Collected Stories Page 9

  “Thank God!” she breathes. “Thank God!”

  During the day she listens, too. While in the kitchen she has always one ear cocked toward the front room where he is reading. She listens for the periodic crinkling of the turned pages and the knock of the pipe bowl against the tray.

  These sounds reassure her and she breathes more freely.

  She calls him: “Emiel, Emiel, it is time for your drops!”

  He comes lumbering back to the kitchen. His feet shuffle clumsily and there is a vague look in his bloodshot eyes. His right leg is slightly stiffened from the stroke. His mind is no longer very alert. His vest is always spotted with grease. He slobbers when he eats. Water dribbles down his chin when he drinks. Often she must speak to him twice before he seems to understand. He sits brooding a great deal. He lies on the couch by the radio and hears nothing. The music is wasted. The comedians, the amateurs, the news-reporters, and the symphony orchestras are all wasted on his ears. He is thinking about his sickness. His face is already like the face of a dead man, gray and expressionless.

  “Emiel, Emiel!” she calls to him.

  He gets up slowly from the couch or the chair and stares vaguely around him. Sighs or grunts. She brings him the glass of water tinted pink with the five drops. He takes it without a word and drains it. A pink trickle goes down his gray-stubbled chin and spots his vest. She comes close to him. Purses her lips. Makes a soft, purring sound. Touches his chin with the tip of her handkerchief. Brushes the wet spot off his vest. Pats him fondly on the pink and silver dome of his head or runs her fingers tremulously down his slack unshaven jowls.

  “Emiel!” she murmurs sadly.

  He sinks back onto the couch and she tucks the Indian blanket around him. It is the red and black Navajo blanket that they bought nearly fifty years ago on their honeymoon trip to the West Coast. She remembers how frightened she was, or pretended to be, of the grim-looking Indians gathered around the station platform, how she squealed with delight over the turquoise bracelet and then with terror when the gesticulating grunting squaws formed a greedy circle around her, pushing things into her face. She remembers how Emiel’s arm went around her and his fingers kept spasmodically pressing into her side till she became almost faint. She could hardly walk back to the train.

  The radio goes on. A political candidate is making a speech. His voice booms out dramatically. He declares that this is a crisis in the affairs of the nation. Vital issues are at stake. But here in the warm interior of their living room neither of them is listening to the statesman’s words. Night surrounds them. Black squares of it press against the curtained windows. They are alone. They are sitting close together. There are only the two of them in this lamp-lit interior. They look as though they were posing for a picture. In a minute the camera will click and the cameraman will say “All right” and they will both smile and start moving again.

  But now they are waiting.

  At ten-thirty she helps him up from the chair or the couch and they go into the bedroom. He bends to remove his slippers.

  “No, Emiel, let me,” she whispers.

  Her hands are amazingly swift and gentle, but ugly to look at, the veins knotted like earthworms under the purplish red skin.

  “There now, you old grouch!” she whispers.

  Her eyes peer teasingly up at him from under the tangle of frowzy gray hair and he catches a glimpse of a fleeting brightness in them which is the ghost of her youth, appearing with a shy, furtive quickness, as though shamefully aware of its own incongruity, and fluttering quickly off, like a songbird that momentarily rested on a frozen branch, casting a single startled glance at the glittering, icily uncordial season that surrounds it and then receding instantly back into that dim but secure dimension from which it had but for that one moment miraculously appeared.

  While he undresses she goes into the kitchen and prepares him a cup of warm milk.

  “Emiel, Emiel!” she calls.

  He comes shuffling heavily into the kitchen. His felt slippers whisper sadly along the black and white checked linoleum. The loose boards creak. They make small half-hearted complaints beneath the old man’s tottering weight. He sinks down in the kitchen chair. He stares for a moment enquiringly at the icebox and the gas range as though they had asked him a question which he had not quite understood.

  “Emiel, your milk,” she says.

  He doesn’t seem to see. She lifts it herself to his lips. He sucks it slowly in. Grunts. Her dish towel is barely quick enough to catch the white trickle.

  “Emiel,” she murmurs sadly.

  His mind is not very clear any more. She wonders sometimes if he is really aware of what he is doing. Does he know what she is saying to him? She talks a great deal. Silence seems heavy these days. It is no longer a natural thing as it used to be before he suffered the stroke. Now silence is waiting and waiting is a continual dread.

