Moise and the World of Reason

  A pause: then:

  “I have recently learned that my mother has turned into a crone.”

  Well, now I understood why she had embarked on the subject.

  “How did this information come to you, Moise?”

  “The information came to me through a message slipped under my door. It was a long letter from an old friend of mine who informs me that my mother has not only turned to a crone but to a scavenger crone. She jiggles public phones for silver to eat at a cheap diner in the midtown section. This friend reproaches me for it. She says that my mother comes out of her cold furnished room in the late afternoon with one hand trailing the walls and the other clutching a cane. She refuses to look into this friend’s eyes or respond to her greetings. She makes a turn of five or six blocks in the midtown section and sneaks into public phone booths and jiggles the hooks for small change to eat at a greasy-spoon diner that’s worse than an Automat in SoHo and this old friend who claims that she pays Mother’s room-rent reproaches me severely for abandoning my mother to these circumstances. As if I could do otherwise in my own situation on Bleecker. This friend suggests that I should bring her to Bleecker or move back to midtown and provide for her there. Provide for her how? By what means? Of course it can’t be considered. It’s a terminal thing, nothing at all to be done, she’d hardly know me, and how could I bear to know her in this state of a scavenger which she’s fallen into? It isn’t as if”

  “What?”

  “She could ever stand me or I could ever stand her. When I took up painting she said I was destined for prostitution or lunacy or both and she threw a suitcase at me and told me to hit the streets. And that’s how I moved to Bleecker.”

  Her gray eyes darkened as if reflecting the nightfall and she lapsed into silence again, for which I was almost grateful. I had never known her to speak in so bitter a fashion upon a subject which, if not tragic, surely contained a considerable pathos, and of her own mother, whether loved or regretted. As recently as the evening before I would have been young enough to be moved to tears but now my youth and the sentiments of it were passed, in fact I was happy that the room contained no mirror, for if I’d looked in it, it might have reflected a face a hundred years older, eligible for casting as the Dalai Lama or Dorian Gray at the end of his transference from portrait to self-ravaged flesh.

  I suppose in some unacknowledged corner of my heart I still possessed the typical Southern attitude toward mothers, something between the maudlin and the unfathomably awful, but certainly never detached, the umbilical cord not merely remaining unsevered but drawn even tighter through time, and the dispassionate, no, that isn’t the word, what I mean is the fierce reportage quality of Moise’s chronicle of her mother’s decline, reminding me of Capote’s In Cold Blood, made me feel that I was not with Moise as I had known her before.

  The gentleness had gone from her as scent from a dried flower and even her classic beauty in the see-through garment had a suspicion of artifice about it.

  She didn’t appear to notice my shocked reaction but when she resumed her speech it was in a much softer tone.

  “You see, I am now convinced that Moppet is dead.”

  “Moppet is?”

  “No, no. Moppet was.”

  “But isn’t ‘moppet’ the Hollywood term for a child on the screen?”

  “Yes, in the cases of Temple and O’Brien, but in the case of this Moppet, it wasn’t a child star but a canine crone, a dog which was the only remaining bond between my mother and me.”

  “You’ve never mentioned this dog Moppet before.”

  “I have mentioned her now that I know she’s no longer, and even before I left the apartment in the midtown section, Moppet had turned to a crone and to a scavenger crone. She had a voracious appetite and you couldn’t get her past a garbage pail on the street, she was well-fed at home but still was unnaturally hungry and when taken out for a walk she would forget to pee, she was so mad for the garbage pails on the street, you could hardly drag her past them, she acquired a preternatural strength when you tried to make her move past a garbage pail and, oh, my God, the way that she would look at you with her great brown eyes through her mop of dirty gray hair, I’m sorry, don’t let me cry, but it was so completely heartbreaking, the huge appetite of this little dog no bigger than a magnified insect. And I would so want to let her spend an hour at each garbage pail, but, you see, her digestion was shot. I took her to a vet’s and he told me that she was probably so hungry because her digestive system was no longer able to absorb nourishment, love. And if I am crying, that is why I am crying, because Moppet is gone and Mother”

  She stopped or became inaudible.

  “I understand now, Moise. You are distressed that your mother has assumed the character of Moppet.”

  “Yes, precisely, how dare she?”

  “You’re being a little unreasonable, Moise.”

  “Completely and why not, chez moi and entre nous?”

  “It must have been more than fifteen years since you left the midtown section, and is it true that you left because your mother threw a piece of luggage at you?”

  “Christ,” said Moise, “what are you talking about, my mother threw a piece of luggage at me? That’s the last thing on earth she would have had sense enough to think of doing, my dear. On the contrary, she tried to block the door when I informed her that I was leaving for good. She threw herself against the door with her arms spread out like Jesus on a cross but I was possessed with a superhuman power and I flung the door open and she fell to the floor and Moppet tried to follow me into the street.”

  Again her voice became inaudible. I was afraid to look at her, it was so icy cold in the room.

  At last I took hold of her hand.

  “There is a parallel to my departure from Thelma, you know, and to my own flight from my mother on West Eleventh when she fell on the street and was arrested as drunk.”

