False Entry (12 page)

So, then, I must learn to watch even the monitor I hold so dear, who holds back the story even as it emerges—now in a man’s voice, now in a child’s. For reading back over what I have written, on this the tenth night since the one when I first sat down here, I see an extraordinary thing. And in it, I see how the critic voice, exquisite
magister
, always takes something away before it gives. I thought I had recorded everything, as I must do. Yet there is one omission. I have never put down my name. Not the one I have now, whose account I must shortly give. The one I gave up.

It is an ordinary name. It would shake no worlds. If cried in the streets of London, it might wake a distant tambour in the ear of some householder who was once an urchin in Fulham, of certain servants retired to Putney or Streatham, or of two brothers and two sisters returned to spend Christmas with whatever old ones are still there in an old house. In Tuscana it would wake no one. Only the second name would sting an occasional ear, like a fly carried over from a summer more than twenty years before.

When a man changes his name, even at the prompting of others, as was the case with me, there must be, I suppose, always some equivocation of identity, some counterpoint still vibrating in the brain. Yet I, when I took up the new name, turned my head to it at once. I filled its shape at once, like those children whom legend says the
Tziganes
used to transmogrify, fattening them inside squat ampullae, until, years later, when the mold was split, there stepped forward a vase-shaped man. I never turned my head to the old name again.

This is a strange evening, still early dusk, one of those half-lit, weekend evenings when the man who has told everyone he will be away looks down onto the street, where a letter is being slipped into a pillar-box, hears a phone in an areaway honing on unanswered, unanswered, and wonders on the absurdity of his being alone. Over the East River the powerful shadow-growth begins, and the oozing timbre of the ships—gruff and choral, exchanging in German their doubled, Faustian pleas. They plead with the room—a roomful of bargains, like everyone’s—where all the fine lava-dust of books and prints will not conceal other objects set impenetrably two by two.

Where so many bargains have been made, one may make one more. When the time comes, I will speak the old name. But not to a page. To someone. When I can do that, perhaps then shall I have come to the end of the story?

A strange evening, moving with strange half-thoughts. One that I have never had before. What if I too must look, not in the great, deserted honeycomb of what I remember—of circumstances piling like feathers, blanched voices, people entombed like crusaders—but in what I have forgotten?

I
WAS NOT LONG
missed at the Pridden house. My mother took my place there. One day, shortly after I had told her I would be studying with Mr. Demuth, she posted a letter to Miss Pridden, telling me, without other comment, that she had done so. An answer, brought by a small colored boy, came the next afternoon.

My mother saw him approach. “Who’s that coming up the walk?”

“Miss Pridden’s boy.”

“She does not use the post, then? Or she’s not on the phone?” Because of my mother’s customers, we had lately had a phone installed.

“Yes, she has a phone.”

My mother folded her sewing. Then, with a flick of her eyebrows, she rose and went to the sideboard, pausing there for a moment as if she recalled certain delicacies, old protocol stored there. She took out her purse.

“Let me.” I stood up, stretching the height that still encumbered me. At the door, I fumbled in the tallied hoard in my pocket and gave the boy a quarter.

My mother turned over the envelope, thick and faintly yellowed, with one large, tremulous word slanting it. “What did you give him?”

“A quarter.”

“A quarter? More than needful, wasn’t it?”

I hesitated. “That’s—what she gives him.”

“Oh? So?” She gave me a curious, assessing smile, but, contrary to our usual procedure with other outlays made from my small allowance, she did not offer to repay me. She was never stingy except from circumstance—even then sometimes breaking into an intense, short-lived largesse—but she knew, as I knew from her, that an action, when paid for in whatever coin, is then and then only one’s own. “And is she rich, then?”

“No. Poor, I think.”

“Oh. So,” she repeated. Bending over the envelope, she read out the word on it. “‘Addressed’” she said, in the ebbing tone of reminiscence. “I did not know they used that form here. ‘Addressed.’”

