False Entry (51 page)

“Pi-erre! Teatime!” Delphine advanced across the cold lawn, shivering for me to see in her sweater, her dark, high-schoolish masses of hair ruffled back, rocking slowly toward me on the iron-braced leg. We were very English in our habits in that house, nudged both by the architecture and the times, and Delphine kept us to it most ardently of all, her sincerity amended by the knowledge that the silver curves of tea-pouring well became a femininity that she had had to express more quaintly than a normal woman, in pinned handkerchiefs, wide skirts, slim, archaic sandals on the wasted foot. A soft-featured, childish thirty above the incongruous spread of hip, reared on all the tender encirclement offered a bright cripple, she had proudly remained unspoiled, gently hoping not to differ. She was in love with me, as I well knew. Schott’s recent attentions, so marked and open, had only inclined her more bravely toward me, even to the point of a small, precious confidence, offered tremulously as a bride, that she was not a virgin. Uncomfortably, I wished she would succumb to a man who would make more sophisticated use of her than I felt myself able. I found her attractions much more normal than she would allow, but saw no way of telling her this without coming closer to accepting them—and we lived in the same house. For, well as I knew Montaigne’s comment on the special heat in the loves of lame women, I was held back by what he had not mentioned—the heat of the attendant psyche. With Delphine, any “affair” she offered, its end already humbly germinated in the word itself, would have a note of hysteria from its beginning, gratitude twining with fidelity in a lovers’-knot not easily severed even by the experienced—and I meant to leave. Anyone could see what her emotions were, arrested and rarefied to a faëry intensity thin as membrane, and as tough. Only love could match it, or perversity, and I felt neither.

“Any for me?” Embarrassed, knowing I saw her excuse, for I always brought the mail up for tea, she still came on; then, glimpsing the one letter in my hand, went on past me to the box. Surly, I let her, although I knew she hated to have her awkward movement observed from behind.

Opening her own letters, she could not keep her eyes from mine. Everyone knew I got no mail, surely speculating on what ties lay behind me, receiving no help from me other than the name of the college, from which I let them think me a graduate of several years back, Lasch never discussing his staff, most people thinking me older than I was. Delphine, traveled, and a great word-fancier, had discerned, from occasional slips (such as “gum-boots” for the “galoshes” which had been rare in Alabama), my origins, and this too she treasured like an intimacy. I disliked her having it only because it was.

“News?” As soon as said, she flushed at having said it, at my noncommittal silence. And a moment later, could not help herself from going on. “From home?”

I was furious with her, for my having no right to be and no way to express it, for her being the gentle, tumultuous creature she was. And, I suppose, for having that barrier to fury, her leg.

“No.”

She would not pry, no not she, a person with feelings so much more bruisable than those who were whole. She wanted to get in, that was all; like anyone in love, she was bedeviled by the thought of it, its proximity, so near, so far. Only one hair of reserve to cross—then to drown together. “But you look so—I hope it’s nothing—?”

“Nothing!” It burst from me, as if we had been snarling for hours. “It’s just that—one’s so far from anything here. From anything important!” I must have crested my head like a peacock.

She bent hers, and started back up the hill, in front of me. As soon as I saw that pathetic gait, which she could not make ordinary if she would, I ran after her. “From the war, I meant, you know what I meant. Delphine.”

“
N’importe
,” she said foolishly, her mouth bright. “
N’importe
!”

So I begged off tea, and went back to my room—to write Dobbin. In the months since, I had seen nothing in the papers about the events in Alabama, the workings of obscure juries there not being as newsworthy as now. If any notice of my uncle’s murder had appeared nationally, it must have done so during the two weeks I had been in my hotel room. I had no wish to exhume it—years later, happening on some AP and UP dispatches for that period, I checked and found nothing. Dobbin’s letter, the one he was waiting to write me, would tell me whatever there was to know. Then why did I write him in advance of it? Up to now, my life, school-grooved like most, had cushioned me against the real multiplicity of the world outside, leading me to assume that there as well complexities would present themselves in a lean, single line of progression, to be dealt with one by one. Lasch’s had proffered a similar groove, those who stayed on burrowing safely there for that reason. But I had a double citizenship in more ways than one, never knowing when the inner globe of the monologue would pall and I must plunge for the outer. Ducking from school to Lasch’s as I had, confusion had still reached me, pulling me with wars, Delphines, my own pendulum, toward the inevitable graduation into it, somewhere along the line.

