The Resurrection, page 24
“I’ll phone Marie,” she said. “Marie would be glad—”
But he shook his head angrily. “No.”
She met his eyes, her lips parted, blackness in her throat. She made as if to shake her head, refusing him, but half way through the movement her look clouded, not from a change in will but from confusion. She said nothing, grieving, knowing as clearly as he’d have known in himself what was happening—the mind weakening under the weight of time, weariness, old ideas, the tyranny of substance. At last, in despair, she said, “All right.” She went to the living room for her purse.
The lights were all on at the Staley house. The sight filled him with dread, and at first he only sat looking up from the car, making no move to get out. At last he strained at the door handle until the latch fell, then pushed with his knee and shoulder to pry it open. On the sidewalk he leaned on the car door a moment and waited for his nausea to settle and the pain in his head to subside. Inside the car, when he looked back, his mother’s dress was lost in darkness; her hands clutching the steering wheel were white, her face eyeless, ghostly.
“Tell Marie I’m here,” he said. “And tell them all—” He paused. He had nothing to tell them. He blew her a kiss, his hand moving clumsily, comic.
He closed the door and waited while she got the car in gear, then turned out into the center of the street. She drove very slowly, squarely down the middle, her headlights on high-beam, lighting the trunks and lower branches of the trees from here to North Street. Every line of the bark stood out clearly, a labyrinth of ingenious connections. He watched the lighted trunks go out, one by one, as she passed them. Then he turned toward the porch.
It took him what might have been quarter of an hour, for all he knew, merely to mount the wooden steps. He watched himself with mingled horror and amusement from above as he stood clinging with both hands to the porch railing, sucking in the smells of the night, struggling like some grotesque vaudeville clown to lift his foot from the first step to the second. He couldn’t do it; it was as if he’d been made for another planet, where the pull of gravity was infinitely lighter and where old, flaking steps sat with less intransigence against him. When he tried to lift his knee with his hand, the nausea washing through his belly and chest made his sense of balance fall away; he had to snatch at the railing quickly to keep himself from reeling. A whimpering began to come out of his mouth, and he no longer remembered how to stop it. He got down on hands and knees. He held himself still a moment, adjusting to the new churning of his nausea, and when he knew he would not pass out, he began to climb. At the top he felt as if he had come a great distance, and he no more dared look down at the street than he would at the moment have dared to look down from a railroad trestle. He thought of getting to his feet again, but the front door stood part way open; he didn’t need to. He crawled into the entryway, thick with scents of overshoes and cloying roses. The rug smelled of, perhaps, cat urine.
The music-room door stood open, and there was a light on. The legs of the grand pianos towered above him like Cretan columns, the nearer pedal-box hanging to within an inch of the carpet, the pedals and the cover-plate bronze, the box itself like a plain but elegant coffin. He rested his head on the carpet a moment and closed his eyes, but again only sight could preserve him from tumbling weightlessness. The dining room, kitchen, and parlor were empty too. A sound came then. It seemed to come from all sides, a great rush of noise like an avalanche, but the part of himself that hovered in godlike detachment above him knew that there had been no more than a whisper, the sound, it might be, of a curtain turning over once in a draft. He crawled toward the open doorway. With a part of his mind, some half-dead nerve, he realized that on the blotched white of the back of his hand there was a brighter, more distinct blotch, and now another—blood. He ran the back of his index finger under his nose and it came away wet. He thought nothing, concentrating all his attention on keeping the room from spinning.
