But the curve was free, and the truck rushed on, past Webb’s and Burkmeister’s and Ford’s and Mahoney’s, the motor screaming like a buzzsaw cutting through ironwood, the rattles from every hinge and bolt filling the cab with a noise like chattering leaden bells or wasps stirred up to rage. She did not need to look at her son to know that his jaw was tightly set, his witch’s eyebrows slightly drawn in, his gray eyes glinting, unblinking, like a madman’s. Little bastard, she thought; and even though his troubles were unreal, mere play troubles, neurotic phantoms, she was sorry for him; coldly, objectively, but also bitterly sorry that he had to be young, if only for a time, and idiotic. His temper fits gave him splitting headaches—histamine headaches, according to the doctor in Rochester. (He’d diagnosed it even before he’d heard the symptoms, or so he claimed later, from no more than a glance at Luke’s painfully flawless handwriting. He was a cocky man, the doctor, red- and round-faced as a wino, and ugly, sitting with his legs apart, soft hand lovingly laid on his crotch.) They were half-day-long sieges of pain that would fill up Luke’s skull, more fierce than the fiercest hangover, until he could see, hear, think of nothing but the dry fire in his brain, and at last he would faint. He’d been born unlucky: he had an enormous tolerance for pain.
But he would not lose consciousness now, while he was driving. If the headache were that far along he would long ago have forgotten his anger, would have forgotten even what steering wheels were for; he would be clinging to her hand, his eyes clamped shut, beyond even praying that he might pass out, merely waiting for it, and she, Millie Hodge, with heart painstakingly fashioned of ice, knowing herself beyond any trace of ordinary motherly hate or love (crushed tight, until time if it moved all around her had nothing left to do with her), would be wishing with every nerve in her body that the burning brain were hers, not his. Not because he was her son and not for duty or charity or guilt. She’d been through it many times, a thing far worse for her than for him because Luke knew nothing, in that last hour, while her mind rushed on over thoughts as precise and sharp as the rods of an iron fence: had been through it and out of it to the light again, forced into the shabby role for which she had not the faintest desire and from which she drew, she devoutly believed, no satisfaction (she knew what satisfaction was, knew where she would prefer to be)—the role of God or archetypal mother or stone at the center of the universe—because by senseless accident she had borne sons. I exist. No one else. You will not find me sitting around on my can like some widow, or whining for the love of my children.
Half a mile from the old place he began to slow down, and the feeling of dread that had been waiting far back in her mind, closed off like a room ghoulishly sealed up after the death of a child, opened suddenly to her consciousness. Already they were passing the century-old stone wall half-buried in woodbine and purple nightshade, and pear and apple and cherry orchard, the remains of the vineyard now grown up to thistle and ragweed and Queen Anne’s lace. They came to where tamaracks stretched dead limbs across the road, throwing parallel arched shadows like the bones of a fish—the truck moving quietly now, and slowly—and she knew he was going to stop. Damn him to hell, she thought. As always in the light of a late afternoon before a storm, the place was unreal, a scene from some greenish, dimly remembered childhood dream that hovered between the hope of escape and nightmare. She compressed her lips, the rush of strong, indefinite emotions channeling efficiently into anger. She said, “Why are you stopping?”
He ignored her. “Stony Hill Farm,” he said. He smiled, lugubrious, and as always when he smiled the center of his forehead pinched down and the outer ends of his eyebrows lifted, making him look more than ever evil, witchlike (but artificially so: she had watched him practice it in front of their oval bedroom mirror as a child, and later, when Luke was in his teens, she had watched him put it on for girls, poor adorable Werther, born for woe—with ears sticking out like Dumbo’s) so that for an instant her anger became mingled pity and disgust. He said: “The dear old homestead of the Hodges. Will you look at that!” His voice was thin and intense. The headache was bad now, she knew, and she thought, Good. But the easy spite brought no pleasure. He had never lived there, and his reasons for wanting to have lived there or to live there now, claim Stony Hill for his barony, were repulsive to her; nevertheless his grief and indignation were as real as if their cause were real. Somehow, God knew how, she was to blame, and his anger was just. She felt a sudden, sharp desire to be somewhere thousands of miles away—in some German university lecture hall, or walking in London early in the morning, or sitting on worn old steps in Rome, with her shoes off, a scent of sewage and flowers in the air.
“I said, look,” he said. All righteousness.
As if casually, she turned her head.
