Free Mrs Hollingsworth's Men - Padgett Powell by Padgett Powell Page A

to get up from
the bed for fantodding all the live-long day about failing his
father, even though Helen of Troy is in the room with him, has now
decided that his problems with his father stem from not going out for
the track team in the tenth grade when a coach at Nathan Bedford
Forrest High School invited him to. That was the invisible point of
failure, he now thinks. He can’t understand why he did not go out,
other than that he did not like to run for its own sake, and his
conviction that the coach was a sadist or pederast of some sort,
which does not seem to him now sufficient grounds for disregarding
the coach. Is this man, immobile on a bed in a rented room in Holly
Springs Mississippi, truly the New Southerner?”
    Mr. Mogul looked at the woman and at Ray. "Oswald
indicates he is the only man they found who was properly undone by
the visions of Forrest."
    “ He the only one we showed him to,” Ray said.
    “ Helen of Troy?” Mrs. Mogul said. “She isn’t
a patch on me.” At this Ray snorted. She turned to him. “What?
You don't think my eyes are special?”
    The woman cut in: “Your eyes are special, but you
are not Helen of Troy. No one is. That is what 'Helen of Troy' means.
Now excuse us. We are about something important here. Your mogul here
is engaged in a large project doomed to failure, and I want to wrap
this up by making sure he knows that."
    Ray was delighted with all of this. His imprudent
confession that they had only one candidate for Mr. Moguls New
Southerner was apparently to go unpunished, unnoticed even. He was
free to fiddle about the table, stealing little looks at Mrs. Mogul,
whose eyes indeed suggested fried blue marbles but who did not, all
in all, incline him to the ground with the hurt of need. The woman
his hostess seemed to have fixed that somehow anyway For this he was
grateful. He had had to throw himself to the ground with the hurt of
need nearly all his life, which had once seemed an onerous thing, hut
which now did not because of the inexplicable sensation he had in the
presence of his hostess that he had not been alive all that
long—“nearly all his life" seemed somehow a laughably short
time. This was a curious sensation to have, sitting there in obvious
middle age, wondering if he should have his hair styled as Roopit
did, or if going to the Barber College and getting these whitewall
specials for five dollars from tentative students and looking like
he’d been treated for mange with foo-foo water was good enough
anymore in the modern world. He had a feeling of being really out of
it, there with Mr. and Mrs. Mogul and this woman drilling Mr. Mogul
as if she owned him. He wanted suddenly not to be out of it.
    “ Why does the black man take to the cell phone so
hard? he suddenly asked Mr. Mogul.
    Mr. Mogul turned to him naturally and began speaking
without pause or seeming interruption from whatever he had been
saying to the woman. “I’m glad you have asked me that question,
Oswald. I can answer it. The black man cannot own the land, we have
seen to that. He does not want the water. He once wanted the road,
but that really was a wanting of the land. When it was Cadillacs, he
managed. Now that it is the BMW the Black Man’s Wish, he can’t.
He now wants the air. From the beginning he wanted the air. This is
why he got loud. This is why he carried the ghetto blaster. He
virtually invented the sub-woofer. And now he can take command of
satellites with the cell phone. He is equal in this respect to the
whitest of white men, the astronaut. Were the market share any
larger, a man would be fiduciarily negligent unto himself not to
market a gold-colored phone exclusively for the brother.”
    Ray was impressed at Mr. Mogul’s smooth delivery.
He thought it might be good to learn to speak that way himself, and
he certainly would have to consider it if he began wearing his hair
in a way that made people expect that kind of sound to come out of a
man. He thought he might, what the