He took his army musette bag, which contained his toilet kit and a clean shirt, and Mary took his fatigues. These could just as well have been left in his saddlebags, but Mary wanted to take them, to hang them up in the closet of the guest room. She wanted to do this. They went up the steps to the front porch and opened the front door, its panes of glass jiggling in their frames. A brass-handled crank bell in the door tinkled once, flatly, though it hadn’t been touched. In the vestibule upon a bureau was a religious statue, or doll, with a pinched, young-old doll’s face. The figure stood a foot high and was dressed in an elaborate doll’s dress edged with pearls and glinting jewels. One hand held a globe surmounted by a cross; the other, too tiny for the rest of the body, was raised, with fingers in the sign of a V. When he stopped to look more closely at this object, Mary said that it was the Infant of Praig, a special care of her dead mother, and in the bureau were drawers full of beautiful clothes for the doll. Her mother used to change the clothes according to the religious seasons. The clothes the doll wore now were dim with dust.
“The Infant of Praig?” he said, preparing, according to his own lights, to be properly, secularly interested.
“It’s really Prague, like in Czechoslovakia,” Mary said, “only it’s always pronounced ‘Praig.’ I’ve never heard it called anything else.”
But they couldn’t dally; they had to proceed into the small living room, where stood a tall, stooped man of no more than fifty who seemed, though intensely there, smudged about the eyes. He seemed, Allard immediately thought, gone by. About his eyes was the hazed look of an abandoned store window.
“Daddy, this is Allard Benson!” Mary said as though highly pleased and surprised.
Allard took the pale hand in his square one. The hands detached themselves quickly, almost with haste.
“How do you do, sir,” Allard said.
“Yes, and you, Mr. Benson?” The voice was weak, though tense. Again Allard saw in his mind the abandoned display window, old placards or posters inside covered with dust, curled at the edges, their information obsolete by years. Even the sun’s light, if it entered here, would turn dull and sad. Mr. Tolliver’s skin was yellow-brown, his glasses tinted sepia like an old rotogravure. The skin of his face and neck hung as though draped over his head and tacked here and there, at the corners of his eyes and where his ears were attached to his head.
“What are those?” he asked sternly, pointing to Allard’s soiled fatigues.
“The old clothes Allard wore over his suit,” Mary said. “I’ll put them in his closet.”
Mr. Tolliver didn’t nod; evidently he disapproved of his daughter’s carrying this man’s dirty clothes. It must have seemed too domestic of her, as if she were closer to him, the young and healthy stranger, than Mr. Tolliver had been told.
“Won’t you sit down, Mr. Benson?” he said.
A silence while Mary was gone with his musette bag and fatigues. Allard sat in an armchair, breath from its cushion rising slowly around him. Information Mary had given him intruded upon him. She had told him that her father was a minor white-collar person in the yarn mill. He had always been in the same niche; he had gone to junior college but had never risen in his job at all, just grown older. He had no tenure, no seniority, and even after all these years they could let him go any time they found it convenient. The mill itself was shaky, sometimes not running at all for a week at a time.
Mary’s brother Robert came in, staring around into the corners of the room as if he were looking for something, said hello and shook hands distractedly. He was tall like his father, taller because at sixteen he hadn’t yet begun to stoop. He was not interested in his sister’s male friends. He was busy; he left for his mad-scientist electronics laboratory in the basement where among other things, Mary had told Allard, he generated great blue shredded clouds of electricity that destroyed all radio communication in the neighborhood.
“Mary tells me you’re majoring in English, Mr. Benson,” Mr. Tolliver said.
“Yes, so far.”
“What would that prepare you to be?”
“I’m not sure—if anything,” Allard said, smiling from habit at the self-deprecating statement he had made so many times. He smiled though he knew Mr. Tolliver would not respond. The man was ill, and probably had no time for any kind of frivolity. But Allard knew also that his statement had not been self-deprecatory at all—just the opposite; in his youthful arrogance he had no need for any dull profession, and he had said this to a sick man worried about his daughter’s future. Mr. Tolliver’s lips were too red, his eyelids too loose around his eyes. It was not really age, it was his illness that like a short circuit had drained away his powers.
