The Third Generation (46 page)

Now the whole house was dark. But he staggered up the front steps and knocked anyway. A man clad in a red flannel robe came to the door. In a thick blurred voice Charles asked for his mother.

The man looked at him sympathetically. “You’re Charles?”

“Yes sir.”

“You were here earlier this evening, weren’t you?”

“Yes sir, I was.”

“Your mother went down to the college to see your brother and hasn’t returned yet.”

“Oh!” He swayed drunkenly as the porch rolled crazily beneath him.

“You can wait for her in her room if you wish,” the man offered.

He thanked him and followed up the stairway, trying to keep from stumbling: The man opened the door to his mother’s room and turned on the light. Charles thanked him again, closed the door and, without removing his overcoat or hat, fell across the bed.

After a moment he turned to make himself more comfortable. His gaze lit on the ash tray on the dressing table. It held the butts of two cork-tipped cigarettes marked with lipstick, and the butt of a homemade cigarette stained brown with spittle. His body went rigid; his neck was caught in the angle of turning, frozen in shock.
His father had been there
….

Abruptly he sprang to his feet. For a moment he stood perfectly still, his head tilted as if listening for a sound. His gaze was unfocused, inturned; he didn’t see anything now. He could feel his heart beating in the sealed silence.
That was why he was drunk
. He looked again at the cigarette butts, studying them as if they contained a clue. Suddenly, uncomprehendingly, his senses were stunned in the manner of a lover’s by discovery of his loved one’s infidelity. Then he was caught up and hurled into a sea of bitter torment. Everything he had tried to forget, to push from his consciousness, to drown in drink and dissolution—the despair over the loss of his home, the breaking up of his family, his parents’ divorce, his failure in school; the open sores of sorrow in his father’s face, the unread blood-and-thunder stories, the vacant stare, the pile of smoldering cigarette butts; the bitter hurt living in his mother’s eyes, the brittle laugh and hennaed hair; and his own remorse for all the things he had done to bring them to such an end—all of it was dug up and brought alive in the picture presented by those three cigarette butts.

“Jesus Christ!” he gasped.

His mind blazed with panic, setting off motion within him as the lighting of a fuse. He was running even before his feet began to move. He ran from the room, hurtled down the stairs. He heard the man shout, “Hey, what’s going on!” He fought the front door, trying to get it open. The demons had broken out and were charging down behind him. He got the door open, leaped across the porch. His foot slipped on the fresh snow and he skidded headlong down the stairs. His hat flew off. He got up and ran bareheaded down the street. Behind him he could hear the man calling, ‘Taylor! Taylor!”

He ran until he was exhausted. But he could not rid his mind of the agonizing picture. He sat on the curb and sobbed, “Goddammit, goddammit,” over and over.
Why couldn’t his father leave her alone; just leave her alone and let everything rest?
The sour flow of acid, brought on by his torment, mixed with the rotgut whiskey, spewed up from his stomach and made a brownish-yellow blot on the white snow. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve, feeling the snow melting in his hair. He looked down the long white street, his thoughts turned inward. “I can’t go through that life again,” he thought.

Then he rose and walked all the way back to Cedar Avenue. His body was giving out but he was unaware of it. He returned to his room. His father was sleeping drunkenly as he had left him, his wide bold nostrils flaring as he snored. His mouth was open and saliva drooled from one corner of his lips.

For an instant hate blazed in Charles with murderous intensity. But his father looked so completely defeated and helpless in his drunken sleep that compassion welled up in his mind, putting out the hatred. He felt an impulse to wipe his father’s mouth, but he didn’t want to awaken him. He turned out the light and stood quietly in the darkness, listening to his father snore. Strangely, he felt his heart listening also, straining itself to hear something, he didn’t know what. It ached from the effort of listening. He held his breath. Some sense warned him of another presence in the room. Quickly he turned on the light again. But there was no one. He stood for a moment longer, wondering what it was, and his emotions were invaded by a sense of death.

“That would be all right,” he heard himself say softly. “That would be fine.”

He turned off the light and tiptoed from the room, down the stairs and from the house.

