False Entry: A Novel

PART I

Innocence

TRUTH. IN THESE DAYS of so many trials by association, where a man A can show, with an infinity of fine brush strokes, how he once was an intimate of the man B, and the man B assert, with what only God might see to be craft or virtue, that he never knew the man A, I see truth as an old, hobbled unicorn limping through the forests of allegation and denial, pausing here and there to try to warm itself at some sun-foil of proof that shines for a moment through the trees. For my own strange history of third-hand listening and remembering—the history of a man formed by nature and circumstance to be the confidant, not of intimacy, but of convenience, and burdened therefore with the retentive, bruised memory of the lonely—has at least given me one bit of truth to hold for myself. It is perhaps the only such I will ever have firsthand, and it is this: I know that there are certain people in the world—two or three, for instance, that I can tick off at the moment—who either have never met me or do not even know that I exist, about whose lives I yet know enough, or so much, that I could claim entrance into their pasts with the most beautiful legalities of detail. Further, I am sure that my history in this respect is strange in emphasis only, not in kind. For I am certain that every person, even the most commonplace, if he could but search and construe his memory, holds within his orbit of power at least one other person to whom he could do the same.

False entry into another person’s life, into his present by means of his past; if it does not happen oftener it must be because of lack of malice, whim or need. And when well accomplished, it is like the successful murder or the hidden masterpiece—unheralded, unsung. For this would not be that dull blackmail which deals in lost babies and old peculations discovered, but a demand of which the debtor may remain forever unaware, and for which the blackmailer, his own sole witness, is a man paid off in the currency of his need. A man perhaps who for once wants his hand on the pulse of another’s life-beat, would for once see a human effect of which he is the cause—or perhaps merely an outsider who can bear no longer to stand beyond the gate.

Fancy him then, this man, standing daily, like the rest of you, in the oblique wash of conversation, rumor and murmurous fact that each night slides out to sea again like the refuse of a city. But this man is an eternal listener at the orchestrations of others, a hoarder of what others would never dream of saving, a reader of old telephone books, who never dares make the call. He saves, without reason, what a man C once said in drink about a man B; he retains gratuitously how the light fell exactly, and on what arrangements, in a house where he, long forgotten, was once the guest of a guest; he recalls how, at a dinner table long since dropped into limbo, shadow blacked the voice of the woman on his left at the sound of a certain name. And one night, as he sits in his evening agony of non-living, listening, hand near the dead phone, to the low, mnemonic mutter of other peoples’ lives, certain names, shadows, half-lights suddenly merge; all the mossy facts adhere, and he feels, formed under his hand, the stone. Shall he fling it—for if he does so, he himself will be the stone? Ahead of him, small but possible, is the entry, easy as the descent in Dante, and beyond it he hears a treble of voices, in whose singing he may join.

I know it can be done, for I have done it. First, when hardly more than a boy, in a small town in the southern part of what I still think of as your United States. That was when, using the chance secret left with me by Johnny Fortuna, I found out the mechanism of myself, and how it could be appeased. And later, but never again so seriously, with so many others. In a way, here in New York, I am doing it now. But here, as I know too well, it is still only the small social calisthenic that keeps one in trim for the greater risk. For here, winding myself as I have into Judge Mannix’s circle, and all too near his daughter’s heart, still it is only like looking at stereopticons on a laughing, nostalgic evening, while all the time one craves to hear, even to be, the huge orthophonic voice. So, soon, perhaps—in some place that must be the only real place—I shall need to do it again.

Let me explain. Let me tell you about it. You being the confidant’s confidant, the page to which he comes at last, carrying what could never be spoken across the dead-end bar at midnight, or whispered—as I have never dared whisper it—in the gentle hours, to the warm nipple of a woman.

Chapter I. His Birth. The Goodmans.

I WAS BORN, AN EIGHT-months child, on Armistice Day of the First Great War, posthumous son of a British cavalry sergeant who had fallen some months before (not in battle, but on home encampment, while drunk, under the heel of a horse), to his widow, a dressmaker, lying in that day not in her own poor flat in World’s End, but in a hastily prepared sitting room on the second floor of the house of her patron, Lady Rachel Goodman—in Golder’s Green. So, there it is for what it is worth or weighs; I was born, perhaps by some already willful act of gestation, not in World’s End but in Golder’s Green.

