A Visit to Priapus and Other Stories (7 page)

“How limp and black they were,” the brother remembered. “I’m glad we don’t know what has become of them. Each card must have been a real mausoleum of dead germs.”

They started back home. All the living creatures in the world except themselves—that is, those workhorses, a pasturing mare and her foal, a small boy, a bird—seemed irresolute as the dead in heaven, where there is nothing more to be resolved.

“If I didn’t love my husband I should be less of a woman but easier to take care of,” she said.

“And does ‘if’ mean anything, if I may ask?”

“Oh, nothing. Exactly nothing.”

His feeling about women always inclined him to agree with their sorrow, and so to give poor consolation. “It will come out all right,” he said weakly. “Your luck will turn. I want to help.”

“Listen to me. This is what I have wanted to say. I am proud that you love my son; he shall always be yours as much as you like. But you mustn’t fret about me, or about any of us. As soon as I get a little stronger, I promise you that I shall go to the city and have myself put together again. Of course I need money. And I need you. But you must clear out. You are too sad by nature to stand it. You have done your share. Rather, I should say, you haven’t any share in this at all. I know you must have trouble enough somewhere else, all your own. This can’t be yours. For the trouble is always where the joy is, and your joy is not here. There isn’t any here for you.”

Thus she took the child away the moment after she had given it to him in so many words. It was a great relief and a disappointment— the almost impossible, all too human burden which did him honor and made him less anomalous in his good fortune, slipping out of his arms. To the same degree that he shrank from any excess of responsibility, he always sought to prove himself able to assume it. In nature, he thought, such things balance better. Tall and attenuated shadows held up the sky; now and then another star came out, and, just enough to support its weight, the shadows darkened. They turned back into the town and came home, where the tired grandmother in the meantime had rocked the child to sleep.

Already sensual and sentimental, the infant boy had learned that by weeping he could obtain the extra gratification of being sung to and carried in someone’s caressing arms up and down, up and down. So he would not let his eyes close when left alone. They had tried to discipline him, but he would stand up in the cot, shaking with willfulness, until he fell and struck his head against the railing. Then the obstinate lament would give way to fainter cries of genuine pain, and someone would give in. His mother could now rarely be the one, and his weight was bound to go on increasing faster than she could recover health. The heat was intense; no one’s strength lasted quite all the day.

The brother consulted the younger sister. “The sooner we stop indulging him the better,” he said. “A little older, he would bear a grudge for a week, and feel altogether unloved and abandoned and abused. I was like that; even God neglected me. Now he won’t mind by morning. Babies haven’t much memory.”

“We all have to give up luxuries in hard times,” the girl said. “Why shouldn’t he?”

So they devised a harness of an old pair of suspenders and some strong tape, stitched and knotted, which both the mothers approved. In it he might exhaust his indignation and his self-pity without any risk, free to turn from side to side, but unable to stand up and fall. “From now on,” the bachelor said, “no more real injuries toward fraudulent ends.” They all smiled deliberately, their mother with a tear. The child’s mother, full of her secret shame, said little. She was able to go down to supper the night the experiment was tried.

It was a simple but fine meal of ham and cottage cheese and jelly and milk. Their father, still young in body but anxious about his health, commented upon each dish. The son-in-law, after long hours of vain business, hungry out of proportions to any such repast, hid his disappointment.

The younger daughter came late to the table, having fastened the baby in his bed.

“Is the boy asleep so soon?” the son- in- law asked.

“Oh, not yet.”

The son explained as lightly as he could. “We decided he would have to be broken of being rocked to sleep. So we made a harness. He can’t stand up and can’t hurt himself.”

Upstairs he began to cry.

The elder mother said, “It is better that he should be trained now. The older he gets, the harder on him it will be. And on the rest of us.”

The son said, “He only cries because he knows that by so doing he can get what he wants. Babies’ lives are experimental; they repeat whatever has resulted in pleasure.”

The aging man at the head of the table scowled at this pretentious reasoning.

