“Couple dollars, Pa, with my penny-one I was telling you about.”
“Like I was saying to my driver just the other day, son, that ain’t all in life, I mean cash.…”—and the tears came blue and fat down the slivers of beard on his cheeks. “It’s good to see you again, boy. It is.” His face was blotched purple and the tears came dripping and his eyes were squeezed up, red rim against red rim, but the voice went on calmly telling me his good news of Pittsburgh. “Money or no money in your pocket, it’s always good to have a son for a father in his age. I been missing you all this time, boy. Your skin is marked there on your face, on your arms over there. What happened?”
Did to myself and now I say I didn’t, Dad! But I just heard him out.
“You were born with a nice clean body, not a mole on it anyplace. Your mother was like that, too. If you’re hungry, let’s be having something to eat. I’m going to fix me some sausage and potatoes now, boy. Will you have a bite with me? Come on to the table and sit down while I fix it,”—the thick body, heavier but still muscled, flap-flapping the slippers and the heels showing pink across the floor.
“Still putting it away, eh Pa?”
“Doc Fink says no more deep fry, and he knows that’s how I like it. Salt, butter, bacon grease, too—”
“So what do you do now, Pa?”
“Deep fry it, boy. You really come back broke?”
All I meant to think was, with a jerk of regret: I spilled my money into the sewer through those nicks on my arm. But the jerk turned out to be a movement of gratitude for my friend Grack, and a hi-dad for my father, too: Thanks for beginning where we left off and with food. If you can eat fats, then so can I.
The old man had grown older, the stubble white on his cheeks and a way of talking which spoke for the hopelessness of words and the hurry-up which the sight of death gives us. He had the slow movements of a strong man who has worked hard, and is tired, and no sleep but one can mend him. Even now he refused himself the compensation of anger! The nervous lift of my head to his was regret for this, was the apology which could never reach him, was, above all, greeting.
Still in his apartment at the corner of a street of side-by-side houses, his fire-escape door open to the flies in summer and the twice-a-week maid, grease in his pots and fat on his thighs, he ran his trucking business for pleasure and went on dwelling in his other habits of a lonely something-to-do. He moved without touching the narrow walls and the accumulation of furniture in these rooms which he knew with his feet and roaming desires. He had no one. He had nothing. He was not sufficient unto himself (no man is), nor was I good enough to make the ghost of my mother stand back. He had nothing to do but to pass back and forth in time from my mother (so pretty she was, and you’d never believe how light on her feet) and then to the rest of life (so heavy, so long). And I was all that was left of his wife and I had come back to him. He leaned the bull chest and the head with its unshaven cheeks toward me. He was trying to smile. “See this old slicer, son? Remember when I got it for a premium? Your mother always wanted a set of nice cutlery, but I got it too late. Couldn’t afford. Look how I honed it down so she’s no more’n a wire on a handle. Makes you wonder about steel, don’t it?”
“I remember, Pa.”
“It’ll sure be a day when this blade goes crack, but it’s coming, I know it. I’m glad, so happy, you come back before all the old things wore out, boy. Coffee?”
“I’ll take it with thanks.”
“Sit down, sit down, you don’t have to play formal manners with your own dad. Sure, I know you’re not used to home ways.”
At first I watched through his talk for him to try to convince me with the index finger to his eye. But this was the new world of America at Pittsburgh I had come back to, a suppleness in its demands and a sternness in its ways. The house would not move. Dad would wait to see what he could do. Grack’s older world had all its morality faced to the one commandment—Be with it and for it!—and the way or the why unjudged by the other solitary judges. Unlike the carnie, the Outside practiced a ritual which could never be learned because it altered with each day. I had to get wise all over again, my pocket-picking wisdom insufficient. He fed me. He learned to talk without questions except for the future. There were proposals, courting hints, and much patience in a heavy man with gray fat and muscles going bad in his age.
Would I like to sell pants? He knew a fellow, a clothier.
How about clerking in a high-class shop? I would just have to sweet-talk a little, pour it on the way I knew how.
