Collected Stories Page 23

  “Oh, I think that’s marvelous, marvelous!” she kept repeating.

  He was thinking of submitting it to the one-act play contest. His roommate had urged him to do so.

  “My goodness, why don’t you!” exclaimed Flora.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” John said. “I think the main thing is just expressing one’s self, don’t you?”

  Immediately afterwards they both laughed, remembering that Flora had said the same thing about the story her English teacher had wanted her to send to Harper’s. “Was it accepted?” John asked.

  “No, it came back with a printed card,” she admitted ruefully. “But I don’t care. I’m writing poetry now. They say that you should write poetry while you’re young and feel things keenly.”

  She laughed and caught John’s arm.

  “I feel things very keenly, don’t you?”

  They sat down on the front steps of the boarding house and talked until the bell tolled for one o’clock classes. Both of them had missed their lunch.

  They saw a great deal of each other after that. They had many interests in common. They were both on the staff of the University’s literary magazine and belonged to the Poetry and French Clubs. It was the year of the national election and John became twenty-one just in time to vote. Flora spent hours arguing with him about politics and finally convinced him that he must vote for Norman Thomas. Later they both joined the Young Communists’ League. John became a very enthusiastic radical. He helped operate a secret printing press and distribute pamphlets about the campus attacking fraternities, political control of the University, academic conservatism, and so forth. He was once called before the Dean of Men and threatened with expulsion. Flora thought this was terribly thrilling.

  “If you get expelled,” she promised, “I’ll quit school too!”

  But it all blew over and they both remained in the University.

  All of these things served to draw them closer together. But for some reason they were not altogether at ease with each other. John always had the feeling that something very important was going to happen between them. He could not have explained why he felt that way. Perhaps it was the contagion of Flora’s intensity. When he was with her he felt the kind of suppressed excitement a scientist might feel upon the verge of an important discovery. A constant expectation or suspense. Was Flora conscious of the same thing? Sometimes he felt sure that she was. But her enthusiasm was so diffuse that he could never be sure. One thing after another caught her interest. She was like a precocious child just discovering the world, taking nothing in it for granted, receiving each impression with the fresh wonder of a child but an adult’s mature understanding. About most things she talked very frankly. But once in a while she would become oddly reticent.

  Once he asked her where she came from.

  “Kansas,” she told him.

  “I know, but what place in Kansas?”

  He was surprised to see her face coloring. They were in the reference room of the library that evening, studying together at one of the yellow oak tables. She opened her notebook and ignored his question.

  “What place?” he insisted, wondering why she flushed.

  Abruptly she slammed the notebook shut and faced him with a laugh.

  “What does it matter what place?”

  “I just wanted to know.”

  “Well, I won’t tell you!”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it doesn’t matter where you come from. It only matters where you’re going!”

  “Where are you going, then?”

  “I don’t know!”

  She leaned back in the straight yellow oak chair and shook with laughter.

  “How on earth should I know where I’m going?”

  The librarian approached them with a warning frown.

  “Please not so loud. This room’s for study.”

  “Where are you going?” John repeated under his breath.

  Flora hid her face in the notebook and continued laughing.

  “Where are you going, where are you going, where are you going!” John whispered. He did it to tease her. She looked so funny with the black leather notebook covering her face, only her braided hair showing and her throat flushed Turkey red.

  All at once she jumped up from the table and he saw that her face was contorted with crying. She rushed out of the room and he couldn’t get her to speak a word to him all the way back to her boarding house.

  Some time later he found the name of her home town on the envelope of a letter which she’d forgotten to remove from a book of poems she’d loaned him. The envelope was postmarked from Hardwood, Kansas. John grinned. It was a hick town in the northwestern part of the state and probably the deadest spot on earth….

  Despising himself for doing so, he opened the letter and read it. It was from Flora’s mother and was a classic of its kind. It complained of the money Flora was having to spend on board and books, urged her to spend less time writing nonsense and buckle down to hard work so that she could get a teaching job when she got through with her schooling because times were getting to be very bad…

  “The ground and the people and the business and everything else is dried up around here,” wrote the mother. “I don’t know what things are coming to. It must be God’s judgment, I guess. Three solid years of drought. Looks like this time God is planning to dry the wickedness out of the world instead of drowning it out!”

  That spring John bought a used car for thirty-five dollars and every free afternoon he and Flora drove around the lovely country roads and had picnic lunches which Flora prepared. He was getting used to Flora’s odd appearance and her absurd animation, but other people weren’t. She had become something of a “character” on the campus. John was at this time being rushed by a professional fraternity and he was told that some of the fellows thought that Flora was a very queer person for him to be seen around with. Now and again his mind would go back to their first conversation in the oak grove of the Baptist Female College, the talk about human relations and her inability to cope with them, and it appeared to him that she was not even going half way in attempting to. There was no reason for her to talk so loudly on such eclectic subjects whenever they passed along a crowded corridor of a university building, there was surely no reason for her to be so rude to people she wasn’t interested in, walking abruptly away without an excuse when talk turned to things she classified as inane—which was almost everything John’s other friends talked about.

