A Tidewater Morning (11 page)

“I’m quitting,” I said. I was astonished. The words had erupted as spontaneously as an ouch of pain.

“What did you say?”

“I’m quitting,” I repeated.

“What do you mean, you’re quitting?” he said. “When?”

“Right this minute,” I replied. Outrage had begun to pound at my temples, and I was fast losing a coherent tongue. “Right this minute. You docked me ten cents on a day like this when it’s so hot I can’t even barely walk—I’m quitting right now!” My voice rose. I was still astonished. It flashed through my mind: Jesus, this is me, talking back. “I don’t need your money, you hear?” I began to walk away past the idling motorcycle, remembering my father’s scornful description of Mr. Quigley, whom he had encountered once or twice, with an effect of extreme distaste. “You damned little homunculus,” I said.

“Hey, come back here, Whitehurst!” he commanded. I turned halfway about and returned his glowering gaze. “You call me a queer?” he said.

“I’m calling you a cheat and a bully,” I retorted. “Leave me alone!” I turned again, began to march away.

“Now, Whitehurst, dammit, listen, come back here!” A conciliatory tone had entered his voice, along with a hint of the frantic, since I was not only leaving him in the lurch with several dozen undeliverable newspapers but engaging in a rebellion that must have been the first he had experienced. I don’t think he had ever had a defector. It was bad for the image of an entrepreneur, I reflected much later, and no doubt it prompted the turnabout, sudden as lightning, that caused him to hustle after me and grab me by the arm, muttering with urgency: “Listen, I take it all back. It was just a joke, Whitehurst. I ain’t gonna dock you a penny. You just take them papers and get on your route, you hear? When you finish up and come back to the store, me and you will just sit down and have us a little chat, man to man. About your debts and all. I'm a reasonable fellow. We’ll share a Co-Cola or two. I should have made allowance for the heat and all, and so I take it all back, you hear?”

I capitulated as if in a trance. I said nothing, turning to the stack of papers, which I crammed painstakingly into my bag, hoisted the load to my shoulder, and walked past Mr. Quigley toward a row of stoops and front porches commencing to catch the morning’s fierce, baked luminescence. The beagle tagged along for a few steps, then trotted home.

His dangerous introversion? Addy, dear, what you are now saying is preposterous. How can anything like that be a danger? And you find a little note like that written in his own handwriting and left on his bedroom table. You find that dangerous, too?

Yes, frankly, I do, for a twelve-year-old boy.

And would you mind telling me again precisely what was written in that note?

He’d left it there and gone out I’d gone in with Florence to clean up and then I saw it It said, as I started to tell you, “I want to
—”
and then the verb, beginning with
f
and ending with
k—“
I
want to blank Lilly Fletcher.
”
That’s all

You still can’t say the word At your age.

No, I can’t

Who’s Lilly Fletcher?

She’s one of his classmates.

Is she pretty?

Jefferson! What difference does that make? My question is, why should the boy write a note like that, and secondly, why should he leave it exposed on a table for you or me or anyone else to see it?

Maybe he found it sexually exciting to write such a note, an expression of his sexual self

Sexual self? He’s just turned twelve, for heaven’s sake!

Dr. Freud, from your favorite city, says we have sexual selves when we are a few weeks old
—

Don’t be facetious, Jeff. A side from that, why should he leave the note exposed
—
no, perhaps displayed
—
in such a manner?

Who knows? Maybe he just forgot all about it Maybe he thought it might excite you or me, if we happened on it Or Lilly Fletcher.

You’re being outrageous, Jeff! That’s abominable!

And you’re being as usual boringly puritanical! So what if he might have found that word, and writing it in conjunction with Lilly Fletcher’s name, sexually arousing? It is pronounced, incidentally, “fuck,” and I should have liked many times, in the old days, to have spoken it to you, saying “fuck me fuck me,” and hearing you joyfully say the same! But I couldn’t ever
—

Jeff! Don’t!

If ever
—

Don’t. Don’t, Jeff. I can’t help what’s
—

I’m sorry, Addy

Please don’t bring that up again It hurts. Don’t say “old days.”

I’m sorry, Addy dear. Forgive me. That was rotten of me—

I suppose I still honor the restraints in language, an old-fashioned quirk on my part

No, I guess that it’s just that I’ve never been able to square the relish you have for certain modern writers
—
James T. Farrell, for example, and Hemingway
—
with this, if you’11 pardon me, dear, unmistakable primness.

