False Entry (41 page)

Next came the store, far down the baseline of his triangle, beneath its old scribble of neon blue. No Semple lounged under it now, creasing and recreasing his duck trousers to an ingoing line of creditors, allotting leeway to some with a nod or odd crook of his thumbs, refusing others with a stillness, a stare. Credit was being arranged for him elsewhere. As a stranger in town, Pierre himself would not know this, must not know it, think only, as he approaches the door with the hung sign which like others on the way will say
CLOSED NOON WEDNESDAY
, that this is the only reason the street is so empty, folk retreated somewhere behind their gray weather and their Wednesday. As a stranger, therefore, he approached the store. Half a yard from it he bent his head, sauntered by without looking. Perhaps he saw that it had a small annex or lumber-room; things catch on the periphery of sight that the eye does not will. The door to this was on the other side of it, hidden. So, if a boy stood there, he passed him.

Now he faced the apex, the courthouse. Its steps lay directly across a square of park, behind two sentinel trees. A paved path circled the park and the courthouse walls.

Politely as any outsider, he took the path. Just as he did so, a figure standing at the top of the high steps, boy or man, its features screened by the trees, turned and went inside. Judgment was always in session; this had nothing to do with him. He examined the face of the building like any tourist who would not bother to go inside to view its staple of flag and lectern, gloom-light that fluttered in women’s breastpins—who had no uncles there. Portcullis 1870, inscription above it too worn to read. “
Nomen mutabilia sunt
” perhaps—names are mutable—as would do for any court in the land. “
Res autem immobilis.
” “Ring” may not move. He drew a finger along the cornerstone, where there was an old watermark, flood mark, three feet or so above the foundation line. A few pariah dogs were always slumped there, for god-knows-what-all, not for warmth surely, perhaps fraternity. One of them, muzzle stretched on its paws, rolled up its eyes at him and measuredly thumped its tail. He shook his head at it, at the door up above. Once entered there—judges, Dobbins of whatever blood and petitioners alike—one was already in the dock.

“Got me wrong,” he said aloud to the dog. “I’m a stranger here.” At once, not ten yards from him, he saw the gap in the circle—the mud alley where the farmers set their stalls on Fridays, that had been here always—as if the hypnotist had at last slapped him, stung himself awake. He ran toward it. Behind him, the dog, its brow wrinkled, again thumped its tail.

Once in the alley he went at a brisk pace, just short of the one he kept for Denoyeville, otherwise he would get to the Jebbs before expected. Going along, he hummed. Down here, he opened his mouth so seldom that his voice had been rusty when it addressed the dog, but now he was up and about again in the jigtime, daytime world. “Do, act, speak, laugh!” he chanted to himself, as he sometimes did in that other world, where personality could be multiple. Here, between the iron bands of family, he had only one—perhaps everyone lost courage for alternatives there. This alley was grim now with the general Ash Wednesday, but he meant to visit it on its bright bourse-Friday, if only to remind himself, like an Alger hero at the scene of his first dollar, of the great bourse to which he had escaped. He stopped now, to look back at the obstacle race just run. There were no planes in the sky, not one since he had been here, to remind him that to some, Tuscana was invisible, not swinging alone as Arcturus, not holding all that there was to the human condition in its sphere. To the new men at the dam it was already bypassed. Those who revisit the buildings of childhood, it was said, always find them shrunken—the chandeliers to rushlight, to wickets all the imperial gates. It was the fault of his “familiar,” then, that cartographer of the condemned and accurate eyes, if the three buildings he had just passed, surely so small in the sight of some, seemed to him as large as they had ever been. Unless he was careful to keep chanting, they might yet appear—golden architraves floating on shadow—as seen once through other eyes, from the height of a hill long fallen, whose scale could never now be known.

