Second Skin (New Directions Paperbook) Read online

  With the mention of my mother’s prosaic name of Mildred I complete my roster, because there is no place here for Tremlow —my devil, Tremlow—or for Mac, the Catholic chaplain who saved my life. No place for them. Not yet. Of course the mere name of my mother has no special connotation, no significance, but the woman herself was the vague consoling spirit behind the terrible seasons of this life when unlikely accidents, tabloid adventures, shocking episodes, surrounded a solitary and wistful heart. Like my father she died when I was young, and I see her with most of her features indistinct. But she too was tall, stoopshouldered, forever smiling a soft questioning smile. I have no recollection of her voice—some short time after my father’s decision in the lavatory she ceased to talk, became permanently mute—and my few visual memories of her are silent and show her only at a great distance off. Wearing her broad-brimmed white hat so immense and limpid it conceals her face and back in waves like tissue paper, she kneels in the garden strip next to the little chipped and tarnished electric sign which is the familiar urban monument of men in my father’s profession and which, in my boyhood, identified our private house as the combined residence and working place of an active small-town mortician. I see my mother kneeling, hidden by the hat, inert and sweet and ghostly in the summer sun. She seems to me to be praying rather than gardening, and my imagination supplies the black trowel untouched by her white-gloved folded hands but stabbed upright, rather, into the earth at her knees. And then, in another fragment of memory, I see her seated in the middle of our lawn on one of my father’s shellacked folding chairs and still dressed in white, still wearing the hat, while he, bareheaded and balding and in shirt sleeves, stands hosing down the long black limousine which was shabby, upholstered in red velvet except for the stiff black patent leather of the driver’s seat, and often smelled of invisible flowers—that worn and comfortable old hearse—when it doubled on Sunday afternoons as our family car. The seated woman, the dripping machine, the man working his wrist in idle circles, this is the vision lying closest to the peaceful center of my childhood. And how much it contains: not only the still day of my youth but also the devotion and modest industry of my parents which gave my early life the proportions of a working fairy tale. For the president of the local bank, an unmarried teacher in the elementary school, two brothers dramatically drowned in a scummy pond at the edge of town, the thin mother of infant twins, three beautiful members of the high school graduating class decapitated in a scarlet coupé, a girl who had sold children’s underwear in the five and dime, in our house all of them appeared, all were attended by my father and my mother as well, she in the parlor, smiling, he in the shop below, since she was always his perfect partner, the mortician’s muse, the woman who more and more grew to resemble a gifted angel in a dreamer’s cemetery as the years passed and the number of our nonreligious ceremonies increased. A few years only—yet all my youth—were marked by the folding and unfolding of the wooden chairs and sudden oil changes in the hearse, until that day my peace and excitement ended and my mother and I were only brief visitors in another undertaker’s home.

  At least I was witness to my father’s death, in a sense was the child-accomplice of whatever dark phantom might have been materializing by his side that noon hour he finally locked himself in the hot lavatory—it was a Friday in midsummer—and rushed through the bare essentials of taking his life. Witness and accomplice because I was crouched with my ear to the door and because we talked together, curious but welcome conference between father and son, and because I played my cello to him and later fished from the trembling cupfuls of water in the bottom of the toilet bowl the little unused bullet which was companion to the one he fired. At least I knew it was for my sake, despite his confusion, his anger, his pathetic cries, and received the tangible actuality of his death with shocked happiness, grateful at least for the misguided trust implicit in the real staging of that uncensored scene.

  How like my mother, on the other hand, to spare me; to disappear, to vanish, gone without the hard crude accessories of sweating water jug, pulmotor, stretcher, ambulance summoned from the City Hospital; gone without vigil or funeral, without good-bys. I missed her one morning and that was all. It makes little difference now that she died only twenty miles away and in the care of a half brother. It makes no difference to me. Because I missed her, I knew at once what had happened, I was alone, I could do nothing but alternate my days between the lavatory-endless brushing of teeth, plastering down of hair—and the back of the hearse where I instinctively stretched out to await my final vision of that experience denied me in space but not in time.

