Frolic of His Own by William Gaddis Page A

he’s a judge, it’s my grandfather when he, what are you doing . . .
    â€”I just don’t like the way he’s watching what we’re doing here . . . and she had, in fact, drawn up her blouse clambering off the end of the bed to reach up and turn the picture’s face to the wall —because it’s none of his business is it? her blouse falling open again —look. Do they look lopsided?
    â€”Do, what?
    â€”I said don’t they look lopsided? like this one’s higher than . . .
    â€”Listen! I’ve got to clear things up about this movie. We’re going to read the play right from the start and you tell me if you saw the same thing in the movie, here. You read the part of the Mother.
    â€”Me?
    â€”Just read it! I’m Thomas, I’m standing silhouetted against the window, left, my back on the room and a letter clutched in my hands behind me and I say, Dead! Now go ahead.
    â€”But I thought we . . .
    â€”Just read it! Where it says His Mother. Is that the place?
    T HOMAS
    (IN A HOARSE WHISPER)
    Dead!
    H IS M OTHER
    Is that the place? On your cheek? Where you were wounded?
    T HOMAS
    (INSTINCTIVELY RAISING HIS HAND TO HIS CHEEK)
    It’s healed.
    H IS M OTHER
    Like a kiss . . .
    T HOMAS
    (TURNING SLOWLY TO FACE HER)
    Is it so bad, then?
    H IS M OTHER
    No, not bad Thomas no, only . . . you look surprised. Is it true then, what we heard? That you were a hero?
    T HOMAS
    Where?
    H IS M OTHER
    On the . . . battlefield?
    T HOMAS
    I mean where did you hear it.
    H IS M OTHER
    Ambers heard, up at Quantness. What happened?
    T HOMAS
    (DISMISSING IT IMPATIENTLY)
    What happened? A shot, or a flying splinter. How’s one to tell at a moment like that . . . ? I didn’t know myself when it happened.
    Seating himself in the window, THOMAS raises a boot to the sill and smooths letter out against it, intently as though trying to read.
    H IS M OTHER
    (ANXIOUSLY)
    Didn’t know yourself, Thomas?
    (SHE PAUSES, AS HE PAYS HER NO ATTENTION)
    You don’t look well, Thomas. I couldn’t see when you came in, coming before it was light, but I knew your step. You look like you’ve scarcely eaten or slept the whole year you’ve been gone, since it started . . . You’re thinner and tired, too, now I can see. You might have lost an eye.
    T HOMAS
    Tired . . . ?
    H IS M OTHER
    Or been blinded for life.
    T HOMAS
    (EXCITEDLY PLANTING BOOTS, BRANDISHING LETTER)
    I told you I hadn’t slept! How could I, with this?
    H IS M OTHER
    Your uncle never gave things away before. Not a smile, not a penny, and his own brother lying dead and buried in a foreign land . . .
    T HOMAS
    (WITH ELATION)
    And he never died before either! Dying intestate, Lord! I admire that, I must confess it. I don’t know why, but I admire that ‘intestate.’ For him, of all men, to die without leaving a will! And after the way he talked to me then, when we came back from France like beggars looking for a new exile, and you sent me up there to see him? ‘Coming in here in your fine French clothes demanding your rights,’ he said to me, when I asked him for the money that he owed to my father, when I’d spent the morning trimming frayed cuffs and pinning the hem on my father’s coat to try to look fit to call. Five hundred dollars! What was that to him, ‘the prominent coal magnate’ this letter calls him, and here . . .
    (LOOKING AT LETTER AGAIN, WAVING IT)
    â€˜The eminent Pennsylvania political leader,’ shabbier than I was with his tarnished buttons, and a coat gone green at the seams. And not for want, mind. He was proud of it, of saving the cost of a coat. Do you know where he’d got it? Off his coachman’s back, when even the coachman was ashamed to be seen in it. And even at that,would he part with the five hundred dollars? Three hundred, take