He was walking slower now, checking the house numbers where there were any. The Jebbs must have gone down the ladder since leaving the high estate of the Higbys; this street petered out just ahead of him, almost at the railroad line. Yonder, where there had once been fields of weed that moved like wheat in the evening breath of the trains, now only one short one kept the divide. The opposite edge of the backs had crept nearer. A rim of shacks lined it, already harum-scarum with the rows of plants they potted in tins, unmatched curtains flying their savage motley, but the porches and chimneys were straight, not yet tumbledown, and the tar-paper covering, stamped to look like brick, slickly new. Here on this side the seedy houses, some derelict, all pale as Methodists gone far in drink, still had the indefinable look of the white dwelling. He found numbers nine and thirteen, no eleven, none marked Jebb. Eagerly he retraced his steps, looking for the special signs of life that marked the house of death on its post-interment day here—a concourse of women mostly, walking in with prepared faces, coming out, wry or pleased, with a bit of jet or a cookpot, trophy of agility as well as grief. The chair would be ceded to him in somewhat the same rhythm, in progression from sideline to sideboard, from random elegy to calculated bottle and cake: he knew how people were here, and not only here. He was half reluctant to miss this diversion, not scorning it, as usual with the young. Already he had begun to understand old people who attended funerals with which they had no earthly connection, patient ghouls hurried by age toward the gossip that might be eternal, old voyeurs after the single story (whose?), old humanists—all bending over the casket to look at the cut gem. And of course he must have the chair.

“You come about the chair, h’aint you?” The question, echo, came from a man hurrying around the corner of number nine, on legs so short that he toddled. “Saw you from the window. Cain’t see this place from the road.” He led the way, the dumpy seat of his sawed-off pants grimaced this way, that, by his gait, toward a shambles of a cottage not much larger than its outhouse. On the porch, he stamped his boots long and virtuously, looking up at Pierre with soft, brown-bulb eyes. “Doggone if she warnt right! She held all along nobody’d come but you!” He was a compact gargoyle of a man, whose outline came to points at several places, at the high shoulder blades and the ears, between which an oval cranium rose like a darning egg, protected by a cap made out of the top of a woman’s stocking. Pierre remembered the deceased, the huge slattern in slippers, neighborhood fence-leaner, who had eased herself into their household the day his mother had been carried home. He had never seen Jebb until now—if this was Jebb. The mailbox, clamped to the porch post, showed another name. It said
Bean.

“She says to come on in and have something first.” The man swallowed shyly. “Won’t be no snap, lugging that thing all the way back to Rhine Street.”

So they surely knew him then; he was in the right place, or the wrong one. “No thanks, I won’t trouble you.” He stole another look at the mailbox. “I’ll just get the chair and go on.”

“
She
says to.” The brown eyes shone trustfully up at him. Oracle, whoever “She” is, says to.

“Come on!” a voice boomed from within, deep, but a woman’s. “Enough for a feast here.” Stooping to get under the door frame, the first thing he saw was the expected: humble table substituted for sideboard, pop bottles for liquor, food in a stiff array not yet broached except by the energetically breeding flies, to one side of all this a large box. “He would do it,” the voice added. “Told him only one to count on was you.”

He followed the voice to its origin—the chair. “Chair,” as it might have been addressed, was prodigious—a high, oaken affair, pedaled, chained and levered, on tandem-size wheels—and chair was filled. An immense bulk of a woman sat in it, trunk-legs planted on the foot-rest, baby-shaped hands at the wheels. In the elephant-hide dimness she filled the chair without jointure, like one of those balloons that rode carnival carts, Buddha head lolling in a fixed, aerated smile. His first wild thought was that this was the waxwork exhibit itself, the deceased Mrs. Jebb, set up natural as life—that he had come a day too early after all. Then “She” rolled forward, saying “Howdy”; the short man urged a chair under his knees from behind, and there he was, wedged between them, tender focus of their inch-close solicitude, feeling extraordinarily like a dummy himself.

“Here you are, now.” A loaded plate was thrust on his lap from the right—potato chips, grocer’s ham, cake indefinable, curdled slaw. “Eat hearty now.” Stocking-cap nodded at him pleasedly, over-extending it, like a child playing house. “She’d have liked that.” From Pierre’s left, the woman snorted, at the same time pushing into his grasp a pop bottle.

“Thank you, thank you!” Pierre turned his head to each. “Mr. Jebb, isn’t it?” The woman would be the dead wife’s mother, that was it. “Mrs. … Bean?”

“Jebb!” both chorused at him, one to an ear. Both sat back, not far, regarding him, their simpleton, between them.

“Marcus Jebb,” the man said. “And this is Mother.” The woman blinked, accepting. Her son clasped his hands primly, sat up straighter. “Bean … he took off somewhere couple weeks ago, ain’t been heard of since. Leaving her all swole up and helpless, right there in that chair.” He swallowed again, eyes bulging with the accompanying emotion, whatever it was, virtue perhaps, and its own modest pleasure in same.

