Now I had been ready to make it easy for Joel; to show him that so far as I was concerned, he need not mind about his mother. This was quite a different thing from finding that he did not mind about his mother; that far from being apologetic of the peculiar sweetmeat which politeness had forced me to eat, he seriously commended her skill in preparing it.
Yet, as so often happened with him, what put me out momentarily, set me free as the expected reaction from him could not have done; it was not necessary to pretend anything, even understanding. I could be curious about the old portraits looking down on us. They were his father’s parents: “The old chap was supposed to be a Talmudic scholar. I don’t quite know what the Christian equivalent of that would be. … The Talmud — it’s a kind of book of religious philosophy. Somewhere in every Jewish family they’ve got a Talmudic scholar preserved, it’s a distinction none of us can afford to be without. Like ours, he’s usually dead, but there are stories about how during his life time he spent his days and nights poring over books of wisdom — you know, the Talmud’s rather like Shakespeare or Finnegans Wake now — hundreds of different interpretations of the text and scholastic arguments which die unsolved with their protagonists. — He doesn’t look much of a scholar, does he?”
We looked the old man in the eye.
I laughed. “She looks the brainy one.”
“She was the go-getter. These Talmudic scholars are nice for prestige, but mostly they don’t make a living. With him I really think it must just have been an excuse to get out of working and hang around the synagogue with his pals.”
“You make it sound like the men’s commonroom.”
He pulled his nose down sardonically, laughing. “Now you see where I get it from. The family glories in the education I’m getting myself, while really all I’m doing is learning to play a devastating hand at bridge. — But seriously, as soon as any member of a Jewish family shows any inclination even vaguely connected with learning — it could be stamp-collecting or pornography — everybody starts wagging their heads: he’s just like old Uncle so-and-so, so studious. … She took in dressmaking to keep the family.” Under her eyes, we wandered back to Joel’s room; she had the imagined power of the dead and alien to fasten her look far beyond the frame or carved limits of their presence; like the face of the idol whose symbolism you do not understand — is he to bring rain, corn or protection? — but whose jeweled eye you feel long after you have left the temple.
I left the house just before lunch with two of Joel’s books under my arm — one was always taking something from him, he was one of those people who give out of a sufficiency in themselves, welling up beautifully to a constant level no matter how often dipped into, and quite independent of material possession or the condescension of generosity. His father had come home but I did not see him, although I could hear, in the back of the house, a heavy tread and a moody voice speaking another language. Joel hung on the gate making a ridge of his brows against the sun. There was a fascination about the way he looked in the full sun; the fascination I had felt in the faces of Indian waiters serving food in Durban hotels. That steely darkness of black curly hair — perhaps it was just that his hair was like theirs. But their faces came up in the sun as his did. The quiet-colored faces and neutral hair among which I had grown up had a way of almost disappearing in bright sunlight, only a sear of gleam here and there traced their light-flattened contours, and they blinked laughter, as if the brightness were a hand pushed in their faces. Ludi was something else again; his brightness took on brightness, like metal.
One could not know whether it was the sun or thought that was making Joel frown. His hesitation made me wait. When we had already said good-by, he asked: “Shall I come to you, now?”
I felt I understood what he meant. One could have a friendship in a train that could exist for years outside one’s life as an entity, but once one met and talked at home instead of between here and there, one part of one’s life and another, the friend of the train moved in to one’s life. “Yes, what about one evening? Tuesday — no, that’s the night I get back late. Wednesday, then?”
But he said, as if it suddenly didn’t matter: “Oh, we don’t have to fix it now.” Then he smiled on an inner comment. “Right,” he said, dismissing it, very friendly, and with a little wave, turned up the path. When I looked back as I turned the corner, to take in a last curious impact of that little house, I saw he had not gone in but was still standing there, on the veranda steps, watching me go or staring at some object of his own.
Joel came to the Mine several times and my mother received him without remark. She spoke to him for a few minutes with the usual slightly arch pleasantness which she showed toward my contemporaries — her whole manner on a higher, soprano key, like an actress helping across some lines whose meaning she feels may not be clear — and then left us on the fly-screened porch that was full of the flowered cotton chair covers and embroidered cushions she had made, the sawdust-stuffed stocking cat that held the door open. At four o’clock she came out with a tea tray laid with fresh linen and, not the best cups, but a little twosome breakfast set that was not in common use. I recognized in Joel’s serious, careful manner that she was even pretty, with her thin, dry-skinned face and her red hair only slightly faded by the curls that the hairdresser steamed into it once a week, now that it was cut, and the almost antiseptic scent of lavender water that waved out of the flounces of her dress. She was even well dressed, in what I was now beginning to recognize was the Mine style: the flower-patterned, unobtrusive blues and pinks of English royalty.
My father spoke to Joel about “your people” and “the customs of your people” with the same air he used to surprise the Portuguese market gardener with a few words of Portuguese, or, when once we drove through Zululand, a Zulu tribesman with a brisk question in his own language. But though I sat in awkward silence, Joel answered with patient explanation, as the cultured native of a country ignores the visitor’s proud clumsy mouthing of a few words of vulgar patois, and returns patronage with the compliment of pretending to mistake it for real interest. “That’s a well-mannered boy,” my father informed me. “They know how to bring their children up to respect older people. And of course they’re clever, it goes without saying.”
Some weeks later I told my mother that Joel had asked me to go with him to a faculty dance. She put down an armful of clean laundry in alarm. “You wouldn’t go when Basil asked you! And the Blake boy.”
“So?”
She stood there looking at me. Her face had the fixed, sham steadiness of someone who does not know how to say the unexpected. The impact of her thoughts left a sort of stinging blankness on her cheeks. As usual, she took refuge in an unspecified umbrage, her suffering of a complaint against me for which I must bear the burden of guilt without knowing its cause. She buried herself in the counting of shirts, left my pile of underclothing and handkerchiefs abandoned on the kitchen chair and swept away with the rest of the bundle to the linen cupboard.