They resumed their walking, Mary a light presence beside him. He believed she would have liked him to take her hand. They walked together a little more separately than she would have preferred, maybe.
She showed him St. Agnes’, a square, depressingly barren brick building where she had gone to school through the eighth grade. They went to Mass every day at St. Agnes’, she said. The four-story building stood in the middle of an asphalt plain, an acre of asphalt. The elms around the edges of the lot were worn to eye level as if by scuffling feet; then they soared upward as if trying to escape the barrenness below, flourishing as living trees only in their upper reaches, in a green stratosphere all their own. Down the street was St. Joseph’s, a large church built of the same burned dark brick, where he would go with them to Mass tomorrow.
“I guess we’d better go back,” Mary said. “I’ve got to keep an eye on my roast.”
He envisioned burning meat and blue flames. They returned to the house and entered its darkness. Mr. Tolliver, still upstairs resting, was a heavy presence.
The kitchen was too small to have a table or chairs in it, so Allard brought a dining room chair into the doorway and sat watching as Mary prepared dinner. Her flowered apron was coming untied and he tied it in a neat bow for her, then put his hands around her waist to measure it, feeling her bones’ perfect and complicated movements within her. He watched her competently manipulate steaming pots and pans, her domestic art efficient as ritual. He volunteered to work the potato ricer, a hinged piston and cylinder that extruded mealy white worms from its perforated bottom.
“That’s a help,” Mary said. “I’d better wake Daddy now. We’re about ready. Would you tell Robert?”
He descended the narrow stairs into the cellar, careful not to hit his head on a floor joist that crossed at eye level. From somewhere in the dank spaces below came cracklings of blue light and the smell of ozone.
“Robert?” he said. “Hey, Robert?”
Robert stood in the far corner of the cellar before a lighted console, his narrow face illuminated from below by the dials and rheostats. The oil furnace stood behind him, a somnolent monster with its round arms raised into the gloom of the ceiling. Allard crossed the gritty cement floor and stopped at what he hoped was a safe distance from the crackling wormy yellow and blue energy he had never managed to understand. Robert nodded and kept turning his dials, gazing sternly at his quivering indicators. A metal globe as big as a basketball above the console grew bright blue hairs of light that forked and shredded off into the atmosphere like the pure hysterical essence of fright. The very air was ripped and fragmented by the demonic power Robert controlled. He glanced once at Allard, acknowledging his presence, but the narrow face, as stern as a helmsman’s, turned back to its command. The blue crackling lessened, replaced by a deep, ominous hum.
“That looks dangerous,” Allard said.
“Only if you’re ignorant of its nature.”
“Do you understand it?”
“I probably understand as much of it as anyone. But no one really understands; we just control it and use it.”
“Then it sounds even more dangerous,” Allard said.
Robert looked at him for the first time with some interest. “Yes. We make up terms for things and sometimes they make us think we know more than we do. Ohms, watts, volts, amperes, kilohertz, megahertz—but we don’t know what the real power is.”
“Sort of like religion,” Allard ventured.
Again the look of interest. Robert thought this over for a moment, then said, “Indeed,” with the dry, matter-of-fact dignity—perhaps stuffiness—of the M.I.T. professor he would quite likely someday be. “But of course all this is more tangible in its results. It works or it doesn’t work. Its force is immediate and measurable.” He made some notations on a clipboard, hung the clipboard back on the wall, and turned down the transformer hum of the infernal machine until all was silent. “I’m interested in electrostatic induction. Do you know what that is?”
“I’m afraid not,” Allard said.
“Well, I won’t go into the details, but it has to do with the transfer of electrical forces from one conductor to another, and the exact nature of the repulsion of similar charges. The blue lightning you saw was the result of electrons becoming so concentrated that they were actually sprayed through the air. There are certain phenomena here we don’t yet understand. We know they happen, but not quite why. Sooner or later I’ll explain them.”
“To the world?”
“To the world.”
“You mean you’ll get the Nobel Prize and stuff like that?”
“Quite possibly, although ‘all that’ is of little importance.”
