A Tidewater Morning (9 page)

“That would be wonderful,” I began. I had for a moment the oddest stir of hope, a flutter in my chest. Then it vanished. “I don’t think I believe in all that. I mean the woman getting well—maybe she did. But the salvation part, I really don’t think so. I think Jesus is okay, but—” I broke off.

“Den how come you go to church?”

“Well, you know, we don’t go to church all that regularly. I haven’t been to Sunday school in two or three months, or church either.”

“Den how come yo’ daddy goes?”

“I’ve told you all that before, Flo. Papa goes because of tradition and because he loves the beauty of the Scriptures and the ethical values of Christianity. He once told me that he went and made me go because I might absorb some of the teachings of Christ having to do with justice. Mostly it’s for me, I guess.”

“Does yo’ daddy
believe,
you think, Paul? Believe in de Holy Spirit an’ de power of de blood and prayer?”

I hesitated for a long time, then said: “I don’t know, Flo. I don’t think so. He gets awfully mad at religion sometimes. He says he’s a skeptic.” After another pause, I went on: “Once Papa told me that whenever there was a long prayer in church he spoke to himself lines from Rilke, who is a German poet.”

In the shadows I sensed Florence slowly shaking her head back and forth. “Po-et Dat is some sad shame.” In a moment she said softly: “I think I’ll go upstairs and see how Miss Adelaide is. I ain’t goin’ to be but a minute. When I gits back I want you to go to bed. Ain’t dis Sunday mornin'? Ain’t you got yo’ paper route?”

“Yes.”

“What time?”

“Five o’clock,” I replied.

“Je
-sus,
dat’s what I thought! Now you got to git to bed right away, you hear me?”

Between the kitchen and the dining room there was another alcove, somewhat larger than the first, which was my mother’s music room. Something compelled me to go there, and I went into the room just as I heard Florence’s feet climbing the stairs above me. I turned on the gooseneck lamp that rested on the upright piano; the little sanctum was aglow with a soft bronze light that illuminated this place treasured by my mother above all other places in the house, or indeed anywhere; shelf upon shelf of bound sheet music, the walls lower down lined with shellac records in albums whose spines bore titles in bright or fading shades of gold. These she and my father played on a fancy cabinet model Atwater Kent electric phonograph, “superheterodyne,” advanced in sound for the day but tending toward fogginess unless the steel needle was changed after a dozen or so discs. There was to me no corny iconolatry in the plaster busts of Schubert, of Beethoven, of Brahms; if they were the saints my mother worshiped, their presence was manifestly justified. Atop the piano there were photographs, framed, inscribed. These she had acquired as others collect pictures of Hollywood divinities.
Für Adelaide,
read one, above chicken scratches in German, signed
Gustav Mahler,
a scholarly-looking man with a pleasant, slightly insane gleam. Another:
To Adelaide Whitehurst, with kindest regards, Ernestine Schumann-Heink.
Arturo Toscanini, fierce. Fritz Kreisler, gemütlich. Lotte Lehmann, fatuously regal. One picture with no inscription save the place and year—Vienna, 1904—always held my gaze, since it showed my young mother herself in a garland of brown braids, with eyeglasses and dressed in a bosomy high-collared blouse and long pleated skirt, smiling a bright-toothed smile that was clearly a smile of sheer infatuation for the whiskered old satyr against whose paunch she leaned—her voice teacher, one Herr “Rudi” Reichardt. It was he who, one sweet and priceless day over thirty years before, had introduced her to Mahler. Squinting down, I saw that the sheet of music on the piano was from Schubert’s
Winterreise.
I was still only half-educated, musically speaking. I had not yet really made myself familiar with the songs my mother sang, the seemingly limitless outpouring of
Lieder
by Schubert and Schumann and Brahms and a dozen others that she had let spring forth from that little room, in her lovely, clear contralto, a sound that always seemed to me to possess an actual coloration, opalescent, like pearl. They all flowed in and out of one another, these unfathomable songs; I could name just a few of them. They were linked together only by a voice that gave them a sometimes festive, sometimes somber tenderness. Few people in the village cared for such music or listened to it seriously; even so, no one considered my mother odd or freakish, and in fact once in a while children would gather along the fence of our backyard, along with a few grown-ups, and listen to her, clapping when she finished with mild but real appreciation for these joyous and plaintive tunes, these alien lyrics so far removed from the aesthetic of the
Lucky Strike Program
and Kay Kyser’s
Kollege of Musical Knowledge,
Guy Lombardo, and other porridge oozing from the radio. But her music, and therefore her chief pleasure in life, had been dealt a fearful blow a couple of years before. One afternoon she tripped and fell in one of her flower beds. It should have been a harmless tumble but it wasn't; the cancer had begun to riddle her bones, and her leg was broken beyond any hope of mending. And so the brace she was compelled to put on, a gruesome contraption of steel and leather straps that she had to wear when standing or walking, or when she was propped up at a right angle while sitting, kept her thereafter from playing the piano at all. This caused her wicked distress, but it didn’t entirely daunt her. She was so indefatigably wed to her songs that often she simply sang without accompaniment; harmony was lost but the fine voice carried on, weakening and fading away only as her body itself was overcome by feebleness and she could walk no more. One of my last memories of her before she became bedridden for good was of her standing in her garden, amid the vivid May blooms and darting hummingbirds and the fidget of bees. Her back was to me, for a while she was motionless, and then she took one or two hobbled steps with her brace and cane. At once, from the way she bowed her head, I knew she was going to sing. There was an indrawn breath, a faltering first note, and I heard her voice rise in clear, untroubled, hymnal melody.

