A World Lost: A Novel (Port William) (7 page)

Her tone of self-reference almost always carried an overtone of selfpity. She asked for pity as she asked for affection -and her demand, as
was inevitable in that hopeless emotional economy of hers, always outran the available supply. As she strove forward with her various claims on
other people, she more and more destroyed the possibility of a genuine
mutuality with anybody. Her need for love isolated and estranged her
from everybody who might have loved her, and from everybody who did.

In her self-centeredness and her constant appeal to others to fulfill
her unfulfillable needs, she was like Momma-pie. Both of them, I think,
belonged to a lineage of spoiled women. From the time of her divorce,
Momma-pie had lived with her expansive pretensions in a small room at
the Broadfield Hotel on the income from a moderately good farm that
she had never seen except from the road. During her life at the hotel she
did nothing for herself except for the light and polite housekeeping of
her room. Aunt Judith was a fastidious housekeeper and a good cookshe and Uncle Andrew had never had the money for household helpbut her work always bore the implication of her poor health, and hints
were often passed between her and Momma-pie that whatever she did
she was not quite able to do.

The would-be aristocracy of the Hargrave upper crust was, after all, I
think, a cruel burden for Aunt Judith and Momma-pie. According to the
terms that they accepted and lived by, they were important because they
were who they were. That was their axiom. And so there they were, suspended in the ethereal element of their pretension, utterly estranged
from the farms and the work from which they lived, hard put to demonstrate their usefulness to much of anybody, and forced to bear the
repeated proofs that Uncle Andrew assumed almost nothing that they
assumed.

It is pleasant and useless to wonder what might have become of Aunt Judith if she had married a milder, more tractable man, just as it is pleasant and useless to wonder what might have become of Uncle Andrew if
he had married a more robust and self-sustaining woman. Such might-
have-beens only renew the notice that Aunt Judith and Uncle Andrew
married each other, and in doing so joined snow and fire.

Uncle Andrew, except that he possessed "aristocratic good looks,"
could not have been anyone that Aunt Judith ever saw in her girlhood
dreams. She must have seen him simply as she wanted to see him: a young
man handsome as a prince, who would make her the envy of other girls.
She must have imagined herself and him as "a beautiful couple." To
Momma-pie - assuming that my father's theory of artful entrapment
was correct-he must have seemed "an excellent prospect," good raw
material in need of polish. If in fact they captured him, then they captured a bull in a henhouse. He was, as undoubtedly he already knew or
soon found out, the very reality that their not-altogether-pretended feminine delicacy was least disposed to recognize. And now they were
obliged to try to contain him in an enclosure prepared for another kind
of creature. He was, whatever else he was, a man of his own time and
place. He honored to some extent the conventions of his capture; he was
capable of affection, sympathy, and regret. Though his confinement did
not exist except when he submitted to it, sometimes he submitted to it.
But he could not be held. It was not so much that he resisted or defied or
rebelled against his bondage; he simply overflowed it. When he filled to
his own fullness, he overflowed his confines as a rising river overflows
its banks, making nothing of the boundaries and barriers that stand in
its way.

The three of them made their daily lives, formed and followed their
routines, made things ordinary and bearable for themselves. Their
strange convergence was not a perpetual crisis. But it was nonetheless
hopeless. They were two almost forceless women entangled past untangling with an almost ungentled man. He of course was as spoiled in his
way as they were in theirs. They had been spoiled by generations of men
who had indulged and promoted their helplessness; he had been spoiled
by women who had allowed him to charm them into acceptance of his
inborn unstoppability. Aunt Judith and Momma-pie had spoiled him
themselves, as I think all the women in his life had done. They were under his spell, as much caught by him as he by them. They could not contain
him, but they could not expel him either.

The best friend he had, I am certain, was my father, who loved him
completely. But my father, purposeful and tireless, sober and passionate,
in love with his family and his work, true to his obligations, could not
have been Uncle Andrew's crony. They could be friends within the terms
of brotherhood and partnership, but partly perhaps because he was
Uncle Andrew's brother, my father was not wild; the whole budget of
Catlett wildness in that generation had been allotted to Uncle Andrew.
For cronies, Uncle Andrew had Buster Simms and Yeager Stump.

