i_ rie Storia

RIVERSIDE COMMUNITY COLLEGE DISTRICT

James Baldwin

John Deck

Herb Gardner

William H. Gass

Judith Higgins
Helen Hudson

Am
: Edited
by
Bu
Foley
Martha
David
and
| Leo E. Litwak
_ '
OF Richard McKenna
William Moseley

Joanna Ostrow

John Phillips —

and others |
 $6.50

The Best
American
Short Stories
1968 and the
Yearbook of the
American Short Story
Edited by Martha Foley
and David Burnett
This year the editors of The Best American
Short Stories have again brought together
twenty of the finest short stories of the past
year — works which represent to highest
advantage the recent development of this
particular literary genre, in which American
writers excel.
Many of this year’s selections deal with
family situations — the difficulty of com-
munication between father and son in
Lawrence Spingarn’s “The Ambassador”; a
child’s growing awareness of evil and sense-
lessness beyond the warmth and security
of the family circle in James Baldwin's ‘Tell
Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone” and
in William Moseley’s ‘The Preacher and
Margery Scott’; a family’s brave attempt
to keep up their illusions in “The Games
That We Played” by Winton Weathers. Some
situations are seen from the viewpoint of
an older person, in stories which underline
the pain of growing old and the struggle to
keep one’s pride in a changing youthful
world. In ‘Greased Samba,’’ for example,
an old couple in a rest home exhaust them-
selves perfecting a dance step; in ‘Dried
Rose Petals in a Silver Bowl” the aging
founder of a select girls’ school fights to
keep her old-fashioned control.
Certain stories deal with an individual’s
disillusionment with himself and with the
standards of the world, others with the dis-
continued on back flap
 Date Due

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 THE

BEST
AMERICAN SHORT STORIES

1968
 ERpe hits

BEST
AMERICAN SHORT STORIES

S
the Yearbook of
the American Short Story

EDITED BY
MARTHA FOLEY
AND
DAVE (BOURNE
Fe?

Houghton Mifflin Company

Boston
1968

Riverside Community College

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COPYRIGHT ©) 1968 BY HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COM-

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PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

“Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone” by James Baldwin. Reprinted
from Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone by James Baldwin. Copyright
© 1968 by James Baldwin, and used by permission of the publisher, Whe Dial
Press, Inc. Originally published in somewhat different form in McCall’s Magazine.
“Greased Samba” by John Deck. First published in The Atlantic. Copyright
© 1967 by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston, Mass. Reprinted with permis-
sion,
“An American Student in Paris” by James T. Farrell. First published in The
Southern Review. Copyright © 1967 by James T. Farrell.
“An Old Man and His Hat” by George H. Freitag. Reprinted from the June
1967 issue of Harper’s Magazine by permission of the author. Copyright © 1967
by Harper’s Magazine, Inc.
“Who is Harry Kellerman and Why is He Saying Those Terrible Things
About Me?” by Herb Gardner. First published in The Saturday Evening Post.
Copyright © 1967 by Herb Gardner.
“In the Heart of the Heart of the Country” by William Gass. First published
in New American Review No. 1. Copyright © 1967 by William Gass.
“The Rotifer” by Mary Ladd Gavell. First published in Psychiatry, Vol. XXX,
No. 2 (May 1967). Copyright © 1967 by Stefan Gavell.
“The Heart of This or That Man” by Donald Gropman. First published in
The Literary Review, Volume XI, No. 1 (Autumn 1967). Copyright © 1967 by
Fairleigh Dickinson University, Teaneck, New Jersey.
“The Snooker Shark” by William Harrison. First published in The Saturday
Evening Post. Copyright © 1967 by William Harrison.
 “The Only People” by Judith Higgins. First published in The Atlantic
Monthly. Copyright © 1967 by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston, Mass.
Reprinted with permission.
“The Tenant” by Helen Hudson. First published in The Virginia Quarterly
Review. Copyright © 1967 by The Virginia Quarterly Review, The University of
Virginia.
“In Shock” by Leo E. Litwak. First published in Partisan Review. Copyright ©
1967 by Leo E. Litwak.
“The Sons of Martha” by Richard McKenna. First published in the February
1967 issue of Harper’s Magazine. Copyright © 1967 by Eva McKenna. Reprinted
by permission of Harper & Row, Publishers.
“The Preacher and Margery Scott” by William Moseley. First published in The
Virginia Quarterly Review. Copyright © 1967 by The Virginia Quarterly Review,
The University of Virginia.
“Celtic Twilight” by Joanna Ostrow. First published in The New Yorker.
Copyright © 1967 by The New Yorker Magazine, Inc.
“Early Morning, Lonely Ride” by Nancy Huddleston Packer. First published
in Southwest Review. Copyright © 1967 by Southern Methodist University Press.
“Bleat Blodgette” by John Phillips. First published in The Paris Review.
Copyright © 1968 by John Phillips.
“The Ambassador” by Lawrence Spingarn. First published in The Southern
Humanities Review. Copyright © 1967 by Auburn University, Auburn, Alabama.
Reprinted by permission of the author and The Southern Humanities Review.
“The Games That We Played” by Winston Weathers. First published in The
Georgia Review. Copyright © Spring, 1967, The Georgia Review, University of
Georgia.
“Dried Rose Petals in a Silver Bowl” by Janet Bruce Winn. First published in
Evidence. Copyright © 1967 by Janet Bruce Winn.
 To
WILLIAM H. Gass
Acknowledgments

GRATEFUL ACKNOWLEDGMENT for permission to reprint the stories in

this volume is made to the following:
The Editors of The Atlantic, Evidence, The Georgia Review,
Harpers, The Literary Review, McCall’s Magazine, The New Amer-
ican Review, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Partisan Review,
Psychiatry, The Saturday Evening Post, The Southern Review, The
Southern Humanities Review, The Southwest Review, The Virginia
Quarterly Review; and to James Baldwin, John Deck, James T.
Farrell, George H. Freitag, Herb Gardner, William H. Gass, Mary
Ladd Gavell, Donald Gropman, William Harrison, Judith Higgins,
Helen Hudson, Leo E. Litwak, Richard McKenna, William Moseley,
Joanna Ostrow, Nancy Parker, John Phillips, Lawrence P. Spin-
garn, Winston Weathers, Janet Bruce Winn.
Foreword

(With apologies to Edmund Wilson who was the first to interview

himself)
Q. Don’t you think it is rather schizophrenic of you to try to be
both interviewer and interviewee?
A. Let’s call it an interior dialogue, a variation of the interior
monologue long popular in literature. Plato with his Socratic dia-
logues made the form classic. In recent years many magazines, even
Playboy, have been filled with them. Of course their present popu-
larity originated in the brilliant series of dialogues which appeared
in The Paris Review and which have been published in book form
under the title Talks With Writers.
Q. Let’s get down to fundamentals. What zs a short story?
A. I wish I knew. Some of the magazines I read this year listed
verse and plays and cartoons on their tables of contents as short
stories. The only satisfactory definition I know is one that I have
quoted before in this collection: A short story is a story that is not
too long.
Q. And if a story is too long?
A. That makes it sound like a bore. But if it is very long and in-
teresting, I suppose it could be called a novel.
Q. What about the novella?
A. Iam glad you asked yourself —I mean myself— that question,
because there have been more novellas than usual in the magazines
this year. Sewanee Review, Southern Review, Kenyon Review and
 Xil Foreword

Epoch, among others, have published splendid novellas. It is a

beautiful form of writing, longer than a short story, shorter than a
novel, which authors love. Many editors, including myself, have to
forgo it because of space limitations. I am proud that I am partly
responsible for the introduction of the word novella into the English
language.
Q. Do you remember how you did that?
A. It was away back in the Thirties. Edward J. O’Brien, who lived
in Oxford, England, and founded The Best American Short Stories,
was visiting in this country and staying at my home. Edward was
not only a remarkable editor but a wonderfully kind man who
helped countless writers, whether they were young and poor and
struggling or old and poor and forgotten. Ernest Hemingway, who
was not noted for gratitude, tells in A Moveable Feast how Edward
saved him as a writer when no one else would publish his fiction.
At the time Edward was visiting America, I was an editor of Story,
which I had founded a couple of years before in Vienna. The mag-
azine was publishing novellas, except that they weren’t called novel-
las then, people were calling them novelettes. One afternoon I
mentioned to Edward how much I detested the word. It seemed to
be in a class with other such flimsy French derivatives as coquette,
soubrette, etiquette and so on. More important, it was incorrect.
Novelette was used in the sense of a condensed novel, a digest.
Edward and I went over a list of possible terms and he suggested
the Italian word, novella. I didn’t think it was perfect, but I liked
it the most of the possible terms, certainly ever so much more than
novelette. Edward was a friend of the editor of the Oxford Dic-
tionary, a neighbor of his in England. He said he was going to
suggest the Oxford include the word, which he did.
Q. And now it is used everywhere?
A. Yes. But the meaning is often distorted. Webster's Seventh New
Collegiate Dictionary defines a novella as “a story with a pointed
and compact plot” which it most definitely is not. If that were true,
I would have stayed with the term novelette. Take such well-known
novellas as Ethan Frome, by Edith Wharton, or Heart of Darkness,
by Joseph Conrad, or The Bear, by William Faulkner. They are
too relaxed in the way they are written to be called either pointed
or compact.
Q. Hadn’t you better keep away from the word plot?
 Foreword Xill
A. Don’t I know it! An editor heard I had told my students that
the dirtiest four-letter word a writer can use is plot. He slashed out
at me in his magazine. So often when something is quoted, it is out
of context and therefore misunderstood. I never denied there are
such things as plots. Heaven knows, life is full of plots. But new
writers think the way to begin a piece of fiction is to invent the
most original plot possible. It is the way I myself was taught in
college and too many classes still use that approach. Think up a
plot, think up some characters, think up a conflict and suspense,
pigeonhole them into the plot. Voila, a story! Baloney. Every real
writer I ever knew, and I have known many both in Europe and in
this country, starts with people and their emotions and actions and
lets them make their own stories. A woman once applied for one
of my classes when I was teaching at Columbia University. “I want
to be a writer,” she told me, “so I can be like God and make people
do what I want them to do.” I had to tell her it was just the oppo-
site. Characters make the author do what they want him to do.
Q. In the foreword to last year’s volume, you said the number of
short stories being published was increasing. Is that still true?
A. It seems to be.
Q. Then fiction is not dying, as some critics have been saying?
A. Of course not. Some years ago I was asked to debate at a P.E.N.
meeting a critic who had been pronouncing the short story dead.
I must have won, because since then I have been reading stories by
him in the magazines. They are good stories, too. Short stories
have been with us since caveman days, when they were oral, and I
believe they always will be. Even if the Bomb puts the few of us
who may survive it back in caves again.
Regarding the novel, we keep forgetting the world has two hemi-
spheres. We might be called hemispherically provincial. We over-
look the wealth of Oriental literature. In the tenth century, when
Europe and our ancestors were still in the Dark Ages, Lady Mura-
saki in Japan wrote The Tale of Genji, a novel. It still can be read
with pleasure.
Q. What about new trends?
A. Sometimes I wonder if there is such a thing in writing. What
are called trends seem to me to be cycles, revivals of interest in cer-
tain kinds of writing. A few years ago black humor intrigued peo-
ple as something brand new. But in the early eighteenth century it
 XIV Foreword

was going strong in the work of writers like Voltaire and Swift. An
excellent illustration of it is in Swift’s famous A Modest Proposal
in which he suggested that if the Irish were starving they could eat
their babies. Now we have the fabulators. They are trying to di-
vorce their writing from all reality, to make it pure invention. Let
them have their fun. But to me, and certainly I can be wrong, their
writing lacks all impact. It is the most easily forgotten writing I
have ever read. It reminds me, even though they go in for ribaldry
instead of prissiness, of the nineteenth-century lady writers of the
Mrs. Southworth school.
Thinking of the fabulators, I remember a talk given by Ray Brad-
bury. Ray is undoubtedly the best known and most skillful writer
of fantasy and science fiction in the country. He emphasized re-
peatedly that all his stories, even those considered the most fantastic,
started with something real he himself had experienced.
When I was editing a magazine, I had the kind of day every
editor knows. All the people on Park Avenue were writing stories
about ranch life, and the people living out West on ranches were
writing stories about penthouse parties on Park Avenue. I finally
became so exasperated I dictated a letter to one such would-be con-
tributor, “Why in hell don’t you write out of your own knowing
and feeling!” At the end of the day that letter was missing from
the pile I was supposed to sign. I asked my secretary about it. “I
didn’t think you really wanted to send out a letter in which you
swore at an author.” I thought for a minute and answered, “Yes, I
do.”” The next day I had a telegram from him: “Thank you for the
first editorial recognition I have ever received.” He went on to send
me other stories, a couple of which I published. He had been an
iron puddler when young in England and could write vividly of
foundry life. He also wrote a novel which was published before —
like too many writers — he was killed in the Second World War.
Q. Mentioning war, are good stories coming out of the Vietnam
fighting?
A. No, it is too soon. Good war stories seldom coincide with the
war in which they take place. Writers now are really just getting
around to the Forties. They never have had a thoroughly “good
go,” to use an Anglicism, at the Second World War. Some writers
and editors tried to disguise Second World War stories as Korean
War stories to make them seem more timely. They’ll probably try
 Foreword XV

to convert Korean War stories in turn to make them seem out of

Vietnam. Wars are following one another too rapidly. Wouldn't it
be wonderful if there were never any more war stories at all, be-
cause then there wouldn’t be any wars?
Q. Who is asking whom questions?
A. Well —
Q. You were speaking of trends?
A. The very latest trend is called concretism. This is an attempt to
make typography an integral part of reading matter. Just as poetry
once strove to give a musical effect, the concretists are after a visual
effect. The Chicago Review has brought out an issue which it calls
the first anthology of concretism, which is probably a collector’s
item by now. There is not a single word in it, only bold black de-
signs, some typographical, some abstract. Again, this is not new,
although The Chicago Review certainly has carried it to an extreme
by omitting language. e e cummings did it with some of his poetry.
Many people have doodled on the typewriter, making designs or
spelling out words in patterns.
Q. What about the experimenting being done by William Bur-
roughs?
A. I have a theory, which I have not seen anywhere, that Burroughs,
as authors often do, became vexed with something he was writing
and tore up a manuscript. Afterward he tried to put the sheets of
paper together and was intrigued by the way they read. So he de-
cided to continue the process. His earlier writing was completely
straightforward. In a way, it is reminiscent of what Picasso an-
swered when he was asked why, since the drawing in his early pic-
tures was so perfect, he changed to a more irregular kind in his
later work. Picasso answered, ‘“That’s why.”
Q. How about extreme frankness in this year’s stories? Do writers
continue to be uninhibited in sexual description and the use of
four-letter words?
A. Absolutely. It so happens that there is not much of it in the
stories in this volume, but that is not because I disapprove. I
smuggled in too many copies of Joyce’s Ulysses when, masterpiece
though it was, it was still forbidden by law in this country, to be-
come a prude at this late date. It is amusing to consider that if
Harold of England, instead of William of Normandy, had won at
the Battle of Hastings, French-derived words, like excrement and
 XVi Foreword

fornication, probably would be considered indecent. Their four-

letter Anglo-Saxon equivalents, once perfectly proper, were defeated
along with their native users. As for the plaint that they have evil
influence on children, there is practically no normal child who does
not learn their meaning at an early age. The plaint is a little like
that of Malcolm Cowley: it made him sad to think that men no
longer have “a private language,” since women now know it.
Q. Which magazines published the best stories this year?
A. First, let me mention the worst. The women’s magazines have
been going downhill for some time. A few years back they were
printing excellent stories. Only occasionally does one find a good
story in them now. You would think they felt that none of their
women readers had ever gone to kindergarten, let alone to college,
as so many women do today. Playboy has often been criticized for
treating women as sexual! objects instead of human beings; inside
those skulls nature put some gray matter. The women’s magazines
treat their readers as utter morons in regard to fiction; some of their
articles are not too bad. No doubt many women, as Carson Mc-
Cullers did, take them for their food pages. Carson called them
“eating magazines.”
It saddens me to mention Carson. From the time the magazine I
edited published “Wunderkind,” her first short story, I knew her
well for her entire writing life. Like the wonderful Flannery O’Con-
nor, also now dead, she was one of the country’s greatest short story
writers.
Q. If the women’s magazines were the worst, which were the best?
A. The small circulation magazines, called “little” because of that
limited circulation. They are not little in quality. Many, many
readers would enjoy them if they only had access to them. But they
do not have the money to finance the lavish promotion campaigns
of the mass circulation magazines primarily interested only in
money and not in literature.
Q. Has there been much humorous writing?
A. No. There never is anymore. No wonder we all miss James
Thurber. The most hilarious writing I read was in the New York
Times Book Review. The author of an article on Harold Clurman
declared, “It is harder to write a good review than a good play.”
Too many critics have the same attitude, as they pontificate on
poetry, fiction or drama. George Bernard Shaw said, “The gates to
Foreword XVI
the literary kingdom of heaven are guarded by frustrated authors.”
He was writing about editors and critics. It is good for both sides
of the writing fence to remember that.
Q. Any parting words?
A. Yes, I would like to congratulate Epoch and its editor, Baxter
Hathaway, on the magazine’s twentieth anniversary. Epoch has
gone its way quietly and unobtrusively without ever sacrificing
quality. The editors and staff of Houghton Mifflin are to be thanked
for their help with this anthology. Finally, tribute must be paid to
Edward J. O’Brien who, in 1915, founded The Best American Short
Stories.
MarTHA FOLEY
Contents

TELL ME HOW LONG THE TRAIN’S BEEN GONE.

James Baldwin
From McCall’s Magazine

GREASED SAMBA. John Deck 29

From The Atlantic

AN AMERICAN STUDENT IN PARIS. James T. Farrell 43

From The Southern Review

AN OLD MAN AND HIS HAT. George H. Freitag

From Harper's Magazine

WHO IS HARRY KELLERMAN AND WHY IS HE SAY-

ING THOSE TERRIBLE THINGS ABOUT ME?
Herb Gardner 19
From The Saturday Evening Post

IN THE HEART OF THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY.

William H. Gass
From The New American Review

THE ROTIFER. Mary Ladd Gavell

From Psychiatry
THE HEART OF THIS OR THAT MAN. Donald Grop-
man 137
From The Literary Review
 Contents
XX

William Harrison 149

THE SNOOKER SHARK.
From The Saturday Evening Post

THE ONLY PEOPLE. Judith Higgins 161

From The Atlantic

THE TENANT. Helen Hudson 187

From The Virginia Quarterly Review

IN SHOCK. Leo E. Litwak 201

From Partisan Review

THE SONS OF MARTHA. Richard McKenna

From Harper's Magazine

THE PREACHER AND MARGERY SCOTT. William

Moseley
From The Virginia Quarterly Review

CELTIC TWILIGHT. Joanna Ostrow 247

From The New Yorker

EARLY MORNING, LONELY RIDE. Nancy Huddlesion

Parker 269
From The Southwest Review

BLEAT BLODGETTE. John Phillips

From The Paris Review

THE AMBASSADOR. Lawrence P. Spingarn

From The Southern Humanities Review

THE GAMES THAT WE PLAYED. Winston Weathers

From The Georgia Review

DRIED ROSE PETALS IN A SILVER BOWL. Janet Bruce

Winn
From Evidence

Biographical Notes
The Yearbook of the American Short Story
Roll of Honor, 1967
Distinctive Short Stories in American Magazines, 1967
Addresses of American and Canadian Magazines
Publishing Short Stories
 THE

BEST
AMERICAN SHORT STORIES

1968
 JAMES BALDWIN

Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone

(FROM MCCALL’S MAGAZINE)

My BROTHER, CALEB, was seventeen when I was ten. We were very

good friends. In fact, he was my best friend and, for a very long
time, my only friend.
I do not mean to say that he was always nice to me. I got on his
nerves a lot, and he resented having to take me around with him
and be responsible for me when there were so many other things he
wanted to be doing. Therefore, his hand was often up against the
side of my head, and my tears caused him to be punished many
times. But I knew, somehow, anyway, that when he was being pun-
ished for my tears, he was not being punished for anything he had
done to me; he was being punished because that was the way we
lived; and his punishment, oddly, helped unite us. More oddly still,
even as his great hand caused my head to stammer and dropped a
flame-colored curtain before my eyes, I understood that he was
not striking me. His hand leaped out because he could not help it,
and I received the blow because I was there. And it happened, some-
times, before I could even catch my breath to howl, that the hand
that had struck me grabbed me and held me, and it was difficult
indeed to know which of us was weeping. He was striking, striking
out, striking out, striking out; the hand asked me to forgive him.
I felt his bewilderment through the membrane of my own. I also
felt that he was trying to teach me something. And I had, God
knows, no other teachers.

For our father — how shall I describe our father? — was a ruined
Barbados peasant, exiled in a Harlem which he loathed, where he
 a Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone

never saw the sun or sky he remembered, where life took place
neither indoors nor without, and where there was no joy. By which
I mean no joy that he remembered. Had he been able to bring with
him any of the joy he had felt on that far-off island, then the air of
the sea and the impulse to dancing would sometimes have trans-
figured our dreadful rooms. Our lives might have been very differ-
ent.
But no, he brought with him from Barbados only black rum and
blacker pride and magic incantations, which neither healed nor
saved.
He did not understand the people among whom he found him-
self; they had no coherence, no stature and no pride. He came
from a race which had been flourishing at the very dawn of the
world—a race greater and nobler than Rome or Judea, mightier
— he came from a race of kings, kings who had never
than Egypt
been taken in battle, kings who had never been slaves. He spoke
to us of tribes and empires, battles, victories and monarchs of whom
we had never heard—they were not metnioned in our text-
books — and invested us with glories in which we felt more awk-
ward than in the secondhand shoes we wore. In the stifling room
of his pretensions and expectations, we stumbled wretchedly about,
stubbing our toes, as it were, on rubies, scraping our shins on golden
caskets, bringing down, with a childish cry, the splendid purple
tapestry on which, in pounding gold and scarlet, our destinies and
our inheritance were figured. It could scarcely have been otherwise,
since a child’s major attention has to be concentrated on how to fit
into a world which, with every passing hour, reveals itself as merci-
less.
If our father was of royal blood and we were royal children, our
father was certainly the only person in the world who knew it. The
landlord did not know it; our father never mentioned royal blood
to him. When we were late with our rent, which was often, the
landlord threatened, in terms no commoner had ever used before
a king, to put us in the streets. He complained that our shiftless-
ness, which he did not hesitate to consider an attribute of the race,
had forced him, an old man with a weak heart, to climb all these
stairs to plead with us to give him the money we owed him. And
this was the last time; he wanted to make sure we understood that
this was the last time.
 JAMES BALDWIN 3
Our father was younger than the landlord, leaner, stronger and
bigger. With one blow, he could have brought the landlord to his
knees. And we knew how much he hated the man. For days on
end, in the wintertime, we huddled around the gas stove in the
kitchen, because the landlord gave us no heat. When windows
were broken, the landlord took his time about fixing them; the wind
made the cardboard we stuffed in the windows rattle all night long;
and when snow came, the weight of the snow forced the cardboard
inward and onto the floor. Whenever the apartment received a
fresh coat of paint, we bought the paint and did the painting our-
selves; we killed the rats. A great chunk of the kitchen ceiling fell
one winter, narrowly missing our mother.
We all hated the landlord with a perfectly exquisite hatred, and
we would have been happy to see our proud father kill him. We
would have been glad to help. But our father did nothing of the
sort. He stood before the landlord, looking unutterably weary. He
made excuses. He apologized. He swore that it would never hap-
pen again. (We knew that it would happen again.) He begged for
time. The landlord would finally go down the stairs, letting us
and all the neighbors know how good-hearted he was, and our
father would walk into the kitchen and pour himself a glass of rum.
But we knew that our father would never have allowed any black
man to speak to him as the landlord did, as policemen did, as store-
keepers and welfare workers and pawnbrokers did. No, not for a
moment. He would have thrown him out of the house. He would
certainly have made a black man know that he was not the descend-
ant of slaves! He had made them know it so often that he had al-
most no friends among them, and if we had followed his impossible
lead, we would have had no friends, either. It was scarcely worth-
while being the descendant of kings if the kings were black and no
one had ever heard of them.
And it was because of our father, perhaps, that Caleb and I clung
to each other, in spite of the great difference in our ages; or, in an-
other way, it may have been precisely the difference in our ages
that made the clinging possible. I don’t know. It is really not the
kind of thing anyone can ever know. I think it may be easier to
love the really helpless younger brother, because he cannot enter
into competition with one on one’s own ground, or on any ground
at all, and can never question one’s role or jeopardize one’s author-
 Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone
4
occur to me to compete
ity. In my own case, certainly, it did not
his role or his author-
with Caleb, and I could not have questioned
tone, my model and
ity, because I needed both. He was my touchs
my only guide.

os, despised and

Anyway, our father, dreaming bitterly of Barbad
mocked by his neighbors and all but ignored by his sons, held
gospel in bars
down his unspeakable factory job, spread his black
if he loved our
on the weekends, and drank his rum. I do not know
mother. I think he did.
and the
They had had five children — only Caleb and J, the first
but two of the
last, were left. We were both dark, like our father;
three dead girls had been fair, like our mother.
It was
She came from New Orleans. Her hair was not like ours.
and finer. The color of her skin remind ed me of
black, but softer
the color of bananas. Her skin was as bright as that, and con-
her
tained that kind of promise, and she had tiny freckles around
mole just above her upper lip. It was the
nose and a small black
which made her beautifu l. Withou t it, her
mole, I don’t know why,
face might have been merely sweet, merely pretty. But the mole
was funny. It had the effect of making one realize that our mother
liked funny things, liked to laugh. The mole made one look at her
eye s
— large, extraordinary dark eyes, eyes which seemed always
to be amused by something, eyes which looked straight out, seem-
ing to see everything, seeming to be afraid of nothing. She was a
soft, round, plump woman. She liked nice clothes and dangling
jewelry, which she mostly didn’t have, and she liked to cook for large
numbers of people, and she loved our father.
She knew him—knew him through and through. I am not
being coy or colloquial but bluntly and sadly matter-of-fact when
I say that I will now never know what she saw in him. What she
saw was certainly not for many eyes; what she saw got him through
his working week and his Sunday rest; what she saw saved him. She
saw that he was a man. For her, perhaps, he was a great man. I
think, though, that, for our mother, any man was great who
aspired to become a man: this meant that our father was very rare
and precious. I used to wonder how she took it, how she bore it
— his rages, his tears, his cowardice.
On Saturday nights, he was almost always evil, drunk and maud-
 JAMES BALDWIN 5

lin. He came home from work in the early afternoon and gave our
mother some money. It was never enough, of course, but he always
kept enough to go out and get drunk. She never protested, at least
not as far as I know. Then she would go out shopping. I would
usually go with her, for Caleb would almost always be out some-
where, and our mother didn’t like the idea of leaving me alone
in the house. And this was probably, after all, the best possible ar-
rangement. People who disliked our father were sure (for that very
reason) to like our mother; and people who felt that Caleb was
growing to be too much like his father could feel that I, after all,
might turn out like my mother. Besides, it is not, as a general rule,
easy to hate a small child. One runs the risk of looking ridiculous,
especially if the child is with his mother.
And especially if that mother is Mrs. Proudhammer. Mrs. Proud-
hammer knew very well what people thought of Mr. Proudhammer.
She knew, too, exactly how much she owed in each store she en-
tered, how much she was going to be able to pay, and what she had
to buy. She entered with a smile, ready.
“Evening. Let me have some of them red beans there.”
“Evening. You know, you folks been running up quite a little
bill here.”
“T’m going to give you something on it right now. I need some
cornmeal and flour and some rice.”
“You know, I got my bills to meet, too, Mrs. Proudhammer.”
“Didn’t I just tell you I was going to pay? I want some corn-
flakes too, and some milk.’ Such merchandise as she could reach,
she had already placed on the counter.
‘When do you think you’re going to be able to pay this bill? All
OLneit, lemeans:
“You know I’m going to pay it just as soon as I can. How much
does it all come to? Give me that end you got there of that choco-
late cake.’ The chocolate cake was for Caleb and me. “Well, now
you put this against the bill.” Imperiously, as though it were the
most natural thing in the world, she put two or three dollars on
the counter.
“You lucky I’m softhearted, Mrs. Proudhammer.”
“Things sure don’t cost this much downtown — you think I don’t
know it? Here.’ And she paid him for what she had bought.
“Thank you. You been mighty kind.”
 6 Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone

And we left the store. I often felt that in order to help her, I
should have filled my pockets with merchandise while she was
talking. But I never did, not only because the store was often
crowded or because I was afraid of being caught by the storekeeper,
but because I was afraid of humiliating her. When I began to steal,
not very much later, I stole in stores that were not in our neighbor-
hood, where we were not known.
When we had to do “heavy” shopping, we went marketing under
the bridge at Park Avenue— Caleb, our mother and I; and some-
times, but rarely, our father came with us. The most usual reason
for heavy shopping was that some relatives of our mother’s, or old
friends of both our mother’s and our father’s, were coming to visit.
We were certainly not going to let them go away hungry
— not
even if it meant, as it often did mean, spending more than we had.
In spite of what I have been suggesting about our father’s tem-
perament, and no matter how difficult he may sometimes have
been with us, he was much too proud to offend any guest of his; on
the contrary, his impulse was to make them feel that his home was
theirs; and besides, he was lonely, lonely for his past, lonely for
those faces which had borne witness to that past. Therefore, he
would sometimes pretend that our mother did not know how to
shop, and our father would come with us, under the bridge, in order
to teach her.
There he would be, then, uncharacteristically, in shirt-sleeves,
which made him look rather boyish; and as our mother showed no
desire to take shopping lessons from him, he turned his attention
to Caleb and me. He would pick up a fish, opening the gills and
holding it close to his nose. “You see that? That fish looks fresh,
don’t it? Well, that fish ain’t as fresh as I am, and I been out of the
water. They done doctored that fish. Come on.” And we would
walk away, a little embarrassed but, on the whole, rather pleased
that our father was so smart.
Meantime, our mother was getting the marketing done. She was
very happy on days like this, because our father was happy. He was
happy, odd as his expression of it may sound, to be out with his
wife and his two sons. If we had been on the island that had been
witness to his birth, instead of the unspeakable island of Manhat-
tan, he felt that it would not have been so hard for us all to
trust and love each other. He sensed, and I think he was right, that
JAMES BALDWIN 7
on that other, never to be recovered island, his sons would have
looked on him very differently, and he would have looked very
differently on his sons. Life would have been hard there, too; we
would have fought there, too, and more or less blindly suffered and
more or less blindly died. But we would not have been (or so it
was to seem to all of us forever) so wickedly menaced by the mere
fact of our relationship, would not have been so frightened of enter-
ing into the central, most beautiful and valuable facts of our lives.
We would have been laughing and cursing and tussling in the
water, instead of stammering under the bridge; we would have
known less about vanished African kingdoms and more about each
other. Or, not at all impossibly, more about both.
If it was summer, we bought a watermelon, which either Caleb
or our father carried home, fighting with each other for this privi-
lege. They looked very like each other on those days — both big,
both black, both laughing.
Caleb always looked absolutely helpless when he laughed. He
laughed with all his body, perhaps touching his shoulder against
yours, or putting his head on your chest for a moment, and then
careering off you, halfway across the room or down the block. I
will always hear his laughter. He was always happy on such days,
too. If our father needed his son, Caleb certainly needed his father.
Such days, however, were rare — one of the reasons, probably, that
I remember them now.
Eventually, we all climbed the stairs into that hovel which, at
such moments, was our castle. One very nearly felt the draw-
bridge rising behind us as our father locked the door.
The bathtub could not yet be filled with cold water and the
melon placed in the tub, because this was Saturday, and, come eve-
ning, we all had to bathe. The melon was covered with a blanket
and placed on the fire escape. Then we unloaded what we had
bought, rather impressed by our opulence, though our father was
always, by this time, appalled by the money we had spent. I was
always sadly aware that there would be nothing left of all this once
tomorrow had come and gone and that most of it, after all, was not
for us, but for others.
Our mother was calculating the pennies she would need all week
—carfare for our father and for Caleb, who went to a high school
out of our neighborhood; money for the life insurance; money
 8 Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone

for milk for me at school; money for light and gas; money put away,
if possible, toward the rent. She knew just about what our father
had left in his pockets and was counting on him to give me the
money I would shortly be demanding to go to the movies. Caleb
had a part-time job after school and already had his movie money.
Anyway, unless he was in a very good mood or needed me for
something, he would not be anxious to go to the movies with me.
Our mother never insisted that Caleb tell her where he was go-
ing, nor did she question him as to how he spent the money he
made. She was afraid of hearing him lie, and she did not want to
risk forcing him to lie. She was operating on the assumption that
he was sensible and had been raised to be honorable and that he,
now more than ever, needed his privacy.
But she was very firm with him, nevertheless. “I do not want to
see you rolling in here at three in the morning, Caleb. I want you
here in time to eat, and you know you got to take your bath.”
“Yes, indeed, ma’am. Why can’t I take my bath in the morning?”
‘Don’t you start being funny. You know you ain’t going to get
up in time to take no bath in the morning.”
“Don’t nobody want you messing around in that bathroom all
morning long, man,” said our father. “You just git back in the
house like your ma’s telling you.”
“Besides,” I said, “you never wash out the tub.”
Caleb looked at me in mock surprise and from a great height,
allowing his chin and his lids simultaneously to drop and swiveling
his head away from me.
“I see,” he said, ‘that everyone in this family is ganging up on
me. All right, Leo. I was planning to take you to the show with
me, but now I’ve changed my mind.”
“I’m sorry,” I said quickly. “I take it back.”
“You take what back?”
“What | said — about you not washing out the tub.”
“Ain’t no need to take it back,” our father said stubbornly. “It’s
true. A man don’t take back nothing that’s true.”
“So you say,’ Caleb said, with a hint of a sneer. But before any-
one could possibly react to this, he picked me up, scowling into my
face, which he held just above his own. “You take it back?”
“Leo ain’t going to take it back,” our father said.
 JAMES BALDWIN Y)
Now I was in trouble. Caleb watched me, a small grin on his
face. “You take it back?”
“Stop teasing that child, and put him down,” our mother said.
“The trouble ain’t that Caleb don’t wash out the tub
— he just
don’t wash it out very clean.”
“T never knew him to wash it out,” our father said, “unless I was
standing behind him.”
“Well, ain’t neither one of you much good around the house,”
our mother said.
Caleb laughed and set me down. “You didn’t take it back,” he
said.
I said nothing.
“I guess I’m just going to have to go on without you.”
Sull, I said nothing.
“You going to have that child to crying in a minute,” our mother
said. “If you going to take him go on and take him. Don’t do him
like that.”
Caleb laughed again. “I’m going to take him. The way he got
them eyes all ready to water, I’d better take him somewhere.” We
walked toward the door. “But you got to make up your mind,” he
said to me, “to say what you think is right.”
I grabbed Caleb’s hand, the signal for the descent of the draw-
bridge. Our mother watched us cheerfully as we walked out; our
father watched us balefully. Yet there was a certain humor in his
face, too, and a kind of pride.
“Dig you later,” Caleb said, and the door closed behind us.
The hall was dark, smelling of cooking, of stale wine, of rotting
garbage. We dropped down the stairs, Caleb going two at a time,
pausing at each landing, briefly, to glance back up at me. I dropped
down behind him as fast as I could. When I reached the street
level, Caleb was already on the stoop, joking with some of his
friends, who were standing in the doorway — who seemed always
to be in the doorway.
I didn’t like Caleb’s friends, because I was afraid of them. I knew
the only reason they didn’t try to make life hell for me, the way
they made life hell for a lot of the other kids, was because they were
afraid of Caleb. I went through the door, passing between my
brother and his friends, down to the sidewalk, feeling, as they
 10 Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone

looked briefly at me and then continued joking with Caleb, what

they felt — that here was Caleb’s round-eyed, frail and useless sissy
of a little brother. They pitied Caleb for having to take me out.
On the other hand, they also wanted to go to the show, but didn’t
have the money. Therefore, in silence, I could crow over them
even as they despised me. But this was always a terribly risky, touch-
and-go business, for Caleb might, at any moment, change his mind
and drive me away. -
I always stood, those Saturday afternoons, in fear and trembling,
holding on to the small shield of my bravado, while waiting for
Caleb to come down the steps of the stoop, away from his friends,
to me. I braced myself, always, for the moment when he would
turn to me, saying, “Okay, kid. You run along. I'll see you later.”
This meant that I would have to go the movies by myself and
hang around in front of the box office, waiting for some grown-up
to take me in. I could not go back upstairs, for this would be in-
forming my mother and father that Caleb had gone off somewhere
after promising to take me to the movies.
Neither could I simply hang around, playing with the kids on
the block. For one thing, my demeanor, as I came out of the
house, very clearly indicated that I had better things to do than play
with them; for another, they were not terribly anxious to play with
me; and, finally, my remaining on the block would have had exactly
the same effect as my going upstairs. To remain on the block after
Caleb’s dismissal was to put myself at the mercy of the block and
to put Caleb at the mercy of our parents.
So I prepared myself, those Saturdays, to respond with a cool
“Okay. See you later,” and then to turn indifferently away, and
walk. This was surely the most terrible moment. The moment I
turned away, I was committed, I was trapped, and I then had miles
to walk, so it seemed to me, before I would be out of sight, before
the block ended and I could turn onto the avenue. I wanted to run
out of that block, but I never did. I never looked back. I forced
myself to walk very slowly, looking neither right nor left, striving
to seem at once distracted and offhand; concentrating on the cracks
in the sidewalk and stumbling over them; trying to whistle, feeling
every muscle in my body, feeling that all the block was watching
me, and feeling, which was odd, that I deserved it.
And then I reached the avenue, and turned, still not looking
 JAMES BALDWIN 1]

back, and was released from those eyes at least; but now I faced
other eyes, eyes coming toward me. These eyes were the eyes of
children stronger than me, who would steal my movie money; these
eyes were the eyes of white cops, whom I feared, whom I hated with
a literally murderous hatred; these eyes were the eyes of old folks,
who might wonder what I was doing on this avenue by myself.
And then I got to the show. Sometimes someone would take me
in right away, and sometimes I would have to stand there and wait,
watching the faces coming to the box office. And this was not easy,
since I didn’t, after all, want everyone in the neighborhood to know
I was loitering outside the movie house waiting for someone to
take me in. If it came to our father’s attention, he would kill both
Caleb and me.
Eventually, I would see a face which looked susceptible. I would
rush up to him —it was usually a man, for men were less likely
to be disapproving — and whisper, ““Take me in,” and give him my
dime. Sometimes the man simply took the dime and disappeared
inside; sometimes he gave my dime back to me and took me in any-
way. Sometimes I ended up wandering around the streets—
but I couldn’t wander into a strange neighborhood, because I
would be beaten up if I did— until I figured the show was out.
It was dangerous to get home too early, and, of course, it was
practically lethal to arrive too late. If all went well, I could cover
for Caleb, saying that I had left him with some boys on the stoop.
Then, if he came in too late, it could not be considered my fault.

