Collected Stories Read online

  October 1945 (Not previously published)

  Tent Worms

  Billy Foxworth had been grumbling for days about the tent worms that were building great, sagging canopies of transparent gray tissue among the thickly grown berry trees that surrounded their summer cottage on the Cape. His wife, Clara, had dreams and preoccupations of her own, and had listened without attention to these grumblings. Once in a while she had looked at him darkly and thought. If he but knew! He has more to worry about than those tent worms! “Tent worms? What are tent worms?” she once murmured dreamily but her mind wandered off while he defined them to her. He must have gone on talking about them for quite a while, for her mind described a wide orbit among her private reflections before he brought her back to momentary attention by slamming his coffee cup down on the saucer and exclaiming irritably, “Stop saying ‘Yes, yes, yes’ when you’re not listening to a goddamn word I say!”

  “I heard you,” she protested crossly. “You were maundering like an old woman about those worms! Am I supposed to sit here starry-eyed with excitement while you—”

  “All right,” he said. “You asked me what they were and I was trying to tell you.”

  “I don’t care what they are,” she said. “Maybe they bother you but they don’t bother me.”

  “Stop being childish!” he snapped.

  They had a sun terrace on the back of their cottage where Clara reclined in a deck chair all afternoon, enjoying her private reflections while Billy worked at his typewriter on the screened porch just within. For five years Clara had not thought about the future. She was thinking about it now. It had become a tangible thing once more, owing to the information she had, to which Billy did not have access, in spite of the fact that it concerned Billy even more than herself, because it concerned what was happening to Billy that Billy did not or was not supposed to know about. No, he did not know about it, she was practically sure that he didn’t, or if he did, it was only in his unconscious, kept back there because he refused to accept it or didn’t even dare to suspect it. That was why he had become so childish this summer, maundering like an idiot about those worms when it was August and they would be leaving here soon, going back to New York, and certainly Billy would never come back here again and she, God knows—let the worms eat the whole place up, let them eat the trees and the house and the beach and the ocean itself as far as she was concerned!

  But about three o’clock one afternoon she smelled smoke. She looked around and there was Billy with a torch of old newspapers, setting fire to the tent worms’ canopies of webby gray stuff. There he was in his khaki shorts holding up a flaming torch of newspapers to the topmost branches of the little stunted trees where the tent worms had built their houses.

  He was burning them out, childishly, senselessly, in spite of the fact that there were thousands of them. Yes, looking over the trees from the sun terrace she could see that the tent worms had spread their dominion from tree to tree till now, finally, near the end of the summer, there was hardly a tree that did not support one or more of the gray tissue canopies that devoured their leaves. Still Billy was attempting to combat them single-handed with his silly torches of paper.

  Clara got up and let out a loud cry of derision.

  “What in hell do you think you are doing!”

  “I am burning out the tent worms,” he answered gravely.

  “Are you out of your mind? There are millions of them!”

  “That’s all right. I’m going to burn them all out before we leave here!”

  She gave up. Turned away and sank back in her deck chair.

  All that afternoon the burning continued. It was no good protesting, although the smoke and odor were quite irritating. The best that Clara could do was drink, and so she did. She made herself a thermos of Tom Collinses and she drank them all afternoon while her husband attacked the insects with his paper torches. Along about five o’clock Clara Foxworth began to feel happy and carefree. Her dreams took a sanguine turn. She saw herself that winter in expensive mourning, in handsomely tailored black suits with a little severe jewelry and a cape of black furs, and she saw herself with various escorts, whose features were still indistinguishable, in limousines that purred comfortably through icy streets from a restaurant to a theater, from a theater to an apartment, not yet going to nightclubs so soon after—

  Ah! Her attitude was healthy, she was not being insincere and pretending to feel what she didn’t. Pity? Yes, she felt sorry for him but when love had ceased being five or six years ago, why make an effort to think it would be a loss?

  Toward sundown the phone rang.

  It rang so rarely now that the sound surprised her. Not only she but their whole intimate circle—of friends?—had drawn back from them into their own concerns, as actors disperse to their offstage lives when a curtain had fallen and they’re released from performance.

  She took her time about answering, having already surmised that the caller would be their doctor, and it was.

  Professional cheer is uncheering.

  “How’s it going, sweetie?”

  “How’s what going?”

  “Your escape from the poisonous vapors of the metropolis?”

  “If that’s a serious question. Doc, I’ll give you a serious answer. Your patient is nostalgic for the poisonous vapors and so is creating some here.”

  “What, what?”

  “Is the connection bad?”

  “No, just wondered what you meant.”

  “I will enlighten you gladly. Billy, your patient, is polluting the air of our summer retreat by burning out something called tent worms. The smoke is suffocating, worse than carbon monoxide in a traffic jam in a tunnel. I’m coughing and choking and still he keeps at it.”

  “Well, at least he’s still active.”

  “Oh, that he is. Would you like me to call him to the phone?”

  “No, just tell him I—no, don’t tell him I called, he might wonder why.”

