Presence Read online

  This morning after he had finished breakfast, eating all alone on the oilcloth-covered kitchen table after his father and his brother had gone off to pray, he had decided not to eat a single thing again the rest of the day. At eleven o’clock, though, his mother, as always, had come out of the bungalow looking for him with a piece of jam-spread rye bread, and at first he had refused to eat it. But then she had said, “Next year . . .” and he had compromised for her sake and eaten it. It tasted good but not delicious, and he got angry a moment later remembering how she had forced it on him. Then at lunchtime she had come out again looking for him, and he had eaten lunch in the same frame of discontent. But now he openly wished, as he sat staring at the ocean and listening to its booming roar, that his father or his brother had forbidden him outright to eat at all. He could have stood it. Side by side with his great father and his good brother he would have been able to go without even water all day. Just as he wouldn’t dream of going into the ocean now, for instance, even though his tweed suit was scratching his neck and thighs, even though he could not stop himself from imagining how fine the water would feel on his skin. His mother had said it was all right if he got into a pair of cotton shorts, but he would not think of taking off his itchy suit. A holiday was a holiday. He tried now to wipe out of his mind that he had eaten lunch. He tried to make himself feel very hungry, but he could not remember the feeling exactly. At least he had not gone back into the bungalow since lunch for a glass of milk. He counted and, half believing, assured himself that he had fasted three times today, and then brushed some sand off the top of his shoes to make himself perfect. But after a moment a vague restlessness returned; he could not believe in anything alone, and he wished his brother or his father were here to see his perfection. Suddenly he realized that without even trying to stop himself he had not picked his nose all day, and felt silvery at the knowledge. But there was not a soul around to see.

  The ocean went on booming. The beach, white as salt, was deserted. There was no tinkle of the ice-cream-man’s bell, hardly any cars were parked on the bungalow-lined street now that September was here, and the little front porches, each one exactly like the next, were almost all empty. Practically no garbage cans stood out on the curbs any more. He felt, pressing against his thigh inside his pocket, the rusted penknife he had found in the Levines’ vacated bungalow last week. It was the best treasure he had ever found at the end of the season when he had followed the other boys to ransack. He wondered idly why the mothers always left so many bobby pins and hairy pieces of soap. Fathers left razor blades, but these were not hidden in the crevices of drawers and under the mattresses. He wondered why mothers stopped talking or changed the subject whenever he came into a room. Under their skirts it was dark. Fathers kept right on talking, hardly noticing a little boy coming in, and there was always more light around.

  A new strangeness on the ocean scattered his memories. He saw its surface tilting up. Far, far out a crest was rising as wide as the sea itself, and a new rumbling, deeper than any he had heard before, was beginning to sound. He got to his feet, ecstatically frightened, ready to run. Higher and higher the crest rose up until it was a straight wall of blackish water. No one else was seeing it, he knew, only he and the sand and the empty porches. Now it leaned forward, hard as stone and compact, and he could hear it kind of screaming to itself as it pounded over on its head, the spray shooting upward like fifty garden hoses going at once. He turned, happy to have escaped death, and started for his house to tell it. Already the joyful words were forming in his mouth. “The water got like hard, like the street, and then it stood up in the air and I couldn’t even see the sky, and then you know what? I saw the beard!” He halted.

  He was not sure, suddenly, whether he had seen the beard. He remembered seeing it, but he was not sure he had really seen it. He visualized his mother; she would believe it if he told her, as she always believed everything he reported that happened to him. But a sadness crept into him now, an indecision, as he remembered that lately she was not as excited about the things he told her. Of course she didn’t say he was lying, like his brother did, or question him the way Ben did so that contradictory details turned up to ruin everything. But there was something about her now that was not exactly listening, the way she always used to. So that even with her now he was finding himself having to add things he knew were not true in order to make her really pay attention. Like about the milkman’s horse stepping on the fly. It really had stepped on that fly, but when she had merely nodded at the news he had gone on and told how it had raised its hoof again, looked down at the ground, waited, and then clomped down on another fly, and then a third. His sallow face frowned. If he went to her now with the news of the ocean he would probably have to say he had seen not only the beard but even the face under the water, and maybe even tell how the eyes looked. In his mind he could clearly see the eyes—they were blue with fat white lids, and they could stare up through the salt water without blinking; but that was not the same as knowing he had actually seen the eyes. If she believed it, then probably he had seen it, but if she merely nodded as she was doing lately, and without gasping and being full of astonishment, then he would end up feeling vagrant and bad that he had said a lie. It was getting to be almost the same as telling things to his brother. Anger against her grew in him as he paused there, aching to tell her at least about the wave. For him, nothing happened if he could not tell it, and lately it was so complicated to tell anything.

