“That’s stupid,” she said. Pious little idiot! Did he really imagine he’d made the discovery all by himself, that it hadn’t been one of the grand old clichés for a thousand thousand years?
“Maybe. So then enlighten me, Mama. How come you can walk on whoever you want to, and me, I’m supposed to live by the Guilty Rule?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
Shame on him! Shame! The ghosts said.
But she could have told him, if there were so much as a prayer that he would listen. It was not her fault that Luke was the victim of a dream, a romantic image of a world that never was. It was not she who’d given him the image.
It was the same with us, the Runian sisters whispered. They referred to their murdering nephew. She smiled. It gave her comfort, this fantasy (for she knew it was that) in which she and the dead sisters were in league against him.
The sentimentality of youth, she thought. And more than sentimentality: overweening pride. Born to save the world ruined by their parents, they prated. Where did it come from—that tiresome idea? That was what the Sunlight Man had said yesterday morning, in effect—or the morning before—except that he’d said more than that, too. Standing up to his ankles in the water, pantlegs rolled up, his hands in the pockets of his suitcoat, studying them as though they were mannequins in a store window. “There’s only rule or anarchy,” he said. “Talk about anything between as ‘freedom’ and you engage in insignificant speech. There’s much to be said for anarchy, to tell the truth. Consider, please. For the child’s safety he learns to stay out of the road. A rule. And for his health he learns to eat both foods he does and doesn’t like. A rule. Nevertheless, grown men can walk in the street if they please, and they can go without food for days if they have their reasons. Sooner or later even the rules which keep a man alive—keep his kind alive—come up for nearer inspection, so to speak, and every generation—and every man of it—is alone. Abandoned to life. The wiser a man grows, the fewer his iron bonds. So it seems.” He mused, looking first at her, then at Luke. “It’s strange, isn’t it, the curious counter-movement. How we long to get home again. When I was a child—” He closed his eyes and, after a moment, nodded, deciding on a different tack. “Punctilious old men think back to the easy freedom of their childhood. And long-toothed beatniks in their cups hone for the rituals of right and wrong their bourgeois fathers taught. I was once told that the antidote to the escape through marijuana is brown sugar; another person told me peanut butter. I don’t know which is true, if either. But though very little is more pleasurable than a marijuana buzz, it is a curious fact of experience that the higher one goes, the more ardently one longs for brown sugar or, alternatively, peanut butter.”
A rat swam toward him. He watched it come, its small legs churning with all their might, stirring the heavy black water, and when it came within six inches he lifted one bare foot and shooed it. The rat turned and continued on its way. He too continued. “With respect to life, I can say this: The greater the freedom I personally achieve—the greater the distance I put between myself and the common run of mankind—bus-drivers, judges, policemen, men of science, and the like—the more I find myself admiring them. I could listen all day to the sober good sense of an upholder of the law. I take my hat off to them, I go down on my knees to them and ask their benediction. Like wicked Jacob in Esau’s hair. All are sinners.”
She said nothing. It was impossible to know whether he was reasoning or raving, seriously questioning her or mocking her.
He waded over to Luke and bent his face forward till his nose was two inches from Luke’s forehead. “And which way will you go, my child?” he whispered. No answer came. The Sunlight Man nodded. “Either way, you have my blessing.” He made a cross in the air, then sadly shook his head. “So much revolution in you,” he said, “so much hatred for order, so much hatred for anarchy—and so much love. How terrible! Where can you run to? I tremble for your soul.” Then, slowly, solemnly, he went down on his knees in the water at Luke’s feet and, after long meditation, kissed Luke’s shoes. After that he sighed, like a man who has finished an unpleasant task, and straightened up and tightened the cords around Luke’s wrists. He gave them all a little wave. “Think positive,” he said. He slapped Luke’s cheek to see if he was conscious. His trousers were soaked to the crotch. He turned back to the stairs, whistling under his breath, and went up and turned the light off.
