Youngblood hawke, p.55
Youngblood Hawke, page 55
"I love you, Frieda."
"Then kiss me as though you love me!"
Tears were starting from her eyes. In all the years he had known Frieda, in all their many quarrels, he had never seen her shattered and hysterical like this. He held her close and bent and kissed her, and told her in extravagant words that he loved her. She clung to him strongly and quietly like a child, her face against his chest, listening to him.
"All right," she said at last, "I've got to get out of here at once. You just remember that I love you, and that we belong to each other . . . Oh, Christ, little Paul's birthday party," she exclaimed, halting in the midst of putting on a shoe. "She'll never come now, will she? What will I say to my husband, to the children? It'll look so queer if she doesn't come. Paul made such an issue of inviting just you and your mother, he worships you so! I wanted to make a big thing and invite his school friends, but no, no, he insisted, just Art and his mother and our family for dinner, there was no reasoning with him. He knew exactly what he wanted. Ye gods, what a mess! Do you think she'll come anyway? Can you prevail on her to come? But then how will I face her? What are you going to tell her?"
"Frieda, if I know mama she's not going to mention it. She'll come to the party. My mother is out of the hills and she has her strange ways but she's a grownup."
"I hope so. God, look at that ravaged face of mine, will you? To hell with lipstick, I've got to get out of here at once. I feel as though twenty eyes were looking at me through these goddamned broken walls." She threw herself at him, her hair carelessly pinned up, her usual height restored by spindly shoes, and kissed him hard. "I love you. That's the answer to everything, and you had better love me, do you hear? We have nothing to feel guilty about, nothing! Make her come to Paul's party. I've never felt more awful. Good night."
He went down to the street door with her, trying to reassure her, but she only shook her head and dashed the back of her hand to her eyes. When he opened the iron-grilled front door, Frieda looked this way and that at the black deserted street. "Good night," she said again. "I'll get a cab on Lexington. I'm exhausted." She slunk down the sidewalk.
4
"Till we meet
Till we meet
Till we meet
At Jesus' feet . . ."
Hawke heard his mother singing in the kitchen as he came downstairs. He had not expected to be greeted on this particular morning by song. "Well, hello there," she said. She was in her old purple house dress, chopping vegetables and tossing them into a colander. "Keeping bankers' hours, aren't we? Want some breakfast, or is it lunch? I'm just putting up my soup. The coffee's hot." She poured a cup before him on the kitchen table, where he sat looking through a pile of mail. "There's another one from your foo-foo lady in Rome. Smells real scrumptious."
He found the gray envelope and involuntarily put it to his nose; then he glanced at his mother, and after a strained moment they both laughed.
Mrs. Hawke's aspect was changed. Hawke had expected her to be angry, disapproving, perhaps sulky, perhaps spoiling for a fight. He had not anticipated the faintly lewd, knowing, cynical look in her eye, and the tart smile. It was not too different from the morning look of some women with whom he had slept; the half-disdainful female acknowledgment that men were eager males in the night, and frowsy neuters looking for coffee and food in the morning. And more, it was his acceptance into the adult world by his mother, as though he had just returned from his honeymoon. Certainly she must have known that he was no virgin; but never before had she been compelled to face the physical fact. Now it was done, and because it had been a shaming accident rather than a formal, politely accepted event like a honeymoon, Mrs. Hawke's ribald awareness of sex—which all women have, however virtuous; the laughter in theatres at sex jokes trills mostly from women's throats—was all the more plainly written on her face. For an instant Hawke had an indecent vision of his old mother and his dead father as lovers; then his mind shut the picture out.
"What'll you have to eat?" she said. "A little or a lot?"
"Anything, ma. I'm hungry." He pulled a letter from Scott Hoag out of the pile.
"You usually are these days. That's the best part of getting over a sickness, the appetite it gives you. What does your Mr. Hoag want now?"
