I let myself go, and keeled over toward her. I lay on my back, with my head on her lap, the way I had known I would do. She let her left hand lie on my chest, the thumb and forefinger holding, and revolving back and forth, a button on my shirt, and her right hand on my forehead. Her hands were always cool. It was one of the first things I remembered ever knowing.
For a long time she didn't talk any. She just moved the hand over my eyes and forehead. I had known how it would be, and knew how it had been before and how it would be after. But she had the trick of making a little island right in the middle of time, and of you knowing, which is what time does to you.
Then she said, "You're tired, Son."
Well, I wasn't tired, but I wasn't not tired, either, and tiredness didn't have anything to do with the way things were.
Then, after a while, "Are you working hard, Son?"
I said, "So-so, I reckon."
Then, after another while, "Tan–the man you work for–"
"What about it?" I said. The hand stopped on my forehead, and I knew it was my voice that stopped it.
"Nothing," she said. "Only you don't have to work for that man. Theodore could get you a–"
"I don't want any job Theodore would get for me," I said, and tried to heave myself up, but have you ever tried to heave yourself up when you're flat on your back on a deep couched and somebody has a hand on your forehead?
She held her hand firm on my forehead and leaned over and said, "Don't now, don't. Theodore is my husband, he's your stepfather, don't talk that way, he'd like–"
"Look here," I said, "I told you I–"
But she said, "Hush, Son, hush," and put her hand over my eyes, and began to move it again upward over my forehead.
She didn't say anything else. But she had already said what she had said, and she had to start the island trick all over again. Perhaps she had said it just so she could start over again, just to prove she could do it. Anyway, she did it, all over again, and it worked.
Until the front door banged, and there were steps in the hall. I knew that it was Theodore Murrell, and started to heave up again. But even now, just for the last instant, she pressed her palm down on my forehead, and didn't let go until the sound of Theodore's steps had entered the room.
I got to my feet, feeling my coat crawling up around my neck and my tie under one ear, and looked across at Theodore, who had a beautiful blond mustache and apple cheeks and pale hair laid like taffy on a round skull and a hint of dignity at the belly (bend over, you bastard, bend over one hundred times every morning and touch the floor, you bastard, or Mrs. Murrell won't like you, and then where would you be?) and a slightly adenoidal lisp, like too much hot porridge, when he opened the aperture under the beautiful blond mustache.
My mother approached him with that bright stride and her shoulders well back, and stopped right before the Young Executive. The Young Executive put his right arm about her shoulder, and kissed her with the aperture under the beautiful blond mustache, and she seized him by the sleeve and drew him over toward me, and he said, "Well, well, old boy, it's fine to see you. How's trick, how's the old politician?"
"Fine," I said, "but I'm not a politician, I'm a hired hand."
"Oho," he said, "don't try to kid me. They say you and the Governor are just like this." And he held up two not thin, very clean, perfectly manicured fingers for me to admire.
"You don't know the Governor," I replied, "for the only thing the Governor is just like this with–" and I held up two not very clean and quite imperfectly manicured fingers–"is the Governor, and now and then God-Almighty when he needs somebody to hold the hog while he cuts its throat."
"Well, the way he's going–" Theodore began.
"Sit down, you all," my mother told us, and we sat down, and took the glasses she handed us. She turned on a light.
I leaned back in my chair, and said "Yes" and said "No," and looked down the long room, which I knew better than any room in the world and which I always came back to, no matter what I said. I noticed that there was a new piece in it. A tall Sheraton break-front desk, in the place where the kidney desk had been. Well, the kidney desk would be in the attic now, in the second-string museum, while we sat in the first-string museum and while Bowman and Heatherford, Ltd., London, wrote a large figure in the black column of the ledger. There was always a change in the room. When I came home I'd always look around and wonder what it would be, for there had been a long procession of choice examples through that room, spinets, desks, tables, chairs, each more choice that the last, each in turn finding its way to the attic to make way for a new perfection. Well, the room had come a long way from the way I first remembered it, moving toward some ideal perfection which was in my mother's head, or in the head of a dealer in New Orleans, or New York, or London, and maybe, just before she died, the room would achieve its ideal perfection, and she would sit in it, a trim old lady, with piled-up white hair, and silky skin sagging off a fine jawbone, and blue eyes blinking rapidly, and would take a cup of tea to celebrate the ideal.