He brought them no breakfast the following morning, and they believed he had abandoned them for good. They could hear no sound of hammering and sawing in the garage, no sound of pacing. “Maybe they caught him,” Nick’s eyes said. Luke snarled inside his gag like a dog, then cried for a long time. She listened to it and hated him. She’d had nightmares last night. The Sunlight Man did not appear with lunch for them. She looked up at the flooring and began angrily to talk to it—or, really, to talk to the demonic spirit which might or might not be beyond the flooring, resting, or possibly hanging dead (she had half-convinced herself by now that he would kill himself), and at last, experimentally at first, she began to shout inside the gag. Hardly a sound. Luke too shouted, but only with his eyes, sometimes at the Sunlight Man, sometimes at her, sometimes at Nick. At last they were all shouting, their eyes resonant in the wet, stonewalled room. They stopped. Millie wept as Luke had. “At a time like this, you learn what the really important things are,” she said in her mind. “That’s stupid,” she said, enraged.
And then at last, just as the light was going out of the casement windows, they began to hear noises upstairs: pacing, the sound of doors and cupboards opening, sounds of cooking. She tried shouting again, but the man would not be hurried. She fell silent again and stood now, head straining forward, eyes rolling upward, listening intently for any sound of hope. At last it came. The cellar door creaked open and light shot down the stairs and then the cellar light clicked on and his feet came in sight. When they could see all of him they saw that he was dressed in a blue suit of terrible dignity, wearing hornrimmed glasses that made him look like a college professor, and smoking an elegant pipe. He dusted off one of the cellar steps, then sat down on it, took off his shoes, rolled up his pantlegs. Then he came and, without a word, untied them and half-carried, half-led them from their posts back to the steps. Upstairs he wiped his feet and lower legs on a kitchen towel, rolled down his pantlegs, and put his socks and shoes back on, then showed them to the dining room. The table was beautifully set, as if for a party: linen tablecloth, china, crystal (where he’d gotten it heaven knew), long slim candles.
“Would you care to freshen up?” the Sunlight Man said. He bowed toward the bathroom. “Meanwhile, I’ll fix us a drink,” he said. “Sainthood cannot be taken on all at once.” He laughed, and the laugh startled her. It was Taggert! Then she remembered that she’d realized that before. And again she could hardly believe it, and, full of alarm, held back from seizing the discovery, waiting to be sure. She glanced at Luke, trying to see if he knew, but his eyes were vague as a madman’s; he was a thousand miles away. She looked then at the Sunlight Man, and she was dead certain. Yet nothing about him, not even the way he stood, was right for the man she knew he was; and even now her mind would not close on it. “Thank you,” she said suddenly, and she went into the bathroom and closed the door, and in the mirror she saw her face. She wept. Monster, she thought, over and over, and she did not know who she meant, the man or herself. She could hear someone moving in the upstairs bathroom, directly over her head. The next thing she knew, she had fallen asleep and someone was knocking on the bathroom door, calling to her.
She felt herself growing stronger. “A minute,” she whispered. She gazed into the mirror and could not tell what she felt. She washed her face. No feeling in the skin. She’d been mistaken. She’d imagined that he had partly grown used to going around like some ugly, drunken tramp, shirttails hanging out, beard a rat’s nest, shoes worn over till the sides supported more than the soles; because when he wanted he could make himself
kempt, almost respectable except for the ruined face. But now, remembering the way he’d covered that face with his arm, she understood his hatred. She remembered the safety razor in the medicine cabinet and squinted, imagining herself slipping the blade into his throat. She opened the cabinet. (Behind her father’s house, when she was a child, there had been a woods where there were the remains of a road not used in years—an alley through the trees, merely—and alongside that road that was no longer a road, there were the ruins of a house where a couple named Springer had lived, long ago; a young man and his bride. She had killed him with a razor, because she loved someone else and never intended to marry him, but was forced. Once Millie had been out in the garage playing—she must have been twelve or thirteen at the time—and had all at once been overcome by a profound, completely inexplicable grief, thinking of the Springer girl. She could see the girl very clearly in her mind now, just as she had then—a tall blonde, with hollow eyes and high cheekbones, wearing a cotton print dress faded almost to white from many many washings. But the Springer girl had in fact been plump, Millie had heard later. She had thick lips and dimples, and she used to swim naked with boys.)