  “Why in hell didn’t you tell him so he’d know and—”

  She didn’t know how to complete her protestation so she cried into the phone: “I can’t bear it, it’s more than I can bear. My mind is full of awful, awful thought, speculations about how long I’ll have to endure it, when will it be finished.”

  “Easy, sweetie.” “Easy for you, not me. And don’t call me sweetie. I’m not a sweetie, there’s nothing sweet about me. I’ve turned savage. Unless he stops burning those tent worms. I’m going to go, alone, back to the city, at least no diseased vegetation and paper torches, and him staggering out there. Got to hang up. He’s coming toward the house.”

  “Clara, it’s hard to be human, but for God’s sake try.”

  “Can you tell me how to? Write me a prescription so that I can?”

  She glanced out the picture window between the phone and the slow, exhausted return of Billy toward the sun deck, which the sun was deserting.

  “Clara, love takes disguises. Your mind is probably full of fantasies that you’ll dismiss with shame when this ordeal is over.”

  “You scored a point there. I’m full of fantasies of a bit of a future.”

  “You mentioned a prescription.”

  “Yes. What?”

  “Recollection of how it was before.”

  “Seems totally unreal.”

  “Right now, yes, but try to.”

  “Thanks. I’ll try to breathe. If only the sea wind would blow the smoke away…”

  When she returned to the sun deck he had completed his exhausted return. He had a defeated look and he had burned himself in several places and applied poultices of wet baking soda, which smelled disagreeably. He took the other sun chair and pulled it a little away from where his wife was reclining and turned it so that she wouldn’t look at his face.

  “Giving it up?” she murmured.

  “Ran out of paper and matches,” he answered faintly.

  There was no more talk between them. The tide was returning shoreward and now the s
mooth water was lapping quietly near them.

  Tent worms, she said to herself.

  Then she said it out loud: “Tent worms!”

  “Why are you shouting about it, it’s nothing to shout about. A blight on vegetation is like a blight on your body.”

  “This is just a place rented for summer and we‘ll never come back.”

  “A man in his youth is like a summer place,” he said in such a soft, exhausted voice that she didn’t catch it.

  “What was that?”

  He repeated it to her a little louder.

  Then she knew that he knew. Their chairs remained apart on the sun deck as the sun disappeared altogether.

  As dark falls, a pair of long companions respond to the instinct of drawing closer together.

  Unsteadily she rose from her deck chair and hauled it closer to his. His scorched hand rested on his chair arm. After a while, the sentimental moon risen from the horizon to replace the sun’s vigil, she placed her hand over his.

  A chill wind of shared apprehension swept over the moonlit sun deck and their fingers wound together. She thought of their early passion for each other and how time had burned it down as he attempted to burn the tent worms away from their summer place to which they, no, would never return, separately or together.

  c. 1945 (Published 1980)

  Desire and the Black Masseur

  From his very beginning this person, Anthony Burns, had betrayed an instinct for being included in things that swallowed him up. In his family there had been fifteen children and he the one given least notice, and when he went to work, after graduating from high school in the largest class on the records of that institution, he secured his job in the largest wholesale company of the city. Everything absorbed him and swallowed him up, and still he did not feel secure. He felt more secure at the movies than anywhere else. He loved to sit in the back rows of the movies where the darkness absorbed him gently so that he was like a particle of food dissolving in a big hot mouth. The cinema licked at his mind with a tender, flickering tongue that all but lulled him to sleep. Yes, a big motherly Nannie of a dog could not have licked him better or given him sweeter repose than the cinema did when he went there after work. His mouth would fall open at the movies and saliva would accumulate in it and dribble out the sides of it and all his being would relax so utterly that all the prickles and tightenings of a whole day’s anxiety would be lifted away. He didn’t follow the story on the screen but watched the figures. What they said or did was immaterial to him, he cared about only the figures who warmed him as if they were cuddled right next to him in the dark picture house and he loved every one of them but the ones with shrill voices.

  The timidest kind of a person was Anthony Burns, always scuttling from one kind of protection to another but none of them ever being durable enough to suit him.

  Now at the age of thirty, by virtue of so much protection, he still had in his face and body the unformed look of a child and he moved like a child in the presence of critical elders. In every move of his body and every inflection of speech and cast of expression there was a timid apology going out to the world for the little space that he had been somehow elected to occupy in it. His was not an inquiring type of mind. He only learned what he was required to learn and about himself he learned nothing. He had no idea of what his real desires were. Desire is something that is made to occupy a larger space than that which is afforded by the individual being, and this was especially true in the case of Anthony Burns. His desires, or rather his basic desire, was so much too big for him that it swallowed him up as a coat that should have been cut into ten smaller sizes, or rather there should have been that much more of Burns to make it fit him.