The girl sat perfectly motionless on the side of Aunt Emma’s bed, staring straight ahead. Aunt Emma was not in the room. From above he saw himself crawling toward her smiling horribly, lifting his hand very feebly as if to say “Hi!” He wiped the blood from his chin with his sleeve. She was barefoot but still had her coat around her, the sleeves hanging empty. She refused to see him. He thought of Karen, who was beautiful, yes, and a class of vague faces squinting at him as he wrote on the board. Marie saying something he had no time to listen to now, though he loved her, yes, a vague mumble in the back of his mind, the chalk bright white and beautiful on the green of the board, the bare legs of the child on the bed shining. But she would not turn, and the sickness charging his throat would not let him speak. A scent of powder and old feet and sachet welled out of the rug, and the coverture on the bed smelled of cleaning. The girl’s perfume filled the room and he thought hungrily, sickly, of her kiss. He remembered that there was something he must remember and strained to catch it until it came. Aunt Emma was gone. I’m sorry, he thought. And then his mouth went sour and he knew that in a moment his terror would be back. The room grew brighter, almost blinding, as though the old woman were emerging from every atom of the place at once. He lunged forward and caught the girl’s bare foot and clung to it, and the room grew brighter still. He struggled against it violently, pressed tight to the rug, and then, as if by his will, he made everything dim. He saw her foot, his bloody hand closed tightly around it—an image out of some grim, high-class Western—and he remembered he had had to talk to her. Now it was dark, and he thought he was saying—shaking his head and smiling apologetically—“No harm. It’s done us no harm.”
11
THE end of the third floor hallway. 9 P.M.
John Horne says:
“Were all my elaborate theories wrong? Is love indeed what Proust thought, a magical battle of consciousness against consciousness, the lover’s attempt to possess and thus annihilate the beloved, but at the same time, paradoxically and thus hopelessly, to not possess, to perpetuate, since only in the beloved can one find oneself, that very self which, through the possibility of betrayal, one’s beloved must place in jeopardy? It’s a view I’ve often denounced in the past. Transcending oneself, I have often held, one creates a shadowy other self, that luminescent Possible that one flies toward with all one’s might. And love (I said) is the discovery in another creature of transcendence aimed in roughly the same direction. It is not (I said) the lover’s purpose to fix his beloved like a bleeding butterfly on a mounting board—if butterflies do, as I think, bleed. Love is mutual flight (I said), transcendence-transcended, to use Sartre’s terms, in the sense that two-winged creatures, whether they be angels or leather-winged bats, can know, can realize their flight in a way neither one could know it alone. So that the concept lover-beloved was wrong from the start: It’s lover and lover in a double search, twin stars each of whose relative motion depends for its significance as motion on the other’s. Not that the lover-beloved concept is inevitably wrong, you understand. One sees it sometimes, especially among those who are brilliant and sensitive but insecure. A cancer of the finest kind of soul. But at its wisest, love is not simply the recognition of flight aimed in a similar direction but a recognition of the universality of flight itself: Thus saints (I am personally acquainted with a saint) can love everything that lives, from worms squirming upwards through the petals of a rose to the questing of the universe as a whole, exploding infinitely outward to find God. Transcendence-transcended, for a saint, is the astonishing act, inconceivable to an ordinary man, or at any rate inconceivable to me, except in theory, of affirming at once, and without contradiction, the Many and the One. It’s the mystical recognition that one’s own flight to higher ground is both itself and the indivisible flight of life toward life. And it is, after all, but a short step from the statement ’St. Francis knew the unthinking transcendence of birds’ to the statement ’Birds loved St. Francis.’ For at some point motion, the root of all, say, negative prehensions, transforms itself into thought, and a man is Nature!”
The blind old woman in the corner says nothing, merely hugs herself, whimpering a little, clutching the collar of her bathrobe, her face white as ashes.
“I speak for your good, you understand,” John Horne explains. He lights another cigarette, then hurries on. “If my words confuse you, don’t trouble about it. Words are merely our outward apparel. You and I understand these things, Miss Thomas. We understood them in grade-school, when I called you ’Grandma.’ You remember that? You called me ’Grandpa.’ We understood each other perfectly.
