The Complete Stories - Flannery O'Connor [191]
“What did she have on?” she asked abruptly, her eyes narrowing.
“Nothing!” he roared. Now will you get her out of here!”
“How can I turn her out in the cold?” she said. “This morning she was threatening to kill herself again.”
“Send her back to jail,” Thomas said.
“I would not send you back to jail, Thomas,” she said.
He got up and snatched the chair and fled the room while he was still able to control himself.
Thomas loved his mother. He loved her because it was his nature to do so, but there were times when he could not endure her love for him. There were times when it became nothing but pure idiot mystery and he sensed about him forces, invisible currents entirely out of his control. She proceeded always from the tritest of considerations—it was the nice thing to do—into the most foolhardy engagements with the devil, whom, of course, she never recognized.
The devil for Thomas was only a manner of speaking, but it was a manner appropriate to the situations his mother got into. Had she been in any degree intellectual, he could have proved to her from early Christian history that no excess of virtue is justified, that a moderation of good produces likewise a moderation in evil, that if Antony of Egypt had stayed at home and attended to his sister, no devils would have plagued him.
Thomas was not cynical and so far from being opposed to virtue, he saw it as the principle of order and the only thing that makes life bearable. His own life was made bearable by the fruits of his mother’s saner virtues—by the well regulated house she kept and the excellent meals she served. But when virtue got out of hand with her, as now, a sense of devils grew upon him, and these were not mental quirks in himself or the old lady, they were denizens with personalities, present though not visible, who might any moment be expected to shriek or rattle a pot.
The girl had landed in the county jail a month ago on a bad check charge and his mother had seen her picture in the paper. At the breakfast table she had gazed at it for a long time and then had passed it over the coffee pot to him. “Imagine,” she said, “only nineteen years old and in that filthy jail. And she doesn’t look like a bad girl.”
Thomas glanced at the picture. It showed the face of a shrewd ragamuffin. He observed that the average age for criminality was steadily lowering.
“She looks like a wholesome girl,” his mother said.
“Wholesome people don’t pass bad checks,” Thomas said.
“You don’t know what you’d do in a pinch.”
“I wouldn’t pass a bad check,” Thomas said.
“I think,” his mother said, “I’ll take her a little box of candy.”
If then and there he had put his foot down, nothing else would have happened. His father, had he been living, would have put his foot down at that point. Taking a box of candy was her favorite nice thing to do. When anyone within her social station moved to town, she called and took a box of candy; when any of her friend’s children had babies or won a scholarship, she called and took a box of candy; when an old person broke his hip, she was at his bedside with a box of candy. He had been amused at the idea of her taking a box of candy to the jail.
He stood now in his room with the girl’s laugh rocketing away in his head and cursed his amusement.
When his mother returned from the visit to the jail, she had burst into his study without knocking and had collapsed full-length on his couch, lifting her small swollen feet up on the arm of it. After a moment, she recovered herself enough to sit up and put a newspaper under them. Then she fell pack again. “We don’t know how the other half lives,” she said.
Thomas knew that though her conversation moved from cliche to cliche there were real experiences behind them. He was less sorry for the girl’s being in jail than for his mother having to see her there. He would have spared her all unpleasant sights. “Well,” he said and put away his journal, “you had better forget it now. The girl has ample reason to be in jail.”
“You can’t imagine what all she’s been