Two days later, when I came back after school from Mr. Demuth’s, I found a note saying that she had gone to tea at the Pridden house. And laid out on her bed, with its skirt spread to its full circle over the edge of its box, I saw her wedding dress, never since worn. I saw too how plain it was against either the dresses in the new stores in Charlotte or those brilliant ones on which she herself sewed, differing from her own two or three others that all seemed one, only in its breadth and its blue. It was still plumped with tissue-paper stuffing; she had looked at it perhaps but not tried it on, and had gone out in her usual black habit.

When she came back, she was flushed and bemused, but more daintily than when she came from the pub. She went past me without a word, into the bedroom, where I heard her humming, and the crackle of the paper as she put the dress away. During the next fortnight she said nothing about the visit, but after that, when it became a weekly venture, she let me understand, although she did not mention the scholarship, that my persistence with Mr. Demuth would be condoned in the light of that other patron who had been approved.

She never dreamed that I felt she had supplanted me there. I hugged bitterly this second insight of how the grown could stride briskly into a room, a relationship, into which the half-grown had preciously crept. And being already half a man, I felt too what a man often feels when two women become friends because of him—that there is always some faint risibility against him in their alliance, exploding in shameful squibs of confidence over his head. I doubt whether this was so between my mother and Miss Pridden. It was only my jealousy focused on a facet of what is always so—that the friendship between women, of women, however loyal, is never wholly substantive; the purity that some of us can give to friendship they give only to love. My mother, of course, did not know what I was feeling—either when she passed me on her way there, carrying the benné seed cakes that she had made to Miss Pridden’s receipt, or some other small token—or on the evenings when, returned from there, she let fall in conversation some warm, descriptive token of the house. Several times she asked me to go with her, but I always pleaded my lessons with Demuth. Once I asked her, “Do you have tea in the library?” and her answer—“No, in the parlor”—gave me a certain painful comfort, but I never went.

I assumed that the house was her real patron, as it had been mine. But my mother had been much shifted about in the world, and never seemed gnawed by that malady which attaches itself to places, whose victims carry its Aleppo boil forever in the palm. Her attachment went to people, back to a certain complex of them that she once had known, and in Miss Pridden, for the first and only time here, she had recognized that composition once more. The dressmaker is a confidante also, and not only of the secret paddings at the breast, the bandy legs beneath the ball dress. As the vanities and the social aspirations flutter down heedlessly on the head bent to the hem, it knows mercilessly as well what other rickety lacks may be borne to the ball. It humbles itself, in hair-true snobbery, only before that
maigre
straightness of bone which, ignorant of Mendel, it calls “style.” My mother had seen Miss Priddens before, in those shabby deaconesses of the genteel whose cheques came more promptly than those of the rich, who ordered a dress from her perhaps once every three years—limpid women, not overly bright or flaming with castellan ardor, who nevertheless inhabited a category for which there was no other word but the seditious one “aristocrat,” a water-color world that ought to have been dead, but in whose pale depths one glimpsed, as unmentionable by them as their underwear, furtive shadows of noblesse that glided like carp in an eighteenth-century pond.

To this my mother paid tribute in the way most natural to her. She made a dress, concealing its execution over many weeks and using no fittings but the dressmaker’s eye. And months later, on the evening when Mr. Demuth telephoned to tell me, almost incoherently, that I had been offered not one scholarship but two, my mother sent word to Miss Pridden, with whom she normally never communicated between visits, saying that we wished to see her that same evening. And for the first time she insisted that I accompany her there. Courtesy demanded, she said, that Miss Pridden hear the news from no one but us, and even perhaps—here her voice faltered in self-denial—that I go there alone. I would have done so, for by now I wanted to see the house again, in the same way that a man wants to encounter a girl he has once been in love with, to savor—now that the worst is over—a martyrdom on which he may safely gormandize. But when she brought out the long box for me to take, and diffidently told me what was in it, I refused. So it was after all I who accompanied her.

