Padgett Powell - Mrs. Hollingsworth's Men

The daughter would have also told the husband about the crazy list — rnaking, but she believed the husband to know about it already. She had seen him looking at it once or twice in the drawer where she kept it in the kitchen. He had closed the drawer and asked where the matches were, or the whatever he could think to ask about instead of asking her about the altogether strange thing in the drawer. He had had a queer look on his face that she had not seen there in a long time. It was a smile, an oblique look of impish bemusement. She realized as she lay there expecting to have to cover herself against their door-ramming rescue of her that the look was the same one she had seen on Forrest’s face after he said “What is that shit?" referring to the Hendrix music. With them hovering outside the door there was no time to give this revelation justice: had she put her husband’s expression on Forrest? If she had, there was more to her husband than she had thought. This was not surprising, because it seemed to her that she had not thought of him at all for about fifty years. And now he was a sanity detective hunched over with his ear to the bathroom door behind which she, whom for all she knew he had not thought of for fifty years, lay like a mad steamed dumpling. Nothing this delightful had arranged itself in her real life in a long, long time.

She braced for the invasion, wondering if they might not turn up the volume on NPR to a deafening level to cover the uncivil sounds of shouldering the door. You could be known to hang yourself in your carport in this neighborhood with a measure of dignity, but the breaking down of a door would not do. A woman down the street, it was alleged, had actually chopped apart the hollow — core door to her son’s bedroom with an ax to prevent his masturbating. The boy in question was thereafter regarded with small gratuitous kindnesses in the neighborhood, while the mother was shied from in the grocery store. Men in particular kept a cart between themselves and her. Thinking of all this now, Mrs. Hollingsworth realized that the invasion was not forthcoming. The bulk of the bourgeoisie was no longer holding its breath up against the hollow-core door preventing her rescue. She was hearing her husbands voice.

From the sound of it, and some muted noises coming from her daughter, she judged her husband to be sitting where Mr. Mogul had sat during the dinner party, at the head of the dining table. Her daughter was not where Mrs. Mogul had been but where Oswald had been, at a polite and reserved remove down the table. Oswald, for all his coarseness, and the haircut, had had a line sense of propriety. “I’d say," her husband was saying, "she is taking a bath."

“Dayad,” her daughter said, as condescendingly as a teenager, “how can you —"

"And I’d say what she has written is, you are right, not a grocery list. And to your notion that sho has lost her mind, I’d say that I hope you are right."

One of the muted noises escaped her daughter at this. "You do?”

"I do."

This was so congruent to Mrs. Hollingsworth’s way of thinking during all these days of making her list that she thought perhaps she had lost her mind. It was one thing to have Forrest speak the way you wanted him to, for you, or her wounded man with his not need and his want, but quite another to have your husband up and vote right along with you, without the least prompt. She realized that she had loaded in the breach of her mouth something to fire at them had they broken in the door, to protect herself along with the ridiculous gesture of trying to cover herself. She had been about to shout at them, “I’m an artist!" With the relief now of what she was hearing her husband say, and realizing she had had this bullet verily on her tongue, she started laughing, and she knew they could hear her. She could imagine her husband gesturing in the air toward her as she laughed, as if to say to the daughter, "See? She is happy. I am right.”

But he was saying something much more improbable than that. “Your mother is tired, honey. I am tired. Or I was. Today I am not. I am retired today.”

“What?” the daughter said, in a tone of shock and wonder that was extremely gratifying. Mrs. Hollingsworth loved her husband at this moment. She thought it a lie designed to take pressure off her in the daughters eyes, and to shock the daughter. But she did not believe her husband to be as malicious with respect to the children as she had become. And indeed he was not, for it appeared instantly that he was not lying.

He told the daughter that he was retired and that he and her mother had enough money to live on and that they were liquidating everything and hitting the trail. “I don’t know,” he said, "if we will take taxis or get a dope van."

“Where are you going?” The tone was now accusing. How had this smooth pea come out of her wrinkled self`?

“I don’t know that either. We might actually sit right here, but we are going somewhere else nonetheless even if we do not move an inch.” Mrs. Hollingsworth almost heard this as “a inch,” as if Oswald had said it. Had she put her husband in Oswald too? There was something aggressive in her husbands voice. It was a good voice, a voice he used professionally as a judge, and he could use it well. He could scare a man into straightening up, a jury into nullifying all notion of nullifying itself. He was cranking it up in the living room on his own daughter. He was a quietly desperate man himself, Mrs. Hollingsworth realized. That she might be insane and he desperate gave her a thrill.

Her husband was now carrying on almost like the man in the tub, but with consummate articulation and elocution, benchgrade. Strangely, she could understand what he was saying much less well than she had understood the man in the tub with her, but she could hear that it was the same kind of song, if it was not the same song. The particulars were now daily and daylight ones, for the daughters benefit. Life was too short to be afraid of it all your life, he was saying, but like this: “There is no dignity in the Volvo. Would you like one?” Ho! He said that! Even odder noises were coming out of the daughter. “No, no, honey Not give it to you, but Blue Book value,” and some huffing purse-sweeping outrage and the door closed and the daughter was gone.

A silence caught the house. It was the ticking of the middling day of the settling suburban house that drove her mad. But there was this new presence in it with her. It sat back at the table. It sighed and, she could see it well, folded its hands in calm regard. It brushed its good haircut back from its temples and looked modestly unkempt and drowsily wild. It was tired. It was retired. It was going to get up in a minute or two and come get in the tub with her. This development was positively luminescent in its improbability, in its corniness, in its fairy-tale dynamic and melodrama. She had written her husband back into her life, her life back into itself; they maybe had one where before they had not. That this had happened was not, she thought — adjusting some heat into the tub via a hose that would make no sound, so that she could hear her husband move toward her — to be looked hard in the mouth. It was to be ridden. If anything happened, they were to fight or run, according to whether it was time to fight or run. Mrs. Hollingsworth knew all about it. Her husbands cologne came through the door before him.

It was of course the same cologne Forrest had worn and that she had dabbed on many times herself. He got in the tub in the same position as the wounded man. He did not say a word. His legs were out in front of them, like something on exhibit, straight and narrow and suit — pa]e. He shimmied them, setting up a small standing wave of ripples in the tub, and stopped and held his legs still. “I wonder if I can still run,” he said.