Endless Things (16 page)

"Son,” she began, she always began, in pencil vanishing now but that would never vanish away. Son. What was he attempting to pack up, or unpack for good, that was in them? How could their envelopes, when he pressed open their torn mouths, exhale the familiar mildew of the house on Mechanic Street, after so long in his own house? It was the smell of the gnomes’ entrance into the basement apartment, the crumbling linoleum of the hall; the smell of the damp-soft wooden stair that stepped up to the door to the alley: and it certified to him, as mere memory could not, that his own life had in fact begun and continued there, and so could not have done so anywhere else.

"Son, I forget whether I told you that Mrs. Auster in the front has died. So just for a moment there is no one in the house.” This one from five years ago, just before the letters ceased to come anymore, before her final illness. “Now Baxter is worried that the next people to come and take the apartment will be negroes, because there are so many of them on Mechanic and all around. He's terribly worried, I don't know why."

Baxter. He should do something about Baxter, make sure he gets the house (though for sure now all filled with Negroes) for himself, blessing or curse or only destiny, amazing how few the choices we have, how strait the way. Baxter found asleep in the entranceway of the house on a December night in the Depression, taken in, still there tonight.

"Well it's odd,” Ma had written, starting a fresh paragraph. “Baxter says that negroes care for nothing but sex. He says when they have their lodge meetings or preach or dance or have a rent party or perform in a jazz band they're only
playing
at those things, and what they're really doing is trying to get sex. I tell him I don't think that's different from anyone. People are always being blamed for doing things just to get sex, aren't they? It was always said when I was younger that whatever men say, they're only thinking about
one thing
, and this was always said in a very censorious way, as though the men were selfish hypocrites. No one ever considered that the poor men were to be pitied after all for even trying to think about anything else at all, trying to be politicians or preachers or banjo players or generals—because isn't it actually
Sex
that's selfish, Sex that twists every ambition and desire into only itself? Here a poor fellow wants to be a poet or a bandit and all he's allowed to make of his desires is babies."

Well it's odd
. How often had he heard his mother say it, with her small smile of satisfaction, having hit on another flaw in the fabric (as it seemed to her), another mismatch of the soul and the earth.

Odd: all his friends who over the years had sobbed into their drinks about how they'd broken their mothers’ hearts by not marrying, not making babies, and his own mother quite satisfied to learn of
her
son's constitution, even proud of him, as though it had been a sly choice of his, a way of defeating if not the enslaving itch itself then at least the usual outcome of it: embarrassingly curious as to how he had managed this coup against the world, and awarding some credit to herself too for taking his side in the matter.

Except for the iceman there had been no Negroes at all on Mechanic Street when he was a boy, or much of anywhere else in the city beyond the confines of the Sunset district, which at the age of three or four he had named Browntown when he and his mother passed through it on the streetcar. With the other kids on his block he had followed the old long-armed hugely strong iceman in his wagon, waiting for the chunks of hard white-veined ice he would sometimes toss out to them. The cruel tongs with which he clamped the blocks and threw them onto his rubber-caped back. The dripping wagon advertised Coal and Ice, and he used to ponder that, why it was appropriate for one place to sell both, the fiery and the cold, the dirty and the clean.

He pocketed the letter in its envelope, disheartened suddenly, having glimpsed that eager receptive kid, and missing him: lost to him now, he alone left inside his flesh. Wonderful and terrible, how children love the world, and swallow it down daylong in spite of everything, everything.

There could hardly have been a street in the city less appropriate than Mechanic for his mother's house, though she hardly noticed: satisfied to be inappropriate everywhere, walking to market past the battling Polish housewives and the kids (heads cropped close for lice) who played tipcat and rolled smokes in the alleys: she in the remains of some ancient æsthetic costume, of which she had many, and her hair coming down. Buying a frightful yellow newspaper and a tin of Turkish cigarettes at the corner store and then making a telephone call that the whole store overheard, a call perhaps to the school principal to explain her son's absence from class: he standing beside her meanwhile (not as good as she was at assuming invisibility, at believing or pretending to believe that people neither notice nor care much about you) and staring fixedly at his shoes.

