False Entry (17 page)

I told him I was going north. “Uh
-uh
!” he said. “Get there, send me down a satchelful that ice.” He tipped two fingers at me when I thanked him. “Hurry back!” he said, and drove off.

The courthouse square was deserted. This was the hour when people lay about wherever they could, letting the day press from their pores. If the office was closed, I thought, I would even go to the Fourchette house, but the door was open, and on it a note:
Ticely—you want that writ Pa promised
,
look in around nine.
Ticely was the name of the sheriff—a sharp reminder that the office, for all its slackness, was the precinct of county business, of adult affairs. But the note was signed
Junior
, by the fumbling, heavy-breathing hulk of a man who was the son. Thus my luck followed me. I should not have got away with what I did, under the rubbed-stone eyes, denatured yet sober, of the elder Fourchette.

Inside the office the fan was blowing, going on just as I had left it, under the wheeling generations of flies. That other day I had been here was “there”; this was “here,” with the fan between them, a weaving “now.” Only I, a patchwork of all three, a being continuously repaired and accreting, had changed. I could still hear, as I did just then, the to-from Memphis train spreading its cloudy horn along the land, but now I had the beginning, the necessary deafness. I could still listen to the voice of memory, but from now on, even to this voice, with calculation. I was almost ready to begin the exchange of unpremeditated feeling for the privilege of knowing at all times who and where I was, for that absence of pain which I would learn to confuse with joy. And I knew the name of the next town north.

I smiled to myself, remembering how once, to know that had seemed the sesame to everything. How enormously more I knew now, and how much less likely I was to be diddled—the proof being that I sat here, ready to defend my name, my selfhood, like any knight-at-arms. I felt the presence of all my appetites, huge to know more, and the possession of them gave me, even as now, the conviction of health. In my knapsack there were still two sandwiches and I hunted them out with sharp pleasure and ate them in great bites. On a stand near the desk there was a dish of pears under a netting, and with a brigand’s look over my shoulder, I lifted the netting and stole one. I felt all the excellence of growing up, the bravery that opened like a door in oneself, the privilege that arrived in mysterious, due course, and no one at the moment could have persuaded me but that growing older was a quantitative affair. In my pocket there was still one brown-papered bar of Demuth’s chocolate, and putting aside childish things, I ate it with a knowing cannibal twinge. My “themes” had not left me; if intent upon it, I could still summon them at will from the uncontaminated country that was still most truly I. That inward country was only more richly textured than I had dreamed, more deeply situated than a child’s. But I could still draw from it a deep surge of innocence—though it came now only at will, preceded by the faintest tinge of injury, and from slightly farther off.

At the window, in the hallucinated lavender that hung just before dark, even Tuscana’s stingy shapes took on the weak lyrism of a town that, though hated, was shortly to be left. It was my duty to cherish that hatred for all that it had meant to me, to hold to the real substance beneath those dim porches, so ingénue and soft now in their evening summer. It would never, I swore, become my province—that Cloud-Cuckoo-Land of youth which other people, sometimes even my mother, saw in the teacup, the time-cup, brooding over it with a bemused smile. But now that I was leaving Tuscana, I could afford at last to admit that I was in it, that this was America and I was in it, here.

Back there, during the years when my mother used to mention, halfheartedly, the ridiculous idea of coming here, “America” had had the comfortable shape of some leviathan humping so far behind the horizon that one could talk of it without ever fearing to see it. For a long time I had not even understood that it and “the States,” as it was called in Fulham, were for the most part the same. “America” was what my mother had always called it, and from her silent head-shakings over the letters from her sister, I had come to regard it as another part of the ill chance that dogged my aunt, that had dogged her also with a mortal disease. So too it had dropped occasionally from the old grandmother’s accented tongue—
Amerika—
sounding down the endless, travertine corridors of her family whenever she spoke of Pierre, her favorite brother who, though a great traveler, had settled permanently there. And on her lips too it had the rap of some uncomfortable destiny that a man less feckless or obstinate than he would have had the sense to avoid. For all her spa acquaintance with Europe, she was a provincial, reconciled to England only because
die Familie
, all the core of it except Pierre and a ragbag of auxiliary cousins, was gathered there. She had, too, all the European woman’s deification (in her case Germanic and Hebraic as well) of the males of the family. And for this brother, the Goodman children’s distaff great-uncle, she had the special matriarchal passion that often extends itself to the adventurer.