We were talking about the boy, Jeff.

Yes?

It’s not just the sex thing. It’s this retreat into solitariness, this introversion I was speaking about He’s so alone most of the time, chooses to be. Not that it doesn’t please me that he reads so much, adores books the way he does. And I know he loves football, at least to watch it I don’t think he’s unmanly. But I’m worried about how he crawls into this shell of his, the hours and hours of solitariness. I dread the idea of him losing touch with reality
—

It could be that reality’s from time to time more than he can bear. Why not? It is for me.

What do you mean
—
what reality?

I can’t say. I’ve been rereading Kant Maybe when I’m finished this time I’ll be able to let you know.

I love you, Jeff. I love our boy. I love him so.

Forgive me for raising my voice, Addy.

I walked past the houses along the route, gazing directly down the sidewalks, never pausing to deposit a newspaper at a door. The village was stirring, the early risers clumping about downstairs. Toilets flushed, here and there I heard the gurgle of a bathtub; a whiff of coffee and warm bread made my stomach churn. I plodded on. The shoulder strap of the bag, unrelieved by any lightening of the load, cut into my flesh but I barely felt the abrasion. In my craving to get where I was going, the dead weight of all that newsprint, feeling on other Sundays like pig iron, had a curious weightlessness, as if the insolent burden itself were helping to hurry me along. At the Episcopal church the sexton, an old Negro man in overalls, hosing a spray of water over a bright patchwork of dahlias and daisies, threw up a pink palm in greeting, then rolled his eyes with slow perplexity when this Sunday I failed to wave back. The river appeared, gray-blue, sparkling, an immense estuary so wide that its far shore was a thin horizontal ribbon, a hairline of dim greenery trembling like a mirage in the humid distance. I toiled onward toward the beach, crossing a strip of spongy marshland that soaked my sneakers. Then I struggled up a sandy slope, finally gained the pier. The pier! My second summer home, my hangout, my club, my Riviera, my salvation. It stretched out on barnacled timber pilings a hundred yards, terminating in a platform from which we swam at low tide or, at high tide, dove like pelicans, plunging into turbid water that all summer long was as warm as the mouth of the Amazon. It was like a Saturday night bath, and a little less clean, situated as it was only a few miles upstream from the vast shipyard and its effluvium, supplemented by other vagrant effluvia of town and village and adrift with curious doodads; an elongated, transparent fish that floated several inches from my nose was, I realized sickishly much later, a condom lazing its way toward Richmond, its purpose spent. The health worries of the period ceased at the waterside; everyone swam in the dirty James and so did I. The sun caused me to emerge from my bedroom’s lonely cocoon, and that summer I had passed most every day at the pier, immersed in the brackish broth or sprawled flat on the boards in my white Lastex trunks, squinting my way through volume three of Freeman’s
R. E. Lee.

This Sunday morning the pier was almost deserted. Two Negro kids about my age were fishing for hardshell crabs at the landing set midway out. They were not allowed to swim from the platform but could fish to their hearts' content. They were crouched immobile above their dangling strings; the stink of the gamey chicken necks they used for bait rose up like a wall of rank vapor through which I hastened, holding my breath. And the end of the pier at last. Occasionally the memories of my boyhood are framed not as if through the boy’s eyes but as reflected in the viewfinder of a movie camera, drawn back on one of those marvelously unimpeded mechanisms, a boom or crane, which allows the object—in this case myself, unshouldering that iniquitous bag—to be seen as if six feet away, angling downward from about the height of a towering basketball player. The eye encompasses more this way: not just the newspapers, weighing two and a half pounds each, being heaved one by one into the river, but the boy shaking with rage and exhaustion, the skinny, sunburned legs moving furiously about, sinews of the thin neck straining as, one after another, the papers are seized from the bag, heaved, drowned. A Sunday edition floats for a moment. I recall how each of the papers seemed to drift at first with a kind of lordly self-confidence, but then immediately afterward blotted up the water, turned from white to deathly gray, and sank out of sight, unfolding layers of itself like some diseased vegetable sea-growth. I was tempted to dive in after them to quench the heat raging around me and to assuage or at least distract myself from the returning sense of doom; but there was something too dreadful about swimming in the midst of those disintegrating fronds of paper, groping me, those headlines, bright comic pages decomposing. So I went halfway down the pier, near where the two Negro boys were crabbing, took off my clothes, and let myself slide in for a brief dip. Then as the sun rose higher I made my way back up through the village toward home.

