On August 31, 1953, her attitude seemed to have changed. It had rained until early afternoon, and so we took our ride after supper, while Joe was at his Boy Scout meeting in Wicomico. That evening she held Tom Brown to a walk-rode him almost apprehensively, I thought, without force or style, and chatted idly about nothing during the ride. But in the pine grove she was calm.
“Everything’s okay, Jake,” she smiled, not warmly.
“What’s okay?”
“I’m still sorry I ran at the mouth so, but that’s over with now.”
“Oh?”
“You know, I really was frightened of you for a while. Sometimes it seemed to me that I couldn’t really say to myself that Joe was stronger than you. Whenever his arguments were ready to catch you, you weren’t there any more, and worse than that, even when he destroyed a position of yours it seemed to me that he hadn’t really touched you—there wasn’t that much of you in any of your positions.”
“You’re getting very sharp,” I laughed.
“That, right there,” she said, catching me up: “all you’d do was laugh when he took the props out of your argument. Then just lately, I began to wonder, ‘If his opinions aren’t him, what is him?’ “
“Bad grammar.”
Rennie ignored me. “You know what I’ve come to think, Jake? I think you don’t even exist at all. There’s too many of you. It’s more than just masks that you put on and take off—we all have masks. But you’re different all the way through, every time. You cancel yourself out. You’re more like somebody in a dream. You’re not strong and you’re not weak. You’re nothing.”
I thought it appropriate to say nothing, since I didn’t exist.
“Two things have happened, Jake,” Rennie said coolly. “One is that I’m pretty sure I’m pregnant again—my period is a week late, and I’m usually regular. The other thing is that I’ve decided I don’t have to think about you or deal with you any more, because you don’t exist. That’s Joe’s superiority.
“One day last week,” she went on, “I either had a dream, or else I was just daydreaming, that for the past few weeks Joe had become friendly with the Devil, and was having fun arguing with him and playing tennis with him, to test his own strength. Don’t laugh.”
“I’m not laughing.” Hell, I was flattered.
“I thought Joe had invited the Devil to test me, too—probably it was because you mentioned devil’s advocate that time. But this Devil scared me, because I wasn’t that strong yet, and what was a game for Joe was a terrible fight for me.” Here Rennie faltered a bit. “Then when Joe saw how it was, he told me that the Devil wasn’t real, and that he had conjured up the Devil out of his own strength, just like God might do. Then he made me pregnant again so I’d know he was the one who was real and I wouldn’t be scared, and so—”
(This pretty conceit Rennie had started calmly, but as she told it she grew more and more emotional—it was a thing she’d obviously worked out for herself with care to salve the hurt of her lying until at the end her apparent new control was gone, and she shook with tears.)
“—and so I’d grow to be just as strong as he is, and stronger than somebody who isn’t even real!”
But she wasn’t. I stroked her hair. Her teeth were actually chattering.
“Oh, God, I wish Joe was here!” she cried.
“You know what he’d say, Rennie. Crying is one of the things that are beside the point: you’re just begging the question. This Devil business is too easy. It lets you get rid of me on false pretenses.”
“You’re not real like Joe is! He’s the same man today he was yesterday, all the way through. He’s genuine! That’s the difference.”
She was sitting on the ground, her head on her knees, and still I stroked her hair.
“But not me,” I said.
“No!”
“How about you?”
For answer she whipped her head from side to side shortly.
“I don’t know. Joe’s strong enough to take care of me, I guess. I don’t care.”
This was absurd and we both knew it. I confined my argument to stroking her hair, which made her shudder. We sat thus for perhaps five minutes without saying anything. Then Rennie got up.
“I hope to Christ you know what you’re doing to us, Jake,” she said. I made no reply.
“Joe’s real enough to handle you,” she said. “He’s real enough for both of us.”
“Nothing plus one is one,” I said agreeably.
Now Rennie was tight-lipped, and rubbed her stomach nervously. “That’s right,” she said.
But a most curious thing happened shortly afterwards. We took the horses back to the stable and drove home, neither of us saying an unnecessary word. It was as though a great many things were held suspended in delicate equilibrium—the rapid crowding on of dusk upon an entirely empty summer sky, with its attendant noiseless rush as of the very planet plunging, doubtless helped—and one felt hushed, for a word might knock the cosmos out of kilter. It was dark when we parked in front of the Morgans’ apartment and I escorted Rennie across the deep lawn.