“It’s a hard world, Mr. Benson,” Mr. Tolliver said.
Allard didn’t care if it was. His world was a different one, anyway, not of this room or of the people who had furnished it, not even visible from here. That they wanted to live here among this furniture he knew, but it was still shocking to him that these choices had been made deliberately. Ocher and umber, cushion dust, varnish, draperies and curtains too heavy for the small room, the white lace at the windows nearly lost to view from the inside. He had been in such rooms before, but they had always seemed the former habitations of people long dead and gone. Glass-covered pictures hung on tasseled cords from the picture moldings. Photographs of relatives and ancestors, some in round or oval varnished frames, leaned out from the dull flowered print of the wallpaper. The pictures were of faded, formal people he knew were dead, their stern dim faces communicating nothing but mortality. The ornamental turnings of the legs of tables, the cast flutings on the columns of lamps, all calculated by someone to be in good taste, seemed only impoverished excess. Tassels on the arms of the sofa and its matching chair hung above the thick, bent legs. The carpet was vaguely Oriental; to examine in any detail its scrolls of ill-defined and exhausted flowers seemed wrong, so Allard took his eyes away from it.
Across from him, over Mr. Tolliver’s thin shoulder, was a framed reproduction of a painting. Jesus Christ stood upon a greenish ball representing the earth, his tapered bare toes seeming to clasp it. Over his flowing white vestments he wore a pink robe open at the chest. On the white cloth that covered his chest was a strawberry-shaped heart he touched with the index finger of his rather effeminately posed left hand. His other hand, held toward the viewer, spurted a white spray from a slit in the palm. The back of his left hand also spurted a strange white fluid from its wound. Calm eyes gazed from the slightly tilted, handsome head that was surrounded by a sunburst halo. Behind the figure, evidently in space, was a pretty sunset or dawn. Allard looked again at the red heart, which was not a stylized valentine heart but something in between that and a real muscular valve. Small radiations, like flames, came from the top of it where it had a short stem, and above the flames was a gold cross.
“The Sacred Heart of Jesus,” Mr. Tolliver said in his faded, stern voice. “The Sacred Heart of Jesus, Mr. Benson. ‘Take My yoke upon you, and learn from Me, for I am meek and humble of heart; and you will find rest for your souls.’ That is from Saint Matthew.”
“Oh,” Allard said. Mary had told him that her father was a convert to Catholicism, with a convert’s intensity of belief.
“You understand that in this house we are all very devout Catholics.”
“Yes,” Allard said, nodding. His eyes slid away from the dim ones behind the sepia glasses. In front of the small brick fireplace, between two tall brass-headed andirons that would never have fit inside, was a vase of cut daffodils. It must have been Mary who had placed them there. She came back, then, and there were two bright things of yellow in the room. Lively, nervous and loving, she smiled at her father and at Allard, then sat lightly on a fringed ottoman beside her father’s chair.
From the photographs Mary had showed him, her mother had been small, with Mary’s delicate bones, but with an intense, tortured Irish face all calm had left as she grew older. What must once have been a pretty face h
ad later become ragged, almost skinless. And it was in this room seven years ago that Mrs. Tolliver had breathed and trembled, knowing she was dying. He wondered if the Infant of Prague or the Sacred Heart of Jesus had comforted her then. A dense web of alien memories and terrors surrounded him. A rope portiere fringed the doorway to the dining room, lampshades were fringed with yellowed lace, a corner whatnot cabinet displayed in its gloom gilded dishes and glass bowls decorated with pea-sized glass lumps. The fancy veneered cabinet of the Atwater Kent radio bore a more modern Bakelite radio on its top. Wall sconces held up orange light bulbs in torch shapes.
On an end table a cast pot-metal model of a sailing ship revealed that perhaps its designer had never seen the sea.
The unmoving air smelled of stale chocolate. Medicinal.
In a narrow, glass-fronted bookcase were a few books: A Daily Missal, Health and the Mind, A Map of Life, Johnny Tremaine, Gone with the Wind. He would of course stay out his sentence here, where people were still living out their lives. What did it mean to Allard Benson except a temporary oppression of his spirit? But this was their home, filled with their valued possessions; the warm cubicles of these rooms were all that had protected them from the hard world outside, from that cold of absolute zero.