At that time my mother was past thirty, and must have looked then as she looked most of her life—composed face, short body and stout calves, crinkly brown hair with a look of roughness to it—one of those sturdy, plain women who seem to age little, because nothing in the way of beauty is ever expected of them. Her father had been in the cavalry also, a sergeant major in the Indian army, but unlike my unreliable father, of whom she spoke seldom, he had been one of those trusted noncommissioned officers who were the bone of the colonial service; we still had—carefully framed, and carried later even to Alabama—the testimonial pamphlet, heavy with august military titles, presented him at his retirement dinner, the picture of him as an erect, mutton-chopped pensioner (his uniformed chest solid with medals and ribbons tinted to a rainbow blur by an overartistic photographer), on the lawns of the Royal Hospital in Chelsea, and the long, campaign-studded notice of his death, in the regimental gazette. And embedded in my mother’s reminiscences of him, I see now what she got from him, what I never saw so clearly before. Cockney in origin, he must have mothered so many subalterns, served as fidus Achates to so many of them returned as ranking officers, that, like many people of his station, he had absorbed, while never presuming upon it, much of their ethic and some of their tastes—as a butler might become, in a dictionary way, and at the most respectful distance, as much of a gentleman as his master. So it was that my mother, to whom it would never have occurred to change either her dumpy, black habit of dress or the varnish-cum-lithograph mediocrity of her parlor, could judge her clients, their drawing rooms, positions and reputations, with the strictness of a connoisseur. And, more important, lived, in her unimaginative way, as much by these judgments as in her parlor. Even by heredity, I see now, I come of a vicarious family.

Her connection with the Goodmans was a simple one. At sixteen, having shown some talent, my mother was apprenticed to a French dressmaking establishment in Lyons, with a final year in the main branch in Paris. They met there, the young Rachel Pereira, shopping for her trousseau with the old Mrs. Goodman, her generous and eccentric mother-in-law-to-be, and my mother (the midinette’s stiff bow at her nape, but the rest of her stolid and stubby in the midst of the other apprentices with their long noses, thin, subtle French lips, and coquettish feet), who had been pushed forward to serve les Anglaises. When they returned to England, she went with them, no doubt relinquished with relief by the maîtresse as too lacking in presence and guile, and until the wedding, six months away, she served as seamstress and maid to the softly winning, primavera bride. Later, when she set up her own business, the Goodmans were her mainstay, for the plain fact of it was that my mother was not a success. She had been too long exposed to gentility to be able to summon the imitative, glacéed arrogance required by the Bond Street salons, and at the same time her sense of style, corrupted by the French, was too vivid and strange for the suburban wives who would otherwise have been her natural trade. But with the Goodmans, with their slipper-easy affections, their Phoenician love of the purple, she was at home.

From my mother’s account of the day of my birth, blended with my childhood knowledge of that house, I know that day almost as if I had been present not only as a newborn wisp, but as if, under the waxed skin and sealed eyelids of my prematurely naked face, there were already working that blotting-paper power of recall which was to be the matrix of my mental life. She lay there physically hushed, my mother, anxious only because her milk had not yet come in, and there was talk that, because of the circumstances, it might not, and I lay there like a dropped doll—Too quiet, the little man! the housemaids hinted—at her side. The servants brought her her dinner—it would be in the covered dishes, flowered and gilded, of Carlsbad china (for although the Goodmans loved showy things, they were not the kind to use them only for show)—and the tray would be set on the lift near the stove in the kitchen and hauled up by one of the maids, who would notch the thick rope securely and then run up a flight to take the tray from the shaft that opened on every floor, to the left of the back stairs. Now and then, all through the day, young Lady Rachel herself kept coming in to see her, her auburn hair skewered in a puff high on her head—like a duchess who for some reason or other preferred to dress her hair like a char’s I always thought it—one of the vast peignoirs my mother was always making for her surrounding her like cumulus, for she was almost always expecting a child.

How wonderful to be born on this day! she said, no doubt pausing dreamily with a hand parting the curtains, for all the Goodmans had a way of dreaming at windows that for years I thought of obscurely as the habit of a class not mine. And, Crossie—my mother’s maiden name was Dora Cross—too lovely of you to have had him here, for you know how I am always forgetting how to bathe a baby, from one to the other, will you trust me to practice on him? And there are all those new nappies you have run up—enough for a regiment! They understood how to comfort, the Goodmans—it ran from them like balm.

Later, the children were brought in to see the newborn—Hannschen and Joseph of course not yet there, but Rosalind and Martin and James, younger than when I knew them, yet I can see them as they must have stood there, three pairs of wide, Goya eyes, toes curling in the gold-braided, pointed red leather slippers sent them each birthday by the uncle in Gibraltar. And after them, the grandmother herself, that marvelously muttering godmother-witch of a woman, carrying down, from the third-floor apartment that was like a crowded bibliography of Vienna, a cup of the strong coffee she brewed on her spirit-lamp—a word I have not thought of in thirty years—and served in one of the high cups that she would never let the heavy-handed serving girls touch. Last of all, just before supper, my mother said, Sir Joseph himself came. He came and stood at the door, dark-bearded orientalist amazingly down from that fourth-floor eyrie I never saw, from which he could seldom be routed, where he wrote the books for which he had been named on the King’s list.

Congratulations, Crossie! he called. I won’t come in. I’m all over ink and dust, too grimy to meet a baby.

He wouldn’t enter the room, explained my mother, with that jealous and delicate sense of pride in her betters which was the mark of her own class—which she carried with her to America, and was lost with there—he wouldn’t enter the room because, although it would have been proper enough with a lady of his own sort, he knew that it would embarrass my mother.

