Mother Rooney had never taken even an aspirin, and now she was harsh and proud.
She heard Harry Monroe’s English Ford outside, with its drizzling ruptured halt at the curb. It was a ghost again, she thought. But she thought of how Harry Monroe had cured her of being afraid every October when the fair came and when she thought she heard something down the hill in back calling her — Mother! Mother! Mother! Harry took her out in the backyard and proved to her that what she was hearing was the men getting the cattle out of the trucks, and when they didn’t move right, the men would lay on with sticks and shout, “Motherfucker!”
“It’s just the Four-H boys saying motherfucker,” Harry explained. Mr. Harry Monroe thought he was being such a clever learned adviser to her. But from Bobby Dove Fleece she knew Mr. Harriman Monroe wasn’t making it as a medical student.
Harry Monroe was really there in the doorway.
He called, “Mother Rooney?” He wore his sophomore lab coat as a cape on his shoulders; he had a fat little book in one hand and a bottle of wine in the other. He was handsome in an old public way. His face was not smooth. He had wanted to play the horn more than know all he was forced to know at the med center of Ole Miss.
He found her. He saw Mother Rooney regarding him. He hit the light switch, and he saw her cartoon yellow hair in its old bun, her bunions shining through her stockings, and the white, blue-rosed dress.
Mother Rooney crooned, “I’m gone, Harriman. You pull off your clothes and let me get a look at you, baby. You were the one, but you always just hurt me. I deserve this. Don’t you be shy. I walked in on Jerry Silas completely naked one night. He was so muscular. He was a wonder. I have seen young men. You aren’t the first. Don’t you be ashamed, Mister Monroe.”
Harry Monroe said, “I know you saw Silas. He’s on the porch. I’m going to take his ass tonight. Don’t you lose control now.”
“You ran my boys away. You ruined this house.”
Mother Looney, he thought. He shut the door and locked it to keep Silas and the other fellow out. “I’m the only one that did care a little,” he said to her. He knelt by her and saw the brooch buried in her and the blood dripping down the old ravine of her breasts. He didn’t want her to see him blanch. He thought she was in shock. “I brought you this bottle of wine. I saw Silas at the Dutch Bar and we thought we’d surprise you tonight. You must take up drinking.” He peered at the wound some more. “I brought this book, the Merck Manual. You can read in it and tell your own disease by the symptoms. You can advise the doctors.”
Aw hell, Monroe thought. The bottle of wine was a third drunk, and the Merck Manual was an old one he’d got out of the pharmacology trash basket.
“You were always ugly to me. Is Jerry Silas out there? I want to see him. I have a crush on him,” she said.
She’s with it. She’s not in shock, Monroe thought.
“I’m not going to let them in,” he said.
Two men were outside the door, falling on the porch and yelling to him.
“You don’t like Silas, Mother. We all knew he was. . he lifted weights. Didn’t just lift them. The weights possessed him. He sent off for special underwear and for red oil to rub on his body. He bought a camera that he could activate from across the room while he lay on his bed, flexing. He’ll kill himself when his stomach muscles start sagging.”
Oh, but they didn’t sag, Mother Rooney thought, when I walked in on him and he was naked and stiff, but twinkling in his eyes so joyously that it was clear he couldn’t hurt a woman in all his health, either. He would have been tender, friendly, out-of-doors with you. Oh, he maketh me to lie down in green pastures, but where was he and where was his pasture? And, yes, he restoreth my soul, but all I got was used up. And, yes, his rod and staff, they comfort me — and they would have, but where was he, and where was the comfort I was entitled to? My cup runneth over with hurt-juice.
“Mr. Silas wanted me to be thirty again,” Mother Rooney said.
Monroe leaned on the stairwell with his head in his hands. He yelled out to the porch for them to shut up. He opened the Merck Manual and began turning pages.
“You cannot like him. You cannot like any of us. We were the ugliest people as a group. Didn’t you see how marked out for losing we all were? Hammack, Worley, Delph. I sometimes wondered how all we shits got ganged up in this — this beautiful house. But especially you can’t like Silas. Silas breathes out a smell of broiler shanties and rotten pine, and he is always sweating. He’s lost his job at the music store, but he flourishes on, trying in different ways to prove that he is not from Fig Newton, Mississippi, that a certain type of mass-produceable chicken wasn’t named after his father.”
“You are very sharp toward others,” Mother Rooney said.
“Oh, I know, me,” Harry Monroe said. “A man who was so bad in music he was booted out of the Jackson symphony, and now almost failing med school.”
“But you keep on being so cruel to me. You won’t open the door and let me see those boys. There are two boys out there, aren’t there?”
“One of them isn’t a boy,” Monroe said.
It was strange to him to hear the two on the porch, still savagely drunk, and to realize that he himself, who had put down more than any of them, was now sober as Mother Rooney was.
He said, “The fellow with Silas is seventy years old. He was at the Dutch Bar and we thought we’d bring him over as a — a gift, a present to you. The old guy is ready to be your companion from now on out; he already has a crush on you, Mother. Listen!”
She had begun to rise, hissing at him.
“I know it’s horrible now. But I and Silas wanted to make amends to you, really. We are so sorry for what happened in this house. You know, it started with the little joking insults, and then it grew to where hurting you was a cult. You really occupied us. Especially those of us who were taking a lot of bad traffic in the shit of the outer world and were originally endowed with a great amount of rottenness in our personal selves. The next thing would’ve been murdering you. I always felt the police were ready to break in any minute.”
“You prissy little scholar. I could’ve taken it,” Mother Rooney said. “You don’t know the hurt that’s come to me. It tells me I’m alive, hurting.”
Monroe looked at her forlornly. “Do you think you can take that pin wound in your chest now?”
“I don’t know.” Mother Rooney sank, remembering the pin. What to do? Monroe wondered. He drew away into the dining room and sat on the couch. “Puncture” was all he remembered. He was very busy with the Merck, after making the phone call. She heard the pages ruffling and Harry mumbling.