The street was still and silent beneath its mantle of snow. He walked down toward Cedar Avenue, his footsteps muffled by the snow. For a moment he experienced the queer sensation of moving in a dream.
He’d get a taxi and ride out to the lake and just keep on walking out into the water until he’d left the world behind
. But there were no taxis in sight, and when he came to the first whiskey joint he went inside.

Mrs. Taylor returned home shortly after one o’clock that morning.

Early the previous afternoon Professor Taylor had called to plead for a reconciliation. He’d been offered a teaching post in a small southern college, and he proposed that they remarry and begin over.

“They’ll give me a house and we can have Charles with us.”

The thought of having Charles again almost tempted her to accept. But deep inside herself she could never forgive him for having let her go.

So she refused. “After what you and your family have done to me I wouldn’t live with you again if you were the last man on earth. Never! Never!” Her voice was pitched in the old harsh tone she had always assumed when addressing him.

But afterwards she was beset with doubts and uncertainties. Was she denying her son his last chance for a normal life because she couldn’t abide his father? She didn’t know. She was tired—so tired. And living alone made decisions so difficult to reach, so hard to defend; she was becoming afraid to trust her judgment any longer.

It had been different when she’d had her husband and her sons. Even when they’d opposed her, the fact of them belonging to her and her belonging to them gave her support. And now there was only herself in her lonely room.

She felt an overwhelming need to talk to someone who loved her, someone who needed her, if just for a moment. From that love and need she would draw her strength.

Her heart thought first of Charles. She knew how much he needed her; how much he loved her. But her mind rejected him. She knew that he was afraid to admit his need or any longer confess his love for her, that he was afraid of committing himself again to a way of life which had disappointed him in the past. Sometimes she had the feeling that since his release from jail and parole to his father instead of herself he was deliberately trying to destroy himself. She had nothing to go on, but at moments her heart was so filled with foreboding she could see him lying dead and neglected in some den of iniquity. There were times when she couldn’t bear to think of him. It was that which made her decision so hard to bear.

So she went down to the college to see William. She did not mention his father’s proposal. She just sat and talked to him about his studies and himself. He took her out to dinner and was very cheerful. He was extremely well liked on the campus, and on every hand the students and professors came forward to meet his mother. She was immensely cheered by her visit.

On the train returning to the city she felt a new growth of hope. She’d try to get Charles into the college. Perhaps William could steady him. Or perhaps she’d get William to talk to him first. The more she thought about it the more feasible it seemed, and by the time she let herself into her house she had convinced herself of its certainty. She felt suddenly happy for the first time in years. An old tune from her childhood came back to mind and she was humming it softly as she mounted the stairs.

Hearing her footsteps, her landlord came from his room and told her of Charles’s visit. “I let him into your room. I don’t know what happened, but all of a sudden he jumped up and ran out of the house.”

Her blood congealed, frozen by a premonition of disaster. “Was he ill?” Her voice was so thin from fear it was barely audible.

“He didn’t seem so. But he was very drunk.”

Now the whole sea of worry washed back over her and she felt the room tilt. She groped for a chair and sat down. Her landlord brought her a glass of water.

“Do you want Mattie to help you to bed?”

“No, thank you, I’m all right now.”

When she had recovered she telephoned for a taxi and went immediately to his father’s room.

Professor Taylor awakened, groggy and uncomprehending. “I haven’t seen him all day. Where has he gone?”

“But doesn’t he work with you in the mornings?”

He was muddled and defensive. “Now don’t start hounding the boy again. You don’t want to make a home for him, so let him alone. He’s getting along all right.”

Her face took the old bitter cast. “God is going to punish you, Mr. Taylor, as sure as you’re alive,” she said harshly. “You just watch what I tell you. You’re going to burn in hell for what you’re doing to your son.”

“The boy’s all right,” he muttered angrily, feeling for his paper sack of cigarettes.