Hawke tore open the thick letter. Two copies of the contract, and a stamped addressed envelope, were attached to Scotty's letter, the third he had written since leaving New York. The signed document that Mrs. Hawke had mailed, or said she had mailed, had never arrived. Scott said the post office must have lost it, and asked Hawke to have his mother sign again and send on the papers as soon as possible. The letter was affable enough, but there was a touch of exasperated urgency in the overblown last sentence. "Of course I know we have a deal, Art, and your word and your mother's word are as good as a signed paper or better as far as I'm concerned, but Glenn and the Coffman people won't move without the release in hand, a verbal commitment isn't enough for them, they're more worried about your mother's real intentions than I am, in view of the previous trouble we've had with her, so please don't hold up on this very long."
Hawke read the letter to his mother over the loud crackle of frying ham and eggs. She snorted, "My intentions! What about their intentions? What do they want two signed copies for now? He said I only had to sign one. Maybe it's a trick."
"Good God, mama, what kind of trick? The paper's meaningless unless they give us twenty thousand dollars. Twenty thousand dollars, for Christ's sake, for a worthless piece of Edgefield wilderness!"
"Ha! If it's worthless why do they want to give us that much money for it? Do you believe that Santa Claus business? I declare, your friend Hoag ought to go around with reindeer and a red suit, so people would recognize him."
Hawke was aware of the disadvantage he was under this morning, talking to his mother: the knowing leer, mixed with sour disapproval, was on her face whenever he looked at her. He said, with less irritation than he might have put into his voice otherwise, "Mama, did you mail that contract?"
"Oh, I'm the liar this morning, is that the idea? That's very interesting. Well, maybe there's been some lying around here, but I think you'd better not go accusing me, Art. Maybe it's just as well if it did get lost in the mail. I sure didn't appreciate being rushed into signing that thing. Why, we never even showed it to a lawyer. Now we can do that, at least. How do we know what's behind all those big legal words?"
"It's a standard legal form. If we delay too much that offer will fall through."
"That's talk. If land's worth money today it'll be worth that much or more tomorrow." She put a tremendous platter of ham and eggs before him, and a basket of hot rolls. "Eat your breakfast and read your letter from the foo-foo lady. I'm busy, I have to put up my soup. Scat, you!" She slammed Hawke's gray alley-cat, Aunt Bertha, off the counter, where it was sniffing at the bloody beef bones. It flew across the kitchen and bounded out of the door with an offended squawk. "Lord, even the cats don't know how to behave in New York. Though I don't know why they should at that, when the fanciest people behave like cats."
She took up a large knife and resumed her chopping of the vegetables, whacking a large green cabbage in two with a stroke like an executioner's, then cutting and cutting again.
"Till we meet
Till we meet
God be with you till we meet again"
she sang in her thin high kitchen soprano. Hawke began to revise his first impression that he was going to get off easily this morning. His mother sang during her cooking, he recalled, either when she was perfectly at ease or when she was on the edge of an explosion.
He opened the letter from Rome.
Dear Mr. Hawke:
Thank you for taking the trouble to answer me. I must say I'm flattered. I haven't the faintest recollection of what I wrote you from the hospital. All I know is I was under sedation and floating six feet off the bed. I'm sure my letter was absurd and probably most embarrassing, and if you didn't throw it at once into the wastebasket will you please do so now? I don't want to think it still exists.
I showed my husband your letter of course and he thinks it would be grand for us to take you to lunch at the Borghese Gardens or something like that, if you do come to Rome. At the moment I'm quite the heroine at home for having elicited a letter from Youngblood Hawke. My husband seems to think it's a greater achievement than giving birth to The Peanut (our temporary revoltingly whimsical name for the new baby).