What about the post office? a factory? soliciting by telephone? a working job or a selling? “You pick it, son,”—and his mouth was that of a swain, soft and half-parted as the lips waited for me.
Back to college, if you really want that,—and I watched choking while his finger, plump and knuckle-thick, came to his eye. There was a lash to rub out; that was all. My father, bald and shaving what hair he had, lay in the cushions like a cheap rubber doll with thick, oily, pasted-on lashes. He walked, he talked, he did his duty, folks. White slivers of beard lay flat against the falsely hale cheeks.
“No, I don’t want it. I think I’ll hang around awhile and see, Pa,” I told him. “College, I mean I don’t want.”
“Just don’t you go back on the road, son,”—and the doll-baby lashes fell shut. “You’re all I have in the world. I’m not counting my possessions. I almost got the detectives on your tail, but I couldn’t afford it. Sure, business was pretty good, pr-retty good, the trucks were hauling sometimes twenty-four hours a day.… Stay here with me now.”
“I came back to see you, Pa.”
“Don’t go away. Find yourself something. You won’t have to stay here so long, just till your old father—”
In a hurry, reproaching and interrupting: “I’ll get something in mind to do, Pa. I haven’t got it yet, but I’ll get it.” By this time he should have known that I needed something from him.
“It’s a pretty good business I got here for a young man. Two White Motor trucks, dependable drivers, a name for careful hauling and paying my bills on the first. Got me a better spot in the depot since you left. You wouldn’t want to work for me, would you, son?”—again, as he said this, the soft shy smile of the fearful swain. I was grateful for the you wouldn’t would you? I loved him for it. But, as is the habit of men like me, it drove me to strike at him harder.
“No, I wouldn’t,” I said.
And his lashes fell thick over the opaque eyes, and the smile sank away within his cheeks.
I needed his anger just because he strangled it for me. I had to twist, to butt, to dig it out. Looking through to his eyes was like standing in the sun, trying to peer through a screen after the girl who has just slipped inside. I remember doing that in Montgomery, Alabama, one time when I followed a girl to the julep-and-Buick part of town because she looked like Phyllis. Otherwise I forgot about Phyl.
“I saved your postcard in my wallet,” he was saying. “Want to see it?”
One thing more about my father now: He showed his happiness by talking easy and going as light as he could on me. He couldn’t help the sticky eyes and the disordered smile. I had made so many judgments on myself that I would not have been able to take even the predictable ones from him, those judgments of nag which never did for his fury against me. The fearfulness in my sight and the thick lashes were the most I could handle. I had given up on his telling me his anger out. Burdened with enough sense to know gratitude for the way he waited me through, I never said anything when I caught him trying to figure me over his newspaper with the teevee, his creaking slippers, and his flabby, money-used face. The soiled furniture of his world swelled about him in damp pillows and upholstery and loose whining springs. He settled among these things of an evening, groaning with pleasure in what I (mistakenly) thought of as power over the future through the abdication of risk. “Just horse around, figure it out for yourself,” the baby-faced blink said to me, the combed lashes sticking together
over his eyes.
Well, this girl in Montgomery—like girls in Rifle City, Colorado, and San Diego, California—had made me think of Phyllis as I did now while my father was patient with my peering about the city jobless, stiff-necked, and cool-headed. Think of her, I say: those others turned me back despite my habit to the side-looking cast in Phyl’s eyes, her black hair short-cropped with a calculated wildness, her eyes, too, calculating in their defect but playing at one time only for me. Home now after three carnie years, I made no effort to find her. Nevertheless, while Pa worked and I pulled with two fingers at the padded roll of dollars I had brought home with me—padded with singles, this small—the backward-bending part of me looked to the small bones quick in Phyl’s cheeks, the small mouth bitten full and pouting, and the intelligent grace of the swimmer in her movements across a room. Deep-breasted, deep-clefted, knowing it and using it, she leaned, laughed, or bent her black curls with the cast of her eye wily in thought. I did not call her or try to find what had become of her. She might still have been too lively for me.