  He went to his front door and entered the small living room, his uncertainty filling him now with bitterness. He saw her through the kitchen doorway working over the pots. She glanced out at him and said, “Have a glass of milk.”

  Milk! When his father and his brother were standing right now praying to God in the synagogue with parched lips, yellow with hunger. He did not answer. He could not even bring himself to go into the kitchen, that blessed place where he always loved to sit with his chin on the cool oilcloth tablecloth, watching her while she cooked, telling her all the amazing things he had seen in the world outside. He hoisted himself onto a chair at the living-room table where he had never sat alone before.

  After a few moments of silence she turned and saw him there. Her eyebrows rose as though she had discovered him suspended from the ceiling. “What are you doing there?” she asked.

  As if she didn’t know! He bitterly lowered his eyes to the table top. Now she came out of the kitchen and stood a few feet from him, mystified. He was not looking at her but he could see her, and once more, as though for the first time, he recalled that she had a strange look lately, her face was somehow puffy. Yes, and she walked differently, as if she were always in a slowly moving line of people.

  She kept looking down at him without speaking, her eyebrows creasing together, and he was suddenly aware that he was the only one in the whole family, including his cousins, whose ears stuck out. “Pull in your ears, Martin, we’re going through a tunnel!” And his uncles looking down at him, grinning—“Where did he come from? Who does he take after?” He did not look like anybody, he recalled as he sat there with his mother before him. The sensation grew in him now that there was a space through which he and his mother were looking at each other all the time, and he did not remember it before. “Are you sick?” she said at last, laying a hand on his forehead.

  He brushed her hand away, lightly striking her belly with the side of his finger. Instantly his finger felt hot, and fright stabbed his stomach like a sliver of glass. She covered her belly with a silent gasp, a deep contraction within her body that he could almost hear, and she turned to go back into the kitchen. He took the chance and looked up at her turning face. It was shut away in silence, and in silence she went back to the stove. She never even screamed at him lately, he realized, and she never dressed any more if he was in the bedroom but went into her closet and talked to him through the nearly closed door. He knew he was not supposed to notice that, just as Ben and Papa didn’t. And n
ow he knew that he was not supposed to notice that she was not screaming at him any more, and he slid down off the chair, not knowing where to go next, his secret knowledge frosting his skin.

  “Why don’t you get into your shorts?” she said from the kitchen.

  A sob started to convulse his stomach. Shorts now! When Ben and Papa had to be standing up and sitting down in the synagogue a million times a day in their wool suits! If it was up to her, people would be allowed to do anything they wanted—and the long beard floating in the water and the ocean so rough! He would like to dare her to go and tell Papa or Ben to put on their shorts!

  “Go ahead, dear,” she said, “they’re in your top drawer.”

  The chair he had been sitting on skidded away, squealing along the floor. He realized he had kicked it and glanced across to the kitchen doorway; she had turned, a frightened amusement in her eyes.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked. Her falseness buzzed like insects around his face.

  He sluffed out the front door, flinging it wide so that the spring meowed.

  “Martin?” She was coming through the living room faster than he had expected, and he moved across the porch, wanting to run but keeping to a prideful stroll. He felt a certain amount of rightness for somehow he had enforced the law on her. Behind him the door spring meowed, and he was starting adamantly down the stoop when she reached out and grasped his shoulder. “Martin!” Her voice was a complaint, but it was also accusing now, reaching and spreading into his most silent thoughts, blasting his rectitude. He tried to wriggle out of her grasp, but she held on to his jacket, pulling so that his jacket button was up to his chin. “Martin!” she screamed now into his face.