The soft knock came again, and Millie started. In the mirror she caught herself gaping like a witch (a second Millie observing the first), saying, “Yes.” She thought with sudden violence, surprising to her, I too would have swum naked with boys. She’d come too late to her sorceries. After the first green dawn. “Yes,” she thought soberly, and opened the bathroom door.
Luke and Nick, too, had washed and had not combed their hair. Luke stood at the piano looking at the keys, holding a martini in his shaky left hand, his mind miles away, or gone entirely. Nick sat on the couch, suitcoat open, with bourbon in front of him and on the ashtray a cigarette he did not seem to have lit himself. The Sunlight Man—no, Taggert Hodge (but that too was wrong: he was no longer Taggert) held out a glass to her, a martini like Luke’s, with a small piece of lemon peel in it. She ignored it. He put it in her hand and closed the fingers.
“Ravishing,” he said.
She was stone. She could look out and see the glow of Attica Prison in the sky. All those policemen down there, she thought, and he’s here, comfortable, prepared to go on for weeks.
“A beautiful night,” he said.
She turned to look at him again for a moment, then shook her head, numb. She remembered him suddenly as he’d been behind the chickenhouse, standing over her after Nick killed Mr. Hardesty, and her back tingled. It passed.
“Yes,” he said. “It puzzles me too. But no doubt there’s some perfectly reasonable explanation.”
“What are you talking about?” she said.
He raised one finger to his lips. “What does it mean, if anything, to say that we’re cruel beasts?” he said. He leaned closer and whispered, “It’s shocking. The fantastic insignificance of it all.”
“All?” she said.
He winked. “As for my own investigations, I’m inclining more and more to the persuasion that the center of it all is Time.” Cliché from one of those modern novels. She realized, briefly, that she was merely a character in an endless, meaningless novel, then forgot.
She nodded again. “Time.”
“Precisely. It makes us suspend our disbelief. We live by instants, that’s human nature; and if we judge, we judge on the basis of the past. But tentatively, because there’s always the future, p. 622. Are you actually trying to understand all this rubbish?”
“Trying—?”
“By instants. Exactly! What we are, instant by instant, is a part of a system of relationships. As in classical ballet. I stand in such and such a relationship to you: that is my meaning, my significance. If I go over there and stand by your son, my significance must change. I kiss him. I slap him. Insofar as there are common elements in all these situations, there is continuity, which is to say, I begin to embody values. And insofar as both of you, or both kiss and slap, also embody these same values, we three have reason to suppose these values are a part of the common core.”
She said nothing.
“It’s very moving, in a way, to be part of the common core. That’s what religion is. The Ten Commandments, that sort of thing.”
She pretended not to hear.
“But only tentatively moving, because of the Future. Everything may change. We expect it won’t, but it may. I’ve known myself characters whose lives seemed absolutely stable, and whose values therefore seemed absolutely clear. But then, unexpectedly, everything changed. You follow me, don’t you? This is a difficult line of reasoning.” He hurried on: “So, probability failed them. They became questioners, testers, gadflies to divinity. They discovered that life was—” He leaned close to whisper: “—vastly insignificant.” He smiled. “They therefore imposed meaning on life: they became, in other words, as rigid as possible, so that in all particular instances they were as much like themselves in other instances as they could manage to be. For example, in all situations (I speak of one example now), one of these people made a practice of turning the conversation to politics, on which he could say exactly what he had said before, with the same expression. This was very comforting to him, as you can imagine. He became skillful at interpreting each new political situation exactly as he had interpreted all past political situations. Eventually, and of course predictably, he took the extreme position, that is, he died. Another such maniac—”
“Wait a minute,” she said.
