Collected Stories Read online

  “There was such a crowd,” she exclaimed bravely, turning to Mrs. Hamilton, “and it was raining so hard that he probably couldn’t see me!”

  “Such a crowd?” Mrs. Hamilton repeated with justifiable wonder. Hers was not a spirit to accept implausible excuses, and at Mineola seldom more than three or four persons alighted from a single train.

  “Well, not exactly a crowd,” Catharine breathlessly admitted, “but you know how it is in the rain. Everyone looks just alike.”

  Cecilia cut in sarcastically: “Mother, do you suppose Bud mistook the Moulton’s colored cook for Catharine? She’s coming back from her cousin’s funeral today…”

  “Cecilia!” Mrs. Hamilton gasped. She turned apologetically to Catharine again. “Cecilia’s always poking fun at Bud!”

  As usual when visiting the Hamiltons, Catharine felt the necessity of sidestepping some kind of scene.

  “Please don’t scold him when he comes in,” she begged, “because it wasn’t his fault and I really enjoyed the walk. The air was so fresh and clean after that stuffy pullman, and the rain…”

  The sound of a car churning up the road gave a quick tug at the steel spring in her chest. It wasn’t Bud, though. The car whined listlessly by and the rain’s brisk monody echoed again through the house, through all the dark, high-ceilinged rooms, like the laughter of ghosts.

  “And the rain,” she went on, glancing toward a streaming window, “has almost stopped.”

  “It’s been raining for five days straight,” Mrs. Hamilton remarked impressively.

  Through the window Catharine could see the melting green shadow of leaves. There were trees all around the house. It was hidden among the trees. And Catharine felt that somewhere among their dripping greenness the boy must be hidden, too, peeking timidly now and then through the streaked windows, appraising like his sisters her new city clothes, the blue hat with the cherries, the dainty, mud-flecked slippers, but not daring yet to come into the house and welcome her home.

  “Five days!” she repeated, “think of that!”

  Her voice sounded much too loud, as voices sound in a fever, and she could hear the red cherries dancing vivaciously against the brim of her hat. She added hastily, in a calmer tone: “I thought it must have been raining an awfully long time. The branches were so wet that they hung right down over the walk, so that all the way up Elm Street I had to hold my hands in front of me to keep the leaves from brushing my hat.”

  “What a pity!” said Mrs. Hamilton, “Well, I told Bud…”

  Turning heavily around, she spied Catharine’s coat on the couch and snatched it up by the collar.

  “Evelyn! The idea of putting Catharine’s coat down there! It’s all wet!”

  Holding the coat gingerly before her, she went toward the back of the house with heavy, measured steps and Evelyn skipped shyly behind her. Catharine was left alone in the front hall with Cecilia. That would make it more difficult when Bud finally came in. Cecilia’s air of cynical detachment was never any help in a crisis. It was hard to believe that she was really Bud’s sister, this placid, housewifely girl bent over the hall grate with a box of matches.

  “Our coal gave out in the middle of March and we haven’t had the furnace going since. This will take the chill off a little.”

  Something was certainly needed to take the chill off, Catharine thought. There was nothing about this house that was calculated to warm a visitor’s heart. It was uncompromisingly ugly. Its lean yellow shape spoke more palpably of age than its creaking timbers, and its interior, with high ceilings, tall stairways, suspended lamps, and angular furnishings, had a relentlessly vertical look as though one could never lie still in it for a moment but must climb ceaselessly toward some undiscovered summit of darkness. It was uglier and more Ibsenish than ever in the presence of April. It seemed to pucker its yellow face malevolently against the young green gesture of returning spring. Its walls groaned and its windows shrieked a loud denial to the playful wind, and through its dark rooms the echoing rain was transposed to such a dismal minor key that to Catharine it sounded like the sly laughter and whispering of ghosts.

  The artificial logs in the grate had burst into blue flame.

