And in her looks, which from that time infus’d
Sweetness into my heart, unfelt before,
And into all things from her Aire inspir’d …
Now the doctor was speaking to her. It was as if Hodge were no longer in the room. “You think you’re going to get well now, or is it going to be back to the asylum with you?”
She stared at him, and the corner of her mouth trembled. At last she said, “Where’s … where’s my brother?”
“He’s in the kitchen.” He indicated the direction with a jerk of his head.
“He shouldn’t be here.” She glanced at Hodge, then away. “I’ll send him out. He has to obey me, and if I say—”
“You’re wrong,” he said. “You have to obey him. He’s supposed to keep an eye on you. Don’t you know who’s God around here?”
She bristled, then calmed herself. “I’m God,” she said.
The attendants laughed, and Hodge narrowed his eyes. He was beginning to sweat.
“You?” the doctor said. He drew back a little, incredulous.
She nodded.
Instantly, he moved toward her a little. “Kneel down.”
She shook her head. “No. You kneel.”
“All right boys,” the doctor said, “show her who’s God.”
They seized her roughly, as though she were a criminal, and forced her to her knees. Her face worked, full of rage. “Now listen,” she whispered.
“Kneel!” he said.
“You’re not supposed to use force against me.”
“Don’t be silly. I’m the boss.”
The dark-haired attendant said, “She’s on her knees.”
The doctor nodded as if immensely pleased with himself. “Now.” He folded his arms. “What are you doing?”
Her face worked violently. It was the face of an old woman, and Hodge closed his eyes for an instant.
“What are you doing to God?” the doctor said.
“Please!”
“All right, let her up.”
She got up slowly. They gave her freedom enough to raise her hands to her face. “There are conditions under—” she said.
He shook his head. “Who’s boss here?”
“You do what I say,” she whispered, “and there are conditions under which we can make conditions under for dealing—”
“There are no conditions.”
Kathleen drew in a deep breath, eyes blank for a moment. She touched her hair, trying to smooth it. “I am the Creator,” she said patiently. “If you don’t do what I say then what can we—”
“Who kneeled in front of whom?”
“I will have to destroy you,” she said.
Again he shook his head. “You can’t destroy me because I’m God.”
“No, I’m God. Have you no faith?” The hand moving on the hair had lost meaning. It worked like a machine.
“No,” he said, “I’m God.”
She was squinting. “Well, I happen to be a better thinker and more—more of a leader than you of human beings and I think what I am and I realize I’m God, and I see what you are and—” She stopped, and Hodge could feel her panic in his chest. “You are and I under conditions—” She stopped again.
The doctor half-turned away from her. “Show her again, boys. There’s no point trying to argue with a crazy woman.”
The dark-haired attendant said, “Kneel to God.”
Again she looked at Hodge. “Tag,” she said.
But the attendants were forcing her down. She tried to scratch at their wrists, but they held her arms too tightly and her nails closed on air.
“Take it easy on her,” the doctor said. And then, to Kathleen: “Make it easy for yourself.”
“Why does God have to cry for Tag?” the shorter attendant said.
She got her hand free for an instant and struck at him, but again he caught her wrist.
“Why does God have to cry for Tag?” he asked again.
“That’s true,” the doctor said. “I hadn’t thought of it.” He bent over her. “That’s true, what he says.”
“You’re not supposed to use force—you’re not boss.”
“Who’s God?” he said.
“I am God. Nomine matris …”
“Why don’t you get up then?”
“Well, I’ll push them away.” She tried. “Tell them to get away,” she said angrily.
“All right boys, get away.”
The attendants released her and stepped back. Hodge waited, the back of his neck tingling. Suddenly, as though she were perfectly sane, Kathleen laughed. “That was a mistake,” she said. “I should have pushed them away, I should have obliterated them.”
Now, crazily, they were all laughing. “Obliterate, yeah!” the shorter attendant said.
“Obliterate, that’s it,” the doctor said. “But you’re absolutely helpless.”