But if wandering around this way was not without its dangers,
neither was it without its discoveries and delights. I discovered sub-
ways. I discovered, that is, that I could ride on subways by myself
and, furthermore, that I could usually ride for nothing. Sometimes,
when I ducked under the turnstile, I was caught, and sometimes
great black ladies seized on me as a pretext for long, very loud,
ineffably moral lectures about wayward children breaking their
parents’ hearts. Sometimes, doing everything in my power not to
attract their attention, I endeavored to look as though I were in
the charge of a respectable-looking man or woman, entering the
subway in their shadow and sitting very still beside them. It was
best to try to sit between two such people, for each would auto-
matically assume that I was with the other. There I would sit, then,
 2 Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone

in a precarious anonymity, watching the people, listening to the

roar, watching the lights of stations flash by. It seemed to me that
nothing was faster than a subway train, and I loved the speed,
because the speed was dangerous.
For a time, during these expeditions, I simply sat and watched
the people. Lots of people would be dressed up, for this was Satur-
day night. The women’s hair would be all curled and straightened,
and the lipstick on their full lips looked purple and make-believe
against the dark skins of their faces. They wore very fancy capes
or coats, in wonderful colors, and long dresses, and sometimes they
had jewels in their hair, and sometimes they wore flowers on their
dresses. They were almost as beautiful as movie stars. And so the
men with them seemed to think.
The hair of the men was slick and wavy, brushed up into pom-
padours; or they wore very sharp hats, brim flicked down danger-
ously over one eye, with perhaps one flower in the lapel of their
many-colored suits. They laughed and talked with their girls, but
quietly, for there were white people in the car. The white people
would scarcely ever be dressed up and did not speak to each other
at all—only read their papers and stared at the advertisements.
But they fascinated me more than the colored people did, because I
knew nothing at all about them and could not imagine what they
were like.
Underground, I received my first apprehension of New York
neighborhoods and, underground, first felt what may be called a
civic terror. I very soon realized that after the train had passed a
certain point, going uptown or downtown, all the colored people
disappeared. The first time I realized this, I panicked and got lost.
I rushed off the train, terrified of what these white people might
do to me, with no colored person around to protect me — even to
scold me, even to beat me; at least, their touch was familiar, and I
knew that they did not, after all, intend to kill me — and got on
another train only because I saw a black man on it. But almost
everyone else was white.
The train did not stop at any of the stops I remembered. I be-
came more and more frightened, frightened of getting off the train
and frightened of staying on it, frightened of saying anything to the
man and frightened that he would get off the train before I could
say anything to him. He was my salvation, and he stood there in the
 JAMES BALDWIN 13

unapproachable and frightening form that salvation so often takes.

At each stop, I watched him with despair.
To make matters worse, I suddenly realized that I had to pee.
Once I realized it, this need became a torment; the horror of wetting
my pants in front of all these people made the torment greater.
Finally, I tugged at the man’s sleeve. He looked down at me with
a gruff, amused concern; then, reacting, no doubt to the desperation
in my face, he bent closer.
I asked him if there was a bathroom on the train.
He laughed. “No,” he said, “but there’s a bathroom in the sta-
tion.” He looked at me again. ‘‘Where’re you going?”
I told him that I was going home.
“And where’s home?”
I told him.
This time he did not laugh. “Do you know where you are?” he
said.
I shook my head. At that moment, the train came into a station,
and after several hours, it rolled to a stop. The doors opened,
and the man led me to the bathroom. I ran in, and I hurried, be-
cause I was afraid he would disappear. But I was glad he had not
come in with me.
When I came out, he stood waiting for me. “Now,” he said, “you
in Brooklyn. You ever hear of Brooklyn? What you doing out here
by yourself?”
“T got lost,” I said.
“I know you got lost. What I want to know is how come you got
lost? Where’s your mama? Where’s your daddy?”
I almost said that I didn’t have any, because I liked his face and
his voice and was half hoping to hear him say that he didn’t have
any little boy and would just as soon take a chance on me. But I
told him that my mama and daddy were at home.
“And do they know where you are?”
I said, “No.” There was a pause.
“Well, I know they going to make your tail hot when they see
you.” He took my hand. “Come on.”
And he led me along the platform and then down some steps and
along a narrow passage and then up some steps onto the opposite
platform. I was very impressed by this maneuver; in order to ac-
complish the same purpose, I had always left the subway station and
 14 Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone
was over, I was in
gone up into the street. Now that the emergency
him if he had a little boy.
no great hurry to leave my savior. I asked
boy, I’d paddle your be-
“Yes,” he said, “and if you was my little
hind so you couldn’t sit down for a week.”
what was his name and if
I asked him how old was his little boy,
his little boy was at home.
and laughed. “His
“He better be at home!” He looked at me
His gaze refocused,
name is Jonathan. He ain’t but five years old.”
sharpened. “How old are your”
I told him that I was ten, going on eleven.
“You a pretty bad little fellow,” he said then.
dreamed of deny-
I tried to look repentant, but I would not have
ing it.
uptown side. Can you
“Now, look here,” he said, “this here’s the
assured him that I could
read, or don’t you never go to school?” I
e trains.” He
read. “Now, to get where you going, you got to chang
“Here, I’ll write it down for you.” He found some
told me where.
coming. He
paper in his pockets but no pencil. We heard the train
helple ss annoy ance, looked at his watch,
looked about him in
looked at me. “It’s all right. I’ll tell the conduc tor.”
rather a mean
But the conductor, standing between two cars, had
pink face.
But
My savior looked at him dubiously. “He might be all right.
.” He pushed me ahead of him into
we better not take no chances
If I
the train. “You know you right lucky that I got a little boy?
go on and be lost. You don’t know
didn’t, I swear I’d just let you
the kind of trouble you going to get me in at home. My wife ain’t
never going to believe this story.”
I told him to give me his name and address and I would write a
letter to his wife and to his little boy, too.
This caused him to laugh harder than ever. “You only say
that because you know I ain’t got no pencil. You are, one hell of a
shrewd little boy.”
I told him that then maybe we should get off the train and that
I would go back home with him.
This made him grave. “What does your father do?”
This question made me uneasy. I stared at him for a long time
before I answered. ‘““He works in a—” I could not pronounce
the word — “‘he has a job.”
JAMES BALDWIN 15

He nodded. “I see. Is he home now?”

I really did not know, and I said I did not know.
“And what does your mother do?”
“She stays home.”
Again he nodded. “You got any brothers or sisters?”
I told him no.
“I see. What’s your name?”
mIRCOns
“Leo what?”
“Leo Proudhammer.”
He saw something in my face. “What do you want to be when
you grow up, Leo?”
”
“IT want to be —” and I had never said this before — “I want to
be a—a movie actor. I want to be a— actor.”
“You pretty skinny for that,” he said.
“That’s all right,” I told him. “Caleb’s going to teach me to
swim. That’s how you get big.”
“Who's Caleb?”
I opened my mouth, I started to speak. I checked myself as the
train roared into a station. He glanced out the window, but did not
move. “He swims,” I said.
“Oh,” he said after a very long pause, during which the doors
slammed and the train began to move. “Is he a good swimmer?”’
I said that Caleb was the best swimmer in the world.
“Okay,” my savior said, “okay,” and put his hand on my head
again and smiled at me.
I asked him what his name was.
“Charles,” he said, “Charles Williams. But you better call me
Uncle Charles, you little devil, because you have certainly ruined
my Saturday night.” The train came into a station. “Here’s where
we change,” he said.
We got out of the train and crossed the platform and waited.
“Now,” he said, “this train stops exactly where you going. Tell
me where you going.”
I stared at him.
“I want you,” he said, “to tell me exactly where you going. I
can’t be fooling with you all night.”
I told him.
“You sure that’s right?”
 16 Teil Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone

I told him I was sure.

“I got a very good memory,” he said. “Give me your address.
Just say it, P11 remember it.”
So I said it, staring into his face as the train came roaring in.
“If you don’t go straight home,” he said, “I’m going to come see
your daddy, and when we find you, you'll be mighty sorry.” He
pushed me into the train and put one shoulder against the door.
“Go on, now,” he said, loud enough for all the car to hear. “Your
mama’ll meet you at the station where I told you to get off.” He
repeated my subway stop, pushed the angry door with his shoulder,
and then said gently, “Sit down, Leo.” He remained in the door until
I sat down. ‘So long, Leo,” he said then, and stepped backward out.
The doors closed. He grinned at me and waved, and the train be-
gan to move.
I waved back. Then he was gone, the station was gone, and I was
on my way back home.
I never saw that man again, but I made up stories about him, I
dreamed about him, I even wrote a letter to him and his wife and
his little boy, but I never mailed it.
I never told Caleb anything about my solitary expeditions. I
don’t know why. I think that he might have liked to know about
them. I suppose, finally, at bottom, I said nothing because my ex-
peditions belonged to me.
Another time, it was raining, and it was still too early for me to go
home. I felt very, very low that day. It was one of the times that
my tongue and my body refused to obey me, and I had not been
able to work up the courage to ask anyone to take me in to the
show. The ticket taker was watching me, or so I thought, with a
hostile suspicion. Actually, it’s very unlikely he was thinking at all,
and certainly not of me. But I walked away from the show, because
I could no longer bear his eyes, or anybody’s eyes.
I walked the long block east from the movie house. The street
was empty, black and glittering. The water soaked through my coat
at the shoulders, and water dripped down my neck from my cap. I
began to be afraid. I could not stay out in the rain, because then
my father and mother would know I had been wandering the streets.
I would get a beating, and, though Caleb was too old to get a beat-
ing, he and my father would have a terrible fight, and Caleb would
blame it all on me and would not speak to me for days.
 JAMES BALDWIN 17
I began to hate Caleb. I wondered where he was. I started in the
direction of our house, only because I did not know what else to do.
Perhaps Caleb would be waiting for me on the stoop.
The avenue, too, was very long and silent. Somehow, it seemed
old, like a picture in a book. It stretched straight before me, endless,
and the streetlights did not so much illuminate it as prove how dark
it was. The rain was falling harder. Cars sloshed by, sending up
sheets of water. From the bars, I heard music, faintly, and many
voices. Straight ahead of me a woman walked, very fast, head down,
carrying a shopping bag. I reached my corner and crossed the wide
avenue. There was no one on my stoop.

Now I was not even certain what time it was; but I knew it wasn’t
time yet for the show to be over. I walked into my hallway and
wrung out my cap. I was sorry that I had not made someone take
me in to the show, because now I did not know what to do. I could
go upstairs and say that we had not liked the movie and had left
early and that Caleb was with some boys on the stoop. But this
would sound strange, and Caleb, who would not know what story
I had told, would, therefore, be greatly handicapped when he came
home.
I could not stay in my hallway, because my father might not be
at home and might come in. I could not go into the hallway of an-
other building, because if any of the kids who lived in the building
found me, they would have the right to beat me up. I could not go
back out into the rain. I stood next to the big, cold radiator, and I
began to cry. But crying wasn’t going to do me any good, either,
especially as there was no one to hear me.
So I stepped out on my stoop again and stood there for a long
time, wondering what to do. Then I thought of a condemned
house, around the corner from us. We played there sometimes,
though it was very dangerous and we were not supposed to. What
possessed me to go there now, I don’t know, except that I could not
think of another dry place in the whole world. I started running
east, down our block. I turned two corners and came to the house,
with its black window sockets. The house was completely dark. [I
had forgotten how afraid I was of the dark, but the rain was
drenching me. I ran down the cellar steps and clambered into the
house through one of the broken windows. I squatted there in a
 18 Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone

still, dry dread, not daring to look into the house but staring out-
the
ward. I was holding my breath. I heard an endless scurrying in
teeth
darkness, a perpetual busyness, and I thought of rats, of their
and ferocity and fearful size, and I began to cry again.
I don’t know how long I squatted there this way or what was in
my mind. I listened to the rain and the rats. Then I was aware
of another sound —I had been hearing it for a while without
realizing it. This was a moaning sound, a sighing sound, a sound
of strangling, which mingled with the sound of the rain and with a
muttering, cursing human voice. The sounds came from the door
that led to the backyard.
I wanted to stand, but I crouched lower; wanted to run, but could
not move. Sometimes the sounds seemed to come closer, and I knew
that this meant my death; sometimes they diminished or ceased
altogether, and then I knew that my assailant was looking for me.
I looked toward the backyard door, and I seemed to see, silhouetted
against the driving rain, a figure, half bent, moaning, leaning
against the wall, in indescribable torment; then there seemed to be
two figures, sighing and grappling, moving so quickly that it was
impossible to tell which was which, two creatures, each in a dread-
ful, absolute, silent single-mindedness attempting to strangle the
other!
I watched, crouching low. A very powerful and curious excite-
ment mingled itself with my terror and made the terror greater. I
could not move. I did not dare move. The figures were quieter
now. It seemed to me that one of them was a woman, and
she seemed to be crying, pleading for her life. But her sobbing was
answered only by a growling sound. The muttered, joyous curses
began again; the murderous ferocity began again, more bitterly
than ever. The sobbing began to rise in pitch, like a song.
Then everything was still, all movement ceased. Then I heard
only the rain and the scurrying of the rats. It was over; one of them,
or both of them, lay stretched out, dead or dying in this filthy place.
It happened in Harlem every Saturday night. I could not catch my
breath to scream. Then I heard a laugh, a low, happy, wicked
laugh, and the figure turned in my direction and seemed to start
toward me.
Then I screamed and stood straight up, bumping my head on
the window frame and losing my cap, and scrambled up the cellar
 JAMES BALDWIN 19
steps. I ran head down, like a bull, away from that house and out
of that block. I ran up the steps of my stoop and bumped into
Caleb.
“Where the hell have you been? Hey! What’s the matter with
your”
I had jumped up on him, almost knocking him down, trembling
and sobbing.
“You're soaked. Leo, what’s the matter? Where’s your cap?”
But I could not say anything. I held him around the neck with
all my might, and I could not stop shaking.
“Come on, Leo,’”’ Caleb said, in a different tone, “tell me what’s
the matter.” He pried my arms loose and held me away from him,
so that he could look into my face. “Oh, little Leo. Little Leo.
What’s the matter, baby?” He looked as though he were about to
cry himself, and this made me cry harder than ever. He took out
his handkerchief and wiped my face and made me blow my nose.
My sobs began to lessen, but I could not stop trembling. He
thought that I was trembling from cold, and he rubbed his hands
roughly up and down my back and rubbed my hands between his.
“What’s the matter?”
I did not know how to tell him.
“Somebody try to beat you up?”
I shook my head. “No.”
“What movie did you see?”
“I didn’t go. I couldn’t find nobody to take me in.”
“And you just been wandering around in the rain all night?”
Yes.”
He sat down on the hallway steps. “Oh, Leo.” Then, “You mad
at me?”
I said, “No. I was scared.”
He nodded. “I reckon you were, man.” He wiped my face again.
“You ready to go upstairs? It’s getting late.”
eOkay.”
“How’d you lose your cap?”
“I went in a hallway to wring it out —and—I put it on the
radiator, and I heard some people coming — and—I ran away,
and I forgot it.”
“We'll say you forgot it in the movies.”
“Okay.”
 20 Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone

We started up the stairs.

sorry. I won't
“Leo,” he said, “I’m sorry about tonight. I’m really
let it happen again. You believe me?”
“Sure. I believe you.” I smiled up at him.
He squatted down. “Give us a kiss.”
I kissed him.
“Okay. Climb up. T’ll give youa ride. Hold on, now.”
He carried me piggyback up the stairs.
in fact, work too
Thereafter, we evolved a system, which did not,
I was
badly. When things went wrong and he could not be found,
on the avenue. This
to leave a message for him at a certain store
more than candy
— on and hot dogs and
store had a bad reputati
me this and told
soda pop were sold there; Caleb himself had told
they
me not to hang out there. But he said he would see to it that
treated me all right.
I went in the store one Saturday night, and one of the boys
up and
who was always there, a boy about Caleb’s age, looked
I'll take
smiled and said, “You looking for your brother? Come on,
you to him.”
This was not the agreed-on formula. I was to be taken to Caleb
only in cases of real emergency, which wasn’t the case this time. I
and
was there because the show was over a little earlier than usual,
since it was only about a quarter past eleven, I figured I had about
half an hour to wait for Caleb.
When the boy made his invitation, I assumed it was because of
some prearrangement with the owner of the store, a very dour,
silent black man, who looked at me from behind his counter and
said nothing.
I said, “Okay,” and the boy, whose name was Arthur, said, “Come
on, Sonny. I’m going to take you to a party.” He took my hand
and led me across the avenue and into a long, dark block.
We walked the length of the block in silence, crossed another
avenue and went into a big house in the middle of the block. We
were in a big vestibule, with four locked apartment doors staring
away from each other. It was not really clean, but it was fairly
clean. We climbed three flights of stairs. Arthur knocked on the
door, a very funny knock, not loud. After a moment, I heard a
scraping sound, then the sound of a chain rattling and a bolt be-
ing pulled back. The door opened.
 JAMES BALDWIN al
A lady, very black and rather fat, wearing a blue dress, held
the door for us. She said, “Come on in. Now, what you doing here
with this child?”
“Had to do it. It’s all right. It’s Caleb’s brother.”
We started down a long, dark hall, with closed rooms on either
side of it, toward the living room. One of the rooms was the
kitchen. A smell of barbecue made me realize that I was hungry.
The living room was really two living rooms. The far one looked
out on the street. There were six or seven people in the room,
women and men. They looked exactly like the men and women
who frightened me when I saw them standing on the corners, laugh-
ing and joking in front of the bars. But they did not seem frighten-
ing here. A record player was going, not very loud. They had
drinks in their hands, and there were half-empty plates of food
around the room. Caleb was sitting on the sofa, with his arm
around a girl in a yellow dress.
“Here’s your little brother,” said the fat black lady in blue.
Arthur said to Caleb, “It was just better for him not to have to
wait there tonight.”
Caleb smiled at me. I was tremendously relieved that he was not
angry. I was delighted by this party, even though it made me
shy. “Come on over here,” Caleb said. I went to the sofa. “This is
my kid brother. His name is Leo. Leo, this is Dolores. Say hello to
Dolores.”
Dolores smiled at me—I thought she was very pretty — and
said, ‘I’m very happy to meet you, Leo. How’ve you been?”
“Just fine,” I said.
“Don’t you want to know how she’s been?” Caleb grinned.
“No,” said the fat black lady, and laughed. ‘I’m sure he don’t
want to know that. I bet he’s hungry. You been stuffing yourself
all night, Caleb. Let me give him a little bit of my barbecue and a
glass of ginger ale.” She already was beginning to propel me out of
the room.
I looked at Caleb. Caleb said, “Just remember we ain’t got all
night. Leo, this is Miss Mildred. She cooked everything, and she’s
a might good friend of mine. What do you say to Miss Mildred,
Leo?”
“Dig Caleb being the big brother,’ Arthur muttered, and
laughed.
 22 Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone

“Thank you, Miss Mildred,” I said.

“and let me try to put some
“Come on in the kitchen,” she said,
the kitchen. “Now, you
flesh on them bones.” She walked me into
take me but a minute to
sit right over there,” she said. “Won't
en table and gave me a
warm this up.” She sat me at the kitch
erade you in at school,
napkin and poured the ginger ale. “What
” she said,
Leo” I told her. “You must be a right smart boy, then,
with a pleased smile. “Do you like school, Leo?”
history and English
I told her what I liked best was Spanish and
composition.
ever. “What do you
This caused her to look more pleased than
want to be when you grow up?”
not tell her what I had told the man,
Somehow, I could
that maybe I would be
my friend, on the train. I said I wasn’t sure,
a schoolteacher.
proudly, “and
“That’s just what I wanted to be,” she said
e I would have made it,
I studied right hard for it, too, and I believ
some no-count
but then I had to go and get myself mixed up with
I didn’t have no better sense but to
nigger. I didn’t have no sense.
And she laughe d and set my plate
marry him. Can you beat that?”
Now, your brother,”
in front of me. “Go on, now, eat. Foolish me.
fine boy. He wants to make some-
she said suddenly, “he’s a right
e
— ambi-
thing of himself. He’s got ambition. That’s what I lik
. Like me. You like my barbe-
tion. Don’t you let him be foolish
cue?”
“Ves, ma’am,” I said. “It’s good.”
it.
“Let me give you some more ginger ale,” she said, and poured
although I
I was beginning to be full. But I didn’t want to go,
to be late. While Miss
knew that, now, it was really beginning
I listened to the voices
Mildred talked and moved about the kitchen,
coming from the other room, the voices and the music. They were
playing a kind of purple, lazy dance music, a music that was al-
ready in my bones, along with the wilder music from which the
purple music sprang. The voices were not like the music, though
they corroborated it. I listened to a girl’s voice, gravelly and low,
indignant and full of laughter. The room was full of laughter. It
at intervals, and rolled through the living room and
exploded,
hammered at the walls of the kitchen.
Every once in a while, I heard Caleb, booming like a trumpet,
 JAMES BALDWIN ras
drowning out the music. I wondered how often Caleb came here
and how he had met these people, who were so different, at least
as it seemed to me, from any of the people who ever came to our
house.
Then Caleb’s hand was on my neck. Dolores stood in the door-
way, smiling. “You stuffed yourself enough, little brother?” Caleb
said. “Because we got to get out of here now.”
We walked slowly down the hall, Miss Mildred, Dolores and Caleb
and me. We reached the door, which had a metal pole built into
it in such a way as to prevent its being opened from the outside,
and a heavy piece of chain around the top of the three locks.
Miss Mildred began, patiently, to open the door. “Leo,” she
said, “don’t you be no stranger. You make your brother bring you
back to see me, you hear?” She got the pole out of the way and then
undid the chain. To Caleb, she said, “Bring him by some after-
noon. I ain’t got nothing to do. I'll be glad to look after him.” The
last lock yielded, and Miss Mildred opened the door. We were fac-
ing the bright hall lights: no, the building was not very clean.
“Good night, Leo,” Miss Mildred said, and then she said good night
to Dolores and Caleb. She closed the door.
I heard the scraping sound again, and we walked down the stairs.
“She’s nice,” I said.
Caleb said, yawning, “Yeah, she’s a very nice lady.” Then he
said, “Now, I don’t want you telling nobody at home about this,
you hear?” I swore I wouldn’t tell. “It’s our secret,” Caleb said.
It was colder in the streets than it had been before.
Caleb took Dolores’ arm. “Let’s get you to your subway,” he
said.
We started walking up the wide, dark avenue. We reached the
brightly lit kiosk, which came up out of the sidewalk like some un-
believably malevolent awning or the suction apparatus of a mon-
strous vacuum cleaner.
“Bye-bye,” Caleb said, and kissed Dolores on the nose. “I got to
run. See you Monday after school.”
“Bye-bye,” Dolores said. She bent down and kissed me quickly
on the cheek. “Bye-bye, Leo. Be good.” She hurried down the
steps.
Caleb and I began walking very fast, down the avenue, toward
our block. The subway station was near the movie house, and the
 24 Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone

movie house was dark. We knew we were late; we did not think we
were that late.
“It was a very long show, wasn’t it?” Caleb said.
eVessalesales
“What did we see? Better tell me about both pictures. Just in
case.”
I told him as well as I could as we hurried down the avenue.
Caleb had great powers of concentration and could figure out
enough from what I said to know what to say if the necessity arose.
But our troubles, that night, came from a very different source
than our parents. I had just reached the point in my breathless
narration where the good girl is murdered by the Indians and the
hero vows revenge. We were hurrying down the long block that
led east to our house when we heard a car braking and were blinded
by bright lights and were pushed up against a wall.
“Turn around,” a voice said. “And keep your hands in the air.”
It may seem funny, but I felt as though Caleb and I had conjured
up a movie — that if I had not been describing a movie to him,
we would not have suddenly found ourselves in the middle of one.
Or was it the end? I had never been so frightened in my life.
We did as we were told. I felt the grainy brick beneath my fin-
gers. A hand patted me all over my body, every touch humiliating.
Beside me, I heard Caleb catch his breath.
“Turn around,” the voice said.
The great lights of the police car had gone out; I could see the
car at the curb, the doors open. I did not dare look at Caleb, for I
felt that this would, somehow, be used against us. I stared at the
two policemen, young, white, tight-lipped and self-important.
They turned a flashlight first on Caleb, then on me. “Where you
boys going?”
“Home,” Caleb said. I could hear his breathing. “We live in
the next block.” And he gave the address.
‘“‘Where’ve you been?”
Now I heard the effort Caleb was making not to surrender either
to rage or panic. “We just took my girl to the subway station. We
were at the movies.” And then, forced out of him, weary, dry and
bitter, “This here’s my brother. I got to get him home. He ain’t
but ten years old.”
“What movie did you see?”
And Caleb told them. I marveled at his memory. But I also knew
JAMES BALDWIN
25

that the show had let out about an hour or so before. I feared that
the policemen might also know this. But they didn’t.
“You got any identification?”
“My brother doesn’t. I do.”
~Let’s see it.”
Caleb took out his wallet and handed it over.
They looked at his wallet, looked at us, handed it back. “Get on
home,” one of them said. They got into their car and drove off.
“Thanks,” Caleb said. ‘Thanks, all you scum-bag Christians.”
His accent was now as irredeemably of the islands as was the accent
of our father. I had never heard this sound in his voice before. And
then, suddenly, he looked down at me and laughed and hugged me.
“Come on, let’s get home. Little Leo. Were you scared?”
“Yes,” I said.. “Were you?’
“Damn right, I was scared. But — damn! — they must have seen
that you weren’t but ten years old.”
“You didn’t act scared,” I said.
We were in our own block, approaching our stoop. “Well. We
certainly have a good excuse for being late,’”’ he said. He grinned.
Then he said, “Leo, I’ll tell you something. I’m glad this happened.
It had to happen one day, and I’m glad it happened while I was
with you — of course, I’m glad you were with me, too, because if
it hadn’t been for you, they’d have pulled me.”
“What for?”
“Because I’m black,’”’ Caleb said. ‘““That’s what for.”
I said nothing. I said nothing, because what he said was true,
and IJ knew it. It seemed, now, that I had always known it, though
I had never been able to say it. But I did not understand it. I was
filled with an awful wonder; it hurt my chest and paralyzed my
tongue. Because you’re black. I tried to think, but I couldn’t. I
only saw the policemen, those murderous eyes again, those hands.
Were they people?
“Caleb,” I asked, “are white people people?”
“What are you talking about, Leo?”
“I mean, are white people — people? People like us?”
He looked down at me. His face was very strange and sad. It was
a face I had never seen before. We were in the house now, and we
climbed a few more stairs, very slowly. Then, “All I can tell you,
Leo, is— well, they don’t think they are.”
I thought of the landlord. Then I thought of my schoolteacher,
 26 Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone

a lady named Mrs. Nelson. I liked her very much. I thought she
I had seen
was very pretty. She had long yellow hair, like someone
a nice laugh, and we all liked her, all the kids I
in the movies, and
I
knew. The kids who were not in her class wished they were.
liked to write composi tions for her, because she seemed really in-
terested. But she was white. Would she hate me all my life because
black? It didn’t seem possible. She didn’t hate me now; I
I was
was pretty sure of that. And yet, what Caleb had said was true.
“Caleb,” I asked, “are all white people the same?”
“TI never met a good one.”
I asked, “Not even when you were little? In school?”
Caleb said, “Maybe. I don’t remember.” He smiled at me. er
never met a good one, Leo. But that’s not saying that you won't.
Don’t look so frightened.”
We were in front of our door. Caleb raised his hand to knock.
I held his hand. ‘‘Caleb,” I whispered, “what about Mamap”
“What do you mean, what about Mama?”
“Well, Mama.” I stared at him; he watched me very gravely.
“Mama— Mama’s almost white.”
“But that don’t make her white. You got to be all white to be
white.” He laughed. “Poor Leo. Don’t feel bad. I know you don’t
understand it now. I'll try to explain it to you, little by little.” He
paused. “But our mama is a colored woman. You can tell she’s a
colored woman because she’s married to a colored man, and she’s
got two colored children. Now, you know ain’t no white lady go-
ing to do a thing like that.” He watched me, smiling. “You under-
stand that?” I nodded. “Well, you going to keep me here all night
with your questions, or can we go on in now?”
He knocked, and our mother opened the door. “About time,” she
said drily. She had her hair piled in a knot on the top of her head.
I liked her hair that way. “You must have sat through that movie
four or five times. You’re going to ruin your eyes, and that'll just
be too bad for you, because you know we ain’t got no money to
be buying you no glasses. Leo, you go on inside and get ready to
take your bath.”
“Let him come over here a minute,” our father said. He was sit-
ting in the one easy chair, near the window. He was drunk, but not
as drunk as I had seen him, and this was a good-mood drunk. In
this mood, he talked about the islands, his mother and father and
JAMES BALDWIN “aif
kinfolk and friends, the feast days, the singing, the dancing and the
sea.
I approached him, and he pulled me to him, smiling, and held
me between his thighs. “How’s my big man?” he asked, smiling
and rubbing his hand, gently, over my hair. “Did you have a good
time tonight?”
Caleb sat on a straight chair near him, leaning forward. “Let Leo
tell you why we so late. Tell them what happened, Leo.”
“We were coming down the block,” I began — and I watched my
father’s face. Suddenly, I did not want to tell him. Something in
Caleb’s tone had alerted him, and he watched me with a stern and
frightened apprehension. My mother came and stood beside him,
one hand on his shoulder. I looked at Caleb. “Maybe you could
tell it better,” I said.
“Go on, start. I'l] fill in.”
“We were coming down the block,” I said, “coming from the
movies.” I looked at Caleb.
“It’s not the way we usually come,” Caleb said.
My father and I stared at each other. There was, suddenly, be-
tween us, an overwhelming sorrow. It had come from nowhere.
“We got stopped by the cops,” I said. Then I could not continue.
I looked helplessly at Caleb, and Caleb told the story.
As Caleb spoke, I watched my father’s face. I don’t know how to
describe what I saw. I felt his arm tighten, tighten; his lips became
bitter, and his eyes grew dull. It was as though — after indescrib-
able, nearly mortal effort, after grim years of fasting and prayer,
after the loss of all he had, and after having been promised by the
Almighty that he had paid the price and no more would be de-
manded of his soul, which was harbored now —it was as though
in the midst of his joyful feasting and dancing, crowned and robed,
a messenger arrived to tell him that a great error had been made,
and that it was all to be done again. Before his eyes, then, the ban-
quet and the banquet wines and the banquet guests departed, the
robe and crown were lifted, and he was alone, frozen out of his
dream, with all that before him which he had thought was behind
him.
My father looked as stunned and still and as close to madness as
that, and his encircling arm began to hurt me, but I did not com-
plain. I put my hand on his face, and he turned to me; he smiled —
 28 Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone

he was very beautiful then! — and he put his great hand on top of
mine. He turned to Caleb. ‘“That’s all that happened? You didn't
say nothing?”
“What could I say? It might have been different if I’d been by
myself. But I had Leo with me, and I was afraid of what they might
do to Leo.”
“No, you did right, man. I got no fault to find. You didn’t take
their badge number?”
Caleb snickered. “What for? You know a friendly judge? We
got money for a lawyer? Somebody they going to listen to? They
get us in that precinct house and make us confess to all kinds of
things and sometimes even kill us, and don’t nobody give a damn.
Don’t nobody care what happens to a black man. If they didn't
need us for work, they’d have killed us all off a long time ago. They
did it to the Indians.”
“That’s the truth,” our mother said. “I wish I could say different,
but it’s the truth.” She stroked our father’s shoulder. “We just
thank the Lord it wasn’t no worse. We just got to say: Well, the boys
got home safe tonight.”
I asked, “Daddy, how come they do us like they do?”
My father looked at us for a long time. Finally, he said, “Leo, if
I could tell you that, maybe I’d be able to make them stop. But
don’t let them make you afraid. You hear?”
I said, “Yes, sir.”” But I knew that I was already afraid.
“Let’s not talk about it no more,” our mother said. “If you two
is hungry, I got some pork chops back there.”
Caleb grinned at me. “Little Leo might be hungry. He stuffs
himself like a pig. But I ain’t hungry. Hey, old man —” he nudged
my father’s shoulder; nothing would be refused us tonight— “why
don’t we have a taste of your rum? All right?”
Our mother laughed. “I'll go get it,” she said. She started out of
the room.
“Reckon we can give Leo a little bit, too?” our father asked. He
pulled me onto his lap.
“In a big glass of water,’”’ our mother said, laughing. She took one
last look at us before she went into the kitchen. “My,” she said, “I
sure am surrounded by some pretty men! My, my, my!”
 JOHN DECK

Greased Samba

(FROM THE ATLANTIC)

Doc Bos: Questionnaire received and read through once. I’ll an-
swer, I think. Not likely to fool around with the “impressions” of
Winifred Farms you ask for down near the bottom. I don’t be-
lieve what you say. I think you sent this to find out why Sug passed
away, had the bruises, smelled odd. That’s what you're after, only
you aren’t man enough to come out straight and ask for it. I can’t
write small enough to get even “short answers” on your form sheet.
May never tell you, finish and not send. Or never finish.
My permanent address is here, with my daughter, and you al-
ready have the number. Three people in the house. Husband,
about forty-five, and daughter, forty-two, and me. Granddaughter
comes by all the time. She’s pregnant, wants guidance, calls me
Gram. But I’m with just the two, Will and Sue, and I have a room
to myself, and run of the house.
Health fine. Bruises—I had plenty —are all gone. Smell—
I smelled, too — remains, I think, because my daughter is snifiing
around. You must have spilled all the beans you could, Doc Bob,
but you couldn’t explain anything. Hips hurt sometimes, pains in
the lower back region, but they were hurting worse at Winifred
Farms, and I got by. Eyes water. Televison makes them water. Not
the shows, the light. Tired sometimes more than others. Health
good.
“Mental attitude” sharp. Can remember whatever is necessary
when it’s necessary. Can cut out the rest if I want. Sharp, but some-
times down. Sug, of course, bothers me. Had to happen. We
 Greased Samba
30

knew it would, both of us. Forty-six years, three months, seven days
I can stop it, any-
(a week). Don’t have to think of that, though.
of success right
time, say no to myself and the wheels lock. My secret
there. Think what you want to think.
want brief an-
Trying to keep the answers short. Suppose you
sible.
swers so we won’t wear out. So you won't be respon
is stupid: We came to Winifr ed Farms because we
Next question
you deserve
had to. Just like you used to say, after the “hard part”
desk, in your
a long vacation. I can see you clearly, sitting at your
sandals, your head shining, telling us about the “long
shorts and
vacation,” when we first became interested.
I could
I had the money for it. I could afford Winifred Farms.
in the Bell-
have afforded better places. I own three shoe stores,
it’s an inexpen sive line, compet ing with
flower-Norwalk area, and
I’m doing fine. My son-in- law, Will, is.
Karl and Gallenkamp, and
He took over.
I liked the looks of the place. The strung-out cottages, and the
who
orchards. I liked your helper, Hemley, and old Dick Watson,
was Volunteer Host to Sug and I. It was quiet. We could have
gone to France or Egypt. Sug, when she found out about our great-
grandchild, wanted to be around for the birth.
Cottages. Cottage seventeen was fine. I want to be exact, whether
it takes a long answer or not. I didn’t like the padding in the
shower. I didn’t like, at first, the handrailing in the hallway.
That railing is a little loose now, by the way. The new occupants
ought to be told that.
I didn’t like the exposure much. If you get up early you like the
light to come right into the house. There, I had to go outside. I
used to watch it start some mornings under the trees. Sug slept late.
I sat on the porch, watched it. First thing I knew the trunks lit
up. You’d see one, then four, then a dozen thin trunks, and then
you could make out the leaves at the top, the shape of the tree at the
top. All right there, day after day. But it was too cold in the win-
ter. The cottages ought to have been built facing the other way.
For the exposure.
General comments on recreation and entertainment. Hell, if you
remember me — Sugar and Hank,
and Sug they called us, in case
you have forgotte n know we loved the games. We won
— you
every prize we ever tried for: the three-legged Jello-in-a-spoon

ee
JOHN DECK 31

race, and the two-couple egg-in-a-spoon relay, with Ike and Mary
Fellers. Ike and I won all the men’s three-legged races. Somewhere
I’ve got a dozen Polaroid snapshots of Sug and I and the others that
they put in the crepe paper wreath on the bulletin board. The
Victors. Smiling, holding up our cups of victory punch.