Meanwhile, first I told Pa I didn’t have penny-one. Lie. Then I told him I had a fat boodle of gain in my pocket. Lie. He nodded and looked, his head thrust forward on his thick neck, always believing me. I think my mother was also too much for him, and died in pity of him at my birth—but that’s the sort of guess you make when you live overlong in a house with a man who deals even with pleasure as a sort of reverence. Lies, lies, and true enough.
Anyway, no man can escape the woman he considers too much rused for him: tear her down or run away toward her if he can’t meet her head-and-hind on. I was coming back to Phyl as the Kansas City legionnaire, stupefied by banquet and toast to the Old Battery, sleeps, sweats in it, dreams of some pert French fifille that he thinks he remembers. She is light to hold, and dance to our dream. She is the prize of an easy war. Remember, Frank, how we took Saint-Tropez?
I was speaking there from fancy. The leap and high-buttoned soar of Phyl made me think of the poor dreams of Vet convention stag parties, where being together makes each wife’s man snore after the same faraway girl.
I called her at last. No, she was not married. Yes, she was claimed. She was to go East to be married in October to a man in the litigation business, she said. He was a lawyer working for a fine organization. He didn’t interest me; it didn’t change anything about Phyl for me, either, whether it was a mote or a lawyer in her scheming eye. Even by telephone I could feel her presence, the smallness of her, swollen with sex, and the thirsty face which came clear astonishingly sharpened with surprise over the telephone. I heard her breath—Fifi transported from the dream! It was the surprise of long anticipation. I had the good dizziness of the barker watching the marks file in at his promise of a high-ly ed-u-cational French can-can from Paris, France, the half-boy, half-girl which sometimes does it like me and sometimes like you—yes, you—plus the genuine man-eating octopus from Japanese seas in added attraction.
Yes, she would see me. I picked the night.
The victory of a barker, however, is an end only in the carnie world at the canvas places where distinguished marks congregate: nothing at all to look roosterish about yet. I named an evening not too near and waited in the dark, my father’s black shades drawn and my Prince Edward butts sucked gray in the dishes, while he went to work; he came home; he watched and waited for me to be a son to him. “You thinking about something, boy? Getting ready? That broke nose trouble you some in the change of weather? Planning things out for yourself?”
“Probably does, Pa. I’ll do the supper dishes tonight.”
Often I walked. I roamed the city at all hours, remembering when I came this high to a fire hydrant, seeing how the lot where we played stick hockey was now a four-story apartment, finding the corner where I had first dropped Phyl’s books and tried to kiss her. I had succeeded, but she had spied out my astonishment at how little good it did us. Then a kiss doesn’t move the sky and make a boy seven feet tall and smart! And a kiss does not unite the two of us in spirit forever! Her laughter was incredible.
At the cliffs of Pittsburgh, black with coal and red with ore, ruled by the mills to which came slope-jawed workers and the snappy commuting engineers, I lazed near the steelmakers while they sometimes cast an indifferent glance at me and away. If I caught an eye, I turned with Grack’s scowl and Grack’s grin through the changing weather, bringing my finger in a wide arc to the tender corner where the tear duct flows in the wind. They turned away. I didn’t mean business.
Still I could have made a fortune in the carnival business. I have tongues, as Jake the Japes once told me; I could run a mission house, be a Captain of Sally. That wouldn’t be being a son to him, Dad’s long-lashed following of me insisted. “It’s good for you to think things out. See that girl Phyllis Whatzername, too. I like it,” he said.
To go away once more, talking the money from their pockets, this would be to fork my tongue forever and to put out his eyes—or so I thought that late summer in Pittsburgh. I believed it was now or never for getting with it. An absolutist, I did not yet know that life keeps on giving us another chance, just as with kisses, as with love’s fumbling to be love—and just as with love’s failure to be more than love. I ate every day. The liverish yellow disappeared from my eyeballs. The scars on my arms faded and vanished. All this should have been a lesson to me.
“What do you call her? What did you say her name was? Son! You’re not listening to me.”
Grack too wanted me to be good to myself even if he could not himself answer to this good. Like a saint devoted forever to his vice in hell, he wanted me to be a visitor and to carry a moment of his revery up with me to the purgatory which is what is best on earth. (Jeez! I had forgotten to kiss Pauline goodbye.)