  And in time it came, the moment when at last I sat up like a miniature fat corpse in the back of the solemn old limousine and found the cobwebs, the streaming motes, the worn velvet carpeting and various bits of silver and thin lengths of steel—the casket runners—all turned to dense geometric substances of light-orange, yellow, radiant pink—and in that blaze, and just as I clenched my hands and shut my eyes, knew that my father had begun my knowledge of death as a lurid truth but that my mother had extended it toward the promise of mystery—this at the instant I saw her, saw her, after all, in the vision which no catastrophe of my own has ever destroyed or dimmed.

  She appears from a doorway in a large white house on a hill; clouds are banked heavily behind the house and hill and a deep morning sun appears to lie buried inside the enormous unmoving range of clouds; there is no one else in the great house with all its white chimneys and shuttered windows, silent, breeze-swept, filled with untouched tinkling crystal and dusty sleigh bells strung on long strips of dried and moldy leather, and my mother steps from under the portico, raises a gentle hand to the hat trembling with a motion all its own, and lifts her face, turns it left and right with the benevolent questioning glance of the royal lady prepared to greet either prince or executioner with her lovely smile which, from where I hide down the hill in a bush, is either innocent or blind. Then she is moving, skin and veils and featureless face—except for the smile—reflecting the peach and rose color of the filtered sun, descends one lichen-covered step and then another, sways and climbs up beside the driver of a small open yellow machine with wooden wheels, white solid tires and brass headlamps. The car is thumping up and down, but silently, and behind the single high seat is strapped a little white satin trunk, and the driver, I see, wears a white cap and driving coat, great eyeless goggles and a black muffler wrapped about his throat and hiding his mouth, nose, chin. With one gloved hand he grips a lever as tall and thin as a sword, and there is a sudden flashing when he contracts his arm; with his other hand he is squeezing the black bulb of the horn, though I hear nothing, and is sitting even straighter against the wind; and now he is gripping the steering wheel, holding it at arm’s length; and now he turns his head and takes a single long look into my mother’s face, and I see that she is admiring him—or pitying him —and I quiver; and then the tires are rolling, the trunk swaying, the muffler beating the air, and suddenly the white coat is brown with the dust of the road and the vehicle, severe and tangled like a complicated golden insect, is gaining speed, and I see that my mother is quite serene, somehow remains unblown, unshaken as the downward ride commences, and is merely touching her fingers to the crown of her familiar hat and raising a soft white arm as if to wave.

  A waxen tableau, no doubt the product of a slight and romantic fancy. Yet I prefer this vision to my father’s death. And by way of partial explanation, at least, I should make note of one concrete circumstance: that my mother, unable to bear the sound of the death-dealing shot—it must have lodged in her head like a shadow of the bullet that entered my father’s—deafened herself one muggy night, desperately, painfully, by filling both lovely ears with the melted wax from one of our dining room candles.

  But on now to the erratic flight of the hummingbird—on to the high lights of my naked history.

  Agony of the Sailor

  She was in my arms and lifeless, nearly lifeless. Together we stood: the
girl, young mother, war bride in her crumpled frock, and I in my cap and crumpled uniform of white duck—it was damp and beginning to soil after these nights awake, was bunched at the knees and down the front spotted with the rum and Coca-Cola from poor Sonny’s upset glass—I hardly able to smile, perspiring, sporting on my breast the little colorful ribbon of my Good Conduct Medal and on my collar the tarnished insignia of my rank, and unshaven, tired, burned slightly red and lost, thoroughly lost in this midnight Chinatown at the end of my tour of duty and still wearing in my forgetfulness the dark blue armband of the Shore Patrol, and so protected, protecting, I holding the nearly lifeless hand and feeling her waist growing smaller and smaller in the wet curve of my arm, feeling even her cold hand diminishing, disappearing from mine and wondering how to restore this poor girl who would soon be gone. I looked around, trying to catch sight of Sonny where he sat in the booth with Pixie. And suddenly I was aware of the blind, meaningless, momentary presence of her little breast against my own and I, regretting my sensitivity but regretting more the waste, the impossibility of bringing her to life again—there in the small fleshed locket of her heart—I wished all at once to abandon rank, insignia, medal, bald head, good nature, everything, if only I might become for a moment an anonymous seaman second class, lanky and far from home and dancing with this girl, but felt instead the loose sailors pressing against us, all of them in their idiotic two-piece suits and laced up tight, each one filling me with despair because she and I were dancing together, embracing, and there wasn’t even someone to give her a kiss. Here then was our celebration, the start of adventure and begining of misery—or perhaps its end— and I kept thinking that she was barelegged, had packed her only pair of stockings—black market, a present from me—in the small tattered canvas bag guarded now between Sonny’s feet.

