"Yes," I told him, for I understood, and understood that he had understood perfectly well what my mother's wild talking had meant.
"You stay here till the nurse arrives," he said, "and don't let anybody in. And the nurse isn't supposed to let anybody in until I get back to see if your mother is normal. Not anybody."
I nodded, and followed him to the door of the room.
After he had said his good-bye, I detained him a moment. "Doctor," I asked, "what about the Judge? I didn't get it straight from my mother. Was it a stroke?"
"No," he said, and inspected my face.
"Well, what was it?"
"He shot himself this afternoon," he replied, still inspecting my face. But then he added quite matter-of-factly, "It was undoubtedly a question of health. His health was failing. A very active man–a sportsman–very often–" he was even more dry and detached in his tone–"very often such a man doesn't want to face the last years of limited activity. Yes, I am sure that that was the reason."
I didn't answer.
"Good day, sir," the doctor said, and took his eyes off me and started down the hall.
He was almost to the head of the stairs before I called, "Doctor!" and ran after him.
I came up to him and said, "Doctor, where did he shoot himself? What part of the body, I mean? Not the head?"
"Straight to the heart," he said. And added, "A.38 automatic. A very clean wound."
Then he went off down the stairs. I stood there and thought how the dead man was shot through he heart, a very clean wound, and not through the head with the muzzle of the weapon put into the mouth to blaze into the soft membranes to scorch them and the top of the skull exploding off like an egg to make an awful mess. I stood there, and was greatly relieved to think of the nice clean wound.
I went to my own room, snatched up some clothes, and then went back to my mother's room, and shut the door. I dressed and sat by the side of the big magnificent tester bed in which the lace-filmed form looked so small. I noticed how the bosom looked slack and the face sunken and grayish. The mouth was somewhat open and the breath through it heavy. I scarcely recognized the face. Certainly it was not the face of the girl in the lettuce-green dress and with the golden hair who had stood by the stocky, dark-suited man on the steps of a company commissary in a lumber town in Arkansas, forty years before, while the scream of saws filled the air and the head like a violated nerve and the red earth between the fields of stumps curdled with pale green and steamed in the spring sun. it was not the famish-cheeked, glowing face that, back in those years, had looked up eagerly and desperately to the hawk-headed, hot-eyed man in alleys of myrtle or in secret pine groves or in shuttered rooms. No, it was an old face now. And I felt very sorry for it. I reached across to take one of the unconscious hands which lay loose on the sheet.
I held the hand and tried to image how things would have been if it had not been the Scholarly Attorney but his friend who had gone to the little lumber town in Arkansas. No, that wouldn't have helped much, I decided, remembering that at that time Monty Irwin had been married to an invalid wife, who had been crippled by being thrown from a horse and who had lain in bed for some years and had then died quietly and sunk from our sight and thought at the Landing. No doubt Monty Irwin had been held by some notion of obligation to that invalid wife: he hadn't been able to divorce her and marry the other woman. No doubt that was why he had not married the famish-cheeked girl, why he had not gone to his friend the Scholarly Attorney and told him, "I love your wife," or why, after the husband had learned the truth, as he must have done to make him walk out of the house and away to all the years in the slum garrets, he had not then married her. He still had his own wife then, to whom, because she was an invalid, he must have felt bound with a kind of twisted honor. Then my mother had married again. There must have been bitterness and dire quarrels all along mixed with the stolen satisfactions and ardors. Then the invalid had died. Why hadn't they married then? Perhaps my mother wouldn't then, to punish him for his own earlier refusals. Or perhaps their life was by this time set into a pattern they couldn't break. Anyway, he had married the woman from Savannah, the woman who hadn't brought him anything, neither money nor happiness, but who had, after a certain time, died. Why hadn't they married then?
I dismissed the question finally. Perhaps the only answer, I thought then, was that by the time we understand the pattern we are in, the definition we are making for ourselves, it is too late to break out of the box. We can only live in terms of the definition, like the prisoner in the cage in which he cannot lie or stand or sit, hung up in justice to be viewed by the populace. Yet the definition we had made of ourselves is ourselves. To break out of it, we must make a new self. But how can the self make a new self when the selfness which it is, is the only substance from which the new self can be made? At least that was the way I argued the case back then.
As I say, I dismissed the question, and dismissed the answer I had tried to give to it, and simply held the lax hand between my own, and listened to the heavy breathing from the sunken face, and thought how in the scream which had snatched me from sleep that afternoon there had been the bright, beautiful, silver purity of feeling. It had been, I decided, the true cry of the buried soul which had managed, for one instant after all the years, to utter itself again. Well, she had loved Monty Irwin, I supposed. I had thought that she had never loved anybody. So now, as I held the hand, I felt not only pity for her but something like love, too, because she had loved somebody.
After a while the nurse came and released me from the room. Then Mrs. Daniell, who was a neighbor of Judge Irwin, came by to see my mother. It had been her telephone call which brought the news to my mother. Mrs. Daniell had heard the shot in the afternoon but had thought nothing about it until the colored boy at the Irwin place ran out into the yard and began yelling. She had gone back into the house with the boy, and had seen the Judge sitting in one of the big leather chairs in his library with the pistol on his knee, his head canted over one shoulder, and the blood spreading out over the left side of the white coat. She had plenty to tell, and she was working down the Row in a systematic fashion. She told me her story, pried unsuccessfully into my visit there of the afternoon and into my mother's indisposition (she had, of course, heard the scream on the telephone), and then took her leave without much to add to her basic narrative at the next port of call.
The Young Executive came in about seven o'clock. He already knew about the death of Judge Irwin, but I had to tell him about my mother. I made it damned plain and without trimmings that he was to stay out of her room. Then he and I went out on the side gallery and had a silent drink together. I didn't mind his presence more than a shadow.
Two days later Judge Irwin was buried in the churchyard under the ghostly, moss-garlanded oaks. Earlier, in his house, I had filed past the coffin with everybody else and had looked down at the dead face. The hawk nose seemed to be paper thin and almost transparent. The usual strong color of the flesh was gone and on the cheeks there was only the coy tint of the mortician's art. But the coarse rufous hair, thinner than ever, seemed to stand up electrically and individually from the high-domed skull. The people filed past, looked down, murmured to each other, and went to stand at the end of the drawing room near the potted palms imported for the occasion. Thus the fact of his death was absorbed effortlessly into the life of the community, like a single tiny drop of stain dropped into a glass of clear water. it would spread outward and outward from the point of vindictive concentration, raveling and thinning away, drawing away the central fact of the stain until nothing at all was visible.