“But isn’t it in fact the case, after all, that the one sure law of the universe is the law of blind force? In history, for instance. What was the rise of America but the growth of a plant where nothing happened to be there to kill it?—Absurd little colonies absurdly revolting when the oppressor happened to be up to his neck in European troubles. Or the case of Hitler—an incompetent, a lunatic, a fear-ridden weakling without a hope in the world, who came at precisely the proper moment, when all the mindless forces in Europe were right and who therefore shot up like air through a vacuum-tube: A convenient tool of the high command, at the start at least, a convenient symbol, a convenient hater—a convenient, wholly pointless explosion, like life itself, Alma Venus! Have you ever read him? An unbelievably stupid man! For instance: Every animal mates only with a representative of the same species. In the exceptional cases of breeding with another species the offspring are sterile or else through lack of vitality succumb to disease or other dangers. Thus bastard forms are eliminated and uniformity is maintained in each species. Therefore it is silly not to recognize that any mixing of Aryans with lower human races is disastrous. In Central and South America there has been more race mixture than in North America, which accounts for their inferior culture. I quote verbatim. A tissue of perfectly astounding bad logic and misinformation. The man’s never heard of the gene pool! And yet people listened, apparently. Blind forces. No other possible explanation. Or take Marx. A philosopher laughed out of Europe, who could get a hearing nowhere but in a barbaric country, among peasants who had no conception of logic, no knowledge whatever of the philosophical tradition. There’s your answer to that ringing question in Aurelius: Hippocrates after curing many diseases himself fell sick and died. The Chaldaei foretold the deaths of many, and then fate caught them too. Alexander, and Pompeius, and Caius Caesar, after so often completely destroying whole cities, and in battle cutting to pieces many ten thousands of cavalry and infantry, themselves too at last departed from life. Heraclitus, after so many speculations on the conflagration of the universe, was filled with water internally and died smeared over with mud. And lice destroyed Democritus; and other lice killed Socrates. What means all this? Nothing! Absolutely nothing! A game of blind forces. Epictetus with all the noble conclusions scratched off.
His son is dead.
What has happened?
His son is dead
Nothing more?
Nothing.
His ship is lost.
What has happened?
His ship is lost.
He has been haled to prison.
What has happened?
He has been haled to prison.
Nothing more?
Nothing.
An idiotic interruption of darkness, a sickness of matter. And what is the proper activity of man? The study of astrology, a life devoted to pursuit of the art of calligraphy. One simply goes on. One gets distance, detaches oneself from one’s thoughts by speaking them aloud, freezing them into the wooden formations of the tongue and teeth, formalizing them out of all content. ’We shall grieve not,’ as the poet says. I forget which poet. One makes up something to do, and one does it.”
He pauses, looking at his cigarette, then corrects himself, “One makes up something to do and, insofar as one is able, one does it.”
He begins to pace back and forth in front of her.
“But what does it mean, ‘One makes up something to do’? How can one make even this trivial sort of leap of faith when one has discovered that the center of the universe is a dark place, the ’coal pocket,’ as astronomers say—if I’ve got the right term? How can one celebrate Alma Venus once one has seen that time and space are a bucket of worms?”
He stops in his tracks and stares at the floor, sucks at his cigarette, then bursts out: “How can I ask that the universe take me seriously? I can’t do it myself! Here I stand, a fat grotesque who is dying, or so my doctor has decreed. What do I do? I play the creature in his death throes: Because I can’t realize it, of course. I look at the world—” He paused, then turned and waved at the window for dramatic emphasis. “I look at the world and I brood on it, but nothing I see or brood on is there, only some unimaginable distortion, the reality behind the mask. I say that the sky is black tonight, but it has no interest in being the black I see. I say that the grass is grayish black, but the truth is merely that to a creature of precisely my size and shape, grass is grass and trees are trees and the laws of thermodynamics are true. So much for human consciousness. An ingenious and delicate instrument designed by monstrous reaches of time for the sole purpose of knowing that all it knows is wrong and, anyway, irrelevant. What then am I to conclude but this: that the only reasonable course for man is to hurry to his grave or, if he’s willing to be made a joke of, to hurry to those who share his condition, keep them entertained with talk, implore them to entertain him in turn, distract him to dreams and elaborate rules—to shadows. Are you a religious person, Miss Thomas?—If I may ask?”
She says nothing. She moves her shaking hand toward him, seems to consider, then draws it back.
He says, “Love, then—the brotherhood of man—comes down to that, it seems: mutual flight to illusion. In the beginning was the void.
