The reality which she dragged to the table made him conscious of a larger unreality that existed in a submerged state. This hidden disturbance floated through the room like the submerged bulk of an iceberg guided by unknown boreal currents.
He made a number of efforts to foster a flood of small talk. Blanche refused to be coerced. His words were tiny rills flowing into an ocean of silence. Finally he managed to rap out a polite, insincere query about her mother. It was seldom that he dared to trespass on these grounds. For some reason Blanche had put a taboo on “mother” talk. However, that individual was expected now in a day or two.
The word “mother” seemed a convenient lightning rod in the electric disturbance about to break.
“You find this a very exciting topic, I notice.” It was Blanche opening the bombardment.
“Exciting … exciting? That hardly seems the word, Blanche. I don’t understand you.” He knew he was skating on thin ice. What the devil was she up to now? “You know I’ve always liked your mother,” he said aloud, as though to convince her by these harmless words that he was merely repeating an idle assertion.
“I know how much you like. Well, she’ll be here soon enough … you won’t be disappointed.”
“Now, Blanche, what’s the meaning of this?” His voice betrayed an increasing irritation. Fine! They would be at it again in no time … hammer and tongs.
Since she said nothing to this he went on. It was imperative to defend himself, no matter what direction the attack came from. He was waiting to see “the whites of their eyes.”
“So you haven’t the slightest idea what I’m driving at? You sit there as though you expected me to tell you a pretty little fairy tale.” She paused a moment. Then, agitato: “Why did you get home so early today? Thought she’d be here, eh? Couldn’t wait till she arrived?”
He repeated the last line like a refrain. He glared at her furiously. “Speak out!” he bellowed. “Don’t beat about the bush this way. Always these damned insinuations.”
“Oh-ho! Insinuations? I do like that. You’re annoyed, are you? Think perhaps I imagine things?”
“I think that you’re capable of imagining anything.” He no longer cared what he said. He was utterly beside himself.
She kept fending him off, stinging him with light jabs, buzzing around like an insect. Her words fairly crackled. It was not so much what she said; it was the implications concealed behind every remark that made him raw and helpless.
“You think you can run off and leave me here alone every night, and then when you’ve had your bellyful and your conscience bothers you, you expect to come home and find me waiting here like a neglected mistress who is ready to fall in your lap for a smile or tender word.”
This sentence, delivered all in one note, took the breath away from her.
“What has all that to do with your mother?” he asked, regaining his composure. (A mistake to revive the “mother” theme. He realized that at the moment it was out.)
“You’ll find that out, too,” she hissed. “It’s high time you were informed of a few things....”
“Look here,” he blurted out, “just what do you mean by that?”
He observed that she hesitated, apparently reluctant, even in her rage, to disclose the rankling. When she had gained sufficient mastery of her emotions to formulate her thoughts with some semblance of coherence, she proceeded. At first he listened in credulously. A skillful detour that concealed the direction of her target almost convinced him that he had nothing to worry about, that she had missed her objective. But just as he began to feel wholly assured, a thorough disquiet overtook him and he was victimized by a premonition of impending disaster. “She’s leading me by the nose,” he said to himself.... “Leading me right up to the brink of the precipice.” And sure enough she was. He knew every inch of the road they were taking. “But how in God’s name could she have kept it down so long? Could she really have known all the time and preserved this horrible pretense?” For a moment he harbored the suspicion that she was feigning a secret knowledge, and that this torture had been premeditated with the purpose in mind of making him squirm and fidget until he him self blurted out the truth but he was wrong in this conjecture.
It was obvious that she knew everything. The picture was only too complete.
The tableau which she mirrored from him was of such a monstrous nature that—well, once the truth was out he no longer heeded her, his mount found it difficult to pierce the limits that hedged this piece of isolated depravity “My own mother—to think of it!” That phrase lodged in his brain like the knife of an assassin. His thoughts raced “backwards and forwards over detail connected with the unhappy circumstances she had just related. He searched vainly for some crumb of justification. He ransacked his heart, scoured his conscience. There was nothing to cling to, absolutely nothing.
Yet there was this iota, let the people say what they would: this woman, this mother of Blanche’s—had she ever acted the part of a mother? Was it not that which had emboldened him to look on her with offending eyes?
To understand what was taking place in Moloch’s brain it is necessary to forget for a space this conjugal scene at the dinner table. Let us go back to the root of the disturbance....
To begin with, when Moloch married Blanche there was little said about this prefix, mother. Blanche had been living under the guardianship of a maiden aunt. A year passed, and one day the two of them decided to go on a belated honeymoon. Blanche had pictured her parents as a gay, middle-aged couple, living a stereotyped existence in a little out-of-the-way hole somewhere in Delaware. She had only visited them half a dozen times since her childhood. They looked forward to spending a quiet leisurely time with these strange people who had brought her into the world.