I’m sending you up some wine, he called. You are to drink it, as much as you can. For you know, we shall be toasting the two of you, downstairs.

I can hear my mother saying that, her hand arrested over the old sewing machine in Fulham, or poking with contempt at the cornbread she learned to make over here. We shall be toasting the two of you downstairs.

The wine came, a cobwebby bottle, and she sipped it. Downstairs, there was music. Outside the window, rackety sounds and voices slipped by the night long, all the crowd-music of that night of peace, a sudden maying in November of all the young and old linking arms across the tennis courts and gardens of Golder’s Green. Wrapped in the red-warmth of that wonderful household, she slept. And the next morning, her milk came in.

Chapter II. Tuscana. He Finds Himself to Be There.

UNTIL MY TENTH YEAR, then, I was in and out of that house. Do you know how it is when you are in pursuit of a woman, have reached her perhaps, but sense that she is not quite as concerned with you, how all the facts about her—whom she sees, where she is to be found at certain hours of the day—have for you a swollen intentness, how you add to and subtract from the doubled image you have of her, with the nervous madness of research? For all the years that I was intermittently in that house—the dressmaker’s boy, holder of pins in boudoirs, maker of fourth or fifth at nursery games, fed with casual sweetness at the family table—for all those years I was in love; I was in love that way. I did not know this then of course, nor would the Goodmans ever have suspected how I felt about them, for their house was always full of accessory benevolences like me. And people like them, the outgoing ones, who spend themselves like gold motes on the air, never realize that what they dispense as generalized kindness, the singlehearted suck up as love. Silent-footed child that I was, as a boy like me had to be taught to be, on the days when I went there, claw-fingers clutching my mother’s the long way out on the Underground, thinking of the second breakfast I would get and of all the coming hours of something more than food, on those days I was like a statue warmed down from its niche into living for a day, and at night, when I was returned to my corner, and until the next time, a fantasy of life remained behind my brow.

So then, I remember everything about that house. Everything. Not only its mold and feel and smell, that any child might keep, but floor by floor, leaf by leaf, the exact cinquefoil of its being. I can stand in its geography and print my track upon it, as a rabbit must sometimes stand, poised, in the lost warren he cannot hope to find again.

And, lilliputian again, I can remember the giants above. Family lore was dropped in that kitchen, glimpsed through the muddle of the cook’s mind like the ring at the bottom of the Christmas custard; occasionally the older children, though usually distant, played at toss in front of me with an ornate secret or family fable. I hid it all away, the way Lady Rachel hid, in a Battersea box, under some bastings I took up to her one afternoon, the cachets she sometimes took when alone. And the thousands of conversations intoned, back and forth, back and forth above my head—I remember those—a Gregorian chant whose pattern appears slowly now down the apse of years, the lingua franca of giants, that now, giant myself, I understand. I can hear Sir Joseph’s voice, the day he spoke to her about the cachets. I can see the hairs on Sir Joseph’s hand.

And it was the old lady, Mrs. Goodman, who first made of me a confidant. Looking back, I see now that her eccentricity was really only a powerful refusal to have truck with the superficial, her incantatory way of talking only that ancestral harking back of the elders, which we reject to our loss. She was one of those interior monologuists who are driven by a lifelong need to see the formal design of their own lives, to fix its rubric firmly among the chapters of the world, and she ruminated best in the presence of a listener manqué—a servant, a stranger, or a child. Since she was also one of those blessed of the earth whose own family is the hub of their sky, it was of the Goodmans that, incessantly, I learned. She ranged her life, theirs, with the passion of a critic, and like the best of these, with a wildness of phrase and a soundness of judgment that gave me something of the method too. Listening, I knew for the first time what it was to make of oneself that gray, faceless well into which another does not dip, but pours. Not for years did I know that the services of the confidant, though apparently selfless, are never so. But it was not her fault, nor yet perhaps mine, that it was to be others’ lives I ranged.

For, at ten, I was torn away. I say torn with reason, thinking of the ghost strength that underlies dead idiom. For, of our trek to America, the ship to Montreal, the long journey south to the town of Tuscana, even my first months in that wizened place (and even there, I gather, no one ever realized it of me), I know only by hearsay. I learned later, of course, that the Goodmans had closed the house in Golder’s Green, following to Japan, with all their own bags and baggage and singsong, Sir Joseph, who held a government post there for some years. They were not the kind to leave dependents behind them like deserted cats, but my mother would never have let them know the extent of her dependence on them. And no one, not even I, knew mine. After some months, heeding the pleas of her only sister—younger than she, ailing, and married to a shrewd Birmingham millhand who had emigrated to a foreman’s job in the States—she accepted the passage money they sent her, and we sailed.