In his look and laugh and way of talking, Buster Simms gleefully
acknowledged the world's lewdness. He was a freckled, smallish, quickeyed man whose conversation tended to be all in tones of joking, from
aggressive to kind. He called Uncle Andrew "Duke." Yeager Stump was
a tall, good-looking man of somewhat the same style as Uncle Andrew.
Of the three, he was the quietest. You could see in the wrinkly corners
of his eyes that he was always waiting to be amused, and was being
amused while he waited. Of the three, he was the only one who lived to
be old.

All three felt themselves too straitly confined in marriage, and they
escaped into each other's company. Or rather, each other's company was
their freedom that, spent or hung over, they allowed themselves to be
recaptured out of, as Samson allowed himself to be bound with seven
green withes that were never dried.

"We did everything we thought of," Yeager Stump would say later.
"Our only limit was our imagination."

They called each other "Cud'n Andrew" and "Cud'n Bustah" and
"Cud'n Yeagah"- for ordinary use abbreviated to "Cuz"- in endless parody of the female cousinship of Hargrave.

When they met in their daily comings and goings, they would greet
one another with a broad show of camaraderie and affection:

"Hello, Cuz!"

"Hello, Cuz!"

And then they would laugh. Sometimes they started laughing before
they had said anything.

The first apartment that Uncle Andrew and Aunt Judith lived in after
they moved to Hargrave had no bathtub. Uncle Andrew loved a bathtub,
and so he would sometimes come around to our house after supper to
have a soak. That was one of the times when he and I would visit. I
would perch on the lid of the thunder jug, as he liked to call it, and he
would lie in hot water up to his chin, and we would talk. Or I would just
sit and watch him, for in everything he did he fascinated me. Unlike my
father, who was in all things thrifty and careful and neat and who bathed
vigorously like a man grooming a horse, Uncle Andrew filled the tub full
and bathed expansively, as if the tub were an ocean and he a whale. He
would bask at length in the hot water, and then he would soap and rinse
with a great heaving and sloshing and blowing and making of suds.

On one such evening, when I must have been about six or seven, I confided to him that I had fallen in love with the older sister of one of my
friends. I said that I wanted to get her off by herself somewhere - a lonely
back road, say -where we could be unobserved. I was going to say that
I would then declare my love. I had given a lot of thought and effort to
the planning of this event, but I lacked confidence; I wanted the counsel
of experience. But I got no further than that detail about the lonely back
road. For a while it looked as though Uncle Andrew might drown in the
extremity of his glee.

'Aw'eah! Aw'eah!" he said as he laughed and whooped and splashed. "Now you're getting right, college! Now you're cooking with gas! You
got your mind properly on your business! You going out among 'em!"

It astonishes me a little yet to realize how characteristically he did not
qualify himself. I had spoken as a small boy, and he had responded unreservedly as a man, as himself. I must have loved him almost absolutely to
have so confided in him. And was I hurt or disappointed when he received
my confidence with such rowdy approval, infusing my shy daydream
with a glandular intensity from another vision entirely? Not in the least,
as far as I remember. I was bewildered, certainly, but was happy as always
to have pleased him and to be carried away on the big stream of his
laughter. And now, of course, I am delighted.

Later, he would quote me to his cronies. Buster Simms would lean to
glance in at me where I sat beside Uncle Andrew in the car. "Duke, is he
looking at the girls yet? Is he transacting any private business?"

And Uncle Andrew would declare solemnly, without looking at me,
"Why, he's got a girl! And he tells me that his business with her calls for
the strictest privacy." And he would go on. Wishing he would stop, I yet
listened in fascination, understanding vaguely that they spoke of a destination at which I had not arrived but to which my fare was already paid.

Thus, though I was as innocent as Adam alone, I became aware of
the sexual aura that surrounded Uncle Andrew.