The furniture changed, but the people in it changed too. Way back, there had been the thick-set, strong man, not tall, with a shock of tangled black hair on his head and steel-rimmed glasses on his nose and a habit of buttoning his vest up wrong, and a big gold watch-chain, which I liked to pull at. Then he wasn't there, and my mother pressed my head against her breast and said, "Your Daddy isn't coming back any more, Son."
"Why did he go away?"
"Because he didn't love Mother. That's why he went away."
"I love you, Mother," I said, "I'll love you always."
"Yes, Son, yes, you love your mother," she said, and held me tight against her breast.
So the Scholarly Attorney was gone. I was about six years old then.
Then there was the Tycoon, who was gaunt and bald and wheezed on the stair. "Why does Daddy Ross puff going upstairs?" I said.
"Hush," my mother said, "hush, Son."
"Why, Mother?"
"Because Daddy Ross isn't well, Son."
Then The Tycoon was dead. He had not lasted long.
So my mother put me in a school in Connecticut and left me to go across the ocean. When she came back there was another man, who was tall and slender and wore white suits and smoked long thin cigars, and had a thin black mustache. He was the Count, and my mother was a Countess. The Count sat in the room with people and smiled a great deal and didn't say much. People looked sideways at him, but he looked straight at them and smiled to show the whitest teeth in the world under the thin, accurate black mustache. When nobody was there he played the piano all day, and then went out wearing black boots and tight white trousers and rode a horse and made it jump over gates and gallop along the beach till its sides were flecked with lather and were pumping fit to die. The Count came into the house and drank _wis-kee__ and held a Persian cat on his knee and stroked it with a hand which was not big but which was so strong that he could make men frown when he shook hands with them. And once I saw four blue-black parallel marks on my mother's upper right arm. "Mother," I said, "look! What happened?"
"Nothing," she said, "I just hurt myself." And she pulled the scarf down over her arm.
The Count's name was Covelli. People said, "That Count fellow is a son-of-a-bitch, but he can evermore ride a horse."
Then he was gone. I was sorry, for I had liked the Count. I had liked to watch him ride a horse.
Then there was quite a while when there was nobody.
Then there was the Young Executive, who had been a Young Executive from the day his mother gave the last push and would be a Young Executive until the day they drained out the blood and pumped in the embalming fluid. But that would be a long time off, because he was just forty-four, and sitting at the desk at the oil company where he earned the pin money to supplement his allowance wasn't breaking him down fast.
Well, I'd sat in that room with all of them, the Scholarly Attorney and the Tycoon and the Count and the Young Executive, and had watched the furniture changed. So now I sat and looked at Theodore and at the new Sheraton break-front desk, and wondered how permanent they were.
I had come home. I was the thing that always came back It kept on raining that night. I lay in a big fine old family bed, which had come from somebody else's family (a long time ago there had been a white iron bed in my room standing on the floor matting, and the big fine old mahogany Burden family bed, which hadn't been fine enough and which was now in the attic, had been in my mother's room) and listened to the rain hiss on the live-oak and magnolia leaves. In the morning it had stopped raining, and there was sun. I went out and saw the thin pools of water standing on the background, like sheets of isinglass. Around the japonicas, the white and red and coral petals, which had been shattered from the blossoms, floated on the blackly gleaming pools. Some of them floated with the curled edges upward, like boats, and around them other petals floated upside down or had shipped water, making a gay carnage as though a battleship had fired a couple of salvos into a fleet of carnival barges and gondolas in some giddy, happy, far-off land.