  For the sins of the world are really only its partialities, its incompletions, and these are what sufferings must atone for. A wall that has been omitted from a house because the stones were exhausted, a room in a house left unfurnished because the householder’s funds were not sufficient—these sorts of incompletions are usually covered up or glossed over by some kind of makeshift arrangement. The nature of man is full of such makeshift arrangements, devised by himself to cover his incompletion. He feels a part of himself to be like a missing wall or a room left unfurnished and he tries as well as he can to make up for it. The use of imagination, resorting to dreams or the loftier purpose of art, is a mask he devises to cover his incompletion. Or violence such as a war, between two men or among a number of nations, is also a blind and senseless compensation for that which is not yet formed in human nature. Then there is still another compensation. This one is found in the principle of atonement, the surrender of self to violent treatment by others with the idea of thereby clearing one’s self of his guilt. This last way was the one that Anthony Burns unconsciously had elected.

  Now at the age of thirty he was about to discover the instrument of his atonement. Like all other happenings in his life, it came about without intention or effort.

  One afternoon, which was a Saturday afternoon in November, he went from his work in the huge wholesale corporation to a place with a red neon sign that said “Turkish Baths and Massage.” He had been suffering lately from a vague sort of ache near the base of his spine and somebody else employed at the wholesale corporation had told him that he would be relieved by massage. You would suppose that the mere suggestion of such a thing would frighten him out of his wits, but when desire lives constantly with fear, and no partition between them, desire must become very tricky; it has to become as sly as the adversary, and this was one of those times when desire outwitted the enemy under the roof. At the very mention of the word “massage,” the desire woke up and exuded a sort of anesthetizing vapor all through Burns’ nerves, catching fear off guard and allowing Burns to slip by it. Almost without knowing that he was really going, he went to the baths that Saturday afternoon.

  The baths were situated in the basement of a hotel, right at the center of the keyed-up mercantile nerves of the downtown section, and yet the baths were a tiny world of their own. Secrecy was the atmosphere of the place and seemed to be its purpose. The entrance door had an oval of milky glass through which you could only detect a glimmer of light. And even when a patron had been admitted, he found himself standing in labyrinths of partitions, of corridors and cubicles curtained off from each other, of chambers with opaque doors and milky globes over lights and sheathings of vapor. Everywhere were agencies of concealment. The bodies of patrons, divested of their clothing, were swatched in billowing tent-like sheets of white fabric. They trailed barefooted along the moist white tiles, as white and noiseless as ghosts except for their breathing, and their faces all wore a nearly vacant expression. They drifted as if they had no thought to conduct them.

  But now and again, across the central hallway, would step a masseur. The masseurs were Negroes. They seemed very dark and positive against the loose white hangings of the baths. They wore no sheets, they had on loose cotton drawers, and they moved about with force and resolution. They alone seemed to have an authority here. Their voices rang out boldly, never whispering in the sort of apologetic way that the patrons had in asking directions of them. This was their own rightful province, and they swept the white hangings aside with great black palms that you felt might just as easily have seized bolts of lightning and thrown them back at the clouds.

  Anthony Burns stood more uncertainly than most near the entrance of the bathhouse. Once he had gotten through the milky-paned door his fate was decided and no more action or will on his part was called for. He paid two-fifty, which was the price of a bath and massage, and from that moment forward had only to follow directions and submit to care. Within a few moments a Negro masseur came to Burns and propelled him onward and then around a corner where he was led into one of the curtained compartments.

  Take off your clothes, said the Negro.

  The Negro had already sensed an unusual something about his latest patron and so he did not go out of the canvas-draped cubicle but remained leaning against
a wall while Burns obeyed and undressed. The white man turned his face to the wall away from the Negro and fumbled awkwardly with his dark winter clothes. It took him a long time to get the clothes off his body, not because he wilfully lingered about it but because of a dream-like state in which he was deeply falling. A faraway feeling engulfed him and his hands and fingers did not seem to be his own, they were numb and hot as if they were caught in the clasp of someone standing behind him, manipulating their motions. But at last he stood naked, and when he turned slowly about to face the Negro masseur, the black giant’s eyes appeared not to see him at all and yet they had a glitter not present before, a liquid brightness suggesting bits of wet coal.

  Put this on, he directed and held out to Burns a white sheet.

  Gratefully the little man enveloped himself in the enormous coarse fabric and, holding it delicately up from his small-boned, womanish feet, he followed the Negro masseur through another corridor of rustling white curtains to the entrance of an opaque glass enclosure which was the steam-room. There his conductor left him. The blank walls heaved and sighed as steam issued from them. It swirled about Burns’ naked figure, enveloping him in a heat and moisture such as the inside of a tremendous mouth, to be drugged and all but dissolved in this burning white vapor which hissed out of unseen walls.

  After a time the black masseur returned. With a mumbled command, he led the trembling Burns back into the cubicle where he had left his clothes. A bare white table had been wheeled into the chamber during Burns’ absence.

  Lie on this, said the Negro.

  Burns obeyed. The black masseur poured alcohol on Burns’ body, first on his chest and then on his belly and thighs. It ran all over him, biting at him like insects. He gasped a little and crossed his legs over the wild complaint of his groin. Then without any warning the Negro raised up his black palm and brought it down with a terrific whack on the middle of Burns’ soft belly. The little man’s breath flew out of his mouth in a gasp and for two or three moments he couldn’t inhale another.