He was never apart from it. He was always playing to whatever woman
was at hand, whether it was Minnie Branch, wearing a pair of Jake's castoff work shoes and with her brood in tow, or Miss Iris Flynn, who was in
fact Yeager Stump's girlfriend, or Aunt Roxanna, Grandma's tall and lean
oldest sister-anybody, so long as she was a woman. Or rather, he did
not play to them; he lived to them, acknowledging them, requiring them
to acknowledge him, as inhabitants of the same exuberantly physical
and sexual world. How they responded he did not care, so long as they
responded, which they invariably did. They scolded, scoffed, huffed,
smiled; they reached out to him; they looked straight into his eyes and
laughed. Of particular interest to me then, and still, was Uncle Andrew's
friendship with Minnie Branch, for of all the people in that overflowing
household on the Crayton Place, I think he liked Minnie best. For him,
maybe, the female world turned on an axis held at one pole by Aunt
Judith and at the other by Minnie Branch -Aunt Judith, with her bred-in dependency, her sometimes helplessness, ill with fright and self regard,
childless and forever needy; and Minnie, who was fearless, capable, hardy,
fecund, unabashed, without apology or appeal. Minnie could cook and
keep house for what amounted to a small hotel, split firewood, butcher a
hog, raise a garden, work in the field, shoot a fox, set a hen or wring her
neck. She was a large, muscular, humorous, plain-faced woman who
wore a pair of steel-rimmed glasses. You could hear her laugh halfway to
the back of the farm. I can see her yet with her white hens clustered at
her feet, picking up shelled corn; she is leaning back against the weight of
the child in her womb, fists on hips, talking and laughing.

She conceived and birthed as faithfully as a good brood cow, welcomed each newcomer without fuss, prepared without complaint for
the next. There was a running joke on this subject that Uncle Andrew
carried on with Minnie and Jake.

"Well, by God, Jake's been at it again! He's as hot as a boy dog!"

Minnie would throw back her head and laugh: "Haw! Haw!"

And Jake would grin and shake his head in wonder at himself. "They
going to have to do something about me."

And when Minnie lay down on the bed, in the big, starkly furnished
bedroom next to the kitchen, to suffer yet another birth, who would be
there, anxiously hovering about, dispensing clean towels and hot water,
eagerly bathing the infant who pretty soon appeared, but Aunt Judith
and Momma-pie? They had no more to do with Minnie Branch in the
ordinary course of their lives than they had to do with the farm. But Minnie's birth pangs drew them like some undeniable music, and their conversation afterward was full of the news of their participation.

Beyond the obvious reasons, Uncle Andrew liked Minnie, I think, because she made nothing special of him; she did not see him as anything
unexpected. She liked him wholly and asked for nothing. He was comfortable with her.

One overcast afternoon, I remember, Uncle Andrew and I were sitting
in Minnie Branch's kitchen, talking with Minnie and another woman I
knew only as Mrs. Partlet. The older children and the hands, one of
whom at that time was jockey Partlet, Mrs. Partlet's husband, had been
fed their dinner long ago and had gone back to the field. The firebox
of the cooking range was almost cold. Uncle Andrew and I were there perhaps just because Uncle Andrew enjoyed being there and did not particularly need to be anyplace else.

Minnie sat in a big rocking chair between the stove and the door
into the next room. She was rocking slowly back and forth, with Coreen,
her then-youngest, lying asleep in the crook of her arm. The second
youngest, Beureen, was asleep in a crib just beyond the door. Angeleen,
the third youngest, was standing quietly at Minnie's knee, looking as
though she would like to climb into her lap. At the moment, Minnie was
ignoring other people's wants. She had a chew of tobacco tucked into her
cheek and was taking her usual big part in the conversation. Now and
then she would turn her head and spit several feet into the ash bucket
behind the stove. Mrs. Partlet, a plump, pretty woman, sat in a straight
chair by the window. Her hands lay in her lap, and as the talk went on
she fiddled with her fingers. I sat at the end of the table nearest the stove
in one of the dozen or so straight chairs, no two of which were the same.
Uncle Andrew sat at the other end, by the back door, his chair tilted onto
its hind legs, his left arm lying along the edge of the table, his right hand
in his pocket. Between the stove and the window where Mrs. Partlet was
sitting, a large washtub full of soaking diapers sat on the floor.