Уолтер Тевис - The Steps of the Sun

“Hold it toward the viewing lens, please.” It was the machine speaking but I almost jumped; it had come to seem very like Mother’s voice.

I held the picture toward the tiny lens at the bottom of the set, and a moment later the face reappeared on the screen. I leaned back in bed, my head propped slightly against the wall, and puffed my cigar. My palms were sweating and my mouth was dry. “Hello, Mother,” I said.

The face moved, quite naturally, talking. “Hello, Benny,” it said. It was uncanny. I felt frightened.

“Are you drunk, Mother?” I said.

“Hardly,” she said. “It’s ten in the morning.”

“Oh,” I said. Somehow the wind had all gone out of my sails. “What year is it?”

She looked down toward her watch. Mother always wore a watch, which may be why I’d never worn one until recently. Until leaving Isabel. “It’s June 8, 2024,” she said. “And I feel like hell.”

“I hate to see you drinking and smoking like that, Mother,” I said. “It makes me nervous.”

She looked at me and then puffed her cigarette. “You’re just a child, Benny,” she said. “You have no idea how badly I feel. And your father’s no help…”

Some of my anger was coming back. “Have you ever asked him for help?” I said.

“What good would that do? You have no conception of what it’s like to deal with that man…”

“ Damn it, Mother! ” I shouted. “You’ve never noticed, have you? You’ve never seen me trying to get him to talk to me …” And I broke off, startled to hear the quaver in my voice like that in the voice of the woman in front of me.

“He used to hold you on his lap when you were a baby. It was only after you got loud and had dirty fingernails all the time…”

“Mother,” I said, “you’re trying to blame me. Damn your soul.”

She laughed, a cruel little self-regarding laugh. “You were hyperactive, Benny. And loud. A real pain in the neck…”

I stared at her, telling myself, It’s only a machine, a computer in an analyst’s office on Third Avenue in New York. It isn’t even her voice. It doesn’t really sound like her. Yet I saw myself as a small boy, dirty-nailed and loud and squirming and I felt hatred toward the child I saw, toward what that mechanical voice had sketched for me so blithely. “Mother!” I said. “Stop it!”

She looked at me and then took a knowing sip from the glass in her hand.

“Mother.” I could hear the pain in my voice as though it were someone else’s. “I was only a little kid.”

She seemed not to hear me. “I never should have had a child.”

“I didn’t ask you to,” I said.

She laughed a little more easily this time and finished her drink. “You were a trial to me even before you were born, Benny. You almost tore out my liver with your feet.” She looked meditative. “That’s all you were when I was pregnant with you: elbows and feet.”

“Goddamn it!” I said, sitting upright in bed. The sheet fell away from me. I was naked there in front of her, exposed. “Goddamn it, you were supposed to be my mother .”

Somehow she had gotten another glass of what must have been gin and she took a long swallow from it. “To tell the truth, Benny, you were a mistake,” she said. “I had too much to drink at the wedding, and took the wrong Fergusson.”

“ Orbach! ” I shouted at the machine, “how can you know that? You’re not her .”

Mother’s picture remained on the screen, motionless now, and Orbach’s voice came on, mechanically synthesized. “It is inferable,” the voice said gravely, “from your memories and dreams. You are not being toyed with in therapy. You hear from your mother what you yourself believe to be true.”

I lay back in bed again and started to pull the sheet over my body, but did not. I puffed my cigar deeply for a moment, nursing myself as always, and said, “Bring her back and let her talk.”

“Benny,” she said, more brightly now, “you were sweet enough in your way, but you never knew what I was going through. You would slobber kisses on me when I was hung over, and try to crawl in bed with me in the mornings, and when you were two you kept hugging your father’s leg until I had to pull you away. You weren’t like other children, with good manners and an ability to entertain themselves. You wanted attention all the time, and I was having problems myself. Your father ignored me. The other faculty wives made me a pariah. Life was very difficult for me.”

I watched her with appalled fascination, remembering every phrase of it from one time or another. As she went on drinking and talking her face became more relaxed and pleasant. She looked younger and I saw, suddenly, that her breasts were still high under her pale-blue housedress and not the sagging old woman’s breasts of the night she had sat with the candles going. “I know I have drunk a bit too much to be the best of mothers,” she was saying, “but other mothers get some help from their husbands.”

Now you’re blaming him , I thought. You’ll blame anybody. Like me with Isabel. I writhed with this for a moment, lost in a confusion of myself and my chattering mother there on the screen. It wasn’t really Mother anyway, only a simulacrum. And neither am I , I thought. I am not my mother either, but only a likeness when it comes to love.

“I had the whole work of rearing you,” she said. “He did not lift one finger. Not one.”

“ Mother ,” I shouted from the bed. “You goddamned fraud. You could have loved me anyway. You could have let me love you…”

“Benjamin,” she said sternly, “you are getting an erection. Cover yourself.”

I looked down. It was true. I stared at myself for a long moment, bedazzled. I was shameless; I kept getting harder.

“Well,” she said in some kind of crazy voice that was half coy and half reproachful, “I’m glad to see that you’re normal. It’s more than I can say for your father in there.”

I stared at her on the screen. “Shut up!” I said. “Won’t you please just shut up?”

Her eyes began to glaze. “Benny,” she said, “you’ll never know what it’s been like for me all these years. God knows I’ve tried. I’ve tried to be a good wife and mother and nobody cares anything for me.”

“ Mother ,” I said, “I cared. I tried to love you and you pushed me away, just like Daddy. The two of you were a fucking team …”

“You don’t have to use that language,” she snapped. “You’ve forgotten how I nursed you, and fed you…”

“That’s not how it was, Mother,” I said. “You used to feed me Franco-American spaghetti out of a can. Half the time you didn’t trouble yourself to heat it.” I stared at her. “You were too drunk, Mother.”

She looked down at her lap a moment and then took another drink. Her voice had become low and her eyes seemed to look inward as they had that night on the couch, with the candles. “You can abuse me all you like, Benjamin, with your gutter language. But the truth is I’m your mother and I did my best for you.”

I sat up in bed, feeling something about to burst in my head. “It wasn’t your best and it wasn’t enough,” I said.

For a long moment we were both silent, staring at one another. I realized, with a shock, that she was much younger than I. Prettiness and weakness met in her face, already showing incipient ruin. My hatred for that face was insatiable; I wanted to crush it like a rotten grapefruit between my hands.

During all this my prick had remained erect. Mother looked at me awhile in a kind of crazy, muted contemplation. Then she said, “I used to wash your thing for you, Benny, when you were little, and cute. You always enjoyed it.”