  “Would you like to go upstairs now, Kitty?” Cecilia asked. Cecilia, the older sister, had been Catharine’s chum in the old days. She and Catharine and Bud had played together in the orchard back of the Hamilton’s house. They had gone through school together, and after his own graduation from high school. Bud had waited a year for Catharine and Cecilia to graduate so that the three of them could go off to the state university together. Cecilia and Catharine had joined the same sorority, but Bud had failed to make a fraternity. He hadn’t reacted at all well to college. It hadn’t brought him out of his shell, as they had hoped it would, but had made him even shyer than before. He had sat in the back of his classrooms almost like a deaf-mute, mumbling that he didn’t know when questions were asked and staring gloomily out of the window when tests were given with his pencil clasped tightly between unmoving fingers. His tall, loose figure had slipped about the campus with such a swift stealth that some of the students had humorously called him “the galloping ghost.” He had dropped out of everything toward the end of the year and the next year he hadn’t gone back. Thereafter Catharine had seen him only on vacations, and each time he had seemed shyer and quieter and more remote. He had seemed to be floating out upon the cold lake of his loneliness further and further from the friendly shore upon which she stood waving and calling his name. Each time she had somehow managed to wade out through the deepening waters to find him again and force her way through his pretended forgetfulness. “Oh, it’s you!” he would seem to say. He would smile with whimsically puckering eyelids and the cold waters of the lake would recede and he would follow her with grateful sheepishness back to the shore of their old-time comradeship. And how delightful it had always been to so recapture their past: everything being warm and sweet between them again: their hands and even their lips being able to touch with the old-time ease! But now that she was returning from her year of work in the city she wondered if it would be at all possible to reach him again. Perhaps these cold waters had closed completely, this time, over his head.

  She felt her throat getting tight with something—pity or longing or fear—as she answered Cecilia’s question:

  “No, let’s stay down for a while. I don’t want to miss Bud. He’s bound to be back in a minute.”

  Cecilia put her arm around Catharine and led her into the parlor. She switched on the table lamp whose silver-fringed alabaster bowl gave a milky color to the gloom. Then she sank down on the ottoman beneath Catharine’s straight-backed chair. Catharine felt suddenly at a loss for conversation. The two girls seemed strangely removed from each other now. Catharine had been in the city since their graduation last June. She was selling advertising space in a city newspaper, making a career for herself, while Cecilia remained in the small home town waiting for Robert, her fiancé, to get established in the grain business so that they could marry. Now that Catharine and the town were definitely severed by her father’s death, over a year ago, she and Cecilia would probably see very little of each other, and the ten months of separation had already somewhat blunted their friendship. When they had gone upstairs and shared a bedroom, it would be easier, perhaps, for them to draw close together again, but now their eyes on each other’s face went either too deep or too shallow and there was a touch of self-consciousness in the ultra-casual pose of their bodies. Catharine was anxious to remove it with friendly chatter. She talked for a while about her work in the city, but as she talked her head moved with such a nervous vivacity that the red cherries on her hat kept clinking brittlely together and she was unpleasantly reminded, for some reason, of a time in college when her coatsleeve had brushed against the arm of a human skeleton in the zoology lab: it had rattled like those cherries and she had glanced sharply up to see the death’s-head staring straight in front of it with a fixed, grimly pat
ient smile, as if to say; “Don’t apologize! It was an accident, I’m sure! Besides, dear lady, we bones have learnt the vanity of pride…”

  She turned quickly to Cecilia and asked; “How’s Robert?”

  “All right,” Cecilia said listlessly. “The grain business is awfully bad right now. We may have to wait another whole year. Waiting gets to be a habit around this place. You just wait and wait for things to get started.”

  She laughed a little painfully, not looking at Catharine. Catharine touched the girl’s dark hair. It was the only thing about Cecilia that reminded her of Bud.

  “Time goes lots faster now that we’re out of college!”

  “Not for me,” Cecilia answered. “It’s just the same as it always was only you aren’t here anymore. And Bud’s got so funny. Really, I don’t know what he’s coming to. This is just exactly like him, Kitty!”

  “What’s like him?” Catharine asked.