In the wan light of the bare bulb Robert looked no longer the stern commander, the Prince of Technology, but the somewhat sallow sixteen-year-old he was, glands slightly out of whack, a pimple on his nostril. But Robert’s knowledge was real, making, by comparison, whatever force or hardness there was in Allard’s consciousness seem of doubtful value. Vagueness seemed his own lot. And the hardness, or sureness, of Robert’s opinions, his lack of self-conscious modesty, was in such contrast to Mary’s compliance, her submissiveness, even though some of her features were recognizable in his facial bones beneath the waxy adolescent flesh. Allard had to look up at him as they turned toward the stairs, the narrow head on its stalklike neck so firmly vertical it might have contained a gyroscope. It seemed quite certain Robert would do as he said he would, day by day, year by year, until he reached whatever heights of scientific glory he envisioned for himself. As if he were on a track.
“I’ve read some science fiction,” Allard said, “and that certainly didn’t help my understanding much.”
“Huh. Venus shuttles run by Portuguese. Time warp and jalopy spaceships.”
“Yeah. As I said, I didn’t get much out of it—except a sort of depressing general prediction that the earth’s a goner.”
“That’s relative,” Robert said. “Presumably, everything’s a goner.” They went up the cellar stairs, leaving the atmosphere of ozone, entering the more earthly one of roast beef.
“That’s what I can’t understand,” Allard said. “How you scientists seem to get comfort out of relativity.”
“It’s logical. It’s clean.” Robert turned to him almost with exasperation. “Listen, you’re the one who ought to be Catholic.”
They entered the small dining room, where there was so little space around the set and prepared central table that they stood on either side of it.
“I don’t mean to dump on your ohms and ergs,” Allard said. “Actually, I believe in them.”
“That’s what I mean. You take them on faith.”
“Do you take your Catholicism on faith?”
“What else can I take it on?” He motioned toward a small crucifix on the wall, a bronzed Christ mounted on a wooden cross. “I manage to compartmentalize all sorts of conceptions. Science, religion, sex, vanity, love, mortality. Let’s say I know the difference between evidence and conviction.”
“Jesus!” Allard said. “You’re a wonder, Robert. You know that?”
Robert flinched slightly at Jesus’ name used as an expletive, then smiled a little out of vanity. Allard’s admiration had been plain.
Mr. Tolliver came in then, Mary behind him, the delicate nurse. He sat down with a fragile lurch, and Mary pointed Allard to his chair. She went to the kitchen and brought back small bowls of soup, then returned for the dishes of vegetables and the roast on its platter. When all the food was present, there was a moment of grave silence. Mr. Tolliver bowed his head and said in a ceremonial voice, “Bless us, O Lord, and these gifts which we are about to receive from Thy bounty through Christ Our Lord. Amen.”
Heads rose. Mr. Tolliver stood up and began to carve the roast. “This is a fancy dinner for Saturday,” he said sternly, not looking at Allard. “What’s the matter with baked beans?”
This time Allard saw that Mr. Tolliver was joking, in his
fashion. He understood too that it was not a matter of give-and-take, that all such sallies would originate from one source. He tried to smile, but his facial muscles had cramped; then he reached for his water glass and nearly knocked it over. Somehow he would get through this meal. Time had to pass, whether one wanted it to or not. Robert hadn’t said a word since his father had entered the room, this small dark room crowded with furniture like the tall, glass-fronted cabinet that contained fancier dishes than they were using. All the furniture seemed to have been bought originally for some other room in better times.
Bless us, 0 Lord… Occasionally he had eaten at tables where grace was said. That strange silence in which one was embarrassed and stunned by a sudden gravity. Somewhat like madness. The Lord is great, the Lord is good, thank Thee, Lord, for this food. For this fudd? What rhymed with good? Or the mocking other side of that madness: Bless this soup and bless this meat; Jesus Baldheaded Christ, let’s eat! But now were they eating this food with Catholic mouths—this food blessed, as though flavored lightly with God sauce?
“When I was a boy,” Mr. Tolliver said, “we had bread and milk on Saturday nights. The bread that had gone stale during the week. Not store-bought bread, either.”
