Man and Boy Read online

  Copyright 1948, 1951 by Wright Morris. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a magazine or newspaper.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 51‐2263

  International Standard Book Number 0-8032-5787-2

  International Standard Book Number 978-1-4962-0265-9 ePub.

  Bison Book edition published by arrangement with the author.

  If man had beene left alone in this world, at first, shall I thinke that he would not have fallen? If there had beene no Woman, would not man have served, to have beene his own Tempter?

  JOHN DONNE, XXI Devotion

  MR. ORMSBY

  IN THIS dream Mr. Ormsby stood in the room —at he edge of the room where the floor was bare—and gazed at the figure that seemed to hover over the yard. This figure had the body of a man but a crown of bright, exotic plumage—the plumage visible, somehow, in spite of the dented gray helmet it wore. Long wisps of it appeared at the side, or shot up, like straw through a leaky pillow, to make a halo of shining, golden spears. Beneath the helmet was the face of a bird, a long face, indescribably solemn, with eyes so pale they were like openings to the summer sky. The figure was clothed in a soiled uniform, too big for the boy inside it, and slung over the left arm, casually, was a gun. On the barrel of the gun Mr. Ormsby could read—he had read it a thousand times—the word DAISY, and beneath this the words 1000 Shot. The right arm of the figure was extended, and above it hovered a procession of birds, an endless coming and going of all the birds he had ever seen. They formed a whirling cloud about his head, and seemed to grow like fingers from the extended hand, but the figure did not speak, nor did the pale eyes turn to look at Mr. Ormsby; but from the parted lips came a sound of irresistible charm. A wooing call, it would seem, for the birds. So they came and went, thousands of them, and they looked so lovely and seemed so friendly that Mr. Ormsby, no bird lover to speak of, put out his hand. And the moment he did, one of the birds dived at his head. Not at his hand, no, but his head, and before he could duck or get away, all of these birds, like a stream of darts, were diving at him. To protect himself he would flail his arms like a man attacked by bees. That woke him up, sooner or later, and sometimes there was sweat all over his body, from either the fright or the violent exercise. There might even be a cloud of bed dust in the air. As his first thought was always for Mother, he would turn on the bed to reassure her, but, strange to relate, the commotion never woke her up. It was uncanny, as Mother was a person who could hear a titmouse enter the bird box—but she never rolled over to question him. He would lie back, his eyes closed, until his heart had stopped pounding, then he would open his eyes and look at the picture on the wall.

  In the morning light—it seemed to be the same kind of light in the picture—the boy stood alone on a bomb-pitted rise, a stormy sky and blowing palm trees at his back. Over one arm, casually, he held a gun, and the other he put forward, the palm up, as if making an offering. The palm was empty, but the fingers of the hand were pressed together, so that he seemed to hold, cupped in the palm, a piece of the sky. The face beneath the helmet had no features, but Mr. Ormsby would have known it—the boy, that is—just from the stance. He would have known it by the way the boy held the gun. The boy always held the gun the way women held their arms when their hands were idle, like parts of their body that for the moment were not much use. The boy had two arms and two good legs—right up to the last he had them—but without the gun he gave you the feeling he was not all there. That some vital part, vital limb, that is, had been amputated. He was all thumbs, as his Mother said, and without the gun over his arm he might fall down just walking across the room. It was the gun that made a hero out of him.

  He had given the boy a gun because he had never had a gun himself and not because he had wanted him to kill anything. The boy didn’t want to kill anything either, and for a while it had worked out pretty well, as the first gun he had wouldn’t hurt anything. He shot it at apples, and then shot the b.b.’s over again. The second gun held one thousand shot, and that worked out pretty well too because of the racket the b.b.’s made in the barrel. It was next to impossible to get close to anything. And yet it was that, just that, which made a hunter out of him. He had to stalk everything in order to get near it, and after going to all that trouble it was only natural that he took careful aim at it. Even later, when he knew better, the boy never seemed to realize that when he shot and hit something, that something was dead. Somehow, that hadn’t occurred to him. Mr. Ormsby sometimes wondered if the shot that killed him—for it had been a shot—had come in time to teach him that. That with one shot, so to speak, a man can kill two things. The bird that he is hunting, and perhaps the hunter in himself.