  When the light is out she begins to think again. The thoughts swarm mercilessly into her mind and she murmurs aloud. Sometimes it is the seashore again and he is lying beside her on the warm sand. The bright grains of it are sliding from his palm and trickling over her bare legs and arms. This memory has a remarkable life. It is the most vivid of them all. She hears the sound of waves coming in and her eyes close slowly against the glitter of sun. Prismatic colors flash through her tangled lashes. She hears his voice slow and caressing as the grains of trickling sand. Rose. Rose. Rose. Rose. He is trying to make her smile. But she will not smile. She keeps her lips drawn tightly together. The sand trickles slowly. Then more swiftly. Then slower. It is warm, so very warm against her bare skin. In spite of herself her lips begin to curl up at the corners. She laughs out loud. The earth rises and sways beneath her. Her body grows large. Immense. The moment is timeless. It forms a perfect arc through space. She whispers his name. Then holds her breath. Yes. He is still beside her. But the warm sand no longer slides from his palm. The glittering sun is lost. It is dark. She turns slowly upon the bed, her eyes closed. If she stretches out her fingers she can touch the sheet that covers him. Yes. She can hear him breathing. Still breathing. The hoarse dragging sound goes wearily on. A tired, heavy thing crawling painfully forward. Desperately pushing and pulling itself still further along. When will it stop? She shudders. No, it must not. Never. Such a thing could not happen to her…

  And then one day she hears a heavy thud. She drops the soup ladle. She stands motionless by the kitchen stove. There is much to assure her that nothing had happened. The casual ticking of the white enamel clock. The throaty murmur of boiling carrots. The buzzing of an early summer fly blue-winged against shining copper screens. And sunlight on geranium leaves. She forces her fingers to lift the soup ladle again. She holds it rigidly poised like a weapon, her eyes blindly staring. In a moment she will hear the slow crinkling of the newspaper or the clank of the pipe bowl against the glass tray. She waits for these. Still there is nothing. Something inside of her congeals. Grows hard and cold as a rock. She staggers forward. No use to delay. She sets the dripping ladle down upon the cloth-covered table and goes straight forward to the living-room door and pushes it open…

  “Emiel!” she whispers. She is too breathless to say more than that.

  He is standing by the round oak table. It was not him, it was only a large book that fell to the floor.

  “I was looking at it. I dropped it,” he explains.

  It is an album of postcard pictures of places that they have visited together on vacations in younger days. There are pictures of Niagara Falls and Yellowstone Park and Canada and Florida and the Great Smoky Mountains. They started it nearly fifty years ago when they took their honeymoon trip to the West Coast. Since then they have been steadily adding to it, almost each summer when they could afford to leave town, and it is now a large book full of pictures.

  Slowly Emiel bends to pick it up.

  “No, no,” she cries, “let me!”

  She darts over to where the fallen book lies. Some of the pictures have sp
illed out. Her red fingers scoop them quickly up from the carpet. She lifts the book painfully and replaces it upon the table. They face each other. He returns her gaze vaguely. Saliva dribbles from the corners of his mouth. His lips are quivering. How moist his eyes are!

  “Emiel, oh, Emiel!”

  She flings her arms passionately around him. Draws him close against her shrivelled bosom. In that embrace she must hold him forever. Time must not take him from her. Let the rest slide away like sand. She will have to keep this!

  “Emiel!” she speaks commandingly. She will show him that she still has strength enough for them both.

  But he will not look in her eyes that have all this force to give him. He turns evasively away from her with those shuffling movements. And her own firmness cracks. It gives way completely and she goes shuffling uncertainly as he does across the room to catch again at his sleeve no longer commanding with a false show of power but only barrenly pleading for something to share.

  “What is it, Emiel? Let me know!”

  She has followed him into a corner. He doesn’t attempt to turn around and escape her. He just stands there avoiding her look till her light touch drops from his sleeve, and then he murmurs—“I was just thinking. That’s all.”

  April 1936 (Not previously published)

  Ten Minute Stop

  The man whom he went to see in Chicago was not in town,

  “He’s gone on a lake cruise,” said his secretary, “and won’t be back till the latter part of the month.”

  Luke couldn’t believe that the man was really gone.

  “But I wrote him that I was coming and he promised to see me. It’s very important. Terribly important. It’s about a job. You see, he knows a cousin of mine and my cousin…”

  “He‘ll return about the twenty-third of the month,” the girl interrupted. “See him then.”