There was a massive japonica tree by the steps. I leaned over to scoop up some petals in my hand, and walked down the curving drive to the gate. I stood there, pressing the petals in the palm and looking out at the bay, which was very bright beyond the strip of whitish sand streaked with drift.
But before noon it began to rain again, a long drizzle and drip from the spongy sky that lasted two days. That afternoon, and the next morning, and the next afternoon, I put on a raincoat belonging to the Young Executive and walked in the drizzle. Not that I was a walker who just has to have his lungs flushed out with ozone. But walking seemed the thing to do. The first afternoon I walked down the beach, past the Stanton place, which was cold and hollow-looking beyond the dripping leaves, and on out to the Irwin place, where Judge Irwin put me in a chair with my heels to the fire and opened a bottle of his choice old Maryland rye to give a drink, and invited me to dinner the next night. But I took a drink and left, and walked on where there weren't any more houses, just brush and oak tangles with here and there a pine rising, and occasionally an open patch of ground with a gray shack.
And the next day I walked up the bay, through the streets of the town, and on beyond till I came to the little half-moon-shaped cove off the bay, where the pine grove came down close to the white sand. I walked just under the shelter of the pines, my heels deep in the needles, then I came out on the sand. There was a place where a half-charred log lay, very black with the wetness and around it the sudden ashes and black butts of driftwood, blacker for the white sand. People still came here for picnics. Well, I had come here for picnics, too. I knew what picnics were like.
I knew what a picnic was like, all right.
Anne and Adam and I had come here years before when we were kids, but it was not raining that day. Not till the end. It was very hot and very still. You could look down the bay, beyond the cove, toward the Gulf, and see the water lifting up into the light as though the horizon had ceased to exist. We swam, and ate our lunch, lying on the sand, then fished some more. But we didn't have any luck. By that time clouds had begun to pile, working in over the whole sky, except toward the west, beyond the pines, where the light struck through the break. The water was very still, and suddenly dark with the darkness of the sky, and away across the bay the line of woods looked black now, not green, above the whiteness of the line which was the beach way over there. A boat, a catboat, was becalmed over in that direction, nearly a mile away, and under the sky and over the dark water and against the black line of the woods, you never saw anything so heartbreakingly white as the sharp sail.
"He better get in," Adam said. "It's going to blow."
"Not quick," Anne said, "let's swim again."
"Better not." Adam hesitated and looked off at the sky.
"Let's," she insisted and pulled at his arm. He didn't respond, still scanning the sky. All at once she dropped his arm and laughed and began to run toward the water. She didn't run directly to the water, but up the beach, toward a little spit, with her bobbed hair back loose on the air. I watched her run. She ran with her arms not quite outspread, crooked at the elbows, and with a motion of her legs which was graceful and free, and somehow awkward at the same time, as though she hadn't quite forgotten one kind of running, the child's running, and hadn't quite learned another kind of running, the woman's running. The legs seemed to be hung too loose, somewhat uncertainly, from the little hips, which weren't quite rounded yet. I watched her and noticed that her legs were long. Which I had never noticed before.
It wasn't a noise, but instead, a stillness that made me turn suddenly to Adam. He was staring at me. When I met his eyes, his face flushed, and he jerked his eyes off me, as though embarrassed. Then he said, "I'll race you," huskily, and ran after her. I ran too, and his feet threw the sand back at me.
Anne was out in the water swimming now. Adam plunged in after her and swam hard and straight, outdistancing me. He was a wonderful swimmer. He hadn't wanted to swim but now he would swim straight out, hard and fast.
I came up to Anne, and slowed down, and said, "Hello." She lifted her head high for an instant, with the gracile motion a seal has, and smiled, and curled over forward in a clean surface dive. Her sharp small heels, side by side, flickered for a second above the water, then drew under. I caught up with her, and she did it again. Every time I caught up with her she would lift her head, and smile, and dive again. The fifth time I caught up, she didn't dive. She rolled over with a light, lounging twist of her body, and floated on her back, looking up at the sky, her arms spread wide. So I turned over, too, and floated, about five or six feet from her, and looked at the sky.