  Other girls on the campus, he could look at and imagine in the future, settled down into average middle-class life, becoming teachers or entering other professions. But when he looked at Flora he could not see her future, he could not imagine her becoming or doing any known thing, or going back to Hardwood, Kansas, or going anywhere else. She did not fit happily or comfortably into the university cosmos but in what other place or circumstances—he asked himself—could she have found any refuge whatsoever? Perhaps he was no more like other people than she was, but his case was different. He was more adaptable, he demanded a good deal less of people and things. Come up against a barrier, he was of a nature to look for a way around it. But Flora—

  Flora had decided that the English department of the University was hopelessly reactionary and the only course she took an interest in, now, was geology. Their favorite spot, that spring, was an abandoned rock quarry where Flora searched for fossils. She danced around the quarry like a bright, attractive little monkey on a wire, her green smock fluttering in the wind and her voice constantly flowing up to him, sometimes shrill with excitement and sometimes muted with intense absorption.

  “Don’t you ever want to be still?” John asked her.

  “Never till I have to!”

  John would get tired of waiting and would open the lunch-box. She would finally join him on the hilltop, too tired to eat, and would spread her fossils around her and pore delightedly over them while John munched sandwiches of peanut butter and jelly or swiss cheese on rye. T
he rest of the afternoon they would spend talking about literature and life, art and civilization. They both had tremendous admiration for the ancient Greeks and the modern Russians. Greece is the world’s past, said Flora, and Russia is the future—which John thought a brilliant statement, though it sounded a little familiar as if he had come across it somewhere before in a book.

  Their discussions would continue unflaggingly till sundown, but as dusk began to settle they would become a little nervous and constrained, for some reason, and there would be long pauses in their talk, during which it was curiously difficult for them to look at each other. After a while, when it was getting really dark. Flora would abruptly jump up from the grass and brush off her smock.

  “I guess we’d better be going,” she would say. Her voice would sound with the dull, defeated tone of someone who has argued a long time about something very important without making any impression upon the other’s mind. John would feel strangely miserable as he followed her down the hill to where they had parked the old roadster. He would also feel that something had been left unsaid or undone, a feeling of incompletion…

  It was the last Saturday before the end of the spring term. They were going to spend the whole day out in the country, studying for a final examination in a French course which they were taking together. Flora had prepared sandwiches and deviled eggs. And John, with some trepidation, had purchased a quart of red wine. He put the bottle in the side pocket of the roadster and didn’t mention it until after they’d finished eating because he knew Flora didn’t like drinking. She had no moral objections, she said, but thought it was a senseless, wasteful practice. She refused to drink any of the wine. “But you may, if you wish,” she added with a primness that made John laugh.

  They were seated as usual on the grassy hill above the rock quarry. It was called Lover’s Leap. Flora held the notebook which they had prepared together and was quizzing John. She was leaning against one of the large white boulders scattered about the hilltop and John was stretched at her feet. He held the wine bottle between his knees and drank out of the thermos cup. Flora’s constraint at first sight of the bottle wore off. She called him Bacchus.

  “I wish I had time to make you a wreath,” she said. “You’d look too adorable with a wreath of green leaves!”

  “Why don’t you be a nymph?” John asked. “Take off your clothes and be a wood nymph! I’ll chase you through the birch trees!”

  The idea pleased John very much. He laughed loudly. But Flora was embarrassed. She cleared her throat and held the notebook in front of her face, but he could see by the base of her throat that she was blushing. He stopped laughing, feeling somewhat embarrassed himself. He knew what she was thinking. She was thinking what might happen if he should catch her among the birch trees with all her clothes off…

  John drank another cupful of wine. He felt very good. He had removed his jacket and unbuttoned the collar of his shirt and rolled up the sleeves. The sun shone dazzlingly in his eyes, made rainbows in his eyelashes, warmed the bare flesh of his throat and arms. A comfortable glow passed through him. He was newly conscious of the life in his body; flexed his legs, rubbed his stomach and arched his thighs. He no longer listened to the questions that Flora was asking him out of the notebook. She had to repeat them two or three times before they were clear.

  At last she became disgusted and tossed the notebook aside.

  “I believe you’re getting intoxicated!” she told him sharply.

  He looked indolently up at her.

  “Maybe I am! What of it?”

