A World Lost: A Novel (Port William) Page 4

  This feminine inner circle had of course a masculine outer circle to which Uncle Andrew pertained by marriage and in which he participated (being incapable of silence, let alone deference) by snorts, hoots, spoofs, jokes, and other blasphemies. He was particularly intrigued by the fervent cousinship of the little class that he had wedded, and he loved to enlarge it by addressing as "cud'n" or "cuz" any bootblack, barfly, yardman, panhandler, dishwasher, porter, or janitor he happened to encounter in the presence of his wife and mother-in-law. His favorite name for Aunt Judith was "Miss Judy-pooty," but he also called her "Cud'n Pud'n." Her mother he named "Miz Gotrocks" in mockery of her love of elaborate costume jewelry and big hats, and her little pair of pinch-nose glasses on a silver chain. But he also called her, as occasion required, "Cud'n Mothah" and "Momma-pie." The latter name, because we children picked it up from him, was what everybody in our family came to call her.

  Aunt Judith, as I judge from a set of photographs that used to hang in Momma-pie's bedroom, had been a pretty girl. She was an only child, raised by her divorced mother, who had been an only daughter. Aunt Judith and Momma-pie were a better matched pair than Aunt Judith and Uncle Andrew AuntJudith had grown up in the protective enclosure prescribed by Momma-pie's status and character; Uncle Andrew had grown up in no enclosure that he could get out of. That the two of them married young and in error is plain fact. Why they got married-or, rather, why Uncle Andrew married Aunt Judith-is a question my father puzzled over in considerable exasperation for the rest of his life. He always reverted to the same theory: that Momma-pie had insidiously contrived it. A mantrap had been cunningly set and baited with the perhaps tempting virginity of Aunt Judith - and Uncle Andrew, his mind diverted to other territory, had obliged by inserting his foot. Maybe so.

  Maybe so. If the theory was ever provable - and my father had no proof- the chance is long gone by now. But a story that Mary Penn told me, after I had grown up, suggests at least that Uncle Andrew was not an ecstatic bridegroom. One of Mary's cousins, a schoolmate of Uncle Andrew's, told her that on the night before his wedding Uncle Andrew got drunk and fell into a road ditch. His friends gathered around, trying to help him up.

  'Aw, boys," he said, "just leave me be. When I think of what I've got to lay with tomorrow night, I'd just as soon lay here in this ditch."

  He had seen his fate, and named it, and yet accepted it. Why?

  However their marriage began, whatever its explanation, their unlikenesses were profound. The second mystery of their union was set forth as follows by my mother: "Did your Aunt Judith have so many health problems because your Uncle Andrew drank and ran around with other women, or did your Uncle Andrew drink and run around with other women because your Aunt Judith had so many health problems?" The answer to that question too, assuming that anybody ever knew it, has been long in the grave.

  The question, anyhow, states their condition accurately enough. Aunt Judith did have a lot of health problems, some of which were very painful. Since no doctor ever found a cause or a remedy for most of them, it seems that the cause must have been in her mind, which is to say in her marriage. And perhaps also in her relationship to Momma-pie. My mother remembers that Aunt Judith never said anything without looking at Momma-pie to see if it was all right. But if Aunt Judith lived in some fear of Momma-pie, I am sure that she lived also in surprise, bewilderment, and dismay at Uncle Andrew, whom she nevertheless adored.

  Sometimes Uncle Andrew could be sympathetic and tender with Aunt Judith, sorry for her sufferings, worried about her, anxious to help her solve her problems. Sometimes, unable to meet her demands for attention or sympathy with the required response, he met them instead with derision. Sometimes, I imagine, he was contrite about his offenses against her and wished to do better. But as they both surely had learned beyond unlearning or pretense, the time would invariably come when, under the spell of an impulse, he would fling her away. He would fling her away as a flying swallow flings away its shadow.

  Aunt Judith always asked you for affection before you could give it. For that reason she always needed more affection than she got. She would drain the world of affection, and then, fearing that it had been given only because she had asked for it, she would have to ask for more.