After it was over the doctor said, “So now you’ve seen it.”
Hodge shook his head, still shaky. “It’s a hell of a thing.” His brother-in-law was leaning on his arm against the doorframe.
“Not too pretty, no,” the doctor admitted. “But you see how it is. Reality’s damned unpretty to Kathleen. You have to drive her to the admissions one by one.”
“You wonder if it’s worth it,” Hodge said.
Her brother glanced at him, thinking the same, it seemed.
“Of course it’s worth it,” the doctor snorted.
Hodge nodded, but the man’s voice made something ring far back in his mind. It was the game again, he realized the next instant. “Tell me something,” Hodge said as if thoughtfully, “do you really believe you’re God?”
The man smiled. “Easy boy,” he said. He closed his hand for a moment around Taggert’s arm.
When the doctor was gone her brother said, “We’ve got to get her out of here, Tag. It doesn’t work.”
“You’re crazy,” Hodge said. “It’s only been six weeks.”
The mild eyes looked at him, swollen behind the thick glasses. “Aren’t we all?—crazy, I mean?”
He stared at the place where he knew his burnt face would be staring back at him out of the darkness of the mirror, and his mind played over and through the past and the present and lived in neither.
Purity, cleanliness, contentment, patience, devotedness, self-denial, above all, silence.
But they had moved her, in spite of him. They had the money, not he. He had pleaded, argued, had even once caught Robert, the oldest, by the lapels of his damned high-yeller suitcoat, prepared to hurl him through the wall. The Professor had sat with his thin legs crossed, as always, tapping the tip of his moustache with one finger, passing no judgment. He agreed with Hodge, but he was the old lady’s slave. “Virtuous love,” Sir Thomas Malory called it. Knight-prisoner, in the ninth year of the reign of Edward Fourth. If the old lady wanted Kathleen burned alive, the Professor would have offered his matches. But so it was with all of them, wasn’t it? Virtuous love. For love of Kathleen the brothers, miserable neurotics themselves, evaded the father whose rule was otherwise in all respects absolute and absolutely corrupt. For love of Kathleen the brothers leaped from cure to cure, as if they were the psychotics, not she. For love of Kathleen the old man hated Hodge like death, her husband, in his mind her destroyer. And as for Hodge,
He stood in the school hallway, leaning on his broom, and he looked at the child who reminded him of the pictures of Kathleen when she was a child, watched her so hungrily, with such brute anguish that if anyone had noticed they’d have locked him up on the spot for dangerous. Perhaps not that bad, quite. He was capable of looking down, capable of smiling with kindly middle-aged-janitor indifference when she passed, walking like music, a drop of sweat beside her nose.
“Possessed,” Helene Burns had said. The mathematics teacher.
He had explained to her lightly how it was with him, and she had seen, for all his light-heartedness, how it was. There were very few of them there that he could talk to; she
was the chief one. Recently divorced. That was why he appealed to her, he knew. He had been happy in his marriage, she had been miserable. Into his wounded animal love for a creature beyond either love or hate, translated into a present eternity, she projected what her marriage might have been; and his loss of what had seemed invulnerable was the objectification of her loss of what never was.
She understood, too, his restless arrogance, the disgust he felt for teachers, principals, Education professors at the university, parents who were riding high in the world, who spoke kindly, condescendingly to him as though his fallen condition were of course a punishment for sins. (And yet he was lying to himself, he knew; they did not scorn him but merely passed by, oblivious even to the fact that he scorned them. Insiders.)
“It’s temporary, Tag,” she said. “You’ll be on your feet soon, you watch.” He slept with her sometimes—that was before the accident—and often he would lie with his hands behind his head and listen with egoistic pleasure to her analyses of his condition. She had a throaty, New York Jewish voice, eyes like a piece of sculpture out of Syria. “You were the one with the smarts,” she said, smiling, nodding, toying with how it must have been. “Also the schmertz. And the baby of the family, that’s what did it.”