Back in their basement, when she lay on the musty divan and smoked her aromatic cigarette and read to him out of the newspaper (atrocious crimes and bizarre fatalities) he found it easier to be on her side against the world. They weren't the only ones on the street (she let him know) who lived without a husband or a father; they were simply the only ones too proud to lie, as the others did, who called themselves Mrs. and claimed to have husbands traveling the world or dead in the war. He wasn't, in fact, too proud to lie, and did lie, at school and on the street; but he was proud of her pride, and took it for his own.

For a long time he believed his mother didn't sleep at night, because she would now and then come into his room in the depths of darkness, wearing the clothes she had worn in the day, and wake him, to give him an orange section or a vegetable pill, or to rub camphorated oil into the wings of his nostrils. Often she was lying on the divan in the same clothes when he got out of bed in the morning. He could tell she had worked late into the night, because on her long table would be the piles of silk flowers she had made. Some of them went for hats; some were for restaurant tables; most were for deathless funeral wreaths. She who was so unhandy otherwise, who rarely even tried to master manual tasks, was magically good at her craft, the miniature blossoms realer than real coming to be within her nearly unmoving fingers as though she conjured them like an illusionist from her palm. Many years later, when he saw a “time-lapse” film of a flower sprouting, growing, putting forth petals and pistils, bowing its heavy head, all in a few seconds, he was made to think in wonder not of Mother Nature but of his own mother at work in the night, her pile of poppies and roses, oxeye daisies, lilies and blue lupines.

On an autumn morning when he was eight, nine perhaps, she woke him in the predawn. Instead of dosing him, she urged him gently out of bed and into his chilly knickerbockers. They were going somewhere. Where? To see an old friend of hers, who wanted to talk with him. No, not someone he knew. No, not a doctor. She gave him tea in the kitchen, whose windows were only just blooming gray, then pushed his cap on his head and went out with him into the silent alley.

How had she chosen that morning to begin his education? For sure there was nothing special about the date or the year or the day. He had not just reached the age of reason like the tough Polish boys who went together all on a day to communion, crossing into religious maturity, dressed fatuously in white and lace. Maybe (he thought later) she had picked the day just for being no day in particular. And yet the unguessable workings of his mother's spirit had been in a way the same as a flair for drama: plucking him out of bed without warning for what he intuited was a journey of initiation, a day unlike other days, a door opening in the wall of diurnality.

(That was how it had been too when one day he came home from school, and she met him at the door, and said to him mildly,
Guess who's here?
And then held open the kitchen door for him to see sitting at the table a pink-cheeked man with a kind smile and hurt eyes. His father, owner of his home, looking like Herbert Hoover in his tight suit and hard collar, and holding in his lap a big box of blocks. Was it that she thought her son needed no explanation, or couldn't grasp one? Was it that she had none to give, not to herself any more than to him? Or was it that she believed there was something salutary in the shock of sudden knowing? It had imparted to him a lifelong expectation of surprise, a conviction that everything important will come suddenly, leaping on the unwatched back like a predator, and nothing the same afterward: an expectation—he thought, now, this night, in helpless grief—that had caused him to neglect and not notice the very most important things, the things that had been alongside all the while, right in plain sight, his humble and now failing organs for a single instance; no matter, too late, too late.)

He had been surprised to see lamplight in the kitchens along the alley, and women inside making breakfast; he hadn't known life began so early. They had walked out to Mechanic Street and out and up the town.

Above the Mechanic district the climbing streets were filled with houses of decorated red stone or brick, with arches and steps and peaked roofs like those that had come in his box of blocks. He passed one after another of these ramifying places, following his mother in her tatty cloak, abashed by strangeness but not unwilling to miss school. The houses were mostly dark but for the areaways where maids and deliverymen went in and out. One or two of them (it would be the eventual fate of all, as the Heights district slid metaphorically downhill) had been divided up inside into warrens of rooms and apartments, though looking the same outside, and into one of these his mother took him, holding his shoulder now and steering him up stairs and down high-ceilinged corridors to a door she chose.

She knocked, perfunctorily, then opened, and looked within: lamplight from inside fell on her face, and just for a moment she reminded him of an illustration in a novel, peeking around the door of the room wherein the author has laid her fate; then she took him within.

