the smaller circular table for the children. The great turkey, glistening in its steaming juices, rested on its accustomed platter, splendid in the moment of glory it had been bred for before its swift dismemberment into wings and thighs and drumsticks and slices of clean white breast at the skilled hands of Tommy’s father. He was a master carver, everyone said—his own father had taught him—and the long knives and the sharpening steel with their handles of silver and horn, which lay there next to his mother’s biggest platter, had belonged to Tommy’s grandfather, the man with the gold watch, and bore his monogram. When Tommy’s father had finished cutting the flesh from the bone, and offered the pope’s nose on his long fork—there were seldom any takers; it was a joke—Tommy knew that the turkey would be nothing but a great shredded skeleton with a few bits of flesh still clinging to its bones, and that Rose would take the carcass into the kitchen and break it into fragments that would fit into the soup pot and become, in a day or two, the turkey soup that Tommy hated.

  Sometimes Tommy thought there were a great many things he hated, despite the fact that hate was a terrible word; it was forbidden, as Mrs. Steer forbade him to use “idiot,” though he had heard her say it. He could hear Mrs. Steer’s voice now, above the others’, singing “Unto joy or sorrow grown.” A long time ago, when Tommy had screamed in rage and frustration that he hated his brother David, his mother had said absolutely, “Of course you don’t hate him, Tommy—he’s your brother!” How did she know he didn’t hate him? Tommy wondered; right then he had been certain of it. “We don’t hate anyone,” his mother had said. Well, maybe she doesn’t, and Tommy thought with amazement: maybe she really doesn’t.

  “Do you love me?” he had asked. He aske
d it a lot; he couldn’t seem to help it. “Yes, of course I love you,” his mother had replied. She was going through the kitchen cupboards, making out the grocery list on the back of one of the old envelopes she saved for that purpose. “You’re my baby, and mothers love their babies.” Tommy frowned. “Oh,” his mother said, “that’s right—you’re not a baby anymore, you’re a child, already in kindergarten, for heaven’s sake.” Tommy was in kindergarten then. It was two years ago. He still believed she was twenty-two. “But you’ll always be my baby, Tommy, even when you’re grown up. You’ll always be your mother’s baby.” She moved toward him and hugged him to her. “What a darling child you used to be, and what a sweet disposition you had.” It was not the answer Tommy was waiting for.