The sky was darker now, with a purplish, greenish cast. The color of a turning grape. But it still looked high, with worlds of air under it. A gull crossed, very high, directly above me. Against the sky it was whiter even than the sail had been. It passed clear across all the sky I could see. I wondered if Anne had seen the gull. When I looked at her, her eyes were closed. Her arms were still spread out wide, and her hair wavered out free on the water from around her head. Her head was far back, her chin lifted. Her face looked very smooth as though she were asleep. As I lay in the water, I could see her profile sharp against the far-off black trees.
All at once, she turned, in the direction away from me, as though I hadn't been there, and began to swim in. She swam with a slow stroke now that seemed retarded and yet effortless. Her thin arms rose and sank with a languid and bemused and fastidious punctuality, like your own effortless motion in a dream.
Before we got to the beach, the rain had begun, big, spaced, heavy, independent drops that prickled the yet glossy surface of the water. Then it was a driving gust of rain, and the surface of the water was gone.
We rose out of the water and stood on the sand, with the rain whipping our skin, and looked out at Adam, who was coming in. He still had a long way to come. Down the bay beyond him, to the south, the lightening kept forking out of the dark sky, with steady thunder. Now and then Adam seemed, for a moment, to be lost in a driving sheet of rain which would rake over the water. Watching him, Anne stood there with her head bowed forward a little, almost pensively, and her shoulders hunched and her arms crossed over her insignificant breasts, hugging herself as though she were just about to shiver, and her knees tight together and slightly bent.
Adam came in, we gathered up our stuff, put on our sopping sandals, and passed through the pine grove, where the black masses heaved above us and the boughs made a stridor which you caught now and then coming out of the roar. We reached our car and went home. That summer I was seventeen, Adam was about my age, and Anne was four years younger, or about that. That was back before the World War, or rather, we before we got into it.
That was a picnic I never forgot.
I suppose that that day I first saw Anne and Adam as separate individual people, whose ways of acting were special, mysterious, and important. And perhaps, too, that day I first saw myself as a person. But that is not what I am talking about. What happened was this: I got an image in my head that never got out. We see a great many things and can remember a great many things, but that is different. We get very few of the true imagines in our heads of the kind I am talking about, the kind that become more and more vivid for us as if the passage of the years did not obscure their reality but, year by year, drew off another veil to expose a meaning which we had only dimly surmised at first. Very probably the last veil will not be removed, for there are not enough years, but the brightness of the image increases and our conviction increases that the brightness is meaning, or the legend of meaning, and without the image our lives would be nothing except an old piece of film rolled on a spool and thrown into a desk drawer among the unanswered letters.
The image I got in my head that day was the image of her face lying in the water, very smooth, with the eyes closed, under the dark greenish-purple sky, with the white gull passing over.
This is not to say that I fell in love with Anne that day. She was a kid then. That came later. But the image would have been there if I had never fallen in love with her, or had never seen her again, or had grown to detest her. There were times afterwards when I was not in love with Anne. Anne told me she wouldn't marry me, and after a while I married Lois who was a better-looking girl than Anne, the kind they turn around on the street to see, and I was in love with Lois. But the image was there all the time, growing brighter as the veils were withdrawn and making the promise of a greater brightness.
So when I stepped out of the pine grove, that drizzly early spring afternoon a long time afterward, and saw the charred log on the white sand where a picnic had been, I remembered the picnic back in the summer of 1915, the last picnic we had before I left home to go to college.
I wasn't going such a hell of a long way to college. Just up to the State University.
"Oh, Son," my mother said, "why don't you be sensible and go to Harvard or Princeton." For a woman out of the scrub country of Arkansas, my mother had certainly learned a lot that time about our better educational institutions. "Or even Williams," she said. "They say it's a nice refined place."
