Padgett Powell - Edisto Revisited - A Novel

“We have what, Mother?”

“A reunion, with enough potato salad.”

“I see.”

“I have never, Son, had the courage to do what I really wanted to do.” She let this ride out there for a while. I refused to question her meaning. I knew the meaning. As her man Taurus would show you the nadir of sexual opportunity on a lost bayou and an institutional assortment of ur hippies to scare you back into the batter’s box, my mother would show the hapless relations potato salad on the hands of the incestuous. The Dinah Shore covered dish on the Sade plates. “Have Patricia make a hot German style if she will, or you make it, and I’ll do, you know, my Joy of Cooking mayo with potato in it, and Sasa can do that, too, or …”

I waited. She never completed the sentence.

“Bye.” She was gone. It was the same bye Sasa had used: curt, frisky, looking-forward-to-something farewells coming from these profoundly disappointed women happily marrying children to cousins.

Potato salad in the South is nothing less than the principal smuggler of cholesterol into the festive, careless heart. It is pure poison beneath the facade of bland puritan propriety. It is the food of choice at any fond banquet of smiling relatives who celebrate tacitly among themselves the dark twining of two of their promising youth. My mother thinks this way instinctively. She can provide the deconstructive grid, but she prefers just doing it. And I must say she is good at it.

At the reunion there were the three bowls of potato salad, and they were provided by the mother of the son in the incest tango, the mother of the daughter in the incest tango, and the son and the daughter in the incest tango. The four of us ate the three potato salads Communion-style until we were Confirmed to the gills.

My mother and my aunt Sasa demonstrate a curious non-speaking solidarity in all of this, and I’ve come to think of them as rival tribal chiefs with iron livers. They approve, each, of her child and the other’s child, but they don’t deign chat. A kind of silent crossing of arms, liver to liver, as it were.

Sasa tries a bite of the Doctor’s potato salad, says, nodding, “Manny”—the rare affectionate diminutive for her customary “Dr. Manigault,” slur of low-country eggheads — and the Doctor tries a bite of Sasa’s potato salad, says, nodding, “Sasa.” Patricia Hod and I cavort in the lee of this détente of mothers. Neither of them will have another bite of food all day and neither of them has cooked a meal in twenty years.

THE FATHERS ARE FEEBLE. That, I am beginning to deduce, is the father’s lot in life. He enfeebles himself when he releases upstream the several million protozoans that engender a tender creature not unlike him but not enough unlike him, swimming downstream toward him — they have yellow footprints for the father painted on delivery-room floors, I hear — and toward his radically inexpert but presumptuous guidance. This is enfeebling. This defines feeble. So my old man and Patricia Hod’s old man, the kind of guys who had Parker shotguns and shot birds when there were birds, who know the whole skinny of the secular, who call a spade a spade or, failing that, have another drink and look at the interest points — these guys just stand there. Looks like a good piece of ass, my old man must think. Damned good, Patricia Hod’s old man counters. And that is that: feeble progenitors with the dog of incest at their Rotarian heels. I never have had direct contact with either of them on this.

My father’s prostate vigilance has been successful: the gland has enlarged to the size of a “baking spud,” as it is hilariously put at the Yacht Club of a Saturday afternoon. (Early in that afternoon, too — these fellows do not waste the day like their landlubber inferiors doing eighteen; they walk down to see what’s been stolen off the boat and go get a drink and play cards, eighteen or so holes of that.) All the finger probing by his childhood friend and protector has netted him the security of knowing there is an expanding baking potato inside him. This is one of many reasons why a man might keep his counsel when his son takes up an attractive taboo, I suppose.

Another might be that I do indeed manage a species of Republican portfolio. I build a handsome building ten or twelve times a year and reduce the coast another ten- or twelve-thousandth in its handsomeness. They ain’t making any more of it is what you chant when you haul onto site (palmettoed dune) your transit and plumb bob. I have annuity. It will not mature for thirty years, but I myself appear to be coming in under the wire. At this the Republican father can cross his arms and smile in the fat-cat sunshine. That the son may be Sade only makes the cat grin. These are the morals of the proper. The proper truss themselves so well that their herniations prove relief. Even thinking about my old man makes me talk like an idiot. Withal, I dislike him not. For the father provides beyond a definition of the feeble a benchmark of error: sons are given to make one fewer error in life than that which sired them. One. To youth this task appears laughably easy. Then … well, you begin to see that the scale and scope and kind of error available is proliferating like everything else. Error is on a microchip today. In 1940 it was on an adding machine you had to have two hands and a strong arm to operate. I think this. I apply for help — but counseling, another aspect of the proliferation of error in our time, is quicksand in these my littoral terms.

In the progenitor’s view, I’ve set out on a broken-field run as imprudent as they get but redeemed by the nature of the ball I carry: to his mind, the ball of carnal desire. I have noticed less protest in life from those you expect it from if the case is made or can be made that those getting away with something are getting away with something. The petty thief is to be shot, but the larcenist — who wanted it, and by God got it — is a hero. If I’d showed up, say, as a teenager, with my blue steel and a black girl, it could not have been tolerated past a weekend. But show up closer to thirty years old with your cousin beaming on your arm, your cousin looking truly marvelous, and you feeling truly marvelous, and there is a line of men forming to tell you, sometimes literally, Go for it!

At his club we have a weekly set-to which I do not regularly enough avoid, and at one of these — shortly after it became known that the Hod affair, tawdry enough in its first phase, with matronly low-country chaperone present and upcountry approval, was back on, and now without chaperone and approbation — the Progenitor said, apropos of nothing, I thought, just stirring his drink with a red swizzle which he would shortly remove and place neatly on his napkin, diagonally from corner to corner, a red-and-white Diver Down flag, “Everybody has their shit.”

“What?”

“Everybody has their shit.”

I laughed. “I suppose they do.”

He looked at me. “You know they do.” This is his use of the imperative. He is not saying that I know by experience of what he speaks, but that I had best believe what he says. It is economical and annoying in the extreme.

It was only then that I got in the ballpark, or, more precisely, realized I’d been standing at the plate taking this brushback pitch. I got ready, now that I knew the count (0–2), for another pitch. Here it came.

“And everybody’s shit stinks .”

Ah yes. The sentiments of the civilized man. The man that Leakey found and Darwin propounded along his trail of betterment and NASA aided to take giant steps for mankind on the moon. I drank my drink. It was like being a teenager again: Let them have their godawful say and get out of their way. This had been called by my father in its day my “being Cochise.” Now, again, I sat there being Cochise. I was Cochise with a martini. I was Cochise with a red plastic sword through his olive, talking to the Great White Father, who was giving Cochise sage and worldly exempli that perhaps his own native gods would not know about. Cochise was probably only getting things like “All things are one” from his own godhead, so he needed “Everybody has their shit” from the Great White Father.