The Moviegoer (17 page)

Still she puts me off. I am only doing a little fishing and it is like any other day, she as much as says to me, so let us not make anything remarkable out of it. She veers away from intimacy. I marvel at her sure instinct for the ordinary. But perhaps she knows what she is doing.

“I
wish
I had known you were going to get up so early,” she says indignantly. “You could have gone over to the Rigolets with Roy and Kinsey. The reds are running.”

“I saw them.”

“Why didn't you go!”—in the ultimate measure of astonishment.

“You know I don't like to fish.”

“I had another rod!”

“It's just as well.”

“That's true,” she says after a while. “You never did. You're just like your father.” She gives me a swift look, which is unusual for her. “I noticed last night how much you favor him.” She casts again and again holds still.

“He didn't like to fish?”

“He thought he did!”

I stretch out at full length, prop my head on a two-by-four. It is possible to squint into the rising sun and at the same time see my mother spangled in rainbows. A crab spider has built his web across a finger of the bayou and the strands seem to spin in the sunlight.

“But he didn't really?”

“Unh un—” she says, dragging it out to make up for her inattention. Every now and then she wedges the rod between her stomach and the rail and gives her nose a good wringing.

“Why didn't he?”

“Because he didn't. He would say he did. And once he did! I remember one day we went down Little Bayou Sara. He had been sick and Dr Wills told him to work in the morning and take off in the afternoons and take up fishing or an interesting hobby. It was the prettiest day, I remember, and we found a hole under a fallen willow—a good place for
sac au lait
if ever I saw one. So I said, go ahead, drop your line right there. Through the
tree?
he said. He thought it was a lot of humbug—he wasn't much of a fisherman; Dr Wills and Judge Anse were big hunters and fishermen and he pretended he liked it but he didn't. So I said, go ahead, right down through the leaves—that's the way you catch
sac au lait.
I be John Brown if he didn't pull up the fattest finest
sac au lait
you ever saw. He couldn't believe his eyes. Oh he got himself all wound up about it. Now isn't this an ideal spot, he would say over and over again, and: Look at such and such a tree over there, look how the sunshine catches the water in such and such a way—we'll have to come back tomorrow and the next day and all summer—that's all we have to do!” My mother gives her rod a great spasming jerk, reels in quickly and frowns at the mangled shrimp. “Do you see what that scoun'l beast—! Do you know that that ain't anything in the world but some old hardhead sitting right on the bottom.”

“Did he go back the next day?”

“Th. No indeed. No, in, deed,” she says, carving three cubes of shrimp. Again she lays back her arm. The shrimp gyrates and Mother holds still. “What do you think he says when I mention
sac au lait
the next morning?”

“What?”

“‘Oh no. Oh no. You go ahead.' And off he goes on his famous walk.”

“Walk?”

“Up the levee. Five miles, ten miles, fifteen miles. Winter or summer. I went with him one Christmas morning I remember. Mile after mile and all of it just the same. Same old brown levee in front, brown river on one side, brown fields on the other. So when he got about a half a mile ahead of me, I said, shoot. What am I doing out here humping along for all I'm worth when all we going to do is turn around and hump on back? So I said, good-by, Mister, I'm going home—you can walk all the way to Natchez if you want to.” It is my mother's way to see life, past and present, in terms of a standard comic exaggeration. If she had spent four years in Buchenwald, she would recollect it so: “So I said to him: listen, Mister, if you think I'm going to eat this stuff, you've got another think coming.”

The boards of the dock, warming in the sun, begin to give off a piney-winey smell. The last tendril of ground fog burns away, leaving the water black as tea. The tree is solitary and mournful, a poor thing after all. Across the bayou the egret humps over, as peaked and disheveled as a buzzard.

“Was he a good husband?” Sometimes I try, not too seriously, to shake her loose from her elected career of the commonplace. But her gyroscope always holds her on course.

“Good? Well I'll tell you one thing—he was a good walker!”

“Was he a good doctor?”