Later, she always used to say that it was for me she had emigrated, but she never said why. Perhaps she could not phrase it, or would not, for hers were not the usual reasons for going to that new world for which she had a certain scorn even before she saw it; indeed, she was never to trust a country where a man, even a son, could rise so soon. I think she left England because I had already begun to look like my father. She was a plain woman who, against her own awareness of it, had let herself shine briefly in the sunny whim of a man whose handsome dash she could never have felt herself to have deserved; other women she could have borne, and probably had, but the manner of his death had disgraced her in the one milieu in which she took pride. And everyone had begun to say that I looked like him, like the specious face in the wedding picture I never saw until months after her death—one of those Burne-Jones faces the Irish produce now and then, with a hint of the spoiled angel in its sentimental modeling, in the blank, neoclassic eye. Unwillingly, that day, I marked the likeness too.

But of all that interim, of a period that must have been about four months, I remember nothing. It is the only part of my life I do not remember. Later there was no mention of illness; apparently through all that time I ate, responded in the ordinary way. When I was grown, and on a navy cruiser for the first conscious sea voyage of my life, I lay awake in my bunk all the first night out, straining for some kinetic memory of how it felt to be at sea. But none came. There is the day at Golder’s Green that must have been the last day; there is the morning I awoke to myself, sitting before a breakfast bowl, in the tallow-soft heat of the house in Tuscana. There is nothing in between.

Sitting now, at the same time within the sound tape and outside it, I wake again that morning. Opposite me, someone has just said Goodman. I see the bowl, my hand stopped on the spoon, objects seen through a curtain of drizzle that a sudden wind parts clear. I look up into a long face with the cramp of illness on it, a face that I do not know. She speaks again, my aunt, in her thin, life-grudging voice, a voice I heard for the first time a moment ago.

Postman says a foreign package you’ve to go for yourself, Dora. Has to be opened at the mails by law, for fear of plants and beetles from out there. Likely from the Goodmans, eh?

Very likely. My mother’s voice is muffled, heard as if from behind a door, that voice, or from under the sheets in the morning, when the dream-stuff is still cotton in the ears. My eyes slide sideways, as a horse’s must feel when the blinders come off. She is there, mantelpiece figure one does not often notice but would instantly miss, on her lap the familiar flood of sewing, but the air around her has a whitish prickle to it, like the sudden, flapped blankness on a home-screen cinema. Then, as I turn, the room is normal. Only the faintest drizzle remains, always settling but unseen; until the day of the hearing nine years from then it never quite left me; it is the color of Tuscana.

The women go on talking, and I hear them, my aunt rummaging on as the chairbound do, my mother’s short replies.

A fine country, says my aunt, to set itself above other nations’ insects. Cockchafers here like bustards, Dora, ants like grains of sand. And at night, always the moths nosing the windows, even a frost does not stop them.

Frost. Are there frosts here? says my mother.

Silk in the package maybe, Dora; will it be that sleazy Jap stuff to be found here in the stores?

Not if it’s from them, says my mother.

I listen, not knowing quite where I am, but only that I am, and knowing this because of an echo like a comfit just swallowed, a warmth in the ear, an echo on the tongue. Then my mother’s hand on my shoulders: Come along now, we’ll fetch the parcel from Goodmans, and I know what the comfit is.

I get up from the table and put my hand in hers. Shall we be going on the Underground? I said.

Everything in my life-to-be there is in that first walk in Tuscana. I traverse it again, inclining my head powerlessly to the right, to the left, from my useless rajah-seat in recall. We walked through the rows of company houses, a time-dirtied laundry line of houses hung once with Northern neatness and never again attended. We passed the twin-stacked mill where my uncle worked, and went along what I took to be the High street, a street too unfinished ever to know that it was one. Only the Negroes, their faces a black surprise to me, held to some invisible meridian along its length, and as they passed us, stepped aside. Down to the left was the funeral parlor from which my aunt would be buried a few years hence, across from it the church where my uncle, clinging practicably to morning tea and a house kempt as it would be at home, was to marry my mother. I passed a trio of buildings, unconscious of the unity they would one day have for me—the courthouse, the general store of Semple, the company factor, and the schoolhouse where I would go that first fall.

If there were only a little east in the wind! said my mother faintly. Never thought to hear myself say that! she added quickly, but I was already back in the bus that wound through Fulham, hearing the passengers reassure one another, with the greenish valor of the permanently cold, that the east was out of the wind. Glancing down, I saw that my knees looked unfamiliar, not red and chapped as I remembered them, and my hands too. The air sickened against my face, pluming in my nostrils like moths. A slack drugstore scent, like cheap vanillin, followed us into the post office from outside. It was the shabby-sweet odor of the South that already I was smelling, the air of a people who had to put too much sugar on their lives.

The man at the desk chatted, while we opened our parcel. I could not understand him at first, although I knew that he was joking. There were several lazy flies on his counter, and one of them lit on the pink-and-bronze kimono my mother lifted from the box.

Nu’n but g’dole ’Mer’can bug, he said.

My mother said nothing, folding the kimono into the box, on top of the black brocaded slippers that were for me.

