As it turned out, I did not make them a good man at all. I managed to go to college four years without acquiring a single honor. When the annual came out, there was nothing under my picture but the letters ???—which was appropriate since I had spent the four years propped on the front porch of the fraternity house, bemused and dreaming, watching the sun shine through the Spanish moss, lost in the mystery of finding myself alive at such a time and place—and next to ??? my character summary: “Quiet but a sly sense of humor.” Boylan Bass of Bastrop turned out to be no less a disappointment. He was a tall farm boy with a long neck and an Adam’s apple who took pharmacy and for four years said not a word and was not known even to his fraternity brothers. His character line was: “A good friend.”
Walter is at ease again. He turns away from the window and once more stands over me and inclines his narrow hollowed-out temple.
“You know most of the krewe, don’t you?”
“Yes. As a matter of fact I still belong—”
“It’s the same bunch that go down to Tigre au Chenier. Why didn’t you come down last month?”
“I really don’t like to hunt much.”
Walter seems to spy something on the table. He leans over and runs a thumb along the grain. “Just look at that wood. It’s all one piece, by God.” Since his engagement, I have noticed that Walter has begun to take a proprietary interest in the house, tapping on walls, measuring floorboards, hefting vases. He straightens up. “I don’t know what’s gotten into you. All I can figure is that you’ve got me on your list.”
“It’s not that.”
“What is it then?”
“What is what?”
“Why in the hell don’t you give me a call sometime?”
“What would we talk about?” I say in our sour-senseless style of ten years ago.
Walter gives my shoulder a hard squeeze. “I’d forgotten what a rare turd you are. No, you’re right. What would we talk about,” says Walter elegiacally. “Oh Lord. What’s wrong with the goddamn world, Binx?”
“I am not sure. But something occurred to me this morning. I was sitting on the bus—”
“What do you do with yourself out there in Gentilly?” People often ask me what is wrong with the world and also what I do in Gentilly, and I always try to give an answer. The former is an interesting question. I have noticed, however, that no one really wants to listen to an answer.
“Not much. Sell mutual funds to widows and dagos.”
“Is that right?” Walter drops his shoulder and feels the muscle in his back. Squatting down on his heels, he runs an eye along the baseboard calculating the angle of settle.
After the war some of us bought a houseboat on Vermilion Bay near Tigre au Chenier. Walter got everything organized. It was just like him to locate a cook-caretaker living right out there in the swamp and to line up some real boogalee guides. But to me the venture was not a success. It was boring, to tell the truth. Actually there was very little fishing and hunting and a great deal of poker and drinking. Walter liked nothing better than getting out in that swamp on week ends with five or six fellows, quit shaving and play poker around the clock. He really enjoyed it. He would get up groaning from the table at three o’clock in the morning and pour himself a drink and, rubbing his beard, stand looking out into the darkness. “Goddamn, this is all right, isn’t it? Isn’t this a terrific setup, Binx? Tomorrow we’re going to have duck Rochambeau right here. Tell me honestly, have you ever tasted better food at Galatoire’s?” “No, it’s very good, Walter.” “Give me your honest opinion, Binx.” “It’s very good.” He got Jake the caretaker out of trouble once and liked having him around. Jake would sit in close to the poker game. “Jake, what do you think of that fellow over there?” Walter would ask him, nodding toward me or one of the others. He liked to think that Negroes have a sixth sense and that his Negro had an extra good one. Jake would cock his head as if he were fathoming me with his sixth sense. “You got to watch him! That Mister Binx is all right now!” And in some fashion, more extraordinary than a sixth sense, Jake would manage to oblige Walter without disobliging me. The houseboat seemed like a good idea, but as it worked out I became depressed. To tell the truth I like women better. All I could think about in that swamp was how much I’d like to have my hands on Marcia or Linda and be spinning along the Gulf Coast.
To tell the absolute truth, I’ve always been slightly embarrassed in Walter’s company. Whenever I’m with him, I feel the stretch of the old tightrope, the necessity of living up to the friendship of friendships, of cultivating an intimacy beyond words. The fact is we have little to say to each other. There is only this thick sympathetic silence between us. We are comrades, true, but somewhat embarrassed comrades. It is probably my fault. For years now I have had no friends. I spend my entire time working, making money, going to movies and seeking the company of women.