  The indignity flamed up in him that she should be so disrespectful of his suit, which he wore so carefully, and he struck at her arm with all his might. “Let me go!” he screamed.

  His blow unleashed her. She cracked his offending hand, holding it by the wrist, again and again, until it stung, and trying to get away he stumbled and landed on the porch, sitting up. “Papa’ll take his strap to you!” she yelled down at him, tears in her eyes.

  Papa! She was going to tell Papa! His contempt pushed her distorted, yelling face a mile away, and he felt a calm road of light opening before him. His jaw trembling, his black eyes edged with hatred, he screamed, “I don’t need you any more!”

  Her eyes seemed to spread open wider and wider, like scandal. He was astonished; even now it did not seem a bad thing to say, only the truth; she didn’t need him so he didn’t need her. But there she was, her mouth open, her hand to her cheek, looking down at him with a horror he had never dreamed a person could show. He did not understand; only lies were horrible. She stepped away from him, looking down at him like a strange thing, opened the door, and quietly went into the house.

  He heard the sea crashing behind him, the sound hitting him in the back familiarly. He got up, strangely spent. He listened, but she was not making any noise or crying that he could hear. He walked down the stoop and along the few yards of sidewalk to the sand, hesitated about ruining his shine, and continued onto the beach. He knew he was bad, but he did not know why. He approached the forbidden water. It seemed to see him.

  There was a privacy here. The brisk breeze would cut off her voice if she called to him, and, he remembered, she could not run after him any more. Just as she did not dance around the table with him or let him jump onto their bed in the mornings, and if he came up behind her any more to clasp her around she would slip quickly out of his embrace. And nobody but he had noticed these new ways, and the knowledge was somehow dangerous. Papa didn’t know, or Ben, and as he walked along the edge of the wet sand, his body wrapped in the roar of the falling waves, he pressed one ear against his head, silently speaking his wish. If only he looked like his father and his brother! Then he wouldn’t know what he was not supposed to know. It was his ears’ fault. Because he looked so different he saw different things than they saw, and he had knowledge of things a fine boy could never know. Like the dentist.

  His breath turned to pebbles in his throat as he tried to fend off the memory of that terrible day. A sudden wash flowed up and lapped at his shoe, and he leaped away. He bent over, trying to concentrate on drying his shoe with his hand. Suddenly he realized that he had actually touched the evil water. He smelled his hand. It did not smell rotten. Or maybe it was God who was in the water today, and you must not get in with Him, so that the water was not stinking rotten even though it was forbidden. He moved back several yards and sat on the sand, the image of the dentist mingling with his thrill of fear at having touched the water, and he gave way to a certain frightening pleasure.

  He clearly saw the sidewalk before their apartment house in the city—his mother walking home, he at her hip, hearing the creaking of the brown-paper grocery bag she was carrying. And he remembered the feeling of walking with her and not having to think where to turn next, when to stop, when to hurry, when to go slow. They were as though connected, and he was simply there. And then, suddenly, they had stopped. Looking up, he saw the strange man’s face close to hers. And a tear fell from the man’s cheek past Martin’s nose. She was talking with such a strange laughter, a dense excitement, posing very straight. And he called her by her first name, the stranger. And afterward, in the lobby as they waited for the elevator, she laughed and said, still with that same high-breathing laughter, “Oh, he was so in love with me! I was ready to marry him, can you imagine? But Grandpa made him go away. He was only a student then. Oh, the books he brought me all the time!”

