(WHAT CAN COME OF TRYING TO READ WILLIAM FAULKNER WHILE MINDING A CHILD, OR VICE VERSA)
THE cold Brussels sprout rolled off the page of the book I was reading and lay inert and defunctive in my lap. Turning my head with a leisure at least three-fourths impotent rage, I saw him standing there holding the toy with which he had catapulted the vegetable, or rather the reverse, the toy first then the fat insolent fist clutching it and then above that the bland defiant face beneath the shock of black hair like tangible gas. It, the toy, was one of those cardboard funnels with a trigger near the point for firing a small celluloid ball. Letting the cold Brussels sprout lie there in my lap for him to absorb or anyhow apprehend rebuke from, I took a pull at a Scotch highball I had had in my hand and then set it down on the end table beside me.
“So instead of losing the shooter which would have been a mercy you had to lose the ball,” I said, fixing with a stern eye what I had fathered out of all sentient and biding dust; remembering with that retroactive memory by which we count chimes seconds and even minutes after they have struck (recapitulate, even, the very grinding of the bowels of the clock before and during and after) the cunning furtive click, clicks rather, which perception should have told me then already were not the trigger plied but the icebox opened. “Even a boy of five going on six should have more respect for his father if not for food,” I said, now picking the cold Brussels sprout out of my lap and setting it—not dropping it, setting it—in an ashtray; thinking how across the wax bland treachery of the kitchen linoleum were now in all likelihood distributed the remnants of string beans and cold potatoes and maybe even tapioca. “You’re no son of mine.”
I took up the thread of the book again or tried to: the weft of legitimate kinship that was intricate enough without the obbligato of that dark other: the sixteenths and thirty-seconds and even sixty-fourths of dishonoring cousinships brewed out of the violable blood by the ineffaceable errant lusts. Then I heard another click; a faint metallic rejoinder that this time was neither the trigger nor the icebox but the front door opened and then shut. Through the window I saw him picking his way over the season’s soiled and sun-frayed vestiges of snow like shreds of rotted lace, the cheap upended toy cone in one hand and a child’s cardboard suitcase in the other, toward the road.
I dropped the book and went out after him who had forgotten not only that I was in shirtsleeves but that my braces hung down over my flanks in twin festoons. “Where are you going?” I called, my voice expostulant and forlorn on the warm numb air. Then I caught it: caught it in the succinct outrage of the suitcase and the prim churning rear and marching heels as well: I had said he was no son of mine, and so he was leaving a house not only where he was not wanted but where he did not even belong.
“I see,” I said in that shocked clarity with which we perceive the truth instantaneous and entire out of the very astonishment that refuses to acknowledge it. “Just as you now cannot be sure of any roof you belong more than half under, you figure there is no housetop from which you might not as well begin to shout it. Is that it?”
Something was trying to tell me something. Watching him turn off on the road—and that not only with the ostensible declaration of vagabondage but already its very assumption, attaining as though with a single footfall the very apotheosis of wandering just as with a single shutting of a door he had that of renunciation and farewell—watching him turn off on it, the road, in the direction of the Permisangs’, our nearest neighbors, I thought Wait; no; what I said was not enough for him to leave the house on; it must have been the blurted inscrutable chance confirmation of something he already knew, and was half able to assess, either out of the blown facts of boyhood or pure male divination or both.
“What is it you know?” I said springing forward over the delicate squalor of the snow and falling in beside the boy. “Does any man come to the house to see your mother when I’m away, that you know of?” Thinking We are mocked, first by the old mammalian snare, then, snared, by that final unilaterality of all flesh to which birth is given; not only not knowing when we may be cuckolded, but not even sure that in the veins of the very bantling we dandle does not flow the miscreant sniggering wayward blood.
“I get it now,” I said, catching in the undeviating face just as I had in the prim back and marching heels the steady articulation of disdain. “Cuckoldry is something of which the victim may be as guilty as the wrongdoers. That’s what you’re thinking? That by letting in this taint upon our heritage I am as accountable as she or they who have been its actual avatars. More. Though the foe may survive, the sleeping sentinel must be shot. Is that it?”
“You talk funny.”
Mother-and-daughter blood conspires in the old mammalian office. Father-and-son blood vies in the ancient phallic enmity. I caught him by the arm and we scuffled in the snow. “I will be heard,” I said, holding him now as though we might be dancing, my voice intimate and furious against the furious sibilance of our feet in the snow. Thinking how revelation had had to be inherent in the very vegetable scraps to which venery was probably that instant contriving to abandon me, the cold boiled despair of whatever already featureless suburban Wednesday Thursday or Saturday supper the shot green was the remainder. “I see another thing,” I panted, cursing my helplessness to curse whoever it was had given him blood and wind. Thinking He’s glad; glad to credit what is always secretly fostered and fermented out of the vats of childhood fantasy anyway (for all childhood must conceive a substitute for the father that has conceived it) (finding that other inconceivable?); thinking He is walking in a nursery fairy tale to find the king his sire. “Just as I said to you ‘You’re no son of mine’ so now you answer back ‘Neither are you any father to me.’ ”
The scherzo of violence ended as abruptly as it had begun. He broke away and walked on, after retrieving the toy he had dropped and adjusting his grip on the suitcase which he had not, this time faster and more urgently.