The letter I wrote Dobbin was as confused, although formal on the surface. Reminding him that I was a national of a country to which I did not wish to return, one engaged however in a war in which I wished to serve, I asked his opinion on how soon “we” would get into it. Unless we would, I did not feel it proper to take out papers here as planned, not wishing to avoid military service, but preferring to cast my lot here, as was natural. Actually it was not at all natural, except in certain small pockets of America, to have feelings ready-made for this sort of thing; thousands of my contemporaries must have been writing just such pretenses to those elders who, neglecting to warn them what heavy thunderclouds of the arbitrary could suddenly loom on a horizon, had taught them to think for themselves. No man really wants to be anonymous. So, in this war, we were to find ourselves running constantly toward the illusion that we had choices, as if this in itself were the white plume. I had rather more anonymity to run from than the average—and this was the real reason I wrote Dobbin, who knew more about me than anyone else now alive. To have someone continue to know. From that deep human itch for which there is no other balm, to be “known.” I’ve no idea whether he ever got the letter.

During the weeks while I waited for his reply, I imagined myself into all sorts of courses. Going to Canada and enlisting there was one—but not being American, would I need a passport? I had none except the old one of my mother’s on which I was down at the age of ten. One day, I dropped by the recruiting office in the postal building in White Plains, and casual as anyone, holding my breath as if the bored sergeant there might read “alien” striped on me somewhere, I found out what was needed for enlistment. “Easy as pie,” he said. “Getting in, that is. Few little John Hancocks here and there, on the dotted.” He handed me some sheets to look over. “You look healthy enough. ’Less you got flat feet.” A second man, at a nearby desk, raised his head from a crossword puzzle. There was no one else in the office. “Join the navy then,” he said. “See the world.” Outside the window, leaf rustled against brick, sun dazed a fruiterer’s stall; in the lobby, feet swished on marble. A little boy went out carrying stamps as if they were holy. If ever there was peacetime, it was there. On the way home, my mind went round and round again (if my uncle, being naturalized, had adopted me—but he had not—whether my mother had included me, still under age, in her first papers), winding me in a self-spun court of chancery. There had been too much law in my life already. And like a fish desiring suddenly to live in air, hearing that there were lungs to be acquired for that element, I wished not to lie. Notice came from Boston that the money had been deposited to my name, followed by a large package—the previously mentioned “effects.” But Dobbin was still silent.

I carried the box down to Lasch’s basement, intending to stow it in my trunk alongside a much smaller one, taken from my mother’s side at the hospital, which when opened the next night in my hotel room had disclosed the packets from the sewing machine—old letters, marriage certificates, the passport, a citation from her school in Lyons, a picture of her first wedding—none of which I had scrutinized except the last, finding, at long length, that I did indeed resemble my father. Well I’d never thought myself a bastard; this opera touch at least hadn’t been included in my longing, in that peculiar “ambition” which had so worried her. Should I use some of the money to go to London, then, conscript myself there?

The second box was much heavier, still in its Tuscana wrappings. A penciled note fell from them.
Your mama pack away some these things long time back. I done put in what else reckon she want you to keep. Enthing I ken ever do
,
you write me
,
care Miss Minnie
,
the Museum. That the best place. Enthing atall. And God bless you in your troubles. Lucine.
I lifted the cover. Lucine had packed us in by layers, on top all the mementos of my grandfather, taken down from their hallowed places on the wall. Next came a layer devoted to my uncle. I passed over it. Beneath were the books from my shelf, under these, dozens of things, from catcher’s mitt to stone collection, that I had forgotten. Objects pursue us, I thought, a detritus we can’t shake, and survival makes sneaks of us all. At the bottom, something both hard and soft was wrapped in tissue. The Japanese slippers fell from it, first signal of my arrival in the new world, and a large conch shell. So my mother had brought it there for me after all, but on second thought kept it hidden—I knew why—exactly as she would have burned that copy of the London
Times
in our nonexistent grate, if she could. I did not lift the shell to my ear. Something caught my eye among my uncle’s things as I replaced them—the page of legal notices which appeared Seasonally in the Denoyeville
Dealer.
I saw almost immediately why he had kept it, my name leaping at me from the required notice of the granting of petition for change. So he’d done that for me too. I wasted no time in gratitude. What a fool I’d been! I came from a town the bulk of whose records for a century back had been lost in the flood. Birth certificates, property attestations—I’d seen their recapitulations paraded on these pages for years. Who was to know that a like loss hadn’t occurred with mine?

