Clock Without Hands (6 page)

"Naturally. They are two different things. White is white and black is black—and never the two shall meet if I can prevent it."

The Judge laughed and held Jester's hand when he tried to pull away again.

"All my life I have been concerned with questions of justice. And after your father's death I realized that justice itself is a chimera, a delusion. Justice is not a flat yardstick, applied in equal measure to an equal situation. After your father's death I realized there was a quality more important than justice."

Jester's attention was always held by any reference to his father and his death. "What is more important, Grandfather?"

"Passion," the Judge said. "Passion is more important than justice."

Jester stiffened with embarrassment. "Passion? Did my father have passion?"

The Judge evaded the question. "Young people of your generation have no passion. They have cut themselves off from the ideals of their ancestors and are denying the heritage of their blood. Once when I was in New York, I saw a Nigra man sitting at a table with a white girl and something in my bloodstream sickened. My outrage had nothing particularly to do with justice—but when I saw those two laughing together and eating at the same table, my bloodstream—I left New York that same day and never went back to that Babel, nor will to my dying day."

"I wouldn't have minded at all," Jester said. "Soon› as a matter of fact, I am going to New York."

"That's what I meant. You have no passion."

The words affected Jester violently; he trembled and blushed. "I don't see—"

"One of these days you may have this passion. And when it comes to you, your half-baked notions of so-called justice will be forgotten. And you will be a man and my grandson—with whom I am well pleased."

Jester held the chair while the Judge pushed himself up from the table with his stick and stood upright for a moment facing the picture above the mantelpiece. "Wait a minute, Lamb." He sought desperately some words that would abridge the chasm that had opened in the last two hours. And finally he said: "You know, Jester, I can see the pink mule you were talking about—there in the sky over the orchard and the shack."

The admission altered nothing and they both knew it. The Judge walked slowly and Jester stood near him ready to steady him if necessary. His pity mingled with remorse and he hated pity and remorse. When his grandfather was settled on the library sofa, he said: "I'm glad you know how I stand. I'm glad I told you." But the tears in his grandfather's eyes unnerved him so that he was forced to add: "I love you anyway—I do love you—Grandy." But when he was embraced, the smell of sweat and the sentimentality disgusted him, and when he had freed himself he felt a sense of defeat.

He ran out of the room and bounded up the staircase three steps at a time. At the head of the upstairs hall there was a window of stained glass which brightened Jester's auburn hair but cast a sallow light on his breathless face. He closed the door of his room and flung himself on the bed.

It was true he had no passion. The shame of his grandfather's words pulsed in his body and he felt that the old man knew that he was a virgin. His hard boy's hands unzipped his fly and touched his genitals for solace. Other boys he knew boasted of love affairs and even went to a house run by a woman called Reba. This place fascinated Jester; on the outside it was an ordinary frame house with a trellis on the porch and a potato vine. The very ordinariness of the house fascinated and appalled him. He would walk around the block and his heart felt challenged and defeated. Once, in the late afternoon, he saw a woman come out of the house and he watched her. She was an ordinary woman wearing a blue dress and with her lips gummed up with lipstick. He should have been passionate. But as she glanced at him casually, the shame of his secret defeat made him draw up one foot against the other leg and stand stricken until the woman turned away. Then he ran all the six blocks to his house and flung himself on the same bed where he lay now.

No, he had no passion, but he had had love. Sometimes, for a day, a week, a month, once for a whole year. The one year's love was for Ted Hopkins who was the best all-around athlete in the school. Jester would seek Ted's eyes in the corridor and, although his pulses pounded, they only spoke to each other twice in that year.

One time was when they entered the vestibule together on a raining day and Ted said, "It's foul weather."

Jester responded in a faint voice, "Foul."

The other conversation was longer and less casual but completely humiliating. Because Jester loved Ted, he wanted more than anything to give him a gift and impress himself upon him. In the beginning of the football season, he saw in a jeweler's a little golden football. He bought this but it took him four days to give it to Ted. They had to be alone for him to give it and after days of following, they met in the locker room in Ted's section. Jester held out the football with a trembling hand and Ted asked, "What's this?" Jester knew somehow, someway, he had made a mistake. Hurriedly, he explained, "I found it."

"Why do you want to give it to me?"

Jester was dizzy with shame. "Just because I don't have any use for it and I thought I would give it to you."

As Ted's blue eyes looked mockingly and suspiciously, Jester blushed the warm painful blush of the very fair and his freckles darkened.

"Well thanks," Ted said, and put the gold football in his trousers pocket.

Ted was the son of an army officer who was stationed in a town fifteen miles from Milan, so this love was shadowed by the thought that his father would be transferred. And his feelings, furtive and secret as they were, were intensified by the menace of separation and the aura of distance and adventure.

Jester avoided Ted after the football episode and afterward he could never think about football or the words "foul weather" without a cringing shame.

He loved, too, Miss Pafford who taught English and wore bangs but put on no lipstick. Lipstick was repulsive to Jester, and he could not understand how anyone could kiss a woman who wore gummy smeary lipstick. But since nearly all girls and women wore lipstick, Jester's loves were severely limited.

Hot, blank and formless, the afternoon stretched ahead of him. And since Sunday afternoons are the longest afternoons of all, Jester went to the airport and did not come back until suppertime. After supper, he still felt blank, depressed. He went to his room and flung himself on his bed as he had done after dinner.

As he lay there sweating and still unsolaced, a sudden spasm lifted him. He was hearing from far away a tune played on the piano and a dark voice singing, although what the tune was or where it was coming from he did not know. Jester raised up on his elbow, listening and looking into the night. It was a blues tune, voluptuous and grieving. The music came from the lane behind the Judge's property where Negroes lived. As the boy listened the jazz sadness blossomed and was left unshattered.

