The Third Generation (37 page)

All the next day he kept to his bed. The following morning the postman brought a notice for him to report to the dean’s office. The dean was a shy, crippled man with a thatch of graying hair. His clear blue eyes, always so warm with sympathy, were immeasurably saddened.

“Mr. Taylor, I have here a report on your misbehavior sent in by one of the students.”

He read aloud the letter recounting the episode with Rose, which Edith Rand had sent to him. “I have not had this investigated.”

“You don’t need to, sir. It’s true.”

“I had so assumed.” He folded his hands, studying Charles’s expression. “You have given me the necessity of making a very difficult decision.”

“I’m sorry, sir.”

“Do you feel that your failure in adjusting to the academic and disciplinary requirement of this university is due, in part, to your ill health?”

“I—” He groped for the words to explain it. “I suppose I don’t fit.”

“Because of your injury?”

“I guess that has something to do with it.”

“If I permit you to withdraw for the remainder of the term, do you believe your health will be sufficiently improved by fall to enable you to make good?”

“Yes, sir, I do.” What else could he say, he thought.

For a time the dean fiddled with the letter opener on his desk, then came to his decision. “I shall permit you to withdraw because of ill health and failing grades.” It was an unprecedented clemency.

Charles stood up and when the dean extended his hand and said, “Good-bye and good luck, Mr. Taylor,” the warm tone of sympathy and the dry, firm, encouraging clasp tore him apart.

“Good-bye, sir,” he choked. ‘Thank you. Thank you.”

For a long time he stood on the stone steps of University Hall, looking across the snow-covered oval. He was saying good-bye again, this time to many things, to all of his mother’s hopes and prayers, to so many of his own golden dreams, to the kind of future he’d been brought up to expect, and to a kind of life, which, on the whole, had been the happiest he’d ever known. But at the time he didn’t realize it. He felt trapped again, pushed into something against his will.
Why hadn’t the dean let him go? Why did they keep pushing him? His mother had pushed him all his life and now, goddammit, she’d start pushing him again. Why hadn’t the dean let him go? Then, goddammit, she couldn’t push him. She wouldn’t have anything to push him toward and he’d be done once and for all
…

Sudden tears blotted out the sight.

He packed early while most of the students were in class and spent the remainder of the day and night in hiding with Rose. He couldn’t face the students. And some strange compulsion had sent him back to the source of his initial hurt. He didn’t know what he expected to get from her.

The next morning he was on the train going home. He imagined his mother’s shocked expression, her face folding into deep, harsh lines of hurt and bitter disappointment. A flash of hatred burnt through his mind, followed by despair.

What’s wrong with me? he thought. Why must I always be some kind of disappointment to everyone?

Came arapping and atapping and atapping and atapping
…The strange words kept time with the clacking of the wheels…He looked out the window. A farm sped by, a cow standing disconsolately in the dreary sweep of snow.

“Gone!” he said involuntarily. “It’s gone!”

24

C
HARLES WAS SICK AND
confined to bed for two months after his return home. Complications had developed from his gonorrhea and his back ached constantly. He had to engage a private doctor and he was always nervous and on edge for fear the Industrial Commission doctors would discover his disease. He was afraid they might stop his compensation.

It was hard to keep it from his mother. She wondered why he needed so many doctors. Torn between concern for his health and anxiety over his state of mind, she couldn’t keep away from him. He lived in torture for fear of her discovering his disease. He hated for her to come into the room. She wanted to nurse him. He had to invent all sorts of reasons to keep her from touching him. They fought each other in bitter silence, the spoken words that passed between them seldom conveying their true emotions. During the day when everyone was out, or at night when they were asleep, he’d slip into the bathroom and treat himself. Once she almost caught him.

“What’s the matter, son? Does your back ache? Why don’t you let Mother rub it?”

“Let me alone!” he shouted, wishing she was dead.

A black pall hung over him which none of them could pierce. William couldn’t gain his confidence. They slept in separate rooms and were almost strangers. Now when they met they treated each other with that delicate diffidence of persons who’ve been close but have lost contact. William kept away.