  Through the waves’ roar he could still hear her excited voice over his head exactly as it had sounded in the lobby. And he reddened again with embarrassment, a humiliation which did not come from any thought or even from the incident itself. He could not imagine her really being married to the dentist since she was Papa’s wife, she was Mama. In fact, he barely remembered anything she had said that day, but simply her laughter and the excitement in her breath when she had left the dentist and entered the apartment house. He had never heard her voice that way and it had made him resolve instantly never to let on that he had noticed the new tone and the rather strange woman who had made it. And the horror which lay behind his embarrassment was that she had thoughts which Papa did not have. He had felt since that day like a small shepherd guarding big animals that must be kept from understanding their own strength, and if he played out of their sight for a moment or even joked or fought with them, he never forgot that his flute would really be no match for their unrealized violence if they once became aware that they were not the same person but separate, not joined in their minds as they thought they were but capable of talking and breathing differently when out of each other’s sight. Only he knew this and only he was in charge of guarding them from this knowledge and keeping them unaware that they were not as they had been before the dentist had come up to Mama on the street.

  As it always happened when he recalled the stranger, he thought now of the day following, a Sunday, when the whole family had gone for a walk, and as they approached that particular square of pavement he had held his breath, certain that when Papa’s shoe came down on it a roaring and a crashing would break the air. But Papa had walked right over the concrete, noticing nothing, and Mama had noticed nothing either, so that Martin at that moment saw his duty clearly; it was that he alone had the vigil to keep. For even though Mama had actually acted that way with the stranger, she was somehow not aware of its real meaning, as he was aware of it. He must never let her know, in any conceivable way, the true meaning of what she had done; that instead of laughing excitedly when she said, “He was so in love with me, I almost married him,” she should have howled and screamed and been horrified. He would never tell her this, though.

  Now his mind trembled and flickered out as it always did when he came to the last part, when he imagined what would happen if Papa should ever find out not only what had happened, but th
at he knew this secret. Papa would look down at him from his height and roar with terrible hurt and horror, “Mama almost married the dentist? What kind of a boy are you to make up such a thing! Waaaaaahhh!” And he would be swallowed up in the roaring, and the agony raised him to his feet.

  He walked beside the ocean, picking up tiny snail shells and crushing them to powder; he threw stones, broke sticks, but a threat would not leave him alone. Slowly it returned to him that he had never seen his mother as horrified as he had just left her. He had driven her crazy many times, but not like this, not with that look in her eyes. And her teeth had showed when she hit him. That had never happened—not with the teeth showing.

  Her teeth showing and her widened eyes . . . He looked at the sea. Maybe it had to do with today being a holy day? He already believed that his badness sent out a sort of invisible ray, a communication that passed beyond his family and entered a darkness somewhere far away; it was not something he ever thought of, it was something he had always known. And the retribution would come out of that darkness as from an unalterable judgment, which could not be stopped or entertained or deflected. Her scandalized eyes seemed now to be frightened for him, for what he had drawn down upon himself from the darkness. She hadn’t been merely mad at him on the porch, she had been afraid with him. He must have said something to her that was not only an insult to her but a sin. And he could not remember what it was that he had said. His failure to remember frightened him in itself; it opened up some awful possibilities.

  The dentist! His heart contracted; by mistake had he told her that he knew she had acted that way with the strange man? Or maybe she believed he had already told Papa? He wanted to run home and tell her, “Mama, I never told Papa about the dentist!” But as soon as he envisioned it he was stopped, realizing he could not tell her either that he knew. And if he told Ben, Ben would be horrified that he could even say such a thing. He sluffed along the empty beach as lonely as his duty, unknowingly sharing his secret with the bearded sea in whose forbidden depths there were eyes that saw, and saw him, and saw through his skull. And, walking, he remembered how it would be to lose his visibility; if Papa should ever discover what he knew, and roared, he would gradually disappear. But that was not the end. He would actually be there, hearing everything and seeing them all the time, except that they would not see him. He suddenly felt he would burst out weeping for them at having lost him, and he quickly corrected his vision. The fact is, he would be visible when they looked at him, but as soon as they turned their backs he would disappear. It was very fine. At night, for instance, he might get up out of bed and invisibly go into their bedroom and just sit there comfortably, and they would never know he was there. And if he got tired when it got very late, he could just lie down in bed between them and everybody would have a good sleep. Except—he carefully amended—he must remember not to wet the bed, or they would wake in the morning and see it and accuse each other and fight.