As we left, he nodded and grinned. Hurry back! he said.

Outside the door, I asked whether that meant we were to return soon for another parcel.

My mother shook her head. It’s what they say here when they mean ‘good-by.’

In our room that night, I put the slippers away. They were beautiful, but they were not what the others had had. They were not from an uncle in Gibraltar. Outside the window, from some unknown point in the hemisphere of night, a late train hooted a long sound. I did not know yet that it had a name—the to-from Memphis train, but I knew by now that it was an American sound. As I shut the drawer, it called once more. Hurry back! it said. Hurry back.

Chapter III. Johnny Fortuna.

WHENEVER I THINK OF Johnny Fortuna, who now, wherever he is, is a man older than myself, I see him only as he was that first autumn I knew him—a boy of fifteen, lying on his stomach in the leaves, talking into the afternoon distance. We always see the lost companions of our youth in some such way; they remain fixed for us against the scrubby haunts of our adolescence the way Icarus, in his own arabesque, remains fixed against history—at once exalted and drowned.

At the school, whose poor resources were never enough for me, where almost at once I became too enviably the best pupil, Johnny was the worst; after a while, our common exclusion drew us together. He was not dull, only dulled, and I found him because I was too. At home, except for my uncle’s occasional outside evening drinking, performed as a workman’s due, without geniality or social compromise, our household, mistrusting the easy fondle of the town, never became part of it; my mother gardened suspiciously among alien flowers; at six we had an immutable tea; the windows, disciplining the weather, remained closed to the heat, open to the chill. Returning home, to England, was never mentioned; feverishly raising the flag of our isolation, we were at home.

And Johnny’s household, one of two Polish caravanserais near the watchman’s shed back of the main-line signal, was one of those that exist for a town to despise. Like me, he had only a mother, but he and his brood of younger brothers and sisters had had more than one father. Mrs. Fortuna was visited at night, and stared down on the street in the daytime, by those men whose morality kept them from the colored quarter; if she took any revenge upon them it was in that her children, no matter how indiscriminately fathered, all had the blond bulletheads and blue eyes of Poles, as if she too kept a national pride. At night, concertina music rose late from her chimney stack, mingled, in the pulsing red air of the signal light, with the smell of mash.

Semple was one of her regular visitors—I never knew him. I repeat it—I never knew him there, or in his store, where we happened not to trade, or in any of the chance walks of the town. There were seven thousand people in the town, and I had the matchless invisibility of my age. I saw him, of course, from time to time, as one does in a place like that, and he may have known of me as my uncle’s nephew, and glancingly passed me by. Once, in the street crowd outside my aunt’s funeral, we brushed, almost the closest we ever came to one another, but I never knew him. This is the point, the one that unhinges truth as people normally know it, the point I must make clear. Until the day of the hearing, I had never been made known to him; our hands had never greeted; we had never spoken; his eyes had never met mine. And now his name is a tremble to me forever. He is that mystery, the accidental man whom we unaccidentally wrong. For, the people to whom we have been something in love or in hate, whom we have discarded or been discarded by—these belong to the libretto; we can tinkle their themes over, all referent tunes. But the accidental man, who holds no meaning, holds all; his theme will never be finished, and will abide to the end. For of course I knew Semple—as the rememberer knows. I knew him from around, from the air, and from Johnny. I knew him from behind.

He was a compact man, just over short, with thick, prematurely white hair, and the look of extra energy this often gives a middle-aged man. A cut above those who worked at the mill, he wore duck trousers most of the year, and these, sharply laundered below the knee but curiously rumpled and used in the region of his sex, gave the impression, as he lounged in the chair in front of his store, that his central energy came from there. He was held to be mean about money, but since his livelihood depended on how he issued credit, this may have been the verdict of those—most of the town, this would be—who could not manage their own. Johnny worked for him part-time in the store, and once, long before I was old enough to understand it, I heard it sniggered that this was the only way Semple ever paid Mrs. Fortuna. Johnny seemed to bear him no more grudge than any boy does the boss because the latter is one.

Of his own home Johnny hardly ever spoke, but I took this for granted, for neither did I of mine. By an instinctive, unphrased agreement we never went to each other’s homes, never showed our friendship to the town. On certain afternoons, when my mother supposed me at the library, I did go there for a while—not to a real library, for the town had none, but to the old Victorian house, with its oddments of books, that the state maintained half as a memorial to the one notable woman whose birthplace Tuscana had been, half as an annuity for the curator, Miss Pridden, the dead woman’s old niece. Miss Pridden liked me, for the accent I had retained, no doubt, that echoed a faded sojourn of her youth, for the soft way I knew how to move among the precious objects she tended and to listen to her account of them, for the fact that I came at all. It was she who later tried to maneuver for me a scholarship to a college in the North. But on those days when I knew Johnny got off early, while she prosed over the books or fumbled with the tea in the pantry, I often managed my exit and ran down toward Semple’s store. Often when Johnny came out and saw me waiting, he barely nodded and moved ahead of me, kicking stones along the path we both knew we would take, and until we entered the woods, I kept my distance, for it seemed only natural to me that he should be ashamed of having no other companion than a boy, smart as he thought me, who was so much younger than he.