I got a little tired there yesterday, so I quit and went to find the
pictures. Found them.
All evening I thought about this form. Just like you to send some-
thing like this months after. Lot I’d forgot. It’s coming back—
probably too much for the short answers.
Going back to recreation and entertainment. I enjoyed the rock
hunts. First entertainment at Winifred Farms. Liked it three times,
three hunts, then I didn’t like it. “Rock Hunt Today. Don’t for-
get rock hats and rock bags!” I asked Hemley about the bulletin.
He said: “Hank, it’s just that a bunch of us go up into the hills be-
hind Santa Ana and look at rocks.” I asked if he thought Sug and I
would enjoy that. He said: “Might find it interesting, Hank. Might
not. Gets you out in the air.” No selling, just straight answers from
Hemley. You got yourself a good helper.
I guess this is an impression, out of place on the form, but what
I thought of last night when I was resting was standing out on the
side of that hill when it was getting dusk in the valley. I thought of
the wind blowing, curling the brims of our straw hats, and tugging
at the women’s skirts, and blowing away the voices.
Scattered— Hemley turned us loose— those that could walk all
right, and we’d stand about ten yards apart. Stoop over, fill the bags
with rocks, then pull them out one by one, dropping them. I never
knew there was such a variety of rocks. Weights all different, sizes
different. And the colors, the veins of color, the patterns.
You’d hear Mary Fellers call: “Ike, looky here. A green one.”
The wind ripped up the words. They came out: “I look ear.
Green.” Like that. From all over. The voices, croaking, and all the
words torn.
“Found one think gold.”
“Green cat eye.”
“Hank quartz.”
Hat brims shuddering, rough edges curving down almost into
our eyes, and the wind sharp enough to make your eyes water, and
 32 Greased Samba

the women’s skirts blowing. The hems flapping. Shadows short

against the scrub brush and the stones. There was always sun, but
down in the valley along the floor of the valley, it was dusk. It got
gray. Night coming up out of the ground. Like smoke coming up.
“Found think gold.”
“Greciveye.
“Hank.”
Voices chopped right off as the words came out.
Pick up a rock, warm in your hand, hold it and weigh it and
squint to see the colors, the grain, the shape. Drop it. Take another
rock.

I stopped. Tired. Granddaughter came by. Puffing. Stands

with her legs apart, belly so heavy it pulls her spine forward.
Wears a cheap flat heel without any arch support. Not as pretty
as her mother. Who’s not as pretty as her mother was. Well, you
wouldn’t know, never saw Sug when she looked like she did.
Well, the rock hunts at the beginning, until I got to finding the
same rocks, on the third trip, and the racing, and the Along Na-
ture’s Trails trips, and the picnic. Even the Annual Winifred Farms
Luau. The one we went to. The idea seemed fine.
I never like a game where you have to sit down to participate.
Never went to a book discussion. Never talked politics because I
know what’s right. Croquet? As Dick Watson used to say: “Cro-
quet, OK.” For most of my life you couldn’t catch me on a dance
floor.
That’s true, too. Maybe ten times I danced with Sug while we
were married, in forty-six years. And then, just at the end, we were
dancing fools.
If you’re surprised you should be. That’s the secret. I may tell
iI
Shuffleboard — old Dick Watson ruined that for me.
You and Hemley never knew about that game that Dick played
and how he cared about it or you would have had more sense than
to treat him the way you did. Now that’s how I feel. I knew him.
I used to sneak a cigar with him now and then. You didn’t know
him, if you want my opinion. Blood pressure’s one thing, just one
thing. You can ask a man to piss in a bottle, or do any other
JOHN DECK 33

damned awful business you want, to get to know something about

him, but you won’t know it all.
I figure when you read this you'll start scratching your knees
and smiling. And a little more sweat will spring out on your skull,
coming out of the pores, where the hair should be. Not that it’s
any fault of yours. Men get bald. Although, you'll admit, yours is
a very special case. You always reminded us of someone else who is
bald — someone famous.
The reason that Dick Watson got so mad at the shuffleboard
game that day was that he was the best player, by a long shot, of all
those amateurs at Winifred Farms. Only Bill Dawkins and Ike ever
beat him, and they might win a game out of every five. Old Dick
showed everybody how. That particular morning he lost three
games in a row. He was nervous, he said later, because it was a
tournament and he wanted his name right back up there, on the
top of the list. He liked having his name there.
That’s why he called the court a son of a bitch. And broke his
stick.
Then you came in from your damned gardening, with your
shorts on and khaki shirt with the sleeves cut off. And them
damned sandals. Your toes dirty, looking like potatoes just dug up.
And you start making up to everyone but going after Dick.
“Before you play again, Dick, I think you ought to weigh those
markers and watch the courts getting waxed. Supervise the wax-
ing.”
I remember the way you turned around and winked at every-
body. You wrinkled your forehead, raising eyebrows you don't
have.
I'll tell you what I think, Doc Bob. I think your advice killed
Dick Watson. He never played shuffleboard again, never went to
the recreation hall again, because he couldn’t weigh the markers,
couldn’t go and watch the waxing. Hell, you knew he wouldn't.
From then on he watched television and came over to my place for
a cigar in the evenings. Clara Watson had a broken hip, you re-
member. Do you remember us at all? And she was a little silly.
Had every reason to be and was.
Yes, we smoked cigars.
He quit the rock hunts when I did. He couldn’t get in on the
 34 Greased Samba

sports because of his feet. He never liked the Along Nature’s Trails
trips. The longer bus rides bothered his kidneys. You must have
records.
It was you that insisted we keep “occupied.” He couldn’t bring
himself to weighing the markers. He quit. And it wasn’t too long
afterward that he passed on.
I want to stop here and say something for the last time. When
I got stuck in the bus toilet, that had nothing to do with Dick.
And the reason I didn’t yell was that I didn’t want to scare Sug.
When Hemley noticed I was gone for a long time, he came and
tapped at the door, and I answered him calmly. I don’t know why
I should have yelled.
You should have those doors made so you can unlock them from
the outside. And not have to take them off if someone gets stuck.
We were on our way to San Juan Capistrano, and they had to stop
the bus and unhinge the door to get me out. This upset Sug and
everybody.
I didn’t like being stuck in there. But I didn’t get stuck because
of Dick Watson, and I couldn’t pull the bolt back, and I saw no rea-
son to scream. That’s it. And down here where you say “evalua-
tion of staff” I’d say you ought to go on back to medical school and
find out that it is wrong to hint to a woman of advanced years that
her husband is grieving the loss of a friend so much he’s shutting
himself up in bus toilets.
Your hints started us going to the dances, and that is the reason
she died, in part, because we thought — you thought — we’d better
be more social.
I won’t say I’m holding you responsible.
I’m quitting now. I get angry thinking about this. I’m not tired.
I shouldn’t get so angry. I’m sweating. Like your bald head.

Missed two days. Worn out yesterday. Slept, read a little, de-
cided not to finish this. Then I couldn’t sleep last night. Kept see-
ing you at your desk, reading this, eating home-grown fruit. You’re
well set up now, but you'll get fat sooner or later. That fruit,
you can’t eat even that all the time, without getting fat. Keeps
you regular you said. Didn’t keep you regular as far as your hair’s
concerned, did it?
JOHN DECK 35
You got my feelings about the “community and social organiza-
tions” except for the square dancing.
I didn’t like that. I hate that slippery stepping, and the music,
and the callers. Only tried it once.
But what I may as well tell you about organization that I forgot
to mention above is the way you handle the passing on of people
of Winifred Farms. It is a disgrace, and I despised it. That is, when
I found out old Dick Watson had passed on that night, I found it
out the next morning, and I was going out to participate in some
kind of a leaf study, and there was the sign on the bulletin board
saying he was dead. And the memorial services were to commence
almost immediately.
I had a sports shirt on and a pair of blue yachting sneakers—
deck wear, we call it—and I had to go in right then and pray,
standing on the shuffleboard court. Old Dick’s mortal remains were
already on the way to Pomona. Clara gone too.
I'm sure you're right. Memorial services are bad enough, when
you get caught in one where you hardly knew the party, and the
sooner they’re done the better. But Dick and I were close. He
hated cigars, called them “stinkers,’” and came over to Seventeen
for one almost every evening. Half the time he couldn’t take more
than about a quarter before he had to throw it out. He kept com-
ing.
Teal-blue deck wear. I see the idea. But there was Willis Town-
send, whom Dick hated, praying for his “safe passage.” And all of
it over then. Amen, and it done.
Sug missed it. I went back, told her Dick was dead, told her I’d
been to the services, and heard that Clara had been sent off. She
couldn’t believe it. She asked me to repeat all. I did. She asked if
I thought Clara had known that Dick was sick, if she’d spent his
last hours at his side. I said I didn’t know. I still don’t.
But you get it all done so fast —and I can see why — that it
scared Sug. What if one of us got sick suddenly? Would the other
know? Scared me, too.

Today Vll tell you about the square dances, and the other
dances, and let’s see if you can keep smiling and raise what should
be eyebrows and wink.
 36 Greased Samba

They’ve got a name for you at Winifred Farms. I won’t tell it.
I'll tell you something else that’ll open your eyes. Make you put
aside your apple for a minute or two.
We went to one lesson and got in with that slick-stepping crowd
that look like the senior citizens you see on television. You see the
lights shining on their eyeglass frames and their grins. They keep
their teeth clenched and keep grinning, everyone panting like heat-
struck dogs, so when you’re close you hear wind whistling through
dentures. And spit crackling and spattering on their stretched lips.
They get this kind of skating step, specially the men, and they
paw at the ground, and come scooting down the middle while every-
body claps and grins and winks at each other in the next formation.
I'l) admit we made fools of ourselves that first night, when they
were trying that reel and that bunch tried to show us how to
do-si-do, where you come down between the two ranks of people.
I saw one man come down backwards and cross in front of his part-
ner and skip up to the end of the line, and he never looked over his
shoulder. And I was just mad enough to try it without looking.
All right, not looking because I didn’t want to be outdone.
And I did hear Sug call out “Hank” when we were three quar-
ters of the way down. So I looked back, but when I moved to the
right, she moved to her left.
Bang. We crashed.
Fell right over on our hands and knees. Both of us lost our
glasses (but they didn’t break, either pair). And I looked around at
her, and she looked around at me.
Everybody else was whooping around, trying to get us up, but we,
Sug and I, just stayed there, on our hands and knees, and looked at
each other, after we found our glasses, and then, by God, we
started laughing. Weren’t hurt, not a bit, and not a bit scared, and
not ashamed, even though everybody began to bray when they dis-
covered we were all right.
I said back there I was mad. All right, I was mad because of the
can in the bus and the way you got rid of Dick when I had on a
Hawaiian shirt and deck wear. And the skatey-footed step the ex-
perts used.
I was mad! Hell, yes. So we went to the dancing lesson and fell
down —I knocked my wife down. But something happened. It
didn’t hurt. Hitting each other didn’t hurt.
JOHN DECK 37
You couldn’t understand that. You saw us winning the three-
legged races, keeping the Jello in the spoon, our two old inside
knees tied together with a scarf. And how we counted to ourselves,
paced ourselves, and pulled ahead of Willis and Lily and the
others. You saw us when Will and Sue came over, or my grand-
daughter, and the women would come up the walk carrying pack-
ages, sometimes balancing them on the unborn baby, and they
wouldn't even let me take a sack. You saw what you thought was
mooning over Dick’s passing on. Or getting into the bus before the
pig was served at the luau, because we said we were tired. We were
tired. Only you don’t have even a suspicion of why we were tired.
You're better off with a specimen, baldy.
Two days after we hit and fell, in the afternoon, while The
Jolson Story was playing, I heard a funny noise from the kitchen.
It was a quiet part in the movie; I think Al was telling his old danc-
ing partner he wanted him to be his manager. I was watching, Sug
was supposed to be washing dishes. I heard her slippers tapping on
the linoleum. I walked in there. Here she came, back to me, skip-
ping down the length of the kitchen between the sink and the stove.
I started clapping.
“You try,” she said.
“No room,” I said.
Carpet in the living room. Bedroom too small. Hallway then.
That’s where we tried.
We danced in the hall that first time, tried it about three times,
and got tired. We went in to sit down, take a breather. I said I
figured with a few more practice sessions we’d be as good as any of
them slick-footed dancers. She said she agreed, she guessed. Then
I said I didn’t care much if we never went back, because that
first fall, just when my glasses were gone, and I thought I’d hurt
her, hitting her so hard, and then all of the grinners came around
and tried to haul us up, that fall had bothered me, and I figured
when we laughed and got them to laughing we had sort of made
ourselves out to be the comedians.
She stopped me: “You didn’t hurt me, Hank.”
Well, I said, I was afraid I had. And then she said she was afraid
she’d hurt me, because she was a little heavy, and moving fast. I
said I didn’t think she was heavy, and that it was my old bones that
were dangerous.
 Greased Samba
38

“They never were dangerous, Hank,” she said.

what that
I won’t tell you what she looked like. I won't tell you
g right in my eye
reminded me of, the way she looked, then, lookin
saying my old bones had never hurt her.
know if
You wouldn’t know. You never were like I was. I don’t
idea what
you ever had a hair on your head. Would you have any
Al singing
it would be, in the middle of the afternoon, with
Posie,” a song I first heard when I was a grown
“Rosie, You Are My
man, not a kid, and to be dancing ?
What we did, then, was get up and try one more dance down
halls
the hallway. It was late enough so you couldn’t see well. The
because of the poor exposure . One
are poorly lighted, anyway,
more dance, backwards, starting with the clickety -clicket y click.
Down we came. Hearing the slippers tap and slide, getting louder,
heard each other breathing, louder, tried to guide by the dark wall,
the rail, but couldn’t.
Wham!
Both of us slid forward. We didn’t fall. We caught the rail!
That safety rail in cottage seventeen. It’s weak.
Because we caught ourselves when we started to fall. And with
the other hand, held onto our glasses. But the next time we put
our glasses down.
The next time was only a minute later when we decided to try
again without hitting but hit again anyway.
Wham!
There. That’s why the bruises. A couple more times. That was
it. The smell was a kind of ointment I bought and had delivered
from a druggist. It was a grease. I put it on the rail.
One night we danced too late, and I got so tired I fell asleep. It
was after the luau. She passed on while I was sleeping.
That’s all. That’s why I left. That’s why she passed on. I haven’t
got any other comments. No, I wouldn’t think of returning.

I don’t know why I’m afraid to tell the truth. Sug wouldn't
be. I’ll tell you why, and you'll spit out apple seeds into your palm,
and put them in the empty ashtray, and rub your hairless knees and
think, and smile, raising what should have been eyebrows and bat-
ting what should be eyelashes, and then you'll nod and think you
got it all. Figure it out. Piss in a bottle. Only you'll be wrong.
JOHN DECK 39

We danced every day for about a week, until we could hardly

walk. We hit. On purpose? We turned the lights out when it was
day or waited until night and neither one of us said anything at
all — couldn’t — only one or the other would get over there, at one
end of the hall, facing the other way, and start tapping heels and
then he’d hear the other set of heels start clicking and wait, until
finally one or the other set of heels went click. Then down
we'd go.
Wham!
Right back, start again. Click. And the clicking and breathing
getting louder, then: Wham!
Until one or the other couldn’t hold on to the rail or just had
to leave, walk out of the room, go in somewhere, sit down, hips
and hind ends (at least mine) aching. Some mornings I didn’t get
out of bed. Couldn’t. Or she couldn’t. Whoever could brought
the food.
A week. And one day, when it was me in bed, and she just barely
out, she said: “How bad are you hurt?” It was the first time we
said anything, I guess. Because we couldn’t talk about it. I won’t
say why. I can’t.
I had some pretty big old bruises. In fact my backside was cov-
ered. Hers was too, she said. And one hip was in bad shape.
She’d brought in a tray with prune juice and toast and Sanka.
She had on a robe. Her hair was still mussed up. She wasn’t wear-
ing glasses. She looked pretty worn out. She said she didn’t want
to go see Doc Bob — you— about the hip because then he'd see
the bruises. So, she said, she reckoned we’d better quit. For a
while, she said. Until we saw if the hip healed. No more dancing.
We didn’t talk about it because we were ashamed. If that’s what
you're thinking. But if you got sense enough just try to imagine
what two senior citizens like myself and Sug would say, if we de-
cided to talk, about what we were doing. And remember we didn’t
hate it.
Remember she said until we saw if the hip healed or not.
It never healed. Hurt her that last month like nothing you could
dream of, Mr. Clean. That’s who you remind me of, only he has
eyelashes and brows. Mr. Clean. Both of us used to call you Mr.
Clean. In fact, a hell of a lot of the people call you that. A lot. Ike
and Mary do. Dawson. They whisper it: “Here comes Mr. Clean.”
 40 Greased Samba

What are you going to do about it? Kick them out? They pay
your way. You can’t.
Waiting, Mr. Clean, until the hip healed, but it didn’t heal. And
we began to get worried, thinking she’d have to go see you. I
suggested she go out, to another doctor, and have an X-ray made.
We were going to, in fact, right after the Annual Winifred Farms
Luau.

Mr. Clean, I almost quit but didn’t.

I suppose you're thinking the hula dancer did it. No. It was
getting in the bus, and having so much trouble lowering ourselves
in the seat, and then my having to go to the can again, while we
were traveling, and her saying: Careful. And then looking sorry after
she said it.
And then, when we were down at the beach, and the pig wasn’t
quite done, and all the others were waiting around there at the
tables with their paper plates and silverware in their hands, and
some of them with napkins tucked down in their shirts, and the lot
repeating: “Boy, there’s a pig I’ll eat.” ““There’s a pig for you.” “I
could eat her all.” On and on. Laughing, nervous, hungry, sniffing
the smoke off the meat. Sug said we ought to take a walk down the
beach. We did, and it was hard getting up out of those picnic
tables, out from behind the stationary benches, hard walking down
that sandy incline. We crossed to the wet sand, but by the time we
got there, her shoes were full.
I said I'd empty them. I started to stoop down. I knew right
away I’d have trouble. My whole lower back region ached. And
from the picnic tables you could hear everybody laughing. I sup-
pose someone else, probably Willis Townsend, had just said that
he could eat the whole pig by himself. I looked up, toward the rise,
where they were.
“I could walk down a ways,” Sug said. “Because you’ll have to
take the shoe off. I can’t.”
So we walked down, out of earshot, out of view. I fell down on
my knees. Just dropped. And she put one hand on my head for the
balance, and lifted each foot.
She put a lot of weight on me. A couple of times she almost fell,
but she caught herself. It pained her to stand on one foot. And I
had trouble getting the laces undone, because of the light off the
 JOHN DECK 4]
sand — made my eyes water. And there was sand in her anklets.
I had to take them off. She wore a wool athletic sock.
It was the first time I’d seen her feet in years. They felt cold
when I brushed them off.
She had to help me up, pull on me, and she had terrible pains.
So we went back to the bus, got right in the bus, sat down together,
and someone — one of the Hawaiian boys — brought us our paper
plates. We never saw the hula-hula dancing at all. We sat and
talked. We didn’t talk about dancing at all. We talked about the
great-grandchild, and whether Sue and Will ought to buy a house,
the one I’m living in, and what the food tasted like. We didn’t
mention anything about the sand, or dancing. But I knew, when
we pulled away that evening, when it was all over, and everybody
got on the bus with them leis around their necks, and all of them
fell asleep with their chins half-buried in flowers. I knew that we’d
dance that night.
We did. Not right away. We turned on the television when we
got home, and both of us were dog-tired. There was one of those
Mexican programs on from over in east L.A. And someone was
demonstrating the samba, a dance where the dancers don’t touch,
but just kind of rock back and forth, and move their arms slowly,
and sometimes pass behind one another. Maybe you know it. I
doubt that.
Sug said: ‘“There’s a dance. We could try that.” And she tried. It
was just rocking, you bend your shoulders forward, and you bend
them back, and you move your arms. By the time she got started,
the demonstration was over, the music finished.
I said: “That’s a hip dance, too, Sug. That’ll hurt.”
“Hurting right now,” she said, and kept on rocking. ‘You don’t
have to bend so much.”
So I tried. Without music it was easier, because you could set
vour own pace. We rocked back and forth, and got damned tired.
She started to pass by me, rocking in and out, slowly, like that.
And we just sort of touched. Hip bones. I’ve thought this over
so many times. When we just brushed she groaned, just a little,
whimpered.
My idea about the grease. Get the grease, cover our clothes with
it, then we’d slide. I wanted to dance. She wouldn’t stop. We
rubbed the grease over the outside of our clothes standing side by
 42 Greased Samba

side at the kitchen table. Then we started again. Just one slight
brush. “Oh!” she whispered.
Then another, light. I grunted.
Want to quit?
No.
Ungh.
They got harder. Before long they were just as hard as ever.
Before long we quit moving our arms. We quit swaying. We just
circled each other, stepping back when we were facing, and with
our glasses off, so we couldn’t see, and then coming in hard.
Wham.
Wham!

I had to quit. Now, I'll go quickly. Sometime along the way I

fell down and slept on the floor and I guess she just kept circling
until whatever it was, a vein, broke open in her brain and killed
her. Killed her.
The grease was cold cream and Crisco, a combination, since we
didn’t have much of either. That’s the source of the smell. Now
you understand. What we did, and we — Sug and I — killed her,
I don’t mind. She didn’t either. I’m going to send this to you. I
don’t care.
I suppose you think that’s funny when a senior citizen whose
wife is dead —who helped kill his wife —says he doesn’t care.
Doesn’t care if he woke up one morning on the sofa in cottage sevy-
enteen and found his Sug dead in the living room, on the floor,
smeared with Crisco and cold cream, bruised.
Go out and pick yourself an apricot, Doc Bob, and sit back under
a tree and get your hairless head to working. Figure it out why we
danced the greased samba. You’ll never know. Mr. Clean. And I
don’t care if I do ruin their little joke. They'll find another one.
You'll never know any more than I’ve told you, and you won't
get any more out of me.
That’s it. And no, I don’t want to return to Winifred Farms, and
won't. Never.
 JAMES T. FARRELL

An American Student in Paris

(FROM THE SOUTHERN REVIEW)

NAIvETE was imprinted on young Alvin Dubrow. He was twenty-

one years old when he went to France, but he looked sixteen. He
was thin and slight. He had blond hair, and eyes that were bright
and blue, and some of his movements and gestures almost marked
him off as a sissy. Alvin left Chicago immediately after having been
graduated summa cum laude, full of singing hopes. His emotions
were more literary than personal and were drawn largely from his
readings. He was bound on a high adventure of the spirit.
Alvin was a virgin and there was a virginal quality about his
mind and his thinking. He had been singularly untouched by ex-
perience, but not because of any lack of desire to live more or to
feel more or to develop and grow. He simply did not see experi-
ence or know it. Experience to Alvin was comparable to the ser-
mons of Werther, the sentiments of the spirit of Romain Rolland’s
Jean Christophe, and the love of Dante for Beatrice. He lived in
the emotions of the books which he had read, and he believed that
life, passing day-by-day, minute-by-minute, on Chicago’s South Side,
could be as rich and intense as it was in the classics which had en-
thralled his life on the Gothic, ivied university campus.
What he saw and heard had not changed or touched him, be-
cause his world was so far beyond the boundaries of his personal
experience. Human passions and sufferings in actual life were dif-
ferent from what they were in books, poured through the sieve of a
great imagination. He was not unsympathetic by nature: he was
unseeing. Most human beings were like figures seen in black and
 44 An American Student in Paris

white on a movie screen. They were real and yet they were not
quite real. The reality of books and the reality of life had changed
places in his psyche.
His father had died when he was seven and Alvin’s memories of
him were dim. He remembered a tall, quiet man who dressed for-
mally and conventionally, who was always precise in speech, and
who had seemed so far above and beyond a little boy that Alvin
had been constantly in awe. He had never known the man and
often during his childhood, he had wished that he had a father.
Mr. Dubrow had been editor of The Chicago Clarion and had al-
ways conducted himself with an air of importance.
During his college years, Alvin had worked summers for the
newspaper, starting in as a copy boy, and in his junior and senior
years, he had worked on space rates as campus reporter. At the
Clarion offices, he had often heard his father spoken of: there were
a number of men still working there who remembered Mr.
Dubrow.
‘Are you following in the old man’s shoes?”
“Getting ready to step into your father’s boots?”
Questions like these were always asked of him, and he would feel
some embarrassment, because it was difficult for him to speak of his
personal feelings and emotions. He was competent in his work, but
he did not aspire to a career as a newspaperman, and he drew back,
almost wincing, at the thought of stepping into his father’s boots.
Alvin did not look forward to his future in terms of a career. ‘The
idea of worldly success was painful to him; it carried with it the
prospect of many obligations and duties that would be onerous and
boring and, he thought, not at all for him. His idea was a life of
the mind, enraptured with books and devoted to ideas. But he was
under a strain about this, because his mother wanted to push him.
He secretly resented the ambitions which she had for him and be-
lieved that they placed a constraint on him. It was not right nor
just for another person, even one’s own mother, to expect you to
live for them and for their ambitions. He wanted to rebel, to
burst out against this, but he was timid, too quiet and gentle a
youth to act on this impulse. Sometimes he felt guilty, and thought
that he was letting his mother down and that he would become a
tragic disappointment to her. His last year in the university had
been made unhappy by these feelings. Walking over campus, or
JAMES T. FARRELL 45
working at the offices of The Daily Maroon, for he was also one of
the editors of the campus paper, or riding downtown on the I.C.
to the offices of The Clarion, he would be troubled by thoughts
about his mother and what he should do after graduation. He
could easily have stepped into a full-time job with the newspaper,
but he did not want to.
His mother did not have to say much to Alvin, because he knew
that she expected great things of him; she wanted him to distin-
guish himself, to be a very important person in the world of affairs.
He showed no interest in girls, and he sensed that this pleased her.
She was a lonely person, who lived in a kind of splendid but iso-
lated sense of her own dignity. Her life was bound up with Alvin
and yet there was a coldness between them. She rarely expressed
her feelings.
It was Alvin’s idea to spend a year in France. On his twenty-first
birthday, Alvin inherited two thousand dollars from his late grand-
father. This would provide him with more than enough for the
trip. He knew French quite well, since he had studied it both in
high school and at the university. His ancestors were of Alsatian
origin and he still had relatives living in Alsace, near Strasbourg.
He decided to make the trip and spend a year studying in France,
but he anticipated opposition from his mother. There had never
been any serious quarrel or difference between them, but he had
feared that there would definitely be one in this instance. If so, he
was determined to hold to his decision: under no circumstances
would he back down.
Alvin’s need to get away seemed urgent to him. He knew all too
little of the world. In Europe there was a depth of culture and a
seriousness about it which was not to be found in America, except
in very unusual cases. He could not feel fully at home in Chicago.
He was not like most of the young men his age. He had been with-
out interest in fraternities and the social life on campus, and he did
not care for athletics. As a student he had been considered bril-
liant, but he was doubtful about his reputation. He wanted and
needed a new field for his endeavors. He must be free; he must test
himself alone and in freedom.
One night, serious and tense, he told his mother of his decision.
She readily agreed to it. Her reaction surprised him and even
shook his determination: perhaps he was doing the wrong thing.
 46 An American Student in Paris

She urged him to go to Paris, spurred him on, discussed his plans
with him, and assured him that she wouldn’t be lonely; he needn’t
worry about her.
He sailed third class on a French ship, and arrived in Paris ex-
cited and smitten by a feverish desire to discover himself, the world
and ideas about the world which would be true and his own.
He wasn’t one of those young persons who found solitude dis-
comforting or agonizing. He was able to be by himself and to oc-
cupy himself with books or with his own thoughts and dreams.
On his arrival in Paris he was alone. He knew no one in the entire
city. But he was very happy, at times intensely happy. Paris, to him,
was something to be savored like a rare wine. At the beginning
Alvin had some difficulty with spoken French but this was minor.
When he had reached the Gare St. Lazare on the boat train, he
checked his bags and took a taxicab to the Left Bank, getting
off at the bridge crossing over to the Boulevard St. Michel. He had
heard of this street. It was in the heart of the Latin Quarter; and
since he was going to study at the Sorbonne, he would find a cheap
hotel in this area and live there. It was still morning, a shining
morning in June. He had time in which to find a hotel, and his
bags were safe at the station. He wandered up and down the Boule-
vard, stirred and fascinated by the crowds, the students, the intoxi-
cating strangeness and newness of the scene. On first sight, Paris
was more than he had even imagined it, more exciting and exhila-
rating, more charming, more beautiful.
He looked at the students — most of them seemed to be shabbily
dressed — and felt an immediate kinship. He would be one of
them, a student. At this stage of his life, this was still what he
wanted to be. He had not completed his period of studying: he was
now free and out in the world, but he was also a student. Exhila-
rated as he was, he still looked at everything with a student’s eye.
On the Boulevard St. Michel, he immediately saw a richness, po-
etry and picturesqueness of life that was unmatched by anything he
had ever seen in America. The young people passing by him on the
sidewalk, or sitting in cafés, were so different from the students he
had seen and known at the university. A nimbus of romance hung
over each of them. Compared to students back home, they seemed
poor. This added an aura of romance to their lives, and conse-
quently his own pilgrimage seemed all the more romantic. He
JAMES T. FARRELL 47

was on a pilgrimage. Walking by the Capoulade, he silently spoke

the French word to himself — pélerinage.
His eyes were bright. He could have been taken for a young man
in love, and, in fact, he was a young man in love. He was in love
with life, with life in Paris as he was seeing it for the first time. It was
too good to believe, but it was all true, and Alvin Dubrow, walk-
ing along the crowded sidewalks of the Boulevard St. Michel, was
living in a dream that was real.
It was like a carnival or a festive occasion, but he reminded him-
self that it was only a normal, everyday morning in the Latin Quar-
ter. Every day would be like this, rich and colorful, picturesque and
romantic, fraught with many meanings, and all of these meanings
would be poetic. And he could be part of this. He would study in
the old rooms of the Sorbonne. Students had sat in these rooms and
dreamed and learned for centuries. Students had done this and
walked these old streets before he had been born, before America
had even been discovered and settled. He was at one with a tradi-
tion, an historic continuity: he was wading in the rivers of a tradi-
tion.
And Notre Dame. He first saw it in the late morning sunshine.
He gasped. Its clean old white stone, its tower, and flying but-
tresses, its solid strength, rising toward one of the bluest and softest
skies he had ever gazed upon, just being there in its ancient glory,
beauty and strength — here was more than an inspiration to Alvin.
He gasped. It was something eternal.
And the Panthéon. He unexpectedly came upon it on his left.
Walking by the Café Capoulade, he saw it. He stood full of awe,
reverent, feeling all the respect he held for the great writers and the
immortals whose bones were interred within that domed, gray
building. The past was real and alive; it was living here in Paris.
All the achievements of the great, of the immortals were like
some fresh current that shot through the air of Paris.
He drifted along for a while, full of his impressions and of the
sights he saw. Two Hindus, African Negroes, Chinese and Indo-
chinese, passing by as part of the crowds that moved this way and
that way. Shops and restaurants and bookstores. Soldiers in blue
uniforms. This distressed him: he was a pacifist. Were he French,
he now would be in one of these uniforms. With so much beauty
and poetry in the world, with the creations of the great immortals,
 48 An American Student in Paris

and with the great truths they had enunciated, why did young men
like himself have to become conscript soldiers of the French Army?
It was the only distressing thing that he had seen in the few hours
he had been in France. But he was not in any mood to feel distress
for long, and his thoughts of war faded like smoke disappearing
in the bright Paris sunshine. He found a restaurant off the Boule-
vard St. Michel where he ate and had a carafe of wine for six francs.
Each bite was enjoyable, Eating itself was a new experience. He
had found a wonder in life that matched the wonder which he had
only found, heretofore, in books. Then, after lunch, he looked for
a hotel and took a small room, for twenty francs a day, in an old
hotel on the Rue Monsieur le Prince. He walked back to the Gare
St. Lazare, asking for directions many times, passing through the
Tuileries on the way, got his valises, and took them back to his
hotel in a cab. He was full of exultant expectations.
Alvin’s first days in Paris were ones of discovery. Shops, stores,
streets, the fronts of old houses, the bookstalls along the quats, the
soft, changing light of Paris, the passing people on the streets, the
sound of spoken French, newspapers and magazines, chance con-
versations, books, galleries, all these were discoveries. The small-
est episodes and the most ordinary of objects were fraught with ad-
venture and softened with a haze of romance. It was as though
everything in this world of Paris were significant and important,
and every thought, every feeling, every fleeting impression of his
were important. He wrote long letters to his mother almost daily,
telling her of what he saw and thought and felt. He was in-
wardly released, and he could give voice to his feelings in these let-
ters, as well as in others to friends and acquaintances from the uni-
versity.
His days passed with seeming quietness, but he felt that there
was a depth of time in each one of them. When he had been in
Paris one week, his arrival seemed to have been a long time in the
past. The sequence of events and memories of that first week be-
came jumbled together, and he had difficulty remembering on
which day it was that he had first visited the Louvre, and on which
one he had gone to see Notre Dame, to wander in moody exalta-
tion through its huge and inspiring interior. He thought more of
himself and of his own feelings than he ever had in the past. What
JAMES T. FARRELL 49

happened to him, what thoughts and reflections he had, what he

saw, all took on importance and had weight.
On his second day, he was browsing in one of the bookstores on
the Boulevard St. Michel, and he bought a set of “A la recherche du
temps perdu” by Marcel Proust. Wandering off, he came to the en-
trance of the Luxembourg Gardens, and found the park to be
dreamlike and almost unreal in the June sunlight. He walked
about for some minutes, thinking and daydreaming. There were
no parks like this in America: and even if there were, it would not
be the same. He could not feel such a sense of freedom there in
Chicago as he could here in Paris. Lovers walking arm in arm, two
stopping to kiss in public. What a scandal that would be on the
university campus. Old women sitting in the sun, knitting,
watching children. Nursemaids. Old men. People strolling, drift-
ing, sitting, a picture in the sunshine, idle in the midst of the day
with no sense of hurry or urgency. And the flowers and the way
the Luxembourg Gardens were landscaped. It was a clean, neat,
orderly, logically worked-out beauty. After strolling about for a
while, he sat down, set the books under his chair, took out a pen-
knife and began to cut the pages of the first volume of the edition.
Merely to hold the book to look at the title and the print and to
cut the pages was an experience. He had read some of Proust's
work in translation, back in Chicago, but now, here in Paris, he
would read the entire work in the original, getting the full flavor
of it. This was like an act of worship. An old woman, with a thick
mustache on her upper lip, asked him to pay for the use of the
chair. He looked up, dug into his pocket and handed the woman
a franc.
“Merci, M’steur.”
He liked hearing that phrase. Then he finished cutting the
pages and, for an hour, he sat reading the first volume. He was
proud of himself because he could understand this book in French,
and it touched his feelings deeply and stimulated him so that a
horde of thoughts were knocking at the doors of his consciousness.
Thoughts about time ran through his mind as he read. Time past,
present, future. All past time was lost time, expired days, years,
vanished centuries. And this vanished time was recapturable. Paris
here was a symbol of recaptured ume.
 50 An American Student in Paris

For a few moments, he looked up from his book and off into the
distance. So stimulated had he become that the pressure of his
thoughts interfered with his capacity to pay attention. The after-
noon had begun slipping away, and the sun was starting to wane.
Several boys in short pants and _ socks, with their knees bared,
walked quietly by. They were French schoolboys, and each of them
had his separate personality, his private thoughts and feelings, his
dreams. It was a simple thought and yet there was an importance
to him in thinking about this. Those boys who had just walked
by him and were now out of sight, any one of them could be like
the young Marcel or the “I” in Proust’s work. And himself at that
age. He rarely thought of his childhood. It had been uneventful.
Almost with a sigh, he told himself that his life had been unevent-
ful. The biggest event in his life had been coming here. In retro-
spect, the days of his childhood seemed like a parade of days al-
most all similar. What he most remembered about them was a
quiet sameness. His mother had used to tell him that he was dif-
ferent from the other boys, and sometimes he had not liked that.
But in some ways he had been different. He had not cared for
sports. He had no knack for them. Whenever the other boys
would inveigle him into a ball game, he had inevitably done badly.
There had been a sense of shame in this, in striking out when other
boys would hit the ball. But he had been a reader even then.
Much of the time, he had preferred reading to playing with other
boys.
He turned back to his book, read for a short period and then,
picking up all of the books, found his way back to the hotel. There
was a melancholy, soft light in the Luxembourg Gardens, on the
Boulevard St. Michel, and on the Rue Monsieur le Prince. It was
a sadness associated with the time of day. Time turned one mel-
low, autumnally sad at the day’s end. Proust’s feeling for time was
like this, he thought. And, as he walked on to his room, he thought
that it was only around midday now in Chicago. Perhaps his mother
would be sitting down to a solitary luncheon.