The last time I had friends was eight years ago. When I returned from the Orient and recovered from my wound, I took up with two fellows I thought I should like. I did like them. They were good fellows both. One was an ex-Lieutenant like me, a University of Cal man, a skinny impoverished fellow who liked poetry and roaming around the countryside. The other was a mad eccentric from Valdosta, a regular young Burl Ives with beard and guitar. We thought it would be a good thing to do some hiking, so we struck out from Gatlinburg in the Smokies, headed for Maine on the Appalachian Trail. We were all pretty good drinkers and talkers and we could spiel about women and poetry and Eastern religion in pretty good style. It seemed like a fine idea, sleeping in shelters or under the stars in the cool evergreens, and later hopping freights. In fact this was what I was sure I wanted to do. But in no time at all I became depressed. The times we did have fun, like sitting around a fire or having a time with some girls, I had the feeling they were saying to me: “How about this, Binx? This is really it, isn’t it, boy?”, that they were practically looking up from their girls to say this. For some reason I sank into a deep melancholy. What good fellows they were, I thought, and how much they deserved to be happy. If only I could make them happy. But the beauty of the smoky blue valleys, instead of giving us joy, became heartbreaking. “What’s the matter with you, Binx?” they said at last. “My dear friends,” I said to them. “I will say good-by and wish you well. I think I will go back to New Orleans and live in Gentilly.” And there I have lived ever since, solitary and in wonder, wondering day and night, never a moment without wonder. Now and then my friends stop by, all gotten up as young eccentrics with their beards and bicycles, and down they go into the Quarter to hear some music and find some whores and still I wish them well. As for me, I stay home with Mrs Schexnaydre and turn on TV. Not that I like TV so much, but it doesn’t distract me from the wonder. That is why I can’t go to the trouble they go to. It is distracting, and not for five minutes will I be distracted from the wonder.
4
WALTER OFFERS TO DRIVE Uncle Jules to town. Through the living-room doors I can see my aunt sitting by the fire, temple propped on her fingers. The white light from the sky pours into her upturned face. She opens her eyes and, seeing me, forms a soundless word with her lips.
I find Kate in the ground-level basement, rubbing an iron fireplace. Since Christmas she and Walter have taken to cleaning things, removing a hundred years’ accumulation of paint from old walls and cupboards to expose the cypress and brick underneath. As if to emphasize her sallowness and thinness, she has changed into shirt and jeans. She is as frail as a ten year old, except in her thighs. Sometimes she speaks of her derrière, sticks it out Beale Street style and gives it a slap and this makes me blush because it is a very good one, marvellously ample and mysterious and nothing to joke about.
To my relief she greets me cheerfully. She clasps one leg, rests her cheek on a knee and rubs an iron welt with steel wool. She has the advantage of me, sitting at her ease in a litter of summers past, broken wicker, split croquet balls, rotting hammocks. Now she wipes the welt with solvent; it begins
to turn pale. “Well? Aren’t you supposed to tell me something?”
“Yes, but I forget what it was.”
“Binx Binx. You’re to tell me all sorts of things.”
“That’s true.”
“It will end with me telling you.”
“That would be better.”
“How do you make your way in the world?”
“Is that what you call it? I don’t really know. Last month I made three thousand dollars—less capital gains.”
“How did you get through a war without getting killed?”
“It was not through any doing of yours.”
“Arm anh anh.” It is an old passage between us, more of a joke now than a quarrel. “And how do you appear so reasonable to Mother?”
“I feel reasonable with her.”
“She thinks you’re one of her kind.”
“What kind is that?”
“A proper Bolling. Jules thinks you’re a go-getter. But you don’t fool me.”
“You know.”
“Yes.”
“What kind?”
“You’re like me, but worse. Much worse.”
She is in tolerable good spirits. It is not necessary to pay too much attention to her. I spy the basket-arm of a broken settee. It has a presence about it: the ghost of twenty summers in Feliciana. I perch on a bony spine of wicker and prop hands on knees.
“I remember what I came for. Will you go to Lejiers and watch the parade?”
Kate stretches out a leg to get at her cigarettes. Her ritual of smoking stands her in good stead. She extracts the wadded pack, kneads the warm cellophane, taps a cigarette violently and accurately against her thumbnail, lights it with a Zippo worn smooth and yellow as a pocket watch. Pushing back her shingled hair, she blows out a plume of gray lung smoke and plucks a grain from her tongue. She reminds me of college girls before the war, how they would sit five and six in a convertible, seeming old to me and sullen-silent toward men and toward their own sex, how they would take refuge in their cigarettes: the stripping of cellophane, the clash of Zippos, the rushing plume of lung smoke expelled up in a long hissing sigh.
“Her idea?”
“Yes.”
Kate begins to nod and goes on nodding. “You must have had quite a powwow.”
“Not much of one.”
“You’ve never understood Mother’s dynamics.”
“Her dynamics?”
“What do you suppose she and I talk about?”
“What?”
“You. I’m sick of talking about you.”
Now I do look at her. Her voice has suddenly taken on its “objective” tone. Since she started her social work, Kate has spells of talking frankly in which she recites case histories in a kind of droning scientific voice: “—and all the while it was perfectly obvious that the poor woman had never experienced an orgasm.” “Is such a thing possible!” I would cry and we would shake our heads in the strong sense of our new camaraderie, the camaraderie of a science which is not too objective to pity the follies and ignorance of the world.
