Read Online Moise and the World of Reason by Tennessee Williams - Free Book Online

was moving gradually into the dominant position.
    â€œMoise, this chicken is turning to a rooster. Have you got some lubricant in the room?”
    â€œI think there’s a bit of petroleum jelly under the bed,” she murmured vaguely. “Now please excuse me again. I want to finish a mural in the bathroom.”
    Even with the lubricant on, I made him say
“Wow!”
    â€œToo much?”
    â€œToo soon, take it easier, love, yours wasn’t the only cherry.”
    Then, having been joined in wedlock by mutual penetration (a complete sort of wedlock that’s often denied to straights), we went to his pad together. It was colder than Moise’s, and far stranger, but again his entrance warmed an unheated space.

    About the homelife, now, in Thelma, Alabama. You’ve doubtless surmised that I had a possessively devoted mother and a father that loved her but was brutal to me because, when he stumbled home drunk from the stave mill he worked for and the bar he frequented, he’d often find the bedroom locked against him and would break in the door and find my mother clinging to me on the bed as if I could protect her from his liquored ravishment of her.
    One night when I was fifteen he snatched me off the bed and shouted, “Get the fuck out of here and don’t come back here ever!” which is just what I did, heading North that night like a bird migrating instinctively that way.
    They had no idea at home that I’d thumbed my way to New York till six months later when Lance discovered that I was listed among those listed by the Bureau of Missing Persons on a nationwide scale. Well, the Bureau never tracked me down but a few days later I wrote a letter to Mother, giving her Moise’s address for mine, and then began the flow of Mother’s letters pleading that I come home, which were delivered to me by Moise. At first she tried to get me back to Thelma with pitifully false enticements, such as “Your father is a changed man, quit drinking, and is anxious as me about you.” “Son, you must come home, you must continue your schooling and develop your talent, your English teacher has told me you write the most beautiful themes she’s ever read in her thirty years of teaching.”
    But then the tone of her letters changed into reproaches and into confessions of illness.
    I couldn’t read them alone, I would read them aloud to Moise and Lance.
    â€œSon, you broke my heart and I can’t recover, I have lost twenty pounds since you ran away to that city which I hear is a modern Babylon that will ruin you body and soul. The doctor says that my grief has affected my nerves and my heart and is bringing on female trouble.
    â€œSon, you know you love Thelma and you are the star of my life which has not been easy. I’m selling garden products to send you bus fare back here and you couldn’t be so heartless as not to return. But if you don’t, I will catch a bus myself and come up there if it kills me. So far I haven’t informed the truant officer, but you are a runaway schoolboy and can be arrested up there and brought home willing or not. Now please don’t force me to do that but you know that I will if you don’t. Meanwhile it is winter and you left in wrong clothes. Tomorrow I’m going to pack your corduroy suit and heavy things in a box and take them to the post office and mail them to you at that address you gave me which I suspect is a false one. Now, son, write me at once, say you’re coming back to us, don’t break the heart of your mother with time running out so fast.
Do not ignore this letter
,
I mean every word I say!
Your father sends his love. He comes straight home from the mill, never stops off at the bar, drinks nothing but milk and sweet cider.”
    I read this letter to Moise and to Lance at Moise’s.
    Moise said, “Love, I think”
    She didn’t continue the sentence so I don’t know what