And Johnny’s household, one of two Polish caravanserais near the watchman’s shed back of the main-line signal, was one of those that exist for a town to despise. Like me, he had only a mother, but he and his brood of younger brothers and sisters had had more than one father. Mrs. Fortuna was visited at night, and stared down on the street in the daytime, by those men whose morality kept them from the colored quarter; if she took any revenge upon them it was in that her children, no matter how indiscriminately fathered, all had the blond bulletheads and blue eyes of Poles, as if she too kept a national pride. At night, concertina music rose late from her chimney stack, mingled, in the pulsing red air of the signal light, with the smell of mash.
Semple was one of her regular visitors—I never knew him. I repeat it—I never knew him there, or in his store, where we happened not to trade, or in any of the chance walks of the town. There were seven thousand people in the town, and I had the matchless invisibility of my age. I saw him, of course, from time to time, as one does in a place like that, and he may have known of me as my uncle’s nephew, and glancingly passed me by. Once, in the street crowd outside my aunt’s funeral, we brushed, almost the closest we ever came to one another, but I never knew him. This is the point, the one that unhinges truth as people normally know it, the point I must make clear. Until the day of the hearing, I had never been made known to him; our hands had never greeted; we had never spoken; his eyes had never met mine. And now his name is a tremble to me forever. He is that mystery, the accidental man whom we unaccidentally wrong. For, the people to whom we have been something in love or in hate, whom we have discarded or been discarded by—these belong to the libretto; we can tinkle their themes over, all referent tunes. But the accidental man, who holds no meaning, holds all; his theme will never be finished, and will abide to the end. For of course I “knew” Semple—as the rememberer knows. I knew him from “around,” from the air, and from Johnny. I knew him from behind.
He was a compact man, just over short, with thick, prematurely white hair, and the look of extra energy this often gives a middle-aged man. A cut above those who worked at the mill, he wore duck trousers most of the year, and these, sharply laundered below the knee but curiously rumpled and used in the region of his sex, gave the impression, as he lounged in the chair in front of his store, that his central energy came from there. He was held to be mean about money, but since his livelihood depended on how he issued credit, this may have been the verdict of those—most of the town, this would be—who could not manage their own. Johnny worked for him part-time in the store, and once, long before I was old enough to understand it, I heard it sniggered that this was the only way Semple ever paid Mrs. Fortuna. Johnny seemed to bear him no more grudge than any boy does the boss because the latter is one.
Of his own home Johnny hardly ever spoke, but I took this for granted, for neither did I of mine. By an instinctive, unphrased agreement we never went to each other’s homes, never showed our friendship to the town. On certain afternoons, when my mother supposed me at the library, I did go there for a while—not to a real library, for the town had none, but to the old Victorian house, with its oddments of books, that the state maintained half as a memorial to the one notable woman whose birthplace Tuscana had been, half as an annuity for the curator, Miss Pridden, the dead woman’s old niece. Miss Pridden liked me, for the accent I had retained, no doubt, that echoed a faded sojourn of her youth, for the soft way I knew how to move among the precious objects she tended and to listen to her account of them, for the fact that I came at all. It was she who later tried to maneuver for me a scholarship to a college in the North. But on those days when I knew Johnny got off early, while she prosed over the books or fumbled with the tea in the pantry, I often managed my exit and ran down toward Semple’s store. Often when Johnny came out and saw me waiting, he barely nodded and moved ahead of me, kicking stones along the path we both knew we would take, and until we entered the woods, I kept my distance, for it seemed only natural to me that he should be ashamed of having no other companion than a boy, smart as he thought me, who was so much younger than he.
So then, as far as ever appeared, no one ever knew of our intimacy. In the time to come, after the hearing where, with Johnny long gone, I testified against Semple and the others, I had a shock of fear that certainly someone would come forward to bring out the old connection between Johnny and me, to say, “His testimony has no standing in law. He was never there. He is only using what belonged to a boy named Johnny Fortuna.” But no one did. I thought then, with the first access of my power, that I must be unique, the only one ever to do what I had done. Experience tells me now how unlikely it is that this should be so. You ordinary people, yes; you are our constant dupes, because you cannot imagine, you will not believe what the more meditative can do with the reservoirs of recall. Wisdom tells me now that there may well have been at least one other like me in Tuscana, whose memory could skulk his world like mine, who recognized what I had done—who knew. He did not come forward then, perhaps because he did not choose to or had other fish to fry. But he may have been there. Perhaps someday he will come from behind—and enter upon me.