Ist auf deinem Psalter,
Vater der Lie-be .
. .

That day I moved away quickly back into the house before the passage ended. I wanted to shut out all impression of her illness—the stooped back, the brace, the cane—so that my mind, for a moment at least, might be filled with the resonance of the voice and its awesome, rhapsodic praise.

I heard someone at the front door and immediately sensed—from the exact, familiar number of nervous taps at the screen—that it was Dr. Beecroft. I went through the living room and let him in. I smelled an odor like iodine from the sagging seersucker suit even before the porch light beamed down on the bald head, the sweating brow, thick spectacles framing worried eyes that, catching sight of me, quickly tried to feign a blink of nonchalance. Some metal things in his black bag made clinks; my mind visualized crooked forceps, scissors, lances, instruments of bloodletting. “Hello, son,” came the amiable voice, “up this hour?” I didn’t answer, could not answer, for just as the doctor entered the hallway there was a commotion in my mother’s bedroom above. We heard the noise of shuffling feet, a thumping, raised voices. The doctor hurried through the living room and up the stairs while I followed, aware that the sound, or sounds, my mother was making was no longer a scream but a choked ebb and flow of breath, as if screaming had been so bottled up by exhaustion that all that could emanate from the core of her torment was a reedy and strengthless wail. Yet somehow she managed to form words, and the words I heard were: “Jeff, Jeff! Hold me!” And when we reached the top of the stairs I was able to gaze into the room and see that my father was lifting her into his arms.
They used to argue so and bitch at each other,
I thought.
They never much touched each other in a loving way.
Florence and Miss Slocum stood by silently, watching. My father raised up the frail frame and enfolded it against his breast. His head, inclined forward, and the back of his soaked shirt prevented me from seeing my mother’s face from the door where I halted, quivering; the electric fan’s spindly vibration drowned out his whispers. I thought: so much arguing. Not howling and fighting like the Rowes and the Hales. But arguing, more or less politely.

I’ve withheld saying this for a long time, Addy, but let me say it now, I think you’re a damnable snob.

Don’t raise your voice like that in front of Paul
—
Paul, son, kindly go outside. No, let me continue. You call Harry Bladen a drunk and you don’t like his manners, and I would be the first to concede that he has perhaps too ready a penchant for the bottle. But he is one of the few enlightened co-workers I have in that mausoleum where I earn our daily bread whom I can talk to on a reasonable level of intelligence, one of the few people indeed in this entire community
—
yourself excluded, of course
—
who may have read anything but a technical book, cared for any painting above the level of Norman Rockwell, who indeed on his own initiative has studied some formal philosophy, as I have done. If he is slightly ill-mannered around you, as you think he is
—
though I believe this is a figment of your imagination
—
it may be that he senses in you the dyed-in-the-wool reactionary you are, unable after all these years to escape your breeding among those money-obsessed, almighty-dollar-oriented northern cormorants who are your family and their friends. Your Paleozoic brother-in-law, for example, who
—

