Facing a woman who meant him well, the boy had become a man in a hollow of doubt. He had kissed his father at the funeral but not his mother. Because of his mother he had not assaulted the man in the funeral home who had insulted them. His father would have assaulted the man, in the parlor or on the very embalming table had the struggle improbably moved from one room to the next. Yet the man who had been the boy whose father would not give him a shotgun or let him play football or teach him to fight or even to gamble at cards could only bluster and threaten and walk out into the blinding sun and see a vision of Forrest riding a horse through sunny hill and dale of grave upon grave.
The lessons he would learn in life would come from hired hands who bore him malice and aimed weapons at him and high school boys who beat him, not from his father. His women would be not sufficiently not his mother. The most honest way he would come to regard them was with the piercing open hunger for them with which he had looked at Mrs. Hollingsworth when he came in her door.
Confused and afraid of life, he would resort to honesty, a fool’s tool that would dig a grave more quickly than undiluted corruption. And he lay in Mrs. Hollingsworth’s arms in a tub of boiling water, saying all this without knowing what he was saying, but trying. She listened to every word that was not a word and thought him to be taking sustenance from her, from her surreal meal, from her having no plans for him that were not precisely and ineluctably and unpredictably her own.
Intruders in the Fog
WHILE THE MAN CARRIED on with the song of his essential self, articulate in its inarticulateness, important in its triviality, the man and the woman and the dog heard a noise outside the bathroom door. A voice whispered, “She’s in here.” The woman knew immediately it was the Tupperware daughter she had asked out of the house. She knew she was talking to her father, and that she had dragged him home from his office day on grounds that she, Mrs. Hollingsworth, had lost her mind. She knew that they could not have heard the man mumbling on about himself but that they could have heard her mumbling along with him, completing his wordless squirreled syntax in the not language he was necessarily using. If they opened the door they would not see the man or the dog, only her in her thinning hirsuteness and pink flesh being a boiled human egg in the middle of the live-long day.
The daughter would have also told the husband about the crazy list-making, but she believed the husband to know about it already. She had seen him looking at it once or twice in the drawer where she kept it in the kitchen. He had closed the drawer and asked where the matches were, or the whatever he could think to ask about instead of asking her about the altogether strange thing in the drawer. He had had a queer look on his face that she had not seen there in a long time. It was a smile, an oblique look of impish bemusement. She realized as she lay there expecting to have to cover herself against their door-ramming rescue of her that the look was the same one she had seen on Forrest’s face after he said “What is that shit?” referring to the Hendrix music. With them hovering outside the door there was no time to give this revelation justice: had she put her husband’s expression on Forrest? If she had, there was more to her husband than she had thought. This was not surprising, because it seemed to her that she had not thought of him at all for about fifty years. And now he was a sanity detective hunched over with his ear to the bathroom door behind which she, whom for all she knew he had not thought of for fifty years, lay like a mad steamed dumpling. Nothing this delightful had arranged itself in her real life in a long, long time.
She braced for the invasion, wondering if they might not turn up the volume on NPR to a deafening level to cover the uncivil sounds of shouldering the door. You could be known to hang yourself in your carport in this neighborhood with a measure of dignity, but the breaking down of a door would not do. A woman down the street, it was alleged, had actually chopped apart the hollow-core door to her son’s bedroom with an ax to prevent his masturbating. The boy in question was thereafter regarded with small gratuitous kindnesses in the neighborhood, while the mother was shied from in the grocery store. Men in particular kept a cart between themselves and her. Thinking of all this now, Mrs. Hollingsworth realized that the invasion was not forthcoming. The bulk of the bourgeoisie was no longer holding its breath up against the hollow-core door preventing her rescue. She was hearing her husband’s voice.
From the sound of it, and some muted noises coming from her daughter, she judged her husband to be sitting where Turner had sat during the dinner party, at the head of the dining table. Her daughter was not where Jane had been but where Oswald had been, at a polite and reserved remove down the table. Oswald, for all his coarseness, and the haircut, had had a fine sense of propriety. “I’d say,” her husband was saying, “she is taking a bath.”
“Dayad,” her daughter said, as condescendingly as a teenager, “how can you—”
“And I’d say what she has written is, you are right, not a grocery list. And to your notion that she has lost her mind, I’d say that I hope you are right.”
One of the muted noises escaped her daughter at this. “You do?”
“I do.”
This was so congruent to Mrs. Hollingsworth’s way of thinking during all these days of making her list that she thought perhaps she had lost her mind. It was one thing to have Forrest speak the way you wanted him to, for you, or her wounded man with his not need and his want, but quite another to have your husband up and vote right along with you, without the least prompt. She realized that she had loaded in the breach of her mouth something to fire at them had they broken in the door, to protect herself along with the ridiculous gesture of trying to cover herself. She had been about to shout at them, “I’m an artist!” With the relief now of what she was hearing her husband say, and realizing she had had this bullet verily on her tongue, she started laughing, and she knew they could hear her. She could imagine her husband gesturing in the air toward her as she laughed, as if to say to the daughter, “See? She is happy. I am right.”
But he was saying something much more improbable than that. “Your mother is tired, honey. I am tired. Or I was. Today I am not. I am retired today.”
“What?” the daughter said, in a tone of shock and wonder that was extremely gratifying. Mrs. Hollingsworth loved her husband at this moment. She thought it a lie designed to take pressure off her in the daughter’s eyes, and to shock the daughter. But she did not believe her husband to be as malicious with respect to the children as she had become. And indeed he was not, for it appeared instantly that he was not lying.
He told the daughter that he was retired and that he and her mother had enough money to live on and that they were liquidating everything and hitting the trail. “I don’t know,” he said, “if we will take taxis or get a dope van.”
“Where are you going?” The tone was now accusing. How had this smooth pea come out of her wrinkled self?
“I don’t know that either. We might actually sit right here, but we are going somewhere else nonetheless even if we do not move an inch.” Mrs. Hollingsworth almost heard this as “a inch,” as if Oswald had said it. Had she put her husband in Oswald too? There was something aggressive in her husband’s voice. It was a good voice, a voice he used professionally as a judge, and he could use it well. He could scare a man into straightening up, a jury into nullifying all notion of nullifying itself. He was cranking it up in the living room on his own daughter. He was a quietly desperate man himself, Mrs. Hollingsworth realized. That she might be insane and he desperate gave her a thrill.