  She swung crisply back to the machine, her face like a door slamming shut against his.

  He felt indignant and couldn’t curb his tongue.

  “What the hell does that boss of yours think I am? I haven’t got money enough to chase him back and forth across the country. Spent my last cent, nearly, making this trip up here to see him and God only knows…”

  She gripped the phone.

  “Shall I call the watchman—or will you get out?”

  He took the evening bus back to Memphis. Rented a pillow for fifteen cents because the thought of another sleepless night actually terrified him. He didn’t feel like himself. He felt as though the thread of his identity had snapped and he was moving on with nothing at all left behind him.

  The bus was a long time loading. Beginning to feel panicky, he clasped the pillow under his arm and darted out of the Blueflyer over to the station drugstore where he purchased a pint of whiskey. Came back with the bottle stuffed in the pillow, hoping that he wouldn’t get hungry on the way home. He had thirty cents left. He sat on the back seat. It extended clear across the back of the bus so that if nobody else occupied it he would be able to stretch himself out. But a young Negro came and sat down close beside him. Then a woman with a baby, Italians, and by the smell of the paper boxes which she spread across the remaining vacant space he judged them to be transcontinental travelers. Redolent of soft bananas and unwashed diapers. It was stiflingly close, the bus not yet started. The young Negro looked at him and grinned. He tried to grin back but his lips were stiff. This alarmed him still more. Not even able to crack a smile!

  Defiantly he took the bottle out of the pillow and drank.

  “Lucky!” murmured the Negro, rolling his eyes at the ceiling.

  Luke offered him a drink. Was afterwards sorry, as the Negro waxed voluble. Showed Luke his taped knuckles. Knocked a white boy out last night in the fourth round.

  “Did better,” remarked Luke, “than Joe Louis.”

  Which started the Negro off on what promised to be interminable.

  “How far you going?” Luke cut in.

  “Champaign. That’s where I live.”

  “How far’s that?”

  “’Bout hundred fifty mile.”

  Well, from then on, thought Luke, maybe I’ll get some sleep.

  He started dozing, however, before they were clear of the city. It was a restless, enervating sleep. He woke up at intervals of every fifteen or twenty minutes. Opened his eyes to find the bus moving each time through dusk a few shades deeper, till finally it was quite dark and they were out of the city and only dark, level fields were sliding past with an occasional yellow light of a farmhouse. Voices droned ahead of him. The young Negro committed himself as earnestly to sleep as to battle, snoring upon a long, rasping note, his shoulders swaying rhythmically against Luke’s, his bandaged hand dangling between his legs. Luke regarded him with admiration and envy. The Negro represented, he thought, something splendid and heroic. Something that made life possible under any circumstances. A kind of impregnable simplicity. A completeness. An undividedness. The boxer sleeps, thought Luke. An exact statement. Said all that was necessary to say. Luke glanced at the Negro and seemed to see his life in graphic design. A strong black line pushing stubbornly forward without a curve. Beside it, his own life, a wavering thread of gray. Not even that anymore. The thread broken. Lost in space that stretched terrifyingly about him.

  The bus lurched. The baby woke up and whined a little and the mother comforted it in a low voice.

  Luke took another long drink and drifted back into sleep.

  It seemed endless. He could stay neither asleep nor awake. Being completely wakeful would be better than this intermittent dozing, this constant jarring out of sleep and back into it. His brain felt stunned. He wanted to think. There were things that he needed to think out before the bus reached Memphis. But couldn’t.

  Then suddenly the lights flared up and he found that the bus had stopped moving. It was standing in the business section of a small city. The Negro pugilist had gotten up and was lifting his suitcase down from the rack. The woman with the baby had already disappeared.

  “What’s this place?” Luke inquired sleepily of the Negro grinning down at him.

  “This here’s Champaign,” the Negro yelled jubilantly as he swung the suitcase to his shoulder. “Home for me, but for you, just a ten minute stop.”

  “Good luck,” said Luke.

  “Same to you, boy!” sang the Negro.

  The dozing passengers stirred fretfully. Luke glanced at the now completely vacant back seat. All the boxes gone. He hardly dared to trust in the miracle of their removal.

  Then he got to his feet and stumbled out of the bus.