“Joe’s home,” I said, observing a light behind the closed blinds of the living room. I heard Rennie, beside me, sniff, and realized that she’d been crying some more.
“We’d better wait a minute before you go in, don’t you think?”
Rennie made no answer, but she stopped and we stood quietly just outside the door. I had no desire to touch her. I bounced idly on my heels, singing to myself Pepsi-Cola hits the spot. I noticed that although the Venetian blind was closed, it was not lowered completely: a bar of light streamed across the grass from an inch-high slit along the window sill.
“Want to eavesdrop?” I whispered impulsively to Rennie. “Come on, it’s great! See the animals in their natural habitat.”
Rennie looked shocked. “What for?”
“You mean you never spy on people when they’re alone? It’s wonderful! Come on, be a sneak! It’s the most unfair thing you can do to a person.”
“You disgust me, Jake!” Rennie hissed. “He’s just reading! You don’t know Joe at all, do you?”
“What does that mean?”
“Real people aren’t any different when they’re alone. No masks. What you see of them is authentic.”
“Horseshit. Nobody’s authentic. Let’s look.”
“No.”
“I am.” I tiptoed over to the window, stooped down, and peered into the living room. Immediately I beckoned to Rennie.
“What is it?” she whispered.
“Come here!” A sneak should snicker: I snickered.
Quite reluctantly she came over to the window and peeped in beside me.
It is indeed the grossest of injustices to observe a person who believes himself to be alone. Joe Morgan, back from his Boy Scout meeting, had evidently intended to do some reading, for there were books lying open on the writing table and on the floor beside the bookcase. But Joe wasn’t reading. He was standing in the exact center of the bare room, fully dressed, smartly executing military commands. About face! Right dress! ’Ten-shun. Parade rest! He saluted briskly, his cheeks blown out and his tongue extended, and then proceeded to cavort about the room-spinning, pirouetting, bowing, leaping, kicking. I watched entranced by his performance, for I cannot say that in my strangest moments (and a bachelor has strange ones) I have surpassed him. Rennie trembled from head to foot.
Ah! Passing a little mirror on the wall, Joe caught his own eye. What? What? Ahoy there! He stepped close, curtsied to himself, and thrust his face to within two inches of the glass. Mr. Morgan, is it? Howdy do, Mr. Morgan. Blah bloo blah. Oo-o-o-o blubble thlwurp. He mugged antic faces at himself, sklurching up his eye corners, zbloogling his mouth about, glubbling his cheeks. Mither Morgle. Nyoing nyang nyumpie. Vglibble vglobble vglup. Vgliggybloo! Thlucky thlucky, thir.
He snapped out of it, jabbed his spectacles back on his nose. Had he heard some sound? No. He went to the writing table and apparently res
umed his reading, his back turned to us. The show, then, was over. Ah, but one moment—yes. He turned slightly, and we could see: his tongue gripped purposefully between his lips at the side of his mouth, Joe was masturbating and picking his nose at the same time. I believe he also hummed a sprightly tune in rhythm with his work.
Rennie was destroyed. She closed her eyes and pressed her forehead against the window sill. I stood beside her, out of the light from the brilliant living room, and stroked and stroked her hair, speaking softly in her ear the wordless, grammarless language she’d taught me to calm horses with.
6
In September It Was Time to See the Doctor
IN SEPTEMBER IT WAS TIME TO SEE THE DOCTOR again: I drove out to the Remobilization Farm one morning during the first week of the month. Because the weather was fine, a number of the Doctor’s other patients, quite old men and women, were taking the air, seated in their wheel chairs or in the ancient cane chairs all along the porch. As usual, they greeted me a little suspiciously with their eyes; visitors of any sort, but particularly of my age, were rare at the farm, and were not welcomed cordially. Ignoring their stony glances, I went inside to pay my respects to Mrs. Dockey, the receptionist-nurse. I found her in consultation with the Doctor himself.
“Good day, Horner,” the Doctor beamed.
