Collected Stories Read online

  Listen, Carl, I said, You’ve got eighty-six bucks. You know what you ought to do with it?

  Naw. What?

  Send Irene a present!

  Sure that would be swell, said Carl, except I wouldn’t know where to send it to.

  Isn’t she still in the Quarter?

  Hell, no, she took a powder right after that big blowup at the spring display. Somebody in the outfit got big-hearted and they dropped the charges against her. Me, I got sprung about the same time, too, but when I dropped around at her studio, it was empty, by Jesus, all the pictures down off the walls, everything gone except—

  Except what, Carl?

  He grinned.

  Do you remember that thing you said to her one night that she liked so much that she wrote it down on the wall?

  Uh-huh, sure I remember! There is only one aristocracy, I repeated, the aristocracy of passionate souls.

  Yeah! said Carl. Well, that was still there.

  Then he got up. I got to play another number, he said. What would you like?

  Two bits, I told him. I want to cry in some beer.

  c. 1940 (Not previously published)

  The Dark Room

  “And your husband, Mrs. Lucca, how long has he been out of employment?”

  “God knows how long.”

  “I’ve got to have a definite answer, please.”

  “It musta been since 1930. Maybe longer than that. My husband, he got laid off cause his head was no good. He couldn’t remember no more.”

  “He hasn’t worked since?”

  “No. He been sick ever since. His head is no good.”

  “Your sons?”

  “Sons? Frank and Tony went off. Frank went to Chicago I think. I don’t know. Tony was never no good. The other two, Silva and Lucio still are in school.”

  “They’re attending grammar school?”

  “Still are in school.”

  Mrs. Lucca’s broom delved with sudden vigor beneath the bare kitchen table. Brought out a lead spoon, some scraps of paper and a piece of twine. She picked up the spoon and placed it on the table.

  “I see,” said Miss Morgan. “And you have a daughter?”

  “Yes. One girl.”

  “She is employed?”

  “No. She don’t work.”

  “Her name and age, please.”

  “Name Tina. How old she is? She come just before Silva. Silva fifteen.”

  “That would make her about sixteen, I suppose?”

  “Sixteen.”

  “I see. I would like to talk to your daughter, Mrs. Lucca.”

  “Talk to her?”

  “Yes, where is she?”

  “In there,” said Mrs. Lucca, pointing to a closed door.

  The social worker got up.

  “May I see her?”

  “No, don’t go in there. She don’t like it.”

  Miss Morgan stiffened.

  “Doesn’t like it? Why not? Is she ill?”

  “I dunno whatsamatter with her,” said Mrs. Lucca. “She don’t want nobody to go in the room with her and she don’t want the light turned on.”

  The broom reached under the stove and extracted a broken cup handle. Mrs. Lucca grunted as she stooped to pick it up. She tossed it into the coal scuttle.

  “What is the matter with her, Mrs. Lucca?”

  “Who? Tina? I dunno.”

  “Really! How long has this been going on?”

  “God knows how long.”

  “Please, Mrs. Lucca, try to give straight answers to my questions. Evading them won’t improve matters any.”

  Mrs. Lucca seemed mildly puzzled.

  “How long has she been in that room?” repeated Miss Morgan.

  “How long? Maybe ‘bout six monts.”

  “Six months? Are you sure?”

  “She started actin’ queer long about New Year’s. He didn’t come over that night. It was the first night he didn’t come over in a long time and it was New Year’s. She called up his place and his ma told her he was out and not to call him no more. She said he was going to marry some Jewish girl.”

  “He? Who is he?”

  “The boy she went steady with a long time. A Jewish boy named Sol.”

  “Was that what made her start behaving like this?”

  “Maybe it was. I dunno. She hung up the receiver and come in the kitchen and heated some water. She said she had pains in her stomach.”

  “Did she?”

  “I dunno. Maybe she did. Anyway she went to bed with it and ain’t been up since.”