  “Why, not meeting you at the station. Going off somewhere by himself just like he was scared you’d bite him or something!”

  “Scared of me?” Catharine laughed. “Oh, Cissy, that’s absurd!”

  But as she laughed Catharine caught herself glancing again through the muddy windows as though she expected to see Bud’s face peeking faun-like between the quivering shafts of green vine.

  “Bud was always like that,” she added gently. “We mustn’t expect him to change all at once.”

  “All at once?” Cecilia mocked. “He was twenty-three last month.”

  Catharine looked down at her hands, waiting tensely, when she heard the back door slam. But it wasn’t Bud this time, either. It was Evelyn, lifting her shrill voice to declare that the butcher’s truck had broken down. Then Catharine’s eyes, beginning to focus again, observed that her black kid gloves were still on. She started drawing them slowly off, grateful for this small occupation, but alarmed to find that her bare fingers had turned so icy cold with suspense.

  “If you had lived here in the house with that boy all this year…” Cecilia’s voice shrank almost to a whisper, “I tell you, Kitty, you’d be down right scared! Most of the time he’s up there in the attic by himself, pounding away on that old typewriter of his that he got from the junk shop, not even bothering to put on all his clothes, Kitty, just a sweatshirt and a pair of old pants like he was training for a championship prizefight or something…. I tell you he doesn’t act civilized anymore, Kitty! He shaves about once every week, he never combs his hair and it seems like Mother just has to make him take a bath! Can you imagine that?”

  The steel spring in Catharine’s chest was twisting itself once more upon the axles of an approaching car. Once more the car passed on by and the spring snapped back, and the rain momentarily seemed to follow the car down the road. The walls eased their complaint, and from the kitchen came sounds of Mrs. Hamilton preparing lunch. It was going to be round steak en casserole, the Hamiltons’ company dish. She could tell by the smell of onions, already tickling dryly the back of her throat and making it hard to swallow.

  “What is he working on now?” she asked Cecilia.

  “Bud? God only knows!” Cecilia laughed shortly. “He has poetry published in the little magazines, you know, but they never pay him a cent for it!”

  “Yes, I know,” Catharine said gently. It was useless trying to explain to Cecilia that poetry wasn’t a commodity, that it could never be bought or sold, that it was, in fact, untransferrable, remaining forever a part of the one who wrote it—the little black trail that his fugitive spirit left behind it on paper…. In the days when Bud had read poetry to them both in the orchard back of the Hamiltons’ house, Cecilia had sometimes liked the sound of it, but would almost invariably ask them: What does it mean? And Bud and Catharine would look at each other and smile over Cecilia’s puzzled head because they two had understood so perfectly: but couldn’t tell!

  “Why should a grown-up man write stuff like that anyway?” Cecilia went on. “It seems so silly in times like these, when people have to sink or swim, to go around with your head up in the clouds, scribbling down little things on paper that don’t make sense!”

  Catharine tried to laugh; “Maybe that’s Bud’s way of swimming. There are lots of different ways, you know, and Bud never was the typical man of action!”

  “Man of action! My God, I should say he isn’t! He does absolutely nothing about everything! Not even his rejection slips seem to bother him much; no more than being beaten at a game of solitaire would!”

  “That’s what it is; a game of solitaire!” Catharine suddenly cried out, lifting both hands to her face.

  “What is?” asked Cecilia.

  Catharine flushed; “Bud’s kind of life, I guess!”

  Cecilia relentlessy watched her deepening flush for several moments before she spoke.

  “It seems such a lousy shame! You know what I mean, Kitty. The way we’d always hoped about you and Bud…

  Catharine tried to keep from trembling as Cecilia’s hand closed with a merciless pity around her ankle.

  “Hoped about us? That’s silly! Bud and I were never anything but friends!”

  “That’s a fib!” Cecilia said softly. “All the time that we spent together when we were kids: do you think I was blind?”

  Catharine held her eyes ironly against the sympathy in Cecilia’s.

  “That was a long time ago. We’ve all of us changed since then.”