“Good morning, sir. Good morning, Mrs. Dockey.”
That large, masculine woman nodded shortly without speaking—her custom—and the Doctor told me to wait for him in the Progress and Advice Room, which, along with the dining room, the kitchen, the reception room, the bathroom, and the Treatment Room constituted the first floor of the old frame house. Upstairs the partitions between the original bedrooms had been removed to form two dormitories, one for the men and one for the women. The Doctor had his own small bedroom upstairs too, and there were two bathrooms. I did not know at the time where Mrs. Dockey slept, or whether she slept at the farm at all. She was a most uncommunicative woman.
I had first met the Doctor quite by chance—a rather fortunate chance—on the morning of March 17, 1951, in what passes for the grand concourse of the Pennsylvania Railroad Station in Baltimore. It happened to be the day after my twenty-eighth birthday, and I was sitting on one of the benches in the station with my suitcase beside me. I was in an unusual condition: I couldn’t move. On the previous day I had checked out of my room in the Bradford Apartment Hotel, an establishment on St. Paul and Thirty-third streets owned by the Johns Hopkins University. I had roomed there since September of the year before, when, halfheartedly, I matriculated as a graduate student at the university and began work on the degree that I was scheduled to complete the following June.
But on March 16, my birthday, with my oral examination passed but my master’s thesis not even begun, I packed my suitcase and left the room to take a trip somewhere. Because I have learned to be not much interested in causes and biographies, I shall ascribe this romantic move to simple birthday despondency, a phenomenon sufficiently familiar to enough people so that I need not explain it further. Birthday despondency, let us say, had reminded me that I had no self-convincing reason for continuing for a moment longer to do any of the things that I happened to be doing with myself as of seven o’clock in the evening of March 16, 1951. I had thirty dollars and some change in my pocket: when my suitcase was filled I hailed a taxi, went to Pennsylvania Station, and stood in the ticket line.
“Yes?” said the ticket agent when my turn came.
“Ah—this will sound theatrical to you,” I said with some embarrassment, “but I have thirty dollars or so to take a trip on. Would you mind telling me some of the places I could ride to from here for, say, twenty dollars?”
The man showed no surprise at my request. He gave me an understanding if unsympathetic look and consulted some sort of rate scales.
“You can go to Cincinnati, Ohio,” he declared. “You can go to Crestline, Ohio. And let’s see, now—you can go to Dayton, Ohio. Or Lima, Ohio. That’s a nice town. I have some of my wife’s people up around Lima, Ohio. Want to go there?”
“Cincinnati, Ohio,” I repeated, unconvinced. “Crestline, Ohio; Dayton, Ohio; and Lima, Ohio. Thank you very much. I’ll make up my mind and come back.”
So I left the ticket window and took a seat on one of the benches in the middle of the concourse to make up my mind. And it was there that I simply ran out of motives, as a car runs out of gas. There was no reason to go to Cincinnati, Ohio. There was no reason to go to Crestline, Ohio. Or Dayton, Ohio; or Lima, Ohio. There was no reason, either, to go back to the Bradford Apartment Hotel, or for that matter to go anywhere. There was no reason to do anything. My eyes, as the German classicist Winckelmann said inaccurately of the eyes of the Greek statues, were sightless, gazing on eternity, fixed on ultimacy, and when that is the case there is no reason to do anything—even to change the focus of one’s eyes. Which is perhaps why the statues stand still. It is the malady cosmopsis, the cosmic view, that afflicted me. When one has it, one is frozen like the bullfrog when the hunter’s light strikes him full in the eyes, only with cosmopsis there is no hunter, and no quick hand to terminate the moment—there’s only the light.
Shortsighted animals all around me hurried in and out of doors leading down to the tracks; trains arrived and departed. Women, children, salesmen, soldiers, and redcaps hurried across the concourse toward immediate destinations, but I sat immobile on the bench. After a while Cincinnati, Crestline, Dayton, and Lima dropped from my mind, and their place was taken by that test pattern of my consciousness, Pepsi-Cola hits the spot, intoned with silent oracularity. But it, too, petered away into the void, and nothing appeared in its stead.