And so, of course, the house did not look the same. It was nether and flat, a burst secret. I could have asked to go alone into the library, but I was experiencing what the grown man does over and over and already shielding myself, as he does, from the acceptance of it—that the mystery he imputes to a house, a body, a town, that when exhausted will impute itself willfully forward to other houses, bodies, towns—is nothing but the rictus of his own mystery.

It seemed to me too, hanging behind my mother, that she presented my news and her box in almost the same moment, and that in their reception they were inextricably jumbled together. Then Miss Pridden withdrew to some inner room, and came out wearing the dress. I can see her in it now—she, the dress and the house all concluding—for during her lifetime I did not go there again.

It was a dress made of some narrow, quiet stuff in an in-between color, whose unpatterned surface my mother had worked with an infinitude of the fine ribbing she had learned in France, leaving it faintly crushed yet vertical. That is all I recall of it. Like most chefs d’oeuvre, it left a total impression—in this case that it recognized its wearer and made her recognizable as she stood here, in her house.

“It suits me, Dora,” said Miss Pridden. “See how it suits me. I can wear it to the yearly dinner. I can be buried in it.” She went to a picture that hung on the wall and peered at herself in its dim, landscaped glass, although a long mirror of her aunt’s hung nearby. I can still see her doing that, her epitome—not aspiring to the mirror. “I was worried about that, you know. But this is suitable to any occasion. And now I can be.”

“I did not mean to put
that
into it,” said my mother. But she had. Even I could see this, that attired in such a dress, any wearer it suited might go to meet either her archivists or her maker—comfortably prejudged. The dress was a triumph of class distinction. Certainly my mother never made anything like it for anyone here. Into it she had sewn her tribute, via Miss Pridden, to all those other meek curators of carp.

I saw too that my mother, in so truly taking Miss Pridden’s measure, had as humbly given her own. So I slipped out and left the three of them together—my mother, Miss Pridden, and the house. They knew their place. I still had to find mine.

N
OW MY UNCLE COMES
forward. He moves into my life like one of those marionettes kept waiting in the wings, who come out upon the stage with jerky dutiful articulation, yet I never knew the nature of the string that dangled him. His name was George Higby. He was one of the few people about whom I never was curious. He was one of those men about whom one is incurious even when one lives with them; even long after, I can see only that now and then, stepping on some floe congealed out of passivity, he moved. There was no way to tell whether he was slow or smart, or much of anything about him, even by examining the negatives of what he was not. One could say that he did not give in particularly to drink or to abstinence, that he accepted the company either of others or of himself without distaste or relish, that he did not appear to be profoundly disinterested in life, or to bear death any grudge. He was hardy, but with the physical economy of a man whose nose never dripped, whose skin never scaled, as if he had enough marrow for circumstance, but none for waste. Originally from one of those northern counties of England where men immemorially knew about cloth—a great-granduncle had been in the Luddite riots—one could not say of him that he was northern enough to be dour, or yet that he would not riot. He had no grease-monkey gaiety with mechanisms, but sometimes, as he walked past the placidly flashing multiples of the power looms, he touched them the way the Chinese touch the abacus. Looking at him in a crowd, one would never particularly choose him as a man who had emigrated once, married twice. He was a man without effluence. What he liked, if he suffered, no man knew. Yet, sometimes, he moved.

People like him press as quietly on the lives of others as the status quo presses on us all. One never knows whether they themselves know that gravitation is on their side. He would have had what he wanted from me, except for accident. I laughed with incredulity when I first heard what he wanted, but now I do not laugh, wondering only how the image of a wish rises in the mind of such a man, a man so locked in the quotidian. As he walks steadily to and fro in the narrow environ of his needs, does he find one evening that image on his doorstep, curled like a child in a crèche? Or are they pressed too, these people so bereft of expression? Do they manage without a sound, without a sigh, in stifled breaths from day to day? He wanted me to change my name to his.

“Both?” I said. “Or would he make do with the last one!”