“Congratulations, Crossie!” he called. “I won’t come in. I’m all over ink and dust, too grimy to meet a baby.”
He wouldn’t enter the room, explained my mother, with that jealous and delicate sense of pride in her betters which was the mark of her own class—which she carried with her to America, and was lost with there—he wouldn’t enter the room because, although it would have been proper enough with a lady of his own sort, he knew that it would embarrass my mother.
“I’m sending you up some wine,” he called. “You are to drink it, as much as you can. For you know, we shall be toasting the two of you, downstairs.”
I can hear my mother saying that, her hand arrested over the old sewing machine in Fulham, or poking with contempt at the cornbread she learned to make over here. We
shall be toasting the two of you downstairs.
The wine came, a cobwebby bottle, and she sipped it. Downstairs, there was music. Outside the window, rackety sounds and voices slipped by the night long, all the crowd-music of that night of peace, a sudden maying in November of all the young and old linking arms across the tennis courts and gardens of Golder’s Green. Wrapped in the red-warmth of that wonderful household, she slept. And the next morning, her milk came in.
U
NTIL MY TENTH YEAR,
then, I was in and out of that house. Do you know how it is when you are in pursuit of a woman, have reached her perhaps, but sense that she is not quite as concerned with you, how all the facts about her—whom she sees, where she is to be found at certain hours of the day—have for you a swollen intentness, how you add to and subtract from the doubled image you have of her, with the nervous madness of research? For all the years that I was intermittently in that house—the dressmaker’s boy, holder of pins in boudoirs, maker of fourth or fifth at nursery games, fed with casual sweetness at the family table—for all those years I was in love; I was in love that way. I did not know this then of course, nor would the Goodmans ever have suspected how I felt about them, for their house was always full of accessory benevolences like me. And people like them, the “outgoing” ones, who spend themselves like gold motes on the air, never realize that what they dispense as generalized kindness, the singlehearted suck up as love. Silent-footed child that I was, as a boy like me had to be taught to be, on the days when I went there, claw-fingers clutching my mother’s the long way out on the Underground, thinking of the second breakfast I would get and of all the coming hours of something more than food, on those days I was like a statue warmed down from its niche into living for a day, and at night, when I was returned to my corner, and until the next time, a fantasy of life remained behind my brow.
So then, I remember everything about that house. Everything. Not only its mold and feel and smell, that any child might keep, but floor by floor, leaf by leaf, the exact cinquefoil of its being. I can stand in its geography and print my track upon it, as a rabbit must sometimes stand, poised, in the lost warren he cannot hope to find again.
And, lilliputian again, I can remember the giants above. Family lore was dropped in that kitchen, glimpsed through the muddle of the cook’s mind like the ring at the bottom of the Christmas custard; occasionally the older children, though usually distant, played at toss in front of me with an ornate secret or family fable. I hid it all away, the way Lady Rachel hid, in a Battersea box, under some bastings I took up to her one afternoon, the cachets she sometimes took when alone. And the thousands of conversations intoned, back and forth, back and forth above my head—I remember those—a Gregorian chant whose pattern appears slowly now down the apse of years, the lingua franca of giants, that now, giant myself, I understand. I can hear Sir Joseph’s voice, the day he spoke to her about the cachets. I can see the hairs on Sir Joseph’s hand.
And it was the old lady, Mrs. Goodman, who first made of me a confidant. Looking back, I see now that her eccentricity was really only a powerful refusal to have truck with the superficial, her incantatory way of talking only that ancestral harking back of the elders, which we reject to our loss. She was one of those interior monologuists who are driven by a lifelong need to see the formal design of their own lives, to fix its rubric firmly among the chapters of the world, and she ruminated best in the presence of a listener
manqué
—a servant, a stranger, or a child. Since she was also one of those blessed of the earth whose own family is the hub of their sky, it was of the Goodmans that, incessantly, I learned. She ranged her life, theirs, with the passion of a critic, and like the best of these, with a wildness of phrase and a soundness of judgment that gave me something of the method too. Listening, I knew for the first time what it was to make of oneself that gray, faceless well into which another does not dip, but pours. Not for years did I know that the services of the confidant, though apparently selfless, are never so. But it was not her fault, nor yet perhaps mine, that it was to be others’ lives I ranged.
