In spite of our antagonism, I had until lately tried to influence the girl, sending her books and, on her birthday, record albums. I knew I could have little effect on her. But when she was twelve I undertook to tutor her in French as a means of broaching other subjects. (Her father, naturally, wanted her to be accomplished.) I was unsuccessful. My missionary eagerness betrayed itself too soon, before I had her confidence. She told her mother that I was teaching her “bad things.” And how was I to explain to Dolly that I was trying to “save” Etta? It would have been insulting. Etta hated the lessons, by simple extension she hated me, and if I had not given her an excuse for discontinuing them, she would soon have found one.
Etta is a vain girl. I am sure she spends a great many hours before the mirror. I am sure, also, that she must be aware of the resemblance she bears to me. It goes beyond the obvious similarities pointed out by the family. Our eyes are exactly alike, and so are our mouths and even the shape of our ears, sharp and small—Dolly’s are altogether different. And there are other similarities, less easily definable, which she cannot help recognizing and which—our enmity being what it is—must be painful to her.
At dinner the talk, in which I scarcely took part at first, was of the hardships of rationing. Dolly and Amos are coffee drinkers but, as patriots, they tempered their complaints with resignation. They turned next to shoes and clothing. Dolly’s brother, Loren, who represents a large Eastern shoe firm, had warned them that the government intended to limit the sale of leather goods.
“We couldn’t get along on four pairs a year,” said Dolly.
But that was unpatriotic, wasn’t it? The contradiction was too plain to be unnoticed.
“You have to take into account what people are accustomed to,” said Amos; “their standard of living. The government overlooks that. Why, even charities don’t give the same amounts to any two families. It would cause too much hardship.”
“Yes, that’s what I meant,” said Dolly. “You couldn’t call it hoarding.”
“No,” I replied. She had addressed herself to me.
“Later on there’ll be a run on clothes, too,” asserted Amos. “That’s the way the consumer market is when people are earning.”
“Of course, Joseph won’t have to worry. The Army will take care of him. But we poor civilians .…”
“Joseph would be indifferent, anyway,” said Iva. “It wouldn’t affect him. He never buys more than one pair of shoes a year.”
“He isn’t on his feet much,” said Etta. Her mother gave her a sharp look.
“I do lead a sedentary life,” I said.
“That was all I meant, Mother,” said Etta.
“He doesn’t worry about any of those things too much, was what I meant,” Iva continued, speaking quickly. “He doesn’t particularly care what he eats, either, just so it’s food. It was no problem pleasing him when I used to cook.”
“It’s a blessing to be that way. Amos is so hard to suit. You wouldn’t think they were brought up by the same mother.”
“He wasn’t so easy to raise in all respects,” Amos said with a smile across the table.
“When are you going into the Army, Joseph?” asked Etta.
“Now, Etta,” said Amos reprovingly.
“Uncle Joseph, I’m sorry. When are you going?”
“I don’t know. Whenever God wills.”
This amused them.
“He’s certainly taking His time about it,” said Dolly.
“There’s no hurry,” Iva interposed. “The longer the better.”
“Oh, of course,” Dolly said, “I know how you feel.”
“But Joseph doesn’t feel that way about it, do you, Joseph?” Amos looked pleasantly at me. “I’m sure he’d like to find out how to hurry Him up. It isn’t only the waiting, but he’ll miss out on his chances for advancement. He ought to get in there and become an Officer Candidate.”
“I don’t think I want to try to make an officer of myself.”
“Well, I don’t see why not,” said Amos. “Why not?”
“As I see it, the whole war’s a misfortune. I don’t want to raise myself through it.”
“But there have to be officers. Do you want to sit back and let some cluck do what you can do a thousand times better?”
“I’m used to that,” I said, shrugging. “That’s the case in many departments of life already. The Army’s no exception.”
“Iva, do you intend to let him go in with that attitude? A fine Army we’d have.”