Alvin matriculated at the Sorbonne and adjusted easily to his

new scholastic environment, but he continued to feel quite soli-
tary in it. The French students appeared different from Americans,
less friendly, and it did not seem possible to know them as easily.
JAMES T. FARRELL 51
You attended classes in the old rooms, heard lectures, and the pro-
fessor gathered up his notes or papers and left, and you left also.
But it was stimulating. On every side, every day, he was finding
stimulation.
His daily experience with Proust kept his mind stirred up.
Somewhat modestly and even a little timidly, he began to realize
how much more feeling there was in him than he had ever paused
to consider. The inner world of each person was a universe, a
universe floating in the time of one’s life. Memories were often
like shadows over this inner world of oneself, but the substance of
these shadows was there, also, hidden rather than lost in oneself.
And time. His thoughts kept reverting to time. The melancholy
of time was much with him. He had begun to think of time in dif-
ferent and fresh terms. It was no longer the time of the clock, and
the time of dates, of years and centuries. On the old buildings of
Paris, he had seen the marks of the centuries, the chips that time
had made in these centuries: the statues of the front portal of the
cathedral of Notre Dame bore these melancholy marks. But time
was in those stones, and similarly, time, past time, was in him. He
remembered himself as a boy, on a rainy day, alone at home,
reading Ivanhoe. He admired Sir Walter Scott more now than he
had as a boy, because Scott had influenced Proust. But something
of that time past was in him: something of all past time was in the
present. Paris was all the more beautiful because so much of time
past was lodged in its stones. He was constantly reflecting about
these ideas, and they helped him in feeling Paris more quickly, ap-
preciating and understanding it.
Alvin thought not only of time but also of people. Each human
being on this planet, he kept reminding himself, was a distinct in-
dividual, with particular thoughts and feelings, and those gave to
each human being his or her individual way of regarding life, of
meeting it, of living it. Everyone he passed on the old streets of
Paris, streets which were so poetic, attractive and interesting to
him — each of these people was an unknown world. Each had so
many personally and individually important meanings, thoughts,
hopes, feelings. The skein of memory was unrolling in each of
these people, and the threads of memory were made up of what
happened in time. Time was part of memory; time was part of
the individuality of every human being.
 An American Student in Paris
52

And would there be another war? And would time, and mem-
severed with the
ory, and life itself, be cut like an artery, mortally
unreal
brutality of a sharp knife? The idea of war had seemed
back in Chicago. A few profess ors and some of the more serious
talked
students of history and the social sciences had sometimes
of it, of the possibility that there would be another World War,
more awful than the last one. But he had never been able to be-
lieve that this was a real possibility. In Europe, it did not always
seem unreal or unbelievable. The number of soldiers to be seen on
the streets was a concrete reminder of militarism. ‘There was more
of a sense that war could come in Paris than in America. America,
Chicago, were so far away, not only geographyically, but in time
and in thought. They had dropped half out of the sight of his
mind. Chicago was really America for him, just as Paris was now
Europe; and Chicago was like an island sinking down into a sea,
with a gray and sunless ocean mist seeping over it:
Alvin struck up a talking acquaintanceship with a young
Frenchman of twenty-one named René Chauffrin, and they took
long walks about Paris, speaking alternately in French and English.
At first, Alvin sentimentally hoped that this would become an in-
timate intellectual friendship between two young men. But the
young Frenchman was somewhat formal, and quite impersonal
toward Alvin. He impressed Alvin as serious and intelligent and
his main interest was in philosophy. He was working on his thesis
and it dealt with Diderot. Chauffrin considered Diderot to have
been one of the greatest minds and writers of France, and this
meant of all time. He was soaked in the literature of his country
and accepted, as though it were a self-evident law of nature, the
fact of the superiority of French culture over that of all other coun-
tries. Alvin was something of a curiosity, an American who spoke
French quite fluently and not with too atrocious an accent. ‘They
met three or four times a week, and took long walks about Paris.
This gave Alvin a chance to see more of Paris and to learn more
about its streets and sights. René would explain things about the
city, especially in the quartier in the twentieth arrondissement
where he had been born, and Alvin would speak of America. How-
ever, he was shockingly surprised at his own ignorance of so many
aspects of American life. He was badly or superficially informed
about the contemporary political life of the United States, and had
JAMES T. FARRELL 53
read much less of American literature than he might have. The
American present had never seemed to him to be as important as
the past. And in his estimation, American literature had been less
worthy of his time than French and English literature. Often,
René Chauffrin asked him questions about America that he
couldn’t answer, and, with some sense of embarrassment, he would
be required to say that he didn’t know.
Thanks to these walks, he managed to cover a considerable area
of Paris. He saw the Champs Elysées at night, the grands boule-
vards, the Place Pigalle and Montmartre, the Place de la République
and the Place de le Bastille. He was distinctly disappointed at the
latter square, because nothing remained there from the days of the
great French Revolution. He liked best what was old in Paris; he
especially enjoyed walking on old and narrow streets. The past
was taking hold of him and his thoughts were full of it. He read
St. Simon and dwelled on the court of Louis XIV, and visited the
palaces of Versailles and Fontainebleau. There was a sense of drama
in this, and, as he walked about, his mind dwelled on imaginary
scenes from the past, and he fell into a soft melancholy. He felt the
past as a pressing emotion, and the stones, the buildings, the floors
and ceilings, the elegant things at the palace of Fontainebleau all
were links to that past. Yet the people were gone and could never
be restored, brought back. There could never again be that same
Louis XIV on this earth. All that this man had felt and sensed,
all that he was, had died.
He walked about the gardens outside of the palace of Versailles,
thinking of this. Proust had helped him to realize so much more
completely and more poignantly how each man, each human be-
ing could feel and sense so fully, and how there was so much living
emotion in everyone. But hundreds of millions besides Louis XIV
had died, and all of their inner world had gone, vanished into less
than dust. His melancholy grew deeper. He gazed about, looking
at the statues, the flowers, wandering along a shaded alley. A
French youth kissed a girl as they walked on ahead of him. Kisses,
too, they died. He had not kissed a girl in three years. He became
agitated. Sometimes he wanted to, and he had been romantically
excited when he had read of Héloise and Abelard, and about two
weeks ago, when he had seen their tombs in the Cemetery of Pére
Lachais. But he had never found the girl who seemed to be right
 54 An American Student in Paris

He grew embarrassed with his thoughts, and tried to

for him.
divert them.
Alvin meditated on how restful the gardens and woods were, and
how inducive a lane of trees like this was to a sense of peacefully
joyous relaxation. The French aristocracy had known how to live.
Did people today know? And what was living? He was living bet-
ter than he ever had before: he was happier now. There was a
sense of solitude within him, and this visit, and the walk here
under the trees enriched that solitude. It was the solitude of a
mind that was not lonely with itself. He turned and walked back,
deciding that it was time to return to Paris.

At first, Alvin thought that Professor Etienne Joubert might be

cold. He was small and on the plump side, with dark hair that was
beginning to grow gray, small dark eyes and a jet black mustache.
He dressed neatly and, Alvin guessed, more expensively than most
professors and college teachers would. His clothes were always
well-brushed, and carefully pressed and, invariably, he had a clean
handkerchief in his coat pocket.
His course was on the Great Revolution, and after the first few
lectures, Alvin knew that Professor Joubert was held in great awe and
respect by the students. Professor Joubert entered the big room
every day at one minute before the hour at which the lecture be-
gan. He walked like a man who knew where he was going, looking
straight ahead and never noticing the assembled students. His pos-
ture was erect, almost stiff. Mounting to the lectern, he looked
down with cold eyes, and began to speak. He talked slowly but
unfalteringly and in full command of his subject. Like Mathiez, he
was a defender of Robespierre and the Jacobins, and he interpreted
the events of the Revolution in terms of social classes; he laid
strong emphasis on economics. The class interests of the peasants,
sansculottes, bourgeoisie and aristocracy had determined the poli-
tics of the Revolution more than the latter had been determining
as causes. This gave Alvin a new perspective. Although he had
taken a number of history courses as an undergraduate at the Uni-
versity of Chicago, and read of political and economic questions
and issues which had stirred and roused the passions of men, he
had thought of history in terms of reason and of ideas. In other
words, ideas had seemed to him to be the determinants of history.
JAMES T. FARRELL 55
And Professor Joubert pushed this relationship around. He spoke
with a conviction of certitude and maintained an air of impreg-
nable authority.
The experiences Alvin felt more were intellectual. His emo-
tions found their fullest and freest play when his mind was aroused
and his imagination was then kindled and stimulated. And Pro-
fessor Joubert, day by day, lecturing on the French Revolution, did
this for Alvin, even though there was no personal contact between
them. Joubert was cold, consistently aloof from his students. Noth-
ing in Alvin’s life as a student back at the University of Chicago
was anywhere near as thrilling as his attendance at Professor Jou-
bert’s course. The idea of studying about the Great French Revo-
lution in Paris, and in the classroom where so great a historian as
Professor Joubert lectured — this in itself was wonderful, a favor
from the gods.
He was learning, perhaps at a faster rate than ever before. His
mind was peopled with the characters of the Revolution, and he
often thought of the crowds, the fighting, the gathering of the dele-
gates at the Convention, the leaders of the factions and their
speeches, the drama of hope and grandeur, blood and death. He
yearned to have lived in those days. Had any period in history been
as violently dramatic, as magnificently exciting as this one? Could
any period be? He didn’t believe so. There was nothing in Ameri-
can history to match it; most certainly there wasn’t.
Being in Paris made his study all the more vivid and compelling.
Many of the buildings of Paris had been standing in those
days. Robespierre, Saint-Just, Danton all must have seen Notre
Dame at sunset. They must have walked in the Tuileries as he
now could. Robespierre had lived on the Rue St. Honoré. The
street was different now, but it was the same street, and he could
also walk on its pavements. And there was the Palais Royal, where
Camille Desmoulins had roused the Parisians. Paris was a city of
tremblingly alive ghosts. Each walk, almost every step he took on
its streets, now could be doubly, trebly exciting.
Autumn found Alvin used to Paris. He had learned to know his
way about, had seen many sights, monuments, historic buildings
and museums; he knew some people, both French and American.
There was a succession of Indian summer days which laced him in
a gentle and pleasing sense of melancholy. These days were in his
 56 An American Student in Paris

thoughts, full, the ripest ones of his life. No day since his coming
to Paris had been without its impressions. He had been and was
g
soaking in so much, an enormity of impressions. He was thinkin
much, reading, and it seemed to him as though his entire personal -
ity were flowing with history, with ideas. There were books, maga-
zines and newspapers, good conversations, pleasing and cheap
meals, walks, and class lectures. He was lucky, so lucky that he
often believed that he could only be grateful to whatever and all
the gods there be for such good fortune.
America — home — was so far away. The news from it was dark.
It was still ridden with unemployment, and the depression was
sinking many, perhaps millions, into moods of hopelessness.
Friends of his from his campus days wrote him about conditions,
and told him, dispiritedly, of their vain and sometimes hopeless
searches for jobs. All such news pained him, but still he was glad
to be out of the American atmosphere for a while. He could do
nothing to change things, and he might well succumb to the dark
pessimism that must be spreading across the land. It was an anti-
dote to pessimism to live for a while, even though only imagina-
tively, through such a period as that of the Great French Revolu-
tion. He was studying about the days of glory, of glory for young
men. He could throb with the keenest pleasure of stimulation
when he read of the public utterances of the men of those days
of glory.
Four men especially occupied Alvin’s thoughts. Two were Robes-
pierre and Professor Joubert. The others were Napoleon and Léon
Blum.
Along with his reading about the Great Revolution, he read of
Napoleon. Bonaparte fascinated him even more than Robespierre.
The life of Napoleon was enthralling, more so than that of any
historic figure about whom he had read. He was impressed by
Napoleon’s energy and decisiveness, and only wished that he had
these traits. To various friends he spoke of how Napoleon slept so
little, and would take quick fifteen- or twenty-minute naps and then
would be up and at work. He was close to weeping when he paid
a second visit to the Emperor’s tomb. Looking down at the enor-
mous casket, reading the names of battles where Bonaparte had
triumphed, his emotions rushed up and choked in him. He wished
that men, at least men like Napoleon, did not have to die. His
JAMES T. FARRELL by

feeling about the melancholy of time came back to him. He

thought of Robespierre and Napoleon, sometimes comparing them,
then again contrasting them in terms of the greatness of each.
They both had acquired for him the status of personal heroes,
and in his reading he would have uncomfortable moments when-
ever he came upon actions of theirs which did not seem right. Be-
cause he had developed his enthusiastic attachment for them, he
had some need to believe that every action of theirs was justifiable.
He accordingly grasped at what Professor Joubert said of the ac-
counts of Danton in a classroom lecture, and likewise he read with
eagerness and relief a monograph on the latter’s accounts and
finances. Professor Joubert appeared to prove that Danton was
guilty of personal corruption, and Alvin was relieved because this
eased disturbed feelings which he had had concerning the execu-
tion of Danton. All his life, Alvin had been scrupulously honest
about money, and had never stolen or cheated anyone out of as
much as one penny. When he had worked for The Chicago
Clarion as campus reporter, he had always been exact in the ex-
pense accounts he turned in. His own honesty helped him the
more to approve of Robespierre and to justify Robespierre’s role
in the trial and guillotining of Danton. Robespierre had done
this to save France, and there was a thrill in thinking of this.
And then, after the defeat and deaths of Robespierre and the other
Jacobin leaders, France had sunk into mediocrity and corruption.
Professor Joubert’s writings on this period interested him and
induced a mood of sadness. The period was gray and unexciting
and the drama had gone out of the Revolution. A gray coat of
paint had been splashed over the great, bright and ennobling
words of the Revolution. This was the nature of life, he would
reason. But it was against such a setting, also, that he saw the rise
of Napoleon. Often he wished that Professor Joubert had, or some
day would, write of Napoleon, and that he would treat Bonaparte
with the same sympathy as he did Robespierre.
But his thoughts, the lectures at the Sorbonne and his readings
also brought to his mind the question of his own future. Never
before had he seriously given thought to the idea of action. Robes-
pierre, and even more so Napoleon, had been men of action. And
their deeds inspired him as well as their words: Napoleon’s deeds
loomed much larger than his words. He could never be a man of
 An American Student in Paris
58

action, but only a student, and perhaps one day a teacher, possibly
of history. But might he not act? Now and then, this question came
to mind.

He watched the funeral cortege of Briand. The sidewalks were

crowded and the police had difficulty in controlling the spectators.
The scene
They laughed at, joked with and jeered at the police.
amused Alvin and he admired the French for showing this atti-
tude. But the solemnity of death slowly passed by, and he was
moved. Briand had struggled for peace: he had been a statesman
of peace. The black hearse, and the dignified men in dark suits
walking behind the hearse, were enacting a scene for him which
belonged to history. A leader, a man who had worked to change
history, was being carried to his grave. And he could see it, instead
of merely having to read of it. Someday, this scene would be de-
scribed in a book, and a student, such as he was now, would read
of it, and would try to grasp it as though it were happening be-
fore his eyes instead of merely being described in a book. He tried
to grasp, to make vivid and immediate, scenes of the Revolution
and from the life of Napoleon about which he read. The signifi-
cance of the passing funeral cortege was for the future, not for the
immediate present. Great men acted for the future.
He left the scene after the cortege had passed, and walked for a
long time, thinking. He silently spoke his own name to himself
Alvin Dubrow. Could he act for the future? Heretofore, he had
only thought of his name in the future in the vaguest way. Perhaps
some day he could write something which might be remembered.
But for him to think like this now, and to ask himself if he could
do something so that he would be remembered, was not this arro-
gance? Who was he? Merely a youth, a student. Napoleon, even
in his youth, had been a genius. Napoleon had always believed
in his destiny, his star. But Alvin Dubrow from Chicago, what star
could he believe in?
What could he do to stir, to move and to change the life of
mankind? Asking himself these questions brought him a sense of
deep frustration, and with this the realization that there was a
pathos about young men such as himself. Heretofore he had never
seriously and thoroughly thought about ambition as it concerned
himself. He had never held great ambitions. Learning, reading,
JAMES T. FARRELL 59

being a student, this was an ambition, but he had postponed the

decision as to where this would finally be directed. His thoughts
about teaching and studying had been, he now understood, vague,
and assumed for a distant future. Someday he might be an his-
torian and on a college faculty. When he had been a boy, he had
known that one day he would be a man. He had more or less
thought about his future in much the same manner. Now he was
a man, a young man, but nevertheless a man. When he returned to
America after his year here, he would have to make decisions and
choices. This was months off, and he had time to think things out
carefully, but even so, months were short. Today he had seen the
funeral of Briand. Once Briand had been a young man finding his
way, and now he was dead.
He walked on along the Seine and thought how once Robes-
pierre and Napoleon had been young and now they were no more.
The shortness of life now bore in upon him with painfulness and
poignancy. All through college, he had thought about the brevity
of life, but this had been a sentence, a cliché, or at best a means of
luxuriating in borrowed and sentimental emotions of melancholy.
Now, his emotion seemed more real. He almost wanted to weep
for the brevity of life. He wanted to call out against this age. Set
against the background of what he was studying, it appeared so
barren. But then, this age was not unrelated to the past, to the
days of the Great Revolution and the Napoleonic Age. Did man-
kind reach heights only in special moments? A great age was, after
all, but a special moment in history.
It was almost dark, and ahead of him was Notre Dame. The
cathedral loomed darkly in the growing dusk. It was on the island
in the Seine, permeated with the kind of solemnity that belongs to
eternity. The stones seemed to want to speak. But he checked him-
self on this thought. Wasn’t it sentimental?
But what was sentimentality? Alvin asked himself this question
in self-defense against his own reason. Not many of the students he
had known at the university seemed to think about these questions.
They, certainly, would consider his thoughts sentimental. But,
sentimental or not, there was this poignancy about life. For the
mind, life was like a vast and infinite universe, an unlimited uni-
verse offering knowledge and ideas. Time was so short in contrast
to this infinity. One would die knowing little, almost nothing.
 An American Student in Paris
60

thought of this, or else he would not have

Napoleon must have
Dame, immediately
worked the way he did. There was Notre
e Emper or in that cathe-
ahead of him now. Napoleon had becom
glory and power. Now, all
dral. A vanished scene of pomp and
dualit y was gone, van-
who had been there were dust. Their indivi
ished in the dust.
with the fact
Reflections on such historic scenes impressed him
and unimpo rtant stu-
that he was nothing. He, was an unknown
his mother . But
dent. He meant something only to himself and to
troubl ed him.
what exactly did he mean to her? The question
spirit hovere d
Even though far away from her, something of her
in his mind
over him, and part of her will seemed to be implanted
he re-
as a restraining and confusing force. He feared that when
And
turned, she would want him to go back to living at home.
away
coming here to Paris had given him an easy opportunity to get
from home. He had to stay away, and how would she take that?
St.
He was troubled as he turned right onto the Boulevard
Michel. He would find a new restaura nt tonight and blow himself
to a more expensive dinner than he usually ate. This would be a
gesture of self-assertion on his part.

ate
Alvin was able to put his doubts out of mind, and to concentr
on his studies and his reading. He decided that whatever his ca-
reer and his future would be, this year of study in Paris would
help him to prepare himself. He even felt some small guilt about
the thoughts he had been having, especially those which he dwelled
upon during his walk on the day of Briand’s funeral. It was a bit
ridiculous for him to hold ambitions beyond his powers of achieve-
ment and attainment, and wasn’t that what he had done, or at least
been tempted to do? He was not the kind of person who would
ever be a man of action, and to think of becoming what he could
not be, to dream of being an actor in history, as though he were
another Napoleon or Robespierre— this was comic.
He laughed at himself, but not with any heartiness. He had
played the fool in his own eyes, or so he concluded. But this gave
him relief. The pressure of needing to learn and to achieve was
disturbing to him. It produced an agonized sense of conscience. If
he did not spur himself on under this pressure he would feel lag-
gard, lazy. To be released from this was like having weights lifted
 JAMES T. FARRELL 61
from his mind. He could learn, read and study for its own sake,
and for no other other reason. There was no necessity that he ever
use what he was learning.
Having shed the burden of a sense of destiny which he had ab-
sorbed, Alvin found his life once again easier and more enjoyable.
His thoughts about history became different: he shifted the empha-
sis. History, he decided, was a drama of ideas and personality.
Learning more about a Napoleon or a Robespierre was like com-
ing to understand a great drama more clearly. History was a kind
of Proustian story.
But he remained fascinated and continued to do a considerable
amount of reading. He still found much stimulation for thought in
the lectures of Professor Joubert. The historian looked different.
In the course of a few months, he had lost weight, and this was
noticeable in his face. His color was sallow, and there was an air
of tiredness about him. But as usual he appeared one minute
ahead of time, mounted to his podium, arranged his notes before
him and spoke. He seemed to believe in his own authority with
absoluteness and the conviction of certitude. As his lectures un-
folded, a note of deep but controlled passion would lurk in his
words. When he mentioned Robespierre, his tone of voice changed.
Alvin observed this and interpreted it as meaning that Joubert’s re-
spect for Robespierre was enormous. Joubert considered Robes-
pierre to have been a great man. It was respect for greatness and
truth. Alvin regarded Joubert as a man scrupulously devoted to
finding the truth. Alvin believed in truth. The purpose not only
of scholarship and study, but also of life should be the search for
truth and the use of truth in life. But truth was of value in itself.
It was an end in itself, he believed. And he sat listening to Joubert
and regarding him as a man who was devoted to truth. Part of the
truth of history was the greatness of Robespierre. Joubert had dis-
covered this and was contributing to the rescue of Robespierre’s
name from obloquy.
But there was the question of the Terror. Alvin was thrilled
when he read the words of Robespierre, his speeches or quotations
from them. Similarly, he was thrilled and inspired when Joubert
would directly quote Robespierre. Often, Professor Joubert would
lecture flatly. He would go on and almost drone out his words, and
Alvin would have to exercise his will power to listen. This he would
 An American Student in Paris
62

do, but the content of the lectures alone held his attention, and
there was a strain in listening. It was against this flatness that Pro-
fessor Joubert would change and speak passionately of Robespierre,
and then he would offer a direct quotation from the words of the
Incorruptible. History would come alive, and Alvin would see the
Professor as a virtual personification of Robespierre. Not only
passion but also anger would come into the Professor’s voice. It
was acting and more than.acting: it was a symbolic transformation
of personality. The enemies of the Revolution and of Robespierre,
now so long dead, were lashed and excoriated anew. And then, in
quoting the eloquent and moral passages from his hero, Professor
Joubert would once more become transformed. Standing almost
rigidly with his plump hands planted firmly and motionlessly on
the lectern, he was a transfixed person. He was Robespierre come
to life anew to fight the battles of the past against cynicism, im-
morality and corruption. The lecture hall became charged and the
tension created helped Alvin to imagine what it might have been
like in the days when Robespierre was in power and was speaking
at the Convention or to the Club of the Jacobins. Alvin experienced
a sense of excitement which seemed different from anything in his
past. Here in Paris, close to the very places where Robespierre
had lived, spoken, and gone to his death, he was feeling what might
be described as the pulse of history. He was carried backwards in
time and for a brief moment, he imagined that he was listening not
to Professor Joubert, but to Robespierre himself.
And yet, from time to time, troubling thoughts and questions
about the Terror would pop into his mind. Had it been necessary?
If necessary in some cases, had it been so in all of them? Had in-
nocent men gone to their deaths? Could the Revolution and the
Republic have been saved without the Terror? The thought of the
Terror, of the blade of the guillotine coming down on a bare neck,
was enough to produce nightmares. If he tried to visualize this
action, he became almost physically ill. And what were the thoughts
of those who were killed in the Terror when they were driven to
their deaths in open carts? This was all disillusioning. And think-
ing of it, he would sigh to himself and in a plaintive mood ask him-
self why mankind could not be more reasonable. But Robespierre
had been the apostle of reason. And the defense of the Revolution
must have been more important than any single life. Even more,
 JAMES T. FARRELL 63

and Professor Joubert had sometimes stressed this point, the situ-
ation had reached the point where it was a question of the death
of one of the leaders or another. Still, Alvin sometimes found him-
self in a quandary.
One night, he was taking a long walk, thinking, brooding and
looking about. In front of a café, a man who wore his cap slanted
and had a scarf flung about his neck, put his hands through the arm
of two girls and Alvin overheard him say:
“Un homme entre deux femmes — qu’est-ce qu’il faut?”
This incident struck Alvin as humorous and as he passed on, he
laughed. He repeated the man’s remark and laughed again. An
incident like this one was so far away from what was on his mind.
And what was on his mind probably did not ever occur to that
Frenchman or the two girls with him. Thought or worry about the
Jacobin Terror probably was a matter of no concern to the great
majority of the French people.
“Qw’est-ce qu'il faut?”
Several times, he repeated this to himself and he laughed.
And he asked himself what real importance there was in the
question about Robespierre that was troubling him. Its answer
had little bearing on the practical everyday life of people. Should
he decide that he had found the answer to his question and had
resolved it in his own mind, what good would it do for humanity?
He might go on and spend his life concerning himself with and
thinking about questions and problems which had no practical
importance. Yet he wanted it this way.
Tired from his walk, and finding himself in front of the Closerie
de Lilas, he went inside for a cup of coffee. There were not many
in the café, but there was a group of young French people at a table
a few feet away from him. Two of the girls were very good-looking.
One was blond and the other brunet. The group was talking
spiritedly and laughing much. Alvin noticed them and then looked
off and tried to pursue his own thoughts. Nothing would be
changed, would it, if he should come to one or another conclusion?
He might come to believe that Robespierre had acted rightly and
was justified, as Professor Joubert thought, or he might reach the
conclusion that the opposite was true. And either way, would there
be any difference?
What could justify executing so many people? The question
 64 An American Student in Paris

came to mind suddenly. It seemed to answer itself. But then what

could be said of Robespierre? In his case, Alvin found that he could
not answer his own question the way he felt that it should be an-
swered. And if the question were so simple, and the answer so easily
arrived at, how was it that Professor Joubert did not see it? Listen-
ing to him lecture, the justification of Robespierre seemed irrefu-
table. It was hard to accept, but perhaps it had to be accepted.
Robespierre was justified. He had done what he had to do, and
he had saved the Republic and the Revolution.
The French group was talking loudly. It was an argument. He
caught some of the names: Pierre, Conrad, Madeleine, Natalia,
Arthur. They were arguing about politics, and one of them was
attacking Laval, the Premier of France. Another was replying that
Laval was not so bad. He was going to vote Radical Socialist all his
life because there might be more stability with a Radical Socialist
government. The young man named Pierre said that Conrad
meant that he was going to vote bourgeois. The one called Conrad
was stocky and plump, and he burst out in genial laughter; he asked
the others what Pierre was if he wasn’t a bourgeois, and how did
Pierre live if not like a bourgeois? And the tall young man named
Pierre then shouted that he had been unfairly attacked and that he
never spoke personally in an ideological or intellectual discussion.
Then they started loudly arguing as to who was unfair and fanatic.
Alvin had begun listening with interest, but continued in amuse-
ment. They were shouting and seemed angry. Listening further,
he learned that the two called Pierre and Conrad were brothers.
Then, as he glanced over at the group, a bit furtively because he did
not want them to think that he was eavesdropping, he heard the
small blond girl tell them that they were not arguing scientifically.
The one called Conrad spoke in an affectionately patronizing man-
ner, calling her “My dear Madeleine,” and telling her that a girl
as beautiful as she should not concern herself with political matters.
She responded that he did not believe that women should have
minds and use them. He told her that men did not love women
for having beautiful minds. And then the other brother, Pierre,
interrupted and asked why he was fanatic; he denied the allegation.
Conrad told him that he was fanatic, and that he would be a fool
to sacrifice his scientific studies for politics, and then added that
JAMES T. FARRELL 65
Pierre would never save the world by trying to be a politician.
Pierre answered that he was not a politician; he was a revolution-
ary. Conrad burst into good-natured laughter. Pierre became even
more enraged, and then the other young man at the table angrily
declared that this was all idiotic, and that they should not go on
engaging in idiotic arguments. The blond girl, Madeleine, said that
she was beginning to fear it was a trait of their family. She wished
that at least they would not shout so much when they argued.
Then, suddenly, they all became friendly and decided to leave. It
took them a long time and required much discussion. Alvin
watched them go, believing that he had been able to look a little
into French life.
Then he paid his bill and walked slowly along the Boulevard
St. Michel to go back to his hotel room. It was late and there were
not many people on the streets. He was lonely. Much as he liked it
here in Paris, and even though he knew that he was learning and
that this year here would probably turn out to be one of the most
valuable, significant and happy ones of perhaps his entire life, still
he now felt these pangs of loneliness. He wondered why he should
feel this way? All his life, he had really been a solitary person, and
he had come to assume that he always would be one. He did not
want his life basically changed. He liked people and saw as much
of them as he cared to, and he believed that it was a matter of his
own choosing not to get too close to them.
The night was windy, the kind of an evening conducive to melan-
choly thoughts. Autumn was a season of melancholy. In the morn-
ing, he would feel different. And hadn’t he thought and brooded
enough for one day?
But he felt a sense of defeat and frustration. He had embarked
on his long walk as though he were going to discover something.
He had wanted to think, to put together some thoughts. Frequently
he had done this before writing to his mother, and he intended to
write her a letter in the morning. He did not want to tell her of his
sense of defeat and of the poignancy he felt in his own solitariness.
In his letters, he always tried to convey a sense of enthusiasm.
Striding on, he looked at his shadow, long and moving on the
dark sidewalk. He thought of himself and saw himself in his
mind’s eye, walking solitary along the Boulevard St. Michel on this
 66 An American Student in Paris

chilly night. This was, he reminded himself, Paris. To walk the

streets of Paris in melancholy, to dwell on the solitude of life, was as
though sadness were being changed into poetry. And there was a
sense of relatedness to others, to many who were unknown to him
and even unknown to anyone now. For students must have walked
at night in Paris for decades and centuries, pondering on life and
death, their future, the dreams they held or wished to discover and
hold. That seemed to him to be what he was searching for here in
Paris — his own dreams. He was still young, but he had never truly
had dreams, the kind of dreams of youth that he had read about
in literature and history. And was this because there was no love
in his life?
Merely asking himself this question caused him discomfort. At
times, he had thought of finding a girl, a sensitive and poetic girl,
but he had never looked. In the presence of women, he would be-
come shy. He could not bring himself to take a girl out, or to think
of marrying and living with a woman. In a letter he had received
about a month ago, his mother had asked him if he had met any
charming and intelligent French girls. But he did not believe that
his mother really wanted him to go out with girls or ever to get
married. But would or might he ever marry? The question seemed
to him strange, unreal, almost absurd. And with sudden, startling
and somewhat frightening clarity, he realized why this was. His
mother was a shadow in his mind, a shadow cast over his thoughts
and desires. It was not a matter of her approving or disapproving
of something he might do or of something that he wanted. She was
a very controlled and civilized woman and he valued her intelli-
gence highly. She would always act intelligently towards him and
would maintain her control and her reserve, no matter what hap-
pened. But she had so managed to plant herself in his nature that
he did not feel free. He was not only unfree to act but even to
think. The thought of girls and of marriage embarrassed him now
walking alone here in the Boulevard St. Michel.
He thought that the real reason for his having come to Paris
was to get away from her, to live alone. And living alone here had
been a great pleasure to him. But he was not free: he was not alone.
Her shadow was in his mind.
He turned off and walked rapidly to his hotel, angry, hurt, and
deeply troubled.
JAMES T. FARRELL 67

Alvin made a trip to Alsace to see his relatives, going by train.