For, at ten, I was torn away. I say “torn” with reason, thinking of the ghost strength that underlies dead idiom. For, of our trek to America, the ship to Montreal, the long journey south to the town of Tuscana, even my first months in that wizened place (and even there, I gather, no one ever realized it of me), I know only by hearsay. I learned later, of course, that the Goodmans had closed the house in Golder’s Green, following to Japan, with all their own bags and baggage and singsong, Sir Joseph, who held a government post there for some years. They were not the kind to leave dependents behind them like deserted cats, but my mother would never have let them know the extent of her dependence on them. And no one, not even I, knew mine. After some months, heeding the pleas of her only sister—younger than she, ailing, and married to a shrewd Birmingham millhand who had emigrated to a foreman’s job in the States—she accepted the passage money they sent her, and we sailed.
Later, she always used to say that it was for me she had emigrated, but she never said why. Perhaps she could not phrase it, or would not, for hers were not the usual reasons for going to that new world for which she had a certain scorn even before she saw it; indeed, she was never to trust a country where a man, even a son, could rise so soon. I think she left England because I had already begun to look like my father. She was a plain woman who, against her own awareness of it, had let herself shine briefly in the sunny whim of a man whose handsome dash she could never have felt herself to have deserved; other women she could have borne, and probably had, but the manner of his death had disgraced her in the one milieu in which she took pride. And everyone had begun to say that I looked like him, like the specious face in the wedding picture I never saw until months after her death—one of those Burne-Jones faces the Irish produce now and then, with a hint of the spoiled angel in its sentimental modeling, in the blank, neoclassic eye. Unwillingly, that day, I marked the likeness too.
But of all that interim, of a period that must have been about four months, I remember nothing. It is the only part of my life I do not remember. Later there was no mention of illness; apparently through all that time I ate, responded in the ordinary way. When I was grown, and on a navy cruiser for the first conscious sea voyage of my life, I lay awake in my bunk all the first night out, straining for some kinetic memory of how it felt to be at sea. But none came. There is the day at Golder’s Green that must have been the last day; there is the morning I awoke to myself, sitting before a breakfast bowl, in the tallow-soft heat of the house in Tuscana. There is nothing in between.
Sitting now, at the same time within the sound tape and outside it, I wake again that morning. Opposite me, someone has just said
Goodman.
I see the bowl, my hand stopped on the spoon, objects seen through a curtain of drizzle that a sudden wind parts clear. I look up into a long face with the cramp of illness on it, a face that I do not know. She speaks again, my aunt, in her thin, life-grudging voice, a voice I heard for the first time a moment ago.
Postman says a foreign package you’ve to go for yourself
,
Dora. Has to be opened at the mails by law
,
for fear of plants and beetles from out there. Likely from the Goodmans
,
eh?
Very likely.
My mother’s voice is muffled, heard as if from behind a door, that voice, or from under the sheets in the morning, when the dream-stuff is still cotton in the ears. My eyes slide sideways, as a horse’s must feel when the blinders come off. She is there, mantelpiece figure one does not often notice but would instantly miss, on her lap the familiar flood of sewing, but the air around her has a whitish prickle to it, like the sudden, flapped blankness on a home-screen cinema. Then, as I turn, the room is normal. Only the faintest drizzle remains, always settling but unseen; until the day of the hearing nine years from then it never quite left me; it is the color of Tuscana.
The women go on talking, and I hear them, my aunt rummaging on as the chairbound do, my mother’s short replies.
A fine country, says my aunt, to set itself above other nations’ insects. Cockchafers here like bustards, Dora, ants like grains of sand. And at night, always the moths nosing the windows, even a frost does not stop them.