THE last light was seeping out of the shabby sky, after the hemorrhage of sunset. High in the west where the fierce constellations soon would wheel, the evening star in single bombast burned and burned. The boy passed the Permisangs’ without going in, then passed the Kellers’. Maybe he’s heading for the McCullums’, I thought, but he passed their house too. Then he, we, neared the Jelliffs’. He’s got to be going there, his search will end there, I thought. Because that was the last house this side of the tracks. And because something was trying to tell me something.
“Were you maybe thinking of what you heard said about Mrs. Jelliff and me having relations in Spuyten Duyvil?” I said in rapid frantic speculation. “But they were talking about mutual kin—nothing else.” The boy said nothing. But I had sensed it instant and complete: The boy felt that, whatever of offense his mother may or may not have given, his father had given provocation; and out of the old embattled malehood, it was the hairy ineluctable Him whose guilt and shame he was going to hold preponderant. Because now I remembered.
“So it’s Mrs. Jelliff—Sue Jelliff—and me you have got this all mixed up with,” I said, figuring he must, in that fat sly nocturnal stealth that took him creeping up and down the stairs to listen when he should have been in bed, certainly have heard his mother exclaiming to his father behind that bedroom door it had been vain to close since it was not soundproof: “I saw you. I saw that with Sue. There may not be anything between you but you’d like there to be! Maybe there is at that!”
Now like a dentist forced to ruin sound enamel to reach decayed I had to risk telling him what he did not know to keep what he assuredly did in relative control.
“This is what happened on the night in question,” I said. “It was under the mistletoe, during the holidays, at the Jelliffs’. Wait! I will be heard out! See your father as he is, but see him in no baser light. He has his arms around his neighbor’s wife. It is evening, in the heat and huddled spiced felicity of the year’s end, under the mistletoe (where as well as anywhere else the thirsting and exasperated flesh might be visited by the futile pangs and jets of later lust, the omnivorous aches of fifty and forty and even thirty-five to seize what may be the last of the allotted lips). Your father seems to prolong beyond its usual moment’s span that custom’s usufruct. Only for an instant, but in that instant letting trickle through the fissures of appearance what your mother and probably Rudy Jelliff too saw as an earnest of a flood that would have devoured that house and one four doors away.”
A moon hung over the eastern roofs like a phantasmal bladder. Somewhere an icicle crashed and splintered, fruit of the day’s thaw.
“So now I’ve got it straight,” I said. “Just as through some nameless father your mother has cuckolded me (you think), so through one of Rudy Jelliff’s five sons I have probably cuckolded him. Which would give you at least a half brother under that roof where under ours you have none at all. So you balance out one miscreance with another, and find your rightful kin in our poor weft of all the teeming random bonded sentient dust.”
Shifting the grip, the boy walked on past the Jelliffs’. Before him—the tracks; and beyond that—the other side of the tracks. And now out of whatever reserve capacity for astonished incredulity may yet have remained I prepared to face this last and ultimate outrage. But he didn’t cross. Along our own side of the tracks ran a road which the boy turned left on. He paused before a lighted house near the corner, a white cottage with a shingle in the window which I knew from familiarity to read, “Viola Pruett, Piano Lessons,” and which, like a violently unscrambled pattern on a screen, now came to focus.
MEMORY adumbrates just as expectation recalls. The name on the shingle made audible to listening recollection the last words of the boy’s mother as she’d left, which had fallen short then of the threshold of hearing. “… Pruett,” I remembered now. “He’s going to have supper and stay with Buzzie Pruett overnight.… Can take a few things with him in that little suitcase of his. If Mrs. Pruett phones about it, just say I’ll take him over when I get back,” I recalled now in that chime-counting recapitulation of retroactive memory—better than which I could not have been expected to do. Because the eternal Who-instructs might have got through to the whiskey-drinking husband or might have got through to the reader immersed in that prose vertiginous intoxicant and unique, but not to both.
“So that’s it,” I said. “You couldn’t wait till you were taken much less till it was time but had to sneak off by yourself, and that not cross-lots but up the road I’ve told you a hundred times to keep off even the shoulder of.”
The boy had stopped and now appeared to hesitate before the house. He turned around at last, switched the toy and the suitcase in his hands, and started back in the direction he had come.
“What are you going back for now?” I asked.
“More stuff to take in this suitcase,” he said. “I was going to just sleep at the Pruetts’ overnight, but now I’m going to ask them to let me stay there for good.”
1950