Proud Flesh (19 page)

To Amy's distress, Dr. Metcalf that day had taken her side, or what he thought was her side, against her mother. To this day he still did that—or would have if Amy had let him. She now declined to discuss Ma with him. She would tolerate no criticism of Ma, especially none made in her defense. She had made him promise that he would say nothing about her to Ma and that whenever Ma asked about her he was to say there was nothing the matter with her.

Why wait? said he.

Amy did not understand.

All right, he had said; when she asked him, that was what he would tell her.

“Ah, you mean she hasn't asked about me,” said Amy. “I was afraid you would say that. I was afraid you would say that. That shows how bad she's feeling. She's afraid to ask. You see, as I told you, she is full of—”

“Your mother,” he said, “is full of—milk.”

Disrespectful of her as it was, even she had laughed. Then suddenly the situation was exactly reversed. The same cast with their roles reversed. There was she in her sickroom with Dr. Metcalf attending her when the door opened and there, with her baby in her arms, stood Ma. Amy had shot her a glare, had pushed back against the headboard, had clutched at the bedclothes to hide herself. She had almost yelled, “You get out of here!”

Dr. Metcalf had risen at once to leave.

“Don't go!” she and her mother had cried as one. She would not have had it otherwise, but she could see that her mother had chosen a time when the doctor would be there so as not to be alone with her, that she had brought along the baby for added protection, though pretending that she had brought him to show Amy, and the bitterness of it she could almost taste. Ah, yes, she knew what bitterness was, though praised to her face so often for her sweetness. Hers, too, was a human heart, and in that poor soil grew more weeds than flowers. The weeds of resentment and jealousy, the weed—most noxious of them all—of self-righteous selflessness. She had tried simply to be a good gardener and root them out while they were still only seedlings.

It was the same situation only worse. To forestall what she dreaded most, that her mother apologize to her, or make a lame attempt to apologize to her, Amy had hurled herself at her feet. The memory of that moment even now was not to be borne. For instead of raising and embracing her, her mother had clutched her baby to her almost convulsively. Totally bewildered, Amy had looked into her mother's pale, pained face and had seen that it took effort for her mother to face her. She forced herself to look into her mother's eyes, steeling herself to accept whatever reflection of herself she saw in them. She looked, and all the courage she had mustered was insufficient. What she saw was: nothing. What she saw was perplexity to equal her own. What she saw was a mirror image of her own distress. Her mother knew no more than Amy did what it was in her that she disliked, distrusted, feared. She could see that her mother—she for whom love of family came before love of God—was aghast that she should feel such unnatural feelings toward a child of hers, and to be unable to find any reason for it. For a moment Amy pitied her mother, and her pity deepened her fear. Her fear was fear for herself, but even more it was fear of herself. She felt herself to be under some congenital curse and powerless to lift it, even to know what it was, until she had committed whatever awful deed she had been predestined to do.

Then had come the worst moment of all. Recovering herself, her mother had smiled, a smile that was terrifying in its timorousness, and had offered the baby to Amy. As if to prove that she trusted her. As if she should feel the need to prove that. As if she were seeking to propitiate whatever dark spirit in Amy she had released by first revealing its existence to Amy herself in that moment when the baby was getting born.

You could almost date Ma's partiality for Kyle from that moment. For Amy did not want to hold him. Could not bring herself to take him. She could hardly bear to look at him. It was nothing against the nameless newborn child. It was instinctive and irrepressible. It was just that the child was associated with her humiliation and her pain.

She thought she knew herself, but did she? Did anybody? Ever? There were as many people inside a person as layers in an onion. At the core, who knew what lay dormant in her? Like those people who went berserk and killed everybody in the house and who in the newspaper accounts were described by their neighbors as quiet and orderly and devoted to the family. Had Ma had her examined by doctors when she was little and had they foretold that one day, maybe well along in life, but sooner or later, inescapably, she would exhibit peculiarities, irrational behavior, lapses—perhaps even criminal tendencies? One heard talk nowadays about a criminal chromosome; was that, like so many medical discoveries, merely the modern confirmation of immemorial folk wisdom? The criminal chromosome—what was that but another name for predestination, for what in the fairy tales had been the prophecy of the bad fairy at the christening: the parents of this child will come to rue the day it was born and the night it was conceived, for it will bring ruin and disgrace upon them.

Oh, when did one cease to be one's parents' child and become oneself? Did that come only after one had become a parent oneself? Was her childlessness the reason she remained, at an age past child-bearing, so much a child herself?

But had she really seen such awful things, or such awful nothings, that day as she thought she had seen? All that in a mere look? Perhaps it was all simply a misunderstanding that had been allowed to grow and get out of hand. One tiny germ, too small to be seen under a microscope, was, if neglected, enough to kill a big man. Sometimes Amy felt that she was like certain patients of hers whose very fear, when they first noticed the symptoms of some slight malfunction, that it might be diagnosed as cancer had kept them from having it examined, and a tumor that might easily have been removed while still benign became through neglect the very malignancy they feared, and ended by killing them. Treated early, might the difference between Ma and her not have been easily cured?

That there was another Amy whom she herself did not know and who was unlike the one she did know, Amy could not doubt, for she had it on the highest authority: Ma. And she had inner evidence that it was so. She had never accepted Amy Renshaw as herself. It was not that she carried in her mind, as in a locket, another image of herself which she wished she had been. It was just that the one people knew her by, the one she saw—reversed—whenever she looked into a mirror, was a mistake, a case of mistaken identity. It always surprised her whenever somebody whom she had not seen for a while recognized her.