  He noticed that she was not very pretty. Especially not when she drew her brows together and squinted her eyes like that. Her face was irregular and bony-looking. Rather outlandish. So broad at the top and narrow at the bottom. Long pointed nose, and eyes, flecked with different colors, which were too large for the rest of her and always so filled with superfluous brightness. Reminded him of an undersized child he once knew in grammar school. For some reason they called him Peekie and threw rocks at him after school. A timid, ridiculous creature with a high, squeaky voice that everyone mocked. The large boys caught him after school and asked him the meaning of obscene words or pulled the buttons off his knickers. She was like that. A queer person. But there was something exciting about her just as there’d been something exciting about Peekie that made the larger boys want to amuse themselves with him. There was something about her that he wanted to set his hands on in a rough way—twist and pull and tease! Her skin was the most attractive thing about her. It was very fine and smooth and white…

  John’s eyes traveled down her body. She wore a black sweater and a black and white checked shirt. As he looked at her legs a brisk wind tossed the skirt up and he could see the bare flesh above where the stockings ended. He rolled over on his stomach and placed both hands on her thighs. He’d never touched her so intimately before but somehow it seemed a perfectly natural thing to do. She made a startled movement away from him. Suddenly he thought he knew what the important thing was that was going to happen between them. He caught her by the shoulders and tried to pull her down in the grass, but she fought against him wildly. Neither of them said anything. They just fought together like two wild animals, rolling in the grass and clawing at each other. Flora clawed at John’s face and John clawed at Flora’s body. They accepted this thing, this desperate battle between them, as though they’d known all along it was coming, as though it had been inevitable from the start. Neither of them spoke a word until they were at last exhausted and lay still on the grass, breathing heavily and looking up at the slowly darkening sky.

  John’s face was scratched and bleeding in several places. Flora pressed her hands against her stomach and groaned. He had kicked her with his knee trying to make her lie still.

  “It’s all over now,” he said. “I’m not going to hurt you.” But she continued moaning.

  The sun had gone down and dusk gathered. There was a big purplish red blotch in the western sky that looked like a bruised place.

  John got up to his feet and stood silently staring at the angry afterglow. A way off to the left was the university town, beginning to emerge through its leafy clouds with the sparkling animation of a Saturday night in late spring. There would be many gay parties and dances that night. Girls in dresses that seemed to be woven of flowers would whirl about polished dance floors and couples would whisper and laugh behind clumps of ghostly spirea. These were the natural celebrations of youth. He and this girl had been searching for something else. What was it? Again and again later on the search would be made, the effort to find something outside of common experience, digging and rooting among the formless rubble of things for the one lost thing that was altogether lovely—and perhaps every time a repetition of this, violence and ugliness of desire turned to rage…

  He spoke aloud to himself. “We didn’t have anything—we were fooling ourselves.”

  He turned from the dark, haunting beauty of the town and looked down at Flora. She blinked her eyes and drew her breath sharply. She looked almost ugly, her face covered with sweat and grass stain. She was not like a girl. He wondered that he had never noticed before how anonymous was her gender, for this was the very central fact of her nature. She belonged nowhere, she fitted in no place at all, she had no home, no shell, no place of comfort or refuge, she was a fugitive with no place to run to. Others in her position might make some adjustment. The best of whatever is offered, however not right. But Flora would not accept it, none of the ways and means. The most imperfect part of her was the most pure. And that meant—

  “Flora…”

  He held out his hand and put his heart in his eyes. She felt the sudden turning of understanding and took his hand and he pulled her gently to her feet.

  For the first time they stood together in the dark without any fear of each other, their hands loosely clasped and returning each other’s look with sorrowful understanding, unable to help each other except through knowing, each completely separate and a
lone—but no longer strangers…

  (Published 1945)

  One Arm

  In New Orleans in the winter of ‘39 there were three male hustlers usually to be found hanging out on a certain corner of Canal Street and one of those streets that dive narrowly into the ancient part of the city. Two of them were just kids of about seventeen and worth only passing attention, but the oldest of the three was an unforgettable youth. His name was Oliver Winemiller and he had been the light heavyweight champion boxer of the Pacific fleet before he lost an arm. Now he looked like a broken statue of Apollo, and he had also the coolness and impassivity of a stone figure.

  While the two younger boys exhibited the anxious energy of sparrows, darting in and out of bars, flitting across streets and around corners in pursuit of some likely quarry, Oliver would remain in one spot and wait to be spoken to. He never spoke first, nor solicited with a look. He seemed to be staring above the heads of passers-by with an indifference which was not put on, or surly and vain, but had its root in a genuine lack of concern. He paid almost no attention to weather. When the cold rains swept in from the Gulf the two younger boys stood hunched and shuddering in shabby coats that effaced them altogether. But Oliver remained in his skivvy shirt and his dungarees which had faded nearly white from long wear and much washing, and held to his body as smooth as the clothes of sculpture.

  Conversations like this would occur on the corner.

  “Aren’t you afraid of catching cold, young fellow?”

  “No, I don’t catch cold.”

  “Well, there’s a first time for everything.”

  “Sure is.”

  “You ought to go in somewhere and get warmed up.”