So how do I answer that? Allard said to himself so clearly he could feel his tongue moving in his mouth.
“I like to make bread,” Mary said. “But of course I can’t if Fm at school.”
“Yes, everybody’s going off to college,” Mr. Tolliver said.
Silence.
“And what do you learn in college these days, Mr. Benson?”
“That’s a hard question,” Allard said. Suddenly he thought of Naomi lying naked on his poncho. “We read a lot of books.”
“Most of which tell you God doesn’t exist?”
“Some of them might imply that. Yes.”
“And still we scrimp and save in order to send our sons and daughters to such places.”
“Well, I’m glad you sent Mary there or I wouldn’t have met her.”
Mr. Tolliver visibly shuddered. “Would you like some more meat, Mr. Benson?”
“Yes, please.” He passed his plate, and the long yellow hands manipulated the carving set. Allard also had more potatoes and carrots. His nervousness made him hungry, which was strange. He could have taken Mary’s roast, that consecrated meat, in his two hands and wolfed at it, bloody juices running down his wrists to his elbows. The cheap flannel suit he wore bound him across the shoulders and under his arms. He glanced at Mary, his eyes feeling avid and dangerous. Asked, he explained between mouthfuls that his father ran a weekly newspaper, the Leah Free Press, that he had no brothers or sisters, that he had spent two and one-half years in the army, ending up as a corporal in the Tokyo-Kanagawa Military Government. Though Mr. Tolliver had asked these questions, he listened with impatience, frowning.
“Did you see Hiroshima?” Robert asked suddenly.
“Are we nearly ready for dessert?” Mr. Tolliver asked.
“No, I never went there.”
“Do you think we should have dropped the bomb?”
“No.”
Mr. Tolliver was consulting with Mary about the dessert. “Jello,” she said.
“What flavor?”
“And then there was Nagasaki,” Robert said.
“A center of Roman Catholicism,” Allard said before he thought.
Mr. Tolliver was staring at him. “What did you say? Roman Catholicism?”
“Very many Catholics in Nagasaki, I understand.”
“Japanese?”
“Japanese Catholics, yes.”
“Don’t you think the bomb helped end the war?” Robert asked.
“Maybe, but mostly you get a scientific toy like that and you want to see how it works.”
Robert smiled for the second time. “I’m interested in more theoretical problems. Though I suppose you’re right—theory transmutes into action.”
“You said it again, Robert.”
“What? What?” Mr. Tolliver said, looking from Allard to Robert and back again. He didn’t like surprises such as this sudden familiar conversation. He reacted as though he had been physically shoved, wincing and then leaning forward again as if to regain his balance.
“We were talking about Robert’s attitudes toward science,” Allard said. He found himself enunciating the words carefully, speaking, he supposed, to a kind of senility.
“Hum!”
While Mary, with Robert’s help, removed the dishes and brought in the jello—raspberry, with whipped cream on top —Mr. Tolliver said nothing and Allard could think of nothing to say. He fully understood by now that he was not supposed to initiate conversation in Mr. Tolliver’s presence. While they ate their jello he thought of things he might say, things he honestly believed; but what he honestly believed would enrage Mr. Tolliver and hurt Mary, so he sat dishonestly among these people, himself unreal, not able to give Mr. Tolliver real answers. He knew the real questions in Mr. Tolliver’s mind, all right, and he could answer them, saying to Mr. Tolliver that, yes, he was leading Mary into sin. The power was love, one we use though we don’t understand it. And yes, she would suffer, and if by any chance there was such a thing as hell, poor Mary would have to go there. But don’t worry about it.
Words and phrases, tinnitus in his head. The pronouncements of a sage of twenty-one. Perhaps he had no control at all, and it was Mary herself who was the real manipulator here. Maybe she had enticed him to this dark place and trapped him, her green eye-fleck the only mortal warning of her power. He followed the sweetly agonizing promises he felt she contained, was dazed by her beauty, his dream of possession ridiculously presumptuous. And the Catholic religion he so easily patronized, with all its squirting blood, its thorns, rapes, burnings and nailings—was it that alien to his own experience? Baal, Antichrist, the Black Mass, nuns copulating in incensed inner sanctums. All of it a plot of the Powers of Darkness. But he had come here to rescue the beautiful part-human sorceress, to free her from her thrall-dom. The Knight of Reason and Lust (that perfectly reasonable emotion), come upon his Indian Pony …
Later, after the dishes were done—Allard wiping the warm plates he took from Mary’s hand—and Mr. Tolliver had again retired and Robert gone to his room to study, she leaned into his arms in the dark living room.