She left the room and walked down to Cedar Avenue in search of someone who knew where Charles could be found. But at that late hour the stores were closed and the houses dark and the street deserted of humanity. Snow sifted soundlessly on the broken pavement and her foreboding grew in the dead silence. She was assailed by the thought that he could be dead in one of those dark houses and she wouldn’t know. Then she saw a drunken couple stagger from a darkened areaway.

She approached them hesitantly. “Pardon me, do you know a young man named Charles Taylor?”

The man eyed her with greed and cunning, thinking she was white. “Now does I know Charles Taylor?” he began, instinctively clowning. “It seems as if I knows a boy named Charles. Is he a big boy or a medium-sized boy or is he a liddle boy?”

The woman snatched his arm, red-rimmed eyes narrowing with animosity. “Come on an’ leave that white trash be. You know you doan know nobody by that name.”

“But he’s my son,” Mrs. Taylor pleaded.

The woman softened and took pity on her. “Then try that whiskey joint back there where we just come from. They’s a lot of young men in there an’ one of them might be yo’ boy. Just go round to the back there an’ knock at the door.”

Mrs. Taylor thanked her and went up the dark walk between two buildings. She screwed up her courage and knocked at the door. A panel opened and two muddy eyes raked her suspiciously.

“Pardon me, I’m looking for my son—” she began.

The panel closed abruptly in her face. She heard a voice behind it saying, “Some white whore say she lookin’ for her son.

The brutal inhumanity of the statement terrified her. Suddenly she was afraid for her safety. She felt her body trembling as she hurried back to the street. Now her foreboding grew out of control, sapping her strength. She felt lost, without friends or help, no way to turn, no one to turn to; and every fiber of her being felt exhausted. The dark dismal stretch of Cedar Avenue gave the impression of another world. For an instant she had the impression of reliving some horrible nightmare. She had to have help.

So she returned to the man who’d been her husband and was the father of her children. She found him still awake, smoking his vile-smelling cigarette and staring at the ceiling. A butt smoldered in the saucer on the stand beside the bed. She made him get up and dress. His face was lined and haggard, creased with sleep wrinkles, his chin bristled with dirty gray whiskers; his eyes were runny and redlaced; his kinky hair matted in a peak. But he was Charles’s father and he had to help her find him. He dressed slowly, as if in a daze, his hands fumbling with the buttons.

Her own face was white from fear and fatigue, and in the bright overhead light the rouge stood out like a mask, and her dyed red hair resembled a wig. Her eyes had dulled from the excessive strain and had receded into her head.

They resembled derelicts. But for a brief moment their appearance meant nothing. They looked into one another’s eyes, all the regret and pity welling from their tortured souls, their twenty-six years of marriage come to this, knowing in that instant that neither could go it alone. For the first time in more than twelve years she wanted him to take her in his arms. But after her rejection of the previous afternoon, he could not try again. She couldn’t make a move to let him know she wanted him. The moment passed. He turned his eyes away. She was blinded by tears.

“We must hurry,” she said in the harsh voice she’d always had for him.

He turned and opened the door without speaking. They made an odd couple trudging through the snowdrifts on Cedar Avenue, the haggard white-faced woman with dark-circled eyes and the shabby little black man with his cringing walk. There was a quality of prayer about the woman, etchings of defeat in the man. The few drunks and late prostitutes whom they approached along the street eyed them curiously. Finally a taxi driver told them to try Dave’s in the Alley.

Charles was lying across the bed in his shirt sleeves and stocking feet. He had the feeling of having been there for a long time, and of awakening suddenly from a strange dream which he could not remember. Something had drawn his attention. He raised his head and looked into the other room, trying to focus his vision. His mind was in a state of semi-stupor and his sense of perception dulled almost to blankness.

As if seen through a dense gray fog he made out the blurred figures of two people in the outside doorway, barred by Dave’s bulk from entering.

“You vile hoodlum, I know he’s here and I’m going to have you arrested for selling whiskey to a minor,” he heard a woman’s voice and when he recognized it as his mother’s, the first sense of shock penetrated his consciousness.

He heard Dave’s bullying voice reply, “Goddammit, don’t argue with me, lady,” and then Veeny say fearfully, “Just close the door.”