Mary seemed to glow against the umber tones of the room. She was so lithe, so … workable. She worked so perfectly, so easily in all her senses and systems. Her one strange flaw was magic, the fleck of jade green in the iris of her right eye. He could catch its glint now as she looked at him. It was dark magic that she had lived her life in this somber house. She was a creature of sunlight, a jewel to be removed from this dullness.
“Mr. Benson was …”
“Allard, Daddy.”
“Urn. Looking at your mother’s favorite picture. Perhaps it seems a little garish to your sophisticated eye, Mr. Benson, but it was a great comfort to her. She was a little girl from south Boston who hadn’t the advantage of a college education.”
“Well, yes, as a picture … I mean as a painting …” Allard said, unable to decide what terms the sick man demanded.
“It’s not by Leonardo, you mean,” Mr. Tolliver went on. “It’s sentimental, isn’t it? The colors are those of the nursery, the figure of Our Savior is too pretty for your taste. Is that it, Mr. Benson?”
“Allard, Daddy. And stop being so antagonistic.”
Mr. Tolliver smiled, or Allard thought he smiled; the bloodless gums showed for a moment. Yes, Mary and her father shared a joke he couldn’t quite figure out. Was it her chiding of her father that made him give that quick grimace of a smile, or was it their mutual recognition of Mr. Tolliver’s deadly sarcasm? Perhaps Mary’s part was to tell him, each time he began to get too nasty, to be quiet. They were “close,” she had said.
“I meant to make the point that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Mary’s mother was, in her way, a saint. She lived in the love of God; the life of Christ entered into her. Beside this mystery all else is trivial, Mr. Benson. One should never forget that.” He looked at Mary, then directly at Allard. “Have you expressed an interest in the Church, Mr. Benson?”
“Daddy, this is ridiculous. It’s embarrassing, and I want you to lay off,” Mary said. “You get the message?”
Again the grimace, but the sick eyes behind the tinted lenses returned coldly to Allard.
“Yes, I’m interested in the Church,” Allard said.
“You’re curious, you mean.”
“Yes, I suppose so.”
“What do you believe in, Mr. Benson?”
“I’m not sure.”
“You’re not sure. Do you believe in God?”
“I’d like to, maybe, but I find it rather difficult.”
“For what purpose were you put upon the earth?”
“God knows.”
“I sense flippancy in your answer.”
“Daddy,” Mary said, “it’s time for your nap. You’re getting tired. Come on.” She took his arm to help him up. “If you’re going to feel good at dinner you’ve got to take one of your pills and have a rest.”
Mr. Tolliver stood up, sighing. Allard rose, too, but though they stood facing each other Mr. Tolliver didn’t look at him. Mary put her arm around her father’s waist. “Come on, Daddy. I’ll help you if you want.” She looked up at her father, her hair light gold against the brindled cloth of his vest.
‘Yes, I’m tired,” Mr. Tolliver said wearily. “Forgive me, but you’re right. I don’t feel too well.” Mary helped him, her arm tightly around his waist as they went toward the vestibule and the front stairs.
Heaviness left the room, though it would be only a short respite. There would be dinner, and tomorrow the strange journey into alien rituals. With Mr. Tolliver’s departure the painting of Jesus relented a bit too, becoming less of a presence and more of a curiosity. The Sacred Heart itself, painted in three dimensions, was a little too small for the size of Jesus’ body—as strangely euphemistic as the paleness of the blood that sprayed so lightly from His nail wounds.
When Mary came back he went over and sat beside her on the sofa’s fat cushions. She put her hand on his arm and smiled at him—her sweet, slightly self-deprecating smile, the smile with her lips closed. Sometimes when he kissed her he would feel this smile impressed against his own lips until with a tremor it would partly open, tender as a flower. Then he would feel that his mouth and tongue had destroyed it, turned it into a kind of agony.