He was eager and excited about it, and it gave him an opportunity
to see something of France. He went third class. The compart-
ment was crowded, but he liked this and talked to his fellow pas-
sengers. They complimented him on his French.
Everything was significant on the trip and small experiences took
on the quality of adventures. The thoughts that he had had of
himself, his mother, the future, the morality of the use of power
and violence, all this dropped away from him. The countryside
which seemed to move by him as the train rolled on, the stations |
they passed and stopped at, the changing people in his compart-
ment, the casual conversation about the trip, the time, the train,
food, all this was important and even thrilling. His feeling was one
of rebirth, and old France which had been here, a garden on this
planet for centuries, seemed as though it had been born only in the
present and for his eyes. All day, there was small talk, railroad sta-
tions, fields and scenery, gray little bridges, streams and trees and
more fields. The green stood out. The sun shone, high and pol-
ished, and the air was shining and sparkling.
His relatives, a family of four, lived near Strasbourg, and took him
around the city. He walked about the streets, and found the town
more modern than he had expected it to be. The cathedral was
beautiful and he gazed at it and wandered about inside as long as
politeness permitted. Above the front door, he saw a statue of
the Virgin Mary, beautiful in its purity, and he looked at it, en-
tranced. He had never seen a statue which had so impressed and
moved him. The calm on the Virgin’s face was extraordinary. Such
a face could well belong to the woman who was the mother of God,
and for a second, he almost wished that he believed in the story of
the Virgin Mary as the Mother of God. And he had the wish that
all men had a mother who looked like the Virgin in the statue.
This was a nonsensical wish, and he knew it. He wished that he
could look longer at the cathedral, but he felt that his relatives were
nervous.
The relatives were named Renoit. The father, Charles, was a
man in his forties, stout and jolly. He owned a prosperous hard-
ware store. The son, Edouard, was twenty-three, thin, medium-
sized and quiet, and his sister, Marie, was eighteen and plain-
looking. The mother, Marie, was still quite attractive, soft-spoken
 68 An American Student in Paris

and quiet. He spent three days with the Renoits, ate big meals, and
drank more beer than he ever had before or believed that he would
in the future. The Renoits asked him questions about America,
about its life and the gangsters in Chicago. The daughter talked
about American movies, and it was clear that she had seen more
of them than Alvin had.
They sat in a big café one evening, and Alvin enjoyed this, watch-
ing the burghers. Many of them drank beer and sat in content-
ment. A number looked more German than French. A band was
playing, people were talking and relaxing, the night was pleasant.
There was a sense of normality and a feeling of comfortableness
about the scene. Perhaps it was bourgeois comfort, and there was
stolidity and a lack of imagination or of interest in ideas here,
but still, there was something pleasing. The lighted café terrace,
looking out on the street, seemed like a little island in the midst of
life here. All around him there was talk, too. The French talked
much more than Americans. He listened to snatches of conversa-
tion about commonplace things and business. He enjoyed this, and
he and his relatives talked more. Monsieur Renoit said he did not
like the Germans, and was happy that Alsace and Lorraine had
been restored to France. Alvin thought that this might possibly be
good, but even so it had only been achieved at the cost of war which
had ended in so many deaths. When he had studied European his-
tory and had read about the war back home at the university, Alsace
and Lorraine had been words, colored shapes on a map, and places
where economic resources were said to be. And they were something
else, parts of the earth where real people lived and died. While
Alvin was thinking, Charles Renoit went on speaking about the
“Boche.” He did not like or trust the Boche. But the Boche had
been beaten and today France was stronger than the Boche. Alvin
noted how his relatives drew much comfort and satisfaction from
believing this. Glancing about the café terrace, he saw several
young soldiers in blue uniforms, and some officers in their tan uni-
forms. France’s strength against Germany was achieved at the price
of many Frenchmen wearing those uniforms. Had his ancestors
not left for America, he could be sitting here now in a uniform.
The thought struck him as strange and preposterous.
Madame Renoit asked him if he liked Strasbourg, and he politely
said that he did. She seemed pleased at this, but then, with a
JAMES T. FARRELL 69

smile, she remarked that he was young, and must like Paris better.
Alvin replied that of course he had only been here two days, and
had spent more time in Paris. Also, he was going to school in Paris.
Did he like attending the Sorbonne? His reply was affirmative. Did
he like it better than in America? she asked. He thought for a mo-
ment before replying, but then told her that probably he did. This
also seemed to please Madame Renoit.
Monsieur Renoit spoke of how beautiful Paris was, and his face
lit up with interest. Three years ago he and his family had spent
two weeks there. Madame Renoit also said that Paris was beautiful.
The daughter, Marie, was listening closely, but Alvin suspected
some sadness in her: her face seemed to have become very sad. His
sympathy and curiosity were roused. She was plain-looking, not
very attractive. Was she dreaming of Paris, of love? What did young
girls dream of? Love. He knew that. The mind of a young girl
was a mystery to him. But then, all minds were. The dreams of
everyone were a mystery and a secret. How much did or could his
mother know of his own thoughts and dreams?
Marie Renoit said that Paris was very exciting, but Alvin sus-
pected melancholy and frustration behind the words. This excited
him. To want something beyond what seemed to be possible was
one of the saddest features of youth. And this ordinary-looking
Alsatian cousin of his must see Paris as the focus of all her
sad dreams.
The mother was talking again, asking him about New York and
Washington, and what they were like. He answered that he had
never been to Washington and that he had only spent a day and a
half in New York, prior to his sailing, and had not seen much of the
city. They were surprised at this. He realized that they did not
really appreciate how big America was. Madame Renoit asked him
if New York was very big. They had all seen it in newreels and
moving pictures. Monsieur Renoit used the word, skyscraper, as an
exclamation. Edouard asked him about the gangsters, but Alvin
did not know what to say in answer. Even though he had worked
on The Clarion, and a couple of years before a Clarion reporter
had been killed by gangsters, Alvin had never paid any particular
attention to gangsters and gang wars. He had usually skipped read-
ing the news about them in the papers. Edouard had seen some
American gangster movies and spoke of these, especially Scarface
 70 An American Student in Paris

and Little Caesar, but again, Alvin had not seen these movies. The
father jokingly said that his son thought of America as the land of
gangsters and cowboys. Alvin remarked that to his knowledge, at
least, he had never seen a gangster and, of course, he had never
seen a cowboy or an Indian, either. By now it was about ten-thirty
and Charles Renoit signaled for the waiter to bring the bill.
The next day Alvin took some free time and walked about Stras-
bourg alone, drinking in the city. He went back to the cathedral
and spent about three hours looking and wandering about.
He returned to Paris enthusiastic and considered his journey to
have been a success.

One day in the spring, Alvin went to the Sorbonne and found
some of the students in the lecture hall speaking in a restrained
tone. Something had happened, he knew immediately. One of the
students told him that Professor Joubert had died. Alvin did not
react to this news with any emotion. It had been as though he were
told that it was raining. Of late, Joubert had not looked well. Al-
vin had observed this more unconsciously than consciously. He had
been short of breath, and one day the week before Alvin had
thought that Joubert might have asthma. This had produced
sympathetic emotions in Alvin, because he suffered from hay
fever in the summertime. And now, being told that the great his-
torian had died suddenly of a heart attack in his sleep, it seemed
as if he had expected this.
His reaction was one of suppressed shock. He even remembered
that when his mother had told him of his father’s death he had
reacted with no emotion. He had not felt sorry, and in those first
moments in the Sorbonne lecture room, after he had learned of Pro-
fessor Joubert’s death, he had felt nothing. The fact of the his-
torian’s death seemed nonexistent, as though it were neither true
nor false. ‘Then Alvin began asking questions, speaking rapidly
and more excitedly than he usually did. When had the Professor
died? What was the cause of his death? Had he known he was ill
and if so, wouldn’t it have been more reasonable to have given up
his work for a while and rested? The French students could not
answer Alvin’s questions, but all of them had explanations. There
was a heated noisy discussion, and as the French students talked,
JAMES T. FARRELL 71

speaking rapidly, interrupting one another and paying no heed to

each other’s statements, Alvin realized that these students were no
longer interested in the dead professor; they were concerned with
their own thoughts. Alvin then excused himself and left.
Outside the warm sun struck him like an insult.
— Il n’est plus.
He repeated this sentence to himself several times. This was the
way that the French usually said that a man was dead. He is
no more. Professor Joubert was no more. This was more graceful
to say than that a man had died.
Alvin did not know what to do nor what he wanted to do. The
emotion which had not come when he had been told the news was
now gushing up in him. For a moment he even feared that he
would cry. The death of a great scholar was an occasion for tears. He
stared at people on the street, watched them moving along on their
business and thought of how heedless and forgetful life was of
death. His mood became solemn. Death could be most solemn and
awesome. The death of Professor Joubert had turned the entire
world into a solemn background for Alvin. In such a mood, he
walked to the Luxembourg Gardens and strolled about. Spring
had come to Paris and he was seeing it there for the second time.
He was young and the coming of spring roused hopes, vague
wishes, a sense of imminence, expectancy and of wonderful pos-
sibilities in life. Spring always promised that something would
happen. A reborn world of greenness produced reborn emotions
in Alvin. The light was soft and rare and hung a soft vest over the
new and delicate green of the trees. The flowers were in bloom and
the air was gentle. Paris was a shining city, and the Luxembourg
Gardens were shining as though in a dream, and he wanted to
open his feelings to all of the newly risen beauty of the world. But
Professor Joubert was dead. How much of life had he missed? How
much undone and unfinished work had he left behind him? When
most people died, it did not mean much, but when a man like Jou-
bert died, it was a loss— the most important kind of a loss. With
such a man, a portion of human knowledge died.
His thoughts ran on in solemn moroseness. He strolled about
aimlessly and with sad eyes, observing the gardens and the people
sitting and moving about. There were many old people out. At
 hee An American Student in Paris

one end, under trees, old men were sitting in the shade, some look-
ing, some talking, some playing cards. The old men, he thought,
must merely be waiting out their last days. The thought was op-
pressive. And then, he thought again of Joubert. Joubert had been
an old man, a man in his fifties, and he must have been racing with
time to get as much work done as he could before the final moment.
Time. More and more, he was dwelling on the melancholy of time.
It slipped away and then you might go with your work undone
and your life unfinished. In youth, time was so long. This was an
illusion. It was not long. Joubert was dead. All the years of his
life were gone, gone for good.
But behind these passing thoughts, Alvin was hurt. It seemed
unfair and unjust that Joubert should have died last night, when
he still could have had so many productive years ahead of him.
Even though he now knew of and accepted the fact of the Pro-
fessor’s death, Alvin did not quite believe it, and he continued
to stroll about the Luxembourg Gardens, thinking. In the lecture
room, he had heard Joubert frequently lecture about events which
had meant death to many people. He had read about death in his-
tory, and he had been studying, even passionately, about men who
had been dead for over a century. He had been more concerned
with the past than the present, and now he suddenly realized, as
though he might have come upon an original idea, that the study
of the past was really a study of men who were now dead. And now,
when he read Professor Joubert’s writings, he would be studying
what a dead man wrote of the deeds of the dead.
He sat down and a woman in black approached him. He handed
her a one-franc piece for the chair. On the gravel walk many peo-
ple passed him — young lovers, students, old women, mothers,
grandmothers, nursemaids with children. He stared at them and
wondered about them. He looked toward the pool on his right
where children were sailing boats, and on the left toward the distant
gate at the Boulevard St. Michel. The park charmed him and yet
he was sad. The sense of death hung over his mind. Never before
had he thought much of death or felt it with the same deep sadness
as he now did. He had been too young really to feel at the time that
his father died.
Soon his year would be finished and he would be returning to
America and to Chicago. How would he feel then and what
JAMES T. FARRELL Ff)

would he do? What would he do with the remainder of his life —

his short life? Yes, he repeated to himself, life was short. Life was
short and here he was already almost twenty-three and he had ac-
complished nothing.
In a deepening mood of melancholy, Alvin left the Luxembourg
Gardens and walked back to his hotel.
 © @ gy a

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 GEORGE H. FREITAG

An Old Man and His Hat

(FROM HARPER’S MAGAZINE)

ONE bay long ago I went into a moving-picture house that showed
Hoot Gibson riding a horse and crying. It was the next-to-the-last
installment of a serial picture. The next installment would
show why he cried and what was to be done and how Mr. Gibson
fared. Next to my father, Hoot Gibson was the greatest man who
lived. I had a nickel that my father gave me for the show. I saw
Hoot Gibson crying on his horse. I paid only a nickel for that. The
Texas sky was all around him in the picture, and still he cried.
The next week my father gave me a nickel to see why. It was
Sunday afternoon in the wintertime, and I gave my coin to the
ticket girl, and she would not give me a ticket, because between the
last installment and this one I had grown into manhood. I could
no longer get in for five cents. I couldn’t see the reason why Hoot
Gibson cried or know how he solved it. I had no more money. My
father was poor. I asked the ticket girl to please let me in, that I
had not grown another five cents’ worth. But she would not. She
was very beautiful, as beautiful as my mother. But allowing me to
go in to see the last installment of Hoot Gibson was against the law.
I waited outside for my friends to come out of the theater. They
would know. I would ask Carl or Fred or Paul Robinson. I waited
from ten after one until almost five in the afternoon for someone I
knew to come out of the theater to tell me why Hoot Gibson cried
and how he solved it and so on. It was cold and snowing in front
of the picture show, and in sleighs people sped by laughing. But
Carl or Fred or Pau! never came out.
 76 An Old Man and His Hat

I knew they were in there. The horses made beautiful sounds

with their feet upon the packed hard snow on the street in front of
the theater. If someone on a quiz program now were to ask me,
“Mr. Sills, what was the loneliest, darkest time of your life?” I
would say, waiting in front of the picture show for Carl or Fred or
Paul to come out and tell me why Hoot Gibson cried or what hap-
pened afterwards and how he solved it. As it is I never really knew.
And when I saw Carl or Fred or Paul again and asked them about
the show with Hoot Gibson in it, they sang songs and blinked their
eyes and smoked cigars and wore glasses, and their voices were deep
and choir-like, and their mouths never told. I asked them where
they were on Sunday, February twentieth in the year 1920, but they
couldn’t account for it at all. They talked about girls and Wall
Street and war and grief.
But no matter now. I don’t care. I have more important things
to discuss than anything Carl or Fred or Paul could ever conjure
up. You know that!

I was walking with my fifteen-year-old son yesterday. We were

out in the country in California, just a man and his kid walking,
and we came to a bridge that spanned a river, and I remembered
what my father, walking with me in my youth, might have asked,
so I said to my son, “See the lovely bridge and the water?’
My son looked a long time at the bridge, at the water. Then he
said, “What bridge, what water?”
“But don’t you see a bridge?” I asked, “and a river?”
My boy looked again. “I see a bird with its head off and a tree
without fruit,” he said.
No rapport!
Now if I were walking along with my father in my young days,
early days for him and early days for me, and my father and I came
to a peach orchard, we will say, and he said, “Morris, what do you
see on the tree?”
I would say, “A peach without a seed.”
And my father would look a long time and he would say, “I see
a peach too, Morris. I see a peach, too! But the peach I see has a
seed.”
And I would understand why. The peach has a seed because
my father is older and looks at life more realistically. But to hear
GEORGE H. FREITAG 77

your son say, “A bird with its head off and a tree without fruit”
— man alive; that is not real rapport, is it?

I am fifty-seven years old. My bones are splintering and

creaking and I nap long and noisily sometimes. A couple of years
ago I went back to visit my parents in Canton, Ohio. They are
very old now and walk around from chair to chair to hold them-
selves up, and watch TV when there is a choir of young boys and
girls singing a cappella, and I went walking uptown in the middle
of the city where the noise was and the progress.
I came to the picture show that I waited in front of for Carl or
Fred or Paul. But men were destroying it to make room for a park-
ing lot, probably, or a supermarket. The steam shovels were at
work swinging the iron ball, knocking down the sides of the
theater’s walls, and the men were swearing at the stupidity of the
steam shovel and little black and white dogs were running away
and rats were being made homeless, and lice; and the odor of the
old rest rooms that always frightened me when I had to leave the
picture and go was everywhere your nose went. I stood there think-
ing back. An old man does that, too. The day was very hot in Ohio.
There was a storm coming up the side of the sky from Cleveland
and Lake Erie, and brief flashes of lightning cut slits in the dark sky.
Papers were blowing everywhere and schoolchildren carrying
weighted-down problems in math were going home.
Finally a man called to me. “You, old man with the gray suit,
you get out of there! You want to get killed?” But I kicked at the
loose dirt and stooped to pick up old calendars and pencil stubs and
walked toward the steam shovel with the man in it. The wind was
blowing something fierce now and someone said, ‘“They’re sure get-
ting it in Cleveland or Sandusky.” And when I got opposite the
man in the steam shovel, I asked him something.
A long time ago, when I was eight years old, or nine, I was in
the show when Art Accord was untying a girl from the railroad
tracks without a sound because in those days nobody made any
noise going through life, and when the girl was rescued and Art
Accord picked her up and carried her to safety and the train came
and silently whistled at a rabbit crossing the tracks and Art Accord
was kissing the girl, Claire Windsor, I think, I was so happy that,
standing in the aisle of the theater, I threw my cap into the air,
 An Old Man and His Hat
78
bareheaded and it was
and it never came down. I had to go home
needles on our lovely
the day after Christmas and snowing and the
r’s carpet and all the
Christmas tree were falling onto my mothe
windows had pictures of frost on them.
thought of my son
So I don’t know what really got into me. I
with its head off and
and the bridge crossing the river and the bird
or: “A cap with a blue
all, and I turned to the steam-shovel operat
visor on it. Have you come across a cap?” I asked.
buttoning his
Then someone coming out of an outside toilet,
And the man in the
pants, called to the man in the steam shovel.
cab of the shovel said, “Okay, Charles. Just an old man looking for
his hat.”
was growing
And I looked toward Cleveland where the storm
Clevel and. I looked through
from. But anybody can look toward
throug h Sandus ky, throug h every-
it. I looked through the lake,
the storm coming , the lightn ing
thing in my way, but I saw only
is rapport!
flashing, the secret place that hid the thunder. And that
 HERB GARDNER

Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He

Saying Those Terrible Things About Me?
(FROM THE SATURDAY EVENING POST)

GEorGIE FISHMAN lay awake, his miniature television set resting

on his chest like a warm chipmunk. The next step, he thought,
is they will put TV shows in syringes and inject them directly into
your brain. Georgie smiled for the first time in six sleepless nights.
“Uh-huh, uh-huh, you is my little darlin’,’ he whispered to the
set, “and we is in the cookie jar together.”
It was three-ten. Channel 7 had just signed off for the night, and
the exhausted set let go with a deep sigh —a hissing, rushing noise,
endless and electric. Georgie had been watching the set for nearly
four hours, and now the set was watching him. Channel 7’s broad-
casting day had just ended and now Georgie’s would begin, his
dreams shaping up in the side streets of his mind like marching
bands, grouping and regrouping off the avenue in preparation for
the big parade.
Georgie usually slept in bits and pieces, his dreams coming
and going without warning: ten-minute quickies, a dozen in one
night, dream festivals. Dr. Miller had instructed him to write his
dreams down as soon as he woke up in the morning, and in six
years Georgie had filled forty-two fat notebooks. He kept them
stacked on a shelf at his bedside, and when the Late Late Show failed
him he would read himself to sleep with a book of his old dreams.
But the last six nights, with the waking nightmare of the
Harry Kellerman thing, nothing put Georgie to sleep. Tonight,
 80 Who Is Harry Kellerman?
he’d even read over some of his top-winner dreams from the spring
of 1963 and come up empty. He would open his head to solve the
Kellerman mystery and everything else got in; open house, and all
kinds of bums were coming in off the street. Georgie moved the hot
set off his chest and sat up at the edge of his bed. His mind wan-
dered, a stray dog loose on a beach of picnic garbage.
Dr. Miller would help him. No. He put the telephone down.
Can’t call him in the middle of the night. Don’t know him well
enough. But that’s the way it worked: Dr. Miller must remain an
objective stranger, that’s how he helped him. After six years the
doctor still called him Mr. Fishman.
Georgie grabbed his portable radio, pressed it against his right
ear, and fell back on the bed. All he had to do was turn on the
radio and in a couple of minutes somebody would be singing one
of the songs he’d written. This always made him happy. Georgie
waited five minutes. Nothing. Other people’s songs. He switched
the dial back and forth, desperately cutting from one station to
another. — baby, love my ba yeah, yeah, you an loves
yah, dar eyes It baaaby, baaaby I heart th
is @ groovy winnah, muh love is a groovy winnah. . . . One of his
songs, it rolled into his brain, soothing. Georgie smiled and settled
into a warm bath of himself.

Ah was a big sinnah,

Till I found out,
Muh baybuh, muh baybuh,
That love is a groovy winnah... .

Ah, there it is, Moby Dick and the Wailers, singing my song, num-
ber four on the Rock Singles Chart and climbing like a son of a bitch,
breaking out. I am okay now, beautiful, I
A vagrant drop of sweat rolled down and tickled Georgie’s eye.
He knew he was giving himself the con. He was not okay and he was
not beautiful, and tonight even the song was not putting him in
shape. He picked up the telephone and dialed Dr. Miller’s number.
“Hello, yes?”
It was the familiar voice of the total stranger. Georgie smiled.
“Hi-ya, Doc-baby?”’
“Mr. Fishman?”
HERB GARDNER 81

“Yeah. You love it, right? Nuts bugging you in the middle of
the ;
“Quite all right. What is it, Mr. Fishman?”
“I never did it before. Called you at home.”
“That’s all right, Mr. Fishman. How are you?”
Six years and he doesn’t know how Iam yet. Beautiful.
“Mr. Fishman?”
Wonder what he thinks of me.
“Mr. Fishman, what is it?”
Maybe he hates me.
“Hello? Hello?’
All he knows about me, he’s gotta hate me.
“Doc, the record I left. Did you listen to it?”
PASH ss QPECOTU wane ANE Scat
““Love Is a Groovy Winner’? My new song.”
“Of course. Very charming. Youth. Enthusiasm. Vigorous.”
He hates it.
“That is not what you called to talk to me about, is it, Mr. Fish-
man?”
aoe.”
“Then tell me what it is, Mr. Fishman.”
“Doc-baby, something’s happenin’. I tell you where Georgie is
at. Doc-baby, Doc-baby, it is Desperate City. I am ready for the
cookie jar. I think you better put me in.”
“Do you mean an institution, Mr. Fishman?”
_ “I mean the New York State Cookie Jar, buster. My marbles,
Doc-baby, the marbles are spilling, m’friend. They are rolling out
onto the floor and under the bed and behind the refrigerator where
you can’t get at them anymore.”
“Mr. Fishman ‘
“Call me Georgie and I'll tell you my trouble. The phone. And
you calling me Mr. Fishman. Together it’s too far away,
baby. George. I'll settle for George.”
“Fine, then. Tell me what’s wrong, George.”
“Good. There’s this fella wants to kill me. A fella that I don’t
know who it is. I mean, you’re not a paranoid if everybody really
does hate you, right? Now, we've established that I’m ready to be
loved. I mean, it’s years now getting me ready for that number.
And I’m really ready to love and commit myself to another human
 82 Who Is Harry Kellerman?

being now, because I’ve learned to love myself and forgive myself
for how rotten I am. That’s where we are at now; that is the scene,
right? I mean it cost me twenty-eight thousand, seven hundred
and sixty dollars, not counting cab fares and a lotta years, so you
could sell me back to myself. And now I’m supposed to be straight
on the love thing ...and...now... an outside force, a big
gun from outa town, a person, is screwing it up, see. Ya got that?”
“George, I believe that, we have discussed several times the value
placed upon the sums you exchange for my professional services.
You fa
“Didn’t mean to mention the money again, sorry x?

“— become, in the exchange of value, obligated to your own

therapy by the fact of its cost.”
“Doctor, darling, sweetness, forget it, that’s 7?

“If, however,you find it e

“Hush now. Dr. Ladybug, one of your children is burning. Some
rat, calling himself Harry Kellerman, is spreading the bad word
with every chick I see. Single-handed the guy is laying the Black
Plague on me. Giving me the bad mouth all over town. Six days
I been checking it out; every chick I’ve seen in the last five months,
he plants a bomb in every plane I fly. You hear this? Oh, Dr.
Cute-person, do you read me? The man is stomping upon my head
bone with marching boots. Irony, man, do you dig the irony here?
For years I can’t really see a girl more than once or twice, tops
thrice, before splitting. Unable, like you said, to sustain with a
lady a relationship. So now maybe I’m really, at the age of thirty-
eight, really ready to sustain, and the Mad Bomber, Attila the tele-
phone, is calling up every broad I boff and spreading the rotten
on me. Help me, help me, oh Wizard, for I lie busted in the yellow-
brick road.”
“Mr. Fishma— George, when did you first become aware
that i
“Sally. The one I told you I started getting seriously happy about.
The only chick’s had enough guts to lay the facts on me.”
Georgie had gotten Sally’s call at five in the morning, six nights
before. He had been chinning himself on the exercise bar in his
bedroom doorway. Breathless, he was on his fourteenth pull-up,
whispering “Invincible” on each lift, when the telephone rang.
“Yeahr”
 HERB GARDNER 83
“Hello, it’s Sally.” Her voice was warm in his ear, and young,
and told him that he would live forever.
“Sally, darlin’.”
“I just now had a terrible experience. Guy calls me up. Says
he’s a friend of yours. Says you have a wife, three children, several
social diseases, and just got out of Payne Whitney Clinic where they
put you for behaving in a violent manner.”
“Who? Who said that? My God.”
“Says his name is Harry Kellerman.”
“I don’t even . . . not even a familiar name.”
“Ts it true?”
“My God. None. None of it. Who did he say he was to me?”
“A friend. An ex-friend of yours. Says that’s all you have is ex-
friends because of how sooner or later you behave in a violent man-
ner. He seemed to know you very well.”
“My God. Who would do that to me?”
“Somebody who hates you.”
“My God. Who is Harry Kellerman?”
“Somebody who hates you. Maybe you behaved toward him in a
violent manner.”
“Darling. Sally. Sweetness. Warmness. How long have you
been seeing me? Three weeks. Hasn’t it been great?”
“Yes, sure, Georgie.”
“Loveliness. Goodness. Golden corn muffin. Don’t let this throw
you. Do you trust me?”
“Yes, sure, Georgie.”
“Then ace it outa your head. Please, Candy Store, Nesselrode, for-
get Harry What’s-his-name.”
“Kellerman. Said his conscience was bothering him and he had
to tell me. Warn me. Georgie, why should somebody call me like
that at four-thirty in the morning, Georgie?”
“Tl kill him. I'll find him and I'll kill him.”
“Georgie, you sound like you are about to behave in a violent
manner.”
“Well, wouldn’t you be angry if somebody was doing that to
you, Sally?”
“T wouldn’t kill him for it, no. Look, Georgie, it’s five a.M., I’m
tired, I’ve got to get up soon for work. I only called to tell you.”
“Will ya wait a minute?”
 Who Is Harry Kellerman?
84

“It’s actually very late.”

“Okay, see you at Sid’s tonight.”
“Tonight, actually, I better just get to sleep early tonight. Okay?”
“Hey, Sally ie
“It’s very late now.”
“Sally. Cuteness
”

“Goodbye, Georgie.”
Georgie went back to his chinning bar. He had suddenly
gained fifty pounds and was unable to lift himself. He hung there
one-handed, four inches off the floor.
“I swear, Dr. Oz-person, it took me three albums. I had to play
my songs for nearly an hour till I felt better.”
“Certainly upsetting,” Dr. Miller said, and then lapsed into si-
lence.
A very human silence, Georgie decided. He is really worried
about me; the Stranger cares. He remembered the time he'd
spotted the doc in the men’s department of Bloomingdale’s, the only
time Georgie’d ever seen him outside of the walnut-paneled con-
sultation room where they had passed the years together. The doc
hadn’t seen him but Georgie had seen the doc trying on a gray pin-
stripe, the trousers rolled up around his ankles like other mortal
men, checking himself out, sucking in his gut and posing in the
three-sided mirror.
“George, do you think you could sleep right now?”
“Not a chance. Send me over an overdose of sleeping pills.”
“George, in just six hours it will be time for our regular session.
Perhaps you ms
“Had the suicide dream again last night. A replay. Put it in the
book. Number thirty-four for that one. If that dream was one of
my songs it would now be number six on the Rhythm-and-Blues
Singles Chart, and climbing fast. I’m in this fancy hotel again,
like always. I write out this suicide note, right, on a brown paper
bag. I hang the bag on a doorknob, and I open up the window and
I climb out on this wide ledge like the hotel’s got, and I inch over,
as usual, to the corner where below me an avenue meets a street,
and I am ready to jump out of the world, see, and there’s this same
crowd, maybe two hundred of them down there, and they always
show up for my suicide dream. So I look down at them and I smile
very friendly because I know all their faces by now. And then, like
HERB GARDNER 85
it happens every time, I notice this peculiar thing. The crowd is
looking up okay, but they are not looking at me; they are looking
over to my left a little. So I peek around the corner, and there, on
the north ledge, a few inches away, is my ex-wife, Gloria, stealing
my act, crouched over and ready to go, and the crowd is watching
her, not me. Her!
““Gloria,’ I whisper over to her, ‘looky-here, doll. It’s me, Georgie,
your lovin’ ex.’
““Georgie,’ she says, ‘how are ya?’
““T’m knockin’ myself off,’ I says.
“ “Cool it,’ she says. ‘I’m workin’ this crowd.’
““No,’ I say, ‘these are my people. I drew these fans. You're
doin’ my number; this is my material.’
“ “Hell with you,’ she says. ‘I am going over very big here. You
gonna ruin this for me like everything else?’
“ “Gloria, do you still love me?’
“She doesn’t answer me so I ask her again.
“Gloria, do you still love me?’
“And she says something but I cannot hear her, and then she
reaches up her hand to sort of touch up her warm honey hair, and
then she looks down below at the jam-packed street, at the heavy
midtown lunch-hour traffic, and then she jumps into it. What do
you mean, vigorous?”
“Vigorous?” Dr. Miller asked.
“Yeah, Doc, my new song. You said it was vigorous. What the
hell is vigorous? What the hell kinda bag is that, please?”
“T was referring to ‘i
“Help me, help me, Doc-baby,’” Georgie whispered, the telephone
trembling in his hand. “Please, it is cookie-jar time.”
“What did you say? I can’t hear you, George.”
Georgie hung up and reached over to the shelf next to his bed
for the piece of office stationery on which he had neatly typed his
List of Suspects. His telephone rang many times and then stopped.
Georgie put his head back on the pillow and studied his List:

1) Her HusBanp, the one who I never should have touched her in
the first place.
2) Bitty, who I didn’t give the song to. He’s in L.A.
3) Blue Suede Jacket; her BOYFRIEND.
 86 Who Is Harry Kellerman?
4) Acent for Sky Blue and the Fly By Knights, who I always give
him such a hard time, and he gives me that rotten look.
5) Stewardess who is married when she is in Chicago. HER HUS-
BAND. He is old man. (I’m so young?).
6) GrortA, but what about the voice?
7) SPANISH POTHEAD WHAT-HIS-NAME who said I stole melody from
him for “Losers and Lovers’ (Number eight on R-R charts
now, moving fast).
8) SON OF A BITCH FROM EAST HAMPTON. I hate him anyway.
9) OTHER PEOPLE who I will think of.
FACTS AND CHARACTERISTICS OF H.K.:
A) Number of girls I checked on—twenty-two.
Number of girls called by K.—sixteen.
B) REACTIONS:
1) Thought He Was Nut—six girls.
2) Believed All Of What He Said—two (but includes Ardra
who believes everything).
3) Believed Some—four.
4) Thought It Was Me Kidding Around—half.
5) Scared And Upset—all (but Ardra).
(C) MAIN CHARACTERISTIC:
1) He hates me.
D) OTHER CHARACTERISTICS:
1) Has sort of deep voice, square; but cold delivery. No dirty
language.
E) All girls called have listed telephone numbers. All girls I took
to Charlie’s Tangerine and/or the Tuesday Bar.
F) POSSIBILITIES:
He (or them) wants me not get married, not get away from
him (them), thinks doing me favor get rid of broads... .

Georgie’s eyes suddenly backspaced over the last sentence. He

grabbed at the telephone, his finger moving in choppy arcs on
the dial.
“Hello,” his father said in his square, sort of deep voice, with his
cool delivery.
“Pop, it’s me, Georgie.”
“Georgie,” his father said, not using any dirty language.
 HERB GARDNER 87
“Your son, Georgie.”
“Your son . . . Georgie.” The best his father could do for the
moment was repeat everything Georgie said till he was awake
enough to think up his own material.
“Your only son, Georgie.”
“Only son, Georgie.”
A muffled rustle of sheets and blankets. “Georgie. Four A.M.
Something wrong. What?”
“No, Pop. Just wanted to talk.”
“To talk what? Four o’clock. What?”
“How . . . how are ya, Pop?”
“Fine. Fine. Four o’clock.”
“Uh ... how’s the store?”
“Closed. It’s four o’clock.”
“Pop, how would you feel if I got married?”
“Wait for the afternoon. Then Rose and me could come.”
“No, not now, but if I did, what would you think?”
“By this afternoon, I could get my suit, then si
“Pops baby, if you didn’t want me to do the marriage bit, if you
figured I’d cop out on you with a chick, just cop out on being a son,
you wouldn’t try to kill my scene, would you? Lay the bad mouth
on me with the broads?”
“Al” — he heard his mother’s voice — ‘Al, what is it?”
“A cop,” his father said. “A cop hit Georgie in the mouth.”
“The hospital,” his mother said. “He is in the hospital.”
“T don’t know, Rose.”
“George?” It was his mother on the telephone, a flat, calm voice.
“George, you are hurt. You are in the hospital. Where are you
located?”
“No, doll, I’m fine.”
“Oh, I see,” she said.
She was glad, of course, that her son was unharmed; but, expect-
ing tragedy and always in training for it, she was confused and
unprepared when it did not come. Rose could spot a terminal dis-
ease at a hundred paces and a funeral at fifty. In her hushed voice
there was always the faint but unmistakable echo of hospital cor-
ridors.
“Four o'clock in the morning, George, I thought ”

“Easy, doll, all is cool.”

 88 Who Is Harry Kellerman?
“Easy, doll, all is cool.’ George, you have a master’s degree in
English Literature from Columbia University. I had always hoped
that you would learn a foreign language, George. And you have.”
“Late, Ma. Gotta split for sleep.”
“George, I recently purchased your latest recording, “The Groovy
Victory of 16:
“No, sweets, that’s ‘Love Isa
”

“And I find, once again, that I harbored in my own home an

enemy of the English Language and a 2
“You're into your tap dance, Ma.”
“and a musical assassin. George, those lovely, sensitive bal-
lads you wrote at school. I remember in particular one entitled
‘Golden Horizons and the Promise of Tomorrow.’ It ie
“I don’t know those gigs no more, Momzo. . . .”
Tie score and we’re into the eighty-seventh inning. A loser’s
game, Georgie knew, but they played it beautifully; they were na-
turals. She had, he realized, taught him everything she knew— to
appreciate literature, to play the piano, and to expect the worst.
“Hello, Georgie.” It was his father again. “Listen, don’t listen to
her. I heard your new tune. It’s a crackerjack, believe me. Terrific.
Go to sleep. Don’t worry. A crackerjack.”
“Thanks, Pop.”
“Listen, I got terrific news for you. Yesterday I put you in the
menu, at the store. I was going to call you. I got ’em all in there,
the greats, sandwiches named after them, the Jackie Gleason Spe-
cial, the Johnny Carson Salad, Sammy Davis, Merv Griffin, alla them
I got in there. And now you.”
“Great. What am I?”
“You're a triple-decker sandwich.”
“Beautiful.”
“The Georgie Fishman Triple-decker. Fresh, thin-sliced Novie,
golden lake sturgeon z
“Beautiful, beautiful.”
“— cream cheese, chives optional, sliced Bermuda onion
“Wow.”
““— on toasted thick pumpernickel.”
“With a side of cole slaw.”
“Of course with a side of cole slaw.”
“Pop, I’m immortal.”
HERB GARDNER 89

“Sure; now go to sleep.”