He was not fooled by his pleasure. As indifferent to that as he was to almost everything, in those days. Everything but his sons. As if saying to himself, “Very well, you too like flattery.” He could have been bored by his vulgar humanness, but he was beyond it. She said once: “The magic tricks are interesting, though. They’re the key, if you want my opinion.” At her apartment, the light on in the kitchen, visible from the bedroom where they lay. On the record player a Broadway musical.
“I don’t,” he said, “—want your opinion—” and grinned in the half-light falling from the doorway.
“Yes you do,” she said casually. He did not protest “The way I figure, you were always quick, and people made a big fuss about it, and pretty soon it was a game. The quickness I mean. You learned all this stuff, but you didn’t really understand it. Like a quiz-kid or something. You just skittered on it, hike a waterbug. A thin film of sense. And they all said Ooh! Aah!’ That’s how it was.”
He frowned.
She said, “Too bad.”
For a long time they were both silent, and then she said again, as if to herself, “Too bad.” She put her arms behind her head, making her breasts rise.
“I need a cigarette,” he said.
After a minute she sat up as if to get them, but looked at him. “Hurt your feelings, Tag?”
He shook his head. “Mere truth. A butterfly’s wing.”
She slid out of bed then and went to the dresser for the cigarettes. She lit one for each of them.
“What started you on the magic tricks?”
“I don’t know.”
“Your father, I think.”
Hodge grinned, then nodded. “Started me on everything. He was—” He had hunted a moment for appropriate words, then let it go. “A forceful personality, as they say.”
“A casket for everything he loved.”
And that too was true, it had seemed to him, but he caught the truth lightly, half-evading it as he caught it, the way you catch a fast pitch that will break the bones of your hand if you take it straight on. “He was beautiful,” he said. “Which is nothing much, in a way, I guess. Not uncommon. But he was.”
Helene nodded. “I thank God my father was somewhat a klutz. He let me be.”
“You’re pretty,” he said. He was tempted to quote her Sappho; but that was for Kathleen. Now it seemed to him that it wasn’t true—was too easy—blaming their failure on the Congressman. Directly under her eyes he palmed the cigarette, made it reappear, palmed it, made it appear, and continued to do it, over and over, mechanical. He watched his painfully won skill dispassionately, with artist’s pleasure, as though he were not the magician but only the assistant, a dutiful instrument. “It was once commonly maintained that Beauty, Goodness, and Truth were subsistent entities,” he said. “That is, that they are properties which attach to existent particulars, but which might without absurdity be supposed to attach to nothing.” He saw the words cut into the wall in precise, ornamental calligraphs.
“Here we go,” she said. She smiled politely. It pleased her to be loved by a man who was clever, though she was not interested.
“I’m serious,” he said and saw it in italic. “As long as the world was solidly theistic, the absolutes were plausible; when it got fashionable to speak of the death of God, people began to talk as though Beauty, Goodness, and Truth were psychological effects—probably base ones. For instance, beauty is described as the sense of relief experienced by ‘living tissue’—that’s jargon for mind and soul—when it’s able to adjust present experience and remembered attitudes, in other words, is able to stop worrying. Some people didn’t believe this account …”
She was leaning on her elbow, watching the cigarette slowly appear and disappear in his hand, her lips drawn to a half-pout half-smile, eyebrows lowered with concentration; but she was thinking neither of what he was saying nor of what his magician’s hand was doing: remembering something out of her own life, or planning where she would eat tomorrow night, or making a list. Her breasts were like a young girl’s, firm and small, and they would rise surprisingly to his touch. He knew that by the simple flicking of a switch he could understand her, move into her experience if only for a moment: it was exactly what he was trying to tell her. He had seen such things, and it was not true that they had to be destructive. On the contrary, that was the greatest of heresies. His father, busy at his work, looked up from his desk, recognized him, smiled. Even if it was only for a moment, it was complete. Politics ceased to exist for him that moment; and as for the small boy in knickers—the casualty of Christmas past—the high, polished, formal room, the crossed flags behind the desk, the littered filing cabinets, the books—all came down to a homely familiarity, mere frame around the Congressman’s face. He had thought at first that he was special to his father, like Benjamin in the Bible, but it wasn’t so, he learned later. To the old man, all that stirred was special—the geese flying over the capitol building, for instance.