No one had told his mother about his episode with the prostitute. But she knew there’d been something more than what was said. She couldn’t conceive of him failing in his studies; he was too brilliant, she thought. He’d done something bad, she knew. Ever since his accident she’d lived in constant apprehension that he’d do something to destroy himself completely. She’d been relieved when he finally went to college. Now she was more apprehensive than before.

For a time, following his enrollment in college, his father had taken new ambition too. He’d tried for a civil service job. But the years away from teaching, without reading, unthinking because thought hurt, had taken their toll of him. He’d deliberately dulled his memory. Now he found he couldn’t draw upon it anymore. As a consequence he didn’t make an eligible grade. It hurt him more than if he hadn’t tried. When winter came on, his carpentry work had fallen off. He had taken a job as a laborer. That, too, added to Mrs. Taylor’s anxieties.

Now William was his mother’s only consolation. He’d graduated from high school that January and had received a gold medal from the school board in honor of his high scholastic record. There had been a glowing tribute in the press. He had many nice friends; everyone loved him. She often wondered at the fate that had taken his sight and yet left him so much more ambitious and nobler than his brother. She couldn’t conceive of where Charles would end. He acted so ugly. Disaster seemed to hang above him like a Damoclean sword. At times she felt he’d be better off if he were dead.

Only his father sympathized with him. Professor Taylor sensed his son’s problem of adjustment, not only to every new phase of his own life, but to every change in theirs, to the over-all uncertainty in which all of them were caught. He knew that the various facets of metropolitan life combined with the strangeness of nonsegregated institutions had put him under a strain. He felt that Charles would have been better off had they remained in the South, or even if he’d been enrolled in a southern college.

“Let the boy alone,” he’d say when Mrs. Taylor complained about Charles’s attitude. “Let him alone; you’re killing him.”

“I’d rather see him dead than ending up in the penitentiary or on the gallows,” she’d reply.

The sound of their bickering went on night after night, her harsh, nagging voice, his whining rebuttal. Charles would close his door but the voices leaked in. He tried to close his mind, but suddenly he’d hear them shouting at each other, as if it were a dream, a nightmare. He’d struggle to awaken and discover he’d been awake all along.

One night he dreamed that his mother had slipped from a high precipice and was hanging perilously by one hand.

He was standing nearby and one part of himself fought furiously to save her, but his body was immobilized. He couldn’t will himself to move. He could only stand there, watching in utter horror, while she slowly lost her grip. The sound of her screams rang in his ears, awakening him. He felt a sharp, burning pain in the region of his disease and discovered he’d had a sexual discharge. Immediately, before he had even cleaned himself, he tried desperately to tear the memory from his mind. He felt utterly debased; he wanted to die. In the bathroom he saw his father’s razor and thought of slashing his wrists. Then he saw the sleeping potions his mother often took. He swallowed six and went to sleep. It was late the next day when he awakened. But all the devastating details of the dream were still with him. He felt defiled, impure. He couldn’t look his mother in the face.

It was then that strange demons began pursuing him. He never saw them, but he always felt them just behind, closing in on him. At the slightest sound he’d wheel about, his face gripped in the horror of death. He tried to escape in study, suddenly determined to re-enter the university that fall. But he got a queer, unnatural reaction from his textbooks. Sight of the printed text made him physically sick; he wanted to vomit. He couldn’t force himself to read.

One night he went into his brother’s room. “Will, I think I’m going crazy,” he said.

William was startled. “What’s the matter, Chuck? What happened?”

He told of his reaction to his textbooks.

William was puzzled. “You mean you actually feel nauseated?”

“That’s it. That’s just how I feel—nauseated.”

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” William said. “It’s just nerve tension. I used to feel that way when I was in the hospital. Why don’t you just relax, let the studies go. Why don’t you just rest, Chuck.”

He tried but he couldn’t. For days he remained in complete despair. William tried to comfort him, but after the first confession he could never talk of it again.

One day his doctor said that he was cured. He dressed immediately after the doctor’s visit and left the house, intending to spend the night with Marge. It was a warm May day. The last of winter’s accumulation of soot-laden snow was thawing and the thick black slime running in the gutters affected him strangely. He felt a strong desire to wade in it and get his clean white shoes filthy. He could barely restrain himself.

