The Moviegoer

everything, every second had to be—”
    â€œBe what, Mother?”
    This time she gives a real French shrug. “I don’t know. Something.”
    â€œWhat was wrong with him?”
    â€œHe was overwrought,” she replies at once and in her regular mama-bee drone and again my father disappears into the old emblem. I can hear echoes of my grandfather and grandmother and Aunt Emily, echoes of porch talk on the long summer evenings when affairs were settled, mysteries solved, the unnamed named. My mother never got used to our porch talk with its peculiar license. When someone made a spiel, one of our somber epic porch spiels, she would strain forward in the dark, trying to make out the face of the speaker and judge whether he meant to be taken as somberly as he sounded. As a Bolling in Feliciana Parish, I became accustomed to sitting on the porch in the dark and talking of the size of the universe and the treachery of men; as a Smith on the Gulf Coast I have become accustomed to eating crabs and drinking beer under a hundred and fifty watt bulb—and one is as pleasant a way as the other of passing a summer night.
    â€œHow was he overwrought?”
    She plucks the hook clean, picks up a pink cube, pushes the barb through, out, and in again. Her wrists are rounded, not like a young girl’s but by a deposit of hard fat.
    â€œIt was his psychological make-up.”
    Yes, it is true. We used to talk quite a bit about psychological make-ups and the effect of glands on our dismal dark behavior. Strangely, my mother sounds more like my aunt than my aunt herself. Aunt Emily no longer talks of psychological make-ups.
    â€œHis nervous system was like a high-powered radio. Do you know what happens if you turn up the volume and tune into WWL?”
    â€œYes,” I say, unspeakably depressed by the recollection of the sad little analogies doctors like to use. “You mean he wasn’t really cut out to be an ordinary doctor, he really should have been in research.”
    â€œThat’s right!” My mother looks over in surprise, but not much surprise, then sends her lead off like a shot. “Now Mister—!” she addresses an unknown fish and when he does not respond, falls to musing. “It’s peculiar though. You’re so much like your father and yet so different. You know, you’ve got a little of my papa in you—you’re easy-going and you like to eat and you like the girls.”
    â€œI don’t like to fish.”
    â€œYou’re too lazy, if you ask me. Anyhow, Papa was not a fisherman, as I have told you before. He owned a fleet of trawlers at Golden Meadow. But did he love pretty girls. Till his dying day.”
    â€œDoes it last that long?”
    â€œAnh anh anh anh anh!” In the scandal of it, Mother presses her chin into her throat, but she does not leave off watching her float. “Don’t you get risque with me! This is your mother you’re talking to and not one of your little hotsy-totsies.”
    â€œHotsy-totsies!”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œDon’t you like Sharon?”
    â€œWhy yes. But she’s not the one for you.” For years my mother has thrown it out as a kind of proverb that I should marry Kate Cutrer, though actually she has also made an emblem out of Kate and does not know her at all. “But do you know a funny thing?”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œIt’s not you but Mathilde who is moody like your father. Sister Regina says she is another Alice Eberle.”
    â€œWho is Alice Eberle?”
    â€œYou know, the Biloxi girl who won the audition with Horace Heidt and His Musical Knights.”
    â€œOh.”
    Mother trills in her throat with the old music. I squint up at her through the rainbows.
    â€œBut when he got sick the next time, I couldn’t help him.”
    â€œWhy not?”
    She smiles. “He said my treatment was like horse serum: you can only use it once.”
    â€œWhat did happen?”
    â€œThe war came.”
    â€œThat helped?”
    â€œHe helped himself. He had been in bed for a month, up in your room—you were off at school. He wouldn’t go to the clinic, he wouldn’t eat, he wouldn’t go fishing, he wouldn’t read. He’d just lie there and watch the ceiling fan. Once in a while he would walk down to the Chinaman’s at night and eat a po-boy. That was the only way he could eat—walk down to the Chinaman’s at