Actually, he may have seemed an adventurer only to her. To others he must have seemed merely that natural dilettante which all such mercantile families inevitably acquire on their way from money to taste. He had his business interests along with the artistic. Although she never said precisely what he did or was, showing at times an irritation with him because she could not, it appeared that he dabbled in export-import, always in some charming currency—Carrara marble, sometimes the finished statuary, terrazzo, wine. Apparently he hovered between his taste and his money, casually augmenting one with the other, and this, although it was not solid enough for her to approve, she could understand. What troubled her was that he did it “over there.” She was the family’s recorder, its central repository, tending, in the continuous brew of her incantations, what she clearly regarded as the family soul. But like the true duennas, the best witches, she had little imagination. Pottering over her memorial fires, she could evoke that concentric family, its panoply of death, birth, banns, houses, taxes and long uneventfulness, in all her known sulphurs and blues, making for herself and them—and for me—such a family as was never anywhere else. But Pierre’s life was lost to her, a blank patch somewhere in the North Atlantic mists across the world. She could not weave him in. It was not his change of country she objected to, or his far journeys. The family, since Egypt perhaps, had had many such—but always together. If Sir Joseph had taken the family to
Amerika
on the morrow she would have gone with him, as later she surely went along to Japan, no doubt settling down devotedly at once to weave that in too. But Pierre was alone. It was not that she thought of him—although she may have—as wandering over savannahs she would have been at a loss to describe. Nor that he never corresponded, except by presents sending a constant stream of curiosa from everywhere, America as well—and came to see her only every four or five years. Without the family she could not imagine him at all. He was therefore the sole denizen of her lamentations; to death and other scourges she gave only a token
sabacthani
, revering these as the natural enemies against which a family circle was formed. Meanwhile she saw him—and made me see him (soon, she said, to be seen on one of his visits, in the flesh)—as a Merlin of talents that could conquer anything except his own waste of them. On her elegiac days as I listened to her, I saw him in “
Amayrika
,” held fast in the laocoön coils of its central dark. At other times—on the days when, chatteringly gay, she talked at me as to some elegant crony of the Ringstrasse—America appeared merely as something he had somehow contracted and would one day abjure like an absurd
mésalliance.

He was of course also the “uncle from Gibraltar.” I had not yet reasoned that out on the day I went to the old lady’s apartments as usual and found him there, having just discovered his presence in the house from Molly, who had called me back as I was bearing off the tray at the usual hour, saying, “Hoi there, hold it a tick, the uncle is with her!”—and carefully replacing its glass with two others, pale red with dots of white on them, that I had never before seen. “Can the boy manage?” I heard the cook say, low. “The Eye-talian ones those are, sent her Easter last,” and Molly’s answering whisper: “Fair treat to watch him. Can he not!”

“
Ach
, so it is
your
day is it?” said the old lady as I entered. “Here comes the handsome waiter. And here
he
is,” she said proudly, clapping her knuckles together and nodding toward the dapper, mustached gentleman who sat next her on the sofa, “the naughty wanderer we speak of so often, at last. Here is my brother Pierre.” She turned to him with glee. “And you,
Brüderlein
, wait.”

Then she put me through our little routine, and he tossed back his head and laughed, smoothing his short gray curls and the mustache that matched them, slapping his sharp, silken knee.

“‘Here comes the handsome waiter,’ eh? My God, Franziska, how you remember! I can hear our dear mother saying that to me now.” I knew that he was really the old lady’s stepbrother, younger and of a different father. It was strange to hear him name the old grandmother, for although she often referred to herself thus in her recitals, I had never heard anyone in the house say it aloud.

“And who is this?” he said, turning to me. “Not another nephew-once-removed I have lost track of?”