Hardly were they forty-eight hours under the parental roof when Moloch’s preconceived image of the mother was shattered. It required the services of no village gossip to make him realize that this middle-aged woman who greeted her daughter so affectionately was the talk of the town. Wherever they went, people turned and stared at her.... The father led a strange life, too. He turned up at mealtimes, spoke about his work or the latest political gossip, and disappeared. Moloch sized the situation up as best as he could and came to the conclusion that these fond parents had arrived at an open convenant permitting each to go his or her own way and no questions asked. There was not even a latent air of hostility between them. Whatever it was, the thing had been settled long ago, and the compromise, such as it was, seemed to work smoothly…. This trim, dapper little man, whose age one could only guess at, was certainly not a bad sort. Immediately upon their arrival he showed a great liking for his son-in-law and lost no time in introducing him to his circle of friends. Sometimes Blanche would accompany them, and then the dapper little parent fairly beamed at everyone, so proud he was to be seen with his daughter and her sensible young husband.
Blanche was totally at a loss to understand her mother’s conduct. As soon as luncheon was over the latter busied herself with her toilette, a thoroughgoing, painstaking process. Moloch soon found himself lingering behind during this process, pretending to be absorbed in a book. Blanche’s preparations to meet the public eye had never enlisted his attention. To be sure, Blanche had never learned to make a ritual of this art, nor had she ever appeared to derive a tenth of the satisfaction and enjoyment which her mother breathed when the task was consummated. Never before had he been made so aware of the intricacies of the coiffure, the subtleties of the perfumers’ art, the mysteries of the bath. By degrees he got to look forward to these ample ministrations and, when the fatal “hope hour” approached, would hang about the house like a moonstruck calf. Blanche, of course, was quick to take notice of this sensual repast. Unable, however, to circumvent his newly acquired habit, she hid her discomfiture by locking herself in her room during the ordeal.
“Does she always act like this?” the mother asked one day when Blanche had retired to her room in a huff.
> “More or less,” he sighed.
“You ought to be out having a good time. You only live once, you know.”
She stood before him in a shimmery negligee, careless of the avid glances which licked her robust body. It struck him that she never considered him as a man. What was it—was he just a raw youth in her eyes? Or was he too dull for her? (In his morbid moments he was able to convince himself that Blanche had made an old fogy of him.)
So it became a vital question with him—whether this woman regarded him as wholly unattractive. He made up his mind that he was going to find out....
It was Blanche who remarked one day that there was something “enigmatic” about the woman. (Blanche frequently referred to her mother as “the woman.”) “I can’t see it,” he replied, summing up for her various elements that created the woman’s personality.
What he saw seemed plain and obvious enough. The woman was a Circe, unsung as yet by any Homer. There were many in the land, only people never recognized them until their infamies were screamed in ten-inch headlines. She was a type, such as one might find in a Greek legend, between the covers of a D’Annunzio volume, or in a Wagnerian opus. One might even find her in an eighteenth-century bordello. A home she has not; merely a rendezvous. Her age is a myth: she is neither youthful nor decrepit. Her features have the splendor and charm of an ancient ruins, mellowed and softened by the touch of time. The nostrils, well-grooved and carving a thrilling arabesque, when distended suggest faint caverns of joy. The head, slightly tilted and enframed by the lecherous twilight of the boudoir, presents a magnificent chiaroscuro. There may be just the barest suggestion of the coming of a Guadeloupe chin. Centered implacably, like a zither flaming with lust, is the gaping red maw. The artist in her fixes it by a staggering daub of vermilion. Her loose, sensual lips are never quite closed. They exist only to slake men’s thirst, themselves remaining parched and seared. A crepuscular odalisque withal whose torso rises like a groundswell. Rondures like the contorted nocturnes of Michelangelo … certainly not the baleful, iniquitous curves of a Utamaro. Something begun by Praxiteles, and left for the moderns to complete.
Does this Circe seem enigmatic?
Anyway, the mistake that Moloch made was to listen to the siren’s song. It floated out from the bathroom and affected him so that neither looks nor things abstract could quiet the forces secreted in his loins. The ceremony took place every day at the same hour. He had only to listen to her rain-shattered melodies—and he was lost.
It was the strangest honeymoon he had ever spent. He had taken with him a bride, and he had discovered a succubus. And now, after all these years of silence, he learned that his wife knew everything.
How did she know? He never asked her that. But when he contemplated the spectacle of this indignant creature, labeled “wife,” who was capable of lying beside him night in and night out during all the years of their married life, who could walk up to the brink of the grave at childbirth, still with lips sealed, his soul revolted. All the malice and suspicion that she had accumulated during the years of their common strife he looked upon as nothing more than the venom of a poisonous reptile. For what, he wanted to know, for what could she have nurtured this slimy secret of their past?
He rose from the table gravely and demanded scornfully what else she held up her sleeve. “What else do you know? Out with it!” he cried.
“What else ought I to know?” she said ruefully.
He wavered a moment. Then he said firmly: “How much can you stand?”
The brutality of this remark undid her. She put her arms on the table and buried her sobs in them.