So then, as far as ever appeared, no one ever knew of our intimacy. In the time to come, after the hearing where, with Johnny long gone, I testified against Semple and the others, I had a shock of fear that certainly someone would come forward to bring out the old connection between Johnny and me, to say, His testimony has no standing in law. He was never there. He is only using what belonged to a boy named Johnny Fortuna. But no one did. I thought then, with the first access of my power, that I must be unique, the only one ever to do what I had done. Experience tells me now how unlikely it is that this should be so. You ordinary people, yes; you are our constant dupes, because you cannot imagine, you will not believe what the more meditative can do with the reservoirs of recall. Wisdom tells me now that there may well have been at least one other like me in Tuscana, whose memory could skulk his world like mine, who recognized what I had done—who knew. He did not come forward then, perhaps because he did not choose to or had other fish to fry. But he may have been there. Perhaps someday he will come from behind—and enter upon me.

But now, when I return to those afternoons I waited for Johnny in the alley behind Semple’s store, when, after tossing a crumb to the gamecock Semple had penned there, we made our way by back paths to the rise above the town, and lay there in the ground myrtle, peeling switches, chewing sourgrass, Johnny always the talker, I the listener—I think first of what a tender balance Johnny kept on all the things he did not tell me. For he, who had been born with the caul of the town’s underside around him, who should have known of the place only what was hawked into the spittoon and raucoused after hours, never spoke to me of the town that way at all. What he used me for was as the repository of his innocence, that pitiable innocence which he could lay nowhere else. And because I was this, for a long time he kept my innocence too.

What Johnny talked about was—normality as he saw it, or dreamed it to be. For years, as paper boy and delivery boy, he had had backdoor glimpses of most of the town, and certain of these he collected the way other boys gathered the stamps that meant the aromatic distances which might someday be achieved. As he leaned over the brink of the town, the curl of smoke from a chimney spoke to him of the baking day of the woman there, the trim lines of wash that ringed his favorite houses brought forth a litany of the routines that went on inside—the churchgoing, the bedtime stories for kids like his brothers and sisters, the evening games—and as the fathers came out to ply the hose on these chosen yards, he could tell of the lodges they belonged to, the bright purchases they were making by thrift or installment, even the minor affiliations of the children who leagued their lawns. He was like a man studying the etiquette of banquet silver, who himself owned but a knife and a spoon.

There was one family by the name of Nellis that had once invited him in to dinner, and of this, and of a habit of theirs, he spoke often. "’Fore dinner they say grace there, you know what grace is? Only they don’t say nothin’, just join hands around the table."

We could see that house from where we lay, and each evening, as its orange lamp popped out on the dusk, he marked it, sometimes mentioning the grace, or another of their ways, sometimes not. Nellis’s light, he would always say, though, and this was always the signal for us to go down. On the way down, once or twice in the beginning, he offered a halting excuse for why he talked so, the way a lover sometimes flaunts a practical reason for his pursuit of what others might think an inutile love. He was going into business, he said, he was going to have an automobile agency, and in business one had to know about people, how they really were.

And once, in the beginning too, when, as we descended, the light flared on in a house at the edge of niggertown, and I asked him, already half knowing, what the boys meant when they slanged the two women who lived there, he stopped on the path and hulked over me, eyes cracked close, his face suddenly wedge-shaped and Slav.

How come you ask me that? he said. "How come you ask me?"

No reason, Johnny, I said, retreating, no reason, and he relaxed then, thinking, as I did then, that there was not. I know now that if there is an original sin in us, it is that intuitive mischief which drives us to ask the humpbacked to discourse on humps. But that time I was learning something else—to swallow the cud of myself. I learned that day the sad second lesson of the confidant—that he may remain only so long as he collaborates in the illusion that he is not there. After that, even on the day when Johnny, breaking his illusion for my sake, let me in on his real world and told me about Semple, I held still and listened only. It was what one had to do in order to be able to stay. And somewhere along in there, I suppose, in those afternoons with Johnny, I lost forever, if I had ever had it, what might have been my own power to confide. Like those savages who bury the ashes of their own fires, hide their combings and nail parings against the magic wreakings of the possible finder, I came too to sense the sovereignty of the finder, and to resolve that no one should ever have a paring of me. Gradually I became critic enough to know that Johnny’s vision of Tuscana rested like a bubble above the real one, but I never said anything. Time after time, I lay there passive on the hillside and let him spread his version of the town before us, golden as a Breughel, all its simple, wheaten actions simultaneous and side by side. And after a while, he made no more excuses. I guess by then he knew that his talking so was no more strange than my listening.

Chapter IV. More Goodmans. He Asks to Return.