  Mrs. Lucca’s broom made timid excursions around the chair in which the social worker was seated. Miss Morgan drew her feet in quickly with the fastidious gesture of a cat avoiding spilled water. The grimy broom straws moved aimlessly off toward the other end of the room. “You mean that she’s been shut up in that room ever since?” “Yeah.”

  “How long has that been?”

  “Since last New Year’s.”

  “Six months?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Doesn’t she ever come out?”

  “She comes out when she got to go to bathroom. She comes out then but that’s the only time she ever comes out.”

  “What does she do in there?”

  “I dunno. She just lays in there in the dark and she won’t come out. Sometimes she makes a lot of noise, crying and all. The folks upstairs complain sometimes. But mostly she don’t say nothing. She just lays in there on the bed.”

  “Does she eat?”

  “Yeah, she eats. Sometimes.”

  “Sometimes? You mean she doesn’t take regular meals?”

  “Not regular. Just what he brings her.”

  “He? Who do you mean, Mrs. Lucca?”

  “Sol.”

  “Sol?”

  “Yeah, Sol, the boy she went steady with such a long time.”

  “You mean he comes?”

  “Yeah, he comes sometimes.”

  “I thought you said he got married to some Jewish girl?”

  “He did. He married that Jewish girl his folks wanted him to.”

  “And still he comes to see your daughter?”

  “Yeah, he comes to see her. He’s the only one she lets in the room with her.”

  “He goes in there? In the room? With the girl?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Does she know he’s married to that other girl?”

  “I dunno what she knows. I can’t tell. She don’t say nothing.”

  “And yet she lets him come in and talk to her?”

  “She lets him come in but he don’t talk to her none though.” “Doesn’t talk to her? What does he do, Mrs. Lucca?”

  “I dunno. It’s dark in there. I can’t tell. Nobody says nothing. He just goes in there and stays awhile and comes out.”

  “You mean, Mrs. Lucca, you let that man go into the room with her, your daughter, her being in such a condition as that?”

  “Yeah. She likes him to go in there with her. It makes her quiet for a while. When he don’t come around she takes on something awful. The folks upstairs complain about it sometimes. But when he comes she’s better. She stops making noise. And he brings her something to eat every time and she eats whatever he brings her.”

  The broom made a wide, circular sweep, piling trash into one corner.

  “It helps out that way,” continued Mrs. Lucca. “We don’t have much. Just what we can get from relief and that don’t amount to so much. Sometimes we don’t even…”

  “Mama, can I have fifteen cents?”

  It was one of the boys, Silva or Lucio, sticking his head through the open window off the fire escape. His nose was bloody.

  “Give me fifteen cents, Mama. I bet Jeep he couldn’t lick me and he did and he says he‘ll beat me up worse if I don’t come across wit’ the dough!”

  “Shut up,” said Mrs. Lucca.

  The boy looked, startled, at Miss Morgan and went clattering back down the fire escape. Shrill cries were heard from the alley
and the running of many feet.

  Miss Morgan’s gaze had not wavered. She was unaware of interruption.

  “I suppose you know, Mrs. Lucca, that you can be held responsible!”

  “For what?”

  There was a blank, strained moment between them.

  “Never mind. How long has this thing been going on?”

  “What thing?”

  “Between this man and your daughter?”

  “Tina? Sol? I dunno! God knows how long!”

  “That isn’t an answer, Mrs. Lucca.”

  “You want to know how long she’s been going with Sol? Almost since she started to school when she was eleven years old.”

  “I mean how long has this man been coming into her room like that?”

  The broom shook itself petulantly and then continued its vague meanderings about the bare kitchen floor.

  “Maybe five or six monts. I dunno.”

  “And you and your husband, Mrs. Lucca, neither of you made any effort to keep him away?”

  Mrs. Lucca looked down at the shuffling straws in mute concentration.

  “Your husband, Mrs. Lucca, did nothing to prevent this man’s coming here?”

  “My husband is been sick a long time.”