Georgie put the telephone down and placed the List of Suspects
over his face. His head way back and his arms and legs out-
stretched, he fell into sleep as though from a great height. Georgie
entered Dr. Miller’s consultation room and was pleased to find
that the doc had replaced the couch with Georgie’s bed, and Geor-
gie lay down in it and pulled the covers up under his chin.
“What do you think, Doc-baby?” Georgie said. “How do you
figure it?”
Dr. Miller leaned forward in his chair, clasped his hands earnestly
on top of his desk, and, his understanding eyes fixed on Georgie,
spoke in a rich, lilting Jamaican accent.
“T tink,” said Dr. Miller, nodding judiciously, “I tink you got
devils in your head.”
“Huh?”
“Yes, mon, you got de debbils in de head. De bad debbils come in
de blood, and we got to get dem out. You go to lake, mon, get
de codfish and put de fish on your forehead and it take all de bad
debbils out of you blood. Oh, yes, de fish, mon, de fish, take out all
de bad debbil.”
“What do you mean, I
”

“Your hour is op now, mon.”

“But, Doctor és
“You hour is op now, mon,” he said, checking his watch. “Day-
light come, and me wan’ go home.”
Dr. Miller’s secretary, Miss Borden, came in from the outer office
as naked as she was meant to be, cleverly covering her right knee
with the doctor’s appointment book.
“Tally-mon,” Dr. Miller said, pointing to the appointment
book, “tally me banana; daylight come and me wan’ 4
Georgie woke up angry, the List of Suspects rattling in his
clenched fist. Cop-out son of a bitch, he never gives me the straight
score. I lay my whole scene on him, and he tells me zero . . . knows
my whole scene . . . the doc, the doc... .
Georgie spun around on his bed and sat up, brightly alert.
The doc. Harry Kellerman. The doc.
Digs my action with the chicks. Jealous. If he can’t score, why
should I? I tell him everybody I got out with; he takes notes, always
takes notes. And I did it to him; I made him crazy with all my
 90 Who Is Harry Kellerman?
action. He’s been auditing my course for too long, and it made him
a nutsy-head. Yeah, poor pale slob hears about it all day long and
never gets any; and, yeah, the way he checked himself out in the
mirror at Bloomingdale’s. . . .
As he dialed Dr. Miller’s number, Georgie felt a sudden warm
rush of tolerance for the doctor’s aberration. After all, Georgie
decided, I’m a little crazy myself.
“Hello, yes?”
“Dr. Miller, aré you the .. . is it you?”
“Yes, this is Dr. Miller.”
“No, no, is it you. Are you Harry Kellerman?”
“This is Dr. Arnold Miller. Who is this, please?”
“Doc-baby, Doc-baby, I .
“Oh, Mr. Fishman.”
“Yea.”
“And, of course, the Kellerman problem. And, quite inevitably,
you have decided that I am the insidious Mr. Kellerman. Fasci-
nating. Our old friend, the destruction pattern again: a need to
undermine the authority of those you respect to destroy the creden-
tialssotrthosé .
No, it wasn’t the doc, Georgie realized. A no-score dumdum idea
in the first place.
“. . . beating them to the punch, as it were, Mr. Fishman, re-
moving your affection and respect from them before they . . .”
The cat is so turned on, Georgie thought, I hate to split on him.
“Go, baby, swing . . .” Georgie said softly, hanging the telephone
up very delicately so that the doctor would not be interrupted.
Okay, great, beautiful. It’s not the doc, then where am I at?
Georgie thought, sitting down at his piano and setting up the List
of Suspects like a piece of sheet music. Georgie began to sing softly,
picking out a slow tune on his piano.

Oh, sixteen girls, and he called them all.

Is he old, is he young, is he short or tall?
Oh, who would do such a thing
To his feller man?
Who is he, who is he,
This Harry Kellerman? ...
HERB GARDNER 91

Georgie looked up at the wall above his piano. It was covered

with at least fifty framed photographs — the credentials of an es-
cape artist. Georgie had a license to operate every known moving
vehicle, and the photographs on the wall showed him leaving in all
of them. There was Georgie in his twenty-two-foot Chris-Craft,
weighing anchor. There was Georgie taking off in his Cessna,
revving up his Porsche, gassing his Honda, rolling away in his golf
cart —in all of them one hand raised, waving goodbye.

He wants me alone, and he wants me single,

Sixteen girls, and he gave’emallajingle .

Hell with the whole crew of chicks, Georgie decided. Except

Sally. Sally, yeah; her I love. Gimme Sally back and I'll bury all my
ignition keys. Georgie the leaver, I’m gettin’ outa that bag, I’m
tired. Check under the hood, baby, you been driving a thousand
miles without a motor.
His left hand shifted into a rock beat, and he wailed a song for
Sally.

Yeah, yeah, yeah,

I’m sayin’
Goodbye to goodbye.
I’m shoutin’
Farewell to farewell.
I'm singin’
So long, that’s 1t for never.
Hello, hello to forever .

Georgie spotted a photograph of himself at nineteen, on a bi-

cycle. That’s how he’d left Ruthie Tresh, on a bicycle.

Yeah, it’s goodbye

To travelin’ with sorrow.
And hello
To see ya tomorrow.
Yeah, yeah, I’m done with departure.
Yeah, yeah, ’cause you got my heart, you're
M’Sally, m’Sally, n’hello-baby. . . .
 92 Who Is Harry Kellerman?
Ruthie Tresh. Hey, Ruthie Tresh. Red hair and lime-green
sweaters. A candy store of a girl. The winter before the Army they
had made love or something very much like it in the Prospect Park
boathouse, and he wrote her three letters from Hamburg in 1946,
sprinkling “love” and “Forever” all over them like oregano. Yeah

nmregvedle,
I’m sayin’
Goodbye to goodbye.
I’m shoutin’
Farewell to farewell. ...

Raising his hand, he waved, in ragtime, to his photographs, and

fifty departing Georgies waved back.

Yeah, I been with the vets

And I been with the rookies
And I paid the toll
For my toll-house cookies
BUPOETE 3 ec

... heard that Ruthie was married to a neurologist in Forest

Hills. It was like a first name, her married name. Like Charlie.
Charleton. Yeah, Mrs. Charleton .. .

oa Veal;
I’m wailin’
Goodbye to never.
I’m shoutin’
Hello to forever.
IP’m ——

Georgie’s telephone rang.

Four-thirty in the morning, only one person it could be. “Sid?”
“Yeah. Jesus, your phone’s been busy.”
Ten years before, Sidney Gill had written the music for Georgie’s
first two hits, Midnight Lady and Jetlove. Since then they had
shared many of their songs, some of their women, and most of their
sleeplessness.
HERB GARDNER 93

“You're the one’s been busy, Sid. Called you maybe five times
tonight. Hey, y know who I been thinking about? Ruthie Tresh.”
“Who's that?”
“Chick. Had her when she was seventeen.”
What Georgie meant to say was that he had loved her when she
was seventeen; but Georgie and Sid were the two Great White
Hunters and it made them uncomfortable to speak to each other
with kindness for their prey.
“Who ya been on the phone with — Sally?” Sid said. “You score
there yet?”
“Yeah, sure. Speaking to a coupla people, the doc ”?

“You and that doc. Witchcraft City. The docs are taking over
the world. Blessed are the docs, for they shall inherit the meek. I
tell you true.”
“Well, I’m in bad shape, see— that guy who’s been cutting my
action, this Kellerman cat, he He
“Look, I call to give you the word on Sally. The lady is a heavy
loser. Bad news. The chick’s a grabber. I see it in her eye. She is
with the raiding party. She lies in wait for the walking wounded
and grabs off the strays.”
“T think this one, Sid, this one’s different.”
“They all been trained with the same army. My eye does not
fail me. The lady is a grabber, and I tell you true.”
“But you don’t know her, Sid. Really, she zi
‘Don’t know her? I been goin’ to school too long to forget how
to read. Hey, Georgie, your signal’s gettin’ weak. What’s happened
to ya this year?”
“Tonight I been thinkin’. Man, I’m thirty-eight. I got a son six-
teen. Half my album’s been played ——”
“Plenty time, we got plenty time, you and me, Georgie, we got
youth to use; we're only what, now? Thirty-five, we 22
“T said thirty-eight, Sid 2
“__ got years left, man, Sallys and Sallys to go before they put
the cuffs on you. Man, do not, I repeat, do not make the funeral
arrangements until you are dead. I seen this Sally operate. Man, it’s
Robespierre; it’s the Reign of Terror. She’s lookin’ to cop a
basket fulla heads.”
“I don’t know, Sid. If they’re mostly losers, how’re we gonna
know when the winner shows up, when u
 94 Who Is Harry Kellerman?
“T figure it like this. I am Baron von Richthofen; I am flying over
enemy territory. When I go down it will be an ace who gets me.
Meanwhile, sir, I shall not be strafed by bluebirds. I will not, re-
peat, will not go down in flames for a flamingo. Do you read me?”
“T don’t know, Sid, I “
“Hey, about planes, what happened to the flying, Saturday? You
were gonna give me a call.”
“There was a problem, Sid.”
“Something wrong with the Cessna?”
“No, actually not. We, Sally and me, she wanted to go to the
ZOO.”
“Yeah. Right. Okay, gotta split now. Quarter to five, and I got
some quality Swedish merchandise flyin’ in at five.”
“Stewardess?”
“Air freight. Can’t be beat for speed and reliability.”
“Well, I won’t keep you on the phone, then.”
“You bet you won’t.”
“Okay, so long.”
pRight, 2reoleyirrende
“Yeah?”
“Watch the skies, I repeat, watch the skies for low-flyin’ starlings.”
“Tl watch out, Sid.”
“T tell you true, sir.”
“Okay, Sid.”
Georgie put the telephone down and then quickly picked it up
again, dialing Information.
“Information. Miss Thompson.”
*Why yes b. Liceeee
Georgie couldn’t remember why he had dialed Information.
“Information. Miss Thompson,” the nasal voice repeated. “Can
I help you?”
“Yes. Do you have a listing for a Mrs. Ruth Charleton, or a Dr.
Charleton, in Queens? I don’t know his first name.”
Georgie, impatient, brushed mounds of nonexistent dust from
his pillowcase.
“Sir, I have an office and a residence listed for a Dr. Bernard L.
Charleton in Forest Hills. Would that be it?”
“Yeah, sweetheart, gimme the residence.”
HERB GARDNER 95

“Hello,” a child’s voice answered.

“Who is this, please?”’
“This is Danny Charleton. I waked up.”
“Beautiful. Is your mother’s name Ruthie? Ruth?”
“Yes. I just now waked up.”
“Great. May I speak to her, please?”
“Okay.”
When Ruthie came on the telephone, Georgie was surprised by
how distinctly he could hear her voice, by how good a connection
they were getting across the twenty years between them.
“Hello, hello?”
“Hello, Ruthie? Hey, Ruthie.”
“Now, just who is this? Who is calling at this hour?”
The voice was angry and not quite as intelligent as he had re-
membered it, but it was certainly Ruthie.
“Hey, Ruthie,” he whispered, “it’s me, Georgie.”
“Who is this, for God’s sake? I can’t hear you.”
I know it was me who cut out, Georgie thought, but I did care;
three letters, love and forever...
“Hello! Is anybody there, for God’s sake? It’s five o’clock in the
MOMMING ..50.
. . and she never said anything about the boathouse. She
should have said something, I was never sure... .
GiHlelio= +... whois this? .::.. speak louder ......”
Listen to her, Georgie thought as he lay back comfortably on his
bed; it’s not going to work. It is definitely not a good relationship.
“Hello; .. . Whots this?”
Listen to her. Demanding. Possessive. It is definitely not going
to work out.
SEACHOy cs
George got on his bicycle and, pedaling energetically, left
Ruthie Tresh for the second time. He had forgotten to turn off his
miniature TV earlier, and the overheated set made a loud and con-
tinuous rushing noise next to his ear, like distant applause.

“Hey, who is this?” At sixteen, his son’s voice had a remarkably

adult authority, and Georgie found himself a little threatened by
 96 Who Is Harry Kellerman?

it. There was also the fact that Paul was probably the only sixteen-
year-old kid in America who hated Georgie’s music.
“This is your father.”
“Which one?”
“George.”
“Oh, Georgie. See, Dave’s out of town. Could have been either of
you.”
He always calls me Georgie. What the hell is that? I’m not your
buddy, kid, I’m your father.
“What’re you, crazy, Georgie? It’s six o’clock in the morning.
Mom’s asleep.”
“T don’t want to speak to her. I called to speak to you.”
“Okay.”
“Uh ... how’s everything at school, Paul?”
“You call up at six in the morning to find out how school is?”
“Yeah. How’s schooler”
“Fine”
Well, what else is there to talk about? Whatever you do, don’t
ask him how he liked your new song.
“Paul, how did you like my new song?”
“Sure made Gran’ma unhappy.”
“What about you?”
“Frankly, it wasn’t as bad as the other ones. Not so loud, this
one. I like, y’know, Getz, Gerry Mulligan. You meet him ever:
Gerry Mulligan?”
“Nos”
“Figured maybe you knew him.”
“No.”
“Anyway, I got to get ready for school now.”
“How is everything there at school?”
“Fine. Like I told you.”
Greats
“Okay, Pop, I gotta go now.”
Pop. Georgie grabbed the word with both hands and swung on
it. If the word had been his exercise bar he could’ve done fifty pull-
ups on it.
“Paul, listen, take a minute for me to lay something on you, clue
you in on my head
HERB GARDNER 97

“Huh?” Georgie’s language was somehow too young for Paul.

“See, some grown-ups, like your father, like me, when things get
really strung out and they don’t know where it’s at . . .’ — No,
Georgie, say it so he can understand you—“‘. . . when they get
confused and upset, they sort of want to check in with some-
body that they . . . groove with, and who they hope grooves with
them. That’s why I called you, Paul.”
“Last time you called was two and a half months ago.”
“That’s correct, Paul. You’re correct about that.”
“Yeah. And you only call me on the phone. I mean, that’s how
you talk to me, on the telephone.”
“That's right. You’re absolutely right about that, Paul.”
Come on, man, Georgie said to himself, just tell Paul that you
love him; swing with it, tell him, roll with it, baby, go... . But
how do you figure it? What’s the percentage in loving people when
it’s never a sure bet they’re gonna love you back? You can get hung
up on that action, killed, you put your chips on one number, you
can come up a heavy loser. How do you figure it?
“Thing is,” Paul said, “if I went to sleep right now, I could get
in an hour of sleep before school.”
“Right.”
“Okay?”
“Right. I’m a little sleepy myself.”
“See ya, Georgie.”
“See ya, Paul.”
Georgie put his telephone down and went out into the small
piece of the July night that belonged to his terrace, hugging him-
self against the nonexistent cold like people who cup their hands
around match flames in closed and windless rooms. Automatically,
he checked out the Tuesday Bar and Charlie’s Tangerine, peering
down fourteen floors and over west three blocks to where the two
places stood opposite each other.
Charlie’s and the Tuesday, Georgie thought, two meat markets
with one Halloween party, where the pretty pretty people came and
shook to his music, to the strict beat of Georgie’s songs, everybody,
everything shaking loose, ponytail pendulums swung, and Daiquiri-
ice trembled in tall glasses, and birth-control pills rattled in plastic
containers.
 98 Who Is Harry Kellerman?
But, Georgie could see, the sun was about to come up and the
Tuesday and Charlie’s Tangerine, keeping strict Dracula hours,
would have put the lid on by now. No action; too late to fall by.
He’d taken Sally down there the week before, shuttling between
the two places all night, making the trip he’d made with all the
Nancys and Bonnies and Betsys and Pattys for all the years of
nights, when, quite abruptly, while he was dancing, there was
a moment when he could not remember which one of the two places
he was in, or which one of the eight, or which one of the twenty-
eight, or which one of his girls was dancing under the hair style
opposite him. They were dancing one of the many don’t-touch-
me-don’t-look-at-me dances which Georgie and the kids there did
with such style: partners keeping clear of each other like graceful
welterweights afraid to land the first punch; the boys shrugging to
the music with spectacular indifference, their heads back, reading
the ceiling; the girls in strict seclusion, their eyes closed, dancing
private dances.
So then it was not odd that several minutes went by before Sally
became aware that Georgie had stopped dancing and was standing
quite still in the middle of the floor.
The music that the stereo speakers machine-gunned into the
room was one of Georgie’s own songs, and now even that was un-
familiar to him. It was Moby Dick and the Wailers doing, “Baby,
Don’t Put Me Down,” an arrangement that sent voices and electric
guitars hurtling through echo chambers and ricocheting off of
each other. The lyrics announced the coming of sweet love, the
voices and instruments finally blending into the unmistakable
scream of an air-raid siren, warning the dancers of enemy planes
and death by flames.
Baby, don’t you picka me up
If you gonna put me down.
Don’t you come and hug me
If you gonna, gonna bug me.
Don’t you come an’ turn me on
If you gonna go an’ turn me off...
Georgie stood, paralyzed. Around him the dancers greeted his
wailing music with peaceful, secret faces while their bodies panicked
openly.
HERB GARDNER 99

“Georgie, you okay?” Sally said.

“Sally,” he said, pointing at her, naming her. And in a mo-
ment he found the name of the place he was in, and then the name
of the record that was playing, but he could not find a name for
the fear that struck him, that made him unable to move, his own
music banging behind his eyes.
Sally saw the terror in Georgie’s face and touched his hand, and it
occurred to Georgie that he loved her, so he took her face in both
of his hands and said, ‘Number eleven, that record is number
eleven now on the Rock Singles Chart and climbing like a son of a
bitch.”
Then he dropped her off at her place, went to Westchester County
Airport and took his single-engine Cessna up to five thousand feet.
It was nearly dawn, and he balanced his wings off on the clearly
visible horizon line. Then he cut the motor and glided into the
clean and silent air.
“T love you, Sally,” he told her, at five thousand feet.
“I love her,’ he said now, and he sprinted across his terrace,
leaped onto his bed, grabbed the telephone, and dialed her num-
ber.
“I love you, Sally,” he said into the telephone as he waited for
her to answer. He could hear his own tired voice and he could
see the unspectacular, almost sneaky Manhattan dawn through
his window; six o’clock and once again he had not slept all night.
“Hello,” Sally said.
“Hello,” Georgie said. “Look, I want to tell you ”

“Oh,” she said, recognizing the thick, sleepy voice immediately,

“you again.”
“T called to tell you ”

“I don’t want to hear anything from you,” she said, stiffly. “Why
don’t you leave me alone? Listen, I told Georgie all about you,
and he’s very angry and so am I, and never, never call me again.
I'll get the cops on you, Harry Kellerman.”
Next to Georgie on the bed, his tiny overheated television set,
nestled among the bedclothes, warmed the blankets and watched
him with its one blind white eye. Dr. Miller, at his desk on the
other side of Georgie’s bedroom, was a ski instructor in a red turtle-
neck sweater. He had a tall, blond face and smiled with many per-
fect snowy teeth.
 100 Who Is Harry Kellerman?

“Hi-ya, crazy-head,” Dr. Miller shouted, his voice echoing

through the splendid mountains around them.
“Hi-ya, Doc-baby.”
“Well, today we’re gonna try the two-mile run. Think you’re
ready, nutsy-person?”
“Yeah, Doc-baby.”
The doctor turned and started up the vast white slope,
and Georgie, slogging along on his heavy skis, followed him obe-
diently.
 WILLIAM H. GASS

In the Heart of the Heart of the Country

(FROM THE NEW AMERICAN REVIEW)

A Place
SO I HAVE SAILED the seas and come...
tor Bs ac
asmall...
town fastened to a field in Indiana. Twice there have been twelve
hundred people here to answer to the census. The town is out-
standingly neat and shady, and always puts its best side to the high-
way. On one lawn there’s even a wood or plastic iron deer.
You can reach us by crossing a creek. In the spring the lawns are
green, the forsythia is singing, and even the railroad that guts the
town has straight bright rails which hum when the train is coming,
and the train itself has a welcome horning sound.
Down the back streets the asphalt crumbles into gravel. There’s
Westbrook’s, with the geraniums, Horsefall’s, Mott’s. The sidewalk
shatters. Gravel dust rises like breath behind the wagons. And I
am in retirement from love.

Weather
IN THE MIDWEST, around the lower Lakes, the sky in the winter is
heavy and close, and it is a rare day, a day to remark on, when the
sky lifts and allows the heart up. I am keeping count, and as I write
this page, it is eleven days since I have seen the sun.
 102 In the Heart of the Heart of the Country

My House
THERE’s A ROW of headless maples behind my house, cut to free the
passage of electric wires. High stumps, ten feet tall, remain, and
I climb these like a boy to watch the country sail away from me.
They are ordinary fields, a little more uneven than they should
be, since in the spring they puddle. The topsoil’s thin, but only
moderately stony. Corn is grown one year, soybeans another. At
dusk starlings darken the single tree—a larch — which stands
in the middle. When the sky moves, fields move under it. I feel,
on my perch, that I’ve lost my years. It’s as though I were living at
last in my eyes, as I have always dreamed of doing, and I think
then I know why I’ve come here: to see, and so to go out against
new things—oh god how easily — like air in a breeze. It’s true
there are moments — foolish moments, ecstasy on a tree stump
— when I’m all but gone, scattered I like to think like seed, for I’m
the sort now in the fool’s position of having love left over which
I'd like to lose; what good is it now to me, candy ungiven after
Halloween?

A Person
‘THERE ARE VACANT LOTs on either side of Billy Holsclaw’s house.
As the weather improves, they fill with hollyhocks. From spring
through fall, Billy collects coal and wood and puts the lumps and
pieces in piles near his door, for keeping warm is his one work. I
see him most often on mild days sitting on his doorsill in the sun.
I noticed he’s squinting a little, which is perhaps the reason he
doesn’t cackle as I pass. His house is the size of a single garage,
and very old. It shed its paint with its youth, and its boards are a
warped and weathered gray. So is Billy. He wears a short lumpy
faded black coat when it’s cold, otherwise he always goes about in
the same loose, grease-spotted shirt and trousers. I suspect his
galluses were yellow once, when they were new.

Wires
THESE WIRES Offend me. Three trees were maimed on their ac-
count, and now these wires deface the sky. They cross like a fence
in front of me, enclosing the crows with the clouds. I can’t reach
in, but like a stick, I throw my feelings over. What is it that offends
WILLIAM H. GASS 103

me? I am on my stump, I’ve built a platform there and the wires

prevent my going out. The cut trees, the black wires, all the be-
yond birds therefore anger me. When I’ve wormed through a
fence to reach a meadow, do I ever feel the same about the field?

People
THEIR HAIR IN CURLERS and their heads wrapped in loud scarves,
young mothers, fattish in trousers, lounge about in the speedwash,
smoking cigarettes, eating candy, drinking pop, thumbing maga-
zines, and screaming at their children above the whirr and rumble
of the machines.
At the bank a young man freshly pressed is letting himself in
with a key. Along the street, delicately teetering, many grandfathers
move in a dream. During the murderous heat of summer, they
perch on window ledges, their feet dangling just inside the narrow
shelf of shade the store has made, staring steadily into the street.
Where their consciousness has gone I can’t say. It’s not in the eyes.
Perhaps it’s diffuse, all temperature and skin, like an infant’s,
though more mild. Near the corner there are several large over-
alled men employed in standing. A truck turns to be weighed at
the Feed and Grain. Images drift on the drugstore window. The
wind has blown the smell of cattle into town. Our eyes have been
driven in like the eyes of the old men. And there’s no one to have
mercy on us.

Vital Data
THERE ARE TWO restaurants here and a tearoom, two bars, one
bank, three barbers, one with a green shade with which he blinds
his window, two groceries, a dealer in Fords, one drug, one
hardware, and one appliance store, several that sell feed, grain,
and farm equipment, an antique shop, a poolroom, a laundromat,
three doctors, a dentist, a plumber, a vet, a funeral home in ele-
gant repair the color of a buttercup, numerous beauty parlors
which open and shut like night-blooming plants, a tiny dime and
department store of no width but several floors, a hutch, home-
made, where you can order, after lying down or squirming in, fur-
niture that’s been fashioned from bent lengths of stainless tubing,
glowing plastic, metallic thread, and clear shellac, an American
Legion Post, and a root beer stand, little agencies for this and that:
 104 In the Heart of the Heart of the Country

cosmetics, brushes, insurance, greeting cards, and garden produce

— anythi ng shoes
— sample — which do their business out of hats
and satchels, over coffee cups and dissolving sugar, a factory for
making paper sacks and pasteboard boxes that’s lodged in an old
brick building bearing the legend, OPERA HOUSE, still faintly golden,
on its roof, a library given by Carnegie, a post office, a school, a rail-
road station, fire station, lumber yard, telephone company, welding
shop, garage — and spotted through the town from one end to
the other in a line along the highway — gas stations to the number
five.

Business
ONE SIDE SECTION of street is blocked off with sawhorses. Hard,
thin, bitter men in blue jeans, cowboy boots and hats, untruck a
dinky carnival. The merchants are promoting themselves. There
will be free rides, raucous music, parades and coneys, pop, pop-
corn, candy, cones, awards and drawings, with all you can endure
of pinch, push, bawl, shove, shout, scream, shriek, and bellow. Chil-
dren pedal past on decorated bicycles, their wheels a blur of color,
streaming crinkled paper and excited dogs. A little later there’s a
pet show for a prize — dogs, cats, birds, sheep, ponies, goats — none
of which wins. The whirlabouts whirl about. The ferris wheel
climbs dizzily into the sky as far as a tall man on tiptoe might be
persuaded to reach, and the irritated operators measure with sour
eyes the height and weight of every child to see if they are safe for
the machines. An electrical megaphone repeatedly trumpets the
names of the generous sponsors. The following day they do not
allow the refuse to remain long in the street.

My House, This Place and Body

I HAVE MET with some mischance, wings withering, as Plato says
obscurely, and across the breadth of Ohio, like heaven on a table,
I’ve fallen as far as the poet, to the sixth sort of body, this house in
B, in Indiana, with its blue and gray bewitching windows, holy
magical insides. Great thick evergreens protect its entry. And I
live in.
Lost in the corn rows, I remember feeling just another stalk,
and thus this country takes me over in the way I occupy my-
self when I am well . . . completely —to the edge of both my
WILLIAM H. GAS Nn 105

house and body. No one notices, when they walk by, that I
am brimming in the doorways. My house, this place and body, I’ve
come in mourning to be born in. To anybody else it’s pretty silly:
love. Why should I feel a loss?) How am I bereft? She was never
mine; she was a fiction, always a golden tomgirl, barefoot, with an
adolescent’s slouch and a boy’s taste for sports and fishing, a figure
out of Twain, or worse, in Riley. Age cannot be kind.
There’s little hand in hand here . . . not in B. No one touches
except in rage. Occasionally girls will twine their arms about each
other and lurch along, school out, toward home and play. I
dreamed my lips would drift down your back like a skiff on a river.
I'd follow a vein with the point of my finger, hold your bare feet in
my naked hands.

The Same Person

Bitty Horsciaw lives alone — how alone it is impossible to fathom.
In the post office he talks greedily to me about the weather. His
head bobs on a wild flood of words, and I take this violence to be
a measure of his eagerness for speech. He badly needs a shave, coal
dust has layered his face, he spits when he speaks, and his fingers
pick at his tatters. He wobbles out in the wind when I leave him, a
paper sack mashed in the fold of his arm, the leaves blowing past
him, and our encounter drives me sadly home to poetry — where
there’s no answer. Billy closes his door and carries coal or wood to
his fire and closes his eyes, and there’s simply no way of knowing
how lonely and empty he is or whether he’s as vacant and barren
and loveless as the rest of us are — here in the heart of the coun-
try.

Weather
For WE'RE ALWAYS out of luck here. That’s just how it is — for
instance in the winter. The sides of the buildings, the roofs, the
limbs of the trees are gray. Streets, sidewalks, faces, feelings— they
are gray. Speech is gray, and the grass where it shows. Every flank
and front, each top is gray. Everything is gray: hair, eyes, window
glass, the hawkers’ bills and touters’ posters, lips, teeth, poles and
metal signs — they’re gray, quite gray. Cars are gray. Boots, shoes,
suits, hats, gloves are gray. Horses, sheep, and cows, cats killed in
the road, squirrels in the same way, sparrows, doves, and pigeons,
 106 In the Heart of the Heart of the Country
all are gray, everything is gray, and everyone is out of luck who
lives here.
A similar haze turns the summer sky milky, and the air muffles
your head and shoulders like a sweater you’ve got caught in. In the
summer light, too, the sky darkens a moment when you open
your eyes. The heat is pure distraction. Steeped in our fluids,
miserable in the folds of our bodies, we can scarcely think of any-
thing but our sticky parts. Hot cyclonic winds and storms of dust
crisscross the country. In many places, given an indifferent push,
the wind will still coast for miles, gathering resource and edge as it
goes, cunning and force. According to the season, paper, leaves,
field litter, seeds, snow fill up the fences. Sometimes I think the
land is flat because the winds have leveled it, they blow so con-
stantly. In any case, a gale can grow in a field of corn that’s as hot
as a draft from hell, and to receive it is one of the most dismaying
experiences of this life, though the smart of the same wind in
winter is more humiliating, and in that sense even worse. But in
the spring it rains as well, and the trees fill with ice.

Place
MANY SMALL Midwestern towns are nothing more than rural
slums, and this community could easily become one. Principally
during the first decade of the century, though there were many
earlier instances, well-to-do farmers moved to town and built fine
homes to contain them in their retirement. Others desired a more
social life, and so lived in, driving to their fields like storekeepers
to their businesses. These houses are now dying like the bereaved
who inhabit them; they are slowly losing their senses . . . deaf-
ness, blindness, forgetfulness, mumbling, an insecure gait, an un-
controllable trembling has overcome them. Some kind of Northern
Snopes’s will occupy them next: large-familied, Catholic, Demo-
cratic, scrambling, vigorous, poor; and since the parents will work
in larger, nearby towns, the children will be loosed upon them-
selves and upon the hapless neighbors much as the fabulous Khan
loosed his legendary horde. These Snopes’s will undertake make-
shift repairs with materials that other people have thrown away;
paint halfway round their house, then quit; almost certainly main-
tain an ugly loud cantankerous dog and underfeed a pair of cats to
keep the rodents down. They will collect piles of possibly useful
WILLIAM H. GASS 107

junk in the backyard, park their cars in the front, live largely
leaning over engines, give not a hoot for the land, the old com-
munity, the hallowed ways, the established clans. Weakening
widow-ladies have already begun to hire large rude youths from
families such as these to rake and mow and tidy the grounds they
will inherit.

People
IN THE CINDERS at the station boys sit smoking steadily in darkened
cars, their arms bent out the windows, white shirts glowing behind
the glass. Nine o’clock is the best time. They sit in a line facing
the highway —two or three or four of them —idling their en-
gines. As you walk by, a machine may growl at you or a pair of
headlights flare up briefly. In a moment one will pull out, spinning
cinders behind it, to stalk impatiently up and down the dark streets
or roar half a mile into the country before returning to its place in
line and pulling up.

My House, My Cat, My Company

I must organize myself. I must, as they say, pull myself together,
dump this cat from my lap, stir
— yes, resolve, move, do. But do
what? My will is like the rosy dustlike light in this room: soft, dif-
fuse, and gently comforting. It lets me do... anything...
nothing. My ears hear what they happen to; I eat what’s put be-
fore me; my eyes see what blunders into them; my thoughts are
not thoughts, they are dreams. I’m empty or I’m full . . . depend-
ing; and I cannot choose. I sink my claws in Tick’s fur and scratch
the bones of his back until his rear rises amorously. Mr. Tick, I
murmur, I must organize myself. I must pull myself together. Mr.
Tick rolls over on his belly, all ooze.
I spill Mr. Tick when I’ve rubbed his stomach. Shoo. He steps
away slowly, his long tail rhyming with his paws. How beau-
tifully he moves, I think; how beautifully, like you, he commands
his loving, how beautifully he accepts. So I rise and wander from
room to room, up and down, gazing through most of my forty-
one windows. How well this house receives its loving too. Let
out like Mr. Tick, my eyes sink in the shrubbery. I am not here;
I’ve passed the glass, passed second-story spaces, flown by branches,
brilliant berries, to the ground, grass high in seed and leafage
 108 In the Heart of the Heart of the Country

every season; and it is the same as when I passed above you in

my aged, ardent body; it’s, in short, a kind of love; and I am learn-
ing to restore myself, my house, my body, by paying court to gar-
dens, cats, and running water, and with neighbors keeping com-
pany.
Mrs. Desmond is my right-hand friend; she’s eighty-five. A thin
white mist of hair, fine and tangled, manifests the climate of her
mind. She is habitually suspicious, fretful, nervous. Burglars break
in at noon. Children trespass. Even now they are shaking the pear
tree, stealing rhubarb, denting lawn. Flies caught in the screens
and numbed by frost awake in the heat to buzz and scrape the
metal cloth and frighten her, though she is deaf to me, and con-
sequently cannot hear them. Boards creak, the wind whistles
across the chimney-mouth, drafts cruise like fish through the hol-
low rooms. It is herself she hears, her own flesh failing, for only
death will preserve her from those daily chores she climbs like
stairs, and all that anxious waiting. Is it now, she wonders. No?
Then: is it now?
We do not converse. She visits me to talk. My task to murmur.
She talks about her grandsons, her daughter who lives in Delphi,
her sister or her husband — both gone — obscure friends — dead
—obscurer aunts and uncles — lost — ancient neighbors, mem-
bers of her church or of her clubs — passed or passing on; and
in this way she brings the ends of her life together with a terrifying
rush: she is a girl, a wife, a mother, widow, all at once. All at once
— appalling— but I believe it; I wince in expectation of the clap.
Her talk’s a fence —a shade drawn, window fastened, door that’s
locked— for no one dies taking tea in a kitchen; and as her years
compress and begin to jumble, I really believe in the brevity of
life; I sweat in my wonder; death is the dog down the street, the
angry gander, bedroom spider, goblin who’s come to get her; and it
occurs to me that in my listening posture I’m the boy who suffered
the winds of my grandfather with an exactly similar politeness,
that I am, right now, all my ages, out in elbows, as angular as
badly stacked cards. Thus was I, when I loved you, every man I
could be, youth and child—far from enough
— and you, so
strangely ambiguous a being, met me, heart for spade, play after
play, the whole run of our suits.
Mr. Tick, you do me honor. You not only lie in my lap, but you
WILLIAM H. GASS 109

remain alive there, coiled like a fetus. Through your deep nap, I
feel you hum. You are, and are not, a machine. You are alive,
alive exactly, and it means nothing to you— much to me. You are
a cat — you cannot understand — you are a cat so easily. Your na-
ture is not something you must rise to. You, not I, live in: in house,
in skin, in shrubbery. Yes. I think I shall hat my head with a
steeple; turn church; devour people. Mr. Tick, though, has a tail
he can twitch, he need not fly his Fancy. Claws, not metrical
schema, poetry his paws; while smoothing ... smoothing...
smoothing roughly, his tongue laps its neatness. O Mr. Tick, I
know you; you are an electrical penis. Go on now, shoo. Mrs.
Desmond doesn’t like you. She thinks you will tangle yourself in
her legs and she will fall. You murder her birds, she knows, and
walk upon her roof with death in your jaws. I must gather myself
together for a bound. What age is it I’m at right now, I wonder.
The heart, don’t they always say, keeps the true time. Mrs. Des-
mond is knocking. Faintly, you'd think, but she pounds. She's
brought me a cucumber. I believe she believes I’m a woman. Come
in, Mrs. Desmond, thank you, be my company, it looks lovely, and
have tea. I’ll slice it, crisp, with cream, for luncheon, each slice as
thin as me.