There is nothing new in her tack against her stepmother. Nor do I object, to tell the truth. It seems to serve her well enough, this discovery of the possibilities of hatred. She warms under its influence. It serves to make the basement a friendlier place. Her hatred is a consequence of a swing of her dialectic. She has, in the past few months, swung back to her father (the basement is to be a TV room for him). In the beginning she had been her father’s child. Then, as a young girl, the person of her stepmother, this quick, charming and above all intelligent woman, had appeared at a critical time in her rebellion. Her stepmother became for her the rallying point of all those forces which, until then, had been hardly felt as more than formless discontents. If she hadn’t much use for her father’s ways, his dogged good nature, his Catholic unseriousness, his little water closet jokes, his dumbness about his God, the good Lord; the everlasting dumb importuning of her just to be good, to mind the sisters, and to go his way, his dumb way of inner faith and outer good spirits—if she hadn’t much use for this, she hardly knew how little until she found herself in the orbit of this enchanting person. Her stepmother had taken her in charge and set her free. In the older woman, older than a mother and yet something of a sister, she found the blithest gayest fellow rebel and comrade. The world of books and music and art and ideas opened before her. And if later her stepmother was to take alarm at Kate’s political activities—a spiritual rebellion was one thing, the soaring of the spirit beyond the narrow horizons of the parochial and into the lofty regions of Literature and Life; nor was there anything wrong with the girlish socialism of Sarah Lawrence; but political conspiracy here and now in New Orleans with the local dirty necks of the bookshops and a certain oracular type of social worker my aunt knew only too well—that was something else. But even so, now that it was in the past, it was not really so bad. In fact, as time went on, it might even take on the flavor of one’s Studententage. How well I remember, her stepmother told her, the days when we Wagnerians used to hiss old Brahms—O for the rapturous rebellious days of youth. But now it is she, my aunt herself, who falls prey to Kate’s dialectic of hatreds. It was inevitable that Kate should catch up with and “see into” her stepmother, just as she caught up with her father, and that she should, in the same swing of the dialectic, rediscover her father as the authentic Louisiana businessman and, if not go to Mass with him, build him a TV room. It was inevitable that she should give up the Philharmonic upstairs and take up the Gillette Cavalcade in the basement. It is, as I say, all the same to me which parent she presently likes or dislikes. But I am uneasy over the meagerness of her resources. Where will her dialectic carry her now? After Uncle Jules what? Not back to her stepmother, I fear, but into some kind of dead-end where she must become aware of the dialectic. “Hate her then,” I feel like telling her, “and love Jules. But leave it at that. Don’t try another swing.”
I say: “Then you’re not going to the Lejiers.”
She puts her cigarette on a potsherd and goes back to her rubbing.
“And you’re not going to the ball?” I ask.
“No.”
“Don’t you want to see Walter as krewe captain?”
Kate swings around and her eyes go to discs. “Don’t you dare patronize Walter.”
“I wasn’t.”
“Do you think I didn’t see the two of you upstaging him at lunch? What a lovely pair you are.”
“I thought you and I were the pair.”
“You and I are not a pair of any sort.”
I consider this.
“Good day,” says Kate irritably.
5
WE TALK, MY AUNT and I, in our old way of talking, during pauses in the music. She is playing Chopin. She does not play very well; her fingernails click against the keys. But she is playing one of our favorite pieces, the E flat Etude. In recent years I have become suspicious of music. When she comes to a phrase which once united us in a special bond and to which once I opened myself as meltingly as a young girl, I harden myself.
She asks not about Kate but about my mother. My aunt does not really like my mother; yet, considering the circumstances, that my father was a doctor and my mother was his nurse and married him, she likes her as well as she can. She has never said a word against her and in fact goes out of her way to be nice to her. She even says that my father was “shot with luck” to get such a fine girl, by which she means that my father did, in a sense, leave it to luck. All she really holds against my mother, and not really against her but against my father, is my father’s lack of imagination in marrying her. Sometimes I have the feeling myself that who my mother was and who I am depended on the chance selection of a supervisor of nurses in Biloxi. When my father returned from medical school and his surgical residency in Boston to practice with my grandfather in Feliciana Parish, he applied for a nurse. The next day he waited (and I too waited) to see who would come. The door opened and in walked the woman who,
as it turned out, would, if she were not one-legged or downright ugly, be his wife and my mother. My mother is a Catholic, what is called in my aunt’s circle a “devout Catholic,” which is to say only that she is a practicing Catholic since I do not think she is devout. This accounts for the fact that I am, nominally at least, also a Catholic.
After my father’s death my aunt sent me off to prep school; during my years in college I lived in her house. After returning to work in a Biloxi hospital, my mother remarried and now lives on the Gulf Coast where her husband is a Western Auto dealer. I have six half-brothers and sisters named Smith. Sometimes during the summer I drop in at their fishing camp on Bayou des Allemands with my Marcia or my Linda.