A month later I had my navy enlistment, the world having beckoned, although my feet were not flat. The sergeant had been right in all his estimates. Just a few John Hancocks here and there on the dotted.

The night before I left Lasch’s, as I prowled along the dim upper hallway of its men’s quarters, on my way to the bathroom after the late party they had given me, I met Delphine, making her way toward me from the women’s side. Since that afternoon, I had had no more of her confidences, although perhaps Schott had, his inquiring hand having been markedly permitted this evening, in the sight of us all. And Delphine, glossy with liquor, proclaiming herself a cork-smeller, had let herself dream audibly of where she would take herself on the competence left her by her grandmother, as soon as the war was over, even letting drop what she had never obtruded on us before, who her father had been, precisely what Smith. She did not tell us of her relationship, on the distaff side, to Lasch’s main backer. Perhaps Schott, compiling his
Almanach de Gotha
for America, already knew. As it was, she seemed to be handling things perfectly if she wanted to have him at least for a while. I had reason to know that his other habits had not changed.

As she came toward me, in a high-necked robe that glimmered like pink china, one hand bunched in front of her on the side where the brace was, I imagined with embarrassment that she might be bringing me a farewell gift, for the women never came here. She motioned me to lean down. The hand was empty. “Just think—” she breathed in my ear. There was no liquor on her breath. “Schott—” She let me lean back. “Schott wants me to sleep with him.” Her eyes, always shadowed like a tired child’s in summer, looked large as a dragonfly’s. They were impenetrable, their direction all-inclusive. Did she know that Schott was not in his room tonight? He made no secret of his ways of course, claiming that they made him the more attractive to women, but I thought now that, as with many Europeans of his type, his underestimations of Americans clung to him like a patchouli, obvious to them, in which he did not know he walked.

“And shall you?” It seemed to me that she had made her statement as a man might make it.

She didn’t smile back. “No. I’ll marry him.”

Years later I saw them together, at a party of their own. She still preferred, noticeably in a hostess, not to leave a room, a table, ahead of others, but now she carried it off like a vanity. Schott had faded to solidity, like so many preachers of the butterfly chance, once they alight. It was said that he adored her, that it had always been more his marriage than hers. And he was allowed to walk behind.

Now, she watched me, her eyes glaucous as a seer’s. Her mouth twitched, but I couldn’t be sure that its mood was the same bright “
n’importe
” of our other encounter. Stretching up, up, she put it on mine, where it warmed, strove.

Inflamed, feeling her brace against my leg, I pulled her closer, growing at once all the perversity I had disclaimed.

“Turn around.” She had withdrawn from me, motioning me to face away from her. She was smiling.

I did so. What on earth? Was it that she didn’t wish me to see her entering Schott’s room? If so, then she’d soon be out again. I could still feel her mouth, round plum wanting me belatedly to know its pulp. At first, I heard no movement from her. Then, waiting, I heard her step going slowly away from me, back to the women’s quarters, rock, rock.

In bed, liquor and the hilarity of doom kept me sleepless, like a man after his bachelor dinner. Time’s hurrying footstep was at my ear, making me proud. I dreamed with eyes awake of all the shocks and fancies to come in a world even subtler than I had imagined, where the women one did not want ran away, where only to perceive its contradictions proved one old. Finally I fell asleep, to dream that I nodded by the fire, an old man rich with experience and even more wondrous regrets, listening to the silent, Tanagra voices of all the women I had not had. I left for boot camp the next morning.