“You put your hands on me in funny places,” she said. “You seem to have a right. I never saw anything like it, but you just seem to have a right.”
“It’s that I don’t think touching you is a sin.” His leg trembled when he put weight on it. She jumped slightly, then stood looking off toward a corner. “What’s the matter?” he said, knowing what it was she’d felt. That thing of the nether regions had grown, and she had suddenly identified it.
“I’m confused,” she said.
“Why? What’s so strange?”
“I don’t know what you want.”
“I want you.”
“I don’t know.”
“I do.”
“How can you be so sure of everything?”
“I’m not sure of everything.” He put his hands lightly around her neck and pulled her, smooth as smoke, back against him.
“It’s a sin. It is.”
He wondered if she ever spoke to other women about such things. “What’s a sin?” he asked.
“The carnal things you do to me.”
“Really?” He had to laugh, partly out of nervousness.
“Yes.”
“But I haven’t done anything except touch you here and there, and kiss you rather chastely on the lips.”
“That’s carnal.”
“We’re both made of flesh, Mary, so whatever we do has got to be pretty carnal, wouldn’t you say?”
“All my life I’ve been told not to. Not to feel this way. ‘Purity of body’—that’s what we were always told. It was always the Sixth and Ninth Commandments. ‘Avoid the occasions of sin,’ they always told us. We had retreats where that was about all that was
said.”
“What’s an ‘occasion of sin’?”
“Like, ‘putting yourself in the position of being alone with a person of the opposite sex.’ I can hear the words.”
“And yet here you are in that position.”
“You may think it’s silly, Allard, but it’s very real to me.”
“What’s it like down there? In hell, I mean.”
“You can joke about it but I can’t. It’s fire. You burn. Forever.”
“And so you go and confess out of fear?”
“I know I’ll want you to touch me again. I’m not sincere in my contrition.”
“So you confess just to assuage this voodoo shit?”
“Allard.” She was frightened and sad. “I don’t understand you.”
The Catholic room seemed to darken around him. He knew no logic could free her from a lifetime of madness. He would have to enter her consciousness through her nerves.
“You sit over there, Allard,” she said, pointing to one end of the davenport. “And I’ll sit here.”
They sat, but soon he reached over and pulled her toward him. She seemed weightless. Then he turned her so that he held her across his lap. So deliberately that it seemed almost natural even to him, his hand moved to her breast and she began to breathe quickly. She seemed to be trying to remove his hand, but her hand was weak. She was substantial to him yet light. He leaned down and kissed her on the mouth, her lips fluttering in little spasms against his.
“No, no. Take your hand away, Allard.” She spoke into his lips and he breathed the small gusts of her breath.
“All right,” he said, moving his hand slowly down. She was an instrument he must play, a perfect and even dangerous instrument because if he made an error she would have to take herself away from him. Yet he must play upon her senses with the exactly permissible intensity. He must be aware of all vital signs, even of the technicalities of inches, radii of muscles, bones, tendons, glands, hollows, straps, hems, plackets, the elasticities of flesh and fabric, of pulse and breath. And he was used by his own intensities; golden moilings, like felt clouds of gas, moved deliciously near pain through his body and his vision. He was aware exactly of the calm he must personify to her, and of course of the impropriety of passion in this crowded room haunted by death, Jesus, hellfire and angels. How far he must go—and what a strange word, far. As if moving toward the act of love were a going-away. But you had to move toward it and when you were spent of all of its beautiful violence you did move beyond and away, for a time at least, into the sadness that sooner or later, in the proper place and time, he would cause Mary to endure.
The Hair of Harold Roux Page 23