  Nobody who knew him had been surprised when the boy ran off and enlisted, nor was anyone surprised when he turned up missing, as they said. He had been missing, some people would say, for a good many years. It seemed only natural to get the official report on it. To Mr. Ormsby it seemed only natural that the boy would turn up something of a hero, though it was a little strange to think of his name being on a boat. The USS Virgil Ormsby was not the best name for a destroyer. But it might kill Mother if she knew—in fact, it might kill nearly anybody—what he thought to be the most natural thing of all. Let God strike him dead if he had ever known anything righter, more natural, that is, than that the boy would be killed. It would have been unnatural if he hadn’t been. That was something that might prove hard to explain, but it was the one thing that he knew would happen— the boy would find a way, he knew, to fit into the master plan. Mother had a way of getting the best out of everyone.

  Mr. Ormsby turned slowly on the bed, careful to keep the coil springs quiet, and as he lowered his feet he reached for his socks on the floor. They were gone. Well, he should have known that. They were gone Sunday mornings and all National holidays. This was not a National holiday, but it was a great day for Mother, and time for him, anyhow, to change his socks. The old pair she had dropped down the laundry chute.

  Carrying his shoes, Mr. Ormsby followed the throw rugs to the closet, like a man crossing a swift stream on blocks of ice. The rugs, made of old silk stockings, sometimes slipped on the hardwood floor, so he had learned to pass from corner to corner, where the gap was small. From the closet, by feel—as the chain dragging on the light made a racket—he selected his Sunday pants, and a worn-only-one-time shirt. Once he got it on, Mother wouldn’t notice it. Until he got it on she would look at the collar, to see if the wings turned up, or worse yet, hold certain parts of it to her nose. As a test it wasn’t really sound, but she relied on it. She would never say “aye,” “yes,” or “no,” but merely hand him back the shirt, or walk down the hall toward the laundry chute with it. The spring lid on the chute came down like a gavel, and meant much the same thing.

  As his drawer to the bureau was stuck, Mr. Ormsby opened the one above it and reached in behind it to fish out a pair of clean socks. They were in a neat, flat wad, like a pincushion. One reason that he wore his socks too long, once he got them on his feet, was that every clean pair was “done up,” as Mother said. It was something of a puzzle just to get it apart. Nine times out of ten he put one of the socks on inside out. It always meant he had to drop everything he had, and take a seat on the stool or the edge of the tub, as he needed both hands as well as one foot at a time to figure it out. There were chairs in the bedroom, but somehow there was never a place to sit.

  Although the rest of the house was as neat as a pin, maybe too neat in some respects, the room they seemed to live in, the bedroom, was pretty much of a mess. Mother refused to let Mrs. Dinardo set her foot in it. There was a
time Mr. Ormsby had brought the matter up, back when they discussed small things like that, and Mother had said she wanted one room in the house where she could relax. Let her hair down—they were the words she used. That had been so extremely unusual for Mother—so human as the boy had put it—that they had both been completely taken with it. It had been good to know there was such a room in the house. It was only natural, however, that any room where Mother had her hair down would not be the place for anyone else. Mother’s idea of letting her hair down was a long nap in her garden clothes, the cotton gloves on her hands, and the grass-stained shoes at the foot of the bed. Mr. Ormsby let his own hair down at the store, where he had a wood-stove he could put his feet on, and a rolltop desk full of indelible pencils and mail-order blanks. But it had been something of a problem for the boy. The way the boy had taken to the out-of-doors was not so much because he was a great bird lover, or a nature lover, but because he couldn’t find a place in the house to sit down. To let his hair down, he had to go somewhere else.