“
Ach
!” she said. “Although you—you are capable of it. Of course not. It is Dora’s boy. You remember Rachel’s Dora.” I made as if to go then, reminded of who I was, but she motioned me to stay. “The others are always off somewhere. We have long conversations together, he and I.” I was too young then to remark, even to myself, that in reality I never said a word, but I remember thinking: Those are “conversations,” then—we have “conversations.”

He fixed his eyes on me, brown plush instead of his sister’s black but with the same mottled keenness. The lids were paper-thin, under brows that bristled and curled at the tips like secondary mustaches. “‘Handsome waiter,’ eh? Would you believe it, that’s what they used to call me. Hmmm? Can you believe it? What do you say?”

It was a warm June, and he was wearing a vanilla-colored suit of the silk my mother called “pongee.” His hat lay beside him, a rolled-brim panama of the same tinge, and next it a smooth, yellow cane. In his tie, pale as the rest of him, something twinkled—a horse with its pinhead hooves stretched to an extension no bigger than the nail of a man’s thumb. “Eh?” he said.

“Not—not the waiter part,” I said, and again he tossed back his head and roared, ending up with a sip of the wine.

“Mmm,” he said, “that’s the stuff I sent you. Must make a note to send you some more next time I go there.” He turned to me. “You’re a canny one, you are.” He had no accent that I had ever, or have ever, heard. Neutral of itself, it seemed to shift with whomever he talked. “What you really like about me is my horse. That’s what all the children like—what I keep in my pockets, and the horse. Here, take a look at it, but don’t prick yourself, its edges are sharp.” He slipped it from his tie and handed it to me. It was made of minute diamonds set so close that one could not see the gold, with a saddle of green stones, and a single, wild red eye that was infinitely laughable yet made the thing move. I held it, looking at the eye and wondering what other marvels he kept in his pockets.

“It is wonderful wine, Pierre,” said Frau Goodman. “I drink every day a toast to you, and my thanks for all the things you send me. I am beginning not to have room for them.” She waved a hand at shelves lined with goblets and preciosities, over every one of which I had seen her crow and adore. “But I must remind you, one can get all these things even here. I would rather have you.”

He whistled under his breath. “Why do you not come with me, then?”

“Leave the family!
Du bist verrückt
!”

His eyes crinkled. “Or for a visit, at least.”

“And what home do you have, that I could visit it!”

“Right now a beautiful one in the
Vieux Carré.
Really now, Franziska, you do not think I inhabit the savage parts of the country? And after that, perhaps San Francisco. Why are you not more pioneer?”

“The winter here is enough pioneer. Like an aquarium nobody cleans. And the maids! Even the boy here dusts better. What would I not give for a
Dienstmädchen
from home!”

He laughed. “I’ll send you that too.”

“Always you
send.
” She shrugged.

He reached in a pocket. “Here. Something for this young man. Something he could not get here, even at Fortnum’s.” He opened the packet for me, exposing three immense tan, nut-studded ovals, one of them crumbled, each as large as his palm. “Taste it.” He watched me. “Good, eh? New Orleans pralines. And now perhaps, if I am going to meet my new grandnieces, I must have my horse again.”

I gave it back, holding it by the stickpin guard at the end. It was indeed very sharp. “You like it, eh?” I nodded. “Better than the candy?” he said. I flushed, my mouth still full. “Don’t answer,” he said quickly, “that was not fair. Besides, I know the answer. But tell me, what is it you like best about the horse? Best, mind you!”

I smiled at him. He was the easiest man to smile at I ever saw. “The eye!” I said.

He raised the brows. “Hmm. Not many say that. And he can dust too. And he has conversation. I could use a boy like that, eh, Franziska? Perhaps I ought to take him along with me.”

“Where?” I said. He was the only person I had ever met for whom I would have deserted that house.

“Have pity, Pierre,” muttered his sister. “Indeed you have not changed an inch. Do you not see he believes you?” She had forgotten, or never knew, as often the charmers refuse to know, how far she had already taken me herself.

I flushed again, understanding now that he had not meant it. This time when I turned to go, neither of them stopped me.