False Entry (25 page)

“In the Matter of …” said the clerk, “application of … an infant … by … his mother to the … Court … County of … your petitioner resides … is the mother of the above … Father of said … to wit, one … deceased having died a resident of … on or about … said infant resides at … with … mother … and … who is the stepfather of. … Said infant is of the age of … having been born in … annexed hereto is a certificate of … he is not employed … not a member of armed forces or inducted for … single and has never been married … never convicted of any crime….” Why must he pause there, I thought, aware again of the sneaking aura of the room, a room from which even a man judged innocent might emerge sensing the underground taint of other crimes for which he had long since judged himself. Fourchette had not moved. Outside a wind was certainly brewing, pulling sullenly at the walls.

“Break the heat maybe.” From behind us, an intended whisper creaked in the sudden pocket left by the air. As if on signal, to demonstrate that no failure of breath had stopped him, the clerk resumed:

“… no judgment or liens against said infant … no action or proceeding … never been adjudicated bankrupt … no claims, demands, liabilities … to which said infant is party … no creditors….” A door in the corridor slammed. The clerk, raising his voice, answered with a sentence in entirety, loud and unelided. “And no person will be adversely affected or prejudiced in any way by the proposed change of name.”

Farther away, another door reported. The window shades swelled inward in unison, were sucked flat. An increasing silver lashing came from outside, the sound of a hard wind rising in groves of foliage, although there were only two trees, tall and sparse, in the square. “Present name of said infant …” said the clerk, his voice the faster as its content was snatched away, “name proposed … that shall assume … grounds of application are … as aforesaid … also as aforesaid….”

My mother rose on my arm, breathing almost soundlessly. “What is he saying? Does he get it right? There’s a noise in my ears. I did not hear.” Nor had I. I moved my head in a nod or a shake, I did not know which, but away from my mother’s face, taut against my shoulder, cupped upward to mine. But again I was forced to look down at her, turning with the slowness in which one moves against the iron of dreams. Her eyes were glaring wide at me, in anger I thought at first; then I saw that her jaw was trembling. Tears, I thought. This must be the way she cries. In the lowest part of me a thought flickered like an adder: “Is this all she will do then—cry?” Heavier still, her weight bore down on my cramped arm in such a way now that I was almost unable to withstand it; raising her, I motioned toward the chair. Shaking her head a hairsbreadth, she remained locked where she was. Then, stealing almost imperceptibly along the side of her that was pressed against me, I felt the tremor, a continuous tremoring that shook her from ankle to thigh. This was no ordinary trembling, but one that did not seem to belong to her, a drumming in which the leg went on of itself. Slowly she lowered her chin to look down at her foot. Because of holding her I could not see it, but in a gap in the wind I heard its heel rat-tat-tatting on the floor. Under the halo of light from the lectern, the clerk filed away inaudibly at the record, while one by one, in a steady chording from cellar to ogive, all the draughts of the old building answered each other. Suddenly I felt her stiffen, draw a long breath, a second. Then the heel came down hard, and was still. Her eyes were half closed. On the third breath she opened them, half smiled at me, lifted her weight from my arm, and stood alone. The clerk turned over a page and put it down. And that was the end of the second paper.

“At a Special Term of … Court, State of … County of … at the Courthouse … Street … City of … Alabama, on the … day of … nineteen-hundred and thirty-six,” said the clerk with a flourish. “Present: Honorable Hannibal Fourchette, Justice.” He paused, in a backwash of quiet. Noises inside and out had stopped, leaving a hollow that pressed the ears. The electric light weakened in the sudden sulphur gloom, fluttering once in the familiar pearl of my mother’s breastpin, given her—I recalled now, after all the years between, by whom and when—at my birth. I thieve nothing, I told myself; it is an accidental name that I may never use—interrupted, patched in halves.

“Go on, Clarence,” said Fourchette. His voice was absent, fading too in the gloom.

“Beg pardon, it’s the order itself, sir,” the clerk whispered. “You usually read the order….”

“Ah, yes, yes, thank you, Mr. Whitlock,” said the judge, rousing quickly in a voice intended to cover, raising his chin from his hand with a large look at the rear of the room. He reached down over the lectern and took the paper. A smile of terror parted my lips. My arm, released from my mother’s weight, felt as light as air.