Nothing she saw shocked her. She had expected and grown used to it long ago. She had planned it, in a way, or so it seemed to her now—as to him. She had perhaps begun planning the destruction of Stony Hill years before she knew she was going to get it from the Hodges and sell it for trash. Though she knew there were people living there—the Negroes Will Jr had found for her when she wanted to sell it—it looked abandoned, the wind-wrecked remains of a farm no longer fit for an Arab to pitch his tent on, or a shepherd to put up his sheep in. Only a small patch of the wide, sloping lawn was mowed, a square directly in front of the balustered and pillared porch. The rest of it, to the left and right and rising beyond the deeply shadowed walnut trees to the nearest of the barns, was grown up like fallow pasture except for, here and there, a burnt-out black patch where it looked as if some dragon had recently lain. The globes she remembered on the lightning rods of the three barns visible from the driveway gate were gone now, the rods themselves crooked or broken off. The high, square silo was precariously tilted, and patches of siding were missing from the barn walls. But the house was worse. The pillars on the front porch were gouged as if by woodpeckers, there were squares of cardboard in some of the windows, nothing was painted, nothing any longer upright. A wide new door had been neatly sawed into the side of the house, the wooden frame left unpainted, and over the gap hung a Sears Roebuck aluminum screen with a large italic M. There were toys lying here and there in the grass, half hidden—a mud-caked bicycle, a rust- and oil-blackened wagon—on the porch steps a naked, headless doll. In the shelter of the wide old walnut trees there was a black Cadillac with a heavily pitted chrome visor.
“It must give you great satisfaction,” Luke said.
Her anger rose sharply, but she said, “You’ll never know the half of it.” She sounded calm and collected. A place for doleful creatures, a dance of satyrs.
He shifted into low and the truck jerked forward. He was squinting badly, and, precisely though Millie Hodge understood the familiar chaos of her emotions, there was nothing she could do against the touch of nausea rising and growing inside her like ugly weather. It was unreasonable that she should be asked to regret for his sake what had nothing whatever to do with him, nothing even to do with his father, little as Luke might understand that; and unreasonable that merely because she was there she should be asked, required, to endure his childish and confused vengeance for wrongs in which she had no part. He was a baby, a twenty-two-year-old baby: the slightest cut, the slightest affront, and home he came howling to mother, the source of all grief. I’m sick of it, she thought, but even as she thought it she knew it was rhetoric.
(She had waited in the livingroom, pretending to read the novel that had come from an old friend, male, that afternoon, knowing Luke would be purposely late and carefully not worrying when the time they had agreed on came, but worrying in spite of that, growing angrier with the passing of each of the minutes she had known would pass, because Luke was childish—she could never be sure how childish—and because she, Millie Hodge, self-regarding bitch, as she described herself, invincible to all reasonable and honest attacks, had been forced again into the silly and degrading role of poor suffering Mama. He had been betrayed by his Indian boy; he??
?d broken out of jail. The minute she’d heard it—Ben Hodge had told her, stopping by with some of that honey from his bedroom wall (inedible, as always, yellow-gray and specked with unidentifiable pieces, wings maybe)—she had known she was in for trouble. Within half an hour—Ben Hodge was barely out the door—Luke had called, asking if she’d come to supper. “Why Luke!” she’d said coyly, well aware that the girlish act repelled him, but not aware until later just why she’d turned it on. Luke had ignored it. So far he was only upset, he hadn’t yet distorted the Indian boy’s trifling betrayal of Luke’s ridiculous faith into something cosmic, unavengeable except on his mother. Or at any rate—since he’d called, after all—he had only just now begun to distort it. There was a pause, after she’d accepted—no sound but the inevitable humming and clicking of Luke’s country line—and she had said sympathetically, “Ben was here. He says Nick’s broken out of jail.” Luke had said, “Yeah. Bastard.” That was all. But she had known (waiting like Whistler’s Mother in the livingroom) what Luke’s irritation would lead to. When he arrived not in the car but in the pick-up truck—but at least, thank God, it wasn’t the semi—she knew he was angrier than she’d expected, and she’d taken a quick Miltown before going out to him. She’d said only, “Hail the late Mr. Hodge!” “Car wouldn’t start,” he’d said. She’d said, “No, I imagine.”)
They had crossed Route 20 and were climbing the Attica hills, toward Luke’s farm overlooking the Attica Prison.
She said, half by accident, “Beautiful time of day.”
“I hadn’t noticed,” he said.
“Well do notice. Don’t be a philistine.”
“Oh, I come by it naturally enough.” He stared fiercely ahead, fists clenched on the steering wheel; and almost without thinking, as lightly and quickly as she’d have swatted a fly, she said: “Not on my side.” Instantly she saw she’d cut deep, and she realized what she’d realized before and conveniently forgotten a thousand times, that Luke could cut, but he couldn’t take it—or no, worse: he couldn’t even cut; would say merely childishly snippy things so far from the mark that they carried no sting, then would wither at just one word from her because she knew every sore spot he had, all sixteen hundred and six of them and all with one name: Father.
“You,” he said, choking, “what would you know?”
“Skip it,” she said. He was speeding up though, taking the curves too fast already—the cars on the lower road, half a mile down, had their lights on, and the sky, the creek far below them, the dirt road ahead of them were gray, the hills, stretching away toward the town of Wyoming, black. In studied slow-motion she got out a cigarette and lit it. “Why do we put up with each other?” she thought. But the time wasn’t right for saying it. “It’s turning out to be one hell of a date,” she said.
“Stop it,” he hissed.
I exist; and nothing else. No one sees me.