The young girl said, “He is getting heavier every minute. Sister can scarcely lift him now. It is hard for anyone, just at this time of day, when you’re tired to death. If he insists on his lullaby very much longer, one of those Polock giantesses up the street will have to be sent for.” She tried to make it seem humorous, but her eyes sought her brother’s—they had made a grave mistake.

For the son-in-law was not listening to the arguments. He was swallowing his food without chewing it, deaf with resentment, deaf to all but the little cries resounding through the house. It was his child, not theirs. Insolent with a sense of his dependence on them, and without hesitation they were robbing him of his natural authority; were making decisions and educating and punishing his son as they saw fit. And his son was to be a gentleman; why should he be initiated into their sad cult of self denial? He stared at his wife as if he saw in her only a member of that family.

They all sat in silence while the babe wept.

It was a warm evening almost as bright as noon. This was the weather of the poor; the atmosphere was a sufficient clothing and shelter, and it seemed nourishing—did one actually need much else?

The tired grandmother, less impressed by the baby’s crying than by the red face of her daughter’s husband, the reactionary expression of her own, made a move to go. “Please don’t, dear,” her daughter said. “We should just have to begin again tomorrow.”

Everywhere else it was the hour of pleasure. And a thousand automobiles were being transformed into vehicles of emotion, illusion; and through the groves young people were going down to the soft-shored lakes to play among the reeds; and in backyards the green clumps of lilac were filling up with fluffy pullets; at that time love usually ceased to torment and turned fecund; and so on. By thinking of these things, the son, unused to home, tried to escape in imagination from the too close reunion.

The lament of the child, losing hope, grew strident. Suddenly the son-in-law dropped his fork on his plate, sprang to his feet, strode over to the window, stepping on his napkin, saying between his teeth, “I will not have a child of mine tied up like that. All your clever theories—what do I care?”

“It can’t be helped, sweetheart. Please don’t mind. He’ll go to sleep in a minute. Please—” his wife pled sweetly, almost without inflection. His brother thought he heard a complaint wilder than the child’s, just subdued by that deliberate flat seraphic tone.

“He is too little to be punished,” the young father said. He sat down but did not eat.

“Refusing to satisfy him and punishing him are not at all the same thing.”

Now his weeping was a low, rasping, almost religious refrain, and seemed to come from a distance.

“I can’t help it. I can’t stand to hear him howling. I won’t. I’m going to clear out if it doesn’t stop right away, I tell you.”

So powerless against him, it was a simple matter for her to answer firmly. “Very well, dear. Go. You’d better go for a while. I’ll telephone you as soon as our child has been disciplined. Run along.”

Oh that voice like a deadened bell! Of course the young husband did not move. It was the first time this pair of lovers had had to quarrel with others present; and after birth and death, that is probably the most pitiful moment in existence.

All the eyes around the table had a listless fixity. They all felt their humanity keenly.

So, each one eating without appetite for the others to see, the meal drew to a close. The younger daughter, the maiden despising marriage and comforted by her provisory freedom, did better than the others. But the silence affected her more deeply than the words. She looked at her father because it was he that she loved best. Her brother’s eyes followed hers, and this is what they both saw in their father’s face: he too was piteously angry.

Though quite out of sympathy with his son-in-law, he had caught his fever of male resentment. He, too, always wanted terribly to be the lord of his home. And now he wanted to be the hero of the scene, envied the scornful sympathy the other inspired and, thinking more and more inaccurately, resented the disapprobation the other deserved. “It ought to be against the law to treat a child like that,” he said. “I swear, I believe a woman could be put in jail for it.”

The unfortunate young mother could not stand that. Her eyes ran and her cheeks whitened. “Father—” she cried.

Nor could the elder mother endure any more. Long since she had learned never to deny the man she so happily loved, but her heart was not old. She looked shamefacedly at her children. She stood up. “I will not go in. I will just look in. To be sure that he is all right.” She fled.

