The Moviegoer - Walker Percy [56]
I sit up and shade my eyes to see her.
Mother wrings her nose. “It was because—”
“Because of what?” I spit over into the water. The spit unwinds like a string.
She leans on the rail and gazes down into the tea-colored bayou. “It was like he thought eating was not—important enough. You see, with your father, everything, every second had to be—”
“Be what, Mother?”
This time she gives a real French shrug. “I don’t know. Something.”
“What was wrong with him?”
“He was overwrought,” she replies at once and in her regular mama-bee drone and again my father disappears into the old emblem. I can hear echoes of my grandfather and grandmother and Aunt Emily, echoes of porch talk on the long summer evenings when affairs were settled, mysteries solved, the unnamed named. My mother never got used to our porch talk with its peculiar license. When someone made a spiel, one of our somber epic porch spiels, she would strain forward in the dark, trying to make out the face of the speaker and judge whether he meant to be taken as somberly as he sounded. As a Bolling in Feliciana Parish, I became accustomed to sitting on the porch in the dark and talking of the size of the universe and the treachery of men; as a Smith on the Gulf Coast I have become accustomed to eating crabs and drinking beer under a hundred and fifty watt bulb—and one is as pleasant a way as the other of passing a summer night.
“How was he overwrought?”
She plucks the hook clean, picks up a pink cube, pushes the barb through, out, and in again. Her wrists are rounded, not like a young girl’s but by a deposit of hard fat.
“It was his psychological make-up.”
Yes, it is true. We used to talk quite a bit about psychological make-ups and the effect of glands on our dismal dark behavior. Strangely, my mother sounds more like my aunt than my aunt herself. Aunt Emily no longer talks of psychological make-ups.
“His nervous system was like a high-powered radio. Do you know What happens if you turn up the volume and tune into WWL?”
“Yes,” I say, unspeakably depressed by the recollection of the sad little analogies doctors like to use. “You mean he wasn’t really cut out to be an ordinary doctor, he really should have been in research.”
“That’s right!” My mother looks over in surprise, but not much surprise, then sends her lead off like a shot. “Now Mister—!” she addresses an unknown fish and when he does not respond, falls to musing. “It’s peculiar though. You’re so much like your father and yet so different. You know, you’ve got a little of my papa in you—you’re easy-going and you like to eat and you like the girls.”
“I don’t like to fish.”
“You’re too lazy, if you ask me. Anyhow, Papa was not a fisherman, as I have told you before. He owned a fleet of trawlers at Golden Meadow. But did he love pretty girls. Till his dying day.”
“Does it last that long?”
“Ann anh anh anh anh!” In the scandal of it, Mother presses her chin into her throat, but she does not leave off watching her ‘float. “Don’t you get risqué with me! This is your mother you’re talking to and not one of your little hotsy-totsies.”
“Hotsy-totsies!”
“Yes.”
“Don’t you like Sharon?”
“Why yes. But she’s not the one for you.” For years my mother has thrown it out as a kind of proverb that I should marry Kate Cutrer, though actually she has also made an emblem out of Kate and does not know her at all. “But do you know a funny thing?”
“What?”
“It’s not you but Mathilde who is moody like your father. Sister Regina says she is another Alice Eberle.”
“Who is Alice Eberle?”
“You know, the Biloxi girl who won the audition with Horace Heidt and His Musical Knights.”
“Oh.”
Mother trills in her throat with the old music. I squint up at her through the rainbows.
“But when he got sick the next time, I couldn’t help him.”
“Why not?”
She smiles. “He said my treatment was like horse serum: you can only use it once.”
“What did happen?”
“The war came.”
“That helped?”
“He helped himself. He had been in bed for a month, up in your room—you were off at school. He wouldn’t go to the clinic, he wouldn