"I went to school where you wanted," I said, "and it was sure refined."
"Or even Virginia," she went on, looking brightly at my face and not hearing a word I said. "Your father went to the University of Virginia."
"That shouldn't be such a bib recommendation to you," I said, and I thought how smart I was to get that one off. I had got in the habit in arguments with her of making some reference to his leaving.
But she didn't hear that, either. She just went on, "If you were East, then it would be easier for you to come over for the summer and see me."
"They are fighting a war over there now," I said.
"They'll stop before long," she said, "then it will be easier."
"Yeah, and it would be easier for you to tell somebody I was in Harvard than in a place they never heard of like State. They wouldn't even have heard of the name of the state it was in."
It's just I want you to go to a nice place, Son, where you'll make nice friends. And like I said, it would be easier for you to come over to see me in the summer."
(She was taking about going to Europe again, and was very annoyed at the war. The Count had been gone quite a spell, since just before the war, and she was going back across. She did go back across, after the war, but she didn't get any more counts. Maybe she figured it was too expensive to marry them. She didn't marry again until the Young Executive.)
Well, I told her I didn't want to go to a nice place and didn't want any nice friends and wasn't going to Europe and wasn't going to take any money from her. That last part about the money just slipped out in the heat of the moment. It seemed a big manly thing to say, but the effect was so much superior to anything I had expected that I couldn't renege and spoil the drama. It knocked her breath out. It almost floored her. I suppose that she wasn't accustomed to hear anything in pants talk like that. Not that she didn't try to persuade me, but I got on my high horse and was stubborn. A thousand times in the next four years I thought what a damned fool I was. I would be hashing or typing or even, in the last year, doing part-time newspaper work, and I would think how I had thrown away about five thousand dollars, just because I had read something in a book about it being manly to work your way through college. Not that my mother didn't send me money. On Christmas and birthdays. And I took that and had me a blowout, a real one with trimmings for days, and then went back to hashing or whatever it was. They didn't take me in the Army. Bad feet.
When he got back from the war, he was full of beans about it. He had been a colonel of artillery and had had himself a wonderful time. He had got there early enough to fire off a lot of iron at the Germans and to dodge a lot of their stuff in reply. In the Spanish-American War he hadn't got farther than a case of flux in Florida. But now his happiness was complete. He felt that all the years he had been making maps of Caesar's campaigns and making working models of catapults and ballistas and scorpions and wild asses and battering rams along ancient and medieval lines hadn't been wasted. Well, they hadn't been wasted as far as I was concerned, for I used to help him make them when I was a kid, and the trick were wonderful little gadgets. For a kid, anyway. And the war hadn't been wasted, either, for he had made a visit to Alise-Ste-Reine, which was where Caesar beat Vercingetorix, and toward the end of the summer after he got back he had Foch and Caesar and Pershing and Haig and Vercingetorix and Critognatus and Vercassivellunus and Ludendorff and Edith Cavell pretty well mixed up in his mind. And he got out all the catapults ands scorpions we had made and dusted them off. But he had been a good officer, they said, and a brave man. He had a medal to prove it.
I suppose that for a long time I took a snotty tone about the Judge as hero because it was a fashion for a while to take such a tone about heroes and I grew up in that fashion. Or perhaps it was because I had bad feet and never got into the Army, or even the S. A. T. C. when I was in college, and therefore had the case of sour grapes that the wallflower always has. Perhaps if I had been in the Army everything would have been different. But the Judge was a brave man, even if he did have a medal to prove it. He had proved it before he ever got the medal. And he was to prove it again. There was, for instance, the time a fellow he had sent up to the pen stopped him in the street down at the Landing and told him he was going to kill him. The Judge just laughed and turned his back and walked away. The fellow took out a pistol then and called to the Judge, two or three times. Finally the Judge looked around. When he saw the man had a pistol and had it pointing at him, the Judge turned right there and walked straight at the man, not saying a word. He got right up to the man and took the pistol away from him. What he did in the war, I never knew.