Her years as a nurse had confirmed a truth she had first detected in herself: a person and his body were strangers to each other, strangers if not enemies. She had looked through the eyes of people as through the peephole of a cell door and seen that inside was a person of another generation, another race from his body—sometimes of another sex. Perhaps early in life body and soul fit, like a nut inside a shell, but as time went by the soul shriveled like the kernel of a nut.

Ma's rejection of something inside her had only strengthened the sense that she did not know herself. That she knew only a part of herself and perhaps not the essential part, merely the shell. That what she saw was what the mirror showed her, the reverse of what Ma saw when she looked at her. That what she saw in the mirror was flat, while Ma was able to walk all around her and see what she could never see.

If there was another being inside her, surely it was the same one who was inside everybody. Amy took care to keep him in the dungeon of her soul, behind bars, shackled and chained to the wall, but Ma might have gotten glimpses of him, and if so, then no wonder she drew back from what she saw. The Devil (it was currently the fashion to call him The Id, and how he must have enjoyed that, for he went always in disguise and under an assumed name, and his main effort was to persuade you that he did not exist) was in everybody. Of course he was just the opposite of her. Contrariness, perversity was his nature. He despised decency, was spiteful and cynical and sardonic, was always ready to find an ulterior motive and to smirk over any bit of cruelty and meanness anywhere in the world. She could hear his voice deep inside her often. For he was a chatterbox and thought he was clever and original and witty, but he was not, he was only wicked and contrary and irreverent. His wit just consisted in turning the truth topsy-turvy. But there were moments when she wondered, there alone in the dead of night and in that dimness, whether the Devil's main aim was not rather to convince you that he did exist, so that you could blame on him all the mean and selfish and cruel impulses that were really your own, that were the real you. The real you, that bitter core, not the sugar coating you had overlaid yourself with.

What if the truth about everything was just the reverse of what it seemed to be, of what we were taught was true? What a sickening thought that was! And yet what if it were true? Like our own faces. The one thing a human being never sees is his own face. When he looks in the mirror what he sees is exactly the reverse of what the world sees. Life was full of evidence that things were just the reverse of what they appeared to be. Our entire moral code, for instance. Take pride. A sin, so we were taught beginning in Sunday school, and what was more, it did not pay. Pride goeth before a fall. And yet the most contemptuous thing that could be said about a person was that he had no pride, while a proud man commanded everybody's respect. For instance, turn the other cheek. Anybody who did just got both jaws boxed. Turn the other cheek: that was held up as the ideal of conduct and yet anybody who did so was despised as a flunky, shunned as some sort of freak. The man who would sooner give a blow than get one, that was the kind of man people looked up to. For instance, jealousy. The green-eyed monster, yet people boasted of their jealousy and were admired for saying that if they ever caught their wife or their husband with another man or woman they would shoot him or her dead. Try to imagine a man with cause to be jealous of his wife who was not jealous of her. What kind of a man would that be? One with a place in heaven maybe but with no place here on earth. For instance, lechery. A sin. Yet what man would disavow a charge of being lecherous? Man not only flouted the laws he had created but boasted of his hypocrisy. Was everything just backwards? Was the truth just the opposite of what we were taught and did everybody know this or was she the only one to have suspected it? Alone in the middle of the night, in silence and in her half-light, Amy would sometimes feel that she alone of all the people who ever lived had stepped through the looking-glass and seen the other side of things. Then at other times she felt that not only was she not the only person to know this but that everybody who ever lived learned it sooner or later but that nobody told anybody else. Because if ever two people confided it to each other, then the illusion that human life was founded upon would end at that moment. The glass would shatter and there would be no more a division between what was and what seemed to be. People would not love their parents nor protect little children nor not steal and kill. The innocent and the guilty would be alike. There was an unspoken conspiracy among humankind to keep this illusion up, for so fragile was it that a single word would shatter it forever.

Being the first born, the child Amy had been supplanted in her mother's affections by each child who came after her. In the line that formed to wait for Ma's attentions, Amy's place was at the foot, and the line grew longer all the time. Little Amy watched her little brothers and sisters being pampered and petted and was told she was too big to be babied any more and made to feel ashamed of herself that she should want to be. To keep from being jealous, Amy put herself in a different category, out of competition with the others. She identified herself with Ma. She made herself a junior mother to the rest. And, by dint of hard work, she brought home regularly the best report card of any of her class at school. She could not bear to be excelled by any of her classmates. Because when she was, and Ma consoled her by saying it didn't matter, not to fret over it, to her it didn't matter at all, then Amy was dismayed. Because if that didn't matter then neither did it matter when hers were the highest marks in class. Then all her work was for nothing.

And what work it was! Amy's schoolteachers were women of a now extinct breed: nuns of knowledge, missionaries to the dark continent of the child mind, whose choice of a career, in those days when teachers were forbidden by state law to marry, must have come to them like a call to take the veil—perhaps like some of those calls, following a disappointment in love, or the acknowledgment that love was not going to come. If the teachers of those days were forbidden by law to have any emotional life, the children of those days were presumed not to have any, or if they did, to leave it at home, not bring it to school with them. To school what they brought were their little minds, like pitchers to the well, and those old maid teachers filled them to overflowing. Reading and writing and 'rithmetic were their subjects, rote and repetition their methods. Each evening the children were sent home with an assignment for the following day which only a child could have done, no adult could have stood it. A hundred compound-complex sentences to parse and diagram. A poem to be learnt by heart. They were there yet, all the uplifting poems that had been carved in the tender bark of Amy's memory: Tell me not, in mournful numbers, Life is but an empty dream! If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, Say not the struggle naught availeth … Fifty new words for the spelling bee, such useful additions to the vocabulary of a ten-year-old as onomatopoeia, rodomontade, exegesis, syzygy … And on one evening after which she was never again to be the same, to which she was even to give a title, like a chapter in a book, one mountainous problem in long division which she could not for the life of her solve.