The Hair of Harold Roux Page 36

  “But what about you, Naomi?” Mary asked, meaning Aren’t you hurt, too?

  “Mary, dear, I have a different attitude about sex than you do.”

  “Sex?” Harold said, staring at Mary. “Sex?” His face went through the strange focusing effect caused by a new conception.

  “Yes, Harold,” Mary said. They could hardly hear her voice. “I’m sorry but I’m not going to lie about anything any more.”

  What happened then his eyes observed, Allard’s eyes that were accustomed to detecting quick motions, centers of possible violence, burning fuses, etc, so that his catlike self could triumph either by attack or escape. Now they merely watched as Harold’s thin arm drew back into the classical, or seven-year-old boy’s bent-elbowed, aimed, telegraphed haymaker, the thin white fist diminishing as it clenched. He observed the hatred on Harold’s usually gentle face, also the fragile fist as it came toward his mouth. But how could it be Harold Roux who was doing this? It was Allard Benson’s unmoving, nonducking head that was being grossly punched by Harold, gentle Harold of the delicately balanced cranium. The white fist was surprisingly hard and painful, painful several times, in fact, as was the other thin fist.

  He spoke to Harold, asking him to stop. He could not think of hitting him back, to stop him that way. The pain increased, Harold evidently being one of those thin people who possess surprising strength, as though their wheyish flesh were part metal. Everyone in the room thought this horror should stop, but before any concerted effort could be arranged Harold had hit him many times in the face, neck, forehead, chest, until he put out his hands to protect himself, to push Harold away. He couldn’t see very well through the blows that stung him as if he were being whipped with a stick. He was being thrashed, demeaned, humiliated not so much by this punishment but by whatever he must have done, whatever inconceivably shameful thing he must have done to cause Harold to turn so violent. He tried to grab Harold’s fists, to still them, though he could hardly see, and suddenly there was quiet in the room; even Harold’s sobbing breaths stopped for the moment, and Allard realized that he had something soft, something crinkly but soft and furry, in his hand.

  They were all looking at Harold, who stood frozen, staring at Allard’s hand and what it held. They looked too, then, at what Allard had in his hand. Then back at Harold, who was not Harold but a slight, forty-year-old man with a head pale as the belly of a fish, blotched by an even paler patchwork, a strange design of unearthed, unentombed skin. That person was not Harold, and Allard saw in shock how much that pad of hair, this pad of hair he now held in his hand, had been Harold’s youth. It did matter, so much more than the before-and-after photographs in magazines could ever show. He held part of Harold in his hand, wondering if he should give the part back.

  Harold fell back into the davenport and sat with his hands over his face, hiding the room from himself. They soon realized that he was crying. Heavy wet tears appeared below his hands and gathered on his chin. Shudders and hiccups made him tremble, his arms and sharp shoulder points trembling beneath the weave of his light sweater, Allard considered whether or not he might put the hair back on that naked head, turning the thing around straight and placing it gently back on. He could not have been more surprised and horrified if he held one of Harold’s fists in his hand, the bloody stump in the air for everyone to see. It did not seem an act he could say he was sorry for.

  Mary put her arms around Harold and hugged him, moving his frail shoulders around toward her. He tried to pull away from her, his hands still pressed tightly against his eyes, but she wouldn’t let him. She pulled his naked head next to hers, the fringes of real hair at his ears and around the back of his ears mussed, upset, wilder than they had ever expected to see any part of Harold. Allard still held the wig, its severed human hair glossy in his hand, a forbidden feeling against his fingers. He felt like a dissectionist. This human part was weighty, corpselike, and belonged back on the rest of its body. But of course it was too late. Harold’s bruised hands seemed much younger, pale and reddish as a child’s, than his blotched naked pate. He wondered if it were glue, or psoriasis, on that head.

