Confederacy of Dunces, A - John Kennedy Toole [51]
IV
Ignatius opened “The Journal of a Working Boy” to the first unused sheet of Blue Horse looseleaf filler, officiously snapping the point of his ballpoint pen forward. The point of the Levy Pants pen did not catch on the first snap and slipped back into the plastic cylinder. Ignatius snapped more vigorously, but again the point slid disobediently back out of sight. Cracking the pen furiously on the edge of his desk, Ignatius picked up one of the Venus Medalist pencils lying on the floor. He probed the wax in his ears with the pencil and began to concentrate, listening to the sounds of his mother’s preparations for an evening at the bowling alley. There were many staccato footfalls back and forth in the bathroom which meant, he knew, that his mother was attempting to accomplish several phases of her toilet at once. Then there were the noises that he had grown accustomed to over the years whenever his mother was preparing to leave the house: the plop of a hairbrush falling into the toilet bowl, the sound of a box of powder hitting the floor, the sudden exclamations of confusion and chaos.
“Ouch!” his mother cried at one point.
Ignatius found the subdued and solitary din in the bathroom annoying and wished that she would finish. At last he heard the light click off. She knocked at his door.
“Ignatius, honey, I’m going.”
“All right,” Ignatius replied icily.
“Open the door, babe, and come kiss me goodbye.”
“Mother, I am quite busy at the moment.”
“Don’t be like that, Ignatius. Open up.”
“Run off with your friends, please.”
“Aw, Ignatius.”
“Must you distract me at every level. I am working on something with wonderful movie possibilities. Highly commercial.”
Mrs. Reilly kicked at the door with her bowling shoes.
“Are you ruining that pair of absurd shoes that were bought with my hard-earned wages?”
“Huh? What’s that, precious?”
Ignatius extracted the pencil from his ear and opened the door. His mother’s maroon hair was fluffed high over her forehead; her cheekbones were red with rouge that had been spread nervously up to the eyeballs. One wild puff full of powder had whitened Mrs. Reilly’s face, the front of her dress, and a few loose maroon wisps.
“Oh, my God,” Ignatius said, “you have powder all over your dress, although that is probably one of Mrs. Battaglia’s beauty hints.”
“Why you always knocking Santa, Ignatius?”
“She appears to have been knocked a bit in her life already. Up rather than down. If she ever nears me, however, the direction will be reversed.”
“Ignatius!”
“She also brings to mind the vulgarism ‘knockers.’”
“Santa’s a grammaw. You oughta be ashamed.”
“Thank goodness Miss Annie’s coarse cries restored peace the other night. Never in my life have I seen so shameless an orgy. And right in my very own kitchen. If that man were any sort of law enforcement officer, he would have arrested that ‘aunt’ right there on the spot.”
“Don’t knock Angelo, neither. He’s got him a hard road, boy. Santa says he’s been in the bathroom at the bus station all day.”
“Oh, my God! Do I believe what I’m hearing? Please run along with your two cohorts from the Mafia and let me alone.”
“Don’t treat your poor momma like that.”
“Poor? Did I hear poor? When the dollars are literally flowing into this home from my labors? And flowing out even more rapidly.”
“Don’t start that again, Ignatius. I only got twenty dollars out of you this week, and I almost had to get down on my knees and beg for it. Look at all them thing-a-ma-jigs you been buying. Look at that movie camera you brung home today.”
“The movie camera will shortly be put to use. That harmonica was rather cheap.”
“We never gonna pay off that man at this rate.”
“That is hardly my problem. I don’t drive.”
“No, you don’t care. You never cared for nothing, boy.”
“I should have known that every time I open the door of my room I am literally opening a Pandora’s Box. Doesn’t Mrs. Battaglia want you to await her debauched nephew and her at the curb so that