Free The Chateau by William Maxwell Page B

straightened, when he corresponded with postage-stamp companies. The obedient, sensible, courteous ten-year-old? Or the moody boy in his teens, who ate them out of house and home and had to be sent from the table for talking back to his father? Take your choice, or take both of them. His mother’s eyes, the Rhodes nose and mouth and chin; the Rhodes stubbornness, his mother said. This book belongs to Harold Rhodes, Eighth Grade, Room 207, Central School.… And whatever became of those boards for stretching muskrat skins on, the skins he was going to sell andmake a fortune from? Or his magic lantern and his postcard projector? Or his building blocks, his Boy Scout knife, his school report cards? And that medicine-stained copy of
Mr. Midshipman Easy
? And the Oz books? Somewhere, all these unclaimed shreds of his personality, since matter is never entirely lost but merely changes its form.
    As a boy of thirteen he was called up on the stage of the Majestic Theater by a vaudeville magician, and did exactly what the magician told him (under his breath) to do; even though the magician told him out loud not to do it, and so made a monkey of him, and the audience rocked with perfectly kind laughter. Since then he hasn’t learned a thing. The same audience would rock with the same laughter if he were called up on the stage of the Majestic Theater tomorrow. Fortunately it has been torn down to make a parking lot.
    In college he was responsive, with a light in his eye; he was a pleasure to lecture to; but callow, getting by on enthusiasm because it came more natural to him than thinking, and worried about his grades, and about the future, and because, though he tried and tried, he could not break himself of a shameful habit. If he had taken biology it would have been made clear to him that he too was an animal, but he took botany instead.
    But who is he? which animal?
    A commuter, standing on the station platform, with now the
Times
and now the
Tribune
under his arm, waiting for the 8:17 express. A liberal Democrat, believing idealistically in the cause of labor but knowing few laborers, and a member in good standing of the money-loving class he was born into, though, as it happens, money slips through his fingers. A spendthrift, with small sums, cautious with large ones. Who is he? Raskolnikov—that’s who he is.
    Surely not?
    Yes. Also Mr. Micawber. And St. Francis. And Savonarola. He’s no one person, he’s an uncountable committee of people who meet and operate under the handy fiction of his name. Theminutes of the last meeting are never read, because it’s still going on. The committee arrives at important conclusions which it cannot remember, and makes sensible decisions it cannot possibly keep. For that you need a policeman. The committee members know each other, but not always by their right names. The bachelor who has sat reading in the same white leatherette chair by the same lamp with the same cigarette box within reach on the same round table for so long now that change is no longer possible to him—that Harold Rhodes of course knows the bridegroom with a white carnation in his buttonhole, sipping a glass of champagne, smiling, accepting congratulations, aware of the good wishes of everybody and also of a nagging doubt in the back of his mind. Just as they both know the head of the family, the born father, with the Sunday paper scattered around him on the living-room rug, smiling benignly at no children after three years of marriage. And the child of seven (in some ways the most mature of all these facets of his personality) who is being taken, with his hand in his father’s much bigger hand, to see his mother in the hospital on a day that, as it turned out, she was much too sick to see anyone.
    What does he
—
what do all these people do for a living?
    Does it matter?
    Certainly
.
    After two false starts he now has a job with a future. He is working for an engraving firm owned by