At the bank, on sudden impulse, he drew out three hundred dollars. He wanted to impress Marge with being rich and prosperous. But Billie’s house reminded him of the fiasco at George’s, the living rooms were quite similar, and he was struck by Marge’s resemblance to Rose. All the bitter hurt came back. Suddenly he felt nauseated again. He left abruptly, walking rapidly along the cheap slum street, avoiding the eyes of the whores in the windows. In his mind he was running. He went out Cedar Avenue, but everything he saw reminded him of something he wanted to forget—couples playing tennis on the courts behind the Y, the corner where he’d wrecked his Aunt Bee’s car. When he approached the Robinsons’ house he crossed the street and looked the other way. The three blocks between 97th and 100th Streets, known as “The Avenue,” a congested area of vice and destitution, was a city paradox. Even though it was early afternoon of a working day, crowds of black and yellow people drifted up and down the street, shouting and laughing and cursing, threading in and out the whiskey joints, the gambling clubs, the whorehouses, as if it were a summer Saturday. Sleek fat pimps and hustlers sat in their parked cars, talking about their money, while starved, diseased flotsam shuffled past, living on a prayer.

Charles had seldom lingered in the vicinity. But now it intruded on his consciousness. A group of mothers with their babies chatted in the sun. A car roared down the street, screamed to a sudden stop. Several youths his age were pitching quarters on the sidewalk. All the different tones of laughter fingered on his mind. A sudden wave of loneliness swept over him. He turned into a pool hall to seek companionship.

“Give me change for a twenty,” he said to the rack boy.

All the hustlers and hangers-on saw his roll of money. Suddenly he found himself hemmed in.

“Play yuh a game of rotation, kid?”

“Don’t you play that guy, he’s slick.”

“The kid don’t gamble. You don’t gamble, do you, kid?”

He was rescued by a big light-complexioned man with curly hair who had once been his barber. “Let that kid alone; he’s a friend of mine. Whatya say, Chuck, long time, no see.”

“Hello, Dave.”

“Wanna buy a car?”

“I hadn’t thought about it.”

“Come on.” Dave took him outside and showed him a big sporty-looking touring car parked at the curb. The top was down and it had red leather seats. “I’ll take you for a ride.”

They drove out into the country and Dave increased the speed. “Listen.” He kicked a pedal on the floor. Motor roar spilled out behind like thunder from a speeding plane, the sound enveloping them whenever they passed underneath a tree. “It’s got a voice, eh?” he shouted over the roar. “A four-by-seven cutout.”

Charles felt as if they were hurtling through space. His blood raced down the black road with the speeding car. “Let me drive,” he shouted.

They stopped and exchanged seats. He gripped the wheel and pressed down on the accelerator. The big car leapt forward in an open-throated roar, throwing him back against the seat, and the road came up over the hood like a tidal wave. Nothing in all his, life had equalled that sensation. He leaned forward into the onrushing road, his mind sealed shut in a feeling of invincible power, the whole past dropping away behind him, cut off; for the moment every thought he’d ever had was blotted out by the bright blue beautiful unknown sensation ahead, all else gone in his consuming sense of might. He knew then that with that car he could outspeed all his fears and trepidations, his shames and humiliations, the gnawing self-consciousness imposed by his injury, the terrible depression that had settled on his thoughts. With that car he could defy everyone. He could take that goddamned car and drive off the edge of the world. And later, after they’d gotten back to town and he was driving slowly down Cedar Avenue, looking at the passing girls, he knew somehow, without actually thinking it, he could also rescue damsels in distress.

He bought the car from Dave, paying down two hundred and fifty dollars and having the balance financed for monthly payments. He had to give his age as twenty-one to sign the contract.

Owning a car gave him a feeling of importance. His mother noticed the change in him immediately. But she didn’t know he’d bought a car. He never took it home. He knew she’d disapprove and he was afraid she might, in some way, force Dave to take it back. So he always parked it on the street beyond the high school and walked home.