  Mrs. Lucca placed a tired forefinger against her forehead.

  “He don’t think good anymore. And me, I can’t do nothing. I got to work all the time. We get along the best that we can. What happens it isn’t our fault. It’s God’s will. That’s all we can say. Miss Morgan.”

  “1 see, Mrs. Lucca.”

  The voice seemed to draw a white chalk line through the air. Mrs. Lucca stopped sweeping and waited. She knew that a verdict was on the point of being delivered. She steeled herself for the words vWthout visibly tensing.

  “Mrs. Lucca, the girl will have to be taken away.”

  “Tina? She won’t like that.”

  “I’m afraid we can’t consult her washes about the matter. Nor yours, Mrs. Lucca.”

  “I don’t think she‘ll want to be going away nowhere. You don’t know Tina. She’s stubborn. She screams something awful whenever you try to make her do something she don’t want to do. She screams and kicks and bites so you can’t come near her.”

  “She‘ll have to go.”

  “I hope she will. I sure hope she will. It ain’t decent for her to be laying in there in the dark all the time. It’s bad for the boys.”

  “Boys?”

  “Yeah, Silva and Lucio. It ain’t decent for them, her layin’ there naked like that.”

  “Naked!”

  “Yeah. She won’t keep a stitch of clothes on her.”

  The notebook slapped together with an exclamatory sound. Miss Morgan screwed the lid on her fountain pen.

  “She‘ll have to be taken away in the morning and held for a long observation.”

  “I hope she‘ll go but I don’t think she will unless he takes her.”

  “He? You mean?”

  “Sol.”

  “Sol!”

  “Yeah, the boy she went steady vWth such a long time.”

  “I see! I see!”

  Mrs. Lucca’s broom resumed its slow motion, backwards and forwards, without any obvious purpose. A dry skin of onion rattled under the grimy straws. Backwards and forwards. The damp boards creaked.

  c. 1940 (Not previously published)

  The Mysteries of the Joy Rio

  I

  Perhaps because he was a watch repairman, Mr. Gonzales had grown to be rather indifferent to time. A single watch or clock can be a powerful influence on a man, but when a man lives among as many watches and clocks as crowded the tiny, dim shop of Mr. Gonzales, some lagging behind, some skipping ahead, but all ticking monotonously on in their witless fashion, the multitude of them may be likely to deprive them of importance, as a gem loses its value when there are too many just like it which are too easily or cheaply obtainable. At any rate, Mr. Gonzales kept very irregular hours, if he could be said to keep any hours at all, and if he had not been where he was for such a long time, his trade would have suffered badly. But Mr. Gonzales had occupied his tiny shop for more than twenty years, since he had come to the city as a boy of nineteen to work as an apprentice to the original owner of the shop, a very strange and fat man of German descent named Kroger, Emiel Kroger, who had now been dead a long time. Emiel Kroger, being a romantically practical Teuton, had taken time, the commodity he worked with, with intense seriousness. In practically all his behavior he had imitated a perfectly adjusted fat silver watch. Mr. Gonzales, who was then young enough to be known as Pablo, had been his only sustained flirtation with the confusing, quicksilver world that exists outside of regularities. He had met Pablo during a watchmakers’ convention in Dallas, Texas, where Pablo, who had illegally come into the country from Mexico a few days before, was drifting hungrily about the streets, and at that time Mr. Gonzales, Pablo, had not grown plump but had a lustrous dark grace which had completely bewitched Mr. Kroger. For as I have noted already, Mr. Kroger was a fat and strange man, subject to the kind of bewitchment that the graceful young Pablo could cast. The spell was so strong that it interrupted the fleeting and furtive practices of a lifetime in Mr. Kroger and induced him to take the boy home with him, to his shop-residence, where Pablo, now grown to the mature and fleshy proportions of Mr. Gonzales, had lived ever since, for three years before the death of his protector and for more than seventeen years after that, as the inheritor of shop-residence, clocks, watches, and everything else that Mr. Kroger had owned except a few pieces of dining-room silver which Emiel Kroger had left as a token bequest to a married sister in Toledo.