  “It’s a good thing that you have!” said Cecilia. “He’s gotten to be such a fool! The craziest thing happened just last week. I found some of his stuff lying around the house. I was kidding him about it being so mushy and all. It made him terribly sore. He got up from the table and ran upstairs and he didn’t write anything for a couple of days after that. Just sat in his bedroom, moping, till Mother sent for the doctor. She thought he was sick!”

  Cecilia was laughing. She seemed to be expecting Catharine to laugh with her. But Catharine couldn’t. She couldn’t even smile.

  “You shouldn’t have done that. Cissy,” she said in a tone that seemed absurdly severe. Cecilia’s laughter and the smell of onions were getting too much. She had a funny feeling in her stomach. She was really fond of Cecilia. But she had to admit that the Hamiltons, all of them except Bud, were like that. Onions for company and laughter at the worst times. She wanted all at once to stand up and beat her fists against the old yellow boards of the house that were frailly forbidding the spring. She wanted to beat hard against them from the inside like April from the outside till the yellow boards splintered and tumbled down and she and Cecilia stood unsheltered in the leafy wetness outside. And then with no threshhold to push his timid feet across. Bud would surely be there. “Oh, it’s you!” his half-averted smile would seem to say. And she would be standing only knee-deep in the cold waters of his loneliness. She would be able to wade out to him again and lead him back to the shore…

  “Oh, my God, I wish he would come!” thought Catharine.

  Didn’t he know that she would make it very easy for him? Just as easy as she possibly could! Catharine knew how to make it easy for Bud. She’d had so much practice in the past. She had learned the wisdom of holding herself off at first. She wouldn’t run up to him and try to kiss him before all the others. She wouldn’t even hold out her hands unless he held his out first. She would lift her hands instead to the bright red cherries on her hat as if to signify by their color something of what she had to offer this time. But no other sign: nothing to frighten him off! She would even pretend to be earnestly brushing the mud-flecks from her slippers as he came thrusting himself desperately forward. She would glance in his direction for only one moment and simply call out very loudly, very brightly, “Hello, Bud!” And then she would go on talking to the others as though the year hadn’t passed, as though nothing at all had passed between this morning and those times when two young girls and a boy had eaten picnic lunches in the orchard back of the old yellow house; when the boy had read poetry to the girls or lay on his ba
ck talking quietly to himself or to her or to the trees, which seemed never to move quite softly enough to keep from jarring the drowsily delicate flow of his voice; when he had driven them, after their lunch had settled, down to the river, where the two girls and the boy had undressed behind separate bushes for a swim and stretched themselves afterwards on a stone-smooth log to get dry…

  As though nothing had passed since then? Well, nothing had passed, really! The book had been closed for a while, but the place marked plainly…

  “Ill make it very easy for him,” she promised herself. “He won’t be afraid!”

  But the house was now filled with little noises, any one of which might betray his stealthy return. Sudden-soft closing of doors. Footsteps moving along the upper halls. Now slow and now hurried. Footsteps on the stair. Too heavy for Bud and too loud. He always moved his large body with an amazing penury of sound. In her mind’s eye she could see him now, moving through a thousand different rooms and places, as she had seen him in the past years, and he moved always like a tall, vague shadow, one hand stretched slightly before him like the feeling hand of the blind, suspicious even of air, groping for things unseen in the path or halfway poised for some defensive gesture as one would move through regions of perilous dark, his eyes very wide but always seeming ready to blink against the full light.

  “He’s coming now!” Catharine suddenly whispered.

  The steel spring in her chest had coiled to its quivering limit as she heard, through the gusty rain, the faint slamming of a car door just outside the house. It was slammed twice. He always had to slam it a couple of times to make it stay shut…

  She jumped to her feet. She was ready in spirit to be quite casual and gay. To be calm because it was necessary for her to be so. But just as suddenly her breath was gone, gone utterly, and it was now her turn, it seemed, to know all of what he had known: the agony of feet coming toward one and of a door thrown open!

  “He is coming now!” she whispered, half to Cecilia and half to herself.