I WAS ALMOST FOURTEEN and had known Johnny about three years, the summer my mother married my uncle. My aunt had died some months before. Never too much of a person, her fretful dying by inches and years had long since squeezed her smooth of that roughened human surface which is needed to draw real feeling from others, yet her death left a curious incoherence in our household. Our invalid’s routine had regularized it, given it a purpose that the outside world, though avoided, might see if it cared to look; even more, the presence of the dying brings an edge of eternity into the air of a home, giving the most cramped household a bit of view. Certainly this was all my uncle and mother had shared until then, and now that the woman who had related them was removed, it must have been this, the need of some united front, more than propriety, that until the marriage was settled upon, made them uneasy with one another. It could hardly have been the fear of gossip alone that moved them, for the town would no longer have bothered to pay them even that intimacy—although my mother may have heard in her mind a lost, transatlantic echo of what would have been said and unsaid in World’s End. No, it would give us all a permanency, my mother said, and my uncle would help toward my education, or find me a place in the mill.

She was sewing as usual, the evening she told me; Tuscana was one of three towns near the site of the great new dam the government was building in the river valley, and she had begun to find a small trade among the wives of the engineers from the North. The air was tight, with the binding summer heat I had never got used to, and although the evening light was still bland and I had polished the panes only the day before, there was no sparkle in them. My uncle had gone out for the one evening away a week he allowed himself. I thought of him sitting mum in the café he still called the pub—a sparely molded man with a dry eye and the sparse manners of those who are easier with machines than with people. He had a colorless justice about him that made him neutral to live with, but I wanted him no closer.

When she had finished speaking, I listened to the late blasting on the river, wishing that one of the thunders would crack the inferior glass, yellow the gray air behind which I lived, and lift me like a rocket away. I cast about for something dauntless to say to her, some proposal that would knock outward the underworld walls of boyhood and made me at one blow a man. I thought of reminding her of the scholarship exams I had planned on, but they were still two years away. But after a moment, I mentioned them.

Yes, yes, she said. We must think of those. She bent her head deeper over her sewing. You will have a room to yourself then, to study in; that will be a help, eh? A little time went by. Then she rose and made tea.

When she returned with the tea things, the blastings had stopped and the panes were dark. I heard a train pass, a long freight, dragging into smaller and smaller falls its long chain of sound.

Could—could we not go home? I said. I had never asked it.

The cups clinked as she served them. Neither of us touched the tea. After a while, sitting with her hands folded, she shook her head. This is home, she could have said, evading, but she sat on, not denying that it was not.

"Could we not—write to them?" For a long time now I had not once spoken of the Goodmans; by an evasion of my own I had managed not to think of them, except in bed at night, when, with my knuckles against my knees, I had sometimes tried to walk among them, putting myself to dream.

Them? She raised her head in casual surprise.

I breathed fast, the way one did before heaving up the stone wheel that covered the well in the yard. The—Goodmans.

Oh— My mother’s soft ejaculation, light smile, plunged me down, even before she spoke further, into that gap down which the child falls, weightless, holding on to some stone of meaning which the giants have wafted aside like a feather. She was smiling, with that faint, sealing tribute people pay to the picnics of long ago, the pretty costumes they once have worn.

Ah, she said, gently laughing, dismissing. So you still remember.

I got up then, and moved for the first time away from her. At the age I was then, the past is our only littoral, sacred because it is all we have to go on; to minimize it, to step lightly across it and onward, to forget, is the treason of maturity. So I got up then and went to the window, and standing there, by an imitative act of memory, as their habit had been, I moved away from her, toward them. I saw young Martin, at the age I was now when we left them, glassy-eyed with rainy-day lethargy, rolling a marble back and forth along the sill; I saw Hannschen with her nose just above it. I put my hand on the curtain and I saw Lady Goodman, whom I always thought of as Lady Rachel, standing in one of her arrested pauses; I saw the old lady Mrs. Goodman at her window on the floor above, staring out upon Tiergartens and, Königsallees melted upon Golder’s Green in the faïence of the years. I saw all of them, watched by myself from behind.

I touched the curtain here in Tuscana, cut down from a patch quilt brought with us from there. The dressmaker’s roster, it was made up of anonymous snippets, but down at one end there was a piece of green damask I knew and had avoided, hating the mute screw of pain that lives in all those objects which survive from one part of us to the other. I put my forefinger on it—object swum so irrelevant and far.

That’s from the dining-room curtain, I said.

I fingered the wall beside it, and I was brushing the rubbed place on the olive-drab wall where the maids eased themselves in with the trays. I bent lower, still touching.

That’s where the splash was, where Molly dropped the tureen. ‘Lucky it wasn’t the Nailsea, eh, Molly?’ Sir Joseph said. Hung on the kitchen wall back there was an old rolling pin of whorled Nailsea glass, given to Molly by her lover, a sailor from that town, with the warning legend that if it fell it would be a sign that he was lost at sea. Sir Joseph’s remark had become a catch phrase in the house, used when something broke, when a child tumbled, when a quarrel was mended.