Stop that! Don’t talk about my family! I will not be castigated or sneered at by you or Harry Bladen or anyone else for so foolish a reason as that I expressed my distaste for Democratic politics and the works of Franklin D. Roosevelt Millions of other people share my views. But if you and I were simply divided over politics, there would be no problem It’s this whole community, these dull-as-dishwater people, who couldn’t be nicer, couldn’t be more bighearted, you understand, but whom I have nothing in common with whatsoever. They’ve helped drive the wedge between us. For years I’ve tried to understand southerners, to get along with them, but I’ve been finally defeated by a kind of provinciality and cultural blindness unequaled anywhere in the world Isn’t it H. L. Mencken, whom you so idolize, who calls the South, correctly, the Sahara of the Bozart? If I didn’t have my music I’d go insane! You can’t imagine the number of times I’ve wished I’d never left the North, gone to New York—

You had your chance, my dear. You came very close to marrying that swank fellow from Pittsburgh, right from your neck of the woods. Why didn’t you go ahead? He would have taken you out of this cultural desert

He just might have! If I’d married Charlie Winslow I’m certain we’d have traveled somewhere at least occasionally. I’m sure he would have taken me to Paris, and I would have seen Vienna again I might have even had one Chanel gown
—
nothing really extravagant, you understand, just something that a woman might like to wear once in her lifetime. Would this be asking
—

Then I’m sorry you settled for so little, Adelaide. I never promised you riches. You knew that wasn’t my style. The compact we made was for a home and love and companionship. I would be incapable of lavishing luxury on you, or myself, even if I cared to accumulate the money to make it possible. I’ve always admired much in you. But I can’t admire your inability to understand that my own passions are not of tangible objects, but, if you’11 pardon my saying so, of the spirit and intellect That is why my leisure time is as valuable to me as your music is to you, and why I spend so much time in my cubbyhole upstairs writing and reading and thinking instead of scheming of ways to make money, as so many people I know do in the midst of this terrifying Depression That is why I am and doubtless always will be a humble drone earning humble wages in a job I don’t much care for. I’ve accepted this as a probably unalterable fact of my existence. I wish you accepted it too. I can’t admire you for despising me for it
—

Jeff, I don’t despise
—

Good night, Addy.

“I insist, Tom!” my father was saying to Dr. Beecroft. Papa had a lean, austere face with a prominent nose and wistful, reflective eyes. Now the face, usually so impassive, was blotched with distress. “You must give her more morphine! I simply insist! That pain is more than anyone can take. It’s diabolical!”

“Jeff, I just don’t think I can give her any more,” the doctor replied. They were all in the hallway now—except for Miss Slocum—out of my mother’s hearing, and I had shrunk back into the shadows near my own room, where I listened to the forbearant, expository voice. “As I told you this afternoon, people often develop a kind of tolerance, they become sensitized after long dosage. And this is what’s happened to Adelaide. She’s beginning to fail to absorb the injections. And also I’m simply having difficulty finding a place where the injections themselves don’t cause pain. She’s become so desiccated in places, you see.” He paused. “What I
will
try to do is give her something else—cocaine orally, if she can possibly swallow it and keep it down. It’s sometimes fairly effective. I can also try some intramuscular …” He went on a bit more, blah blah blah, unintelligible.

“Please do anything, Tom. There must be some way to blank out that—” He saw me at the instant I saw him. “Paul—” he said. Papa was not the calmest of men, philosophically inclined though he was. Fortunately his life had been free of
too
many disturbances. He had little natural aplomb, and even minor crises tended to get him rattled, unstrung. His thin face possessed a delicate, professorial quality more suited to reflection than to confrontation; when really agitated he got hot-eyed and, to me, a bit scary, and at the moment I felt that I had never seen him so haggard-looking, so disheveled to the forlorn depths of his spirit. “Paul, son,” he said as gently as he could, “you should be in bed.”