“What was that?”
“He had lost thirty pounds. He wasn’t sick — he just couldn’t keep anything down. Dr Wills said it was amoeba (that year he thought everything was amoeba; another year it was endometritis and between you and me he took out just about every uterus in Feliciana Parish). At the breakfast table when Mercer brought in his eggs and grits, he would just sit there looking at it, white as a sheet. Me, it was all I could do not to eat, my breakfast and his. He’d put a mouthful of grits in his mouth and chew and chew and he just couldn’t swallow it. So one day I got an idea. I said listen: you sat up all night reading a book, didn’t you? Yes, I did, he said, what of it? You enjoyed it, didn’t you? Yes, I did. So I said: all right. Then we’ll read it. The next morning I told Mercer to go on about his business. I had my breakfast early and I made his and brought it to him right there in his bed. I got his book. I remember it — it was a book called The Greene Murder Case. Everybody in the family read it. I began to read and he began to listen, and while I read, I fed him. I told him, I said, you can eat, and I fed him. I put the food in his mouth and he ate it. I fed him for six months and he gained twenty five pounds. And he went back to work. Even when he ate by himself downstairs, I had to read to him. He would get downright mad at me if I stopped. ‘Well go on!’ he would say.”
I sit up and shade my eyes to see her.
Mother wrings her nose. “It was because—”
“Because of what?” I spit over into the water. The spit unwinds like a string.
She leans on the rail and gazes down into the tea-colored bayou. “It was like he thought eating was not—important enough. You see, with your father, everything, every second had to be—”
“Be what, Mother?”
This time she gives a real French shrug. “I don’t know. Something.”
“What was wrong with him?”
“He was overwrought,” she replies at once and in her regular mama-bee drone and again my father disappears into the old emblem. I can hear echoes of my grandfather and grandmother and Aunt Emily, echoes of porch talk on the long summer evenings when affairs were settled, mysteries solved, the unnamed named. My mother never got used to our porch talk with its peculiar license. When someone made a spiel, one of our somber epic porch spiels, she would strain forward in the dark, trying to make out the face of the speaker and judge whether he meant to be taken as somberly as he sounded. As a Bolling in Feliciana Parish, I became accustomed to sitting on the porch in the dark and talking of the size of the universe and the treachery of men; as a Smith on the Gulf Coast I have become accustomed to eating crabs and drinking beer under a hundred and fifty watt bulb — and one is as pleasant a way as the other of passing a summer night.
“How was he overwrought?”
She plucks the hook clean, picks up a pink cube, pushes the barb through, out, and in again. Her wrists are rounded, not like a young girl’s but by a deposit of hard fat.
“It was his psychological make-up.”
Yes, it is true. We used to talk quite a bit about psychological make-ups and the effect of glands on our dismal dark behavior. Strangely, my mother sounds more like my aunt than my aunt herself. Aunt Emily no longer talks of psychological make-ups.
“His nervous system was like a high-powered radio. Do you know what happens if you turn up the volume and tune into WWL?”
“Yes,” I say, unspeakably depressed by the recollection of the sad little analogies doctors like to use. “You mean he wasn’t really cut out to be an ordinary doctor, he really should have been in research.”
“That’s right!” My mother looks over in surprise, but not much surprise, then sends her lead off like a shot. “Now Mister—!” she addresses an unknown fish and when he does not respond, falls to musing. “It’s peculiar though. You’re so much like your father and yet so different. You know, you’ve got a little of my papa in you — you’re easy-going and you like to eat and you like the girls.”
“I don’t like to fish.”
“You’re too lazy, if you ask me. Anyhow, Papa was not a fisherman, as I have told you before. He owned a fleet of trawlers at Golden Meadow. But did he love pretty girls. Till his dying day.”
“Does it last that long?”
“Anh anh anh anh anh!” In the scandal of it, Mother presses her chin into her throat, but she does not leave off watching her float. “Don’t you get risque with me! This is your mother you’re talking to and not one of your little hotsy-totsies.”
“Hotsy-totsies!”
“Yes.”
“Don’t you like Sharon?”
“Why yes. But she’s not the one for you.” For years my mother has thrown it out as a kind of proverb that I should marry Kate Cutrer, though actually she has also made an emblem out of Kate and does not know her at all. “But do you know a funny thing?”
“What?”
“It’s not you but Mathilde who is moody like your father. Sister Regina says she is another Alice Eberle.”
“Who is Alice Eberle?”
“You know, the Biloxi girl who won the audition with Horace Heidt and His Musical Knights.”
“Oh.”
Mother trills in her throat with the old music. I squint up at her through the rainbows.
“But when he got sick the next time, I couldn’t help him.”
“Why not?”
She smiles. “He said my treatment was like horse serum: you can only use it once.”
“What did happen?”
“The war came.”
“That helped?”
“He helped himself. He had been in bed for a month, up in your room — you were off at school. He wouldn’t go to the clinic, he wouldn’t eat, he wouldn’t go fishing, he wouldn’t read. He’d just lie there and watch the ceiling fan. Once in a while he would walk down to the Chinaman’s at night and eat a po-boy. That was the only way he could eat — walk down to the Chinaman’s at midnight and eat a po-boy. That morning I left him upstairs as usual. I sent Mercer up with his paper and his tray and called Clarence Saunders. Ten minutes later I look up and here he comes down the steps, all dressed up. He sits himself down at the dining room table as if nothing had happened, orders breakfast and eats enough to kill a horse — all the while reading his paper and not even knowing he was eating. I ask him what has happened. What has happened! Why, Germany has invaded Poland, and England and France have declared war! I’m here to tell you that in thirty minutes he had eaten his breakfast, packed a suitcase and gone to New Orleans.”
“What for?”
“To see the Canadian consul.”
“Yes, I remember him going to Windsor, Ontario.”
“That was two months later. He gained thirty pounds in two months.”
“What was he so excited about?”
“He knew what it meant! He told us all at supper: this is it. We’re going to be in it sooner or later. We should be in it now. And I’m not waiting. They were all so proud of him — and especially Miz Cutrer. And when he came home that spring in his blue uniform and the gold wings of a flight surgeon, I swear he was the best looking man I ever saw in my life. And so — cute! We had the best time.”
Sure he was cute. He had found a way to do both: to please them and please himself. To leave. To do what he wanted to do and save old England doing it. And perhaps even carry off the grandest coup of alclass="underline" to die. To win the big prize for them and for himself (but not even he dreamed he would succeed not only in dying but in dying in Crete in the wine dark sea).
“Then before that he was lazy too.”
“He was not!”
“It is not laziness, Mother. Partly but not all. I’ll tell you a strange thing. During the war a bad thing happened to me. We were retreating from the Chongchon River. We had stopped the Chinese by setting fire to the grass with tracer bullets. What was left of a Ranger company was supposed to be right behind us. Or rather we thought we were retreating, because we got ambushed on the line of retreat and had to back off and head west. I was supposed to go back to the crossroad and tell the Ranger company about the change. I got back there and waited half an hour and got so cold I went to sleep. When I woke up it was daylight.”