  “Exactly, a parallel, yes, and that is why you are here and I am here in this icy room together. We are a pair of monsters by the same edict of law. There is a difference, though. You have alternatives to it, one of which you’ll accept. I mean you won’t stay here long.”

  “Do you mean you plan to evict me?”

  “No, heavens, no. Evict you I would never. However I do know your nature. You are influenced by Mars with Venus rising. All signs portend that you will voluntarily move back into the world outside.”

  “Moise, that is your suggestion to me but not my impulse, you know.”

  “Possibly not at this moment but other moments will come. And so will another person. Your nature is”

  “What?”

  “Evanescent, you’re evanescent by nature. Infinitely variable as the snake of the Nile, my child.”

  (I then took up a Blue Jay and began writing these things down. And a number of things that preceded. I don’t know how long it took me but when I’d stopped writing the atmosphere of the room was colder and darker. You know, it is not quite clear to me how much of this story is written in Blue Jays, how much on laundry cardboards and how much on rejection slips and the envelopes they came in, but a great deal has certainly been written, so much that I hardly dare to believe that it can ever be assembled into anything like what could be described as even an ordered anarchy, that detestable phrase which I can’t seem to avoid.)

  Moise is now talking again.

  “I suppose I ought to get an animal as a companion very soon now.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes, one needs some companionship in the end.”

  “You mean that I won’t do?”

  “Temporarily only. Don’t make me keep repeating my totally accurate analysis of your nature.”

  In her voice there was a shrillness, almost a shrewishness, that reminded me of how little we can depend on the generally accepted idea that people in the same boat are good boat partners. Or that sharing the bread of desperation, succumbing to the same terminal illness in the company of each other, is bound to prov
ide some comfort. Or was she

  I started to say “acting again” but had she ever deliberately put on a performance of anything but Moise which was not a performance since it was being entirely herself. No need for a question mark there.

  “Nothing in the world’s that totally accurate, Mo.”

  “How dare you contract my name to Mo. What are you up to, you meretricious little—faugh!”

  Yes, she did say “faugh,” that much outdated utterance of disgust, so unsuitable to her vocabulary, Moise being, in her way, such a very “now” person. And the way she said it has compelled me to use the despised mark of punctuation which I trust hasn’t appeared in this chronicle up till now, meaning then.

  “Nothing’s totally accurate in your world but mine is now more simplistic. Simplistic to the ultimate degree of — Oh, I didn’t tell you that my reproachful friend enclosed a snapshot she’d taken of my mother emerging from her midtown quarters to make her telephone rounds without little Moppet. Here it is, look at it and inwardly digest it if you can, I couldn’t. She looks like a mummy just unveiled from a sarcophagus, and in her youth”

  I looked at the snapshot and couldn’t imagine the youth of Moise’s mother.

  “In her youth my mother had great beauty, or the illusion which is superior to it. She had hopes, once, when young, of a career on the stage, but hopes go astray like plans of, and so forth.”

  “Did she ever make an appearance on the stage?”

  “Oh, that she did, as sure as the Actress Invicta has appeared on stage as regularly as a comet which astronomers know will reappear in the sky at intervals almost as predictable as if the sky is just a big timepiece. Which maybe it is. Isn’t that a shuddering thought?”

  “Yes, Moise, the sky, when I looked at it last night from the roof of the warehouse, did give me violent shivers. It was the opposite of a companion.”

  She apparently only picked up the word “companion.”

  “I’m glad you agree I should have an animal as a companion, but it has to be resourceful. It will have to scavenge because I can’t provide for a living soul in the world and animals have souls.”

  “How about a cat?”

  “What about a cat?”

  “I’ve discovered the warehouse is full of cats and probably also kittens as well as rats. I can go back there tonight and catch you a whole bagful of kittens and you can make a selection and I will return the others unless you want the whole lot.”

  “One will suffice,” said Moise, “but pick it out carefully for me.”

  “Well, I can pick it out for size and color but I’m not sure I can tell if it is resourceful or not.”

  “It has to have the capacity to scavenge.”

  “I think that capacity is born and bred into the bones of most cats.”

  “Well, now, let’s see, it is late January and if you brought me a kitten, it would be influenced by the”

  Abruptly she started to move in a spastic fashion and I snatched up the tongue depressor, thinking that she was going into a seizure.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, no,” she cried out when I pressed the wooden spoon against her mouth. “I am not having a fit, you can see I’m not working since I have nothing to work with. It is just so goddam frozen-over as Greenland’s mountains in this world without reason.”

  “I’m sure it’s going to get warmer before it gets colder.”

  “Because it couldn’t get colder.”

  “No, because you will have a warm cat-companion from the warehouse.”

  “So you say and I’m supposed to believe you.”

  “I’ve never lied to you, Moise.”

  “Everyone always lies to the dying,” she whispered.

  “The living, perhaps, are inclined to lie to the dying but the dying don’t lie to the dying.”

  “Try to make some sense,” she said, “we must try to make some sense.”

  Moise then lifted a long, fragile hand to my face.

  “Love, your chin is bristly, you need a shave, and you mustn’t neglect your appearance even here.”

