Mrs Hollingsworth's Men - Padgett Powell (12 page)

This was of course suspiciously convenient—looking
to Mrs. Hollingsworth, given her own ruminations concerning men who
wanted and needed. But it was also complicated enough that she was
not sure she had generated it all. It had an integrity that was
stronger than her own formulation would have been, she thought.

She approached the man and put her finger inside the
hopeless shirt she had cruelly given him. It seemed a fit emblem of
this new life he said he had, though. Previously the shirt would have
been a nice powder-blue Brooks Brothers oxford cloth. "What I
want," she said, “is for you to take a bath with me.”

The lemon dog was working
a spot on the living room carpet. It could not advance because it had
to do the system-clearing cough at every sniff. It stood in its
tracks, snuffling up and discarding invisible olfactory trash. “Too
much weirdness in that carpet for him to know anything at all,"
the man said. “He’s got the instinct to give up. He’ll move on.
I must too.” Mrs. Hollingsworth did not like her man speaking this
overtly—she was better than that, she thought, and he was. Still,
he said it. She was going to have to get used to the idea of taking a
man for what he was despite her cartoon of him. She had heard of
Michelangelo’s cartoon on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, cut into the
plaster, lines that he had had the genius to ignore once up there on
his back with the truer paintbrush in his hand.

* * *

In the scalding tub—the man shied from the water,
and whimpered and fretted getting in, almost asymptotically, and
remarked that he needed to be sterilized anyway—she laid the man
back against her and held him in her arms. She calmed his eyes by
pressing her hot hands over his eyelids, and she held his breasts,
and her own were trapped against his back in an exhilarating press of
steam and heat, making them tender and alive. She pushed the man
forward and checked them to see if they had turned into huge wontons,
which is what they felt like. His broad back was gorgeous in that
position, and she took a good coarse washcloth and good glycerine
soap to him. She washed him as if, it occurred to her, they were in
the nineteenth century, or whatever century it was or centuries it
was that people sat in tubs and other people poured great gouts of
hot water on them and washed them. How had that disappeared? Maybe
that disappearance was the beginning of the hell-in-a-handcart ride
the human world seemed set on. The man leaned forward and accepted
this succor from her without protest.

He began to speak. He spoke at great length, and
nothing he said was intelligible to the ear. Yet she understood
everything he said. It was a modification of the curious phenomenon
that Ray Oswald had observed in the Forrest film during the dinner
party. It was talk that sounded like talk but was not talk, yet in
the present case was understandable to an organ other than the ear
and the brain. While he talked, the lemon dog came into the bathroom
and stopped its snuffling and sat and regarded the man with its head
held atilt as if it understood everything. Mrs. Hollingsworth
realized she was listening in the same way.

She realized too she was not capable of reporting
what the man was saying, any more than the dog was. But the man was
speaking the truth of his life, and to her. It was of the pain of his
life, and his smallness, and his failures, and it was offered to her
not as something she would need to assume the burden of and help him
with, any more than the dog would be asked to help him with it. It
was being put into the air more or less as clothes are put into the
air before lovers unite. He was taking his clothes off for her. Hers,
she felt, were off. She realized that in this respect she was not
unlike the dog. This was perhaps what was spectacularly lovable about
dogs: their clothes were off at all times, and they did not even know
it. People wanted to be that way

She and the dog listened to the man go on. The room
was filled with agreeable steam and the music of this confession that
was so complicated, like the carpet the dog could not analyze, that
you could only love it and go with it and hum along and kiss the ear
of the man singing it, who was singing it not because he needed her
to hear it but because he wanted her to hear it, and she did not want
to hear it, but she needed to.

She began to see along with the man, to comprehend,
as it were, because she could not apprehend what he was saying in the
ramble of language that was not talk. The man was seeing that his
father who had taken him out of football had also sold his shotgun
rather than give it to him, a boy of thirteen who could have used a
shotgun. So the disappointment the boy had given the father came
before that. The mother was somehow approving of this, the not
football and the not gun. The father was known to fight and the
mother was also approving that the boy would not be known to fight,
though she approved of the father’s violence. Had the father had
the boy taken from him by the mother? What were the mothers
nonfootball nongun nonviolent plans and hopes for her boy then? Plans
so fond that she denied the plans the father had naturally had, in
the absence of which the boy would grow up to be afraid of
thick—shouldered high school boys because he had not been allowed
to be one. And in the absence of which the boy would grow to look
distrustfully upon the women who purported to give him succor—what
were they really up to? Were they not like his mother? Did they have
plans for you that were defined primarily by their not being someone
else’s plans for you, that alone their virtue? Facing a woman who
meant him well, the boy had become a man in a hollow of doubt. He had
kissed his father at the funeral but not his mother. Because of his
mother he had not assaulted the man in the funeral home who had
insulted them. His father would have assaulted the man, in the parlor
or on the very embalming table had the struggle improbably moved from
one room to the next. Yet the man who had been the boy whose father
would not give him a shotgun or let him play football or teach him to
fight or even to gamble at cards could only bluster and threaten and
walk out into the blinding sun and see a vision of Forrest riding a
horse through sunny hill and dale of grave upon grave.

The lessons he would learn in life would come from
hired hands who bore him malice and aimed weapons at him and high
school boys who beat him, not from his father. His women would be not
sufficiently not his mother. The most honest way he would come to
regard them was with the piercing open hunger for them with which he
had looked at Mrs. Hollingsworth when he came in her door.

