Collected Stories Page 20

  He looked at Jane and felt kind of sorry for her, although she was certainly not being very nice to him today.

  Well, she probably felt a little neglected. He should have called her or made some further advances after those blurred goings-on in the bedroom that night.

  His ears were abruptly assailed by the renewed whine of the vacuum cleaner.

  “Jane!”

  “Excuse me just a few minutes. I’m expecting company and I’ve got things to redd up a little.”

  She gave him a quick, hard smile as she pushed the infernal apparatus across the floor. The odor became more and more nauseating. He raised his legs from the floor and stretched full-length on the sofa.

  This sort of treatment he certainly would not put up with!

  “Jane—/Jane!”

  She turned off the cleaner.

  “What is it?”

  “I’m feeling lonesome,” he said.

  “Are you?”

  “Jane, don’t you ever feel lonesome?”

  “Never.”

  “Why don’t you settle down, Jane?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Get married!”

  “Hanh!”

  She started to turn on the vacuum. He grabbed it from her and rested his chin on the handle.

  She put her hands on her hips and stared at him so uncordially that he was almost intimidated.

  “Where do you think Rachel is?”

  “Worried about her?”

  “Oh, no,” he laughed, “I’m not optimistic enough to think she’s gone for good!”

  Jane did not smile nor even glance at him again. She pushed the cleaner into a closet and began pounding the silk pillows into shape. She tugged at the corner of the one on which he was resting.

  This was intolerable!

  He grabbed her by both shoulders and jerked her down on top of him and squashed his mouth against hers. He tried to force her lips open, at the same time pushing his hands down her back. All at once he felt a terrific blow on the side of his head. It stunned him. Green light flashed in his eyes and there was a sickening spasm in his stomach. He leaned over the edge of the sofa and that bicarbonate of soda he had had at the drugstore spilled into the inadequate cup of his hands.

  He wiped them stupidly on his handkerchief.

  “What did you hit me with?”

  It was an unnecessary question. On the floor were shattered bits of blue pottery which he remembered seeing in the shape of a vase that contained a pair of sunflowers.

  “You might have killed me with that,” he said to her sadly.

  She was standing over him, panting, and the disgust on her face was completely unfeigned.

  “You make me sick!” she said. “Now please get out!”

  The room had not changed in his absence, only the light shone through a different window. The light was different. While he was gone upon his unhappy excursion about the city, the light in the room had performed the circuit of a lifetime, from violence to exhaustion. Now it did not stare at him nor make any harsh demands. It stayed near the window in a golden blur. The horsefly had also moved to that other window and showed a recession of power. Against the exterior light its delicate wings still glinted as points of blue flame, but the furious dives at the screen were now interspersed with periods of reflection which seemed to admit that failure was not any longer the least imaginable of all eventualities. Donald crossed immediately to the screen and gently unlatched it to let the fly out. He did this rather silly thing unconsciously, just as he opened doors for cats or children. He was a very kind man. There was something soft and passive about his mind which made it unusually responsive to the problems of creatures smaller or even weaker than himself. He stood awhile at the window. What was it this moment was trying to make him remember? Oh, my God, yes, that long-ago play he was in. That was his first acting job; he played the part of an adolescent coal miner who was killed in the collapse of a shaft. His mother was played by that old bitch Florence Kerwin. At the last curtain she slowly advanced to a window flooded with yellow gelatine and said in a tremulous whisper, “All sunsets are remembrance.” There was a count of five and a very slow curtain. Before the curtain was down the seats were banging up and the little patter of applause was drowned in the shuffle of feet. The mysterious little Alabama spinster who wrote the play was standing breathlessly beside him in the wings as old Florence Kerwin came off.

  The actress glanced at them both and shouted. “The play’s a turkey!”

  The manager was standing there, too, and the spinster author turned to him uncomprehendingly.

  “What is a turkey?” she asked.

  “A bird with feathers!” he told her.

