Sitting at their breakfast table Nailles and Nellie seemed to have less dimension than a comic strip, but why was this? They had erotic depths, origins, memories, dreams and seizures of melancholy and enthusiasm. Nailles sighed. He was thinking of his mother. She had suffered a stroke four months ago and had never quite regained consciousness. She was a patient in a nursing home in the west end of the village. Nailles visited her every Sunday and remembered uneasily his visit of a week ago.
The nursing home was one of those large places, the favorite of undertakers, that had been made obsolete by the disappearance of a servant class. There was a crystal chandelier and a marble floor in the vestibule but the furniture seemed to have been gathered from some ancient porch and the flowers on the table were made of wax. The director was a Swede and must have been a prosperous Swede since his rates began at one hundred and fifty dollars a week; but he did not spend his money on clothes. His trousers shone and he wore a shapeless brown jacket of cotton. He spoke without an accent but in the pleasant, singing way of Scandinavians. "Dr. Powers was here yesterday," he sang, "but he had nothing to report. Her blood pressure is a hundred and seventy-two. Her heart is damaged but still very strong. She is getting twenty-two cc.'s of PLM six times a day and the usual anticoagulants." The director had received no medical education but he displayed the medical information that had rubbed onto him with the same flair with which a green soldier will display his military nomenclature. "The hairdresser came on Wednesday but I didn't have her hair touched up. You asked me not to."
"My mother never dyed her hair," Nailles said.
"Yes, I know," the director said, "but most of my clients like to see their parents looking well. I call them my dolls," he said, speaking with genuine tenderness. "They look like people and yet they're really not." Nailles wondered darkly if the director had played with dolls. How else could he have hit on this comparison. "We dress them. We undress them. We have their hair arranged. We talk with them but of course they can't answer. I think of them as my dolls."
"Could I see her," Nailles asked.
"Certainly."
The director led him up the marble stairs and opened the door to his mother's room. It was a small bedroom with a single window. It would have been a child's bedroom when the house contained a family. "She spoke last Thursday," the director said. "The nurse was feeding her. She said, 'I'm living in a foxhole.' Of course her speech was blurred. Now I'll leave you alone." He closed the door and Nailles said: "Mother, Mother…"
Her white hair was thin. Her teeth were in a glass on a table by the bed. She breathed lightly and moved her left hand on the covers. Nailles had pled with the doctor to, as he put it, let her die, but the doctor had said that it was his responsibility to save lives. Inert, uncomprehending, the emaciated figure still had for him an immense emotional power. She had been in all things a fair woman-kindly, decent and loving-and that she should be so cruelly smitten and left so close to death challenged Nailles's belief in the fitness of things. She should, he thought, have been rewarded for her excellence by a graceful demise. He took the deathly wages of sin quite literally. The wicked were sick, the good were robust; although her inertness made these the opinions of a simpleton. Her hand moved and he noticed then that she wore her diamond rings. Some nurse, playing doll, must have slipped them onto her fingers. "Mother," he asked, "Mother, is there anything I can do for you? Would you like Tony to come and visit you? Would you like to see Nellie?" He was talking to himself.
Nailles then thought of his father. The old man had been a crack shot, a lucky fisherman, a heavy drinker and the life of his club. Nailles remembered returning from college in his freshman year. He had brought his roommate with him. He admired his roommate and presented him proudly to his father at the railroad station, but the old man raked the stranger with an instantaneous look of scorn and rejection and gave a perceptible shake of his head at the incredible bad taste his son had displayed in the choice of a companion. Nailles had thought they would go home for dinner but his father took them instead to a hotel where there was a band and dancing. When he began to order the dinner Nailles saw that his father was very drunk. He joked with the waitress, made a grab at her backside and spilled his water. When the band began to play "I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles" he left the table, made his way through the dancers, took the baton away from the conductor and led the band. Everyone in the restaurant was amused but Nailles who, had he possessed a pistol, would have shot his father in the back.
