I thought, although it wasn’t really a thought, that Clara, rather than my mother, should have died, and that I could kill her, right there in the bed. The night clerk would never remember us, and I had registered under my usual fake name, “Bob Wyatt,” a moniker so insipid as to be blank. Kill her to even things up for my sad, uncompleted mother, and then commiserate with Ben and Miss Complit. I could imagine their sensitive literary comments, the lines from Hardy or Yeats, and Ben’s dim smile as I delivered the envoi with a snatch of Dylan Thomas, a poet whom Ben loathed.
I was sick with guilt, intolerable slug that I was, and waiting for despair to fall on me in its black rain. Good old despair! that most durable and aberrant and selfish of pleasures. But despair eluded me, or I it, and as the room began to admit pale January light, I went down on Clara until she very happily came. She was more or less sweet after that, and let me give her my bacon at breakfast. We sat at the table a long time, drinking coffee and smoking. I didn’t want to call the hospital and be told about my mother, I didn’t want to be right. I didn’t want to have to take care of the terrible details of death, the business angle, as Ben had once called it, prick that he was. But mostly, I didn’t want to have to pair my mother’s flesh and Clara’s, but it was already too late to escape that.
Of course, I write this now, years after these events, as the phrase goes. What I then thought, I don’t recall. We ate, by the way, in an Automat on Broadway, just south of Eighth Street. It’s long gone, along with all the other Automats, along with all the other every-things, but every time I pass the spot where it stood, I can smell Clara. Her subtle sexual odor is uncannily apparent, an odor that she claimed was generated exclusively for me — a preposterous confession that I, sweet Mother of God, believed for a long time. Now I’m righteously permitted, I feel, to think of her as nothing but that sexual odor. As nothing but a cunt.
The phenomenon of my mother’s death in the Methodist Hospital in Brooklyn at the moment at which I was drunkenly fucking Clara, became, some months after the funeral, the source of what I quite irrationally believed would be a revelation of sorts. Of what, I had no idea, but the temporal conjunction of the two incidents seemed too sinister not to be meaningful. I thought that I might now be able to understand the feverishly obsessive erotics occasioned in me by the thought of Clara, because of the coincidence of death and fornication. I apparently really believed that my flatly banal night in the Brittany held some lesson for my life. And yet, if truth be told — if truth be told! — the adventure was, as always with Clara, intrinsically void. My mother’s death lent it no importance; in fact, I was, surely, intent on teasing some meaning from this drunken shambles to avoid the shame of self-confrontation: that is, my mother’s death, if rightly manipulated, would redeem my debased adultery by lending it a tragic mystery. What childish perversity!
I know that had I been gifted that night with second sight, so that I could have predicted my mother’s sudden fall into death; and had I seen such catastrophe in my mind’s eye while kissing Clara’s sex through her glowing lingerie, her demise would have occasioned nothing that my lust had not already decided on. To be crudely frank, I would have crawled to Clara under any circumstances, come corruption, hell, come anybody’s death. So, then, my desire to make those two incidents yield meaning was nothing more than a way of avoiding the truth about my own lust; I wanted, that is, to make my lust important, in the same way that blinded lovers know that their ordinary couplings are unique and astonishing and bright with amorous truth.
Even now, when I think to luxuriate in self-pity, I conjure up that particular night and try to extract, from its various acts, a moral, no, a lesson, a pensum, that will serve to partially explain my general failure as a man. This failure must be somehow dependent upon the circumstances attendant upon my mother’s death. Or so I hope; for otherwise my life seems to have no meaning at all, not even that of its being. But I am always sidetracked, because I link that night with the night spent with Grace, and that, without fail, allows my father to enter the bleak world of recollection.
I occasionally dream of my father, especially when I find myself vexed by memories of Clara. In these dreams, he does workaday things, nothing strange or even unexpected. He lights an English Oval, he leans against one of his gleaming Cadillacs, he turns to me and says “Lavagetto,” he buys me a Hickey Freeman pearl-gray pinstripe suit, he takes me to the fights at the Garden where we sit ringside with big, loud men, he tells me he’s sorry about my mother, whom he always loved. When he confesses to the latter, he says something about the good veal and peppers in the Italian grocery on Baltic Street, but I know how to translate this secret dream language. But whatever he is doing or saying, he invariably wears a snap-brim fedora, and much of the time it is a white Borsalino. This hat is, I think, a figure for authority and grace and strength, for arrogance, for manhood. A figure, that is, for everything that I once wanted to possess and exhibit.
When I was sixteen, my father took me, on a hot day in August, to a pier in Erie Basin, where he was doing a complete overhaul on two Norwegian freighters. His foreman, a short, dark man of forty-five or so, whose name — the only name I ever knew him by — was Sorrow, took his cap off when he approached my father, and made a slight bow to me. I was embarrassed by this, and looked away at the huge rusting and peeling hulls of the Kristiansand and the Trondheim riding high in the water. Sorrow said something to my father in Sicilian, and my father answered in English, and gestured toward the ships. As Sorrow walked away, my father put his arm around my shoulders, and said something about the old greaseballs and their goddamn Chinese, and laughed. I should note that by this time in his life my father, who had been born just outside Agrigento and who had passed through Ellis Island at the age of ten, had invented an American birthplace for himself, and had given himself a wonderfully burlesque “American” middle name, Kendrick. My mother often delightedly said that he claimed a birthday on, sometimes, the Fourth of July, and sometimes Flag Day. And yet my mother, for all of her bitterness toward this man from whom she had been separated for twelve years, never spoke of him without a subterranean admiration and affection that I had no way of reconciling with her anger and sense of betrayal. He was to her, I now think, the only real man in the world, and she had often told me stories of their courtship and early marriage that were suffused with details that were at once innocent — almost girlish — and oddly erotic. On that pier, though, whatever he may have been to my mother, he seemed to me a magical stranger in a beautiful hat and a tropical worsted suit of so creamy a tan that it seemed to blush. I knew why Sorrow was so deferential, for my father radiated an authority that created him a figure endowed with authority: he made, that is, a self that was, then, his self. It was not, that is, the creation of someone that he was not, a kind of con-man invention that, for some reason, many people admire, but was infinitely more subtle than that: he had successfully endowed, in some mysterious way, certain traits of manhood with a style that was not naturally or specifically intrinsic to them, but which became so at the moment of his appropriation of them. It was this, I suspect, that so enthralled my mother.