“It’s my conviction,” I said. “Iva couldn’t change it, and I’m inclined to think she wouldn’t want to. Many men carry their ambitions over from civilian life and don’t mind climbing upon the backs of the dead, so to speak. It’s no disgrace to be a private, you know. Socrates was a plain foot soldier, “hoplite.”
“Socrates, eh?” said Amos. “Well, that’s a good and sufficient reason.”
A little later in the evening, Amos, calling me aside, led me up to his bedroom and there, producing a hundred-dollar bill, thrust it like a handkerchief into my breast pocket, saying, “This is our Christmas present to you.”
“Thank you,” I said, pulling it out and laying it on the dresser; “but I can’t take it.”
“Why can’t you take it? Nonsense, you can’t refuse it. I tell you, it’s a present.” He picked up the bill impatiently. “Be a little more hardheaded, will you? You’re always up in the air. Do you know what I paid in income taxes alone last year? No? Well, this isn’t a drop in that bucket. I’m not depriving myself of anything to give it to you.”
“But what will I do with it, Amos? I don’t need it.”
“You are the most obstinate jackass I’ve ever seen. You can’t stand being helped even a little, by anyone.”
“Why, this is your shirt I’m wearing, and these are your socks. I appreciate them, but I don’t want anything else.”
“Joseph!” he exclaimed. “I don’t know what to do with you. I’m beginning to think you’re not all there, with your convictions and your hop—! I wish I knew how it was going to turn out with you. You’ll ruin yourself in the end. Think of Iva sometimes. What’s her future going to be like?”
“Oh, the future.”
“That’s what I said.”
“Well, who the devil has one?”
“Everybody,” Amos said. “I have.”
“Well, you’re in luck. I’d think about it a little if I were you. There are many people, hundreds of thousands, who have had to give up all thought of future. There is no personal future any more. That’s why I can only laugh at you when you tell me to look out for my future in the Army, in that tragedy. I wouldn’t stake a pin on my future. And maybe I wouldn’t have yours .…” Toward the end my voice had begun to shake.
Amos faced me quietly for a while. Then he said, “Take the money, Joseph,” and left. I heard him going downstairs.
I sat on the bed groggily, holding my head. There was a weak lamp burning in one corner; from its copper slot one band of light crossed the curtain; the rest of the room was nearly dark. The ceiling had become a screen for the accidental motions of the greenish street beyond, and across half its width was thrown intact a reflection of the Venetian blind, like the ribs of some immemorial fish. What sort of impression had my words made on Amos? It was impossible to tell. What could he think? Perhaps he considered me more hopeless than ever. But what did I think? Was what I had said half as true as it was impetuous? His neat vision of personal safety I disowned, but not a future of another kind. Still, how could I reason with him? He was a distance beyond reckoning from the craters of the spirit, so that they were no more than small pits on his horizon. But in time they would draw closer. Yes, everyone came to face them when those horizons shrank, as they could not fail to shrink. I went to the bathroom and washed. The crammed feeling at my heart began to wear off, and when I hung the towel back on its glass rod I was less confused. I picked up the hundred-dollar bill from the dusk of the carpet where it had
fallen. If I tried to hand it back now there would be a scene; I knew better than to try. I searched the top of Amos’s dresser for a pin or clasp of some kind. Not finding one there, I opened one drawer after another until, in Dolly’s dressing table, I came upon a pincushion. I went to the bed and stuck the bill to the counterpane over the pillow. Then, in the hall, I stood for a while, hearing the husky voice of the radio speaker below and the laughter and comment of the others. I decided not to join them.
Instead, though I knew it meant working a hardship on Iva to leave her to Dolly, Etta, and Amos, I climbed to the third floor. There, in what had once been an attic, Dolly had furnished a music room. One entire side of it was taken up by a broad monster of a piano which crouched on bowed legs, awaiting use. It was, however, seldom touched, for it had been replaced downstairs by a more jaunty and stylish instrument that showed its teeth like a darky entertainer. On the opposite side of the room was a phonograph with a shelf of records above it. I began to look for a record I had bought Etta a year ago, a Haydn divertimento for the cello, played by Piatigorsky. To find it, I had to hunt through a dozen albums. Here Dolly and Etta, for all their sense of property, were careless; there were numerous broken records. But I found mine whole and, thankfully—my dejection would have doubled if it had been cracked or missing—I started it, and sat down facing the piano.
