Collected Stories of Reynolds Price

by Reynolds Price

  Jessie, answer me this—if you saw yourself as the lady enthralled (danced buxom away), why did you hang it by your own front door, your last sight on leaving the house each day before heaving yourself into one more failure; and who did you see in the ashen young man, eyes down, in need of a haircut, as he yields more slowly to his partner in the dance?

  Never mind, again. All messages delivered. But till then at least, I work on here, issuing my own invitations (your message: invitation unacceptable)—house stocked with food (even crab, peach ice-cream), leaves broadening round me already, mid-April, a cave of green; pond boiling with fish now swollen with roe you could never catch though you tried countless hours; field cluttered with cows (your only phobia)—and when nights are sleepless and I slouch after work, facing my black window, the black woods beyond (the white-faced sniper we suspected there), the sight I want most often is you—a ghost in slacks!—to stretch by me here on my Navajo rugs (your bleak warning given and acted upon) and tell me the joke of the ape in love, so bad we could groan again in delight; and bare your heart (smooth, glistening now), face mine again (though younger, ruining).

  Come at will, dear hulk, slimmed a little perhaps from your final fright but needless at last, free, no longer tired, and laughing to be homeless.

  LATE WARNINGS

  My Parents, Winter 1926

  MY PARENTS—not yet my parents—stand on a crude plank bridge. The sky behind them is bleak, trees bare—November, December 1926. (My mother’s left hand proves the year no later. She casually hides it—no wedding ring yet. They will marry soon, deeper into winter, January.) But they wear no more than their Sunday suits (his black or blue, hers tan or gray); no overcoats, scarves, boots or gloves. My father’s hat is in his hand. My mother’s shoes are baby-doll slippers. Her spit-curl rests on her forehead, no wind. Yet the day is clearly cold—the air, the light. Late afternoon, by its slant.

  They are unprotected. They do not feel cold. They lounge, unshuddering, loose in their clothes; stock-still for the camera.

  Or perhaps they do not care but only yearn—to touch entirely. They have not, will come to their wedding as virgins (so my father believed). Then how can they stand so calmly at ease and smile so slightly at their cameraman? (Does he offer some threat?) My father’s eyes smile inward only (his goal in sight, his five years’ courtship now promised reward); my mother’s only smiling is expressed in her stance—she cants herself confident against my father’s shoulder, down his whole left side.

  They must care, must quickly protect themselves. Take shelter in time.

  They will not—did not, perhaps by then could not. And shelter from what?

  Where, for instance, is my father’s left leg? Why does their shadow not resemble them?

  The Knowledge of My Mothers Coming Death

  Saturday

  OUR meetings now are allegorical. Each week I haul my soiled clothes thirty miles—my house to hers. Each week she brings them clean—her house to mine. This afternoon in May we meet at mine. She sits before my window in my new chair—its saddle-brown obscured by her blue dress, her gray hair streaked by green light off my trees. I face her from the sofa, near enough—she sees me best at three-yards distance now. We talk of daily things—her car, my leaking roof—as one man’s hands might speak to one another, thirty-two years of mutual life between them or like cooled lovers, joined but satisfied. I even roam her face, discovering beauty—the dark gold eyes, the open smiling mouth (spread wings but resting)—all as familiar as if I had made it. I partly have. All but the neat scar railing down her forehead, one inch behind which beat two aneurysms, bared two years ago but covered at once, untouched and lethal. Her time-bomb, she calls it—who knows the time? But not today. Not now it seems. We are spared again. The sun is in the window now, behind her. She is bright. She turns from me an instant. The line of her features transmits warm light. Her face has assumed the translucence of age—youth and age—and I think inside my own sound head, “I have loved you all your life,” then remember she lived twenty-seven years before starting me. Still I do not feel I have lied or blubbed. She says “Four-thirty” and faces me. She must start home before the evening rush; so I end on money, as I mostly do—but offering not asking. Proud as a camel (her bank account under twenty dollars) she smiles, “Not now. Save till I’m needy.”— “But you’ll let me know?”—“I’ll let you know. When I need anything I’ll call on you.” We walk to her car. She says, “I’ll see you when your clothes are dirty.” I offer again what I’ve offered before—to take the clothes to a laundry here, spare her the chore. I intend both kindness and separation. She recognizes both, accepts the first, laughs, “And put a fat blind sixty-year-old widow out of work?”—“No,” I say. She says, “You hate this. I know you do.” I look up rebuked but she means her car—its color, milk-green. I do, I forgot. “I forgive it,” I say.—“Thank you,” she says, smiles, we kiss, she starts. Her car snaps smartly down my drive. She does not look back. I watch her dust as she reaches the road, is consumed by leaves; think, “The best woman driver in history”; then suddenly know, not coldly nor in fear but know for the first time without the least doubt—“That is the last sight I have of her.”