“On reading and filing the petition of Dora Cross Higby, verified the twenty-eighth day of July, 1936 …” Fourchette’s voice was flat, an old man’s office tones now, enunciating every word. He stopped now to verify the two of us, his court, his audience, with a glance, cleared of its mist, that knew us for what we were. “… praying for a change of name of the above infant, it being requested that he be permitted to assume the name of Pierre Goodman in the place of his present name and the court being satisfied that said petition is true and it appearing from the said petition and the court being satisfied that there is no reasonable objection to the change of name proposed—”

I did not move, turn an inch to look at my mother, from whom there had come a sound, a motion like a muffled wing-beat, but no word.

“Now on motion of … hmmm …
attorney
for the said petitioner it is Ordered—” Here he paused. It seemed to me, staring, that I fed him with my breath. “—that the said infant, born on November 11th, 1918, be and hereby is authorized to assume the name of Pierre Goodman in place and stead of his present name upon complying with the provisions of this order, namely …”

I must not look at her, I thought. I will not look at her, for it seemed to me that if I did so everything would fall away, all the counterpoises that held us up, together—the family illusion shared of shared days, the illusion of love and the fabric, not of hate, but of anti-love revenging itself for what it is. The word “turn” swung in my mind like a compass needle. It is her turn now for one thing, yours for the other. Only turn now and see what you wished for arrived. The room will fall away, you will fall away from each other—all as you wished—you will be two nothings on a plain. Why is there no sound from her, I thought, no cry? Yet I could not turn.

“That this order be entered and the said petition upon which it is granted be filed within ten days from the date hereof in the office of this court in the County of Banks, that within ten days from the date of entry hereof, a copy of this order shall be published in the
Denoyeville Dealer
, a newspaper published in the County of Banks, Alabama; and that, within forty days after the making of this order, proof of such publication by affidavit shall be filed with the clerk of the Supreme Court in the County of …”

I am innocent, I said to the rostrum, my lips dry over my teeth in what I could not be sure was a snarl or a smile, for it seemed to me truly that I held a part of myself to myself, as the young mother had held her child. And now I heard it again, the tic, the drumming spasm of the heel on the floor. Save me from what I shall have done, I thought; who brought us here? We bring ourselves, we brought ourselves, we came to this dock together. Let me remember that when I turn.

“… that, following the due filing of the said petition and entry of said order as hereinbefore directed, the publication of such an order and the filing of proof of publication thereof, said infant shall be known as and by the name of Pierre Goodman …”

And then I heard the sound. And I turned.

“—which he is hereby authorized to assume and by no other name: (and it is further ordered, that a certified copy of this order shall not be issued until proof of compliance with the above provisions has been duly filed with the clerk of this court.)

“Enter.

“Hannibal Fourchette … Justice Supreme Court.”

My mother stood upright, her hand clapped to her mouth. It was a posture seen at once to be physical; this was no hand holding back a cry but the cramp of agony in which the hand presses back the actual knife in the throat, the burst in the breast, the clutch in the bowels. Her heel was still now, the foot clamped to the floor by the rod of the leg—stiffened to the hip—on which she appeared transfixed. As my arms went out to her she bent from the waist, looking down on the alien rod that would not let her fall; then, as I touched her, she straightened, and as I caught her she fell.

The chairs next us had arms to them and she was not to be bent; on my knees I held the upper part of her from the floor. Above the hand that concealed her mouth, her eyes looked into mine, not a cloud between us, lens into lens. They were wide and bright, stricken with knowledge, not with death.

“You … are—” she said, and the third word, the glottal echo I ponder yet, escaped me except, for its vowel.
Lost
I thought it was once, then
false—
I was sure of it—then for a while that it was surely
gone
; I have risen up at night and struck the wall above my bed with my fist, saying, “The word was
wrong
,” and believed it for the span of a cigarette, and I have halted, as to a gong, on a street corner, thinking
all
; what she said was
all.
Each is a facet of the central stone. The glossary goes down the years and will never be done. It is the word—suckled, lost, hunted—that is written at birth on the wall. It was my paring, and I thought then that she spoke it, behind the hand that slid down then and showed to the sudden cluster of faces above her the puckered seam of her lip, dragged downwards, smeared to the side.