If you're of my husband's mind and want to lunch with a plump and plain mother of three and her very handsome and devoted spouse, why okay. I doubt we'll be in Rome when you get here, we're going home soon and home is very far from this enchanting city or indeed from any civilized place. I can't imagine what I'd have to say to an author like you. I'd be afraid all the time that you were seeing through me like an X-ray, and I'm quite uneasy, frankly, about that letter I wrote you in my narcotized state. Do get rid of it, if you haven't, and don't bother any further with me, I'm fat as a house aside from everything else. Just finish that new book. I'm dying for something decent to read, and if nothing good comes along soon I may start my fourth time around in Dickens, which would be a decidedly neurotic act of withdrawal from modern society.
HONOR H.
Hawke looked up from the letter and saw his mother glancing at him, her mouth in a sarcastic twist. "Does that foo-foo lady write as pretty as she smells?"
He tossed the letter on the table. "You're welcome to read it."
Mrs. Hawke's back straightened, and she resumed her vicious chopping. "Hmf! I'm not the least bit interested in reading your mail, thank you, especially from foo-foo ladies. I think maybe you already know too many of those for your own good, but I reckon that's none of my business, is it, you're thirty years old and a famous writer, and I'm just your stupid old mother from the back hills."
"Okay, mama, okay. Let me have some more coffee."
"Certainly, Mr. Youngblood Hawke. I guess I still come in handy for making you a breakfast or coming down out of the hills and nursing you through a pneumonia that you caught doing God knows what in the big city, then when you're all better I'll go home till the next time I have to come and pick up the pieces and get a few more surprises. Is the coffee hot enough for you?"
"It's great, mama, just great."
"Oh, I don't know, I guess some women you know can make better coffee and please you in some other ways but the good Lord in his wisdom has set limits to the services a mother can perform. The good Lord also has set down some other laws but maybe they were just given to country people, nobody seems to know about them in New York and young men who were brought up knowing them seem to forget them here right fast."
Hawke decided that there was no escape, after all. He said, "Mama, I'm sorry you were embarrassed. I honestly didn't think you'd be surprised. I thought you knew."
"Knew! I like that!" She dropped the knife and faced him. "You thought I knew, and yet went on treating that woman as though she were a respectable person? Why, I help unfortunate people in Hovey all the time, and I have pets I've adopted, old ladies and just lately a crippled boy of nineteen, and I thought this woman was being kind to you the same way, because you were alone in the city. I could understand that. I thought she was a fine woman, but she sure isn't. There's a word for what she is."
Hawke said, "Don't talk about her, mama."
"What shall I do, pretend everything's just jim-dandy? That woman with her gray hair, her wrinkles, her four children, her hands all knotted like an old carpenter's! What on earth could have gotten into you, Art, what do you see in her? It's horrible, what you're doing, it's evil and I can't even understand how you can enjoy it. Of all the millions of women that go wiggling around this city couldn't you find one your own age, not my age?"
"Christ Almighty mama, Frieda's not your age, she's forty-two."
"I'm fifty-three. She's nearer me than you. Art, you're ruining your life, God doesn't allow things like that just to go on and on. How long has it been going on?"
"What's the difference?"
"Well, how long? Was last night the first time?"
"The first time? Mama, I've been in love with Frieda Winter for years."
"In love! You call that being in love? Lord have mercy on us. What next? How about that Jewish secretary of yours, are you in love with her too? She's married but of course that makes no difference to a famous writer, I see that. Are you carrying on with her, too?"
Hawke said drily, clamping down on his anger as best he could, "All right, mama. Shut up."
"Shut up! You're telling your mother to shut up? You've come a long way, Art Hawke."
Hawke slammed down his coffee cup. "I don't expect you to forgive or to understand. Frieda Winter and I fell in love with each other long ago. What's been done can't be undone. You're to drop the subject or pack up and go home, today."
"Art, I'm your mother, I have a right to tell you things for your good and I must. You can hate me all you want for it."
"You won't change anything. I know the thing is impossible, I've known it all along. I plan to go to Europe soon and break it off."
"Europe! She'll just follow you to Europe, boy. Come home if you want to break it off. Thank God you still have that much sense. She won't come to Hovey, that I promise you. She'll never face me."