  “I came without a razor.”

  “I once had a razor to shave my pubic hair,” she remarked dreamily. “You know, I had a certain vanity about my vaginal entrance and I used to keep it hairless as a child’s. I’ve never been fucked, you know, except in the mouth, not due to aversion to the male organ nor puritanical scruples but because I have a militant attitude about the greatest world problem outside of my room, which is an excess of people, population increasing two million a year in this country alone, and probably billions elsewhere.”

  “I’ve always admired it.”

  “The excess of people?”

  “No, no, I meant your vaginal orifice, Moise!”

  “Oh, but the razor rusted. I don’t shave my pubic hair anymore.”

  ‘‘But the pubic hair is so light and downy that your unviolated entrance is quite visible when you don’t cross your legs.”

  “So much for the lips of my vagina,” she said, “but I can’t accept the image of you with a beard.”

  “Neither can I but I made a hasty departure without”

  “Without living equipment except yourself, and I would say you are much better off without it.”

  “But it was so warm with its fever in bed. I have no bitterness toward it, although I know that second love of my life was mostly a creature of self-induced delusion.”

  She sighed.

  “I have little time for friends in my life now, and less for acquaintances, and for enemies, none at all.”

  (If I’m kept on here, along with the warehouse cat, and it continues this way for a month or so, I wonder if I won’t start writing down “quoth Moise” instead of “Moise says.” I have a feeling that as her drift toward terminal magic goes on she will start “quothing” instead of speaking, like that raven of Poe’s: I can’t recall another poet who employed the word “quoth” instead of “said,” and I found myself, at this point, drifting into vagrant thoughts about Poe, as read and written about. I remembered that he’s reputed to have had no love in his life except for his sister and fantasies such as Lenore and Annabel Lee and Helen in a niche who sailed a thousand ships and probably never shit. And I remember he died on election day in Baltimore, or collapsed on that day, and has ascended to quoth beyond his mortal sorrows and immortal works unquoth. And then my thoughts wander toward the good gray poet Whitman who was probably scared but who dared to celebrate our love and live oaks growing in Louisiana, where he claimed to have had a woman and illegitimate offspring, but scholars have never been able to substantiate any truth in either, and so he is stuck with that horse-car conductor in Washington and the beautiful wounded youths he nursed and comforted in Civil War hospitals. And his Calamus poems that shocked the delicate Southerner Lanier into describing Whitman’s poetry as a “barbaric yelp above the rooftops of the world,” and why not yelp barbarously over the rooftops of this world instead of playing a flute in Philadelphia, Mister Sidney Lanier? I love you, too: the Marshes of Glynn are exactly as you described them and you wrote a very beautiful line about the latitude of the horizon being so like the tolerance of good men.)

  She is speaking again about the cat-companion.

  “And the advantage of a warehouse cat is that when it’s hungry, it will not look to me for”

  “Sustenance, no, it wouldn’t.”

  “Unless, very large and demented by hunger, it looked at my bare feet and arms as edible objects.”

  I laughed as I thought there was intentional humor in this macabre thought. Moise has always claimed to lack humor, but I’ve not believed that she lacked this quality which, without which, she could not have survived in her “room.”

  “Moise, you said let’s make sense, so let’s do make it.”

  “Sense is exactly what I’m trying to make. I’ve heard of or read of recluse persons confined with pets who devoured the recluse when the recluse no longer provided for them with anything but his own fles
h, living or dead. That end to my existence would be such a scandal that it would obliterate all memory of my work. And so I want you to promise me that when this promised cat-companion has come to stay here, if it has no better sense, you’ll drop in now and then, after you have discovered your third love, and that you’ll remind me at a suitable point to find a new home for the cat, no, I couldn’t find one, you’d have to take it home with your new love.”

  “At what point would that supposition?”

  “When you visit me for the last time and find me incapable of giving it adequate care.”

  “Yes, I will, I promise.”

  There was a motionless but restive feeling between us now. We were talking to be talking about something, a giddy sort of talk that people streak into when any discussion must serve to ward off desperation a short while longer.

  But that while had run its course now. We’d fallen silent except for chattering teeth, and stayed in that silence until I noticed that the candle placed on the pale blue saucer had not been lighted and said, “Moise, the candle, you didn’t light it.”

  “Oh, merciful savior, no. I’m sorry, child, I’ll light it.”

  Both of us breathed long relieved sighs as she lighted the aromatic candle in the saucer, and the miracle of its glow and the tender emanation of its scent gave us both, I believe, the sense of receiving the sacrament from a saintly old priest.

  Under its spell we were as if hypnotized for a while. When she spoke again it was about a piece of hotel stationery that she had picked up among the literary properties on the street.

  “This isn’t your handwriting.”

  I took it from her hand and saw that it bore the name of an uptown hotel and then I knew it was the piece of hotel stationery that the derelict playwright began to write on last night when I left him alone for my ascent to the roof.

  Beneath the hotel’s name and cabalistic insignia there were five stanzas of rhymed verse which would have been illegible if not written in such large capital letters. The poem was titled Cyclops eye and was signed by the derelict playwright with yesterday’s date beneath the signature.