The room (absurdly high-ceilinged, for it had been split off from a bigger room of proper proportions by a blank wall) could be read instantly, like a page: the single chair was by the window, its green velvet seat concave from being sat on; the lamp was on the table, and the book beneath the lamp, and the stool before the book; the towel hung above the washstand, the scrap of rug lay under. Coal smoldered in the grate; more filled the scuttle. The person who as it were projected all this around himself stood in the center of the carpet in a wadded dressing gown and a fez, hardly taller than the boy he looked at.

"This is Dr. Pons,” his mother said, and that was all. Dr. Pons seemed to have a board jammed into the back of his dressing gown; soon his visitor would determine it was the man's own spine, severely twisted out of true. It gave a sort of spiral motion to his walk that was at once painful and fascinating to watch, a walk that Kraft had later on assigned to more than one character without ever (he thought) quite communicating its effect.

On that first day, his mother stayed there with him and the doctor (of what? Kraft had never asked) and listened; she drank pale tea that the doctor made on a gas ring, and so did the boy. On other days she would only take him to the door, or to the bottom of the street; at length he was left to make his way to this place himself.

How did his instruction begin, when it began? Going up to the Heights was a duty he did because she told him to, and he made little effort to remember the days or the hours. Was he told stories, or was he first asked questions? Was there a text, pages to turn and touch with a pencil tip; or did they only talk together, about his days and his life, his life on this earth; a lesson pointed up, a moral drawn?

Whatever it was, it couldn't have been really news, nor would he have been surprised or appalled by what Dr. Pons had to reveal to him. He knew about religion. There were churches at each end of his block on Mechanic Street: Precious Blood on the south, Reformed E.U.B. on the north, and his mother had explained to him their function; and at Christmas when on the steps of the Catholic church was set forth the little tableau, the chipped plaster figures of sheep and shepherd, camel and king and babe, she told him the story: how the son of a far-off invisible king came to be lost in a wide dark winter world; how he came to learn who he was and how he had come to be there, what task he had come to do, and who his real father was. The Christmas Story.

And now and then, at no fixed interval, a little group had used to gather at his mother's house and tell that story in other forms, or tell other stories with the same form, for it was thought to require many iterations, until one or another telling awakened the selfsame story lying coiled and unsuspected in the hearer's own heart.

The story, he would come to learn, was the one that Dr. Pons had to tell, and it was from Dr. Pons they had learned it, if they had not learned it from Dr. Pons's own teachers. When they told it in the house on Mechanic Street, the parts were acted out by abstract nouns that behaved like personages: Wisdom. Light. Truth. Darkness. Silence.
Wisdom fell outside the Limit that was Spirit, and in her fall the Darkness came into being; so she was the Light caught by the Darkness. And she wept: and her tears became the world we live in
. If he listened—which usually he did not—the big words would flicker into life in his mind for a moment as they were spoken of, only to go out again, like the terms in a physics lecture, Velocity, Force, Mass, Inertia, featureless balls and blocks colliding in no-space and not-time, which are yet supposed to contain the answer to the hardest question, or the second-hardest actually:
why is everything the way it is, and not some different way instead?

They were a funny-looking bunch, Kraft remembered, most of them a little off-kilter or oddly shaped, hairless or wooly, with round soft stomachs or asymmetrical eyes or lumpy brows; they stuttered and fidgeted and sat without ease: as though their spirits had long lived uncomfortably within their swollen or shriveled bodies, which showed the signs of the struggle for dominance, still undecided. Some of them he would come to know pretty well, for they were later his mother's tenants, taking the two upper apartments briefly, living and sometimes dying up there, visited in their extremity by some—not all—of the others. They all seemed to die young of unlikely diseases or live to terrible old ages, burdened with bodily needs that they, and his mother, were contemptuous of but patient with. Mrs. Angustes has to go, son. Silently laboring toward the purgatorial john on his arm. How is it (he would come to wonder) that the adherents of a cult can elect to have, out of the common life we all must undergo, just those experiences that confirm them in their exclusive vision; how do they make themselves into people such as their cult believes all people to be?