The Complete Stories - Flannery O'Connor [189]
She had given a little cry; she looked aghast. He was pleased that she should see death in his face at once. His mother, at the age of sixty, was going to be introduced to reality and he supposed that if the experience didn’t kill her, it would assist her in the process of growing up. He stepped down and greeted her.
“You don’t look very well,” she said and gave him a long clinical stare.
“I don’t feel like talking,” he said at once. “I’ve had a bad trip.”
Mrs. Fox observed that his left eye was bloodshot. He was puffy and pale and his hair had receded tragically for a boy of twenty-five. The thin reddish wedge of it left on top bore down in a point that seemed to lengthen his nose and give him an irritable expression that matched his tone of voice when he spoke to her. “It must have been cold up there,” she said. “Why don’t you take off your coat? It’s not cold down here.”
“You don’t have to tell me what the temperature is!” he said in a high voice. “I’m old enough to know when I want to take my coat off!” The train glided silently away behind him, leaving a view of the twin blocks of dilapidated stores. He gazed after the aluminum speck disappearing into the woods. It seemed to him that his last connection with a larger world were vanishing forever. Then he turned and faced his mother grimly, irked that he had allowed himself, even for an instant, to see an imaginary temple in this collapsing country junction. He had become entirely accustomed to the thought of death, but he had not become accustomed to the thought of death here.
He had felt the end coming on for nearly four months. Alone in his freezing flat, huddled under his two blankets and his overcoat and with three thicknesses of the New York Times between, he had had a chill one night, followed by a violent sweat that left the sheets soaking and removed all doubt from his mind about his true condition. Before this there had been a gradual slackening of his energy and vague inconsistent aches and headaches. He had been absent so many days from his part-time job in the bookstore that he had lost it. Since then he had been living, or just barely so, on his savings and these, diminishing day by day, had been all he had between him and home. Now there was nothing. He was here.
“Where’s the car?” he muttered.
“It’s over yonder,” his mother said. “And your sister is asleep in the back because I don’t like to come out this early by myself. There’s no need to wake her up.”
“No,” he said, “let sleeping dogs lie,” and he picked up his two bulging suitcases and started across the road with them.
They were too heavy for him and by the time he reached the car, his mother saw that he was exhausted. He had never come home with two suitcases before. Ever since he had first gone away to college, he had come back every time with nothing but the necessities for a two-week stay and with a wooden resigned expression that said he was prepared to endure the visit for exactly fourteen days. “You’ve brought more than usual,” she observed, but he did not answer.
The Comforts of Home (1960)
Thomas withdrew to the side of the window and with his head between the wall and the curtain he looked down on the driveway where the car had stopped. His mother and the little slut were getting out of it. His mother emerged slowly, stolid and awkward, and then the little slut’s long slightly bowed legs slid out, the dress pulled above the knees. With a shriek of laughter she ran to meet the dog, who bounded, overjoyed, shaking with pleasure, to welcome her. Rage gathered throughout Thomas’s large frame with a silent ominous intensity, like a mob assembling.
It was now up to him to pack a suitcase, go to the hotel, and stay