A city, Sam thought, turning over, that was everywhere and nowhere, where we all come from, where we all go…
Two weeks after his (pre-) birthday dinner — and after a birthday that seemed less like a birthday than Christmas had seemed like Christmas — , Sam dreamed. Papa’s interpretation of the dream certainly would have been that it came from Sam’s sneaking off to read those magazines that lied so about Egypt and the darker races. Before dismissing that interpretation, however, we should remember that the sneaking was — for Papa — as constitutive as the stories; which put him not so far from the Viennese doctor whose book on the death instinct had been translated into English two years before by the redoubtable C.J.M. Hubback, published first in England and just reprinted in the United States by Boni and Liveright — and who, for his interpretation, would have erected an elaborate structure of authority and transference, language, sexual guilt, and wish fulfillment: Papa and the Viennese doctor had, neither of them, heard of one another; but both were educated men of a single age and epoch, so that they shared a number of ideas. Doubtless the Viennese doctor’s younger Swiss-born rival would have added that the dream indicated a surge of the creative in Sam, frightening in its implications and quite possibly to be repressed, but that still must be reckoned with. And the medical wisdom of half a dozen decades on would have suspected in it the first sign of an apnœa, directly related to smoking, that very likely would get worse — though probably not for years.
Night. Night the terrible…
Carefully, Sam the Spy walked down the steps into the strange cellar. The light behind him dimmed. He glanced back — someone had just closed the wooden doors up to the street. Moonlit chinks along the ceiling’s edge by the ends of the great beams were winking out, here and there. Outside, he realized, things were toppling over the small openings. Something shook the whole building. Behind, the cellar doors flapped up a moment — but only dirt and darkness tumbled down the steps — before they closed for good under the weight above. Water began running through the single upper window, suddenly to gush — while trickles rilled the walls.
The subterranean chamber was descending into the sea!
The pressure grew intense; it was becoming harder to breathe. What light there was in the weedy water dimmed as they sank; but in the last of it, he realized, behind him, beside him, something — formless and dark — was in there with him. It splashed toward him through the darkening flood. He had to get out, get away, only in the enclosing blackness his breath was stifled in his chest —
Sam tore his face from the pillow, punching and pushing himself up into light. He gasped as the quilt fell to his lap. He sat, gulping. In the middle of the room, the tall figure turned toward him: chills encased him — the thing splashing in the submarine black had transfigured into this moonlit form…? The drape was back over the wing chair. Moonlight sluiced the room.
As Sam got his orientation back, the figure — frowning Hubert, in his pants, shirtless now but wearing his carpet slippers, and surely on his way out to the hallway’s chilly commode — asked: “Sam…? You all right?”
“Yeah…” Sam was breathing hard.
The frown fell away before a chuckle. “What were you dreaming about?”
But in the moonlight, the tomblike dark of the submerged and suffocating crypt was already slipping away.
“Hubert…?”
“Yeah?”
Sam ran his hand around his bare neck, down his naked chest. Nothing was wrong with his breathing now. He took three more breaths to make sure. “Hubert? Back when you were about fifteen — or sixteen, you did something. And Papa got so mad, he chained you to the water pump in the backyard, and he was shouting at you that he was going to leave you chained up in the yard all night — only then he must have gotten even madder, because about ten minutes later, he got this orange crate and came back and began to beat you with it, beat you ’til the slats broke all up, and you were bleeding and crying — and Mama was scared. I think she thought he was going to kill you.”
“Yeah,” Hubert said. “So did I.”
“Hubert — what did you do?” The question asked, the last of drifting, of dreaming, vanished, Sam was icily awake, electrically alert.
Hubert shifted his weight, then shifted it again. “Just… stuff. That’s what you were dreaming about?”