When I fell on the stairs, he said it, I said. I felt his arms picking me up, his hands testing my bones as he would his own childrens’, his tobacco richness as he set me down. ‘Lucky it wasn’t the Nailsea, eh?’ he said.

And standing there, between Sir Joseph and the widened eyes of my mother, I talked on, remembering, my tongue never fast enough for what I saw. Leaving the dining room, the smell of orange bitters from the open sideboard followed one, and, transliterated, clung to the wooden pineapple on the newel post in the hall. Have a care now, said Molly, passing me on the stair, for I was carrying the old lady’s afternoon half-bottle of Madeira. I saw myself stop on the landing to look at the light streaming through the leaded pane that showed the Knight of Malta with his white cross on his black robe, to hunt for the bit of misplaced red near his nose.

‘Stand just so,’ Martin said, I said, ‘and if the light’s proper you’ll see the old Hospitaler bleed from the nose.’

Enough! Enough! said my mother, but I was already past her, almost among them, putting myself to dream. I passed Lady Rachel’s half-closed door, that room, muffled with voile, where she endlessly wanted to be resting, and I could almost see her murmur, hand at her forehead, the way she often would at the nursery hour, Hours to go, before good night.

Hours to go, before good night, I whispered, going by, seeing, as I used to, the pale blue, ladylike hours that stretched before her until she could re-enter the muffled room.

Child! Child! said my mother, but I was already on the third floor landing. I knocked on the door and opened it.

The old lady looked up, as if from spinning. Da bist du! she said, all the past in her lap, and then I was in the room with her; I was there, with them.

Here comes the handsome waiter, she said. And what does he say?

Guten Tag, gnädige Frau, I said, very stiff with the tray.

Ach, such ton he has, das kleine Herrgöttle von Bieberach, she said, grinning. You remember what that means?

Little Mr. God from Beeberock, I said.

Aha, she said. I see you have not forgotten.

No, I have not forgotten, I have never forgotten, I was about to answer, but then, wee at the small end of the telescope, my mother cried out, and came forward. She cannot reach me, I thought, for now I am with them. I opened my mouth to answer, but the long arm grew and reached me, shaking, shaking, and I dropped the tray, and all was smashed.

In bed that night, and nights after, I pressed my knuckles against my knees and waited, but I could not get back. It was because someone else knew now, I thought. Someone else had a paring of me. For now and then I caught my mother watching me. But she never spoke to me of the Goodmans again.

Chapter V. Miss Pridden.

ON THE DAY OF the wedding I was up early and dressed for school as usual, having all that week refused to attend the ceremony even in the serge suit they had hopefully got for me. They were leaving for Memphis immediately after; my uncle had taken a week off from the mill and had bought a second-hand car.

Now, as I went about the room that was to be mine from tonight, I was almost glad of the week alone and of their going, only wanting them to know that it was I who dispensed with them. I had grown up some in the past weeks, if growth can be said to come by stations of recognition of what one cannot have. If my mother had not come in just then to say good-by to me in just that way, in just that dress, might I never have gone to look for Johnny that evening?

But she did come, in that way, precisely minted for her eleven-o’clock business, and in that dress, with the sharpened waist, the unfamiliarly wide skirt with its assertive rustle. And for all the tender rue with which she reached for me, I saw the little raised comb of pride that hardens upon a woman, once she has a man again to show the world. I ducked her kiss.

Do not mind the dress, she said, still reaching. And if I could bend from the sound tape now, I would bend toward her. Meeting her there, in that impossible tangent, I could explain to her that when we come of age in our own flesh we have more charity for the image of what our parents did to beget us, and after; that it is only the young who, harsh in their own straits, want to keep that image eunuch and dry. But the tape has no mercy; I answered her then.

It looks … like a client’s dress, I said, and ran past her out of the house.

In the yard, I reminded myself of the schoolbooks left behind in the room, but I did not go back. She did not come after me. A cardinal whistled, and other calls, still unknown to me, insinuated from bush to bush. Although it was only eight o’clock, and well on toward October, my jersey was already dark at the armpits with sweat. In the reticent, marine land I had come from, the birds were already long gone—perhaps some of them here to me. Outside the gate, the old car, heavily waxed by my uncle, sweated too, with a premarital shine. I closed the gate and went on to school.

When I got out that afternoon, the town had a Friday hum to it; it was market day, and even the steady loungers in front of the courthouse had each his paper bundle or loaded cord bag. In the long mud alley back of the main street, the tenant farmers’ wives stood as usual at their slap-up stalls, behind strings of rabbits congealed in their own rust, limp fowl and garden greens, old gray cartons of dirt-flecked eggs. But beyond every turning now, raw orange in the late sun, lay the great Federal gash in the hills—its crater ready to rise. I remember now how, up on the main street, a few Negroes nudged in front of the wet red slick of a new store front, saying, Chain store, man, chain store from the North, and how two of their women,