Moise and the World of Reason (20 page)

Lance would have advised me to keep my mouth shut, but since Lance is long gone from this room and all others of which I know, his admonitions are also permanently absent and I persist in trying to entice Moise out of her chilling silence.

“Moise?”

“Yes? Now what?”

“Will you please talk to me, we are sitting here like strangers in the waiting room of a station.”

“Doesn't everybody do that who sits anywhere with someone?”

“No. It was never like that when Lance”

“When Lance, when Lance, it's like the flower of knighthood, that far away from our present existence.”

“I know, but I did hope that when you let me back in the room there'd be a little comforting communication between us, if only by signs or glances, but you sit there completely sunk into your thoughts, you're remote as the Himalayas to a traveler without passport or means of passage.”

“Well, I will break my silence to tell you this. There's always been something a little marked-down, a little depreciated about your character since Lance's departure and the advent of your catamite on the prowl. I must tell you that you writers, you people of the literary persuasion, you substitute words and phrases, slogans, shibboleths and so forth for the simplicities of true feeling. Put a few words in what you think is a clever arrangement, and you feel absolved of all authentic emotion.”

(It had struck me till this outburst that Moise in her improvised see-through garment was almost without bodily sensation or mental animation, that she was suspended in both: she breathed without sound and hardly perceptible motion of her chest, and if her eyelids flickered, they did it in a way that escaped observation. Now I knew that she was in a turmoil of feeling that made my own seem relatively serene.)

“This doesn't seem like you at all.”

Her response was a four-letter vulgarism which she had never used before, at least not in my presence. Vulgarisms of word or deed did not seem in her province, they seemed to belong outside the door on Bleecker, despite the confessions made the evening before of “unnatural relations” with the patron “eighty-seven at Bellevue.”

“Scriveners fuck off.”

“Why?”

“When have you ever gotten out of your skins, your crocodile hides, to exhibit anything but yourselves and your blah-blah cleverisms? You can't see life through your lives which stink to the devil's nostrils. Yes, put that down in your Blue Jay.”

“Moise, I don't recognize you.”

“You thought I was complicated, not a simple barbarian. And you say I am thinking but I am not thinking at all. Thinking involves cogitation like wrestling mentally with specific problems which I am not doing. What I'm doing's reflecting, and reflecting's knowing of things which are not problems since they have no solution, none whatsoever, which are simply fixed conditions that only time and mortality can affect, I mean in a terminal fashion, and don't use the word ‘semantics,' don't throw that fucking word at me or I will know that you're a familiar of that horrible red-bearded professor at NYU that even Mary McCarthy's dropped like a sizzling hot rock.”

“Still I would like to know the subject of your reflections.”

“All right, you shall and I think you'll be sorry. I was reflecting upon the fact that there is such a profusion of crones in this city.”

Well.

My natural cunning advised me to profess ignorance of the word “crones,” and as for her reflection upon their profusion in the city, this was indeed peculiar, for though Moise has about her a timeless quality, she is certainly not old.

“What is a crone, Moise?”

“Look it up in a dictionary,” she replied sharply.

“All right, where's the dictionary?”

“If there is a dictionary it will be in”

She pointed to a cabinet built into the opposite wall. It contained a curious mélange of “found objects” and so forth, the most remarkable of which was a copy of
Who's Who
for 1952.

“Why do you keep a copy of
Who's Who
for 1952?” I asked her.

“Because in 1952 a society lady I met by accident on upper Park took up my acquaintance, wanted me for a model, she was an amateur painter of portraits, a wretched old thing of no talent but much academic training and afflicted with a malignancy that her doctors fooled her about, declared her health to be perfect except for adhesions from her last operation. Well, that's neither here nor there. She took me under the wing of her enormous wealth for some weeks, which is a pertinent detail, and one day she said, ‘I want to give you a party, sort of a debut, here, look in this book and give me the names of the guests you want invited from it.' She gave me that
Who's Who
for 1952. Well. It so happened that I did have a relative named Coffin who was in the book, but this relative was afflicted with chronic melancholia, she had purchased two hundred thousand dollars' worth of Belgian lace when a dreadful attack of the melancholia came on her and she left the lace exposed, nobody dared to touch it except an army of moths which destroyed it almost completely. Well. I called this relative Coffin and she appeared to be on the upswing of her cycle and she actually accepted the invitation to the debut party. I then took the liberty of inviting my close friends not listed in
Who's Who
but on the subversive lists and welfare rolls. Well. The relative Coffin never recovered from it and neither did the Park Avenue lady, summoned a doctor far too late for medical intervention and died in the elevator from her two-story penthouse. The 1952
Who's Who
I have kept as a memento of her short-lived patronage, love. Now what have you picked up?”

“Moise, I've discovered a candle and a book of matches.”

“Oh, my God, for his sake. Is it one of my thick, aromatic candles?”

“Yes, identical to last evening's and is intact.”

I placed the candle on the table, replaced
Who's Who
in the cabinet, and returned to sit by Moise. She drew a long breath and then said, “Christ on a crossbeam, lofted, you said ‘What is a crone' as if you'd never noticed them crouching on doorsteps in all weather or leaning out of windows to suck in breath or, in the midtown section, you must have passed through it sometime, they creep about the streets where they congregate singly.”

“‘Congregate singly' is a”

“Yes, but they do, it's the truth, there's no contradiction about it. The midtown section is infested with crones and the
wanderings
of them, my God.”

“So, crones . . .”