Then the visiting son lost his temper. All his life he had been calculating and, though malicious, mild up to a point—when suddenly, two or three times a year, he would be possessed. Suddenly emotion would break forth, with a sort of harmful brilliance. Then his self-possession was good for nothing but to hurt someone. He could not think and could not say what he thought. All was inspiration and he merely heard himself speak. This began to happen now, with a warning jerking in some nerve or muscle at the back of his head.

The young husband said to his wife, “Your father is right. Your baby is still crying up there. Listen to him. It sounds like a tied-up dog. You don’t care what he suffers so long as your relatives say it’s all right.”

With her napkin she wiped her tears.

The other young man, feeling the worst answers all ready but unchosen, tingling on the tip of his tongue, ran to the door like one taken sick. He could not be sure what the words on his lips were or what they would lead to; he had to reach the door before they could be heard. On the way he stammered aloud, “It does not matter what is the best thing to do, your wife is my sister, your wife is too ill, if the child must be put to sleep, someone else will have to take charge—”

He stood on the porch alone. No one could have understood all that he had said, nor guessed all he meant—what a blessing! His judgment of his brother-in-law (just and pitiful enough in theory, though accompanied by questionable feeling) in any such torrent of instinctively chosen words, would have had no result but to make more nightmarish everyone’s distress. Only getting out of doors in time could have checked it; and along with it a parallel plaint, less detailed, less reasonable, in defiance of his father. It was not clear in his mind now. What was most clear was that his own childhood had somehow come back to him, in him. His heart was beating like a child’s.

His feeling had not been in logical order and was not yet; some mystery of mistaken identities, or crossed strands of time, lay at the bottom of it. Several persons had figured in the scene as one and the same; he himself had experienced as more than one. He was the grown son and brother, but he had felt like a child. He was also, being so like the weeping child, its real father—not in reality but in truth. And his sister and his mother were the same woman; then his sister’s husband might as well have been his father—no, what nonsense! He passed his hand across his face as if to brush away an optical illusion.

This was the trouble: suddenly he had lost all sense of independent personalities, and recognized only composite categories of souls: all the sensitive, brutal, and tragic men, all women fumbling in the spell of love as best they could, and all the children. It seemed to him that there were no real differences of age, but mere subdivisions of one eternally unfledged soul—in infancy, for other’s pleasure, accustomed to pleasure; deprived when others were powerless to provide; forming habits by mistake; all to be paid for in due time, and broken. All of them were evidently too poverty-stricken to act upon intelligence. The impotent abandoned what they coveted; the fertile harmed what they begot.

His father joined him, very angry, but with the new dignity of his age. They had planned to pay a visit together miles away in the country that evening. They walked across the soft-sounding lawn. “If your sister cannot do better than this, she will have to find some-where else to live. For I won’t be made miserable another minute, with your modern principles.”

“You and her husband have made yourselves ridiculous, that is all. Under the circumstances he should hold his peace. You know it as well as I do. It is not a matter of principle. Sister is sick. She can scarcely hold her baby, much less walk up and down with him until he has had enough of it and falls asleep. Who is there to do it? Mother is tired.”

“Well, I won’t hear him crying during meals. I’m going to eat in peace. She is stubborn. She always was, when she was little; it’s nothing new. You agree with her, of course, because you are like that yourself. But I won’t stand it. I’m going to be master in my own house. I tell you, she will have to go.”

“Very well, sir. She shall go then. You took her in because they are poor and have no other place to go. Of course your home is your own. And when you’ve had enough of charity to your children, you’ve only to say so.”

Oh, indeed the past had come back—all of it in disorder. A moment ago it was with his infant nephew that he had identified himself; now as he spoke he was confusing himself with himself as he had been years before, a small boy. Thus his father had provoked him; then, too, there had been talk of youngsters’ deserving to be driven from home, of whether or not a father was master in his own house—the poor great-hearted man! Then, as now, unhesitatingly he had replied, the most logically insulting phrase after phrase. He remembered vividly how he had been: slight and pallid, detestably afraid, fighting back in barking tones like some small animal instinctively inspired. So also the babe in his turn, to his father, a few more years having passed, would speak.