“Was he! And what hands! If anyone ever had the hands of a surgeon, he did.” My mother's recollection of my father is storied and of a piece. It is not him she remembers but an old emblem of him. But now something occurs to her. “He was smart, but he didn't know it all! I taught him a thing or two once and I can tell you he thanked me for it.”

“What was that?”

“He had lost thirty pounds. He wasn't sick—he just couldn't keep anything down. Dr Wills said it was amoeba (that year he thought everything was amoeba; another year it was endometritis and between you and me he took out just about every uterus in Feliciana Parish). At the breakfast table when Mercer brought in his eggs and grits, he would just sit there looking at it, white as a sheet. Me, it was all I could do not to eat, my breakfast and his. He'd put a mouthful of grits in his mouth and chew and chew and he just couldn't swallow it. So one day I got an idea. I said listen: you sat up all night reading a book, didn't you? Yes, I did, he said, what of it? You enjoyed it, didn't you? Yes, I did. So I said: all right. Then we'll read it. The next morning I told Mercer to go on about his business. I had my breakfast early and I made his and brought it to him right there in his bed. I got his book. I remember it—it was a book called
The Greene Murder Case.
Everybody in the family read it. I began to read and he began to listen, and while I read, I fed him. I told him, I said, you can eat, and I fed him. I put the food in his mouth and he ate it. I fed him for six months and he gained twenty five pounds. And he went back to work. Even when he ate by himself downstairs, I had to read to him. He would get downright mad at me if I stopped. ‘Well go on!' he would say.”

I sit up and shade my eyes to see her.

Mother wrings her nose. “It was because—”

“Because of what?” I spit over into the water. The spit unwinds like a string.

She leans on the rail and gazes down into the tea-colored bayou. “It was like he thought eating was not—
important
enough. You see, with your father, everything, every second had to be—”

“Be what, Mother?”

This time she gives a real French shrug. “I don't know. Something.”

“What was wrong with him?”

“He was overwrought,” she replies at once and in her regular mama-bee drone and again my father disappears into the old emblem. I can hear echoes of my grandfather and grandmother and Aunt Emily, echoes of porch talk on the long summer evenings when affairs were settled, mysteries solved, the unnamed named. My mother never got used to our porch talk with its peculiar license. When someone made a spiel, one of our somber epic porch spiels, she would strain forward in the dark, trying to make out the face of the speaker and judge whether he meant to be taken as somberly as he sounded. As a Bolling in Feliciana Parish, I became accustomed to sitting on the porch in the dark and talking of the size of the universe and the treachery of men; as a Smith on the Gulf Coast I have become accustomed to eating crabs and drinking beer under a hundred and fifty watt bulb—and one is as pleasant a way as the other of passing a summer night.

“How was he overwrought?”

She plucks the hook clean, picks up a pink cube, pushes the barb through, out, and in again. Her wrists are rounded, not like a young girl's but by a deposit of hard fat.

“It was his psychological make-up.”

Yes, it is true. We used to talk quite a bit about psychological make-ups and the effect of glands on our dismal dark behavior. Strangely, my mother sounds more like my aunt than my aunt herself. Aunt Emily no longer talks of psychological make-ups.

“His nervous system was like a high-powered radio. Do you know what happens if you turn up the volume and tune into WWL?”

“Yes,” I say, unspeakably depressed by the recollection of the sad little analogies doctors like to use. “You mean he wasn't really cut out to be an ordinary doctor, he really should have been in research.”

“That's right!” My mother looks over in surprise, but not much surprise, then sends her lead off like a shot. “Now Mister—!” she addresses an unknown fish and when he does not respond, falls to musing. “It's peculiar though. You're so much like your father and yet so different. You know, you've got a little of my papa in you—you're easy-going and you like to eat and you like the girls.”

“I don't like to fish.”

“You're too lazy, if you ask me. Anyhow, Papa was not a fisherman, as I have told you before. He owned a fleet of trawlers at Golden Meadow. But did he love pretty girls. Till his dying day.”

“Does it last that long?”

“Anh anh anh anh anh!” In the scandal of it, Mother presses her chin into her throat, but she does not leave off watching her float. “Don't you get risque with me! This is your mother you're talking to and not one of your little hotsy-totsies.”