Confused and afraid of life, he would resort to
honesty, a fool’s tool that would dig a grave more quickly than
undiluted corruption. And he lay in Mrs. Hollingsworth's arms in a
tub of boiling water, saying all this without knowing what he was
saying, but trying. She listened to every word that was not a word
and thought him to be taking sustenance from her, from her surreal
meal, from her having no plans for him that were not precisely and
ineluctably and unpredictably her own.
 

Intruders in the Fog

While the man carried on with the song of his
essential self, articulate in its inarticulateness, important in its
triviality, the man and the woman and the dog heard a noise outside
the bath-- if room door. A voice whispered, "She’s in here."
The woman knew immediately it was the Tupperware daughter she had
asked out of the house. She knew she was talking to her father, and
that she had dragged him home from his office day on grounds that
she, Mrs. Hollingsworth, had lost her mind. She knew that they could
not have heard the man mumbling on about himself but that they could
have heard her mumbling along with him, completing his wordless
squirreled syntax in the not language he was necessarily using. If
they opened the door they would not see the man or the dog, only her
in her thinning hirsuteness and pink flesh being a boiled human egg
in the middle of the live-long day.

The daughter would have also told the husband about
the crazy list—rnaking, but she believed the husband to know about
it already. She had seen him looking at it once or twice in the
drawer where she kept it in the kitchen. He had closed the drawer and
asked where the matches were, or the whatever he could think to ask
about instead of asking her about the altogether strange thing in the
drawer. He had had a queer look on his face that she had not seen
there in a long time. It was a smile, an oblique look of impish
bemusement. She realized as she lay there expecting to have to cover
herself against their door-ramming rescue of her that the look was
the same one she had seen on Forrest’s face after he said “What
is that shit?" referring to the Hendrix music. With them
hovering outside the door there was no time to give this revelation
justice: had she put her husband’s expression on Forrest? If she
had, there was more to her husband than she had thought. This was not
surprising, because it seemed to her that she had not thought of him
at all for about fifty years. And now he was a sanity detective
hunched over with his ear to the bathroom door behind which she, whom
for all she knew he had not thought of for fifty years, lay like a
mad steamed dumpling. Nothing this delightful had arranged itself in
her real life in a long, long time.

She braced for the invasion, wondering if they might
not turn up the volume on NPR to a deafening level to cover the
uncivil sounds of shouldering the door. You could be known to hang
yourself in your carport in this neighborhood with a measure of
dignity, but the breaking down of a door would not do. A woman down
the street, it was alleged, had actually chopped apart the
hollow—core door to her son’s bedroom with an ax to prevent his
masturbating. The boy in question was thereafter regarded with small
gratuitous kindnesses in the neighborhood, while the mother was shied
from in the grocery store. Men in particular kept a cart between
themselves and her. Thinking of all this now, Mrs. Hollingsworth
realized that the invasion was not forthcoming. The bulk of the
bourgeoisie was no longer holding its breath up against the
hollow-core door preventing her rescue. She was hearing her husbands
voice.

From the sound of it, and some muted noises coming
from her daughter, she judged her husband to be sitting where Mr.
Mogul had sat during the dinner party, at the head of the dining
table. Her daughter was not where Mrs. Mogul had been but where
Oswald had been, at a polite and reserved remove down the table.
Oswald, for all his coarseness, and the haircut, had had a line sense
of propriety. “I’d say," her husband was saying, "she
is taking a bath."

“
Dayad,” her daughter said, as condescendingly as
a teenager, “how can you —"

"And I’d say what she has written is, you are
right, not a grocery list. And to your notion that sho has lost her
mind, I’d say that I hope you are right."

One of the muted noises escaped her daughter at this.
"You do?”

"I do."

This was so congruent to Mrs. Hollingsworth’s way
of thinking during all these days of making her list that she thought
perhaps she had lost her mind. It was one thing to have Forrest speak
the way you wanted him to, for you, or her wounded man with his not
need and his want, but quite another to have your husband up and vote
right along with you, without the least prompt. She realized that she
had loaded in the breach of her mouth something to fire at them had
they broken in the door, to protect herself along with the ridiculous
gesture of trying to cover herself. She had been about to shout at
them, “I’m an artist!" With the relief now of what she was
hearing her husband say, and realizing she had had this bullet verily
on her tongue, she started laughing, and she knew they could hear
her. She could imagine her husband gesturing in the air toward her as
she laughed, as if to say to the daughter, "See? She is happy. I
am right.”

But he was saying something much more improbable than
that. “Your mother is tired, honey. I am tired. Or I was. Today I
am not. I am retired today.”

“
What?” the daughter said, in a tone of shock and
wonder that was extremely gratifying. Mrs. Hollingsworth loved her
husband at this moment. She thought it a lie designed to take
pressure off her in the daughters eyes, and to shock the daughter.
But she did not believe her husband to be as malicious with respect
to the children as she had become. And indeed he was not, for it
appeared instantly that he was not lying.

He told the daughter that he was retired and that he
and her mother had enough money to live on and that they were
liquidating everything and hitting the trail. “I don’t know,”
he said, "if we will take taxis or get a dope van."

“
Where are you going?” The tone was now accusing.
How had this smooth pea come out of her wrinkled self`?

“
I don’t know that either. We might actually sit
right here, but we are going somewhere else nonetheless even if we do
not move an inch.” Mrs. Hollingsworth almost heard this as “a
inch,” as if Oswald had said it. Had she put her husband in Oswald
too? There was something aggressive in her husbands voice. It was a
good voice, a voice he used professionally as a judge, and he could
use it well. He could scare a man into straightening up, a jury into
nullifying all notion of nullifying itself. He was cranking it up in
the living room on his own daughter. He was a quietly desperate man
himself, Mrs. Hollingsworth realized. That she might be insane and he
desperate gave her a thrill.