“Sunstroke,” whispered one of the men. “Hits you worst in hurricane weather.”

“Not the sun kind,” the other said low. “My father—I know the look of it”; and the old clerk, hunched over his own chancre of mortality, said nothing. I searched for gospel in any face that would give it.

“Phone the doctor from here, Clarence,” said Fourchette from the rostrum, “and get her home in my car.” He had not moved; there was no need for him to, although a lesser man would have. Authority, stepping forward from him like the ghost of all that he had slipped from, dictated to us precise details of what to do.

The two men lifted her up and from me, their faces goblin-near to hers, as in a deposition. They refused my help as I got up from my knees. “Stay here a minute, son,” said one, “and pull yourself together. We’ll meet you outside.” As they steadied her between them, the old clerk reached over, his head humbly averted, lifted the portion of her skirt that hung between her legs and folded it across them, and I saw that it dripped wet from a wide dark circle at the groin.

Then I was alone. Fourchette was there, and yet it still was so. To the right of one of the pictures a clock that I had not seen, expected clock of public rooms, assumed and seldom noticed, showed its hands at three o’clock; three hours more before my uncle would come off shift; less than an hour since we had come here. It asserted the day, joined me to it, yet I had more than enough time to note with pedantic care that its frame was yellow mission oak like such clocks everywhere, that its scraped gilt name was “Seminole.” I had time, as one does when alone, to feel an air current pure on my hands, to turn them over in it, examining their scars, the faintly begun script of the years, their pores. I stood in one of those yawns of identity when alternatives lock, where one can only wait and be. In a minute I would live, move again, live forward; meanwhile I idled there in the languid horror of the human when it first sees the web, when it first knows that what it will fight to the death to keep and what it will fight to the death to lose are the same.

Above me, over the lectern, the waiting hole of darkness had returned—Fourchette’s head, sunk over its next case, or its own. As I turned to leave, its visor lifted again and the white face looked out at me. I thought of what I secretly knew of it—devious leaver of keys, doler-out of bottles to its son. Contender or collaborator, we were together and alone. It was no wonder the town kept him on as the world keeps Hamlet—lucid immovable who knew us each for what we were, and whom we could then call mad. Outside, on the courthouse steps, my legs wavered like a convalescent’s, but they carried me forward to the waiting car.

Our cortege passed slowly through streets still darkened by the tail of the wind that had brushed them seasonally and veered off, leaving behind it for some hours yet a sound as of a train riding in the air six feet or so above us, the declining hurricane’s characteristic roar. The car was an old touring eight, its shape vaguely familiar; the men had placed my mother on the long rear seat, themselves on the two jump seats facing her, and had shunted me up front with the clerk, who drove. I felt nothing. I was a nothing on a plain. But I was alone.

My uncle opened the door to us. He had seen us from the parlor window where, all against custom, he had been sitting, unaware of what had occurred. He did not explain to us, then or after, what had brought him home at that hour—later I saw the ceremonial bottle out on the sideboard and the white stain on my aunt’s walnut table where the small glass, its modest ration slopped over in the moment of drinking, had left a ring. Mr. Whitlock’s telephone call to the mill had missed him; the doctor had not yet arrived.

He received us, our bedraggled procession, our circumstance, full in the face, while this side information dribbled from us and him in the crosshatched babble that attends such a blow. His face did not change when he saw us, but no one who watched it could ever again misunderstand the plight of a face that could not. At the moment when the two men, walking directly to the bedroom with the surety with which everyone in the region knew these houses, were about to put down their burden, my uncle, who had been following numbly behind, intervened. Arms upthrust, in a sudden motion that staggered all three men, he scooped her from the other two, held her for a moment over the bed, defying gravity and them as if this were his privilege, and gently lowered her down. My mother’s eyes, still wide, remained so; her crooked lip said “George,” and one hand, the unaffected left one, scrabbled at her shamed dress, as if she asked his help to conceal it. My uncle nodded, then his face changed at last; his lips turned in upon themselves, and bending, he rested them for a minute over the stain, on the hand. Watching, I felt my throat distend, not for myself, but as any bystander outside the life and accident of this house might feel the salt hurt, salt surprise of his first sight of what intimacy was.