  "Sugah," she would say to whichever of us children had come in sight, "come here and kiss yo' Aunt Judith!" And she was capable of issuing this invitation with the broad hint that, because of her frail health, the grave might claim her before we would have a chance to kiss her again. I am glad to remember that, in spite of everything, I felt a genuine affection for her, especially in the time before Uncle Andrew's death -before fate authenticated her predisposition to woe. In those days she could be a pleasant companion for a small boy, and I remember afternoons when we sat together while she read to me from the evening paper a reporter's serialized account of the movement of a group of soldiers from training camp to troopship to battle. We both became deeply interested in those articles and looked forward to them. I remember how our reading fitted together our interest in the story of the soldiers, our sense of great history unfolding, and our mutual affection and pleasure. And yet when she turned toward me with her need, as sooner or later she always did, it was hard to provide a response satisfactory to either of us. It is hard to give the final kiss of this earthly life over and over again. Mostly I submitted silently to her hugs, kisses, and other attentions, profiting the best I could from that exotic smell of cigarette smoke and perfume that hung about her.

  Her tone of self-reference almost always carried an overtone of selfpity. She asked for pity as she asked for affection -and her demand, as was inevitable in that hopeless emotional economy of hers, always outran the available supply. As she strove forward with her various claims on other people, she more and more destroyed the possibility of a genuine mutuality with anybody. Her need for love isolated and estranged her from everybody who might have loved her, and from everybody who did.

  In her self-centeredness and her constant appeal to others to fulfill her unfulfillable needs, she was like Momma-pie. Both of them, I think, belonged to a lineage of spoiled women. From the time of her divorce, Momma-pie had lived with her expansive pretensions in a small room at the Broadfield Hotel on the income from a moderately good farm that she had never seen except from the road. During her life at the hotel she did nothing for herself except for the light and polite housekeeping of her room. Aunt Judith was a fastidious housekeeper and a good cookshe and Uncle Andrew had never had the money for household helpbut her work always bore the implication of her poor health, and hints were often passed between her and Momma-pie that whatever she did she was not quite able to do.

  The would-be aristocracy of the Hargrave upper crust was, after all, I think, a cruel burden for Aunt Judith and Momma-pie. According to the terms that they accepted and lived by, they were important because they were who they were. That was their axiom. And so there they were, suspended in the ethereal element of their pretension, utterly estranged from the farms and the work from which they lived, hard put to demonstrate their usefulness to much of anybody, and forced to bear the repeated proofs that Uncle Andrew assumed almost nothing that they assumed.

  It is pleasant and useless to wonder what might have become of Aunt Judith if she had married a milder, more tractable man, just as it is pleasant and useless to wonder what might have become of Uncle Andrew if he had married a more robust and self-sustaining woman. Such might- have-beens only renew the notice that Aunt Judith and Uncle Andrew married each other, and in doing so joined snow and fire.

  Uncle Andrew, except that he possessed "aristocratic good looks," could not have been anyone that Aunt Judith ever saw in her girlhood dreams. She must have seen him simply as she wanted to see him: a young man handsome as a prince, who would make her the envy of other girls. She must have imagined herself and him as "a beautiful couple." To Momma-pie - assuming that my father's theory of artful entrapment was correct-he must have seemed "an excellent prospect," good ra
w material in need of polish. If in fact they captured him, then they captured a bull in a henhouse. He was, as undoubtedly he already knew or soon found out, the very reality that their not-altogether-pretended feminine delicacy was least disposed to recognize. And now they were obliged to try to contain him in an enclosure prepared for another kind of creature. He was, whatever else he was, a man of his own time and place. He honored to some extent the conventions of his capture; he was capable of affection, sympathy, and regret. Though his confinement did not exist except when he submitted to it, sometimes he submitted to it. But he could not be held. It was not so much that he resisted or defied or rebelled against his bondage; he simply overflowed it. When he filled to his own fullness, he overflowed his confines as a rising river overflows its banks, making nothing of the boundaries and barriers that stand in its way.

  The three of them made their daily lives, formed and followed their routines, made things ordinary and bearable for themselves. Their strange convergence was not a perpetual crisis. But it was nonetheless hopeless. They were two almost forceless women entangled past untangling with an almost ungentled man. He of course was as spoiled in his way as they were in theirs. They had been spoiled by generations of men who had indulged and promoted their helplessness; he had been spoiled by women who had allowed him to charm them into acceptance of his inborn unstoppability. Aunt Judith and Momma-pie had spoiled him themselves, as I think all the women in his life had done. They were under his spell, as much caught by him as he by them. They could not contain him, but they could not expel him either.