I believe that I was justifiably disappointed in Moise at this moment, for here I had been crouching like a priest in the shrine of a sibyl, Blue Jay and pencil in cold-stiffened fingers, trusting her to emerge from her silent revery with speech of a pure and elevating nature, oracular utterances that contained the quality of which the poet Keats must have been dreaming when he referred to “huge, cloudy symbols of a high romance,” and now that I had provoked her to speech, she had spoken of nothing more inspired or inspiring than what I've now transcribed, faithfully as I could, in my last notebook. She had sat there looking like Garbo as Karenina or Camille: then had produced a verbal accompaniment to that image as incongruous as a bathetic score by Max Steiner. I know, of course, that a terminal situation frequently draws the victim in a descent to, not a rise to, new levels of concern. I also know that the true nature of a person's concerns in extreme circumstances may be obscured by sayings that are inappropriate if not altogether irrelevant to the awesome finality of a situation such as seemed to enclose Moise in her world retired from reason.

“‘Ah, Harry, thou hast robbed me of my youth,'” I quoted from the bard.

Her reply was a scatological expletive which I prefer to delete and a slight but ferocious shrug of her shoulders and a hitch away from me on the bed.

“You wanted me to talk and now I'm talking and there's nothing funny about it, I can assure you that I am as humorless as the invincible living actress or the great narcissan of diarists, Anima Nimes.”

“Moise, have you caught the fever that I caught from Charlie?”

“I am
immune,”
she shouted, yes, she literally shouted, “to fevers contracted from catamites on the prowl.”

“But you are talking with the extravagance of fever.”

“I believe I am shouting.”

“Yes, you are crying out like a heretic put to the rack who is in such pain that she”

“Denies, confesses,
même chose.”

“Perhaps you are worried about the problem of future prospects.”

“Not in the least since my time has already broken the tape of its distance. You know that my life-style has dropped far below the level of subsistence which it barely approached in the past except for the month I modeled and made a debut for poor Miss
Who's Who
on Park. I suppose that Scott Fitzgerald would have observed a great mystic difference between a very rich crone and a destitute crone, but when I remember that old Park Avenue lady, besieged by relatives gasping for her demise, spending her time either painting without vision or filling enormous scrapbooks with clippings about her idol Senator Joseph McCarthy and his crusade against radical infiltration and going to The Colony for lunch which she couldn't digest, which she'd vomit after two bites despite its incomparable quality in '52. No, crones are crones and wealth or destitution makes no difference in their desperation, except that maybe the ones that sit on winter doorsteps with dirty wrappings about their legs are distracted by physical sensation in a more fortunate way. But in the midtown section where I lived before Bleecker, I tell you there was a real profusion of crones and they crept about the streets like snails, all about the same height and color, for camouflage purposes, I guess, and all with one hand trailing the walls and the other hand clutching a cane or a stick and they never have pocketbooks with them, sometimes they manage to clutch a brown paper bag filled with refuse they've gathered in alleys, they clutch it under the arm that has the hand with the cane, and, oh, they're gray, they're past gray, clothes, faces and hands, all that camouflage gray for protection from death. Instinct takes them outdoors and cunning brings them back in and they dwindle away like the ranks of veterans of old wars in Memorial Day parades. But there are always replacements. Always new crones. They never look at you since they don't want to be noticed and they don't carry pocketbooks because they can't cry out or lift a hand in defense if the pocketbooks should be snatched.”

A pause: then:

“I have recently learned that my mother has turned into a crone.”

Well, now I understood why she had embarked on the subject.

“How did this information come to you, Moise?”

“The information came to me through a message slipped under my door. It was a long letter from an old friend of mine who informs me that my mother has not only turned to a crone but to a scavenger crone. She jiggles public phones for silver to eat at a cheap diner in the midtown section. This friend reproaches me for it. She says that my mother comes out of her cold furnished room in the late afternoon with one hand trailing the walls and the other clutching a cane. She refuses to look into this friend's eyes or respond to her greetings. She makes a turn of five or six blocks in the midtown section and sneaks into public phone booths and jiggles the hooks for small change to eat at a greasy-spoon diner that's worse than an Automat in SoHo and this old friend who claims that she pays Mother's room-rent reproaches me severely for abandoning my mother to these circumstances. As if I could do otherwise in my own situation on Bleecker. This friend suggests that I should bring her to Bleecker or move back to midtown and provide for her there. Provide for her how? By what means? Of course it can't be considered. It's a terminal thing, nothing at all to be done, she'd hardly know me, and how could I bear to know her in this state of a scavenger which she's fallen into? It isn't as if”

“What?”

“She could ever stand me or I could ever stand her. When I took up painting she said I was destined for prostitution or lunacy or both and she threw a suitcase at me and told me to hit the streets. And that's how I moved to Bleecker.”

Her gray eyes darkened as if reflecting the nightfall and she lapsed into silence again, for which I was almost grateful. I had never known her to speak in so bitter a fashion upon a subject which, if not tragic, surely contained a considerable pathos, and of her own mother, whether loved or regretted. As recently as the evening before I would have been young enough to be moved to tears but now my youth and the sentiments of it were passed, in fact I was happy that the room contained no mirror, for if I'd looked in it, it might have reflected a face a hundred years older, eligible for casting as the Dalai Lama or Dorian Gray at the end of his transference from portrait to self-ravaged flesh.

I suppose in some unacknowledged corner of my heart I still possessed the typical Southern attitude toward mothers, something between the maudlin and the unfathomably awful, but certainly never detached, the umbilical cord not merely remaining unsevered but drawn even tighter through time, and the dispassionate, no, that isn't the word, what I mean is the fierce reportage quality of Moise's chronicle of her mother's decline, reminding me of Capote's
In Cold Blood
, made me feel that I was not with Moise as I had known her before.

The gentleness had gone from her as scent from a dried flower and even her classic beauty in the see-through garment had a suspicion of artifice about it.

She didn't appear to notice my shocked reaction but when she resumed her speech it was in a much softer tone.

“You see, I am now convinced that Moppet is dead.”

“Moppet is?”