Jester got up and went downstairs. His grandfather was in the library and he slipped into the night unnoticed. The music came from the third house in the lane, and when he knocked and knocked again the music stopped and the door was opened.

He had not prepared himself for what he would say, and he stood speechless in the doorway, knowing only that something overwhelming was about to happen to him. He faced for the first time the Negro with the blue eyes and, facing him, he trembled. The music still throbbed in his body and Jester quailed when he faced the blue eyes opposite him. They were cold and blazing in the dark and sullen face. They reminded him of something that made him quiver with sudden shame. He questioned wordlessly the overwhelming feeling. Was it fear? Was it love? Or was it—at last, was it—passion? The jazz sadness shattered.

Still not knowing, Jester went into the room and shut the door.

T
HE SAME
midsummer evening while the scent of honeysuckle lingered in the air, J. T. Malone made an unexpected visit to the old Judge's house. The Judge went early to bed and was an early riser; at nine in the evening he sloshed mightily in his evening bath and the same procedure happened at four in the morning. Not that he liked it. He would have liked to be safe in the arms of Morpheus until six o'clock or even seven like other people. But the habit of being an early riser had got into him and he couldn't break it. The Judge held that a person as corpulent and free-sweating as he was needed two baths a day, and those who were around him would agree with this. So at those crepuscular hours the old Judge would be splashing, snorting and singing ... his favorite bathtub songs were "On the Trail of the Lonesome Pine" and "I'm a Rambling Wreck from Georgia Tech." That evening he did not sing with the usual gusto, as his talk with his grandson had troubled him, nor did he put toilet water behind each ear as he might have done. He had gone to Jester's room before his bath but the boy was not there, nor did he answer from the yard. The Judge was wearing a white dimity nightshirt and clutching a dressing gown when the doorbell rang. Expecting his grandson, he went downstairs and crossed the hall barefooted and with his robe slung negligently on his arm. Both friends were surprised to see each other. Malone tried to avoid looking at the too-small bare feet of the very fat Judge, as the Judge struggled into his robe.

"What brings you here this time of the night?" the Judge said in a tone as though midnight had long since passed.

Malone said, "I was just out walking and thought I might step in for a moment." Malone looked frightened and desperate and the Judge was not deceived by his words.

"As you see I've just finished with my bath. Come up and we can have a little nightcap. I'm always more comfortable in my own room after eight o'clock. I'll pile in my bed and you can lie in the long French chair ... or vice versa. What's bothering you? You look like you've been chased by a banshee, J.T."

"I feel like it," Malone said. Unable to bear the truth alone, that evening he had told Martha about the leukemia. He had run from his own house in terror and alarm, fleeing for comfort or solace anywhere. He had dreaded in advance the intimacy that tragedy might have restored from the distant casualness of his married life, but the reality of that soft summer evening was worse than any dread. Martha had cried, insisted on bathing his face with cologne and talked of the children's future. In fact, his wife had not questioned the medical report and behaved as though she believed that her husband was incurably sick and was in fact a slowly dying man. This grief and credence exasperated and horrified Malone. As the hours passed the scene grew worse. Martha talked about their honeymoon at Blowing Rock, North Carolina, and the births of the children and the trips they had taken and the unexpected changes in life. She even mentioned, in connection with the children's education, her Coca-Cola stock. Modest, Victorian lady—almost sexless it had seemed to Malone at times. This lack of interest in sex had often made him feel gross, indelicate, almost uncouth. The final horror of the evening was when Martha unexpectedly, so unexpectedly, referred to sex.

Martha was embracing the unnerved Malone when she cried, "What can I do?" And she used the phrase that had not been said for years and years. It used to be the phrase for the act of love. It originated when Ellen was a baby who watched the older children do handsprings on the Malone summer lawn. The small Ellen would call out when her father came home from work, "You want me to do a handspring for you, Daddy?" and that phrase of summer evenings, wet lawns and childhood had been their word for the sexual act when they were young. Now the twenty-years-married Martha used the word, her bridges carefully placed in a glass of water. Malone was horrified knowing that, not only was he going to die, but some part of him had died also without his having realized. So quickly, wordlessly, he hurried out into the night.

The old Judge led the way, his bare feet very pink against the dark blue carpet, and Malone followed. They were both glad of the comfort of each other's presence. "I told my wife," Malone said, "about that ... leukemia."

They passed into the Judge's bedroom where there was an immense four-poster bed with a canopy and feather pillows. The draperies were rich and musty and next to the window there was a chaise longue which he indicated to Malone before he turned his attention to the whiskey and poured drinks. "J.T., have you ever noticed that when someone has a failing, that fault is the first and foremost thing he attributes to another? Say a man is greedy ... greed is the first thing he accuses in others, or stinginess ... that is the first fault a stingy man can recognize." Warming to his subject the Judge almost shouted his next words, "And it takes a thief to catch a thief ... a thief to catch a thief."

"I know," Malone replied, somewhat at a loss to find a hinge to the subject. "I don't see..."

"I'm getting around to that," the Judge said with authority. "Some months ago you were telling me about Dr. Hayden and thoses little peculiar things in the blood."

"Yes," Malone said, still puzzled.

"Well, this very morning while Jester and I were coming home from the drugstore, I chanced to see Dr. Hayden and I was never so shocked."

"Why?"

The Judge said: "The man was a sick man. I never saw a man fall off so rapidly."

Malone tried to digest the intimations involved. "You mean...?"

The Judge's voice was calm and firm. "I mean, if Dr. Hayden has a peculiar blood disease, it is the most likely thing in the world to diagnose onto you instead of himself." Malone pondered over this fantastic reasoning, wondering if there was a straw to grasp. "After all, J.T., I have had a great fund of medical experience; I was in Johns Hopkins for close on to three months."