Pierre, unsure of where to allot his sympathy, looked back and forth between them. “Oh, then you’ll still need it,” he murmured. “I mean, the chair.”

Both exploded in laughter, Mr. Jebb slightly behind his mother, like two straight men over the sally of the comedian between them.

“Not
her
,” said Mr. Jebb when he had recovered, nodding toward his mother. “Her,” he said with almost equal reverence, nodding vaguely at Pierre’s plate, as if it were there, hovering over this honor done her, that the departed might still be found. “Didn’t wait till she passed on. Bean and my old missus, I mean. He just took off.”

“She took off first!” the woman said harshly. “And don’t you ever forget it!” With sudden violence, she gave the chair a shove, sending herself past Pierre’s knees to the table, where the wheels wedged, bringing her to rest just over the food. Slowly she hoisted herself up, a job for block and tackle, or for what already glutted her eyes, expanded her doll-shaped nostrils. Seeing her upright, it was already improbable to imagine this diva of the flesh as ever sitting, ever moved from where she was except by some fluxion of gas within or ground beneath, then as suddenly she kicked the chair behind her with a foot that came from beneath her skirt like a kitten and disappeared again. “Works right good,” she said, “but I ain’t yet ready for it.” She applied herself to the food, at first without benefit of plate, then turning back to them over a loaded one, her voice coming ventriloquially, as if thought were only a secondary chewing. “Marcus’ lawful wife she was. Always taking off with that Bean. Two years back, when Bean got the dam job, she took off for good. Then when
he
takes off, leaving her sick, she puts the health service on to us. Next of kin, they say, and you know who come running.” She paused, munching in the direction of her son.

Mr. Jebb gave Pierre a gentle poke. “Eat hearty now,” he said. “You ain’t hardly had nothing.” Swallowing, he reclasped his hands.

“Two weeks he waits on her, hand and foot, night and day. It ain’t decent, Marcus, I said, not after what she told the whole town last time. Bury her decent. But the rest ain’t.”

“First-class burial,” said Mr. Jebb.

“I’ll say. Last carriage empty, you know, for respect. That’s all right too, she was his children’s mamma. I won’t say otherwise, Bean or no Bean. But surely, I said, you ain’t going on with that second-day business!” Mrs. Jebb paused, this time in Pierre’s direction. “That cake come all the way from the Jew dellycadessen in Denoyeville,” she commented, lowering at his full plate. “Don’t nobody make better funeral cake than the Jews.” Under her frown, he broke into the cake.

Fondant cheeks pursed, she watched him work backwards across the plate, free himself as best he could of the sin of nongluttony. Mr. Jebb sat poised alert, on the edge of his chair. Catching Pierre’s eye on him, he swallowed again, not, as now could be seen, from present sentiment only, but from a kind of permanent tic of it, as if Mr. Jebb’s heart constantly rode so near the surface that every now and then he was put to the trouble of gulping it back down.

“Delicious …” said Pierre into the silence, once, twice, and again when he had finished. More than this was expected of him, he knew; he was their only hope of audience, of elegy; how else was Mr. Jebb to divest himself of his feelings, his mother divulge what she yearned to, unless he knew his role? Once more he repeated himself, this time, with a sudden hiccough of remembrance, in the town’s own idiom. “Very tasty.”

“He would do it.” Hope gleamed again in her eel-jelly eye. “Who’d come after those pickings out there, I said. No more and you’d get from a hen in molt.” The hand resting on her bosom flicked toward the relic box and lay flat again. “Next of kin, that’s all he’d say. Next of kin is the children, I said—eight of them they had, four living and working—and when they come to choose wasn’t so much as a pinky-ring to go round. You’ll see, I said. Only thing in that place ain’t trash is the chair.”

“Sorry to bother you about it.” Pierre stood up and took hold of the chair. “On such a sad day!” he heard himself add. Why, it was easy; the extra word, phrase, had popped out of him like a belch, half hypocrisy, half Coke. This then was what “condolences,” empty as the last carriage in a first-class burial, were for. We help each other round the bend, improvisers all. For Mr. Jebb, set off at last, as if by the turning of a proper key in his back, had begun a slight, steady rocking. What with his size and his cap, it gave him an unfortunate resemblance to a child needing to go to the bathroom, but under the circumstances was still recognizable as that formal palsy with which mourners, greeting each other, say nothing, say all.