Frost. Are there frosts here?
says my mother.
Silk in the package maybe, Dora; will it be that sleazy Jap stuff to be found here in the stores?
Not if it’s from
them, says my mother.
I listen, not knowing quite where I am, but only that I am, and knowing this because of an echo like a comfit just swallowed, a warmth in the ear, an echo on the tongue. Then my mother’s hand on my shoulders:
Come along now
,
we’ll fetch the parcel from Goodmans
, and I know what the comfit is.
I get up from the table and put my hand in hers. “Shall we be going on the Underground?” I said.
Everything in my life-to-be there is in that first walk in Tuscana. I traverse it again, inclining my head powerlessly to the right, to the left, from my useless rajah-seat in recall. We walked through the rows of company houses, a time-dirtied laundry line of houses hung once with Northern neatness and never again attended. We passed the twin-stacked mill where my uncle worked, and went along what I took to be the High street, a street too unfinished ever to know that it was one. Only the Negroes, their faces a black surprise to me, held to some invisible meridian along its length, and as they passed us, stepped aside. Down to the left was the funeral parlor from which my aunt would be buried a few years hence, across from it the church where my uncle, clinging practicably to morning tea and a house kempt as it would be “at home,” was to marry my mother. I passed a trio of buildings, unconscious of the unity they would one day have for me—the courthouse, the general store of Semple, the company factor, and the schoolhouse where I would go that first fall.
“If there were only a little east in the wind!” said my mother faintly. “Never thought to hear myself say that!” she added quickly, but I was already back in the bus that wound through Fulham, hearing the passengers reassure one another, with the greenish valor of the permanently cold, that the east was out of the wind. Glancing down, I saw that my knees looked unfamiliar, not red and chapped as I remembered them, and my hands too. The air sickened against my face, pluming in my nostrils like moths. A slack drugstore scent, like cheap vanillin, followed us into the post office from outside. It was the shabby-sweet odor of the South that already I was smelling, the air of a people who had to put too much sugar on their lives.
The man at the desk chatted, while we opened our parcel. I could not understand him at first, although I knew that he was joking. There were several lazy flies on his counter, and one of them lit on the pink-and-bronze kimono my mother lifted from the box.
“Nu’n but g’dole ’Mer’can bug,” he said.
My mother said nothing, folding the kimono into the box, on top of the black brocaded slippers that were for me.
As we left, he nodded and grinned. “Hurry back!” he said.
Outside the door, I asked whether that meant we were to return soon for another parcel.
My mother shook her head. “It’s what they say here when they mean ‘good-by.’”
In our room that night, I put the slippers away. They were beautiful, but they were not what the others had had. They were not from an uncle in Gibraltar. Outside the window, from some unknown point in the hemisphere of night, a late train hooted a long sound. I did not know yet that it had a name—“the to-from Memphis train,” but I knew by now that it was an American sound. As I shut the drawer, it called once more. “Hurry back!” it said. “Hurry back.”
W
HENEVER I THINK OF
Johnny Fortuna, who now, wherever he is, is a man older than myself, I see him only as he was that first autumn I knew him—a boy of fifteen, lying on his stomach in the leaves, talking into the afternoon distance. We always see the lost companions of our youth in some such way; they remain fixed for us against the scrubby haunts of our adolescence the way Icarus, in his own arabesque, remains fixed against history—at once exalted and drowned.
At the school, whose poor resources were never enough for me, where almost at once I became too enviably the best pupil, Johnny was the worst; after a while, our common exclusion drew us together. He was not dull, only dulled, and I found him because I was too. At home, except for my uncle’s occasional outside evening drinking, performed as a workman’s due, without geniality or social compromise, our household, mistrusting the easy fondle of the town, never became part of it; my mother gardened suspiciously among alien flowers; at six we had an immutable tea; the windows, disciplining the weather, remained closed to the heat, open to the chill. Returning “home,” to England, was never mentioned; feverishly raising the flag of our isolation, we
were
at home.