During all this space of time sitting at a candle-lit spool table under a tattered American flag that a brother-in-law of Bob’s had brought back from the Bulge, we had a few laughs — all roughly equal. They were about:
on one hand, the difficulties of coitus interruptus with a Bucks County girl in her brother’s pup-tent in her farmer-pappy’s dew-damp back yard probably watched through a distant screen door by a quiescent old Golden Retriever,
and on the other, Bob’s feat with the cross-stick boomerang—“Well it sure as hell came back,” said Bob, “I thought it was going to scalp me”
on one hand, Hugh Blood’s strange whistle when Bob was about to leave his feet for the window, and Bob said he’d known way up in front of his mind that that whistle was Hugh’s—
and on the other, Petty’s dad’s old friend Mrs. Bolla, recuperating in Presbyterian after having her veins done — each fine leg wrapped from ankle to ass — slowly reading an Updike novel brought by Bob’s mother who once said to mine, “For an Italian she seems awfully restrained; but he, of course, was supposed to have been a bit on the cold side — all involved in natural gas geology”:
while Bob — for it seemed throughout that this other force of Robby his oldest son preoccupied him or hung near like a power to which these outer, equidistant recollections were raised — with the dure pique of a good man who can’t see why his warmth and abruptness are not accepted as a kind of leadership albeit temporary — Bob at several points recurred to Robby: “Said sucking a run of herring up out of the cove with a machine wasn’t real fishing, and I said to him God who said it was! Well this is a kid who sits around reading electronic catalogues. One day I started mowing the lawn but then I was out of gas and when I said, ‘Robby, get me the five-gallon can in the garage beside the skis,’ he waited a second and looked at me: just blank. And yesterday I was alone in the house, or thought so, and I phoned Ben Sedgwick — you’ve met Father Sedgwick — I suddenly had to ask him what he really thought about Bonhoeffer going back to Germany in ’40—wasn’t it really suicide? and after I dialed I think I said a phrase or two in advance and I waited with this dead phone in my hand and then the line was busy and I held on, I don’t know why I held on, and then I knew I was being watched and I looked off through the hall door across a corner of the living room through another door to the new living room and there was Robby just staring at me, it was like night and he made me feel like a fool, a lunatic, and do you think he looked away or said a word?”
“You mean you were scared?” I asked after a while as Bob pushed the bourbon across almost upsetting it on the table’s central bolts.
Mild eyes framed in gold circles peer at me as if I am some distinctly odd question — the face opens and writhes in violent laughter and the whole pen assembly on my private seismovec gashes right off the drum, in fact up right off my Rictus Scale — the noise as suddenly turns off, and Bob says quietly, “’Course not.”
“Come in here,” my father said from his bed in the room to my right as I stood in my pajamas in the hall facing the bathroom and with my bedroom behind me. My morning muse had been Camille a moment before when I was sitting on the edge of my Sunday bed thinking about the party she’d taken me to. Now in the hall my morning muse had risen to the height of Tracy: I don’t know what I expected my father to say but I delayed obeying him and said I’ll be out of the john in a second.
Well he was mad in that sunny room. As I must have said in those pages removed by the Hungarian — I don’t know which page but the phrase was in the lower right third — my father was sitting up in bed. You could see great gray-and-white platforms of ice in the water off the near docks; a tug crossed my path as I ran that ice-strewn Brooklyn slip straight across the East River to the ferry landings. On the floor of his open closet I saw the black-and-white saddle shoes he bought the summer we went to the shore instead of the stone heart house in Heatsburg. My father had my prominent nose, though not my height; eyes gray, face delicate and square, mouth precise but responsive. My mother had replaced the empty tumbler from last night and instead of that acidophilus milk I dreaded being near, there was water beside the three short brown bottles.
It was my saying God was just someone to tell your side of the story to.
The scene has less meaning now then earlier in this confession when it was a mere glimpse equidistant from Camille’s father’s Bahama duck marshes.
My father’s being in bed sitting up against the ramp-like wedge of my mother’s lemon satin invalid pillow that he’d bought her made his daunting finality immeasurable. He was not harsh but he was certain, though less terrible after he’d worked himself up a bit, for he thought my seeming taciturnity was gall.
What do you mean by saying such a thing? What were you thinking of? Now you’re in college you’re free, is that it? I know you don’t tell me a lot of things. And I tell myself I don’t want you to. Listen: how dare you speak of God as “just” anything? just some pal to tell some petty tale to? What do you know? Now that you’re a freshman in college you can spout the difference between Augustine and Bonaventure. You’ve been taught how to drive a car because I knew you’d break the college rule and drive this year and I wanted to make sure you knew how. You know Cyrus E. Dallin sculpted Indians. You knew more about the Bible than any other boy in your ancient history class four years ago, maybe more than Cadbury. Well you don’t know nothin’. And someday when you have to earn a living—
(I’ve smoothed it here, Dom, he was hesitating as he got mad, and I’ve eased his slight breathlessness.)
— and when you make some big mistakes instead of all these little ones, come back then and tell me about God.
Dom, I’d been a bit flip but I didn’t deserve what I got. Yet maybe it’s the uncalled-for things that say the most, am I running out of space and is someone going to walk in on me here? by uncalled-for I mean the unfair blurts you should have done without. In the middle of his ejaculations I felt affectionately insane and nearly asked him what God’s last name was, I’d often wanted to know. I wanted to be weaker before my father that Sunday morning than I was; but even in my gaping pajamas I didn’t know how. Then my father said, “He is so close, I don’t see how you can’t feel Him.” My mother said, “It’s a phase.”
Betsy and Ted were to have gone to a film tonight, and you know that just as I could describe to you the gap Dot left vacant on this east wall behind the white leather couch, so if I chose I could tell you the theater Betsy and Ted went to and what was on and even the price per head, which was why they were going there, and even delineate the furniture emporium diagonally across the street. But now I don’t know if they went together or apart, or not at all. If not, they found something else to do.
Dom, among some Indian tribes of Brazil the chief holds his numerous women partly because his important trances can be homicidally volatile, and somebody has to be around to keep him from killing perhaps even himself. Now at least in Dot’s caustic wit if not wholly in your mind, you were a chief; so maybe you’re a suicide because you let that pregnant secretary and other secretaries go, you let Dot go, Kit go, and whom else I don’t know enough about you to know. Richard let you go.
There it is, hero. Yours is the ultimate insurance. Stunted by publicity, you’ve emerged at fifty-two into mystery.