The night my mother and the Young Executive and I went to dinner at his place, nearly fifteen years later, he dug up some of the junk again. There were the Pattons, a couple who lived down the Row, and a girl named Dumonde, whose presence I took to be tribute to me, and Judge Irwin, and us. Digging up the ballista was, I suppose, a tribute to me, too, though he always had sown a tendency to instruct his guests in the art of war of the pregunpower epochs. All during the meal it had been old times, which was another tribute to me, for you come back to the place you have been and they always start chewing over that bone: old times. Old times, just before dessert, worked around to how I used to make models with him. So he got up and went into the library and came back with a ballista, about twenty inches long, and shoved his dessert to one side and set it up there on the table. Then he cocked it,, using the little crank on the draw drum to wind back the carriage, just as though he hadn't been strong enough to do it with a finger or two all at once. Then he didn't have anything to shoot. So he rang for the black boy and got a roll. He broke open the roll and removed a little hunk of the soft bread and tried to make a pellet of it. It didn't make a very good pellet, so he dipped it in water to make it stick. He put it in the carriage, "Now," he said, "it works like this," and tipped the trigger.
It worked. The pellet was heavy with a good soaking and the zip hadn't gone out of the ballista with the passage of the years, for the next thing I knew there was an explosion in the chandelier and Mrs. Patton screamed and spewed mint ice over her black velvet and bits of glass showered down over the tablecloth and the big bowl of japonicas. The Judge had made it dead center on an electric-light bulb. He had also fetched down one of the crystal bangles of the chandelier.
The Judge said he was very sorry about Mrs. Patton. He said that he was a very stupid old man in his second childhood to be playing with toys, and then sat up very straight in his chair to show what a chest and pair of shoulders he still had. Mrs. Patton ate the rest of the mint ice, punctuating her activity with distrustful glances at the disgraced ballista. Then we all went back into the Judge's library to wait for the coffee and the brandy bottle.
But I loitered [u23] behind in the dinning room for a moment. I have said that the zip hadn't gone out of the ballista with the passage of the years. But that was a misstatement of fact. It hadn't had a chance to. I went over to examine the thing, with a motive more sentimental than scientific. But then I notice the twists, which gave its zip. There are two twist of fiber on all those things, ballistas, some types of catapults, scorpions, and wild asses, through each of which the butt of a propelling arm is adjusted to make, as it were, half of the bow of a kind of supercrossbow. We used to cheat by mixing in catgut and fine steel wire with the string of the twists on our models to give more force. Now, as I looked at the thing, I realized that the twists weren't the old twists which I had put in back in the dear dead days. Not by a damned sight. They were practically new.
And all at once I had the sight of Judge Irwin sitting up nights, back in the library, with catgut and steel wire and strings and pliers and scissors on the desk beside him, and with his high old red-thatched head bent over, the yellow eyes gimleted upon the task. And seeing that picture in my head, I felt sad and embarrassed. I had never felt anything, one way or the other, about the Judge's making those things in the first place, years back. When I was a kid it seemed natural that anybody in his right mind would want to make them, and read books about them, and make maps and models. And it had kept on seeming all right that the Judge _had__ made them. But the picture I now had in my head was different. I felt sad and embarrassed and, somehow, defrauded.
So I joined the guests in the library and left a piece of Jack Burden in the dinning room, with the ballista, for good and all.
They were having coffee. All except the Judge, who was opening up a bottle of brandy. He looked up as I came in, and said, "Been looking at our old peashooter, huh?" He put the slightest emphasis upon _our__.
"Yes." I said.
The yellow eyes bored right into me for a second, and I knew he knew what I'd found out. "I fixed it up," he said, and laughed the most candid and disarming laugh in the world. "The other day. You know, and old fellow with nothing to do and nobody to talk to. You can't read law and history and Dickens all the time. Or fish."
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