“I’m sorry,” Mary said, “but he’s sick and worried, Allard. It’s some kind of kidney or liver trouble the doctors can’t figure out. You know? And his job, too. And just now he was looking down at your motorcycle. It does look wild and irresponsible the way it sort of leans over—as if it’s about to fall but doesn’t care.”
“Well, he’s probably right about that,” Allard said.
Mary laughed and squeezed his arm. “Oh, he shouldn’t worry so much about you and me.”
He put his hand around her slim waist and signaled gently that she should lean toward him. Of course she moved consentingly the way he wanted her to, her eyes closing, her lips opening slightly. Her breath was sweet and warm, the moist tissues of her lips cool. Through his thumb he felt her pulse in the tender, taut skin of her throat. He always found himself holding her in ways that resembled the grips of violence. When they moved apart Mary sat shyly, her head down, her hands upturned in her lap.
“I’d like to put you on that rakehell motorcycle and take you out of here,” he said.
“Is it that bad? I know it must be strange for you and I’m sorry Daddy’s so sort of picky.”
“It’s all right. Don’t worry about me,” he said, feeling a little noble.
“Anyway, you know I promised not ever to ride on your motorcycle.”
“You’ll break that promise, Mary.” He felt pity for Mr. Tolliver, knowing that all the history of love and care, family, shared sorrows, everything she might owe her father, would matter very little when his own need—this callow young stranger’s supposed need—took what it wanted of her. He didn’t have to exact promises or make demands, as her father did. It was not necessary to do anything, or to be anything but what, for better or worse, he was. But then he reminded himself that his intentions were in fact honorable.
She smiled and shook her head. “I never break promises,” she said.
He believed it—in every case except his own. “Let’s go for a walk or something,” he said. “Have we got time before dinner?”
“Yes. I’ll put the roast in now and we can go. I can show you where I went to school, if you’re interested.”
In the small, crowded kitchen he put his arms around her. She laughed and pushed him away so she could fiddle with the gas stove. The oven came on with a blue whoosh. She put the roast in the oven on its pan and turned the flames down, then opened the door to the cellar and called down to Robert, telling him the roast was on and to look at it once in a while. Allard couldn’t hear Robert’s answer. “He probabl
y won’t think of it, anyway,” Mary said.
They went out of the dark house into the warm light. On the sidewalk Allard was conscious of being watched through the windows of other houses, of being considered Mary’s suitor. At the corner a woman in black said hello to Mary while looking only at Allard, then crossed the street, walking with difficulty, as though her legs were partly fused where they came together.
They turned up the hill, away from the brown river, the mill and the row of duplexes.
“When Robert goes to M.I.T. next year, Daddy will be alone most of the time. He thinks of that a lot and it’s sad, you know. He couldn’t stand the idea of someone living in, like a housekeeper. He’s so desperate and weak.”
“How about his religion?” Allard said.
“It’s no substitute for people.”
“Isn’t that kind of sacrilegious?”
“It’s true, isn’t it? Unless you have a vocation, I suppose. And he’s worried about me being at the university even though he’s proud of it, too.”
“Worried you’ll meet a horny atheist like me.”
She laughed. “Oh, I know you, Allard! You’re not an atheist at all!”
“I can see why he’s nervous. I’m the leading character in his worst nightmare, and before you’ve been in college a year you’ve found me and invited me home.”
“When he gets to know you …”
“I doubt that.”
She stopped and turned toward him, serious, her clear eyes honest, lucid. “Do you really love me, Allard?” she said.
“Yes.”
“Then I don’t see …”
“Why it’s not okay with your father?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t see it, really? Mary, what kind of daughter and Catholic are you?”
“I love my father and I’m a good Catholic. What I mean is that he loves me, too, Allard. Really. He’s discouraged and afraid right now, but he does love Robert and me. I’m sorry about the way he acted, but he’s never been a success in business or anything so you know how much our family meant to him. Maybe he wasn’t respected much in the mill, but when he came home he was respected. He deserved it, too, and now our home is breaking up. Can you imagine how he feels?” There were tears in her eyes. “He’s only fifty but he looks and feels about a hundred.”
The Hair of Harold Roux Page 22