“I’m a palmist, too,” he said. “Were you aware of that? Give me your hand. Very good, wonderful. Fingers lightly curled. Good. Are you ready?” He closed his eyes and began to move his fingers over the palm of her hand slowly, like a man feeling out a page of braille. “Pointed and Sensible Suggestions to Guest and Hostess,” he read. “Avoid controversy and argument. Do not monopolize any good thing. Do not overdo the matter of entertainment. Do not make a hobby of personal infirmities. Go directly when the call or the visit is ended. Do not forget bathing facilities for the traveller. Make yourself at home, but not much so. In ministering to the guest do not neglect the family. Conform to the customs of the house, especially as to meals. Let no member of the family intrude in the guest chamber. Do not make unnecessary work for others, even servants. Be courteous, but not to the extent of surrendering principles. Do not gossip; there are better things to talk about. When several guests are present, give a share of attention to all. Introduce games and diversions, but only such as will be agreeable. Better simple food with pleasure than luxuries with annoyance and worry.” He opened his eyes. “Shocking,” he said. He looked alarmed and let the hand fall. “Nevertheless, you and I are not so dissimilar as I had imagined, my dear. Shall I refresh your glass?” She had not drunk from it. “I too have a great respect for facts. For instance, it is of no little importance to me that a closed room is bad for sleeping in because air once breathed parts with a sixth of its oxygen and contains an equivalent amount of carbonic acid gas. Air breathed six times will not support life. And I care very much that red hair is of that color because it has a larger proportion of sulphur than black hair. If a fishbone gets stuck in your throat you can get it down by swallowing a raw egg. A red-hot iron passed over old putty will soften it so that it can easily be removed. A teaspoonful of Borax added to cold starch will make clothes stiffer than anything else I have ever tried, and it adds no polish. Let me refresh your glass.”
He poured. It ran down over the sides.
“And so, dear Millie, it comes to this. I’ve pursued the whole question as far as I care to, and I’m ready to leave. I pray you may come to understand yourself and may continue joyfully on the road I have started you up—or down, depending on your point of view. Just one thing more. Your son must drive us, preferably in the tractor-trailer. That might require your maternal influence. Convince him, dissuade him from jokes and tricks, and we’ll call the whole thing even.”
“Even?” She turned away.
Luke had turned partway toward them. He was li
stening, pretending not to.
“Nothing personal,” the Sunlight Man said. “You won’t believe that. Most people wouldn’t. Nevertheless, I have watched objectively, partly because of the accident of my having been cut off from intervening, and partly, I suppose, because of my nature. I’ve observed every move of your chess game with the Old Man, and maybe I’ve sympathized with both sides, at times. In any case, he was right, as you see, and you were wrong. You brought down his house, made fools of his sons and even grandsons, your own sons. But law was on his side.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Religion.”
She searched his eyes. He really did seem to imagine he was talking sense, and she wanted to grasp it. But it was useless. She watched the moving lips, the undeniably insane smile. She remembered the razorblade tucked inside her bra.
“All the walls mankind makes can be broken down,” he said, “but after the last wall there’s still one more wall, the final secret, Time. You can’t get out of it. The man in the back room, as who’s-it says—sitting with head bent, silent, waiting, listening to the commotion in the streets: the Keeper of the Kinds. You and I, Millie, we were going to run naked in our separate woods and play guitars and prove miraculous. But outside our running the bluish galaxies are preparing to collapse, and inside our running is the space between the pieces of our atoms. And so I won’t kill you for your destructions, or kill the police for theirs. We’ll have dinner, like civilized people, and then your son will drive us away to where we can hide for eternity, like Cain.”
She looked at Luke. Before she knew she would say it, she asked, “Luke, can you?”
“Did I ever have a choice?” he said.
She tried to think. “Do you know who this is?”