But now, when I return to those afternoons I waited for Johnny in the alley behind Semple’s store, when, after tossing a crumb to the gamecock Semple had penned there, we made our way by back paths to the rise above the town, and lay there in the ground myrtle, peeling switches, chewing sourgrass, Johnny always the talker, I the listener—I think first of what a tender balance Johnny kept on all the things he did not tell me. For he, who had been born with the caul of the town’s underside around him, who should have known of the place only what was hawked into the spittoon and raucoused after hours, never spoke to me of the town that way at all. What he used me for was as the repository of his innocence, that pitiable innocence which he could lay nowhere else. And because I was this, for a long time he kept my innocence too.
What Johnny talked about was—normality as he saw it, or dreamed it to be. For years, as paper boy and delivery boy, he had had backdoor glimpses of most of the town, and certain of these he collected the way other boys gathered the stamps that meant the aromatic distances which might someday be achieved. As he leaned over the brink of the town, the curl of smoke from a chimney spoke to him of the baking day of the woman there, the trim lines of wash that ringed his favorite houses brought forth a litany of the routines that went on inside—the churchgoing, the bedtime stories for kids like his brothers and sisters, the evening games—and as the fathers came out to ply the hose on these chosen yards, he could tell of the lodges they belonged to, the bright purchases they were making by thrift or installment, even the minor affiliations of the children who leagued their lawns. He was like a man studying the etiquette of banquet silver, who himself owned but a knife and a spoon.
There was one family by the name of Nellis that had once invited him in to dinner, and of this, and of a habit of theirs, he spoke often. “’Fore dinner they say grace there, you know what grace is? Only they don’t
say
nothin’, just join hands around the table.”
We could see that house from where we lay, and each evening, as its orange lamp popped out on the dusk, he marked it, sometimes mentioning the grace, or another of their ways, sometimes not. “Nellis’s light,” he would always say, though, and this was always the signal for us to go down. On the way down, once or twice in the beginning, he offered a halting excuse for why he talked so, the way a lover sometimes flaunts a practical reason for his pursuit of what others might think an inutile love. He was going into business, he said, he was going to have an automobile agency, and in business one had to know about people, how they really were.
And once, in the beginning too, when, as we descended, the light flared on in a house at the edge of niggertown, and I asked him, already half knowing, what the boys meant when they slanged the two women who lived there, he stopped on the path and hulked over me, eyes cracked close, his face suddenly wedge-shaped and Slav.
“How come you ask me that?” he said. “How come you ask
me
?”
“No reason, Johnny,” I said, retreating, “no reason,” and he relaxed then, thinking, as I did then, that there was not. I know now that if there is an original sin in us, it is that intuitive mischief which drives us to ask the humpbacked to discourse on humps. But that time I was learning something else—to swallow the cud of myself. I learned that day the sad second lesson of the confidant—that he may remain only so long as he collaborates in the illusion that he is not there. After that, even on the day when Johnny, breaking his illusion for my sake, let me in on his real world and told me about Semple, I held still and listened only. It was what one had to do in order to be able to stay. And somewhere along in there, I suppose, in those afternoons with Johnny, I lost forever, if I had ever had it, what might have been my own power to confide. Like those savages who bury the ashes of their own fires, hide their combings and nail parings against the magic wreakings of the possible finder, I came too to sense the sovereignty of the finder, and to resolve that no one should ever have a paring of me. Gradually I became critic enough to know that Johnny’s vision of Tuscana rested like a bubble above the real one, but I never said anything. Time after time, I lay there passive on the hillside and let him spread his version of the town before us, golden as a Breughel, all its simple, wheaten actions simultaneous and side by side. And after a while, he made no more excuses. I guess by then he knew that his talking so was no more strange than my listening.