Pa and Phyl were waiting for me. Grack, dwelling in cunning and sloth, busy in despair, waited in the rains of North Dakota. I looked around and dozed in the fat pillows of my father’s chair and waited.
5. Evaded my mail and the liability to love
IT was nice. The day for Phyl came golden clear, a September interval with the dirt of the city upwinded from the smokestacks and the sun sailing free. In Indian summer weather the vegetables of the suburb turned crisp and obedient to the sun, all of them, hollyhocks, commuters, school-children. Vacuum cleaners awoke with a wail and the quick-deciding kids were already sick of Crafts and Social Studies. Hoots of gang and band shrilled among the birdsong of electric wiring behind the apartment building; someone cried, “Give it here!” and the nostalgic critter wanting out within me thought, Lookee lookee lookee.
The one thing I did for Dad, having wrapped his old flannel bathrobe about my skinny flanks, was to make his breakfast mornings before he went off to the dispatcher’s office. We sat blinking at each other over coffee. “You all riled up about seeing that girl tonight, son?” he asked me.
“No more’n she’s worried about me, Pa.”
“That’s fine, fine, it’s called taking things in your stride. Like I did when my driver twisted a trailer off into the ditch coming out of Youngstown and I’d forgot to renew the insurance. What did you say her name was? They’re only women.”
“That’s all they need be, Pa,”—and his gray face wrinkled with the complicity of laughter between father and son while toast crumpled between the plump cheeks.
Later I went down to the mailbox. We all have dreams of lotteries, longlost Oklahoma uncles, delicious fawn-eyed models from the perfume ads who have found our address, and we reach behind our names even if all we find is the electric bill. The top letter was addressed to me. I turned it over for the fun of receiving mail, the abstract breath which a word can carry from person to person, the pleasure teased through a pen until it comes out grammar. This envelope had been smudged by hands unskilled in writing. The return address was a jail in Kearns, Utah. The letter was from Grack.
And he had set me loose only to drop the net on me?
I stood in the hard September sunlight of the suburb,
the scratch of a rake next door and the tasty stench of burning leaves in my nostrils, and knew that all this was slipping away—money and plan and Pa and Phyllis, and the suppleness of decision of which I have already spoken—as my fingers slipped over this envelope which Grack had sent to bring me back. Then he couldn’t!—I knew this without opening. If he couldn’t do without me, how could I be expected to do without him? I looked to the leaf fire down the block for a flame to reach out for this paper in my hands. The dead leaves crackled, and the green edges hissed and sang. If his will had sent me home, how could I remain in my father’s house in the suburb when his will called me back? Or had he given me something he could not so easily Indiangive?—some alteration in my moral chemistry which this humor of his could not dissolve.
Freeing me, he thought now to play leash with old affections and gratitudes. I hustled my breath in the autumn like a shill pushing to buy. But I would not buy.
And, watching my hand move with the letter, I discovered that in these doings I had decided myself. Boggling my father and Phyl, ambiguously loosened but unfree, the stiff-limbed gestures of the suburb were my only trust. I practiced the skill of meanness. The gesture was one of putting away, thrusting off, closing. Grack had seen in his moment of pity for me that I needed my childhood more than I needed him. And now that I was making the effort, I choked with anger at my own injustice to myself which had sent me from morphine (of which I still dreamt) to Grack (who signaled our carnie past like the thrilling daytime memory of a dream, and beckoned). This letter had come to take me down once more. He was in jail; he needed help; he asked me to risk myself as he had done, with only a knife between us, during those days and nights in the cabin. When I left he might have picked up a habit himself, as if the number of habits is fixed, and the rule strict that he take my place in the one I had given up. The transmigration of joypoppers!—He had no rights now. I asked my respite and time to work. To answer the call on friendship for him meant to foreclose my own mortgage. I tried, like the suburb, to hate those not of our way as much as those in our way. Sacred fear universal, terrific, and purificatory! My choice was declared now, to return evil for good and callousness for kindness, in justice or not, or be never a man or nearly one.
Man Who Was Not With It Page 4