  There should have been love in our dark and nameless Chinatown café. But there was only an hour to spare, only the shot-glasses flung like jewels among the sailors—each provided with his pocket comb, French letters, gold watch and matching band —only the noise, the smoke, the poster of the old national goat-faced man over the bar, the sound of the record and torch singer, orchestra, a song called “Tangerine,” only the young boys with their navy silk ties and Popeye hats, crowded elbows and bowls of boiled rice; only this night, the harbor plunging with battleships, the water front blacked-out, bloody with shore leave and sick with the bodies of young girls sticking to the walls of moist unlighted corridors; only our own café and its infestation of little waiters smiling their white-slave smiles and of sailors pulling down their middies, kicking their fresh white hornpipe legs; only ourselves—agitated eccentric naval officer, well-meaning man, and soft young woman, serious, downcast—only ourselves and in the middle of no romance.

  So in the shame and longing of my paternal sentiment, flushed and bumbling, I felt her knee, her hip, once more her breasts— they were of a child in puberty though she was twenty-five— and touched the frock which I had found tossed over the back of the hotel sofa. I glanced down at her head, at the hair pinned up and her neck bare, at her face, the beautiful face which reminded me suddenly of a little death mask of Pascal. From one wrist she carried a dangling purse, and when it swung against my ribs— dull metronome of our constrained and hollow dance—I knew it was an empty purse. No stockings, no handkerchief, no lipstick or keys; no love, no mother, no Fernandez. There among all those sailors in the smoke, the noise, I pulled her to me, wincing and lunging both as I felt imprinted on my stomach the shape of hers, and felt all the little sinews in her stomach banding together, trembling. It was midnight—Pacific War Time—and I tried to collect myself, tried to put on a show of strength in my jaw.

  “I’ve never been afraid of the seeds of death,” I said, tightening my arm, staring over her head at the litter of crushed cherries and orange rind wet on the bar, “and if I were you I wouldn’t blame Gertrude for what she did.” We executed a fairly rakish turn, bumped from the rear, blocked by the tall airy figure of a bosun’s mate—the uniform was stuffed against his partner in an aghast paralysis of love, bell-bottoms wrapped tight around the woman’s ankles, the man’s white face swaying in an effort to toss aside the black hair drenched in rum—and I looked down into my own partner’s eyes which were lifted to mine at last and which were as clear as sea shells, the pupils gray and hard, the irises suddenly returning to sight like little cold musical instruments. I sighed—my sigh was a hot breath on her dry lips—I blushed, I got my wind again, and it was a mouthful of smoke, mouthful of rum, fragrance of salty black sauce and yellow plague.

  “As you know,” I said, “I grew up very familiar with the seeds of death; I had a special taste for them always. But when I heard about Gertrude something happened. It was as if I had struck a new variety. Her camel’s-hair coat, her pink mules, her cuticle sticks scattered on the floor, her dark glasses left lying on the unmade bed in the U-Drive-Inn, I saw the whole thing, for that moment understood her poor strangled solitude, understood exactly what it is like to be one of the unwanted dead. Suddenly Gertrude and I were being washed together in the same warm tide. But in our grief we were casting up only a single shadow— you.”

  Quickly, artfully, I gave the bosun’s mate a shove with my sea-going hip and, heavy as I was, stood hovering, sagging in front of Cassandra. I held her, with a moistened finger I touched her dry mouth, I raised her chin—unsmiling dimple, unblemished curve of her little proud motherhood—I watched her gray eyes and I waited, waited for the sound of the voice which was always a whisper and which I had never failed to hear. And now the eyes were tuned, the lips were unsealed—moving, opening wide enough to admit a straw—I was flooded with the sound of the whisper and sight of a tiny golden snake wriggling up the delicate cleft of her throat—still no smile, never a smile—and curling in a circle to pulse, to die, in the shallow white nest of her temple.