  They had just redecorated the house that summer—Mr. Ormsby tiptoed down the hall to the bathroom—and Mother had spread newspapers around to protect a few things. There hadn’t been a chair in the place—the boy’s pants seemed to stick to the ones they had repainted—that hadn’t been covered, both the seat and the back, with a newspaper. It was about that time, toward the end of that summer, that Mr. Ormsby took to having his pipe in the basement, and the boy had taken to the great out-of-doors. Otherwise, he might not have even thought of it. But because he had wanted a gun himself, and the boy was alone with no kid around to play with—because of that he had brought home that damn gun. A thousand-shot b.b. gun by the name of DAISY, and five thousand lead b.b.’s in a drawstring bag.

  That gun had been a mistake—he began to shave himself in lukewarm water, as when he let it run it banged the pipes, woke Mother up. When the telegram came that the boy had been killed Mother never said a word, no, not a word, but she made it clear, perfectly clear, whose fault it was. He wasn’t even drafted, no, that was the hell of it. He wanted to shoot at something or other so badly that he just ran off.

  Mr. Ormsby stopped thinking while he shaved, attentive to the mole at the edge of his mustache, and leaned over the bowl to avoid dropping suds on the rug. There had been a time when he had wondered about an Oriental throw rug in the bathroom, but over the years he had become accustomed to it. As a matter of fact, sometimes he missed it, as when they had overnight guests with young children and Mother remembered, just in time perhaps, to take it up. Without that rug he sometimes felt just a little uneasy, in his own bathroom, and this led him to whistle to himself or turn the cold water on and let it run. If it hadn’t been for that he might not have noticed that Mother did the same thing herself, particularly if there was someone in the house. Guests, the iceman, Mrs. Dinardo, or even himself. She would turn on the water and let it run until she was through with the toilet, then she would flush it before she turned the water off. If you happen to have old-fashioned plumbing, and have lived with a person for twenty-three years, you can’t help noticing little things like that. He had got to be a little like that himself. Since the boy had gone he had got into the habit of using the toilet in the basement, the one they had put in, as Mother described it, for the help.

  With a folded piece of toilet tissue Mr. Ormsby wiped off the rim of the bowl, then stepped back to see if he had spilled anything. There was an ant crossing the floor—a rainy summer always brought them in—and he stooped over and let the ant crawl on the back of his hand. Then he walked to the window, unhooked the screen, and blew the little fellow into the back yard. After he did this he remembered that now they were killing ants. They had become a Victory Garden pest. But for a little more than twenty years Mother had trained him not to kill anything, and with the boy around that was one rule that he didn’t break. Mother was a girl of the old school—which made life a little harder in some ways, but in other ways where in the world would you find a woman to match? It was openly admitted—see that feature editorial in the Bulletin just three months ago—that Mother had, singlehanded, saved a good part of the nation for the quail. And the quail, as she put it, would save that much of the nation for her.

  With his socks on, but carrying his shoes—“The hour I love,” Mother had said, “is the hour before arising”—Mr. Ormsby left the bathroom and tiptoed down the stairs. There was no reason, as he had explained to Mother the spring they were married, why she should get up when he could just as well get breakfast for himself. He had made that suggestion at a time when he was looking forward to the baby, and Mother had been, that first year, a pretty frail girl. She needed, as he had said, to preserve her strength. The truth was that he needed to preserve his own, as he had a lot of early morning work at the store, and one of Mother’s breakfasts might take two or three hours. It always took half the dishes around the place. Every one of these dishes had to be soaked for fifteen minutes in boiling water, washed with a cloth, and then carefully rinsed three times. And when it came to dishes, Mother wouldn’t be rushed. Ever since Mrs. Dinardo had told her about Mr. Dinardo’s case of trench mouth, pretty much in detail, Mother washed and scoured the silver herself. That took about forty minutes, and she liked to superintend his wiping it.