“No — well, maybe I was. I’m not sure. But I woke up thinking about it.” Outside the window, clotheslines hung like lapping lariats that, beyond the frame, would encincture night to day. “Can’t you tell me what it was, Hubert? So I’ll know? I was just nine or ten, and Jules or Laura wouldn’t tell me anything. Jules — I don’t think she really knew what it was about either — but she said if I was that curious, I should ask Papa. But I was afraid to. I thought if it was that awful, if I asked about it he might do the same thing to me. At least that’s what I thought then.”
“Yeah, maybe he would have — no.” Hubert humphed. “It was just stuff… with a girl.” He pursed his lips, debating whether to say more. “You remember Alina, Reverend Fitzgarn’s daughter?” Hubert took a breath, the moonlit admission clearly difficult. “I stole some of Papa’s money, to go out and get a bottle and be with her. And then Reverend Fitzgarn caught the two of us, doing it — or, least ways, just about doing it. And he came raging to Papa that he would have me locked up by the police if Papa didn’t do something himself — and Papa was embarrassed as all get out, at least at first; then he got real mad because I’d shamed him. Then, when he got back to the house, he found out I’d stolen from him too. Five dollars.”
“Alina Fitzgarn?”
“Um-hm. Look — just a second, I got to go to the toilet. You be all right?”
Sam nodded.
His arms and back gone from ivory to — with his next step — cadaverous gray, Hubert went out through the hall door. Limen to lintel, like a species of mystery, black filled the space ajar. Sam’s fingertips tingled on the quilt. He moved his foot over, beneath the covers, from where it had thrust, on his waking and turning, into cold bedding. Outside in the hall, water gushed into the commode.
Hubert came back in and pushed the door closed behind him. “I’m gonna have to get me a chamber pot — this getting up and having to go out to pee in the morning every morning at — ” he reached into his pants to pull out the pocketwatch Mama had sent him for Christmas (but it had arrived three days late), and held it up — “nearly ten to four! — just isn’t going to make it. At least not in this weather.” He dropped the watch from its chain — so that it swung in the light, turning and unturning — and burlesqued a shiver. “It’s cold out there! I guess — ” He swung up the watch and caught it, white-gold flashing in the moon, and dropped his hand toward his pants pocket — “I’m starting to turn into an old man!” (Hubert liked that watch, Sam knew. But each time Hubert took it out, Sam felt not so much jealous of the object as he did simply at sea, himself not knowing the hour.) Hubert had stopped in the middle of the floor on the same spot he’d stood before. In moments he seemed to have settled back into the same discomfort. Hubert took a long, considered breath. At last he said: “Papa didn’t let me stay outside all night, you know. He turned me loose — after he wore himself and that orange crate out. He made me come inside and sit in his study — my nose was bleeding, my arm was sore — and he talked to me. I can remember it, I can see him just as clear, behind his desk. He said we had to call a truce, him and me. He said we had to call a truce between us — that if we didn’t, he was going to kill me or I was going to kill him. If I didn’t drive him to his grave with shame and sorrow, I was going to do it with a gun or my hands. Or worse, he’d have to kill me first. ‘You want to go to New York,’ he said, ‘with Hap and Corey?’ I hardly heard what he was saying, when he said it. I mean, after he’d just about murdered me, it was like he’d turned around and offered me a present. What I’d expected him to say was that I wouldn’t be allowed to go out of the house and had to stay in my room and eat bread and water for the next three months — or something like that. He said, ‘You want to go to New York…?’ ” Hubert reached up across his bony chest to rub his arm with his hand. “You see, Papa’s a strong-headed man. I guess he had to be, to do what he’s done — working at the school, be a minister to all those Negroes down home, get himself elected bishop. But he’s got some strong-headed children too. And he’s smart enough to know you can’t have all these strong-headed people living under one roof — not ten or twelve of us. Not that many. So that’s why I came up here. He loves us, you know. It’s taken me a while to figure that one out. But he does.” Hubert dropped his hand, took a breath. “Look — if you want to talk about this some more, let’s do it in the morning. Is that all right?”