  “I think you would like to know,” she began, whispering, spacing the words, “you would like to know what I did with the guitar. Well, I burned it. Pixie and I burned it together.” And in her whispered seriousness, the hush of her slow enunciation, I heard then the snapping of flames, the tortured singing of those red-hot strings. Even as I dropped her hand, let go of her waist, brought together my fat fingers where the Good Conduct Ribbon like a dazzling insect marked the spot of my heart in all that wrinkled and sullied field of white, even as I struggled with the tiny clasp—pinprick, drop of blood, another stain—and fastened the ribbon to the muslin of her square-collared rumpled frock, even while I admired my work and then took her into my arms again, hugging, kissing, protecting her always and always, and even while I gave her the Good Conduct Medal—she the one who deserved it; I, never—and shook long and happily in my relief: through all this hectic and fragile moment I distinctly heard the gray whisper continuing its small golden thread of intelligence exactly on the threshold of sound and as fine and formidable as the look in her eye.

  “Pixie and I were alone, mother and daughter, and we did what we had to do. I think she disapproved at first, but once I got the kerosene out of the garage she began to enjoy the whole thing immensely. She even clapped her little hands. But you ought to have known,” taking note of the ribbon, touching it with the tip of her pinky—no other sign than this—and all the while whispering, whispering those minimum formal cadences she had learned at school and gently moving, turning, arching her bare neck so I should see how she disciplined her sorrow, “you ought to have known the U-Drive-Inn was no place for a child. …”

  I blushed again, I glanced down at the small bare feet in the strapless shoes—scuffed lemon shells—I welcomed even this briefest expression of her displeasure. “It was no place for you, no place for you, Cassandra,” I said, and wished, as I had often wished, that she would submit to some small name of endearment, if only at such times as these when I loved her most and feared for her the most. A name of endearment would have helped. “You were too innocent for the U-Drive-Inn,” I said. “I should hav
e known how it would end. Your mother always told me she wanted to die surrounded by unmarried couples in a cheap motel, and I let her. But no more cheap motels for us, Cassandra. We won’t even visit Gertrude in the cemetery.”

  She caught my spirit, she caught my gesturing hand: “Skipper?”—at least she allowed herself to whisper that name, mine, which Sonny had invented for me so long ago before we sailed —“Skipper? Will you do something nice for me? Something really nice?”

  She was still unsmiling but was poised, half-turned, giving me a look of happiness, of life, in the pure agility of her body. And hadn’t she, wearing only the frock, only a few pins in the small classical lift of her hair, hadn’t she come straight from a sluggish bath tub in the U-Drive-Inn to the most violent encounter ever faced by her poor little determined soul? Now she held before me the promise of her serious duplicity, watching and gauging—me, the big soft flower of fatherhood—until I heard myself saying, “Anything, anything, the bus doesn’t leave for another hour and a half, Cassandra, and no one will ever say I faltered even one cumbersome step in loving you.” I gripped her small ringless hand and fled with her, though she was only walking, walking, this child with the poise and color and muscle-shape of a woman, followed her through the drunken sailors to the door.

  In the dark, whipped by pieces of paper—the tom and painted remnants of an old street dragon—a sailor stood rolling and moaning against the wall, holding his white cupcake-wrapper hat in one hand and with the other reaching into the sunken whiteness of his chest, the upturned face, the clutching hand, the bent legs spread and kicking to the unheard Latin rhythm of some furious carnival. But on flowed Cassandra, small, grave, heartless, a silvery water front adventuress, and led me straight into the crawling traffic-it was unlighted, rasping, a slow and blackened parade of taxicabs filled with moon-faced marines wearing white braid and puffing cherry-tipped cigars, parade of ominous jeeps each with its petty officer standing up in the rear, arms folded, popping white helmets strapped in place—led me on through admiring whistles and the rubbery sibilance of military tires to a dark shop which was only a rat’s hole between a cabaret —girl ventriloquist, dummy in black trunks—and the fuming concrete bazaar of the Greyhound Bus Terminal—point of our imminent departure—drew me on carefully, deftly, until side by side we stood in the urine-colored haze of a guilty light bulb and breathed the dust, the iodine, the medicinal alcohol of a most vulgar art.