The Complete Stories - Flannery O'Connor [190]
He did not know where a suitcase was, he disliked to pack, he needed his books, his typewriter was not portable, he was used to an electric blanket, he could not bear to eat in restaurants. His mother, with her daredevil charity, was about to wreck the peace of the house.
The back door slammed and the girl’s laugh shot up from the kitchen, through the back hall, up the stairwell and into his room, making for him like a bolt of electricity. He jumped to the side and stood glaring about him. His words of the morning had been unequivocal: “If you bring that girl back into this house, I leave. You can choose—her or me.”
She had made her choice. An intense pain gripped his throat. It was the first time in his thirtyfive years… He felt a sudden burning moisture behind his eyes. Then he steadied himself, overcome by rage. On the contrary: she had not made any choice. She was counting on his attachment to his electric blanket. She would have to be shown.
The girl’s laughter rang upward a second time and Thomas winced. He saw again her look of the night before. She had invaded his room. He had waked to find his door open and her in it. There was enough light from the hall to make her visible as she turned toward him. The face was like a comedienne’s in a musical comedy—a pointed chin, wide apple cheeks and feline empty eyes. He had sprung out of his bed and snatched a straight chair and then he had backed her out the door, holding the chair in front of him like an animal trainer driving out a dangerous cat. He had driven her silently down the hall, pausing when he reached it to beat on his mother’s door. The girl, with a gasp, turned and fled into the guest room.
In a moment his mother had opened her door and peered out apprehensively. Her face, greasy with whatever she put on it at night, was framed in pink rubber curlers. She looked down the hall where the girl had disappeared. Thomas stood before her, the chair still lifted in front of him as if he were about to quell another beast. “She tried to get in my room,” he hissed, pushing in. “I woke up and she was trying to get in my room.” He closed the door behind him and his voice rose in outrage. “I won’t put up with this! I won’t put up with it another day!”
His mother, backed by him to her bed, sat down on the edge of it. She had a heavy body on which sat a thin, mysteriously gaunt and incongruous head.
“I’m telling you for the last time,” Thomas said, “I won’t put up with this another day.” There was an observable tendency in all of her actions. This was, with the best intentions in the world, to make a mockery of virtue, to pursue it with such a mindless intensity that everyone involved was made a fool of and virtue itself became ridiculous. “Not another day,” he repeated.
His mother shook her head emphatically, her eyes still on the door.
Thomas put the chair on the floor in front of her and sat down on it He leaned forward as if he were about to explain something to a defective child.
“That’s just another way she’s unfortunate,” his mother said. “So awful, so awful. She told me the name of it but I forget what it is but it’s something she can’t help. Something she was born with. Thomas,” she said and put her hand to her jaw, “suppose it were you?”
Exasperation blocked his windpipe. “Can’t I make you see,” he croaked, “that if she can’t help herself you can’t help her?”
His mother’s eyes, intimate but untouchable, were the blue of great distances after sunset. “Nimpermaniac,” she murmured.
“Nymphomaniac,” he said fiercely. “She doesn’t need to supply you with any fancy names. She’s a moral moron. That’s all you need to know. Born without the moral faculty—like somebody else would be born without a kidney or a leg. Do you understand?”
“I keep thinking it might be you,” she said, her hand still on her jaw. “If it were you, how do you think I’d feel if nobody took you in? What if you were a nimpermaniac and not a brilliant smart person and you did what you couldn’t help and…“
Thomas felt a deep unbearable loathing for himself