More Vital Data

THE TOWN Is exactly fifty houses, trailers, stores, and miscellaneous
buildings long, but in places no streets deep. It takes on width as
you drive south, always adding to the east. Most of the dwellings
are fairly spacious farmhouses in the customary white, with wide
wraparound porches and tall narrow windows, though there are
many of the grander kind— fretted, scalloped, turreted, and deco-
rated with clapboards set at angles or on end, with stained-glass
windows at the stair landings and lots of wrought iron full of fancy
curls — and a few of these look like castles in their rarer brick. Old
stables serve as garages now, and the lots are large to contain them
and the vegetable and flower gardens which, ultimately, widows
plant and weed and then entirely disappear in. The shade is ample,
the grass is good, the sky a glorious fall violet; the apple trees are
heavy and red, the roads are calm and empty; corn has sifted from
the chains of tractored wagons to speckle the streets with gold and
 110 In the Heart of the Heart of the Country

with the russet fragments of the cob, and a man would be a fool
who wanted, blessed with this, to live anywhere else in the world.

Education
BusEs LIKE great orange animals move through the early light to
school. There the children will be taught to read and warned
against Communism. By Miss Janet Jakes. That’s not her name.
Her name is Helen something— Scott or James. A teacher twenty
years. She’s now worn fine and smooth, and has a face, Wilfred
says, like a mail-order ax. Her voice is hoarse, and she has a cough.
For she screams abuse. The children stare, their faces blank. This
is the thirteenth week. They are used to it. You will all, she shouts,
you will all draw pictures of me. No. She is a Mrs. — someone’s
missus. And in silence they set to work while Miss Jakes jabs hair-
pins in her hair. Wilfred says an ax, but she has those rimless tinted
glasses, graying hair, an almost dimpled chin. I must concentrate.
I must stop making up things. I must give myself to life; let it mold
me: that’s what they say in Wtsdom’s Monthly Digest every day.
Enough, enough — you’ve been at it long enough; and the chil-
dren rise formally a row at a time to present their work to her desk.
No, she wears rims; it’s her chin that’s dimpleless. So she grimly
shuffles their sheets, examines her reflection crayoned on them.
I would not dare . . . allow a child . . . to put a line around me.
Though now and then she smiles like a nick in the blade, in the
end these drawings depress her. I could not bear it— how can
she ask? — that anyone . . . draw me. Her anger’s lit. That’s why
she does it: flame. There go her eyes; the pink in her glasses
brightens, dims. She is a pumpkin, and her rage is breathing like
the candle in. No, she shouts, no— the cartoon trembling — no,
John Mauck, John Stewart Mauck, this will not do. The picture
flutters from her fingers. You’ve made me too muscular.
I work on my poetry. I remember my friends, associates, my
students, by their names. Their names are Maypop, Dormouse,
Upsydaisy. Their names are Gladiolus, Callow Bladder, Prince
and Princess Oleo, Hieronymus, Cardinal Mummum, Mr. Fitchew,
The Silken Howdah, Spot. Sometimes you’re Tom Sawyer, Huckle-
berry Finn; it is perpetually summer; your buttocks are my pillow;
we are adrift on a raft; your back is our river. Sometimes you are
Major Barbara, sometimes a goddess who kills men in battle, some-
WiLWDAM IH. GASS Tetee

times you are soft like a shower of water; you are bread in my
mouth.
I do not work on my poetry. I forget my friends, associates, my
students, and their names: Gramophone, Blowgun, Pickle, Ser-
enade ... Marge the Barge, Arena, Uberhaupt... Doctor
Dildoe, The Fog Machine. For I am now in B, in Indiana: out of
job and out of patience, out of love and time and money, out of
bread and out in a temper, Mrs. Desmond, out of tea.
of body,
So shut your fist up, bitch, you bag of death; go bang another door;
go die, my dearie. Die, life-deaf old lady. Spill your breath. Fall
over like a frozen board. Gray hair grows from the nose of your
mind. You are a skull already— memento mori — the foreskin re-
tracts from your teeth. Will your plastic gums last longer than your
bones, and color their grinning? And is your twot still hazel-hairy,
or are you bald asaditch? ... bitch...... Ditch eesears eee
bitch. I wanted to be famous, but you bring me age—my emptiness.
Was it that which I thought would balloon me above the rest? Love?
where are you? . . . love me. I want to rise so high, I said, that
when I shit I won’t miss anybody.

Business
For MOST PEOPLE, business is poor. Nearby cities have siphoned
off all but a neighborhood trade. Except for feed and grain and
farm supplies, you stand a chance to sell only what one runs out
to buy. Chevrolet has quit, and Frigidaire. A locker plant has left
its afterimage. The lumber yard has been, so far, six months about
its going. Gas stations change hands clumsily, a restaurant becomes
available, a grocery closes. One day they came and knocked the
cornices from the watch repair and pasted campaign posters on
the windows. Torn across, by now, by boys, they urge you still to
vote for half an orange-beblazoned man who as a whole one failed
two years ago to win at his election. Everywhere, in this manner,
the past speaks, and it mostly speaks of failure. ‘The empty stores,
the old signs and dusty fixtures, the debris in alleys, the flaking
paint and rusty gutters, the heavy locks and sagging boards: they
say the same disagreeable things. What do the sightless windows
see, I wonder, when the sun throws a passerby against them? Here
a stair unfolds toward the street — dark, rickety, and treacherous
—and I always feel, as I pass it, that if I just went carefully up and
 LZ In the Heart of the Heart of the Country

turned the corner at the landing, I would find myself out of the
world. But I’ve never had the courage.

That Same Person

THE WEEDS catch up with Billy. In pursuit of the hollyhocks,
they rise in coarse clumps all around the front of his house. Billy
has to stamp down a circle by his door like a dog or cat does turn-
ing round to nest up, they’re so thick. What particularly troubles
me is that winter will find the weeds still standing stiff and tin-
dery to take the sparks which Billy’s little mortarless chimney
spouts. It’s true that fires are fun here. The town whistle, which
otherwise only blows, for noon (and there’s no noon on Sunday),
signals the direction of the fire by the length and number of its
blasts, the volunteer firemen rush past in their cars and trucks,
houses empty their owners along the street every time like an
illustration in a children’s book. There are many bikes, too, and
barking dogs, and sometimes — hallelujah — the fire’s right here
in town —a vacant lot of weeds and stubble flaming up. But I’d
rather it weren’t Billy or Billy’s lot or house. Quite selfishly I
want him to remain the way he is— counting his sticks and logs,
sitting on his sill in the soft early sun — though I’m not sure what
his presence means to me . . . or to anyone. Nevertheless, I keep
wondering whether, given time, I might not someday find a figure
in our language which would serve him faithfully, and furnish his
poverty and loneliness richly out.

Weather
I WOULD RATHER it were the weather that was to blame for what I
am and what my friends and neighbors are — we who live here in
the heart of the country. Better the weather, the wind, the pale
dying snow ... the snow—why not the snow? There’s never
much really, not around the lower Lakes anyway, not enough to
boast about, not enough to be useful. My father tells how the
snow in the Dakotas would sweep to the roofs of the barns in the
old days, and he and his friends could sled on the crust that would
form because the snow was so fiercely driven. In Bemidji trees
have been known to explode. That would be something — if the
trees in Davenport or Francesville or Terre Haute were to go
WILEIAM Hi. GASS 113

blam some winter— blam! blam! blam! all the way down the gray,
cindery, snow-sick streets.
A cold fail rain is blackening the trees, or the air is like lilac and
full of parachuting seeds. Who cares to live in any season but his
own? Still I suspect the secret’s in this snow, the secret of our sick-
ness, if we could only diagnose it, for we are all dying like the elms
in Urbana. This snow — like our skin it covers the country. Later
dust will do it. Right now— snow. Mud presently. But it is snow
without any laughter in it, a pale gray pudding thinly spread on
stiff toast, and if that seems a strange description, it’s accurate all
the same. Of course soot blackens everything, but apart from that,
we are never sufficiently cold here. The flakes as they come, alive
and burning, we cannot retain, for if our temperatures fall, they
rise promptly again, just as, in the summer, they bob about in the
same feckless way. Suppose though ... suppose they were to
rise some August, climb and rise, and then hang in the hundreds
like a hawk through December, what a desert we could make of
ourselves— from Chicago to Cairo, from Gary to Columbus —
what beautiful Death Valleys.

Place
I WOULD RATHER it were the weather. It drives us in upon ourselves
—an unlucky fate. Of course there is enough to stir our wonder
anywhere; there’s enough to love, anywhere, if one is strong
enough, if one is diligent enough, if one is perceptive, patient,
kind enough — whatever it takes; and surely it’s better to live in
the country, to live on a prairie by a drawing of rivers, in Iowa or
Illinois or Indiana, say, than in any city, in any stinking fog of
human beings, in any blooming orchard of machines. It ought to
be. The cities are swollen and poisonous with people. It ought to
be better. Man has never been a fit environment for man — for
rats, maybe, rats do nicely, or for dogs or cats and the household
beetle.
A man in the city has no natural thing by which to measure him-
self. His parks are potted plants. Nothing can live and remain
free where he resides but the pigeon, starling, sparrow, spider,
cockroach, mouse, moth, fly, and weed, and he laments the ,ex-
istence of even these and makes his plans to poison them. The
zoo? There ts the zoo. Through its bars the city man stares at
 114 In the Heart of the Heart of the Country

the great cats and dully sucks his ice. Living, alas, among men and
their marvels, the city man supposes that his happiness depends on
establishing, somehow, a special kind of harmonious accord with
others. The novelists of the city, of slums and crowds, they call
it love —and break their pens.
Wordsworth feared the accumulation of men in cities. He fore-
saw their “degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation,” and
some of their hunger for love. Living in a city, among so many,
dwelling in the heat and tumult of incessant movement, a man’s
affairs are touch and go— that’s all. It’s not surprising that the
novelists of the slums, the cities, and the crowds should find that
sex is but a scratch to ease a tickle, that we’re most human when
we're sitting on the john, and that the justest image of our life is in
full passage through the plumbing.
Come into the country, then. The air nimbly and sweetly rec-
ommends itself unto our gentle senses. Here, growling tractors
tear the earth. Dust roils up behind them. Drivers sit jouncing
under bright umbrellas. They wear refrigerated hats and steer by
looking at the tracks they've cut behind them, their transistors
blaring. Close to the land, are they? good companions to the
soil? Tell me: do they live in harmony with the alternating sea-
sons?
It’s a lie of old poetry. The modern husbandman uses chemicals
from cylinders and sacks, spike-ball-and-claw machines, metal
sheds, and cost accounting. Nature in the old sense does not mat-
ter. It does not exist. Our farmer’s only mystical attachment is to
parity. And if he does not realize that cows and corn are simply
different kinds of chemical engine, he cannot expect to make a
go of it.
It isn’t necessary to suppose our cows have feelings; our neigh-
bor hasn’t as many as he used to have either; but think of it this
way a moment, you can correct for the human imputations later:
how would it feel to nurse those strange tentacled calves with their
rubber, glass, and metal lips, their stainless eyes?

People
Aunt Pet’s still able to drive her car —a high square Ford — even
though she walks with difficulty and a stout stick. She has a watery
gaze, a smooth plump face despite her age, and jet black hair in a
Wilts ETA Ets: GrAISIS 115

bun. She has the slowest smile of anyone I ever saw, but she hates
dogs, and not very long ago cracked the back of one she cornered
in her garden. To prove her vigor she will tell you this, her smile
breaking gently while she raises the knob of her stick to the level
of your eyes.

House, My Breath and Window

My wIinpow is a grave, and all that lies within it’s dead. No snow
is falling. There’s no haze. It is not still, not silent. Its images are
not an animal that waits, for movement is no demonstration. I
have seen the sea slack, life bubble through a body without a trace,
its spheres impervious as soda’s. Downwound, the whore at wag-
tag clicks and clacks. Leaves wiggle. Grass sways. A bird chirps,
pecks the ground. An auto wheel in penning circles keeps its rigid
spokes. These images are stones; they are memorials. Beneath
this sea lies sea: god rest it . . . rest the world beyond my window,
me in front of my reflection, above this page, my shade. Death is
not so still, so silent, since silence implies a falling quiet, stillness a
stopping, containing, holding in; for death is time in a clock, like
Mr. Tick, electric . . . like wind through a windup poet. And
my blear floats out to visible against the glass, befog its country
and bespill myself. The mist lifts slowly from the fields in the
morning. No one now would say: the Earth throws back its cov-
ers; it is rising from sleep. Why is the feeling foolish? ‘The image
is too Greek. I used to gaze at you so wantonly your body blushed.
Imagine: wonder: that my eyes could cause such flowering. Ah, my
friend, your face is pale, the weather cloudy; a street has been
felled through your chin, bare trees do nothing, houses take root
in their rectangles, a steeple stands up in your head. You speak
of loving; then give me a kiss. The pane is cold. On icy morn-
ings the fog rises to greet me (as you always did) ; the barns and
other buildings, rather than ghostly, seem all the more substantial
for looming, as if they grew in themselves while I watched (as you
always did). Oh, my approach, I suppose, was like breath in a rub-
ber monkey. Nevertheless, on the road along the Wabash in the
morning, though the trees are sometimes obscured by fog, their
reflection floats serenely on the river, reasoning the banks, the
sycamores in French rows. Magically, the world tips. I’m led to
think that only those who grow down live (which will scarcely win
 116 In the Heart of the Heart of the Country

me twenty-five from Wisdom’s Monthly Digest), but I find I write

that only those who live down grow; and what I write, I hold,
whatever I really know. My every word’s inverted, or reversed—
or I am. I held you, too, that way. You were so utterly provisional,
subject to my change. I could inflate your bosom with a kiss, dis-
perse your skin with gentleness, enter your vagina from within,
and make my love emerge like a fresh sex. The pane is cold.
Honesty is cold, my inside lover. ‘The sun looks, through the mist,
like a plum on the tree of heaven, or a bruise on the slope of your
belly. Which? The grass crawls with frost. We meet on this win-
dow, the world and I, inelegantly, swimmers of the glass; and
swung wrong way round to one another, the world seems in. The
world — how grand, how monumental, grave and deadly, that
word is: the world, my house and poetry. All poets have their in-
side lovers. Wee penis does not belong to me, or any of this fog-
gery. It is hts property which he’s thrust through what’s womanly
of me to set down this. These wooden houses in their squares,
gray streets and fallen sidewalks, standing trees, your name I’ve
written sentimentally across my breath into the whitening air,
pale birds: they exist in me now because of him. I gazed with
what intensity. ... A bush in the excitement of its roses would
not have bloomed so beautifully as you did then. It was a look
I'd like to give this page. For that is poetry: to bring within about,
to change.

Politics
SporTs, POLITICS, and religion are the three passions of the badly
educated. They are the Midwest’s open sores. Ugly to see, a source
of constant discontent, they sap the body’s strength. Appalling
quantities of money, time, and energy are wasted on them. The
rural mind is narrow, passionate, and reckless on these matters.
Greed, however shortsighted and direct, will not alone account
for it. I have known men, for instance, who for years have voted
squarely against their interests. Nor have I ever noticed that their
surly Christian views prevented them from urging forward the
smithereening, say, of Russia, China, Cuba, or Korea
— Vietnam.
And they tend to back their country like they back their local
team: they have a fanatical desire to win; yelling is their forte;
and if things go badly, they are inclined to sack the coach. All in
Will AM Ene GAUSS 117

all, then, Birch is a good name. It stands for the bigot’s stick, the
wild-child-tamer’s cane.

Final Vital Data

THE MODERN HOMEMAKERS’ Demonstration Club. The Prairie
Home Demonstration Club. The Night-outers’ Home Demonstra-
tion Club. The IOOF, FFF, VFW, WCTU, WSCS, 4-H, 40 and 8,
Psi Iota Chi, and PTA. The Boy and Girl Scouts. Rainbows, Ma-
sons, Indians and Rebekah Lodge. Also the Past Noble Grand
Club of the Rebekah Lodge. As well as the Moose and the Ladies
of the Moose. The Elks, the Eagles, the Jaynettes, and the East-
ern Star. The Women’s Literary Club, the Hobby Club, the Art
Club, the Sunshine Society, the Dorcas Society, the Pythian Sis-
ters, the Pilgrim Youth Fellowship, the American Legion, the Amer-
ican Legion Auxiliary, the American Legion Junior Auxiliary, the
Gardez Club, the What-can-you-do? Club, the Get Together Club,
the Coterie Club, the Worthwhile Club, the No Name Club, the
Forget-me-not Club, the Merry-go-round Club ......

Education
HAs A QUARTER disappeared from Paula Frosty’s pocketbook? Imag-
ine the landscape of that face: no crayon could engender it; soft wax
is wrong; thin wire in trifling snips might do the trick. Paula
Frosty and Christopher Roger accuse the pale and splotchy Chery]
Pipes. But Miss Jakes, I saw her. Miss Jakes is so extremely vexed
she snaps her pencil. What else is missing? I appoint you a detec-
tive, John: search her desk. Gum, candy, paper, pencils, marble,
round eraser — whose? A thief. I can’t watch her all the time, I’m
here to teach. Poor pale fosseted Cheryl, it’s determined, can’t
return the money because she took it home and spent it. Cindy,
Janice, John, and Pete — you four who sit around her — you will
be detectives this whole term to watch her. A thief. In all my time.
Miss Jakes turns, unfists, and turns again. I'll handle you, she cries.
To think. A thief. In all my years. Then she writes on the black-
board the name of Cheryl Pipes and beneath that the figure twenty-
five with a large sign for cents. Now Cheryl, she says, this won't
be taken off until you bring that money out of home, out of home
straight up to here, Miss Jakes says, tapping her desk.
Which is three days.
 118 In the Heart of the Heart of the Country

Another Person
I was RAKING leaves when Uncle Halley introduced himself to me.
came from the comet, and that his mother had
He said his name
borne him prematurely in her fright of it. I thought of Hobbes,
whom fear of the Spanish Armada had hurried into birth, and so
Uncle Halley to honor the philosopher, though Uncle
I believed
Halley is a liar, and neither the one hundred twenty-eight nor the
fifty-three he ought to be. That fall the leaves had burned them-
selves out on the trees, the leaf-lobes had curled, and now they
flocked noisily down the street and were broken in the wires of
my rake. Uncle Halley was himself (like Mrs. Desmond and his-
tory generally) both deaf and implacable, and he shooed me down
his basement stairs to a room set aside there for stacks of news-
papers reaching to the ceiling, boxes of leaflets and letters and
programs, racks of photo albums, scrapbooks, bundles of rolled-up
posters and maps, flags and pennants and slanting piles of dusty
magazines devoted mostly to motoring and the Christian ethic. I
saw a birdcage, a tray of butterflies, a bugle, a stiff straw boater,
and all kinds of tassels tied to a coat tree. He still possessed and
had on display the steering lever from his first car, a linen duster,
driving gloves and goggles, photographs along the wall of him-
self, his friends, and his various machines, a shell from the first
war, a record of “Ramona” nailed through its hole to a post, walk-
ing sticks and fanciful umbrellas, shoes of all sorts (his baby
shoes, their counters broken, were held in sorrow beneath my nose
—they had not been bronzed, but he might have them done
someday before he died, he said) , countless boxes of medals, pins,
beads, trinkets, toys, and keys (I scarcely saw — they flowed like
jewels from his palms) , pictures of downtow n when it was only a
path by the railroad station, a brightly colored globe of the world
with a dent in Poland, antique guns, belt buckles, buttons, sou-
venir plates and cups and saucers (I can’t remember all of it —I
won't), but I recall how shamefully, how rudely, how abruptly, I
fled, a good story in my mouth but death in my nostrils; and how
afterward I busily, righteously, burned my leaves as if I were purg-
ing the world of its years. I still wonder if this town — its life, and
mine now— isn’t really a record like the one of “Ramona” that I
 WILLIAM H. GASS 119

used to crank around on my grandmother’s mahogany Victrola

through lonely rainy days as a kid.

The First Person

BILLy’s LIKE the coal he’s found: spilled, mislaid, discarded. The
sky’s no comfort. His house and his body are dying together. His
windows are boarded. And now he’s reduced to his hands. I sus-
pect he has glaucoma. At any rate he can scarcely see, and weeds
his yard of rubble on his hands and knees. Perhaps he’s a surgeon
cleansing a wound or an ardent and tactile lover. I watch, I must
Say, apprehensively. Like mine-war detectors, his hands graze in
circles ahead of him. Your nipples were the color of your eyes.
Pebble. Snarl of paper. Length of twine. He leans down closely,
picks up something silvery, holds it near his nose. Foil? cap? coin?
He has within him — what? I wonder. Does he know more now
because he fingers everything and has to sniff to see? It would be
romantic cruelty to think so. He bends the down on your arms like
a breeze. You wrote me: something is strange when we don’t
understand. I write in return: I think when I loved you, I fell to
my death.
Billy, I could read to you from Beddoes; he’s your man perhaps;
he held with dying, freed his blood of its arteries; and he said that
there were many wretched love-ill fools like me lying alongside the
last bone of their former selves, as full of spirit and speech, none-
theless, as Mrs. Desmond, Uncle Halley and the ferris wheel, Aunt
Pet, Miss Jakes, Ramona or the megaphone; yet I reverse him
finally, Billy, on no evidence but braggadocio, and I declare that
though my inner organs were devoured long ago, the worm which
swallowed down my parts still throbs and glows like a crystal palace.
Yes, you were younger. I was Uncle Halley, the museum man
and infrequent meteor. Here is my first piece of ass. They weren’t
so flat in those days, had more round, more juice. And over
here’s the sperm I’ve spilled, nicely jarred and clearly labeled.
Look at this tape like lengths of intestine where I’ve stored my
spew, the endless worm of words I’ve written, a hundred million
emissions or more: oh I was quite a man right from the start; even
when unconscious in my cradle, from crotch to cranium, I was erec-
tile tissue; though mostly, after the manner approved by Plato, I
 120 In the Heart of the Heart of the Country

had intercourse by eye. Never mind, old Holsclaw, you are blind.
We pull down darkness when we go to bed; put out like Oedipus
the actually offending organ, and train our touch to lies. All cats
are gray, says Mr. Tick; so under cover of glaucoma you are sack
gray too, and cannot be distinguished from a stallion.
I must pull myself together, get a grip, just as they say, but I
feel spilled, bewildered, quite mislaid. I did not restore my house
to its youth, but to its age. Hunting, you hitch through the holly-
hocks. I’m inclined to say you aren’t half the cripple I am, for
there is nothing left of me but mouth. However, I resist the im-
pulse. It is another lie of poetry. My organs are all there, though
it’s there where I fail — at the roots of my experience. Poet of the
spiritual, Rilke, weren’t you? yet that’s what you said. Poetry, like
love, is—in and out—da physical caress. I can’t tolerate any
more of my sophistries about spirit, mind, and breath. Body equals
being, and if your weight goes down, you are the less.

Household Apples
I KNEW NOTHING about apples. Why should I? My country came
in my childhood, and I dreamed of sitting among the blooms like
the bees. I failed to spray the pear tree too. I doubled up under
them at first, admiring the sturdy low branches I should have
pruned, and later I acclaimed the blossoms. Shortly after the fruit
formed there were falls —not many — apples the size of goodish
stones which made me wobble on my ankles when I walked about
the yard. Sometimes a piece crushed by a heel would cling on the
shoe to track the house. I gathered a few and heaved them over
the wires. A slingshot would have been splendid. Hard, an unat-
tractive green, the worms had them. Before long I realized the
worms had them all. Even as the apples reddened, lit their tree,
they were being swallowed. The birds preferred the pears, which
were small — sugar pears I think they’re called — with thick skins
of graying green that ripen on toward violet. So the fruit fell, and
once I made some applesauce by quartering and pairing hundreds;
but mostly I did nothing, left them, until suddenly, overnight it
seemed, in that ugly late September heat we often have in Indiana,
my problem was upon me.
My childhood came in the country. I remember, now, the flies
on our snowy luncheon table. As we cleared away they would settle,
WILLIAM H. GASS ee}

fastidiously scrub themselves and stroll to the crumbs to feed

where I would kill them in crowds with a swatter. It was quite a
game to catch them taking off. I struck heavily since I didn’t mind
a few stains; they'd wash. The swatter was a square of screen
bound down in red cloth. It drove no air ahead of it to give them
warning. They might have thought they’d flown headlong into a
summered window. The faint pink dot where they had died did
not rub out as I’d supposed, and after years of use our luncheon
linen would faintly, pinkly, speckle.
The country became my childhood. Flies braided themselves
on the flypaper in my grandmother’s house. I can smell the bakery
and the grocery and the stables and the dairy in that small Dakota
town I knew as a kid; knew as I dreamed I’d know your body, as
I’ve known nothing, before or since; knew as the flies knew, in
the honest, unchaste sense: the burned house, hose-wet, which
drew a mist of insects like the blue smoke of its smolder, and gangs
of boys, moist-lipped, destructive as its burning. Flies have always
impressed me; they are so persistently alive. Now they were coat-
ing the ground beneath my trees. Some were ordinary flies; there
were the large blue-green ones; there were swarms of fruit flies too,
and the red-spotted scavenger beetle; there were a few wasps, sev-
eral sorts of bees and — checkers,
butterflies sulphurs, monarchs,
commas, question marks — and delicate dragonflies . . . but prin-
cipally houseflies and horseflies and bottleflies, flies and more flies
in clusters around the rotting fruit. They loved the pears. Inside,
they fed. If you picked up a pear, they flew, and the pear became
skin and stem. They were everywhere the fruit was: in the tree still
—apples like a hive for them — or where the fruit littered the
ground, squashing itself as you stepped . . . there was no help
for it. The flies droned, feasting on the sweet juice. No one
last
could go near the trees; I could not climb; so I determined at
to labor like Hercules. There were fruit baskets in the barn. Col-
lecting them and kneeling under the branches, I began to gather
remains. Deep in the strong rich smell of the fruit, I began to hum
myself. The fruit caved in at the touch. Glistening red apples,
devour-
my lifting disclosed, had families of beetles, flies, and bugs,
were streams of flies; there were
ing their rotten undersides. There
flies, seas and oceans. The hum
lakes and cataracts and rivers of
bees when they came to
was heavier, higher, than the hum of the
 iz In the Heart of the Heart of the Country

the blooms in the spring, though the bees were there, among the
flies, ignoring me — ignoring everyone. As my work went on and
juice covered my hands and arms, they would form a sleeve, black
and moving, like knotty wool. No caress could have been more
indifferently complete. Still I rose fearfully, ramming my head in
the branches, apples bumping against me before falling, bursting
with bugs. I’d snap my hand sharply but the flies would cling to
the sweet. I could toss-a whole cluster into a basket from several
feet. As the pear or apple lit, they would explosively rise, like
monads for a moment, windowless, certainly, with respect to one
another, sugar their harmony. I had to admit, though, despite my
distaste, that my arm had never been more alive, oftener or more
gently kissed. Those hundreds of feet were light. In washing
them off, I pretended the hose was a pump. What have I missed?
Childhood is a lie of poetry.

The Church
Fripay NicHT. Girls in dark skirts and white blouses sit in ranks
and scream in concert. They carry funnels loosely stuffed with
orange and black paper which they shake wildly, and small mega-
phones through which, as drilled, they direct and magnify their
shouting. Their leaders, barely pubescent girls, prance and shake
and whirl their skirts above their bloomers. ‘The young men, leap-
ing, extend their arms and race through puddles of amber light,
their bodies glistening. In a lull, though it rarely occurs, you can
hear the squeak of tennis shoes against the floor. Then the yelling
begins again, and then continues; fathers, mothers, neighbors join-
ing in to form a single pulsing ululation — a cry of the whole com-
munity — for in this gymnasium each body becomes the bodies
beside it, pressed as they are together, thigh to thigh, and the same
shudder runs through all of them, and runs toward the same re-
lease. Only the ball moves serenely through this dazzling din. Obe-
dient to law it scarcely speaks but caroms quietly and lives at peace.

Business
Ir 1s THE WEEK of Christmas and the stores, to accommodate the
rush they hope for, are remaining open in the evening. You can
see snow falling in the cones of the street lamps. The roads are
filling — undisturbed. Strings of red and green lights droop over
Witt AM E GASS 123
the principal highway, and the water tower wears a star. The win-
dows of the stores have been bedizened. Shamelessly they beckon.
But I am alone, leaning against a pole—no.. . there is no one
in sight. Theyre all at home, perhaps by their instruments, tun-
ing in on their evenings, and like Ramona, tirelessly playing and
replaying themselves. There’s a speaker perched in the tower, and
through the boughs of falling snow and over the vacant streets, it
drapes the twisted and metallic strains of a tune that can barely be
distinguished — yes, I believe it’s one of the jolly ones, it’s “Joy to
the World.” There’s no one to hear the music but myself, and
though I’m listening, I’m no longer certain. Perhaps the record’s
playing something else.
 MARY LADD GAVELL

The Rotifer

(FROM PSYCHIATRY)

Txuoucu I sir hunched studiously over my microscope, I am gazing

dreamily past it and out the open window, at the lazy afternoon
campus. But the lab instructor, a graduate student who stutters
a little and dreams of the day when he will be an assistant profes-
sor, comes hovering down the row of tables, and I return to my
microscope. I do not plan to become a biologist. ‘Two sciences are
Required, and I regard with detachment the sophomores’ frogs’
legs and sheep’s livers, each with a name tag attached, which float
in the barrel of formaldehyde in the corner. It gives off a techni-
cal, advanced, arcane smell, but it does not stir me. Next year I
shall be off to another lab and another science and shall putter
about with Bunsen burners or magnetic fields.
It is late in the fall, although it is still warm here in Texas, and
the faint sounds of football practice drift in through the open
window. We forty freshmen in this room have, since our arrival
at the state university from the sleepy cactusy towns and the raw
cities and the piny woods and the plains, been learning of the
protozoa, the one-celled creatures who simply divide when they
want to become two, and are not always sure whether they are
plants or animals. The lab instructor has hovered over us yearn-
ingly, wanting us to get a good view of the amoeba, to really appre-
‘
ciate the spyrogyra.
But today, as he gives each of us a glass slide with a drop of
pond water on it, he tells us that we are leaving the protozoa and
 126 The Rottfer

beginning the long evolutionary climb. Today we shall see the

rotifers, who belong to the metazoa. We too, at the other end of
the microscope, are metazoa; the rotifer, like us, has a brain, a nerv-
ous system, and a stomach.
I am fairly good, by this time, at adjusting my microscope. I
know that those long, waving fronds are reflections of my own
eyelashes, and I recognize algae when I see it, greenish leafy stuff
rather like the broccoli on a dormitory dinner plate. Soon I find
the rotifers
— furiously alive, almost transparent little animals,
churning powerfully along in their native ocean.
Watching, I am a witness to a crisis in the life of a rotifer. He is
entangled in a snarl of algae, and he can’t get loose. His transpar-
ent little body chugs this way and that, but the fence of algae
seems impenetrable. He _ turns, wriggles, oscillates, but he is
caught. Rest a moment, I whisper to him, lie still and catch your
breath and then give a good heave to the left. But he is in a wild
panic, beyond any reasonable course of action. It seems to me that
his movements are slowing down, as if he is becoming exhausted.
Maybe I can help him. Perhaps I can put my finger on the edge
of the glass slide and tip it ever so slightly, tilt it just enough so
that the water will wash him over the barrier. Cautiously, gently,
I touch the slide.
But the result is a violent revolution in the whole rotifer uni-
verse! My rotifer and his algae prison wash recklessly out of sight,
and whole other worlds of rotifers and algae and amoebae and mis-
cellaneous creatures of the deep reel by, spinning on the waves of
a cataclysm. My rotifer is gone, lost to me. Huge and clumsy,
more gargantuan than any Gulliver, I am separated from him
forever by my monstrous size, and there is no way I can get through
from my dimension to his.
The bell rings; lab is over. I take my slide out from under my
microscope; there on it is the merest drop of water, and I look at
it uncertainly. I start to wipe it off, to put the slide away, but I
hesitate and look at it again. The lab instructor, seeing me still
standing there, hurries over. ‘Did you get a good conception of
the ciliary movement?” he asks me anxiously.
“I guess so,” I answer, and I polish the slide until it is dry and
shiny and put it away.
MARY LADD GAVELL 127

Like that earnest young man, the lab instructor, I became, for
a little while a few years later, an intellectual sharecropper, as
we called young graduate students who had various ill-defined and
ill-paid functions around the university. During this period I was
for some reason handed the job of going through the papers of the
Benton family, which a descendant, looking for something suitable
to do with them, had turned over to the university. The Bentons
had been a moderately prominent family who had moved from the
East to Tennessee in the 1790’s, and then, thirty or so years later, to
the Southwest. They were notable for having been respectable,
prosperous, God-fearing and right-doing lawyers and landowners,
and they were also notable for having saved most of the papers
that came into their hands. All these qualities had culminated in
Josiah Benton, who had been State Treasurer in the 1840’s and
had saved every paper he got his hands on.
So for weeks and weeks, I sat in a corner of the archives library
and turned through fragile and yellowed papers, making out the
dim and faded handwriting of Benton love letters, lists of Benton
expenditures for curtain material and camisoles, reports and
complaints to various Bentons from their tenants, letters to trav-
eling Benton husbands from Benton wives, bills of sale for Benton
slaves, political gossip from Benton cronies and domestic gossip
from Benton relatives, diaries begun and never finished, and a
few state papers filched by Josiah, like many another bureaucrat
after him, from the official files.
It was impossible not to become interested in the Bentons. I sat
down with those boxes of ancient gossip and circumstance more
eagerly than I asked a friend, what’s new? Lydia May Benton
feuded with her sister-in-law Sally, and the mysterious trouble
about Jonathan Bentley, it turned out, was that he drank. Aunt
Millie Benton’s letters to her traveling husband began and ended
with protestations of devotion and obedience, but in between she
told him what to do and when to do it. But if Josiah’s wife Lizzie
had ever had an opinion, it went unrecorded; when she was men-
tioned at all, it was to say how dear, sweet, good, and ailing poor
Lizzie was. Josiah emerged like a rock; he was honest, he was rigid,
he was determined, and he carried through what he began. But it
was his son, little Robert Josiah Benton, who interested me most.
 128 The Rotifer

There was little said about Robert Josiah before 1832, when
at ten he was sent away to a school in Massachusetts. There had,
of course, been a few references to him earlier. When he was born,
Josiah, whose first two children had been girls, wrote proudly to
his brother, “My Lizzie was delivered of a fine eight-pound boy this
morning. I shall make of him, God willing, a Scholar and a Gen-
tleman.” Later on, in one of the few letters that Lizzie seemed to
have received, her sister, who had recently been to visit them, ex-
claimed over what a “Beautiful and Clever child your Robert
Josiah is.” And once, when Robert Josiah must have been about
eight, Josiah’s list of expenditures included, “To roan horse for
my Son.”
Robert Josiah was sent to Massachusetts to be made into a scholar
and a gentleman, as Josiah had probably written the headmaster
of the school. “According to your instructions,” the headmaster
replied, “your son will be given a thorough grounding in Mathe-
matics and Latin, with somewhat subordinate attention given to
French and to those Sports which befit a Gentleman. You will re-
ceive Quarterly Reports from me as to the progress of your Son,
and the Rules of our School require that each Scholar shall write
his Father fortnightly so that you shall be well inform’d con-
cerning his Welfare. I personally supervise the writing of these
letters, ascertaining that they contain no misleading statements,
as the inexperience and frivolity of Youth might give them a
tendency to do, so that you shall at all times have a True and Cor-
rect account.”
Robert Josiah went away to school at the end of the summer,
and in the fall and winter months the fortnightly letters appeared,
painfully neat, carefully spelled, stiff little letters, beginning, “My
Dear and Respected Father’ — Lizzie was not addressed, although
somewhere in the letter Robert Josiah would say, “Give my Dear
Love to my Mother.” The letters always ended ‘Your obedient
Son.” He would report that he was well and that he was studying
hard in order to gain the full benefits of the advantages that his
father was so generously providing for him, that he was treated
with the utmost consideration by the professors and by the head-
master, and that he hoped the headmaster’s reports of him would
be found to be satisfactory. Once he said that he found Latin very
difficult, but he hastened to add, “Do not believe, Dear Father, that
 129
MEA Ray eitAUDDe GAVen lL
me to study it
I question on this account your Wisdom in desiring
he apolog ized for the short-
or that I shall Neglect it.” Sometimes
allow’d only one Candle and it is
ness of a letter by saying, “I am
almost finished.”
At Christmas he went so far as to say, “I miss my Dear Mother
try to overcome
and you Very much, and my Sisters also, but I shall
my Studies .” Often
it and to Devote my Attention more fully to
about his horse, whose name was Jupiter, and
he would inquire
of Jupiter and
about Nero, his dog. “Does Timothy take good care
of Nero?” he would ask.
And so the letters continued — stiff, polite, adult little notes.
childish sound crept into
But sometimes a barely wistful, faintly
Robert Josiah
them: once in a while it became perfectly clear that
write, and instead
wanted to come home. In January he failed to
ill with a mild at-
the headmaster wrote that Robert Josiah was
that he would soon be fully
tack of the ‘‘Grippe,” but felt confident
his letters
recovered. And apparently he was, for two weeks later
once, “I wish I could see my Dear
resumed. But now he wrote
Mother.”
Benton, an older cousin
Then a letter appeared from John
Harvard College, and who
of Robert Josiah’s, who was attending
e from a short vacation,
had had an occasion, on returning to colleg
to stop by Robert Josiah’s school.
you will forgive the
“My Dear Uncle,” he wrote, “T trust that
ssing you regarding my
extreme liberty which I am taking in addre
t Josia h. Your Son looks very
recent visit with your Son Rober
bout with the Grippe, and I think
thin, as a result of his recent
no doubt that the Head-
perhaps he is studying too hard. I have
Fine and Conscientious
master of the School is an extremely is e
Scholar and that his School is an excellent one, but his regim
doubt profit greatly from
most Rigorous, and while some boys no
stage for Robert Josiah,
this, I think it may be too severe at this
and of course of still tender
who is perhaps of delicate constitution
ude of Robert Josiah is one
years. I beg to assure you that the attit
I trust that you will for-
of loving obedience to your wishes, and
Uncle, this intrusion of mine into your Family Af-
give, my Dear
lent Judgment in all mat-
fairs, since I am confident of your Excel
Benton.”
ters. Your respectful Nephew, John
Well, it was a good thing that some body had looked in on little
 130 The Roitfer

Robert Josiah to see how he really was, but the question was,
would anyone as determined as Josiah listen?
Apparently not. The weeks passed, and the stiff little letters
kept coming from Robert Josiah. But they were more openly
homesick now, and once or twice he wandered curiously from the
subject as he was writing. Probably John’s letter had merely
rubbed Josiah the wrong way; he was, after all, only a young up-
start of a nephew. Somebody else would have to try to make Josiah
understand that Robert Josiah needed to come home — and there
was no relying on Lizzie, poor, pale, ailing little thing, probably
worried sick but unable to have an opinion about anything. But
somebody had to do something! Josiah was not mean; he was just
rigid, opinionated, and ambitious; he could be made to understand.
Frantically I searched in my mind for the right tack to take with
Josiah, the best way to put it to him.
But then something happened — maybe a student going out of
the library banged a door -— and past and present whirled around
me in waves and washed me up at a library table, well into the sec-
ond half of the twentieth century, with yellow old papers stacked
around me. It had all happened in 1832; they were all dead and
gone. There was nothing I could do for little Robert Josiah; I
could hold in my hand the letters that he had written, and read
the words he had put down there, but I was far, far away, sepa-
rated from him by more than a century. There was nothing I could
tell his father; there was no way I could get through from my di-
mension to his.
Rather halfheartedly I looked for the rest of the letters. There
were just two or three more from little Robert Josiah, and then
they stopped. There was nothing more. There were accounts,
bills, business letters, and, later on, more personal letters to Josiah,
but there was nothing mentioning Robert Josiah. I read through
thirty or forty more years of Benton papers, but I never saw another
word about a son of Josiah Benton’s.