When he could stand it no longer he went over to her and put his arms around her soothingly. The table trembled with her grief. Once before, when she was in a state of nervous collapse (due to her fear of childbirth), he had seen her weep this way. There was something animal-like about it… reminded him of a squealing calf at the slaughterhouse when it gets its first whiff of fresh-spilt blood.
He was ashamed of what the neighbors would think. “Stop it, please, I beg you,” he repeated, stroking her hair and finally getting down on his knees beside her. The gentleness of his voice only seemed to stimulate her tears. New reservoirs of emotion were tapped; her whole body rocked and sagged until the pain of it numbed him. He rose to his feet and waited stoically for the exhaustion which he knew would follow. He began to reflect about the situation philosophically.
Meanwhile, between hiccoughs and groans, she contrived to put in a few words. Her utterances were repetitious. They were chiefly interrogations, addressed to a remote and imperturbable deity.
“Oh God!” she wailed. “What have I ever done, what could I do to deserve this?”
He beseeched her to control herself. “You’re hysterical, Blanche.”
“Oh, why must I be humiliated in this way… always, always, always? Haven’t I been a good mother, haven’t I always been loyal to you?”
“Of course, Blanche … of course. There, there …” he whispered soothingly.
She flared up again. “You don’t mean it, I know you don’t. You’d say anything just to have me stop.” She continued to weep copiously. He stood stone still, waiting, waiting for her to dry up.
He fell into a reverie as he stood beside the cowering figure of his wife. At his slightest touch she shuddered, gasped anew, and fell into a collapse. Queer thoughts were roving through his head. This man, Jim Daly, for instance, who was consumed with love for Blanche—how would he have managed things? Would he have made a mess of it, too? Was it not inevitable that with such a woman for a wife such and such situations would occur? Jim Daly was probably eating his heart out because he couldn’t have this woman, Blanche. Another man, out in North Dakota, was in the same fix most likely. The two of them suffering agonies over the loss of this imaginary being. Yes—imaginary? Did the women they yearn for exist? Where was she? Surely it wasn’t this abject, grief-crazed, tear-sodden creature hanging over the table like a raped virgin?
For all he knew she was yearning for them, too. He couldn’t tell which was the favorite. She probably wanted them both. To tell the truth, he had a suspicion that she didn’t know who she wanted, or what she wanted. She, too, was concerned with imaginary beings, with lovers who would fade, at the first touch of reality, into mythic monsters. He wished to God they would change places with him for just a little while. It was all nonsense, this raising a woman to the skies without knowing a thing about her....
He thought of the letter Prigozi had sent him upon his wife’s death. The words were graven in his memory “From the first time I met you I considered you a friend. To me that means but one thing; that nothing you ask of me is too much, that you are free, nay, more than free, to come and take unasked what I have to give … that no thought be hidden from you, and no secrets kept.” And all the actions of this fantastic individual, for whom he had come to have such a strong affection, were but proofs that these assertions were not idle. Here was one whom he had not married, whom on occasion he had taken mean advantage of, and had mocked and treated slightingly; yet the little word “friendship” had taught him to behave in a noble, generous way. And to Blanche this man whom he called friend was nothing more than a disgusting little Jew who delighted in prying into other people’s affairs.
He gave up thinking about it all. It was useless to reason with Blanche. She had her point of view, and he had his. He saw life as an adventure, perhaps a sordid one, but an adventure nevertheless. As for her, she was wriggling through life on her belly. No wonder she was afraid and disgusted. To her it could never be other than a crawling, stinking affair.
17
“… IN SOFIA I STARTED TO DO WHAT YOU CALL THE White Way stunt. You must not think, however, that I did this only for the fun of the thing or that I am by nature perverted, but here in the Balkans feelings towards such kind of things are totally different. You rise right away in the esteem of the people here when you keep a notorious and much-coveted ‘grande
co-cotte,’ or when you sit at a gambling table and stolidly rake in your gains and still more stolidly look at your money being raked in. Especially in Sofia I got the right dope as I took for a few weeks as my companion the most notorious woman here, who is called here ‘la seulegrande cocotte de Sofia’—went with her to the fashionable bathing resorts, etc. Then I discarded her and took the prima donna of the Royal Opera here. After three months of this kind of life I had established just the right kind of rakish reputation to find grace with the public opinion, as I wrote you already, quite different from public opinion in the USA. I feel that 1 can retreat and start again a sober life.
“I give you all these details in order to show you how it is possible that I, who was only a couple years past scanning the street and apartment numbers in the neighborhood of the Flati-ron Building with a bunch of telegrams in his hand and dressed up like a horse and wagon, can allow himself now to entertain prima donnas of the Opera.... Saturday night I had only one wish and that was that you could have sitten next to me....
“The boss wants to be back in Roumania on the fifteenth as he is invited at the Cornation of the King and Queen of Roumania. I will join that event, too, and will have a third opportunity of renewing acquaintance. I have found a charming Roumanian girl here, which occupies most of my spare time….