“Hotsy-totsies!”

“Yes.”

“Don't you like Sharon?”

“Why yes. But she's not the one for you.” For years my mother has thrown it out as a kind of proverb that I should marry Kate Cutrer, though actually she has also made an emblem out of Kate and does not know her at all. “But do you know a funny thing?”

“What?”

“It's not you but Mathilde who is moody like your father. Sister Regina says she is another Alice Eberle.”

“Who is Alice Eberle?”

“You know, the Biloxi girl who won the audition with Horace Heidt and His Musical Knights.”

“Oh.”

Mother trills in her throat with the old music. I squint up at her through the rainbows.

“But when he got sick the next time, I couldn't help him.”

“Why not?”

She smiles. “He said my treatment was like horse serum: you can only use it once.”

“What did happen?”

“The war came.”

“That helped?”

“He helped himself. He had been in bed for a month, up in your room—you were off at school. He wouldn't go to the clinic, he wouldn't eat, he wouldn't go fishing, he wouldn't read. He'd just lie there and watch the ceiling fan. Once in a while he would walk down to the Chinaman's at night and eat a po-boy. That was the only way he could eat—walk down to the Chinaman's at midnight and eat a po-boy. That morning I left him upstairs as usual. I sent Mercer up with his paper and his tray and called Clarence Saunders. Ten minutes later I look up and here he comes down the steps, all dressed up. He sits himself down at the dining room table as if nothing had happened, orders breakfast and eats enough to kill a horse—all the while reading his paper and not even knowing he was eating. I ask him what has happened. What has happened! Why, Germany has invaded Poland, and England and France have declared war! I'm here to tell you that in thirty minutes he had eaten his breakfast, packed a suitcase and gone to New Orleans.”

“What for?”

“To see the Canadian consul.”

“Yes, I remember him going to Windsor, Ontario.”

“That was two months later. He gained thirty pounds in two months.”

“What was he so excited about?”

“He knew what it meant! He told us all at supper: this is it. We're going to be in it sooner or later. We should be in it now. And I'm not waiting. They were all so proud of him—and especially Miz Cutrer. And when he came home that spring in his blue uniform and the gold wings of a flight surgeon, I swear he was the best looking man I ever saw in my life. And so—cute! We had the best time.”

Sure he was cute. He had found a way to do both: to please them and please himself. To leave. To do what he wanted to do and save old England doing it. And perhaps even carry off the grandest coup of all: to die. To win the big prize for them and for himself (but not even he dreamed he would succeed not only in dying but in dying in Crete in the wine dark sea).

“Then before that he was lazy too.”

“He was not!”

“It is not laziness, Mother. Partly but not all. I'll tell you a strange thing. During the war a bad thing happened to me. We were retreating from the Chongchon River. We had stopped the Chinese by setting fire to the grass with tracer bullets. What was left of a Ranger company was supposed to be right behind us. Or rather we thought we were retreating, because we got ambushed on the line of retreat and had to back off and head west. I was supposed to go back to the crossroad and tell the Ranger company about the change. I got back there and waited half an hour and got so cold I went to sleep. When I woke up it was daylight.”

“And you didn't know whether the Rangers had come by or not?”

“That wasn't it. For a long time I couldn't remember anything. All I knew was that something was terribly wrong.”

“Had the Rangers gone by during the night?” asks my mother, smiling and confident that I had played a creditable role.

“Well no, but that's not—”

“What happened to them?”

“They got cut off.”

“You mean they were all killed?”

“There wasn't much left to them in the first place.”

“What a terrible thing. We'll never know what you boys went through. But at least your conscience was clear.”

“It was not my conscience that bothered me. What I am trying to tell you is that nothing seemed worth doing except something I couldn't even remember. If somebody had come up to me and said: if you will forget your preoccupation for forty minutes and get to work, I can assure you that you will find the cure of cancer and compose the greatest of all symphonies—I wouldn't have been interested. Do you know why? Because it wasn't good enough for me.”