  Donald had put his arms about her shoulders as she began to cry those tears that innocence is bathed in when it blunders trustfully into the glittering microcosm of Broadway, and over the quivering shoulders of Miss Charlotte Something or Other, who never was heard of again, he could see the coldly furious little manager tacking the closing notice upon the board.

  Now Donald began to look around for the note Rachel must have left to explain her very long absence. He looked everywhere that a note might conceivably be left, even under the bed and the stove in case it had blown to the floor. At last he opened the closet where Rachel kept her clothes. Then for the second time that afternoon he received a blow that all but cracked his skull. Her clothes were gone from the closet. Her suitcase was also gone. Almost nothing remained but empty hangers.

  Rachel is not coming back!

  Until his blurred sight focused he moved toward the wall where against her protests he kept the picture of Rachel as a Glow Worm. On her lips was the gay, artificial smile of show business, the spangled tutu was lifted to show her bare thighs. Her bosom was visible through the sheer band of chiffon, no one had ever had such a lovely bosom as Rachel still had, but then…

  In just a few moments the curtain of the finale would be coming down and they would go out to eat and then home to bed. In the hotel room a shade would be lowered for the beginning of something instead of the end. Oh, God, what pleasure those early nights had contained, things that couldn’t even be said with music! Wasn’t it natural to be vain in those days? It wasn’t ridiculous to be vain in those days, both of them young and both of them lovely, then, coming together with such a crazed abandon that daylight would crowd the windows before their hands and arms and mouths would begin to let go of each other. Then they would go out to breakfast without having slept, no stockings on Rachel, he without socks or tie, and gorge themselves, hungry as wolves, on bowls of steaming cereal and cups of sweet black coffee and platters of bacon and eggs. What did they say to each other? It didn’t seem that they ever talked to each other; he couldn’t remember conversations between them. It was all longing and satisfaction of longing. They helped each other undress when they had returned from breakfast, gently each took the other’s shoes off, and they fell on the bed like a pair of rag dolls a child dropped there, their bodies athwart each other in silly positions, so much light in the room for people to sleep in but not enough to keep them awake much longer…

  Oh, Rachel, where have you gone?

  No other refuge was thinkable but sleep, so he went to the bed and lifelessly took off his clothes. Under the covers he doubled his body up in a round, embryonic position. He closed his teeth on a corner of the pillow, the one that was hers, and began to release his tears.

  Rachel, Rachel! Oh, Rachel!

  Then all at once he heard her returning footsteps.

  All in a rush of calling and sobbing she entered. Before he could lift his shoulders from the bed she had fallen upon him. She tore back the covers and scalded his face with her tears. Her cheekbones were awfully sharp. There was so little flesh on her arms, they were actually skinny, and yet they embraced him so fiercely he couldn’t breathe.

  “Oh, Rachel,” he sobbed, and she moaned, “Donald, Donald!”

  The name of a person you love is more than l
anguage—but after a while, when their sobbing had quieted a little, he held her fiery head in the crook of his arm and began to recite the litany of his sorrows. He told her about his misfortunes, the ones of this day and the probable ones of tomorrow. He told her about his illness, his palpitations, his possible death before long. He told her his beauty was lost, his time was now past. He had not been given that part he had counted upon. Strangers had laughed at him on the street. And Jane had misunderstood him; she had struck him over the head with a piece of blue pottery that might have killed him—

  And Rachel whose sorrows were scarcely less than his own, said nothing about them but set her lips on his throat and answered with infinite softness to everything that he told her, “I know, I know!”