  If he got away early he had time, in the late afternoon, to do the shopping, and this got him home near the middle of Mother’s nap. While she dressed and had her bath, he would prepare the meat. He had found he had a flair for meat at the time when Mother, who liked to eat it, found it made her nearly sick to handle it in the bloody stage. He had gone from meat to vegetables, easily. If he didn’t have a flair, he could still keep an eye on them while they were cooking, something Mother, with her mind full of things, found it hard to do. She didn’t have a sense of time, which he seemed to, and it always seemed to be around supper that important people tried to get her on the telephone. Calls from Washington might go on for half an hour. There was always something Mother was trying to push through the House. The phrase troubled Mr. Ormsby, hard to say why. It was nearly always something worth while—housing for the poor, or more refuge for the quail—but he often had the feeling that the opposition was being pushed around. That never proved to be true, as Mother was nearly always singlehanded, and fighting for things that very few people seemed to care much about. It had made her, as everybody knew, a great force in the state. She was nearly always alone, but Mr. Ormsby could never get over the feeling, come what might, that the opposition was scared to death. Sooner or later, she would push it through the House.

  There had been a year—at the foot of the stairs Mr. Ormsby peered into the living-room—when Mother had made several marvelous meringue pies. That had been before the boy had taken up with the gun. But feeling as she did about the gun—and she let them know how she felt about it—she refused to slave, as she said, in the kitchen for people like that. She always spoke to them as they—or as you plural—from the day he had given the boy that gun. When she called for something they both would answer, and though the boy had been gone three years Mr. Ormsby still felt him there, right beside him, when Mother said you.

  He felt the same way about the living-room. The boy was gone, the boy was dead, but he could never enter the room without pausing, like a stranger, to peer into it. One morning he had found the boy, with all of his filthy outdoor clothes on, sprawled out asleep where Mother had forbidden him to sit. It had given him quite a shock, as the boy lay asleep under the newspapers that Mother had spread out to protect the new cushions. His feet stuck out, like a tramp asleep in a park. Naturally, he should have punished the boy—at the very least have made him get up—but he had tiptoed by as if Mother lay there asleep. His mouth had opened, but he hadn’t said word. Part of that was probably the shock of it, but the reason he hadn’t called to him was that the boy for some time had had no name. He had one, of course, but they had stopped using it. Virgil was all right for a baby, or a little boy with a head of dark curls,
but it was nothing a father could call his son. There had been one week he had called him Son—but he had given up doing that, as the boy was always startled to learn who that was. He would look around the room to see who else was there. It was either Virgil or nothing, as Mother had carefully explained to them both that she had not named him Virgil for his father to call him something else. So it had been nothing—that is to say, he called him Virgil when speaking to Mother, but in his own mind he always referred to him as the Boy.

  From the table beside the piano Mr. Ormsby picked up his watch, his car keys, and about ninety cents in change. As these things often fell out of his pockets when he took his pants off in the bedroom, Mother had suggested that he empty his pockets downstairs. Beneath his leather wallet were two aspirin tablets, the official invitation to the USS Ormsby, and a note in Mother’s hand reading: Remember icebox pan.

  It was Mother’s habit, over the years, to jot the important things down in a note, but it had reached the point where there were notes all over the house. She wrote a note instead of speaking to him. Mother found it a very sensible system, but it had the effect, over the years, of cutting down on what little they had to say. There were days when they seldom exchanged a word. Sometimes Mother would get up from the table and search high and low for a pencil, finally borrow his own, and then sit down and write him a note. It was one of the things—the good things—she was apt to carry too far.

  Take the icebox pan, for instance. It might be hard to explain to some people why a woman like Mother, so advanced in her thinking, still had an icebox with a drip pan underneath. Mr. Ormsby sold electric iceboxes himself—he tried to, that is— and Mother might have agreed, just for business reasons, to use one of them in the house. It was not that Mother was old-fashioned—no, nothing like that—it was just that she refused to buy anything but the best. Right up until Pearl Harbor there had been so many new improvements, and new models, that she hadn’t been able, as she said, to honestly make up her mind. Nor did she think the last word on the subject had been said. She couldn’t make up her mind, for instance, whether the gas type was worth the extra money, or whether those boxes with all the moving parts really did wear out. And after Pearl Harbor it was all out of the question— for a woman like Mother—so the icebox pan would have to be remembered for several more years.