I
WAS ALMOST FOURTEEN
and had known Johnny about three years, the summer my mother married my uncle. My aunt had died some months before. Never too much of a person, her fretful dying by inches and years had long since squeezed her smooth of that roughened human surface which is needed to draw real feeling from others, yet her death left a curious incoherence in our household. Our invalid’s routine had regularized it, given it a purpose that the outside world, though avoided, might see if it cared to look; even more, the presence of the dying brings an edge of eternity into the air of a home, giving the most cramped household a bit of view. Certainly this was all my uncle and mother had shared until then, and now that the woman who had related them was removed, it must have been this, the need of some united front, more than propriety, that until the marriage was settled upon, made them uneasy with one another. It could hardly have been the fear of gossip alone that moved them, for the town would no longer have bothered to pay them even that intimacy—although my mother may have heard in her mind a lost, transatlantic echo of what would have been said and unsaid in World’s End. No, it would give us all a permanency, my mother said, and my uncle would help toward my education, or find me a place in the mill.
She was sewing as usual, the evening she told me; Tuscana was one of three towns near the site of the great new dam the government was building in the river valley, and she had begun to find a small trade among the wives of the engineers from the North. The air was tight, with the binding summer heat I had never got used to, and although the evening light was still bland and I had polished the panes only the day before, there was no sparkle in them. My uncle had gone out for the one evening away a week he allowed himself. I thought of him sitting mum in the café he still called the “pub”—a sparely molded man with a dry eye and the sparse manners of those who are easier with machines than with people. He had a colorless justice about him that made him neutral to live with, but I wanted him no closer.
When she had finished speaking, I listened to the late blasting on the river, wishing that one of the thunders would crack the inferior glass, yellow the gray air behind which I lived, and lift me like a rocket away. I cast about for something dauntless to say to her, some proposal that would knock outward the underworld walls of boyhood and made me at one blow a man. I thought of reminding her of the scholarship exams I had planned on, but they were still two years away. But after a moment, I mentioned them.
“Yes, yes,” she said. “We must think of those.” She bent her head deeper over her sewing. “You will have a room to yourself then, to study in; that will be a help, eh?” A little time went by. Then she rose and made tea.
When she returned with the tea things, the blastings had stopped and the panes were dark. I heard a train pass, a long freight, dragging into smaller and smaller falls its long chain of sound.
“Could—could we not go home?” I said. I had never asked it.
The cups clinked as she served them. Neither of us touched the tea. After a while, sitting with her hands folded, she shook her head. “This is home,” she could have said, evading, but she sat on, not denying that it was not.
“Could we not—write to
them
?” For a long time now I had not once spoken of the Goodmans; by an evasion of my own I had managed not to think of them, except in bed at night, when, with my knuckles against my knees, I had sometimes tried to walk among them, putting myself to dream.
“Them?” She raised her head in casual surprise.
I breathed fast, the way one did before heaving up the stone wheel that covered the well in the yard. “The—Goodmans.”
“Oh—” My mother’s soft ejaculation, light smile, plunged me down, even before she spoke further, into that gap down which the child falls, weightless, holding on to some stone of meaning which the giants have wafted aside like a feather. She was smiling, with that faint, sealing tribute people pay to the picnics of long ago, the pretty costumes they once have worn.
“Ah,” she said, gently laughing, dismissing. “So you still remember.”
I got up then, and moved for the first time away from her. At the age I was then, the past is our only littoral, sacred because it is all we have to go on; to minimize it, to step lightly across it and onward, to
forget
, is the treason of maturity. So I got up then and went to the window, and standing there, by an imitative act of memory, as their habit had been, I moved away from her, toward them. I saw young Martin, at the age I was now when we left them, glassy-eyed with rainy-day lethargy, rolling a marble back and forth along the sill; I saw Hannschen with her nose just above it. I put my hand on the curtain and I saw Lady Goodman, whom I always thought of as Lady Rachel, standing in one of her arrested pauses; I saw the old lady Mrs. Goodman at her window on the floor above, staring out upon Tiergartens and, Königsallees melted upon Golder’s Green in the faïence of the years. I saw all of them, watched by myself from behind.