  1944 (Published 1954)

  The Malediction

  When a panicky little man looks for a place to stay in an unknown town, the counter-magic of learning abruptly deserts him. The demon spirits that haunted a primitive world are called back out of exile. Slyly, triumphantly, then, they creep once more through the secret pores of rocks and veins of wood that knowledge had forced them out of. The lonely stranger, scared of his shadow and shocked by the sound of his footsteps, marches through watchful ranks of lesser deities with dark intentions. He does not look at houses as much as they look at him. Streets have an attitude toward him. Signposts, windows, doorways all have eyes and mouths that observe him and whisper about him. The tension in him coils up tighter and tighter. If someone smiles to offer a sudden welcome, this simple act may set off a kind of explosion. The skin of his body, as cramped as a new kid glove, may seem to be split down the seams, releasing his spirit to kiss stone walls and dance over distant roof-tops. The demons are once more dispersed, thrust back into limbo; the earth is quiet and docile and mindless again, a dull-witted ox that moves in a circular furrow, to plow up sections of time for man’s convenience.

  This was, in fact, the way that Lucio felt when he first encountered his future companion, the cat. She was the first living creature in all of the strange northern city that seemed to answer the asking look in his eyes. She looked back at him with cordial recognition. Almost he could hear the cat pronouncing his name. “Oh, so it’s you, Lucio!’ she seemed to be saying, “I’ve sat here waiting for you a long, long time!”

  Lucio smiled in return and went on up to the steps on which she was seated. The cat did not move. Instead she purred very faintly. It was a sound that was scarcely a sound. It was a barely distinguishable vibration in the pale afternoon air. Her amber eyes did not blink but they narrowed slightly—anticipating his touch which followed at once. His fingers met the soft crown of her head and moved down over the bony furred ridge of her back: under his fingers he felt the faint, faint quiver of her body as she purred. She raised her head slightly to gaze up at him. It was a feminine gesture; the gesture of a woman who glances up at her lover’s face as he embraces her, a rapt, sightless glance, undeliberate as the act of breathing.

  “Do you like cats?”

  The voice was directly above him. It belonged to a large blonde woman in a gingham dress.

  Lucio flushed guiltily and the woman laughed.

  “Her name is Nitchevo,” said the woman.

  He repeated the name haltingly.

  “Yes, it’s peculiar,” she said. “One of our roomers give her that name Nitchevo. He was a Russian or something. Stayed here before he took sick. He found that cat in an alley and brought her home an’ fed her an’ took care of her an’ let her sleep in his bed, an’ now we can’t get rid of th’ dog-gone thing. Twice already today I thrown cold water on her and still she sits!—I guess she’s waitin’ for him to come back home. But he won’t, though. I was havin’ a conversation the other day with some boys he used to work with down at the plant. It’s too bad now. They tell me he’s right on the verge of kickin’ the bucket out west where he went for his lungs when he started to spit up blood.—Tough luck is what I call it.—He wasn’t a bad sort of a fellow as them Polacks go.”

  Her voice trailed off and she turned away, smiling vaguely, as if to go back inside.

  “Do you keep boarders?” he asked.

  “No,” said the woman. “Everybody along here does but us. My husband is not a very well man anymore. Got hurt in an accident down at the plant and now he’s not good for nothing except being tooken care of. So me—” she sighed, “I got to work out at that bakery down on James Street.”

  She laughed and held up her palms, the sweating lines of which were traced with a chalky whiteness.

  “That’s how I got all this flour. My next-door-neighbor, Mizz Jacoby, tells me I smell like a fresh loaf of bread. Well—I don’t have time to keep boarders, all I can keep is roomers. I got rooms I could show you—if you would be interested.”

  She paused in good-humored reflection—stroked her hips and allowed her gaze to slide off on a gentle excursion among the barren treetops.

  “As a matter of fack,” she continued, “I guess I could show you that room the Russian vacated. If you ain’t superstitious about occupying the room that a man took sick in as bad as that. They say that it ain’t contagious but I don’t know.”

  She turned and went into the house and Lucio followed.

  She showed him the room that the Russian had lately moved out of. It had two windows, one that faced the brick wall of a laundry that smelled of naphtha, another that opened upon a narrow back-yard where greenish-blue cabbage heads were scattered about like static fountains of sea-water among the casual clumps of unweeded grass.