The old man shook his white head, weaved, bobbed, called for fortissimo and pianissimo and gave a hilarious impersonation of an orchestral conductor. It was one of his most successful acts at the club. The band laughed, the conductor laughed, the waitresses put down their trays to watch and Nailles sank deeper and deeper into his abyss of misery and unease. He could leave the place and take a taxi home but the already touchy relationship between himself and his father would only worsen. He excused himself and went to the toilet, where he leaned on a washbasin. It was the only way he had to express his grief. When he returned to the table the performance was over and his father was having a third or fourth drink. They finally got some dinner and in the taxi on the way home his father fell into a drunken sleep. Nailles had helped him up the steps to the house, grateful to be able to play out this much of his role as a son. He ardently wanted to love the old man but this was his only filial opportunity. His father went on up to his room and Nailles was greeted by his mother's faint, pained, knowledgeable and winsome smile.
A fresh pillow lay on the only other chair in the room. He could, by taking a step, lift it, press it to her face firmly and end her pain in a few minutes. He took the step, he lifted the pillow off the chair and returned to his seat, but suppose she struggled, suppose, in spite of her pain and her cavernous loss of consciousness she still instinctively and tenaciously loved what remained of her life; suppose she regained consciousness long enough to see that her son was a matricide. These were Nailles's memories at the breakfast table.
Nellie was not the sort of hostess who, greeting you at a dinner party, would get her tongue halfway down your throat before you'd hung up your hat. She was winsome. She wore lace that morning and smelled of carnations. She was a frail woman with reddish hair whose committee work, flower arrangements and moral views would have made the raw material for a night-club act. She was interested in the arts. She had painted the three pictures in the dining room. The canvas came printed with a maze of blue lines like a geodetic survey map. The areas within the lines were numbered-one for yellow, two for green and so forth- and by following the instructions carefully she was able to raise, on the lifeless cloth, the depth and brilliance of an autumn afternoon in Vermont or (over the sideboard) Gainsborough's portrait of the daughters of Major Gillespie. This was vulgar and she guessed as much, but it pleased her. She had recently enrolled-genuinely curious and anxious to be informed-in a class on the modern theater. One of her assignments had been to go to New York and report on a play that was being performed in the Village. She had planned to go with a friend but her friend was taken sick and she made the journey alone.
The play was performed in a loft before a small audience. The air was close. Towards the end of the first act one of the cast took off his shoes, his shirt, his trousers and then, with his back to the, audience, his underpants. Nellie could not believe her eyes. Had she protested by marching out of the theater, as her mother would have done, she would seem to be rejecting the facts of life. She intended to be a modern woman and to come to terms with the world. Then the actor turned slowly around, yawning and stretching himself unselfconsciously. It was all true to life but some violent series of juxtapositions, concepts of propriety and her own natural excitability threw her into an emotional paroxysm that made her sweat. If these were merely the facts of life why should her eyes be riveted on his thick pubic brush from which hung, like a discouraged and unwatered flower, his principal member. The lights faded. The cast remained, dressed for the rest of the play but Nellie was unnerved. When she left the theater it was rainy and humid. She crossed Washington Square to catch a bus. Some students from the university were circling the pool carrying picket signs on which were written Fuck, Prick and Cunt. Had she gone mad? She watched the procession until it wound out of sight. Shit was the last placard she saw. She was weak. Boarding the bus she looked around for the reassuring faces of her own kind, looked around desperately for honest mothers, wives, women who took pride in their houses, their gardens, their flower arrangements, their cooking. Two young men in the seat in front of her were laughing. One of them threw his arms around the other and kissed him on the ear. Should she thrash them with her umbrella? At the next stop what she was looking for-an honest woman-took the seat beside her. She smiled at the stranger, who returned the smile and said, wearily: "I've been looking everywhere for English cretonne, good English cretonne, and there doesn't seem to be a yard of it available in the city of New York. I have good English things and an English-type house and nubbly, stretchy reps look completely out of place in my decorating scheme, but nubbly, stretchy reps are all you can get. I suppose there must be some cretonne somewhere but I haven't been able to find it. My old cretonne is perfectly beautiful but it's showing signs of wear. Iris, peonies and cornflowers on a blue background. I have a sample here. She opened her bag and took out a scrap of printed linen.