It was the first movement, the adagio, that I cared most about. Its sober opening notes, preliminaries to a thoughtful confession, showed me that I was still an apprentice in suffering and humiliation. I had not even begun. I had, furthermore, no right to expect to avoid them. So much was immediately clear. Surely no one could plead for exception; that was not a human privilege. What I should do with them, how to meet them, was answered in the second declaration: with grace, without meanness. And though I could not as yet apply that answer to myself, I recognized its rightness and was vehemently moved by it. Not until I was a whole man could it be my answer, too. And was I to become this whole man alone, without aid? I was too weak for it, I did not command the will. Then in what quarter should I look for help, where was the power? Grace by what law, under what order, by whom required? Personal, human, or universal, was it? The music named only one source, the universal one, God. But what a miserable surrender that would be, born out of disheartenment and chaos; and out of fear, bodily and imperious, that like a disease asked for a remedy and did not care how it was supplied. The record came to an end; I began it again. No, not God, not any divinity. That was anterior, not of my own deriving. I was not so full of pride that I could not accept the existence of something greater than myself, something, perhaps, of which I was an idea, or merely a fraction of an idea. That was not it. But I did not want to catch at any contrivance in panic. In my eyes, that was a great crime. Granted that the answer I was hearing, that went so easily to the least penetrable part of me, the seldom-disturbed thickets around the heart, was made by a religious man. But was there no way to attain that answer except to sacrifice the mind that sought to be satisfied? From the antidote itself another disease would spring. It was not a new matter, it was one I had frequently considered. But not with such a desperate emotion or such a crucial need for an answer. Or such a feeling of loneliness. Out of my own strength it was necessary for me to return the verdict for reason, in its partial inadequacy, and against the advantages of its surrender.
As I began to play the record for the third time, Etta came into the room. Without speaking to me, she went to the shelf and, taking down a bright-colored album, waited, an impatient frown on that fresher and somewhat harder or unworked version of my own face. I now scarcely heard the music. I was already braced for a struggle, the inevitability of which I recognized at once. I groped inside the cabinet of the phonograph for the lever.
“Just a minute. What are you doing?” she said, coming forward a step.
I turned with an aggressive movement. “What?” I said.
“I want to use the machine, Joseph.”
“I’m not finished with it yet.”
“I don’t care,” she insisted. “You’ve had it to yourself all this time. It’s my turn. You’ve been playing that thing over and over.”
“You snooped, didn’t you?” I said accusingly.
“I did not. It was so loud everybody heard it downstairs.”
“You’ll have to wait, Etta.”
“I will not,” she said. “I want to play these Cugat records Mama gave me. I’ve been wanting to hear them all day.”
I did not step aside. At my back the turntable whirred, the needle making a dull scrape among the last grooves. “As soon as I play the second part of this I’ll go.”
“But you’ve had the phonograph since dinner. It’s my turn.”
“And I say no,” I replied.
“You have no business saying no to me,” she said.
“No business!” I exclaimed with an abrupt, raw jerk of anger.
“It’s my phonograph; you’re keeping me from my phonograph!”
“Well, if that isn’t small!” I said.
“What you call me or think about me doesn’t matter.” Her voice rose above the tac-a-tac of the machine. “I want to listen to Cugat. I don’t care.”
“Look,” I said, making a strong effort to control myself. “I came up here with a purpose. What purpose it isn’t necessary to tell you. But you couldn’t stand to think that I was here alone, no matter why. Maybe you thought I was enjoying myself, ah? Or hiding away? So you hurried to see if you could spoil it for me. Isn’t that true?”
“You’re such a clever man, Uncle!”