If you look like a vagrant it is difficult to occupy a train-station bench all night long, even in a busy terminal, but if you are reasonably well dressed, have a suitcase at your side, and sit erect, policemen and railroad employees will not disturb you. I was sitting in the same place, in the same position, when the sun struck the grimy station windows next morning, and in the nature of the case I suppose I would have remained thus indefinitely, but about nine o’clock a small, dapper fellow in his fifties stopped in front of me and stared directly into my eyes. He was bald, dark-eyed, and dignified, a Negro, and wore a graying mustache and a trim tweed suit to match. The fact that I did not stir even the pupils of my eyes under his gaze is an index to my condition, for ordinarily I find it next to impossible to return the stare of a stranger.
“Weren’t you sitting here like this last night?” he asked me sharply. I did not reply. He came close, bent his face down toward mine, and moved an upthrust finger back and forth about two inches from my eyes. But my eyes did not follow his finger. He stepped back and regarded me critically, then suddenly snapped his fingers almost on the point of my nose. I blinked involuntarily, although my head did not jerk back.
“Ah,” he said, satisfied, and regarded me again. “Does this happen to you often, young man?”
Perhaps because of the brisk assuredness of his voice, the no welled up in me like a belch. And I realized as soon as I deliberately held my tongue (there being in the last analysis no reason to answer his question at all) that as of that moment I was artificially prolonging what had been a genuine physical immobility. Not to choose at all is unthinkable: what I had done before was simply choose not to act, since I had been at rest when the situation arose. Now, however, it was harder—“more of a choice,” so to speak—to hold my tongue than to croak out something that filled my mouth, and so after a moment I said, “No.”
Then, of course, the trance was broken. I was embarrassed, and rose quickly and stiffly from the bench to leave.
“Where will you go?” my examiner asked with a smile.
“What?” I frowned at him. “Oh—get a bus home, I guess. See you around.”
“Wait.” His voice was mild, but entirely commanding. I stopped. “Won’t you have coffee with me? I’m a physician, and I’d be interested in discussing your case with you.”
“I don’t have any case,” I said awkwardly. “I was just—sitting there for a minute or so.”
“No. I saw you there last night at ten o’clock when I came in from New York,” the doctor said. “You were sitting in the same position. You were paralyzed, weren’t you?”
I laughed shortly. “Well, if you want to call it that, but there’s nothing wrong with me. I don’t know what came over me.”
“Of course you don’t, but I do. My specialty is various sorts of physical immobility. You’re lucky I came by this morning.”
“Oh, you don’t understand—”
“I brought you out of it, didn’t I?” he said cheerfully. “Here.” He took a fifty-cent piece from his pocket and handed it to me—I accepted it before I realized what he’d done. “I can’t go into that lounge over there. Go get two cups of coffee for us and we’ll sit here a minute and decide what to do.”
“No, listen, I—”
“Why not?” he laughed. “Go on, now. I’ll wait here.”
Why not, indeed?
“I have my own money,” I protested lamely, offering him his fifty-cent piece back, but he waved me away and lit a cigar.
“Now hurry up,” he ordered calmly, around the cigar. “Move fast, or you might get stuck again. Don’t think of anything but the coffee I’ve asked you to get.”
“All right.” I turned and walked with dignity toward the lounge, just off the concourse.
“Fast!” the doctor laughed behind me. I flushed, and impulsively quickened my step.
While I waited for the coffee I tried to feel the curiosity about my invalidity and my rescuer that it seemed appropriate I should feel, but I was too weary in mind and body to wonder at anything. I do not mean to suggest that my condition had been unpleasant—it was entirely anesthetic in its advanced stage, and even a little bit pleasant in its inception—but it was fatiguing, as an overlong sleep is fatiguing, and one had the same reluctance to throw it off that one has to finally get out of bed when one has slept around the clock. Indeed, as the Doctor had warned (it was at this time, not knowing my benefactor’s name, that I began to think of him with a capital D), to slip back into immobility at the coffee counter would have been extremely easy: I felt my mind begin to settle into rigidity, and only the clerk’s peremptory “Thirty cents, please,” brought me back to action—luckily, because the Doctor could not have entered the white lounge to help me. I paid the clerk and took the paper cups of coffee back to the bench.