“You mean he wasn’t home last night?”
“No, dear. He’s been gone since last Thursday. He’ll be back tomorrow, I think, if you want to see him.”
“I don’t want to see him. I’m just glad he wasn’t here last night.”
“That’s a strange thing to say about your father, dear. Why are you glad?”
“Because I want you to promise to do something for me, and it will be better if he doesn’t know anything about it. If I ask you to do something for me that may seem rather strange, will you do it?”
“Of course, dear. If I can. You know I always try to do anything for you that I can.”
“I know, Mother. You’ve always been very good to me. It’s really not so much to ask, after all. I only want you to promise to say that I spent last night here if anyone should ask you.”
“To lie, dear? Why ever should you want me to do that?”
“Well, let’s not get heavy about the lying, Mother. Chances are you won’t have to say anything at all, but if you should, I want you to say that I was here. Will you do it?”
“I don’t know. I don’t like to tell lies unless it’s absolutely necessary. You will have to tell me why you want me to say you were here when you really weren’t.”
Donna lit a cigarette and sat looking at her mother through the thin smoke between them. She had thought that it might be possible to arrange things without a confession, but now she saw that it wouldn’t. Besides, she felt suddenly a rather perverse desire to be perfectly honest, not so much for the sake of honesty as for the sake of honesty’s capacity to shock and disturb.
“Aaron’s dead,” she said.
“Aaron? Mr. Burns? The Aaron Burns you work for?”
“That’s right. He died in his home last night, or perhaps early this morning, and that’s why I want you to say I was here. It might ruin me if I were to become involved, and at the very least it would be unpleasant.”
“Involved? I don’t understand what you mean by becoming involved. For God’s sake, you didn’t have anything to do with his death, did you?”
“Oh God, Mother, will you please stop being so tragic? I already have enough to bear without this in addition. I didn’t kill him, if that’s what you mean, and I didn’t contribute to his death indirectly, either. He had a heart condition. He simply died some time while I was asleep. Sometime in the night or early morning.”
“You spent the night with him?”
“Yes. I have spent many nights with him.”
“Oh, Donna, Donna! So your father was right after all! Sleeping with a married man, living like a—”
“Stop it, Mother! Stop it immediately! And if you say anything against Aaron, one damn word, I’ll never speak to you again. Do you understand? He was kind and generous and gentle, which I am not and can never be, and we were good for each other. You needn’t expect me to be ashamed of anything I have done. Do you think I will feel like a criminal because I committed adultery? Well, there was something between us that was what we both needed, and whatever it was, it was good. And I will tell you that it was infinitely more moral, if you are concerned about my morals, than the sour cohabitation that you and Father have been engaged in for as long as I can remember.”
She had not intended to be so cruel, and she regretted at once that she had been. Sucking smoke into her lungs, she expelled it with a long exhalation and watched the slow crumbling and complete dissolution of the vestiges of beauty in her mother’s face.
“Don’t cry,” she said. “Damn it to hell, please don’t cry.”
Standing up abruptly, sickened by ambivalence, she walked out of the living room and through the dining room into the kitchen. On the range was an aluminum pot half full of cold coffee. Lighting the burner under the pot, she stood watching it while the coffee heated. As she stood and watched she began to think with clarity of her position and all that stood in the balance now that Aaron was dead. Here in the ugly house she loathed, in the smell and the shadow of the life she had escaped, she was morbidly aware of what she stood to lose, the shop and her job and all that they entailed and promised. It was not fair after she had schemed and worked so long and so hard, it was simply the rottenest piece of goddamn luck at just the time when everything was going so beautifully. Suddenly, to Aaron, wherever he was, her mind cried out a thin, irrational indictment of betrayal.
Why did you have to die? she thought. Oh, why in hell did you have to die?
Chapter II
1.
One of Donna’s earliest recollections in the area of inceptive light, where remembrance survived in scattered oddments, was the sound of a sewing machine. In the beginning there was one kind of sound, and a little later there was a slightly different kind of sound, and this change occurred when her mother’s old treadle-driven machine was traded in for one with an electric motor. She was sorry to see the old machine go, for the treadle had fascinated her, and she had become quite proficient at working it with her hands while sitting on the floor and looking across under the golden oak cabinet at her mother’s knees. Her mother was glad to be thus relieved of the labor of pumping, and it was pleasant on the floor with her head full of the incisive sound, and the bright fabrics sometimes tumbling over the edge of the machine and behind her to form a kind of silk or cotton or warm wool tent. The old machine was a Bartlett and the new one was a Singer. She remembered the name of the old one quite clearly because it was spelled out in iron letters between iron legs in a shallow arc that served as a brace. The name was also spelled out on the treadle, which consisted of a kind of intricate filigree around the name inside a rectangular iron frame.
A significant oddment was Mrs. Kullen. Mrs. Kullen’s husband was a meat cutter who had acquired his own market, and one of the benefits deriving from her marriage to this prosperous merchant was solvency sufficient for the hiring of a seamstress to modify her fat butt. There were other women who came to the cramped and narrow house for fittings, and some of them were even remembered for a while after they ceased to come, but it was Mrs. Kullen who became and remained the gross symbol of oppression, the prototype in Donna’s mind of those who become dominant through a distortion of values.
Her mother was then beautiful, and employed a fine talent, and those who came to her should have come for favor and not for service, but this was not so. It was perfectly apparent that her mother was considered by these dull and demanding women to be little more than a menial, and it was her mother’s fault, because she was weak and submissive and did not know how to utilize her own superiority. And it was in Donna the beginning of the ambivalence on the one hand, toward her mother, and concentrated contempt on the other, toward all of those for whom Mrs. Kullen stood. And Mrs. Kullen stood for them in her corset. She stood in the room in a slant of sun among a myriad of particles of suspended dust, and the angle of the narrow band of light fell across her fat white downy thighs between her corset and her stockings. This was Donna’s first sight of her, or at least the sight which assumed precedence over all others in time and intensity, and it was the way, the only way, she was ever able to see her afterward in her mind.
For quite a while she seemed to share the house only with her mother and the machine and occasionally the women who came for fittings, and then all of a sudden, emerging from darkness as if he had been gone since her birth and had just returned, there was Wayne Buchanan, her father. It was not true that he had been gone, of course. He was there all the time from the beginning, but for some reason that she could not determine he was excluded from her earlier recollections. Neither could she determine why it was that he took his place so abruptly at the time that he did, but he must have been brought into focus by something unpleasant, something now forgotten that he said or did, for he took shape in an animus that was never overcome. Surely she had formerly felt some affection for him, or had accepted him at least with a kind of tolerance, but the feeling was extinct, if it had existed at all, before it had left a trace in her mind.