  Angela and Nathan drew chairs up before Harold’s knees and sat down, which seemed planned, ceremonially odd. Naomi came around and sat on the arm of the davenport on Harold’s other side, her long arm reaching down so she could squeeze the back of Harold’s neck. Allard couldn’t understand all this touching, all this squeezing and patting and touching, as if Harold were a little puppy. He couldn’t understand how that could comfort a man. But he did know, and again he felt himself an alien here. Each of the others had made an instant and proper diagnosis of Harold’s state. Angela and Nathan were patting Harold’s knees, their voices saying it was all right, it was all right, Harold.

  “Don’t cry, Harold,” Mary said. “Don’t be so upset.”

  Allard observed, since he was useless here, his observing. Evidently, in some terribly accidental, coincidental way, he had destroyed Harold’s ability to look at his friends. The destroyed person seemed battered, savaged beyond salvation. To remove anyone’s dignity in this fashion was not what Allard wanted to do, or thought himself capable of doing, and this was Harold, who had more than once nominated Allard to be his best friend, his only confidant. Allard did not think of himself as being brutal, or as a betrayer, and yet here he was and something awful had happened. He put the crumpled wig down on Harold’s coffee table; then, still having to watch his victim, took out his handkerchief and blew a small amount of blood out of his nose. His lips were swelling too, but the only bad place was where Naomi had hit him the other evening. Of course his little bruises were nothing compared to Harold’s paralysis, which suggested to him the grief of bereavement, all the worst terrors of grief that could ever happen to a person. Men and women had gone into that denying, crouching position from the beginnings of the race, covering their eyes from the viciousness of their fellows.

  Harold’s friends, those other people, still touched him, still moved their hands over him. Allard felt shame, or anger at his shame, or maybe anger at Harold’s shame. “Harold!” he said sharply. “Hey, Harold!” He could not agree with all this demeaning patting and cuddling. In similar circumstances, if they could be imagined, he would find it intolerable to be petted like a baby. “Harold!” he said again.

  “Shush, Allard!” Naomi said.

  Shush! Another word he hadn’t known Naomi could ever use. Did these women have all those childhood words ready at any moment? He felt a lack of control; those were not the words he had chosen for his maturity, or for Harold’s, or for anybody’s. He wanted to leave but he couldn’t leave Harold in this condition, in these hands. So he stood, agonized in some more complicated way than even this complicated situation seemed to demand.

  Harold had contracted into this shivering thing dressed in human clothes but not really there. His face and head seemed out of shape, as if squeezed lopsided by his own fingers.

  “We’ve got to get him to talk to us,” Mary said.

  “Come on, Harold,” Naomi said. She massaged the back of Harold’s neck, leaning over him now with both hands massaging his neck and shoulders. He held his head rigid, although it must have been an effort. Pink areas that changed slowly, like clouds, had appeared on the skin of his head. He was surrounded and couldn’t get away.

  Mary, who was no longer the consoled but the one to console, spoke to Harold. “I know how you must feel,” she said. Part irony there, but she spoke softly, with a confessional dryness Harold surely listened to. “Allard didn’t mean to pull off your hair, I’m sure of that. He doesn’t know what he’s doing sometimes.” She gave a short laugh that was worldly and sad, then continued in a soft, barely ironic voice. “I know how bad you feel. I do. I didn’t tell you I was a fallen woman, Harold, did I. I’m sorry you felt the way you did about me and then you had to find out, but I’m through lying about anything. We all knew you wore that false hair anyway, you know, and if it made you feel better not to look
bald none of us held it against you. I know I didn’t. I don’t think anyone did. Maybe Allard, I don’t know. But he didn’t want you to wear it because he thought it would be better for you not to wear it. I know he didn’t mean to pull it off, though. That was an accident. Do you want to put it back on now? Do you want to put it back on?”

