My mother was sitting at her dressing table with her back to me, and she was holding a brush behind her head as if she had just finished a stroke down the length of her shining hair, and I could picture her sitting there brushing her hair all the time my father was saying all those angry things to her and answering him back with the cold contempt in her voice, and I had to admit in justice to him that it was something that would probably make anyone furious. I could see the reflection of her face in the mirror, and she could see me in the mirror too, and her eyes widened and she slowly laid the brush or, the glass top of the dressing table and reached up automatically with the other hand to clutch the top of her robe. She turned on the bench to look at me directly, and my father turned also in his position between us, and the two of them looked at me together.
Finally my mother said in a normal voice, “What are you doing up, darling? I thought you were asleep hours ago?”
“I tried to sleep, but I couldn’t,” I said. “I was watching out the window, how the moonlight was and everything.”
“That’s very nice, but perhaps you could have gone to sleep if you had closed your eyes and tried a little harder. Did we disturb you when we came in?”
“You didn’t exactly disturb me, but I could hear you talking.”
“Why did you get up? Are you frightened?”
“You sounded angry. I thought maybe you would stop being angry if I came down and opened the door.”
My father came over and put a hand on my head. “We were talking about something that caused us to lose our tempers with each other. That was pretty foolish, wasn’t it?”
“Why did you say you might kill Mother?”
“Did I say that? I certainly didn’t mean it. It shows you how foolish it is to become angry.”
“Why did Mother say you wouldn’t divorce her? Did you say you would do it?”
“Your mother said things she didn’t mean, just as I did. You mustn’t think about it any more or let it bother you in the least. Now you had better go back to bed.”
“I would like for Mother to come with me.”
“Is that necessary?”
My mother stood up and walked over to us. I could see the shadow of her body under her thin robe, and she was wearing a scent that I have never forgotten and can still smell, even at this moment, though I have not wanted to remember it, and she put an arm around my shoulders and said, “Of course I will come with you. Come along, darling.”
We went to my room together, and I got into bed again, and she sat on the edge of the bed beside me, and it was then still a great pleasure to look at her and touch her and smell the scent of her.
“It’s lovely,” she said. “The moonlight on the ridge, I mean. I can understand why you stayed awake to look at it.”
“I didn’t stay awake on purpose,” I said. “It just happened.”
She sat there looking out the window with a soft light on her face that seemed like it was coming through from the inside, and I lay there thinking that it was more beautiful by far than the moonlight on the ridge, or even on the river, and after a while I went to sleep, and she went away.
That was the beginning of awareness, but not yet of knowing, and my mother and father lived in a cold compromise that lasted for months, and whatever was wrong between them that night went right on being wrong, and it looked like it was going on forever, and then it changed. Something happened, and I don’t know what it was, but there was certainly something, because they were gay with each other again, and went out together at night, and came home talking and laughing, and slept in the same room and all that. It was late in the summer of that year that we went to Mexico City, and I remember Chapultepec Park as clearly as if it were yesterday but nothing else, and everything was fine until the Mexican musician. (Oh, God, that reminds me of the other night in Em Page’s bar, and at home later, and what a thundering, bloody bore I must have made of myself! I must send Em a card and apologize, but I suppose he hopes devoutly that I never enter his place again, and I can’t blame him if he does.)
I didn’t know at the time that it was because of the Mexican that we came home so soon, of course, and didn’t know it until years later, after my mother was dead and my father told me about that and other things so that I would understand why everything in our life had gone sour, but I knew that it was because of something bad, something wrong between them again, and by the time my father finally got around to telling me I already knew how my mother had been, that she liked to sleep around, and a lousy Mexican musician more or less didn’t make a hell of a lot of difference one way or another.
The cold compromise, following Mexico City, was resumed and was complete and was never afterward violated, and the compromise seemed to be that they would maintain the appearance of marriage without the substance, and for a long time, because I was very young and knew nothing, I was sure that my mother was good and right for no other reason than that she was incredibly beautiful, and that the wrong between them, whatever it was, was his. Later, after the day I saw her with the man who cut the grass and took care of the flowers, I assumed the other extreme and thought that that fault was all hers, and I hated her and was sickened by her and could not stand her near me. My revulsion was something I could neither hide nor explain, and it is possible that it contributed to the sum of factors that caused her to kill herself, and if it did, I’m sorry, but I couldn’t help it. Now, looking back, I can see that it was either the fault of both or the fault of neither, and I believe really that the latter is true, that she could no more help what was in her blood or brain or glands, or wherever it was, than he could help the peculiar social cowardice that made it easier to suffer a life-long private degradation rather than to suffer even briefly a public one. The creed of the Laweses, the God-damn cowardly creed of the Laweses, and I suppose that I am as faithful a subscriber to it as any of the others before me, and as great a coward.
This man who cut the grass and took care of the flowers. I can’t even remember his name, and this is probably one of the things that I’ve repressed and deliberately refused to remember. But I can still see him quite clearly in my mind as he was when he worked for us, his tall strong body burned brown by the sun, his white teeth flashing in his dark face with a bold arrogance that seemed to remind you that he might be only a kind of handyman in the yard and gardens, but that he had his own points of superiority if you cared to notice. He worked for us in the spring and summer and early autumn of two years, and it was in the summer of the second year that I saw my mother with him in the arbor by the bluff above the river, and it is now time to think about it clearly, long past time. Here in this warm sunshine, on this bright terrace, it is time to bring it out of the dark into the light and to see it for what it was and nothing more, illicit and wanton and a breach of fidelity but basically normal just the same, nothing at all to sicken a life for more than two decades.
There was this garden swing in the deep back yard, and I liked to sit there in the summer and look down into the bottoms at the gray ribbon of river that had come a thousand miles to this place, and beyond the river was the rich bottom land running east to the ridge. I liked to sit there in the swing and look at the ridge and river and think about how it must have been when there were Indians here, and Conestoga wagons crossing the river on rafts on the way west, and my father said that this hadn’t actually been so long ago, but it seemed to me that it surely must have been ages and that he only thought otherwise because he was himself so old. At that time he must have been all of forty, give a year or two either way, but there was already in him a chill grayness that made him seem much more.