“Clever man!” I said, mimicking. “Movie talk. You don’t even know what you’re saying. This is absurd, quarreling with a stupid child. It’s a waste of time. But I know how you feel toward me. I know how much and how genuinely you hate me. I thank God, child that you are, that you have no power over me.”
“You’re crazy, Uncle,” she said.
“All right, that’s said and over, there won’t be any more of it,” I said, and believed that I was succeeding in checking myself. “You can listen to the conga, or whatever it is, when I leave. Now, will you go or sit down and let me play this to the end?”
“Why should I? You can listen to this. Beggars can’t be choosers!” She uttered this with such triumph that I could see she had prepared it long in advance.
“You’re a little animal,” I said. “As rotten and spoiled as they come. What you need is a whipping.”
“Oh!” she gasped. “You dirty … dirty no-account. You crook!” I caught her wrist and wrenched her toward me.
“Damn you, Joseph, let go! Let me go!” The album went crashing. With the fingers of her free hand she tried to reach my face. Seizing her by the hair fiercely, I snapped her head back; her outcry never left her throat; her nails missed me narrowly. Her eyes shut tightly, in horror.
“Here’s something from a beggar you won’t forget in a hurry,” I muttered. I dragged her to the piano bench, still gripping her hair.
“Don’t!” she screamed, recovering her voice. “Joseph! You bastard!”
I pulled her over my knee, trapping both her legs in mine. I could hear the others running upstairs as the first blows descended and I hurried my task, determined that she should be punished in spite of everything, in spite of the consequences; no, more severely because of the consequences. “Don’t you struggle,” I cried, pressing down her neck. “Or curse me. It won’t help you.”
Amos pounded up the last flight of stairs and burst in. Behind, breathless, came Dolly and Iva.
“Joseph,” Amos panted, “let her go. Let the girl go!”
I did not release her at once. She no longer fought against me but, with her long hair reaching nearly to the floor and her round, nubile thighs bare, lay in my lap. Whether this was meant to be an admission of complicity and an attempt to lighten my guilt, or whether she wished them to see and savor it fully, I did not know at first.
“Stand up, Etta,” Dolly sai
d curtly. “Straighten your skirt.”
Slowly, she got to her feet. I wonder if any of them were capable of observing how exactly alike we looked at that moment. “And now, if you can, Joseph,” said Dolly, turning her dilated eyes on me, “explain what you were doing.”
“Mother,” Etta suddenly began to sob. “I didn’t do anything to him. He attacked me.”
“What! In the name of God, what are you talking about?” I exclaimed. “I spanked you because you had a spanking coming.”
What unspeakable inference or accusation was that in Dolly’s widened eyes? I returned her look steadily.
“Nobody has ever laid a hand on Etta for any reason whatsoever, Joseph.”
“Whatsoever! Is calling her uncle a beggar a sufficient ‘whatsoever’? There’s something ambiguous in your mind. Why don’t you speak out?”
She turned to Amos as though to say, “Your brother is going insane. Now he’s springing at me.”
“I put her over my knee and gave her a hiding, and it wasn’t half of what she deserved. She swore at me like a poolroom bum. A mighty fine job you’ve done with her.”
“He pulled me by the hair, that’s what he did,” Etta cried. “He nearly twisted my head off.”
Iva, after turning off the phonograph, had seated herself near it in the background and did her best to efface herself. Which signified to me that she was acknowledging my shame. But there was no “shame.” She, too, now came into the sphere of my anger.
“What else did he do?” Dolly demanded.
“Oh, so you think she’s covering something up! I spanked her. What else are you fishing for? What are you hoping she’ll say? What sort of vulgarity. …”
“Stop acting like a wild man!” Amos said peremptorily.
“It’s your fault, too,” I retorted. “Look how you’ve brought her up. It’s might fine, isn’t it. You’ve taught her to hate the class and, yes, the very family you come from. There’s a whatsoever for you. Are people to be null because they wear one pair of shoes a year, not a dozen? Try your teeth on that whatsoever!”