Free Fall Read Free Page A

temples—I’m like Ma; indifferent. He might as soon be an Odd Fellow or an Elk.
    “What was my dad, Ma?”
    I lie. I deceive myself as well as you. Their world is mine, the world of sin and redemption, of showings and conviction, of love in the mud. You deal daily in the very blood of my life. I am one of you, a haunted man—haunted by what or whom? And this is my cry; that I have walked among you in intellectual freedom and you never tried to seduce me from it, since a century has seduced you to it and you believe in fair play, in not presuming, in being after all not a saint. You have conceded freedom to those who cannot use freedom and left the dust and the dirt clustered over the jewel. I speak your hidden language which is not the language of the other men. I am your brother in both senses and since freedom was my curse Ithrow the dirt at you as I might pick at a sore which will not break out and kill.
    “What was my dad, Ma?”
    Let him never know. I am acquainted with the warm throb myself and think little enough of physical paternity compared with the slow growth that comes after. We do not own children. My father was not a man. He was a speck shaped like a tadpole invisible to the naked eye. He had no head and no heart. He was as specialized and soulless as a guided missile.
    Ma was never a professional any more than I am. Like mother, like son. We are amateurs at heart. Ma had not the business ability nor the desire to make a career and a success. Neither was she immoral for that implies some sort of standard from which she could decline. Was Ma above morals or below them or outside them? Today she would be classed as subnormal, and given the protection she did not want. In those days, if she had not clad herself in such impervious indifference she would have been called simple. She staked small but vital sums on horses in the “Sun”, she drank and went to the pictures. For work, she took whatever was available. She charred for chars, she—we—picked hops, she washed and swept and imperfectly polished in such public buildings as were within easy reach of our alley. She did not have sexual connection for that implies an aseptic intercourse, a loveless, joyless refinement of pleasure with the prospect of conception inhibited by the rubber cup from the bathroom. She did not make love, for I take that to be a passionate attempt to confirm that the wall which parted them is down. She did none of these things. If she had, she would have told me in her slurred, rambling monologues, with theirvast pauses, their acceptance that we are inescapably here. No. She was a creature. She shared pleasure round like a wet-nurse’s teat, absorbed, gustily laughing and sighing. Her casual intercourse must have been to her what his works are to a real artist—themselves and nothing more. They had no implication. They were meetings in back streets or fields, on boxes, or gateposts and buttresses. They were like most human sex in history, a natural thing without benefit of psychology, romance or religion.
    Ma was enormous. She must have been a buxom girl in the bud but appetite and a baby blew her up into an elephantine woman. I deduce that she was attractive once, for her eyes, sunk into a face bloated like a brown bun, were still large and mild. There was a gloss on them that must have lain all over her when she was young. Some women cannot say no; but my ma was more than those simple creatures, else how can she so fill the backward tunnel? These last few months I have been trying to catch her in two handfuls of clay—not, I mean, her appearance; but more accurately, my sense of her hugeness and reality, her matter-of-fact blocking of the view. Beyond her there is nothing, nothing. She is the warm darkness between me and the cold light. She is the end of the tunnel, she.
    And now something happens in my head. Let me catch the picture before the perception vanishes. Ma spreads as I remember her, she blots out the room and the