The Amalgamation Polka by Stephen Wright

Author:Stephen Wright
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780307386595
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-06-11T16:00:00+00:00

Unlike most military campaigns, which rarely proceed as intended, Liberty’s crucial scene with his mother turned out to be not at all the lachrymose ordeal he had feared. She received him cordially in her bedroom, costumed in no mask of pale grief but appearing as herself, in the role he had largely known her by, eyes unringed, the whites startlingly pure and bloodless, complexion fair as a country milkmaid’s, her silvery black hair freshly washed and brushed. To her son she looked like a perfectly healthy adult woman who had decided, for understandable reasons, to simply remain beneath the shelter of the covers for a few days. He hesitated just inside the door.

“I’ve been expecting you,” she said, carefully closing the well-thumbed copy of the Bible she had been idly leafing through, a book to which she maintained a long, difficult, ambiguous relationship but one she could not, at least as yet, entirely abandon.

“It took a certain amount of time to accumulate the required courage.”

“I was expecting that, too. Come, sit beside me,” she urged, patting the blanket. “I want to feel your weight on the bed.”

As he settled into the soft knolls and hollows of the feather mattress, he noticed now, up close, a disturbing vagueness to his mother’s presence, a slight truancy around which attention skirted.

“Have you been eating properly?” she asked, then, feeling his forehead, “Do you have a fever?”

“No greater than the country’s.”

She sighed. “I don’t suppose there’s anything I could say which would matter at this point. I couldn’t keep you from wandering as a child, I certainly cannot lock you up in your room now.”

“And there’s always the window.”

“I’ve known all these turbulent years that one day the turbulence would certainly invade our home, but I think I willfully refused to admit just how frightfully personal it might be.”

“But I’ll be back before summer,” he argued, the promise sounding ridiculously hollow even to him.

“Don’t, Liberty. Please stop. I have found that the unpleasant episodes of a life are more fruitfully endured when regarded through the strong lens of truth. All I ask is that you write regularly and that you try to refrain from imprudence. Don’t play the hero for anyone. There will be more than enough fools scrambling for that position and you will, no doubt, witness what becomes of them. The satisfactory fulfillment of one’s duty is heroism enough for anybody. Remember: the successful transit of even a single day is heroic beyond measure.”

“You understand this is an obligation I cannot shirk.”

“Yes. And you understand that I am a mother.”

“A grade that outranks the highest general.”

“Good, now give me a kiss.”

She smelled of soap and hyacinth and her own particular Roxana scent, somewhat vanillalike, ever allied in his mind with sentiments of safety and love, and as he paused in the doorway to say good-bye (for the last time as it turned out; he would never see her again) he was presented with a privileged glimpse into the nature of nature when

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