False Entry Read Online Free PDF Page A

things, the blastings had stopped and the panes were dark. I heard a train pass, a long freight, dragging into smaller and smaller falls its long chain of sound.
    “Could—could we not go home?” I said. I had never asked it.
    The cups clinked as she served them. Neither of us touched the tea. After a while, sitting with her hands folded, she shook her head. “This is home,” she could have said, evading, but she sat on, not denying that it was not.
    “Could we not—write to them ?” For a long time now I had not once spoken of the Goodmans; by an evasion of my own I had managed not to think of them, except in bed at night, when, with my knuckles against my knees, I had sometimes tried to walk among them, putting myself to dream.
    “Them?” She raised her head in casual surprise.
    I breathed fast, the way one did before heaving up the stone wheel that covered the well in the yard. “The—Goodmans.”
    “Oh—” My mother’s soft ejaculation, light smile, plunged me down, even before she spoke further, into that gap down which the child falls, weightless, holding on to some stone of meaning which the giants have wafted aside like a feather. She was smiling, with that faint, sealing tribute people pay to the picnics of long ago, the pretty costumes they once have worn.
    “Ah,” she said, gently laughing, dismissing. “So you still remember.”
    I got up then, and moved for the first time away from her. At the age I was then, the past is our only littoral, sacred because it is all we have to go on; to minimize it, to step lightly across it and onward, to forget , is the treason of maturity. So I got up then and went to the window, and standing there, by an imitative act of memory, as their habit had been, I moved away from her, toward them. I saw young Martin, at the age I was now when we left them, glassy-eyed with rainy-day lethargy, rolling a marble back and forth along the sill; I saw Hannschen with her nose just above it. I put my hand on the curtain and I saw Lady Goodman, whom I always thought of as Lady Rachel, standing in one of her arrested pauses; I saw the old lady Mrs. Goodman at her window on the floor above, staring out upon Tiergartens and, Königsallees melted upon Golder’s Green in the faïence of the years. I saw all of them, watched by myself from behind.
    I touched the curtain here in Tuscana, cut down from a patch quilt brought with us from there. The dressmaker’s roster, it was made up of anonymous snippets, but down at one end there was a piece of green damask I knew and had avoided, hating the mute screw of pain that lives in all those objects which survive from one part of us to the other. I put my forefinger on it—object swum so irrelevant and far.
    “That’s from the dining-room curtain,” I said.
    I fingered the wall beside it, and I was brushing the rubbed place on the olive-drab wall where the maids eased themselves in with the trays. I bent lower, still touching.
    “That’s where the splash was, where Molly dropped the tureen. ‘Lucky it wasn’t the Nailsea, eh, Molly?’ Sir Joseph said.” Hung on the kitchen wall back there was an old rolling pin of whorled Nailsea glass, given to Molly by her lover, a sailor from that town, with the warning legend that if it fell it would be a sign that he was lost at sea. Sir Joseph’s remark had become a catch phrase in the house, used when something broke, when a child tumbled, when a quarrel was mended.
    “When I fell on the stairs, he said it,” I said. I felt his arms picking me up, his hands testing my bones as he would his own childrens’, his tobacco richness as he set me down. “‘Lucky it wasn’t the Nailsea, eh?’ he said.”
    And standing there, between Sir Joseph and the widened eyes of my mother, I talked on, remembering, my tongue never fast enough for what I saw. Leaving the dining room, the smell of orange bitters from the open sideboard followed one, and, transliterated, clung to the wooden pineapple on