  The best friend he had, I am certain, was my father, who loved him completely. But my father, purposeful and tireless, sober and passionate, in love with his family and his work, true to his obligations, could not have been Uncle Andrew's crony. They could be friends within the terms of brotherhood and partnership, but partly perhaps because he was Uncle Andrew's brother, my father was not wild; the whole budget of Catlett wildness in that generation had been allotted to Uncle Andrew. For cronies, Uncle Andrew had Buster Simms and Yeager Stump.

  In his look and laugh and way of talking, Buster Simms gleefully acknowledged the world's lewdness. He was a freckled, smallish, quickeyed man whose conversation tended to be all in tones of joking, from aggressive to kind. He called Uncle Andrew "Duke." Yeager Stump was a tall, good-looking man of somewhat the same style as Uncle Andrew. Of the three, he was the quietest. You could see in the wrinkly corners of his eyes that he was always waiting to be amused, and was being amused while he waited. Of the three, he was the only one who lived to be old.

  All three felt themselves too straitly confined in marriage, and they escaped into each other's company. Or rather, each other's company was their freedom that, spent or hung over, they allowed themselves to be recaptured out of, as Samson allowed himself to be bound with seven green withes that were never dried.

  "We did everything we thought of," Yeager Stump would say later. "Our only limit was our imagination."

  They called each other "Cud'n Andrew" and "Cud'n Bustah" and "Cud'n Yeagah"- for ordinary use abbreviated to "Cuz"- in endless parody of the female cousinship of Hargrave.

  When they met in their daily comings and goings, they would greet one another with a broad show of camaraderie and affection:

  "Hello, Cuz!"

  "Hello, Cuz!"

  And then they would laugh. Sometimes they started laughing before they had said anything.

  6

  The first apartment that Uncle Andrew and Aunt Judith lived in after they moved to Hargrave had no bathtub. Uncle Andrew loved a bathtub, and so he would sometimes come around to our house after supper to have a soak. That was one of the times when he and I would visit. I would perch on the lid of the thunder jug, as he liked to call it, and he would lie in hot water up to his chin, and we would talk. Or I would just sit and watch him, for in everything he did he fascinated me. Unlike my father, who was in all things thrifty and careful and neat and who bathed vigorously like a man grooming a horse, Uncle Andrew filled the tub full and bathed expansively, as if the tub were an ocean and he a whale. He would bask at length in the hot water, and then he would soap and rinse with a great heaving and sloshing and blowing and making of suds.

  On one such evening, when I must have been about six or seven, I confided to him that I had fallen in love with the older sister of one of my friends. I said that I wanted to get her off by herself somewhere - a lonely back road, say -where we could be unobserved. I was going to say that I would then declare my love. I had given a lot of thought and effort to the planning of this event, but I lacked confidence; I wanted the counsel of experience. But I got no further than that detail about the lonely back road. For a while it looked as though Uncle Andrew might drown in the extremity of his glee.

  'Aw'eah! Aw'eah!" he said as he laughed and whooped and splashed. "Now you're getting right, college! Now you're cooking with gas! You got your mind properly on your business! You going out among 'em!"

  It astonishes me a little yet to realize how characteristically he did not qualify himself. I had spoken as a small boy, and he had responded unreservedly as a man, as himself. I must have loved him almost absolutely to have so confided in him. And was I hurt or disappointed when he received my confidence with such rowdy approval, infusing my shy daydream with a glandular intensity from another vision entirely? Not in the least, as far as I remember. I was bewildered, certainly, but was happy as always to have pleased him and to be carried away on the big stream of his laughter. And now, of course, I am delighted.

  Later, he would quote me to his cronies. Buster Simms would lean to glance in at me where I sat beside Uncle Andrew in the car. "Duke, is he looking at the girls yet? Is he transacting any private business?"

  And Uncle Andrew would declare solemnly, without looking at me, "Why, he's got a girl! And he tells me that his business with her calls for the strictest privacy." And he would go on. Wishing he would stop, I yet listened in fascination, understanding vaguely that they spoke of a destination at which I had not arrived but to which my fare was already paid.

  Thus, though I was as innocent as Adam alone, I became aware of the sexual aura that surrounded Uncle Andrew.

