Frolic of His Own by William Gaddis Page B

it or leave it, he said, and a deed to oblivion, the deed to this place he’d been stuck with on a bad debt.
    (CHUCKLING WITH RELISH)
    What a fine pair of tramps we must have made, and this fortune between us, when he sent me off to see his man Bagby. This same one, his General Manager, the same Bagby that’s written this letter. ‘Bagby takes care of such things,’ he said when he sent me off. Seven years ago, this same one, this same Bagby.
    (PACING THE ROOM, MUTTERING WITH RELISH)
    Sitting up stark naked in the middle of his bed gaping at a comic print, a bag of jawbreakers beside him and a hard hat on his head. ‘Come in,’ he says to me, into his dingy furnished room. ‘There’s your money on the chiffonier, I’ve no doubt you’ll want to count it.’ ‘Here? The devil it is,’ I told him, without even touching the envelope. ‘My uncle said gold, and where’s the deed that he talked about?’ ‘Suit yourself,’ says Bagby, cracking a jawbreaker in his teeth, ‘in the top drawer,’ and back he went to his comic. There it was, three hundred dollars counted out in the drawer, and the deed to this place with it. And now . . . !
    (TURNING HALF TOWARD HER)
    â€˜Bagby takes care of such things . . . ’ By God, and he does!
    H IS M OTHER
    Thomas! . . . Language fit for the battlefield, you’re not in camp now among strangers and animals.
    T HOMAS
    (APPROACHING HER)
    A battlefield, that’s what it’s been all our lives! And now? Isn’t it a time for . . . ‘language,’ as you say? To owe no one, after . . . all this. The years of all this, and of talking poormouth at Quantness . . .
    H IS M OTHER
    You’ve earned your keep up at Quantness.
    T HOMAS
    And to never be forced into any man’s debt again!
    H IS M OTHER
    Do they know?
    T HOMAS
    Know? Up at Quantness? Of course. And the first thing the Major said, when I told him about it last night, was ‘Get up there and claimit.’ Do you think he wants the mines, the coal, all of it seized by the Federal government? Confiscated, if I don’t claim it? Do you know how much we need coal?
    H IS M OTHER
    (LOOKING PAST HIM TO WINDOW)
    I do know, Thomas.
    T HOMAS
    When I rode in there last night, on furlough, and found this news waiting, why I . . . I was a hero, home from the war, as though I’d lived there all my life and not just these three years since I married.
    H IS M OTHER
    (RUEFULLY)
    They’ve needed you more than you did them, Thomas. The work you put in on Quantness cotton while this place ran to ruin . . .
    Standing over her, THOMAS gestures imploringly, then turns and crosses to the window, where he stands staring out.
    T HOMAS
    By heaven, what a day!
    H IS M OTHER
    (AFTER PAUSE)
    They’ve stopped the pension, Thomas.
    T HOMAS
    (TURNING)
    Pension?
    (STARES AT HER FOR A MOMENT, THEN BREAKS INTO LAUGHTER)
    My father’s pension? That . . . how-much-was-it-a-month?
    (ADVANCING TOWARD HER AGAIN)
    Listen, don’t you understand? This, what we have now, it’s worth all the pensions they ever paid?
    (HALF TURNING FROM HER DOWNSTAGE CENTER)
    It was an insult, that pension, coming year after year to remind us what injustice was, in case we’d forgotten. In case I’d been able to forget all the plans that he had for me, for a great career in public life, bringing me up to read Rousseau, believing the ‘natural goodness of man . . . ’
    Turning to her impulsively, THOMAS goes down to one knee beside her chair, and she throws up a hand to save the lamp from falling.
    Listen, we can wait our lives out, Mother! Waiting for something like this . . . Waiting for something to happen, isn’t that what people do? What keeps them alive, this waiting? What . . . even my father, wasn’t he? Waiting for something to