“It’s an early hour, Dr. Taliaferro,” I heard Papa saying through the living-room window, “an early hour. You shouldn’t have done it. It’s a fruitless mission.”

“Jeff, I hope you don’t mean that,” came Dr. Taliaferro’s voice. “I'm not here to offer you anything but my presence. I want to help in any way I can.”

“I’ll tell you what you can do to help. Get yourself a glass from the sideboard while I try to get the ice… out of… this ice tray… without… cutting my hand off! Then you can join me while I have another belt of Old Crow.”

“Something lighter, Jeff? If you’ll just tell me where it is.”

“In the kitchen. In the refrigerator. Ask Florence. I think she’s back there. She’ll find you a ginger ale or something.” There was a brief silence. “Delphine, how about some
tay.
Some cool iced
tay.
’S what they say in England. Spot of
tay,
love?”

A woman responded in a murmur, so soft that I lost the words. I could tell that Papa was a little drunk, and I felt a fresh uneasiness. He so rarely drank but when he did—Jesus, watch out. He really couldn’t handle whiskey with grace, which may be why he drank so seldom; I knew there were no moral or religious scruples that kept him away from the bottle. Perhaps he was simply aware that a mere taste of alcohol turned him garrulous and indiscreet, made his humor heavy-handed, unlimbered his tongue in a most aggressive way, causing him also to speak in a high, penetrating tone as he was doing now. He was addressing Dr. Harrison Taliaferro, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church. The name was pronounced Tolliver, one of those antique Virginia mutations that had amused my mother (along with the Sclater that became Slaughter, St. John turned into Sinjin, Montague losing its terminal vowels to rhyme with Sontag) nearly as much as the minister’s creamy baritone and aging-matinee-idol pulpit manner had amused me. He had cracked us up—we pubescent apes who sat in the back pew bursting with imprisoned giggles, flaring our nostrils, clenching our jaws, turning our palms outward in pious entreaty in unison with his own, listening to not a word of those ardent marathon sermons preached from beneath the arched gospel legend in gold leaf: be ye doers of the word not hearers only. To my knowledge he had never visited our house, but here he was, Nelson Eddy himself. I could see him through the window, seated together with his broadbosomed wife—motherly, twisting a big flowered handbag—who was staring directly at my father. She wore a damp, puckered look tinged with alarm. Seconds before there must have been sorrow, now there was disapproval. Shock.

“No tay then?” my father went on. “May I continue in my endeavor to explain why I am a hypocrite?”

“Jeff, please,” protested the minister, “this is a terrible time for you. I don’t want you to feel it necessary to unburden yourself—”

“I’m not unburdening myself, Dr. Taliaferro,” he interrupted. “Since when was the truth a burden to an honest man? And I trust I can call myself honest. I’m deficient enough in most other virtues. But I’ll tell you, Doctor, it’s neither easy nor much fun to be a good hypocrite, especially if one is honest. Your run-of-themill dishonest hypocrite—and I’d say that the breed composes a substantial majority of your congregation—doesn’t really object to all the fraudulent trappings of religion, the vain ceremonials, the ceremonial vanities, the bland absurdities of this ritual called worship. Metaphorically speaking, he devours these sanctimonious goodies because they taste good not to his soul but to his ego. They thrill that most sensitive part of his palate, which is his self-esteem. In his core he knows how empty, how false all this obscene obsequiousness is, but, you see, he is a dishonest hypocrite and therefore it causes him no pain. On the other hand, I, being an
honest
hypocrite—that is not an oxymoron, Doctor—have throughout the decade or so of my service to your business—pardon me, to your house of worship—felt extreme distress. This is whether it be sitting on a Sunday absorbing your incomparable wisdom, or teaching a Sunday school class, as I have so many times, the absolutely riveting fact that in Deuteronomy it is written that thou shalt not plow with an ox and an ass together—and have given in my heart a private twist to those words ‘plow’ and ‘ass’—or at a Wednesday night meeting of the deacons, when for two hours my bones have ached with ennui and my brain with Christian banality. I have felt pain. I have felt—forgive me the comparison—crucifixion.”