  He was never apart from it. He was always playing to whatever woman was at hand, whether it was Minnie Branch, wearing a pair of Jake's castoff work shoes and with her brood in tow, or Miss Iris Flynn, who was in fact Yeager Stump's girlfriend, or Aunt Roxanna, Grandma's tall and lean oldest sister-anybody, so long as she was a woman. Or rather, he did not play to them; he lived to them, acknowledging them, requiring them to acknowledge him, as inhabitants of the same exuberantly physical and sexual world. How they responded he did not care, so long as they responded, which they invariably did. They scolded, scoffed, huffed, smiled; they reached out to him; they looked straight into his eyes and laughed. Of particular interest to me then, and still, was Uncle Andrew's friendship with Minnie Branch, for of all the people in that overflowing household on the Crayton Place, I think he liked Minnie best. For him, maybe, the female world turned on an axis held at one pole by Aunt Judith and at the other by Minnie Branch -Aunt Judith, with her bred-in dependency, her sometimes helplessness, ill with fright and self regard, childless and forever needy; and Minnie, who was fearless, capable, hardy, fecund, unabashed, without apology or appeal. Minnie could cook and keep house for what amounted to a small hotel, split firewood, butcher a hog, raise a garden, work in the field, shoot a fox, set a hen or wring her neck. She was a large, muscular, humorous, plain-faced woman who wore a pair of steel-rimmed glasses. You could hear her laugh halfway to the back of the farm. I can see her yet with her white hens clustered at her feet, picking up shelled corn; she is leaning back against the weight of the child in her womb, fists on hips, talking and laughing.

  She conceived and birthed as faithfully as a good brood cow, welcomed each newcomer without fuss, prepared without complaint for the next. There was a running joke on this subject that Uncle Andrew carri
ed on with Minnie and Jake.

  "Well, by God, Jake's been at it again! He's as hot as a boy dog!"

  Minnie would throw back her head and laugh: "Haw! Haw!"

  And Jake would grin and shake his head in wonder at himself. "They going to have to do something about me."

  And when Minnie lay down on the bed, in the big, starkly furnished bedroom next to the kitchen, to suffer yet another birth, who would be there, anxiously hovering about, dispensing clean towels and hot water, eagerly bathing the infant who pretty soon appeared, but Aunt Judith and Momma-pie? They had no more to do with Minnie Branch in the ordinary course of their lives than they had to do with the farm. But Minnie's birth pangs drew them like some undeniable music, and their conversation afterward was full of the news of their participation.

  Beyond the obvious reasons, Uncle Andrew liked Minnie, I think, because she made nothing special of him; she did not see him as anything unexpected. She liked him wholly and asked for nothing. He was comfortable with her.

  One overcast afternoon, I remember, Uncle Andrew and I were sitting in Minnie Branch's kitchen, talking with Minnie and another woman I knew only as Mrs. Partlet. The older children and the hands, one of whom at that time was jockey Partlet, Mrs. Partlet's husband, had been fed their dinner long ago and had gone back to the field. The firebox of the cooking range was almost cold. Uncle Andrew and I were there perhaps just because Uncle Andrew enjoyed being there and did not particularly need to be anyplace else.

  Minnie sat in a big rocking chair between the stove and the door into the next room. She was rocking slowly back and forth, with Coreen, her then-youngest, lying asleep in the crook of her arm. The second youngest, Beureen, was asleep in a crib just beyond the door. Angeleen, the third youngest, was standing quietly at Minnie's knee, looking as though she would like to climb into her lap. At the moment, Minnie was ignoring other people's wants. She had a chew of tobacco tucked into her cheek and was taking her usual big part in the conversation. Now and then she would turn her head and spit several feet into the ash bucket behind the stove. Mrs. Partlet, a plump, pretty woman, sat in a straight chair by the window. Her hands lay in her lap, and as the talk went on she fiddled with her fingers. I sat at the end of the table nearest the stove in one of the dozen or so straight chairs, no two of which were the same. Uncle Andrew sat at the other end, by the back door, his chair tilted onto its hind legs, his left arm lying along the edge of the table, his right hand in his pocket. Between the stove and the window where Mrs. Partlet was sitting, a large washtub full of soaking diapers sat on the floor.