(Look! he’d said, and hunkered in solemn attire
to lift his son, like any God or farmer,
and pointed. Over the capitol dome, to the west,
a wing of one-and-many geese went sliding,
honking south like old Model T’s redeemed,
gone glorious. Oh, not for the lesson in it,
not for the high-falutin, falling mind
organizing itself to swim or fly
with ease searching out the dire vacuity:
not for that: for thisness: twenty-four geese
enroute from swamp to swamp, encountering a dome
at twilight, passing and touching an unseen mark;
they freeze, fall out of time and into thought,
an idiograph in the blood of man and son.
No image. The pure idea of holiness.
His mother said when they told of their vision, “Ah!”)
That was how it was. When they were together at supper—the big room bright, the table as loaded with his mother’s old china serving dishes as a table would be at the Grange Hall, the four brothers and their tanned, boyish sister contending busily, passionately for truth and mashed potatoes and applesauce—the old man, white hair streaming, saw them all, reached out with his heart and mind and knew them. He made them more themselves than they normally were, not in the sense that he forced them to some identity of his own choosing: he looked at them, guessed out what went unsaid and made them clearer to themselves and also surer. Not always. He too could be abstracted, sunk inward to his own considerations. His white hair lay like dirty cotton on the collar of his coal-black formal suit, his liver-spotted white hands lay on his belly like the hands of a man in his coffin, his chin protruded like a snowplow blade, and his eyes grew calm as stones in
the bed of a stream. For hours he wouldn’t move a finger, wouldn’t even sniff. After such spells he was a hurricane of energy and joy. A manipulator, an orator, a writer of bills and crafty epigrams. They had not minded his periods of remoteness. One intense moment is longer than a thousand years. And the moments when his concern for them turned on were dependably frequent. He became a knower of gestures, a pure imagination. He knew a man’s character by becoming it, like the flagae who lurk in the mirrors of the Hindu. When strangers came to the house he would sit tense with concentration in his chair, huge old gentle hippopotamus with shaggy brows, tie askew, and before the talk was over he would know the man and would know, besides, the road to the man’s conversion. Not that he sat in judgment, ticking off rights and wrongs. There was nothing in him of righteousness, hard doctrine. To think that a man’s opinions were wrong was for him no more to think less of the man than to think that a tree planted in the wrong place was wicked and pernicious. He was impatient with men who refused to stop speaking platitudes, but it was against his faith in life to suppose such stubbornness proved stupidity. He was a work of art, and living with him was like living in the presence of art. The absolutes of human intuition took on the weight and form of reality. The Good became, in his presence, an aquastor, an ethereal form made as visible and tangible as an angel standing on a stone. It was impossible to say afterward, “There are no angels.” At worst one must say—Taggert Hodge must say—Dear God, where are the angels?
And so (he remembered, floating in the dark), knowing he could reach out with a simple question and know her, be translated in an instant to the beach in her mind, or the list she was making, or the fear she was toying with, and knowing, on the other hand, that he could reach out with his hand and touch her breast, make it rise to him, and knowing, finally, that she was not hearing a word he said, Hodge had gone on talking, struggling to tease his feeling into knowledge. He burned more delicate calligraphs into the clay-dead bedroom wall. “The difference between knowing and understanding may be obscure at first—the distinction between ‘whatness’ and ‘thisness’—but it’s one we commonly recognize in ordinary speech. All men acknowledge that no human being can ‘know’ another one: I can know your name, your age, your classifications. But understanding is beyond the brain’s analysis. When I say I understand you I mean we’re the same. Imagination.”