  As he looked out that back window and the woman stood behind him, breathing warmly upon the nape of his neck and smelling of flour, he saw Nitchevo, the cat, picking her way with slow grace among the giant cabbage heads.

  “Nitchevo,” remarked the woman.

  “What does it mean?” he asked her.

  “Oh, I don’t know. I guess something crazy in Russian.—He told me but I forgotten.”

  “I’ll take the room if I can do like the Russian and keep the cat here with me.”

  “Oh!” laughed the woman. “You want to do like the Russian!”

  “Yes,” said Lucio.

  “Him an’ me were pretty good friends,” she told him. “He helped me out with things my husband ain’t good for now that he’s had that accident down at the plant.”

  “Yes?—Well, how about it?”

  “Well—” she sat down on the bed. “I never take nobody in without talking a little. There’s some things I like to be sure of before I make final arrangements—You understand that.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “For instance, I don’t like fairies.”

  “What?”

  “Fairies!—I had one once that used to go out on the street in a red silk scarf and bring men back to the room.—1 don’t like that.”

  “I wouldn’t do that.”

  “Well, I just wanted to know. You looked kind of strange.”

  “I’m foreign.”

  “What kind of foreigner are you?”

  “My folks were Sicilians.”

  “What?”

  “An island near Italy.”

  “Oh.—I guess that’s all right.”

  She looked at him—winked and grinned.

  “Musso!” she said. “That’s what I’ll call you—Musso!”

  Ponderously coquettish, she rose from the bed and poked him in the stomach with her thumb.

  “Well—how about it?” he asked her.

  “Okay.—Have you got a job yet?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Go down to the plant and ask for Oliver Woodson. Tell him Mizz Hutcheson sent yuh.—He‘ll give you a job all right with my recommendation.”

  “Thank you—thank you!”

  She grinned and chuckled and sighed and turned slowly away. “My husband has got the war-news on the radio all of the time.—It gives me a pain in the place that I sit down on.—But a sick man’s got to be humored.—That’s how it is.”

&n
bsp; But Lucio wasn’t listening. He had turned back to the window to look at the cat. She was still down there in the yard, patiently waiting between two large cabbageheads to receive the verdict that settled her future existence. Oh, what a passion of longing there was in her look. But dignity, too.

  Quickly he moved past the woman and down the front stairs.

  “Where are you going?” she called.

  “Out! In back!-For the cat!”

  Lucio got a job at the plant through the man named Woodson. The work that he did was what he had always done, a thing that you did with your fingers without much thought. A chain clanked beneath you, you made some little adjustment, the chain moved on. But each time it moved beyond your place in the line it took a part of you with it. The energy in your fingers was drained out slowly. It was replaced by energy further back in your body. Then this was drained out also. When the day ended you were left feeling empty. What had gone out of you? Where had it gone to? Why?—You bought the evening papers the yelling boys poked toward you. Maybe here was a clue to all of these questions. Perhaps the latest edition would tell you what you lived for and why you labored. But no! The papers avoided that subject. Instead they announced the total amount of tonnage now lost at sea. The number of planes brought down in aerial combat. Cities captured, towns bombarded.—The facts were confusing, the paper fell out of your fingers, your head ached dully…

  Oh, my God, and when you got up in the morning, there was the sun in the same position you saw it the day before—beginning to rise from the graveyard back of the street, as though its nightly custodians were the fleshless dead—seen through the town’s invariable smoke haze, it was a ruddy biscuit, round and red, when it might just as well have been square or shaped like a worm—anything might have been anything else and had as much meaning to it…

  The foreman seemed to dislike him, or maybe suspect him of something. Often he stopped directly behind Lucio’s back and watched him working—stood there an unnecessarily long time and before he moved off always grunted a little and in a way that suggested any number of menacing possibilities.