  Some of these facts are of dubious pertinence to the little history which is to be unfolded. The important one is the fact that Mr. Gonzales had managed to drift enviably apart from the regularities that rule most other lives. Some days he would not open his shop at all and some days he would open it only for an hour or two in the morning, or in the late evening when other shops had closed, and in spite of these caprices he managed to continue to get along fairly well, due to the excellence of his work, when he did it, the fact that he was so well established in his own quiet way, the advantage of his location in a neighborhood where nearly everybody had an old alarm clock which had to be kept in condition to order their lives (this community being one inhabited mostly by people with small-paying jobs), but it was also due in measurable part to the fact that the thrifty Mr. Kroger, when he finally succumbed to a chronic disease of the bowels, had left a tidy sum in government bonds, and this capital, bringing in about a hundred and seventy dollars a month, would have kept Mr. Gonzales going along in a commonplace but comfortable fashion even if he had declined to do anything whatsoever. It was a pity that the late, or rather long-ago, Mr. Kroger, had not understood what a fundamentally peaceable sort of young man he had taken under his wing. Too bad he couldn’t have guessed how perfectly everything suited Pablo Gonzales. But youth does not betray its true nature as palpably as the later years do, and Mr. Kroger had taken the animated allure of his young protégé, the flickering lights in his eyes and his quick, nervous movements, his very grace and slimness, as meaning something difficult to keep hold of. And as the old gentleman declined in health, as he did quite steadily during the three years that Pablo lived with him, he was never certain that the incalculably precious bird flown into his nest was not one of sudden passage but rather the kind that prefers to keep a faithful commitment to a single place, the nest-building kind, and not only that, but the very-rare-indeed-kind that gives love back as generously as he takes it. The long-ago Mr. Kroger had paid little attention to his illness, even when it entered the stage of acute pain, so intense was his absorption in what he thought was the tricky business of holding Pablo close to him. If only he had known that for all this time after his decease the boy would still be in the watchshop, how it might have relieved him! But on the other hand, maybe this anxiety, mixed as it was with so much tenderness and sad delight, was actually
a blessing, standing as it did between the dying old man and a concern with death.

  Pablo had never flown. But the sweet bird of youth had flown from Pablo Gonzales, leaving him rather sad, with a soft yellow face that was just as round as the moon. Clocks and watches he fixed with marvelous delicacy and precision, but he paid no attention to them; he had grown as obliviously accustomed to their many small noises as someone grows to the sound of waves who has always lived by the sea. Although he wasn’t aware of it, it was actually light by which he told time, and always in the afternoons when the light had begun to fail (through the narrow window and narrower, dusty skylight at the back of the shop), Mr. Gonzales automatically rose from his stooped position over littered table and gooseneck lamp, took off his close-seeing glasses with magnifying lenses, and took to the street. He did not go far and he always went in the same direction, across town toward the river where there was an old opera house, now converted into a third-rate cinema, which specialized in the showing of cowboy pictures and other films of the sort that have a special appeal to children and male adolescents. The name of this movie house was the Joy Rio, a name peculiar enough but nowhere nearly so peculiar as the place itself.

  The old opera house was a miniature of all the great opera houses of the old world, which is to say its interior was faded gilt and incredibly old and abused red damask which extended upwards through at least three tiers and possibly five. The upper stairs, that is, the stairs beyond the first gallery, were roped off and unlighted and the top of the theater was so peculiarly dusky, even with the silver screen flickering far below it, that Mr. Gonzales, used as he was to close work, could not have made it out from below. Once he had been there when the lights came on in the Joy Rio, but the coming on of the lights had so enormously confused and embarrassed him, that looking up was the last thing in the world he felt like doing. He had buried his nose in the collar of his coat and had scuttled out as quickly as a cockroach makes for the nearest shadow when a kitchen light comes on.