“Go away!” she cried.
But it only looked down and shuffled the cards.
“Oh, please go away, please,” she said. “I have been having such a nice time. If I — oh, please don’t make me talk.”
Its skin was clean and fresh and rosy, the eyebrows were trim, the mustache was blond and curled up at the corners. It dealt itself a hand of cards, panting heavily.
“Be good to me, please, and leave. Please. Oh, please. Please. Please.”
Its hands began to shake as it turned over the cards. When it looked up at her again, tears beaded from its eyes. She looked to the eyes, windows of the soul, route to the brain, and felt the terrible long-lived longing in her stomach to go to them and suck them out and swallow. To go to him and eat him up and keep him. To go and sell all she had and buy him. To lay her fortunes at his feet and follow him across the world and out.
She said, “No, but I mustn’t.”
“I thought you’d been waiting all this time so we could talk again,” he said.
Her resolution failed her, but only momentarily. “Yes, I have — but this isn’t the time.”
“Oh?”
“The time was forty years ago.”
“Oh?”
“What’s the use of apologizing, Nicolo? It’s unseemly. It doesn’t fix anything. You missed out — I wish you had known me later on.”
The radio twittered from the parlor. The baker split another peach and passed half of it to the boy.
The figure wiped the tears from its face with its handkerchief and blew its nose. As it hastily got up to leave, it knocked over the chair and bent low to right it, but the boy and the baker didn’t see. The figure passed through the doorway, slow and young, its slick white shoulders gleaming.
Mrs. Marini turned to the baker. She said, “I’m afraid we’ll have to be going out now.”
The Forest Runner
Even today, sixteen and one half years after the fact, his sister dead, his store sold, his archive of Confederate correspondence donated to the county public library, his concordance burned, his flower garden on the bluff behind the house collapsing season by season into the lake, the house leaking rain in every room, the woman herself dead, surely — since how else has he for sixteen and one half years been denied the fulfillment that is his by right, of being called, in words spoken out loud not by himself but by somebody else, by a person living in the world out there, the thing that he is — even this afternoon, trapped in the throng of bodies in a street carnival not three blocks from the café where he had whiled away the hours, poisoning himself with sugar, ardently believing he would be found, he still casts his eyes about for the face that will know his face, for the woman who will recognize what he is and point her finger, opening her mouth to speak, and call him by his name.
The jeweler knows that the undiminished desire to be accused by name by this woman is the proof that he has failed. That gable roof with sides that are shallow in slope at the top and steeper below is a gambrel. The short sleeveless dress with a row of buttons up the spine that the little girl in front of him is wearing, against whose backside the force of the crowd is pressing his legs, is a pinafore. He has a name, too, that could save him from himself, that could turn him into a word if only she were to see him and call him by it. Then all would be lost at last. He could surrender the long-held hope to hold a thing, a thing in his hand, and leave it at that. He would no longer have a material hand in which to hold the thing. But she isn’t here, surely, she’s dead — the instrument of his salvation — he killed her, surely.
He’s been coming to this carnival every August for five years, but she has yet to show herself, and his hope is waning.
He has stood at the washroom mirror calling himself by the name his father shared with him, but the words only stuck to the mirror. Another person was required. Look at these people, the girl in the pinafore with her pink legs, the ten thousand others forcing him up against her; they are at least not alone in having names, like the gambrel roof, or the samovar in the café. Only he is nameless, real, among them.
At night, as a boy in the winter in Kentucky, warming himself by the potbelly stove in the cabin, his uncle showed him how to put a double bend in a saw by pushing it against the toe of his boot, and how to strike it with a hammer and control the note its vibrations made by bending it further and unbending it and striking different parts of the bigger bend. He practiced playing it at home, in the woodshed of his father’s house by the lake. He taught himself to play “My Sister, She Works in a Laundry” and “The Mule Skinner’s Song” and “What Was Your Name in the States?” and “Pharaoh’s Army Got Drownded.” And he made up his own tunes, in love, as he would never love anything else, with the queer, trembling, human sound of a shaking piece of steel, and he taught himself to bow it also, with the bow of his father’s fiddle. Then his father’s cousin, who picked banjo in a hillbilly band at a saloon on Saturday nights, persuaded his parents to let him go just once and play with them.
The rest of the band was standing — the fiddlers and the fellow with the harmonica and the old man they all called “Sir,” whose name he never learned, were all standing while they played. Only he, the youngest, sat in a chair, while he struck the saw with a ball-peen hammer.
He had never bowed it in the presence of others. The saw played with the hammer was clothed; the saw played with the bow was naked, the sound unobstructed by the clash the hammer made. And when in the woodshed in the presence of no one else he bowed it, he himself was naked. Bowing the saw was a simple thing he had that he could do, all his own; it was the pure act, of which the other, the playing of it with a hammer, the version others were allowed to witness, was an imperfect replica.
But the men knew he knew how to bow it, and they put the screws on him. And he didn’t want to. It was not for others to hear. But if he bowed it for others he might find that this was the way in, the way through, you had to expose your innermost to the outside. I address myself finally to the material world and its citizens and become part of it and one of them. So he agreed, yes, he would do it.
And the moment came, the signal, when Sir hopped into the air and brought both feet down on the stage. He slid the hammer under his chair. The others took their instruments away from their faces, and he drew the bow along the untoothed edge of the saw, knowing the audience was there but unseeing it with the glow in his eyes of the coal-oil lamps in the apron of the stage.
He was more than naked. The sound in the presence of other people ripped him up the middle, showing to the open air the wet things inside that composed him, that turned food and air into the self he was.
Then, from someplace beyond the wall of light, came the keen of somebody laughing at him.
Yet he did not stop playing or leave his seat.
When Sir clapped at last his boot on the stage, the band picked up the tune again, sewing him up somewhat, giving him some clothes to wear. They played through midnight, until the saloon closed. His cousin walked him home through the black streets. He climbed the stairs to his room.
The bishop in his miter (those two bands of cloth, hanging down the back of it like the pigtails of this pink-legged girl, are lappets) and the priests processing up the street, the young boys in cassocks, the men in long white linen albs chanting solemnly in Latin, the statue of a mulatto on a platform (a mulatto is so called because his blood is mixed as a mule’s is), and this flock of crones, in black, barefooted, murmuring over their beads (an assemblage of starlings is a murmuration), and the big, clumsy band playing so solemnly even though they are out of tune and off beat, all bring back to him the way that night in the saloon as a boy he had struggled manfully to express with the bow and the saw the solemnity he felt inside him, the solemnity of a human self, and had succeeded only in making something that was laughable. In the same way, this, the pageantry, the murmuring in a dead language, the gaudily bejeweled midget half-Negress these people are worshipping as if the icon were holy instead of standing in for something that was holy — all this is in fact solemn and in fact also mistaken, absurd, laughable.