"I can't go back to Hovey. I'll make damned sure she doesn't follow me. That's all about it, mama, except one thing. You're to come to her house for dinner tonight as though nothing had happened."
"Whaaat! Art, you're out of your mind. Why, ask the wretched woman yourself. She'll beg you not to bring me. She'll sink through the floor at the sight of me."
"She wants you to come. She told me so. You're coming."
"I will not. I won't sit at a table with her. She's a disgusting New York thing, I don't care how much money she has and how smart she is. You can say I'm sick or something. I won't come."
Hawke stood, thrusting back his chair so that it clattered across the room and crashed into the wall. He burst out in a maniacal roar, his eyes starting from his head, "YOU'RE COMING, do you hear? And not another word about it."
His mother shrank back from him, plain terror on her face. "Art, for heaven's sake, you're just out of a sickbed, do you want to have a stroke? God help us, your face is purple. How dare you scream at me like that? I'll come, my God."
"That's settled," Hawke said hoarsely. He scooped up the mail and walked out of the kitchen, feeling the room swim around him. It was an extremely elegant early American kitchen, all copper pans and wooden beams and maple furniture, but the floor was still bumpy raw cement.
5
In panic one usually does the least sensible thing. Frieda Winter was a hard woman to panic, but being found in Hawke's bed by Hawke's mother had knocked apart her self-possession, so she had insisted that Hawke bring his mother to Paul's birthday dinner. Frieda knew only one method of carrying off her life, a method that had served for many years—total bland pretense that nothing wrong was ever going on; and by instinct that was the method she seized on to join together the broken pieces of the adultery which for her had become part of her normal existence, her chief pleasure in a life of pleasure. It was a terrible mistake, and she knew it as soon as Mrs. Hawke walked into her house, but by then nothing could be done.
The Winter family was assembled in the living room, and it occurred to Hawke that this was the first time he had seen them all together except in the painting on the dining-room wall. The least real of the lot was Bennett, the oldest son, a chubby boy of twelve in the painting, and now a junior at Yale. Hawke had met him only two or three times in brief chance encounters. He was fully as tall as Hawke and seemed still to be growing; a lean broad-shouldered youngster, with his father's long jaw; dressed to the perfection of advanced collegiate taste, which at the moment leaned to stringy ties, dark suits, pink shirts with tiny collars, and oversize purplish shoes. Whether from shyness or sullenness he hardly ever spoke to Hawke. Tonight after jumping to his feet for the introduction to Mrs. Hawke he dropped on a hard chair and sat round-shouldered, wringing immense bony hands between bony knees. The fat older daughter seemed to have given up the struggle to shine, between her effulgent mother and her younger sister, who at fifteen had bloomed out with a figure like Frieda's, a sharp puckish manner, and sparkling eyes. The older one was doing the unpainted straight-haired esthete in flat shoes and thick dark stockings.
Frieda's husband pushed himself heavily out of his armchair to greet the guests. His mustache was now completely white, and the bag under his chin was a fat thick pouch sharply marked off at the jaws. The illness that had put him back on a rice diet showed in the bluish tinge of his skin. "Well, how's the wolf of Wall Street?" he said, measuring Hawke as usual with a glance of half-suppressed irony. "You seem to have come around pretty well. Frieda had you at death's door."
"He was mighty sick," Hawke's mother said. "Art needs a wife to take care of him, that's what he needs."
"Ah well, it's an old problem, Mrs. Hawke, domesticating the artist," Winter said. "Typically they don't domesticate, they shake themselves to pieces or burn themselves up with their own excess energy. The Poe and Baudelaire pattern. Of course there are also the mellow old married word-grinders, the Trollopes, the Tennysons, the Thomas Manns. Let's hope that Arthur will settle down some day and become one of those."
Frieda loudly popped a cork and said, "Champagne, everybody!"
