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PARTISAN REVIEW
laugh. She wasn't, or, anyway, she didn't seem to be, at all uneasy
or embarrassed. She chatted as though there were no subject which
had to be avoided and she got Sonpy past his first, faint stiffness. And
thank God she was there, for I was filled with that icy dread again.
Everything I did seemed awkward to me, and everything I said
sounded freighted with hidden meaning. I was trying to remember
everything I'd heard about dope addiction and I couldn't help
watching Sonny for signs. I wasn't doing it out of malice. I was
trying to find out something about my brother. I was dying to
hear him tell me he was safe.
"Safe!" my father grunted, whenever Mama suggested trying
to move to a neighborhood which might be safer for children. "Safe,
hell! Ain't no place safe for kids, nor nobody."
He always went on like this, but he wasn't, ever, really as bad
as he sounded, not even on weekends, when he got drunk.
As
a matter
of fact, he was always on the lookout for "something a little better,"
but he died before he found it. He died suddenly, during a drunken
weekend in the middle of the war, when Sonny was fifteen. He and
Sonny hadn't ever got on too well. And this was partly because Sonny
was the apple of his father's eye.
It
was because he loved Sonny so
much and was frightened for him, that he was always fighting
with him. It doesn't do any good to fight with Sonny. Sonny just
moves back, inside himself, where he can't be reached. But the
principal reason that they never hit it off is that they were so much
alike. Daddy was big and rough and loud-talking, just the opposite
of Sonny, but they both had-that same privacy.
Mama tried to tell me something about this, just after Daddy
died. I was home on leave from the army.
This was the last time I ever saw my mother alive. Just the
same, this picture gets all mixed up in my mind with pictures I had
of her when she was younger. The way I always see her is the way
she used to be on a Sunday afternoon, say, when the old folks were
talking after the big Sunday dinner. I always see her wearing pale
blue. She'd be sitting on the sofa. And my father would be sitting
in the easy chair, not far from her. And the living room would be
full of church folks and relatives. There they sit, in chairs all around
the living room, and the night is creeping up outside, but nobody
knows it yet. You can see the darkness growing against the window-
