“‘Talk.’
“‘What should I say?’
“‘Speak.’
“‘I don’t know what to say.’
“‘Let’s hear it,’ I commanded.
“‘I don’t know what you want me to say. I … Be nice to me. I’m the one they laugh at—I am. They know what I do. I’m the one they’re laughing at. They think you’re a cripple like themselves.’
“‘In the beginning was the Word. Say.’
” I don’t know what you want!’
“‘To unlock the secret of your voice. Just that.’
“‘It will end by my being fired. I’ll lose my job. All I want is to help people. Why won’t you go?’ She was crying, though I didn’t hear this so much as see it.
“I recalled her stories after we made love. ‘Stop. That’s enough. Eureka, I’ve found it. Thank you.’
“‘I wish I never sat next to you on that bus.’
“‘Now I know the secret. I’m leaving.’
“‘The secret,’ she said contemptuously.
“‘Certainly,’ I said. ‘I knew you had one. Now I know what it is.’
“‘What is it?’ she asked dully.
“‘You were naked. I’m a sucker for the first person singular.’”
Dick Gibson paused. He leaned back, appearing to rest. “Quick,” he said, suddenly leaning forward again. “Let me see your watch.” He took up someone’s wrist and brought it to his face. “You’re left- handed,” he said disgustedly, flinging the wrist away. “The numbers are upside down.” He grabbed someone else’s wrist, bent down over it so that his nose almost touched the man’s watch, and studying the dial, he figured to himself furiously. “Ah,” he said breathlessly, “one hour and seventeen minutes. I just made it.”
He was in Newark that evening, out on a sleeper that night, did not speak to strangers and arrived in Pittsburgh the next morning.
It was strange to be in a big city again — even stranger than to be home — and he realized that except for layovers he had not been in a really large city since he’d left home. It was fitting. Small towns were the historic province of apprenticeship — villages, townships, county seats, flocculent, unincorporated tufts of population — these backwaters were your unheeding witnesses to your new processes and evolving styles. Just the same he felt expansive, auspicion’s loved object, young Lochinvar come riding out of the west on a round trip.
As he left Union Station and looked up Mellon Boulevard at downtown Pittsburgh, he was tremendously excited. He perceived with a sovereign clarity, shipping impression like a lovely cargo, and what he saw was to stay with him all his life as the very essence of the city. He admired the black, thick buildings, the dark windows like glass postage or framed deep water. There were high projecting cornices at the top stories like the peaks of caps, and he tried to look in under them to the careful scrollwork, distinctive as the flow of a hairline. Shifting his gaze he watched the smooth, shiny trolley rails that, blocks off, flowed into each other like twin rivers of perspective. At a nearby corner a snagged lace of electric lines floated above the traffic. He sighted along a row of canopies that unfurled above the big display windows of a department store in a parade of identical angles, trawling on the bright and windless morning a still fringe of scallops. He looked up the tall, fluted shaft of an iron light standard. It seemed monumental to him, something to light up outer space. He waited for a traffic light to change and crossed the street, moving with a certain awe toward a bank like a pagan temple, its brass and marble ornament engraved like money.
It pleased him to be in this city of just under a half-million, a large American city of the first class with a major league ball club (in a state with three major league teams; no state had more; only New York had as many), three great daily newspapers, and eleven radio stations (all the networks plus KDKA, perhaps the greatest independent in the country). He congratulated himself. Depression or no, soot or no — an industrial pall hung on the buildings like a painted shadow, but it was not unpleasant; it seemed an earnest of the city’s value — it was a magnificent place, as finished and fixed for him as a city in Europe. Yet he felt a twinge too, realizing it was merely his home, that he belonged there only in that sense, that despite his years away from it, he was simply its citizen. No great company had called him there, nor had he, prospector-like, shouldered his way through Indian hazard to seek its veins and work its lodes. In this sense he felt it less his than the last traveling salesman’s off the train with him that morning. By the time he was settled in a cab he was already down a peg or two, and he no longer knew the city well enough to be satisfied that the driver did not cheat him as he turned up alleys and cut through parks.
His mother was standing on the porch when the taxi pulled up. “Och,” she said, recognizing him, “a taxi, is it? Nivver moind that the roof wants fixin’ or cupboard’s bare. Bother all that, so long as himself here can roid about in the cabs.” It was her Maw Green imitation, a doughty Irish washerwoman from the Sunday funnies. He had not thought about it since he’d left home, and was surprised that it could still make him uncomfortable.
“Hello, Mama.”
“Saints presarve us,” his mother sighed. She moved down the steps toward him. “It’s you, it’s really you this toime? ’Tisn’t a ghost or a trick of the wee folk?”
“It’s me, Mama.”
She reached out and touched him, then pretended to wipe a tear from her eye. “La, listen to me blather when it’s probably hungry y’are from yer journey.” She stepped back to appraise him. “Och, and foine it is yer lookin’ too, lad. Faith and begorrah,” she said, shaking her head sadly, “if only yer father were here to see you.”
“Is Papa dead, Mama?”
“No, God love you, boy, but only down t’ the corner fer a pint. Ah, bejazus, where’s me manners?” She took his heavy suitcase from him and would have had him lean on her as they went up the stairs, but he eluded her and walked up them unaided into the house. His mother followed him inside, calling, “Arthur, Arthur lad, ye must guess who’s come. It’s himself, Arthur, it’s young himself himself.”
They heard a rough noise, a clumsy banging and clatter from behind one of the closed bedrooms off the hallway. It was exactly the sound of something outsize and heavy being maneuvered into position, a full steamer trunk, perhaps. He looked at his mother, but she would not meet his glance. Her eyes which had burned with a feverish humor when she had done her imitation had now gone dead; her shoulders sagged.
“Mama?” They heard the noise again and his mother turned away from him. He looked around to see his brother Arthur pushing himself down the hallway in a wheelchair.
“Arthur,” he said. “My God, kid, what is it?” He rushed to the boy’s side.
“I can do it myself,” his brother hissed. “Hands off,” he said sternly. He wheeled himself past his brother and then turned when he was in the center of the living room. He looked at Dick Gibson contemptuously for a moment and then, tilting his head, his eyes so wide it must have pained him, he displayed the utter dependency of love. “Did you make good? Did you, brother?”