  Sunday

  I KNOW it is day but I still lie dreaming, the frail quick thread that races morning—scraps of rhyme, clever retorts, problems dispatched. Then I calm, fall awhile; fall slower, slower till in stillness I endure this knowledge: my mother and I move in her car (whose color I no longer hate) through the heart of a city. She drives as always effortlessly, the visible sign of her inner grace. I sit on her right in a passenger’s daze. She stops for a light and another car stops on her side, close beside her. The passenger in that car is a girl age twenty. She could easily touch my mother’s face, its left profile; but instead she stares and I watch her stare. It slowly becomes a crouch, a frown, then a silent scream. The light goes green. My mother shifts gear, moves forward first, proceeds through the junction, continues her way. Yet terror is stuck in my chest, a stob. I study what half of her face I can see—the right profile, unchanged, at work. I know what waits on the left side though—the girl’s frown has only confirmed my knowledge. I say “Mother” calmly—“Look here at me.” Half-smiling she looks full-face a moment—the time she can spare from the road—and I see my oldest fear enacted. The artery beneath her left profile presses forward—a tree. A bare purple tree, rocks forward, peels downward silently. I think, “She is dying. I must take the wheel.” But she faces the road, still efficient though dead, bearing me forward—her urgent task.

  I wake, the stifling weight of dread. At breakfast I down the impulse to phone her; but by noon when I still have not thrown the dream, I drive ten miles to visit a friend, then do not tell him, sit gray and quiet in his room a bombsite, he whole at its center laughing on. At last he says, “What has ruined your day?” I say, “I have dreamt my mother’s death.” He takes an unseen world for granted (battles it daily), says “That would ruin it.”

  Monday

  THAT friend is with me at my house now. He sits in the new chair and I sit opposite. The doors are open to the loud spring night. We laugh against it, then are suddenly silent—a natural pause. But the night has paused with us, entirely still; and in that silence (two seconds at most) a tide turns against us, against the house. The night lunges brute at every opening, every dark pane. We two seem under crushing assault, hopeless, surrendered. I look to him, look first to his hands— broad, knob-knuckles; they are gripped to the sides of the chair, blood gone. His face looks to me from the pitch of a shudder. He is bearing the brunt. Then the surge subsides; first from me, more slowly from him. We sit a moment exhausted, grateful. Then I half-laugh, say toward him “What happened?”—“Nothing,” he says. I have not guessed but I know he lies. And now I cannot accept a lie. I say, “But it did—and to you. What happened.” He does not—cannot? will not?—face me. “Not happened,” he says. “It has not happened yet.”

  Not yet but
will. I am sure now of waiting.

  Tuesday

  I HAVE eaten my supper, stacked the three dishes. In an hour I must drive ten miles, a meeting. The trip takes less than twenty minutes; but I start to go now, pulled out of the house by my ancient fear of missing things—trains, friends, the smallest chance. I wrench on a tie, rush into my coat, take a single step from closet to door. The phone rings. Now. Do I know? Have I learned? No. The instant of fright, leap of response are my constant reactions to telephone bells—that all news is bad. I stop its ring, pause before Hello, embracing the silence. A strange woman’s voice, “Is this Mr. Price?”—“Yes,” I say. She does not name herself—“I am here at your mother’s …”

  I have not learned from the three past days but now I know. I silently recite in unison with her—“Something has happened to your mother.”—“I know.”—“You know? It only just happened.”—“I mean that I know what has happened,” I say. “Where is she now?”—“The ambulance has just left for Wake Hospital.”—“Thank you,” I say, “I will go straight there.” I lower the phone, hear her speak against extinction, raise it again, take the explanation this stranger must give. She inhales deeply—“Reynolds” (awards me my first-name, consolation), “she was talking on the telephone, sitting in this chair where I am now. I was across from her, saw it all. She stopped herself in the midst of a sentence, put her right hand to her forehead slowly, looked at me and said, ‘I have a terrible pain in my head.’ Then she dropped the phone and looked at her lap and began to pick at the nap of her skirt as if it was stain. Then she slumped on herself so I went to her. You don’t know me but I …”

  I thank her, say I am on my way. Then in cold efficiency (a gift from my dream) I call the hospital emergency room. A woman answers. I give my name, say, “My mother is on her way to you now. She cannot talk, will be unconscious and I want to warn you what to expect. She has had two cerebral aneurysms for some years now. They are on either side of the optic chiasma. One was ligatured two years ago with a Crutchfield clamp. The other has burst.”—“All right,” she says, “we’ll be looking for her.” I say, “I am coming there now myself.” “All right,” she says—then, “Are you a doctor?”—“No,” I say.—“You sound like a doctor.”—“No,” I say.—“You know so much I thought you must be.” She intends it as compliment, has time to talk on—“How do you know so much?” she says. I tell her, “I keep my eyes very clean,” then am seized in a scalding strangling shudder, set the phone in its cradle, say aloud to the room, “What do I know, what will anyone know who cannot, will not read plain warnings; who if I could read, could still not save my love from death?—save her skull slowly filling itself, a bowl of blood?”