“They had an interesting theory in the Middle Ages, Miss Thomas. Perhaps you’re familiar with it. The idea of a god who was infinite Wisdom, Goodness, and Power—Father, Son, Holy Ghost, you know—though I’m not sure I’ve got the three parts properly lined up; it may have been the Son who stood for Power. The brilliance of the concept, in any case, lay in this: that Wisdom, Goodness, and Power are precisely what human beings don’t have. For anything to have meaning at all, we must posit a God who has what we lack and who for some mad reason wants to give it to us. It’s a beautiful vision, and its progress is a beautiful thing to trace. From Moses to Job, for instance—Moses bending to the will of the Lord, Job grabbing the old man by the ear. Job says, ’God is a tyrant,’ and when Job’s friend tells him he’s got to be wrong, he’s got to have committed a sin of some kind to be punished the way he’s being punished, God steps in and takes Job’s side: ’You say the thing that is not so.’ From that point it’s all predictable: God stretched out broken on the rood; the remission of sin. It’s a beautiful vision, and I’ve even believed it from time to time. One must, in a way. But it makes us even more ridiculous, don’t you think? Better to know you’re ridiculous and establish definite limits to the laughter. Isn’t that so?”
He turns suddenly and draws closer to the old woman. “Perhaps I’m mistaken, Miss Thomas. Perhaps you can point out some error in my reasoning.” Abruptly, frantically, he snatches her hand. “I must be wrong. You know it, don’t you? My good woman, I can see it in your eyes!”
“John,” she says in horror. Her gray face shakes. “Shame on you,” she says. “Shame on you, John!”
12
ELIZABETH STALEY’S annual recital was always a splendid event, in its way. All the important people would be there or, if they weren’t, would have sent their excuses, and everyone would be dressed in his finest. Everyone who was anyone had taken lessons, at one time or another, from one of the Staley sisters, and though now Maud Staley had no vocal students, which meant that the traditional vocal part of the recital had been dropped, and though now Emma Staley had no student painters, which meant that the walls would not be hung with floral still-lifes or country bridges, everyone in Batavia who had reason to look back with pleasure or nostalgia at his or her cultural awakening at the Staley house was sure to be in attendance.
The Y.W.C.A. auditorium, as the little room was called, was lighted by tall white candles on seven-branched candelabra. The old damask sofas were pushed back to line the walls, with spaces left between them for the candelabra and the elevated bouquet stands borrowed from the Methodist Church. Metal folding chairs filled most of the room. The bouquets were of red roses and white carnations, tonight as always, because of the symbolic meaning of the flowers—though nobody including Elizabeth Staley herself remembered precisely what the symbolic meaning was. Maud and one of the older girls met the guests at the door, while Elizabeth saw to last-minute details in the kitchen. (There were always little sandwiches afterward, and tea, coffee, and punch.) The children who were to play in the recital sat, arranged by order of entrance, in the little dining room just off the auditorium, the boys in dark-blue suits and bow ties, the girls in party dresses or formals. They whispered in great excitement, every girl jealous of some other girl’s dress, or suffering a vast, undisclosable passion (for the boy with red hair), or running over, one last time, in terror and hopeless confusion—fingers racing up and down an invisible piano—her recital piece. The younger boys poked one another in the ribs, or pulled the curls or the ribbon ends of the girls beside them; the older boys sat with their heads down, their hands on their knees, one neatly polished shoe on top of the other, sunk in gloom or talking loudly, with sudden bursts of maniacal laughter, about basketball, or baseball, or the girl with the daisies in her hair.
The entryway and the auditorium hummed with talk and the shuffling of feet, the rustle of mimeographed programs, the occasional click of one of the metal folding-chairs bumping another. The grandfather’s clock—the chimes carefully left unwound—said quarter to eight. Two of Elizabeth Staley’s older boys bowed politely to each cluster of guests coming in and led them, if they would be led, to seats, and a tall, thin girl in a white dress with a wide pink sash checked over the flower arrangements on the two gleaming Baldwins at the front of the room. She moved the benches, each a fraction of an inch, then stood back, her lips pursed solemnly, considering her work. At last, with a look of extreme satisfaction, she left the room. Elizabeth Staley appeared in the doorway, nodded and smiled briefly in the general direction of her guests, studied the room critically, then vanished. The crowd grew.