  Harold wouldn’t answer, even by moving his head one way or another. It seemed so strange that Mary, in her yellow bathing suit, was ministering to Harold, hugging him now to show her affection toward this somehow partially decapitated person. The frivolous yellow bathing suit and Mary’s young smoothness, the perfection of her skin. She was only eighteen, and though Allard had once thought eighteen an advanced age for women he was twenty-one now and she seemed young. Harold was twenty-four, even if he did look middle-aged with all that bare pate showing. Twenty-four did seem adult, and it seemed to him that age, that proper gauge of developement that had always meant so much in childhood, was going undependable and wrong. All of these people had resources hidden from him, or weaknesses hidden from him. They had tenderness and consolation hidden from his knowledge. They were all larger continents than he had suspected, dangerous and enveloping. He could not reach for Mary and Naomi; his reach was not great enough. Angela and Nathan and Harold all had depths he hadn’t considered, maybe didn’t have himself. Even Knuck and Hilary, and Vera Upstairs, that poor creature, maybe she was also too deep for him.

  And yet, he thought, I caused all this. He was the stranger who had caused all of this emotion, these screams and tears and the evocation of all this sympathy that was probably love, whatever that might be.

  So could an assassin have caused all of it.

  His Indian Pony could take him three thousand miles away from these complicated lives. He traveled light. He could be packed and on the moolit highway headed west in less than an hour. He could leave his footlocker with the housemother to be sent home, pack his saddlebags and roll the other things he might need in his poncho, roping the tight bundle neatly across his saddlebags—balanced, comforting, ready for speed. His new tires were crisp and round.

  “Go ahead, Harold,” Nathan said. “Put it back on if you want. It’s not going to shock us or anything. If I was bald at your age I’d wear a hairpiece, too. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.” Nathan retrieved the wig from the coffee table and put it on Harold’s lap, where it sat, a furry hemisphere Harold wouldn’t acknowledge.

  “Look, Harold,” Naomi said, “somebody’s got to straighten you out. You can’t just go into a cataleptic fit or something just because you found out a few things about life.”

  “I’m worried about him,” Mary said. “We can’t just leave him all torn apart like this.”

  “We won’t leave him like this,” Naomi said, “but we don’t seem to be getting through to him very well.”

  “What can we do?” Angela said.

  They were all so grave, these strange women who had revealed their naming harlotry to poor Harold and now wouldn’t let him go. Allard felt hysteria, or something near it, rise in him. He might suggest shock treatment: they could have a Black Mass, right now. Naomi would be the Christ-killing Altar Witch, playing the skin flute. Amen. Sancti Spirituset Filii. Mary would be the virgin deflowered by Beelzebub upon the altar. Jesus womb thy of fruit! Allard would play Beelzebub with mad relish. Then they would strip Harold naked and paint him blue, using that bottle of Quink right there on his desk, to prepare him for Angela, great naked spanking Angela, thighs like a wild mare, who would ponderously rape him while his slobbering friends chanted a High Mass backwards.

  He didn’t suggest this; it barely flickered through his criminal mind, followed by pity. Shocking things were still happening to Harold, if Harold was listening.

  Angela said, “I don’t suppose it would do anything to try to explain to Harold that Mary is not a ‘fallen woman’ just because she and Allard have had sexual intercourse. Personally, and I’m sure Nathan will agree, I think the act of physical love is a beautiful and natural thing, but I do think it wasn’t very nice of Allard and Naomi to have done it in front of Mary and Harold, even if by accident, considering Harold’s religious sensitivity and his protective feelings toward Mary. And poor Mary must have felt betrayed because Allard is, or was, or had strongly suggested that he might be, her intended husband.”

  Allard looked around Harold’s room, at his sedate furniture, his framed Currier and Ives prints against the rich wallpaper, his books safe and orderly behind glassed cabinet doors. His friends had followed Harold here to Lilliputown, his sanctuary, even to this room he had made into a place of calm and dignity—and proceeded to violate all of his sensibilities, even tearing the very scalp off his head. With friends like these, who needed Boom Maloumian?

  Angela, with her good clear patrician eyes, had already seen the first ominous sign. Just after they crossed the narrow bridge on the way to the Town Hall, she had seen a tall person standing in the moonlight across the park. The figure was dark-clothed above the waist, but below were long, moonlit bare legs. This tall creature, caught in that bemused, half-hunched posture that is never mistaken for anything else, looked down at what it was doing, or at what part of its body was doing. And yes, there was the glittering, pencil-thin arc connecting a man to the earth.

