Then she said, "You're tired, Son."
Well, I wasn't tired, but I wasn't not tired, either, and tiredness didn't have anything to do with the way things were.
Then, after a while, "Are you working hard, Son?"
I said, "So-so, I reckon."
Then, after another while, "Tan–the man you work for–"
"What about it?" I said. The hand stopped on my forehead, and I knew it was my voice that stopped it.
"Nothing," she said. "Only you don't have to work for that man. Theodore could get you a–"
"I don't want any job Theodore would get for me," I said, and tried to heave myself up, but have you ever tried to heave yourself up when you're flat on your back on a deep couched and somebody has a hand on your forehead?
She held her hand firm on my forehead and leaned over and said, "Don't now, don't. Theodore is my husband, he's your stepfather, don't talk that way, he'd like–"
"Look here," I said, "I told you I–"
But she said, "Hush, Son, hush," and put her hand over my eyes, and began to move it again upward over my forehead.
She didn't say anything else. But she had already said what she had said, and she had to start the island trick all over again. Perhaps she had said it just so she could start over again, just to prove she could do it. Anyway, she did it, all over again, and it worked.
Until the front door banged, and there were steps in the hall. I knew that it was Theodore Murrell, and started to heave up again. But even now, just for the last instant, she pressed her palm down on my forehead, and didn't let go until the sound of Theodore's steps had entered the room.
I got to my feet, feeling my coat crawling up around my neck and my tie under one ear, and looked across at Theodore, who had a beautiful blond mustache and apple cheeks and pale hair laid like taffy on a round skull and a hint of dignity at the belly (bend over, you bastard, bend over one hundred times every morning and touch the floor, you bastard, or Mrs. Murrell won't like you, and then where would you be?) and a slightly adenoidal lisp, like too much hot porridge, when he opened the aperture under the beautiful blond mustache.
My mother approached him with that bright stride and her shoulders well back, and stopped right before the Young Executive. The Young Executive put his right arm about her shoulder, and kissed her with the aperture under the beautiful blond mustache, and she seized him by the sleeve and drew him over toward me, and he said, "Well, well, old boy, it's fine to see you. How's trick, how's the old politician?"
"Fine," I said, "but I'm not a politician, I'm a hired hand."
"Oho," he said, "don't try to kid me. They say you and the Governor are just like this." And he held up two not thin, very clean, perfectly manicured fingers for me to admire.
"You don't know the Governor," I replied, "for the only thing the Governor is just like this with–" and I held up two not very clean and quite imperfectly manicured fingers–"is the Governor, and now and then God-Almighty when he needs somebody to hold the hog while he cuts its throat."
"Well, the way he's going–" Theodore began.
"Sit down, you all," my mother told us, and we sat down, and took the glasses she handed us. She turned on a light.
I leaned back in my chair, and said "Yes" and said "No," and looked down the long room, which I knew better than any room in the world and which I always came back to, no matter what I said. I noticed that there was a new piece in it. A tall Sheraton break-front desk, in the place where the kidney desk had been. Well, the kidney desk would be in the attic now, in the second-string museum, while we sat in the first-string museum and while Bowman and Heatherford, Ltd., London, wrote a large figure in the black column of the ledger. There was always a change in the room. When I came home I'd always look around and wonder what it would be, for there had been a long procession of choice examples through that room, spinets, desks, tables, chairs, each more choice that the last, each in turn finding its way to the attic to make way for a new perfection. Well, the room had come a long way from the way I first remembered it, moving toward some ideal perfection which was in my mother's head, or in the head of a dealer in New Orleans, or New York, or London, and maybe, just before she died, the room would achieve its ideal perfection, and she would sit in it, a trim old lady, with piled-up white hair, and silky skin sagging off a fine jawbone, and blue eyes blinking rapidly, and would take a cup of tea to celebrate the ideal.
The furniture changed, but the people in it changed too. Way back, there had been the thick-set, strong man, not tall, with a shock of tangled black hair on his head and steel-rimmed glasses on his nose and a habit of buttoning his vest up wrong, and a big gold watch-chain, which I liked to pull at. Then he wasn't there, and my mother pressed my head against her breast and said, "Your Daddy isn't coming back any more, Son."
"Why did he go away?"
"Because he didn't love Mother. That's why he went away."
"I love you, Mother," I said, "I'll love you always."
"Yes, Son, yes, you love your mother," she said, and held me tight against her breast.
So the Scholarly Attorney was gone. I was about six years old then.
Then there was the Tycoon, who was gaunt and bald and wheezed on the stair. "Why does Daddy Ross puff going upstairs?" I said.
"Hush," my mother said, "hush, Son."
"Why, Mother?"
"Because Daddy Ross isn't well, Son."
Then The Tycoon was dead. He had not lasted long.
So my mother put me in a school in Connecticut and left me to go across the ocean. When she came back there was another man, who was tall and slender and wore white suits and smoked long thin cigars, and had a thin black mustache. He was the Count, and my mother was a Countess. The Count sat in the room with people and smiled a great deal and didn't say much. People looked sideways at him, but he looked straight at them and smiled to show the whitest teeth in the world under the thin, accurate black mustache. When nobody was there he played the piano all day, and then went out wearing black boots and tight white trousers and rode a horse and made it jump over gates and gallop along the beach till its sides were flecked with lather and were pumping fit to die. The Count came into the house and drank _wis-kee__ and held a Persian cat on his knee and stroked it with a hand which was not big but which was so strong that he could make men frown when he shook hands with them. And once I saw four blue-black parallel marks on my mother's upper right arm. "Mother," I said, "look! What happened?"
"Nothing," she said, "I just hurt myself." And she pulled the scarf down over her arm.
The Count's name was Covelli. People said, "That Count fellow is a son-of-a-bitch, but he can evermore ride a horse."
Then he was gone. I was sorry, for I had liked the Count. I had liked to watch him ride a horse.
Then there was quite a while when there was nobody.
Then there was the Young Executive, who had been a Young Executive from the day his mother gave the last push and would be a Young Executive until the day they drained out the blood and pumped in the embalming fluid. But that would be a long time off, because he was just forty-four, and sitting at the desk at the oil company where he earned the pin money to supplement his allowance wasn't breaking him down fast.
Well, I'd sat in that room with all of them, the Scholarly Attorney and the Tycoon and the Count and the Young Executive, and had watched the furniture changed. So now I sat and looked at Theodore and at the new Sheraton break-front desk, and wondered how permanent they were.
I had come home. I was the thing that always came back It kept on raining that night. I lay in a big fine old family bed, which had come from somebody else's family (a long time ago there had been a white iron bed in my room standing on the floor matting, and the big fine old mahogany Burden family bed, which hadn't been fine enough and which was now in the attic, had been in my mother's room) and listened to the rain hiss on the live-oak and magnolia leaves. In the morning it had stopped raining, and there was sun. I went out and saw the thin pools of water standing on the background, like sheets of isinglass. Around the japonicas, the white and red and coral petals, which had been shattered from the blossoms, floated on the blackly gleaming pools. Some of them floated with the curled edges upward, like boats, and around them other petals floated upside down or had shipped water, making a gay carnage as though a battleship had fired a couple of salvos into a fleet of carnival barges and gondolas in some giddy, happy, far-off land.