It is a reasonable cue for one to guard himself, set himself for a blow of the absurd. Her emphasis on china rather than expensive is a signal that what follows won't be easy to track. But my father does not prepare for the blow, nor will he share a flicker of condescension with me.
"This plate," my mother says, slyly touching my father's plate, "cost four hundred dollars." She quickly jerks her finger back, as if the plate has suddenly gotten hot.
She looks at her finger. Or pretends to. I notice that she actually looks at me while holding her finger in front of her face. She wants a sign, one hair of a reaction, to launch into finer, higher absurdity-to "have a fit," in my father's parlance. This is, I find, remarkable-she is perfectly and vigorously logical in the way she can scale into a tour de force of mindlessness. While the content of her fit will be nuts, the form will be logical, and it has made me w0nder-my father apparently does not-if her sickness is not partly or part-time voluntary.
She still looks at her finger. "We had the four hundred and we had to buy the plate." This is a complex accusation. I've heard, as I say, its form before, and she means, I think, that even though we had the money, we were not old-family and therefore did not already own the china and had to buy it-with new money, thereby invalidating in certain senses our right to even have the heirloom china.
She is saying, I think, that she was a country-club, new-milli0naire's wife who wasted herself in pursuit of a status that specifically could not be bought. If I throw her into the fool/ true-fool gradient, she appears to be not unlike the Veteran-someone gave her a false center to pursue and she did and discovered finally it was hollow. She had a houseful of River Road furniture and no family name to match it. She has a houseful of dead fucking niggers. She was self-important until one day she discovered she was not important. This, I think, at table, at brunch-and who knows but that she is mocking even now--is what has unleveled her.
On the sideboard I notice a postcard-out of place in the unused room-and lean to look at it; as I do, my mother says, "It's for you."
"It's what?"
"Read it. Ladyfriend-but I don't have a license to meddle."
The card is a photo of a romantic scene very much like the one of Mary in the Sunday supplement, and I see before anything else M.C.B. signed on the back.
Muhv-
Garden restored. Miss you more than like. Got sillymental in Fla. (about Stump-don't tell Hoop) and messed up. Give call. Tunkie Friedeman gave address. Says he knows you'll be back in the sun soon, ha ha. Said to tell you that.? Drop by?
Love-
Friedeman? What in the world was going on? Tunkie Friedeman? Conspiracy theory entered my mind. This was no damned Brownian powder-blown drift. I felt like Mia Farrow in Rosemary's Baby.
Then again, was it only that Mary and Friedeman knew each other and somehow discovered-did I tell Mary I worked for a Friedeman and she held her no-bio tongue? Yes. I told her I worked for a nut. She smiled. She knew him. But how did she know I'd come home? She didn't. Chanced it. A small endothermic bonding 238 bondings down the thousandfold series that was evolving me unto some end.
I recalled an early chemistry professor I had who seemed to have relied entirely upon his sense of smell in achieving his considerable academic station. On emeritus status, he was employed to interest freshmen in the magic of chemistry-almost the alchemy of chemistry-its colors, its aromatic delights, even its poetry. His chemistry was numberless, headache-free, earthy, approximate, elegant-a chemistry that seduced worried freshmen. You may call dicopper oxide, he'd say, cuprous oxide, and copper oxide, cupric. You may, as the English do, refer to al-you-minium. Bleach is sodium hypohalite. He'd waft a tube to his Old World nose, hold it to the light-glacial acetic acid (you may call it condensed vinegar), or another tube, product of a spuming reaction-sniff-why, it's old methyl ethyl ketone. What's that brown stuff in there? Some suspicious student would ask. That, the emeritus Nose Chemist would say, that is nothing, some trash.
I felt then, with the postcard, as if that was the only kind of chemist I could reasonably be in this life chemistry-it would have to be by instinct and it would have to be relied on well. Mary's card impressed me as not unlike unidentified brown precipitate in a reaction too complex to probe further in the particular. It was not trash, but it was finally distracting to know more about it. Mary and Tunkie Friedeman. Were they lovers? How far back could reactions in the life series be said to go?
"What time is it? I'd better get ready. Are you ready?"
"Dad, are you still selling the company?" He looks at me, happy not to have to answer her. "You still planning to sell?"
"I have buyers," he says.
"Who's running it?"
"It's on auto-pilot." He doesn't want to talk about it.
"Would it still be good not to sell?"
"Smart not to."
"Isn't my appointment at eleven?" my mother says.
"Mother," he says, "the appointment is at noon. It's always at noon."
"Are you ready?"
He turns from her, stone-faced. Something happens to me. Before I can say it, my mother announces, "I have osteopsoriasis."
"Don't sell," I say.
"What?"
"Osteopsoriasis. It's new."
"I'll do it," I say. "Give me a year."
"A year? Are you serious?"
"He's so handsome."
Very gravely, as if we have just signed a world armistice, he stands and rounds the corner of the table, his hand extended in an arc much wider than the catcher's-mitt position ceremoniously toward me. We shake.
"Mother," he orders, "get in the car. You don't want to be late."
"Not today," she says. She fairly jogs out of the house.
"I'll have to drive her around for an hour." He grins, the first I've seen. "Do we understand each other?" he says.
"I think we do," I say, not knowing yet why I've said what I've said.
"Why are you in those clothes?"
I persuade him to drop me off at the bus station-he suggests I take a plane-and we part on very good terms under the GO BIG RED marquee, his engine running and my mother primping in the rearview, smiling at herself.
All the way to Knoxville I considered the proper use of new utterance, its true relation, if any, to the formulations I have been borne along on. It seems now that new utterance is perhaps the linguistic equivalent of the kind of living that takes into account backward as well as forward motion. The maker of new utterance is taking a chance that he will not close the gap toward meaning, that he may in fact widen it, as the foolish living I've come to appreciate chances the same failure to advance and may indeed set one back. On the final bus home I regarded myself as a kind of Havana Carlisle willing to tell things anew-willing to wave my cigar about and be misinterpreted, if that was the cost.
I immediately went to Friedeman's office and with no delay found him.
"Tunkie," I said.
He looked up from his desk, his face a wave of recognition and, I thought, put-on happy-to-see-you mirth. He solemnly stood and came around to me, extending both hands. He said, "My son, the fire is renewed?" His manner was altogether suggestive of a Benedict rather than a Tunkie.
"I have a year in which to be consumed by it, Father."
He then looked at me with what I took to be real delight, and I think it was delight in my assuming a penitant's role, which made to me altogether more sense about him. His Baptism was a polite mockery, a new utterance he played with.