  She had thought it must be Hilary, who had probably awakened and followed them, and of course it wouldn’t have been good form to point him out at that moment. In any case, thinking that he would be along presently, she hadn’t mentioned it.

  Aaron finds himself in his small study, standing there looking down at his notebooks. His desk light prints a warm yellow circle on the place where all of his thoughts should be directed. He should be working right now, but his family will be home soon and he has a sense of the preciousness of time, much like the last few hours of a furlough. Time is running out, including these last minutes before they all get home and demand his attention, guilt and acceptance.

  But he is too tired, and where is his family? Where is the crunch of gravel, the slamming of the car doors, those voices that fill him with dread and love, that make his skin bunch up in knots and his eyes hurt? There has been an accident; they have all been killed and he is free. Free! And then the true meaning of that freedom comes over him like a wind from across the Arctic ice, a continent empty of all but white ice.

  Maybe he’d better call Wellesley and find out when they left. A perfectly useless thing to do which would only make John and Cynthia worry. If they have been in an accident he will be notified. Along the ugly and murderous highway speeds a police car, blue lights frantic, siren screaming panic, guilt, death, and in the blood and oil and broken glass the number of this very telephone, the ugly black telephone in the hall, will be found.

  The telephone screams. It screams out of his vision of its squatness so that at first it is only hallucination. But it is not hallucination and he is frightened into nausea; it is shock, that same coldness and vertigo. His body, still knowing how to function under adversity, moves toward the hallway and the screaming.

  “Hello?”

  “Hello, Dad?” It is Bill, who is fifteen, the deep voice still new.

  “Bill! Where are you? What’s the matter?” He sees the strobic blue lights, the grotesque immobility of the wreckage.

  “We’re going to stay over tonight. It seems you forgot to get the headlights adjusted and everybody was blinking their lights at us. Mom got blinded so we turned around and came back.”

  “Oh.”

  “We’ll start in the morning, okay?”

  “Okay. Let me speak to Agnes. Is she there?”

  “Hey, Mom?” The voice of his son is fainter yet louder to itself, directed into another room in another place. There is the feeling of depth over that distance, perspective through sound, dimming to the vanishing point.

  “Hello?” Agnes’ voice is suddenly there, hard, mature, yet beneath is the echoing sweet sound of a girl. She has grown up no more than he has.

  �
�How are you?” he says, feeling love for her.

  “I was surprised you’d be home.”

  No, no. His soul wilts at this short circuit, sickened by the old pattern of their discontents. It is so familiar and it never fails to make him angry or despairing and it is unanswerable.

  “I thought you’d probably be out comforting Helga,” she says.

  Helga! But he hasn’t… It was George he was to comfort! But of course Agnes knows because it is her only business to know. He hasn’t and wouldn’t, but that is never enough, never enough. His most suppressed inclinations are as guilty as flagrant acts. So why not act, then? asks his anger.

  “That makes me unhappy,” he says.

  “Well, good night,” Agnes says, and hangs up.

  He wants to speak to Janie, and to say more to Bill. Her hostages? No, not that simple. She has as hostages all those years with their moments, her joy that can be unalloyed, her duty toward her children that is born of love and can’t be faulted. For richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health. History as hostage. He wants to break down a wall. He could drive his fist right through this wall, but it is too late to do that because he has already located the two-by-four studs and would aim in between them, so his rage is not pure, is it?

  Allard would not have had it end this way. Perhaps as an allegory, purer and simpler, evil against good—that would have been nicer to be in, provided it ended well and he was neither maimed nor killed. More like the Second World War, for instance. And here was Lilliputown, the very name suggesting allegory.

  Whom had Angela seen?

  And if it were Robert Gordon Westinghouse, the Poet of the Lady of the Orbiting Moon, Mellifulous Aponatatus, who always let down his pants to urinate, how did he get there? They had seen no extra cars in the parking spaces in front of the Town Hall—only Harold’s Matilda, Nathan’s Ford, Knuck’s newly acquired ancient Plymouth rumble-seat coupe and Allard’s motorcycle. Was the Poet a highly improbable scout? A spy?