  On the street it seemed much cooler. There was a freshness in the air. Must have been raining lately. Yes, there were puddles of rainwater in the street and the lighted windows of the café were still streaming. Looked pretty from the outside, the lights and the moving forms diffused. He opened the screen door. Inside electric fans were droning. In the rear a Brunswick Selecter being played. Nasal tenor inquiring if it was true what they said about Dixie. Luke grinned to himself. Do they really flog women down there? But the tune was light and infectious. It shocked him a little out of his daze. The place was full of young fellows. In one corner they were playing a game, shooting marbles into little sockets. Others were seated about a porcelain-topped table drinking beer. Champaign was a college town. Champaign and Urbana. University of Illinois. These must be summer students. He remembered his own college days a few years back and felt a nostalgic pang. Grinned ironically to himself. Sat down at the counter but could think of nothing that he wanted. Just as well. Thirty cents and all the next day.

  “Glass of milk,” he ordered finally in a low voice. Perhaps it would help him to get some real sleep now that he had that whole back seat to himself.

  When he’d finished drinking the milk he went back outside. Next to the café was a small open lot containing lighted billboards. He sat on a low wooden fence and stared at a poster advertising a coming show. Jane Barlow and Stark Navle in Sacramen
to. Navle’s head glittered darkly like the back of a cockroach. Nevertheless it was a nice-looking sign. The colors were bright but not glaring. Like the dresses that girls wear to summer dances, it had an air of pleasing insouciance which said in effect the the world is like this—very gay!

  Somewhere in the wet grass a cricket began chirping.

  A young couple strolled by. He heard their low voices.

  “You know I didn’t mean it that way,” murmured the young man.

  “How did you mean it then?” she lisped babyishly. The words were like the movement of a body in the dark. A female body arching itself slowly upwards against the male pressure. He felt in his own loins the sweet answering thrill. Clenched his fist as he gazed after the girl’s figure. White dress. Expanse of hips. The young man’s arm slid carefully about the waist. Nothing hurried. Plenty of time. Movement of bodies in the dark. Now in light. Appeared distinctly for an instant in the yellow pool through the dripping café windows, their shadows flying out to prodigious lengths across the dim street and then their self-absorbed figures reswallowed by night.

  He gulped and looked again at the movie poster. Jane Barlow had gorgeous breasts. In her pictures she alsways wore gowns cut down low at the neck. You could often see the little groove between the two delectable promontories of her bust. Her hips were ample, too. They swayed when she walked even better than those of April East, who was corseted a little too tightly, and she had a way of looking at a man with her lips parted and her eyes opened wide…

  “Wouldn’t kick her out of bed,” he reflected dully.

  Then ceased thinking about the poster. Listened to the cricket’s chirping. What’s he talking to himself about? Refined old ladies making conversation on the church lawn. Or Professor Abbott on Restoration Drama. Reading passages from Venice Preserv’d or Cato or Conquest of Granada. The long, heroic speeches of Almonzaro. Or Belvidera declaiming windily of love. Of love, of love. Luke grinned. Those were living people, too, those Restoration poets. Thomas Otway was alive once. So were Addison and Dryden. And they believed a great deal of what they wrote. Or thought that they believed it. Heroic tragedy and heroic love. And all the while in private people were doing and thinking what they were doing and thinking today. Exactly the same thing in the same way. The vicious intrigues. Constantly draining their passion like running sores on prostitute flesh. And toilets that didn’t flush. And the dangers of bathing and fresh air in winter. And the rotting teeth. And horse dung all over the narrow streets. And the diseases and the deaths and the ignorance. And the masses suffering and dying ignominiously while the nobility wept for the plight of sweet Belvidera. Or applauded the wit of perfumed fops. Extremes of sentimentality and of cynicism. The life at Whitehall no less extravagant than a Wycherley farce. The king’s mistress threatening to have a miscarriage if she didn’t get the first ride in his new French calèche. Seventy thousand dying in London of the plague. Thirteen thousand homes destroyed by one fire. And all of that happened and was allowed to happen and the rich and the poor alike lived and died, the fawning poets, the lewd and elegant lords, the prudish lascivious ladies, the diseased and ignorant multitudes—all of these lived and died upon the earth and nothing was done about it. The pretty and dully saccharine poems were preserved. The heroic tragedies were sacredly kept for posterity. Discreetly all that was terrible and dark in the individual lives of the people was left unsaid and forgotten. Over and done long ago. Doesn’t count anymore. New people to cover the earth these days. And the earth still merrily reeling through space. Throwing off gay sparks toward those problematical beings on Mars!