(Seven-thirty, according to her watch. If she hadn’t had to come hold Luke’s hand she’d be riding up the Thruway now with Sol Ravitz, to the lecture at Buffalo U. She’d be sitting laughing and smoking and talking, telling him he hadn’t the faintest idea what Plato meant by imitation, because Sol liked being attacked head-on—and because it was true, he really was all confused about Plato—and she would feel unnaturally alert, alive, both her body and her mind; would be conscious—as though she were balanced on a tightrope—of the distance between himself and her and the distance between herself and the door on her side: conscious that she smelled good, that when he glanced over at her she was pretty, so that sooner or later it would occur to even Solomon Ravitz that perhaps after the lecture and the drinks, coming home along the Niagara River or driving through the park, they might stop for a little; she might not take offense. She thought, I have my world. They had come, in her mind, to where blue-white lights splayed over the Thruway, impersonal and stark as the lights at the prison, to their left and right the outlines of tall buildings, the lights on the far-off office windows as precise and clean-cut as stars. The night air would be thick and warm, tinged with the smell of the chemical plants a mile away, and with the city all around them, the cold lights on the pavement, the car would be cozier than ever, the conversation full of overtones Sol would not yet be catching. “It’s absurd to trace art to ritual,” she said. “It’s as silly as saying sex began as religion.” He glanced at her, smiling. It came to her that what she was saying was truer than she’d realized at first. “Art and sex are very much alike,” she said. “I suppose the similarity is the reason for Freud’s mistake.” “What I like about you is your humility,” he said. She blew smoke at him and laughed. When she reached to the ashtray to scrape off her cigarette her hand was less than four inches from his, and she concentrated on the flutter of excitement she felt, wondering if he too felt it now and whether he ever felt it any more with his fat, stupid wife. It was impossible that he should, she knew. Perhaps he was not repelled by her, as she had been repelled for God knew how long, living out her best years with Hodge. But the thrill was dead, inevitably; created to die from before the beginning, like all illusions, and impossible to revive except feebly, momentarily, when one happened to be made jealous. “Love is revolt,” someone had told her—Stanley Burrish, when they met in San Francisco three years ago—and it was true. A flight from the humdrum, from reality: you shucked off all you had been before and the world that went with it, you became the enemy of the universe and imagined your lover to be another just like you, and so for a moment the two of you were free, lifted out of all ordinary dullness, out of the old vulnerability, became godlike or childlike or a little of both, and the world, no longer a fence around you, was beautiful. So that love was doomed, the new world sickened like the old. Move on. She stood in a white dress waiting at the underpass, half a mile from the paintless tenant-house where her father sat on the porch staring, spitting sometimes, his mouth sunk until the tip of his nose almost touched his chin, cracks of black dust encircling his neck, a ne’er-do-well, but no worse than her mother who whined and cried and peopled the yard with worthless Jewels, the boys doomed to tenant-farming like their father, or to factory work, or to working as guards at the Attica Prison, the girls doomed to whining and childbirth and sour old age: but not Millie, waiting in a white dress, standing erect and dignified (she was sixteen), as casual and as wide awake as a lynx. She knew the lights of the Hodge Pierce Arrow the minute they appeared at the top of the hill, and she put her hand out awkwardly, as though she did not know how to hitchhike. She waited until they had already seen her before she smiled as if with pleased surprise. More often than not it would be Ben, and he would tip his cap grandly, like his father at election time, and say, “Millie Jewel!” as though he too were surprised. Ben was a year older than she was, in Millie’s opinion the most beautiful boy on earth. He drove with his left hand clinging to the windshield post, all the windows wide open, the leather top roaring behind her ears, his right hand not closed on the steering wheel but walking it with his fingertips. He would say, “Where tonight?” “To class,” she would say, and he would smile, kind, as though there were a sweet, sad secret between them, and she would think, terribly moved, Oh Ben, Ben! but would stay where she was, pressed to her door, erect and polite, smiling.
One night she said, “Where are you going, Ben? There a track meet tonight?”
He glanced at her, thoughtful, then grinned. “A practice, sort of.”
“I hear you’re very good,” she said.
He laughed. “People lie. I’m miserable, but the others are even worse.”
“I wish I could see you sometime,” she said. (She had seen him many times, in fact—watching from the end of the football field. He had powerful shoulders and powerful legs and a waist like a girl’s. When he stabbed the pole in the box and twisted upward, his bare feet pointed like a diver’s, rising smoothly, as if in slow motion, his dark hair would fly over his face and stay there until he was above the bar, turning and arching over, quick, like a fish leaping, and
then when he snapped back his head and shoulders, his hair would fall into place again, as though the whole trick were not missing the bar but preserving one’s grooming. She had seen him flip off balance once and drop flailing into the sawdust, and she had seen that when he got up he was limping and one leg was bleeding, spiked. She had wanted desperately to run to him, but she had been afraid. She had covered her eyes, sick, and that night, walking alone in the pasture, she had cried, and had called in the darkness courageously, “Ben! Oh, Ben, Ben!”)
Ben said, “Believe me, you’re not missing a thing.” Then, quickly, as though the talk made him nervous: “How’s class?”
“It’s awful,” Millie said. She added at once, because she’d let out more emotion than she’d meant to, “But no doubt it will improve my character. I’m going to be much, much nicer once I learn French. You wait and see.”
He laughed. After a minute he said, “Why French, though?”