  Life for Life

  SIFTING the debris of my mother’s death—Death Mother of Trash (old bank books, canceled checks)—my numb hands find an emblem of her life, a stack of records (brittle 78s) which I have not played through in twenty years, island planted by her in her death, pleasant garbage to relieve my chore. I rock back on numb haunches, smile, suck breath (hot July breath), then lift the records to a cooler room, unlid the old Victrola, throw its switch. Like every other thing here now she’s dead, it leaps to duty; eager, accurate spins. I pile on half the stack, fall heavily into my father’s chair still dark with his head oil, he dead ten years, surrender to the waiting random order—hoot of Emmy Destinn as Mignon, Lucrezia Bori’s lean Vedrai carino; then suddenly as bombs within the room, the forties: Spike Jones’ Chloe, crash of kitchens (through laughter, crash of Warsaw, London, Frankfurt); then Franklin Roosevelt, 1941, the 8th December, “I ask the Congress to declare …” At thirteen on my own I sent for this, from N. B. C., a birthday gift for Father. Half-pained, half-peeved, I rise, reject it harshly. Still covered by one more, the next disc falls, clatter of changer, roar of needle, voice—“Good morning, Mrs. Jones. My name is Price. I’ve come to show …”

  My father’s voice. Forgotten. Lost. Now round me in his room. Slow, calm—the only music he could make. Twenty-one years of daily hearing it; but ten years gone, I could no more have heard it in my head than Lincoln’s voice—have often tried at night to dredge it back, send it looping through some favorite joke, some mimic, even to bear again its last few words (nonsense fierce as flail across my eyes, gargled from cancerous lungs through silver tube). But here again I have him and remember. A demonstration record made by him in 1940 when he had sold more toasters, fans, lamps, stoves than any other salesman in the state and as reward was asked to speak his pitch in lasting wax (reward when he was locked in blank torment—downing his thirst to drink, drown finally, and baffled to find ten simple dollar bills to meet this month’s new howling creditor).

  I down my own new need to stop him. I grant him the rest of his respite, reward.

  “… Mrs. Jones, do you know that many children” (chirren he says) “will suffer poor eyes in years to come just because of the light they study by?” (His just is jest)

  I had even lost that!—the jest that littered his life, every speech of the thousands he for years unreeled on the stoops of strangers, incurious, ungrateful—merely and rightly bored, whole lives being daily laid at their feet, reeled out from twitching guts like garden hose, the past shames, present needs of grinning beggars. Postman, parents, lovers, mirrored selves.

  “Now Mrs. Jones, if you will say the word, I’ll bring you on approval our new floor lamp. No obligation on your part at all …”

  I say the word she never can, calm No, and end his endless bottled plea for hope. Next record plays, bald irony, black jest, Anderson sings Komm Süsser Tod of Bach.

  So Father, sweet death I have given you, mere silence, rest; vowed not to force you through your pitch again. To seal the vow I look up to your picture on the wall. Deep walnut frame, deep window on your face. 1918, you eighteen yourself, the worst of wars hung bleeding overhead (your brother Edward’s lungs already gassed; your own Guard button in your left lapel, an eagle spread above a waiting world; you will be called-for weeks from now yourself but saved in port by Armistice) and still your gaze though high is clear, undoubting; a surety that even now seems firm, not boyish foolishness, seems well-informed as though you saw sure detailed happy futures, a life like water (clear, needed, useful, permanent, free), spared all you will so soon acquire (drink, wife, sons, labor, thirty-six more years). I touch the glass above your silent mouth, say silently—

  Dear boy (dear gray eyes, broad nose, curling lip), locked on your browning cracking paper card, I offer you my life—look, it will serve. Cancel all plan of me, let me not be, so you may have free time, move always sure, accept with smooth hands what your eyes still see, elude brute ambush of your gurgling death.

  Design for a Tomb

  AMONG the things modern sons are spared are parental tombs— the bother, the crippling expense, the arrangements to find space, an artist; then choose a design that will honor the dead with a minimum of gas, guard their alarmingly indestructible bones and yield to any thoughtful stranger some sense of the lives discontinued within.

  The job now is simple as buying a dog—a burial plot 18’ × 12’ at the cost of Manhattan real estate; a tasteful stone with the names blown in by compressed air through rubber stencils, as ruthless in placement as neon light.

  I’ve bought you that. Mother bought it, in fact, at Father’s death, ruinous as a pyramid—$600, consuming what insurance the cancer had spared—but I chose the design, remembering his wish of nine years before to have a gravestone like FDR’s. Not quite the tonnage Hyde Park could bear but the principle, at least—two marble slabs, unveined Vermont white, one flat, one standing, PRICE the one interruption of the perfect planes since fouled by birds and blundering mowers yet broad enough to straddle the four of us.

  But suppose I had not and the choice was now mine, to cover you both with whatever was due—unlimited funds and artists at hand. (I recall Father laughing two dozen times that when Mother died, he’d set over her “a Coca-Cola and a pack of BCs in Georgia gr
anite.” She’d rally, “I’ll pile a little hill on you; name it Worry Wart.”)

  An allegory—Grief? (which I no longer feel); my own bust weeping, my brother grim beside me? Generosity?—a pair of hands, open? An eternal flame?—in Carolina summers? with Father fire-phobic?