My cousin Leah and I grew up in different parts of the country

and never knew each other well. When she came to live in the city
where I now worked, we felt an obligation to be friendly, but the
friendliness was a trifle forced, weighted down by our families’ ex-
pectations that we would have a great deal to say to each other
MARY LADD GAVELL 131

and the inescapable fact that we did not. We rang each other up
from time to time to chat and exchange family news, and since she
was new to the city I introduced her to my friends. But she was
six years younger than I, and the people I knew seemed jaded to
her. They were not really jaded at all, but then almost anybody
seemed a little battered beside Leah.
Leah’s father, my uncle, was old when she was born. His first
wife had died, leaving four sons already grown, and eventually he
married again, a gentle girl who gave him one daughter and died
shortly afterward. People wondered how that stern, hard old man
was going to manage with a little girl, but he managed very well.
A tender fatherliness flowered in him which his sons had never
known. He and Leah were always together; they rode horseback
over his farms together, and supervised the haying together, and
went shopping for her clothes together, the old man looking as
out of place as possible, but calm in the conviction that here, as
everywhere else in the world, all you had to do was make it plain
what was wanted and be able to pay for it. My uncle was a rich
man —not a private-yacht kind of rich, but a Midwest-farming
kind of rich, a_ turn-out-the-lights-when-you’re-finished-with-them
and don’t-dip-into-your-principal kind of rich. When Leah got into
her teens and began to be beautiful, he sent her to the best girls’
school he could get her into, because he figured their reputation
might not mean much, but it was all he had to go on. But first he
asked them what they had to teach her that she could earn her liv-
ing by.
She became a commercial artist, and eventually she came to the
city and got a job. The best word I can think of to describe her
when I first encountered her, twenty-one, all grown-up and on her
own, is dazzling. She was radiant; she twinkled and glittered and
dazzled like a diamond, yet her strange, pure, golden-brown eyes
looked out at the world with the simplicity and delight of a child.
She saw the best in everyone. She met a notorious misogynist
and thought him so sweet and shy; and she was introduced to a
celebrated old lecher and reported that he was so good all through
that he reminded her a lot of her Daddy. She made me nervous.
But she was sharing an apartment with two former schoolmates,
and the three of them— all as lovely and charming and gay as if
they had been turned out by some heavenly production line, gig-
 132 The Rotifer

eling and putting up each other’s hair and wearing each other’s
clothes, living off peanut butter sandwiches and chewing over their
combined worldly wisdom like so many puppies with a shoe — pre-
sented themselves in an invincible girls’-dormitory armor to the
world. And I was, after all, young myself and in no mood to worry,
in love with the city, with my job in an international organization,
and, as I recall it, with the Third Executive Assistant of the British
Delegation.
Then she called me up one night to say that she was engaged
and was going to be married right away. He was a junior associate
in the well-known law firm of Judd, Parker, and Avery, and his cre-
dentials of age, height, education, and background seemed to be
impeccable. I felt that she emphasized his suitability a trifle for my
benefit; she put me in the older-relative category. Her father
was not too well; he had recently had an operation, and she was
planning to go home to see him, and so they had decided to be
married here the following Sunday and to go home together. On
Saturday night her roommates were throwing a little party for them
at the apartment, and would I come and meet Dick then? I said
I'd love to, and I wished her all the happiness in the world.
That was Monday night, and I had such a busy week that I
didn’t have much time to think about Leah. A series of interna-
tional meetings kept me working late every night. On Wednesday
I didn’t get away until almost midnight, and I was exhausted when
I finally caught a cab. I sank back and wiggled out of my high-
heeled shoes in the dark. The cab driver had a girl friend with
him in the front seat; I suppose it’s lonely work, cruising the night
streets. She leaned against his shoulder, and when he stopped at a
red light, he rested his head companionably against her; he said
something monosyllabic, and she laughed. I thought wisely, look-
ing at the backs of their heads, that they were too comfortable in
their closeness to be a young dating pair, but were old lovers, or
married. When we got to my address he turned on the light for a
moment to make change. I saw that he was good-looking and prob-
ably in his late twenties, and that she was about the same age,
pretty, with a mop of blond hair, and in blue jeans.

I must pause here to explain that I am a recognizer of people.

I am a sort of Paganini, or Escofher, of recognizing. People who say,
MARY LADD GAVELL 133

“I remember faces but I just can’t remember names,” are amateurs;

I remember thousands of faces for which I have never known a
name. The streets swarm with them: People who once did my hair
or sold me shoes, stood next to me in elevators, in ticket lines, or
at fires, gave me a new blouse in exchange for one that didn’t fit,
or four words at a cocktail party in exchange for four of mine. I
remember them all; but they cut me dead.
The first time I ever set forth on the streets of Paris, I was with a
friend, a woman who occupied a high position in the international
organization for which I worked, and who had, as it happened,
been mainly responsible for the firing from that organization, a
year or so before, of a Frenchman named Charpentier, the reason
being general quarrelsomeness, I think. No doubt his side of the
story was different; I never knew all the ins and outs of it. He re-
turned to the French civil service, from whence he had come, but
not before delivering some fairly painful parting shots.
My friend and I stepped from the boat train out into the spring
morning sunshine of Paris, bent on none but pleasant errands, and
at once I recognized M. Charpentier on the street. I was used
to domestic recognizing; at home I damped down the recognizing
smile on my face as automatically as I glanced at the traffic lights;
but I lost my head at such a stunning foreign success and cried out,
‘Monsieur Charpentier!” He stopped, we stopped, and the shock
turned both their faces to concrete. He gave a short, savage jerk
of a bow, and her teeth met like gears as she ground out a greeting
between them. It had been the dearest wish of both their hearts
never to see each other again. As the hostess, so to speak, in the
situation, I babbled something like, “How nice once more to see
you again, and how beautiful is your city!” speaking pidgin Eng-
lish, although his own was perfect. He looked at me with a mix-
ture of loathing and bewilderment. We had known each other
only slightly a year or more before, and he did not recognize me.
My friend and I proceeded on our way, but a shadow had settled
over the day. She was rather silent, and I smiled, whenever JI caught
her eye, Uriah Heepishly. Paris has never been the magic city to
me that it is to some.

On Saturday night I went to my cousin’s apartment and met her

fiancé. He was a good-looking young man in his late twenties, with
 134 The Rottfer

a conservative tie, a direct eye, and a firm handshake. He greeted

me with a special, cousinly warmth, and his manner toward Leah
was a charming mixture of serious protectiveness and teasing adora-
tion. And of course he didn’t recognize me; there was not the faint-
est cloud in his clear young gaze. My cousin was radiant; she flit-
ted among the guests like a sprite. “Tell me, Mary,” she whis-
pered when she alighted near me for a moment, “what do you
think of him? Isn’t he wonderful? Isn’t he?”
“He’s very handsome and very charming,” I said.
“Oh, I’m so glad you like him,” she cried, and she gave me a
hug. “You and Dad are the people I want to like him—1I don’t
care about anybody else!’’ And she was off.
Well, I suppose that more than one struggling young professional
man has driven a cab at nights to make a little extra. And surely
many a young man has an auld luve to be off wi’ before he be on
wi’ the new— and if the timetable’s a bit crowded, it’s not a hang-
ing offense. I’m as broad-minded as the next, and yet — and yet —
this was my little cousin Leah, my beautiful, shining little cousin,
with whom I had not a blessed thing in common, who thought
all the world loved her as well as her Daddy did. I looked at the
young man again, and I imagined that his neatly cut face was
clearly sinister and that his every word and gesture was plainly
false. Was he really a lawyer with Judd, Parker, and Avery? It
would be possible to find out; I could, in fact, simply call them up
and ask, on some pretext or other. But it was Saturday night, and
the wedding was Sunday, and on Monday I wouldn’t want to know.
Or I could, then and there, look him right in the sincere blue eye
and tell him that I had seen him driving a cab last Wednesday
night with a blond young woman under circumstances suggestive
of considerable intimacy, and what, as a promising young lawyer
on the eve of marriage to my cousin, did he have to say about it?
But how in the name of heaven could I say that? It was melodra-
matic. It was a line to be delivered by an outraged father, back to
the fireplace, or perhaps by a worldly, erect old aunt in her parlor,
shooting a severe glance past her teacup. I simply couldn’t manage
it; I was only a cousin, about his own age and considerably less
self-assured than he looked, spectacles slipping woefully down my
nose, licensed as neither duenna nor private eye, nervous of mak-
ing a fool of myself and showing it, in the crush of a large party
MARY LADD GAVELL 135

in a small apartment, where it took a shout to be heard at all,

and elbows jostled into conversations from all sides. And, after all,
what if I were mistaken? I may be a Paganini, I may be an Escof-
fier, but the possibility had to be granted, and it would not make
a very auspicious beginning for us ail. And anyway, it was too late.
The chapel was reserved, the wedding dress hung on its satin
hanger in the closet, and the organist was instructed to play a
Love You Truly.”
When I left that night, I suddenly at the door, without intend-
ing to at all, threw my arms around Leah and held her tight. There
she was, my little cousin, my equal, my contemporary, within the
circle of my arms; but I was separated from her forever by all the
complexities of what I did not know and could not do. Our lives
carried us on in our own dimensions, like people passing on differ-
ent escalators, headlong to meet whatever harm or good was to
come our way. And so I left her awkwardly, and I smiled jerkily
at the bridegroom, who gave me a cousinly peck on the cheek, and
we all said something about seeing each other the next day.
I had dinner with them a couple of months later, after they had
returned to the city. They seemed very happy, and the stars shone
in Leah’s eyes as brightly as ever. I couldn’t say I liked him; but
there was, as I looked him over, this time more quietly and lei-
surely, something reassuring about his very ordinariness. He sim-
ply didn’t have the stuff in him to be a Bluebeard or a Landru.
He was a bright enough, nice enough young man, who, I surmised,
thought his ways to be a little more winning, and other people a
little more simple, than they were, and whose eye was firmly fixed
on the main chance. But that was the worst I could think of him,
and I was glad I hadn’t tried to confront him with my silly cab-
riding story; it wouldn’t have done anyone any good, and perhaps
it was all a mistake, anyway. They left the city shortly afterward;
Leah called to tell me that an opportunity had opened up for Dick
out in the Midwest, and he was leaving Judd, Parker, and Avery.
She was glad because she would be nearer her father.
They were divorced about a year later, very shortly after her
father died, and my cousin is back in the city, with a job doing
fashion-ad illustrations. I assumed she was working just to keep
herself busy, but a newsy old aunt of mine who was through town
recently tells me that’s not so. Leah will be a rich woman, one
 136 The Rotifer

day, but at present she has to make her living, for her father, just
before he died, changed his will so as to tie up the money very se-
curely for a good while to come. I don’t know why the divorce,
of course — mental cruelty, or something, I suppose; it’s nothing I
can ask Leah about unless she wants to talk about it. Dick imme-
diately got married again, to a cheap, fuzzy-headed little blonde, as
my aunt puts it. Leah’s still a handsome woman, but the dazzle is
gone, and she looks tired around the eyes. But so do I; so, in time,
does everybody.

ii
 DONALD GROPMAN

The Heart of This or That Man

(FROM THE LITERARY REVIEW)

Mr. SHapiro fumbled with the window pole. Nine C would be

here in a few minutes for its weekly session and he was not pre-
pared. Open the window, remove his jacket, set out the jars of
paint and the brushes he argued for each week.
“Now, Allan,’ Miss Katz would say, “I don’t know if this request
is covered by any rule. After all, I’m the art teacher and you teach
English.”
“Well, Miss Katz,” he would say, “if you don’t tell anyone, and
I don’t tell anyone, it will be our little secret. You know,” and
here he would smile, a little less broadly each week, “it’s like giving
an anonymous donation to the CJA or Red Feather. You and I
help these kids, but we don’t brag about it. Inside we know we
are doing something good.”
‘Well, all right, Allan, what somebody doesn’t know won’t hurt
him. Now remember to have them wash the brushes and wipe
down the jars. Your boys are awfully messy. And by the way, do
you really need so much paper?”
He still fumbled to fit the metal hook into the slot at the top of
the window. He had read somewhere that an open window pro-
vides fresh air and inspiration. Through the high many-paned
window he could see the street below him. The pale lemon light of
a two o’clock winter afternoon drifted down from a silent and
spent sky, but did not seem to fall on the brown heaps of snow and
slush.
A policeman walked by. and Mr. Shapiro noticed that he could
 138 The Heart of This or That Man

not see the small balloons of breath puff out over the policeman’s
shoulder. Was it warmer, what was it, March? Or April already?
Snow on the streets in April? No matter. He liked to watch the
breath balloons and fill them in. For policemen he inserted things
like: I am a policeman, sometimes I’m your friend; I like to find
robbers ’cause I’m partners with them. The policeman crossed the
street. Mr. Shapiro looked over and saw Jaime sitting in a doorway.
He was looking up at the empty sky and started up when the police-
man burst into his sight. The policeman leaned over and Jaime
waved his arms, shook his head, and pointed at Mr. Shapiro. No,
Mr. Shapiro thought, he is pointing at the whole school. The po-
liceman now shook his head and crossed back to the school side of
the street with Jaime. The policeman disappeared at the side of
the window and Jaime disappeared beneath it. Did the policeman
invoke me, Mr. Shapiro thought, to make Jaime come to class and
stop being truant?
The bell rang to start the last class as Mr. Shapiro was folding
his suit jacket over the back of his chair. He had read somewhere
that a teacher in shirtsleeves provokes less resistance in these stu-
dents. The students started to drift into the room, singly or in twos.
Mr. Shapiro had a moment of panic. What am I doing here? I
should be home reading, getting my Ph.D., getting laid, getting
money. What good can I do, help these poor underprivileged bas-
tards become privileged so they can assimilate, have appliances and
not live on welfare, and use toilet paper to wipe their asses instead
of El Diario de Nueva York, so that in the final end they’ll fill me
with loathing like all the rest of the smug, consuming bastards.
Shapiro’s law of human nature, not too romantic I hope, says, a hu-
man being evinces more interesting manifestations while being
consumed than while consuming. A contemporary aesthetic: What
is the most beautiful thing in the world, the ultimate perfection?
A young girl dying of consumption? No. A whole ethnic group be-
ing consumed.
Am I merely stupid, or expiating guilt? Anyway, why do these
kids call me Mr. Shapiro? Everyone else calls me Allan, in the army
they called me kike, my wife calls me schmouk, my professors call
me dummy, although I never heard them.
Hey Al baby, what’s shakin’? Man, this is a wise scene and you
DONALD GROPMAN 139

a real wig. Catch some pot Al, it’s just a fifty pinney joint, but like
it’s all I carry. You not like those other teachers, they hard bastards,
but you okay man, you got it everywhere, and the boy would use
his index finger as a wand to touch his own temple, his chest, and
his sex. The monologue elated Mr. Shapiro even though he could
not recognize the student in the daydream.

On Friday afternoon the class with Nine C always went well.

Four times a week Mr. Shapiro tried to teach them English. They
wrote compositions and read Silas Marner. They had spelling
quizzes and tried to parse sentences on the board. Whenever his
wife, or anyone else not connected with the school, asked him about
the class, Mr. Shapiro had one stock answer, “They just don’t give
a shit.” But one thing did seem to interest them and that was the
Friday session.
Mr. Shapiro had decided it would be a good idea to read them
poems and let them paint what the poems meant to them. This
would serve several functions: they will hear some poetry, they will
express themselves in the paintings and, maybe, Mr. Shapiro hoped,
I can get through to them. In September he had found a box of
gold stars in his desk, the only trace left of the teacher before him.
Each week he pasted a star on a painting, trying to give the star
where he felt it would do the most good.
He tried to select poetry from the high school reader that would
appeal to them. This afternoon he was going to read some Robert
Frost. He felt it would make sense to them, offer them images
they could instinctively grasp.
While he sat on his desk thinking, the students took paper and
jars of paint. Two of them went into the hall to fill the water
pitchers, for they had finally accepted the fact that the paints worked
better if they were thinned. Most of the class was busy mixing paint
when Jaime walked in. He didn’t look at Mr. Shapiro. He went
to his seat and sat down.
Mr. Shapiro leafed through the reader, but he watched Jaime.
The boy was probably older than he looked, perhaps fifteen or six-
teen, but he was no bigger than a twelve-year-old. He always left
the two top buttons of his shirt open and he wore no undershirt,
 140 The Heart of This or That Man

so Mr. Shapiro could see the middle of his pale honey-colored chest,
the skin pulled taut across the knobby clavicles.
Jaime didn’t move. He sat staring at his desk, his thin fingers
buried themselves in his matted black hair.
Mr. Shapiro walked up the aisle. “Don’t you have any paints,
Jaime?”
Jaime looked up at him. Mr. Shapiro saw a bleached face. The
black eyes seemed gray, the hirsuteness on the upper lip seemed
white. Mr. Shapiro’s legs felt suddenly weak, he felt a large parch-
ing knot in his throat.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, his voice much softer than he had
intended.
“Nothing, Mr. Shapeiro. There’s nothing is wrong.”
“Come with me, I’ll help you get some paints and a piece of
paper.” He felt foolish mouthing these words, silly words about
bottles of paint and empty paper, but he could think of nothing
else.
Jaime was seated again, his paints before him on his desk. Mr.
Shapiro waited until he was ready, smiled at him and began to
read. As he read the first words of ‘““Mending Wall” they too
sounded silly to his ears. He felt embarrassed and knew that his
face was turning red. The volume of his voice dropped from the
pitch it started at, he mouthed the words as quickly as he could,
droning them out like some primitive and unyielding chant. He
looked up from the book while mouthing familiar phrases and saw
the class looking at him strangely.
“Am I reading too quickly?” he asked, trying to control his flus-
ter, restraining himself from hurling the high school reader
through one of the many-paned windows and leaving the school
and the students forever. “Am I reading too quickly for you to
follow me?” He despised himself for the touch of condescension
in his voice, but he would have augmented it if a student hadn’t
answered.
“Yes, Mr. Shapeiro, much too fast.” It was Jaime. He was still
sitting with his elbows on his desk and his fingers buried in his
matted black hair.
“Sounds like the IRT,” another student said, and there was gen-
eral laughter, even from Mr. Shapiro.
“I guess you're right, I was going a little fast. I’ll begin again.”
DONALD GROPMAN 141

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,

That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spiils the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

Mr. Shapiro read the whole poem, slowly and with emotion.
Now that the poem was fresh in his mind he recited most of it from
memory. Before him at the rows of desks he could see the pale
honey-colored faces, some with their dark eyes on his face, others
staring at the book in his hands. Jaime had not changed his posi-
tion. Mr. Shapiro could still see where the boy’s fingers started to
disappear into his black hair. He repeated the last line twice,

He says again, “Good Fences make good neighbors.”

The class stirred itself, Mr. Shapiro had an ephemeral sense of

accomplishment. Maybe there was a contact, he thought, maybe I
had their attention, that is the start of a dialogue. “Any ques-
tions?” he asked.
One boy asked why the wall was there anyway if it didn’t do
any good, and Mr. Shapiro started to answer. He started to explain
the significance of New England stone walls, how they originated
when the farmers had to pick the stones out of the soil in order to
plant a crop, and how they have become a tradition in that part
of the country. He started to explain further the irony of the dia-
logue between the two farmers, and felt he was losing the class
again, so he cut it short, “Any other questions?”
“Yes, Mr. Shapeiro.” It was Jaime again. “Can you read that
part again where they carry rocks like wildmen?”’
Mr. Shapiro picked up the book:

I see him there

Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness, as it seems to me,
Not of the woods only and the shade of trees.

“What did you want to know about them, Jaime?”

“Nothing, Mr. Shapeiro, I just wanted to hear you read them
again.”
 142 The Heart of This or That Man

“All right. All right, class, we’ll begin painting now. It wasn’t
a long poem and it didn’t take up much time. Maybe there will be
time enough for two paintings.”
It was Mr. Shapiro’s practice not to bother the students while
they were painting, he felt his looking over their shoulders might
inhibit or intimidate them. He took his jacket and went to the
teacher’s room for a cigarette. It was not the standard procedure,
leaving a class alone, especially Nine C, but he had done it before
on Fridays and there were never any complaints from the adjoin-
ing rooms.
The lounge for male teachers was next to that for female teachers.
At the door he saw Miss Katz. He didn’t want to talk to her. He
didn’t even want her to see him.
“Allan, you naughty, have you left your class unattended? And
with poster paints yet! I hope you don’t have any trouble,’ Miss
Katz said, walking up to him. She had an empty cup in her hand.
Mr. Shapiro knew that if it was wet she was leaving the lounge and
ih
if it was dry she was just arriving. But Miss Katz held the cup up-
side down and he couldn’t tell. At first he didn’t hear her words.
He was convinced she was holding the cup that way just to keep
him from knowing if it was wet or dry. “I hope you’ve never left
them before, this could raise a problem for you.”
“No,” Mr. Shapiro said, “I haven’t. I had to go to the bath-
room.” He had wanted to say I had to take a wicked leak, or I sud-
denly, for no reason at all, felt like puking, but he only said, and
repeated, “I had to go to the bathroom.” He hated himself again,
for not saying what he wanted to say, for putting the bathroom ex-
cuse in some vague past tense, as if everyone didn’t have to empty
out at least once a day. He thought of the kids in the room, their
honey-colored faces screwed up over their paintings, dreaming in
their heads of orchards and fields, and he blurted out, “Do you
know, Miss Katz, they are really more ginger-colored than honey-
colored,” and he leaped into the male lounge.

When he returned to the classroom it was just as he’d imagined.

He saw rows of heads, almost every one of the heads covered with
very black hair, bent over the desks. He felt pleased, he forgot all
about Miss Katz and the probability that she was at that moment
DONALD GROPMAN 143

telling some other faculty member what he had said to her. When
Mr. Shapiro thought about this in the lounge he tried to re-create
Miss Katz’s language. “You know, Louise, we were talking about
his leaving his class unattended, and he was looking strange to be-
gin with, staring at my teacup, and suddenly he shouted at me
something about ginger and honey. Then he flew into the men’s
lounge and slammed the door. Don’t you think he’s disturbed?”
He had ground his cigarette out on the floor of the lounge, and
Miss Katz with it.
He stood at the window looking out. The sun was still shining,
but it really wasn’t shining, he thought, that is too active a descrip-
tion. The sunlight is drifting down, it is settling like a cloud of
pale dust, it is falling because of gravity. He glanced at the students
and saw Jaime. His head was bent over his desk, but both his hands
were buried in his hair. Mr. Shapiro walked over to him. “What's
wrong, Jaime, don’t you feel like painting today?”
“Yes, Mr. Shapeiro, I’m all done.”
Mr. Shapiro looked at the painting on Jaime’s desk. There were
two huge figures, manlike but inanimate, facing each other. Both
figures had their arms raised high above their heads and in their
hands held stones. There were bright carmine streaks on their
heads, faces and shoulders. Between them was a black wall that
began in the absolute foreground of the painting and ran right
through the depth and off the paper. Mr. Shapiro looked more
closely and saw a third figure, a smaller one, crouched in a blob of
gray on the wall. He felt the same weakness in his legs and the
knot in his throat that he had when he looked into Jaime’s face
at the start of the class.
“What does it mean?” His voice was gruff, almost angry. ‘wo
or three of the other students looked up at him, then turned back to
their paintings.
“Nothing.”
“It can’t mean nothing. Everything means something. It has
to mean something.” His voice was more insistent, hatred for him-
self ran through his body like a chill. “What does it mean?”
“Nothing,” Jaime said, looking up at him with the gray eyes and
white hirsuteness on his upper lip. “It don’t mean nothing.”
Mr. Shapiro straightened up, he looked at the painting again
 144 The Heart of This or That Man

from his new and more distant perspective. The two large figures
were both all green. He hadn’t noticed that before. And the sky
was watery yellow. The ground, where there was grass in the poem,
was grape-purple. His eyes were drawn to the small blotted figure
crouched on the wall. He leaned over again to have a closer look
at it. “Who is that little figure supposed to be, the one on the top
of the wall?”
Jaime looked up at him for a moment, then slid his fingers back
into his hair and started to look at his painting again.
Mr. Shapiro looked at the clock over the door. There were only
ten minutes left to the class. Ten minutes and the day was over,
and the week. “All right, class, let’s start cleaning up. While you
clean the brushes and wipe off the jars I'll come around and pick
the star-winner for today.”
Most of the paintings tried to show the two farmers standing by
the wall, and most of them had green grass and blue skies. But
Mr. Shapiro could not think about any of them. He looked at them
all, made a comment here, gave a word of encouragement there,
but his imagination wasn’t in it.
He walked up the aisle Jaime sat in. He paused a little longer at
each painting as he got closer to Jaime. When he got to him he
walked right by.
The brushes were all washed and standing in a jar, the bottles
of paint were all cleaned on the outside, the empty water pitchers
stood beside them. Mr. Shapiro looked at the clock. The bell would
ring in two minutes. He had to announce a winner. “All right,
class, the best painting today was done by Jaime Morales. Come up,
Jaime, and I’ll give you your gold star.” The usual practice was to
exhibit the best painting at the front of the room, and explain why
it was the best. But today Mr. Shapiro didn’t do this. He only an-
nounced the winner, and when Jaime didn’t come forward he re-
peated, “Jaime, come up and I’]l give you your star.”
He looked at Jaime. The boy was still sitting as he had sat for
all the time Mr. Shapiro saw him in class. He saw the top of his
head, the thin fingers buried in the thick black hair. But now the
fingers were clutching at Jaime’s scalp. He was crying.
A few of the students around him looked at him, and then looked
at Mr. Shapiro. Mr. Shapiro looked back at them vacantly. Jaime
started to cry louder. Mr. Shapiro saw the bony clavicles in Jaime’s
DONALD GROPMAN 145

pale honey-colored chest jerk in and out, he saw the boy’s forehead
and cheek muscles clench up to hold back the tears.
“What the hell is wrong?” he shouted, running up the aisle.
“What’s wrong now, what did I do?” The whole class was staring
at them now, at Jaime and Mr. Shapiro. “What's wrong? Answer
me!” he shouted. He didn’t care that he was shouting, or that the
whole class was watching him. Jaime looked up at him. Now his
gray eyes were flecked with red. He stopped crying. “Nothing is
wrong, ever.”
The bell rang. Mr. Shapiro was still standing over Jaime. Some
of the class got up, others waited for Mr. Shapiro to dismiss them.
“Okay,” he said, his voice cracking and weary, “you can all go now.”
Mr. Shapiro was still leaning over Jaime. He was looking at the
painting. He was still drawn to the small gray figure.
wrong, Jaime, you can tell me now, everyone is gone.”
“What’s
“There’s nothing wrong.”
can
“Come on,” Mr. Shapiro said, his confidence returning, “‘you
tell me.”
“T have nothing to tell.”
back
“Well, in that case, how about helping me carry the supplies
to the art room?”
Mr. Shapiro felt that he had suppressed whatever it was that
and made him shout. Together, in two trips,
made his legs weak
Mr.
they returned all the supplies. Now the week was over, but
to know
Shapiro knew something in it was unfinished. He wanted
to
why Jaime had cried. He wanted to know because he wanted
with
help the boy. He wanted to understand him, to communicate
him and thereby comfort and help him. He could be honest with
and he could ad-
himself again, now that he had himself in control,
.
mit that he also wanted to know just for the sake of knowing
your way, I’ll walk you home.” They started
“C’mon, Jaime, I go
you forgot your paintin g.” Jaime
out the door, “Wait a minute,
rememb ered the open window s
went back to get it. Mr. Shapiro
lemon light of an hour ago had
and began to close them. The pale
g into itself,
turned to grayish-yellow. The sun seemed to be drawin
absorbing its light back from the world.
He turned from the window and saw that Jaime was crying.
Shapiro could
The slush had hardened on the sidewalk. Mr.
he could think of no
see breath balloons when Jaime exhaled, but
 146 The Heart of This or That Man
words to fill them. “TI’ll buy you a coke, or a hot chocolate,” he
said, and they went into a Nedick’s. Jaime had his painting rolled
up, and he put it on the floor beside him. They both ordered hot
chocolates and Jaime put two teaspoons of sugar into his. They
blew into their cups without talking. Jaime took a sip of his choco-
late and smacked his lips. It was too hot.
“Do you want to know why I cried?”
“Yes, if you want to tell me.”
“I want to tell you, Mr. Shapeiro, but it’s not easy. It’s hard.”
“Start at the beginning, then, take it slow.” Mr. Shapiro felt very
comfortable sitting at the counter in Nedick’s on a Friday after-
noon with one of his students. Before Jaime started to talk, he
already felt a sense of accomplishment.
“It’s account of my painting.”
Mr. Shapiro was mildly disappointed. “How could that painting
make you cry? And anyway, you won the star this week. It was the
best painting. You should be proud of it.” Mr. Shapiro had not yet
tasted his chocolate, but he felt warm inside. He said again, “You
should be proud of it.”
“I am, I am, I wanted to win a star, but now I don’t have any-
thing to do with it.”
Mr. Shapiro was hardly listening. He felt expansive inside him-
self. The questions that had nagged at him earlier in the day
seemed resolved. He knew why he was here, why he was teaching
and not doing something else, why he was teaching in this particu-
lar school. He knew why he was teaching students like Jaime. He
was helping them. He would never despise them for assimilating
or becoming bourgeois. He was their friend, not their critic. He
understood them. They needed him.
“What did you say, Jaime?”
“I don’t have anything to do with it now, nothing at all.”
“Why don’t you keep it in your wallet as a memento, so you
can look at it and feel good when you want to.”
“What do you mean, Mr. Shapeiro, it can’t fit in my wallet, it’s
too big.”
“Oh, you're talking about the painting. I thought you meant my
gold star.”
“The painting, that’s what I can’t do anything with,” Jaime said,
his voice cracking, and he started to cry again.
DONALD GROPMAN 147

Mr. Shapiro was upset. “What is it, Jaime, you’re not telling me
everything. What is it? I have a right to know.”
“I’m proud of my painting, Mr. Shapeiro, I’m glad I got the star
today.” Jaime huddled up on his stool, he crouched over his hot
chocolate and held the cup in both his hands. “We live in a room
with four other families,’ he said, and he looked at Mr. Shapiro.
Mr. Shapiro didn’t want to hear what Jaime was saying. He looked
at the boy’s eyes. They were black now, and shining. Tears rolled
like pebbles down his smooth face. Mr. Shapiro blew into his
chocolate. He drank some, it scalded and stuck in his throat.
“Would you like a doughnut?” he sputtered.
“We live in a room with four other families. Every month we
change places in the room. This month is our turn in the middle.
I want to hang my painting but I have no wall.” Jaime stopped.
He was still looking at Mr. Shapiro. “I have no wall!” he shouted
into Mr. Shapiro’s face, and ran out of the Nedick’s.

Mr. Shapiro sat at the counter. He looked down and saw Jaime’s
painting on the floor. He picked it up. A chill ran up his arm and
down his back. He pushed his cup of chocolate aside and unrolled
the painting. One end of the black stone wall drilled into Nedick’s
countertop, the wider end thrust at him.
When he first saw the painting in the classroom he knew what
it was about, but he had tried to fool himself. Now his eyes fell
on the green figures planted on the grape-purple grass. So,
he thought, so I’ve come to this.
He glanced around Nedick’s, but nothing seemed as real as the
green men stiffly raging on the purple lawn beneath the streaked
and watery sky.
He folded the painting and stuffed it into his coat pocket. He
lit a cigarette and sipped some chocolate. Miss Katz’s teacup, dry
or wet, what was the difference? Why had he let it matter?
He felt sorry.
Mr. Shapiro slapped the edge of the countertop with his fingers.
The countergirl asked what he wanted, but he did not look up. It
has always been walls, he thought. Hearts of men _ some-
times pushed against walls. But the heart of this or that man, he
thought, is the heart of this or that man ever strong enough to force
the issue, to burst the walls and let the outside pour in?
 148 The Heart of This or That Man

He did not know. He was sorrier now, for his brain had failed
him. Kike they called him, schmouk, dummy. They may be right.
He nestled deeper into his shame. But it was more bitter than that.
He knew now, with a fierce hatred for all mankind, that he did not
have the heart to reject his own sorrow.
 WILLIAM HARRISON

The Snooker Shark

(FROM THE SATURDAY EVENING POST)

THERE WERE NO lettered archways, no inscribed monuments, noth-

ing which properly announced that this was the University, his
dream. Sammy looked in vain for a single Latin phrase cut into
the facades of the buildings.
The dormitories, the battered columns of the building where
most of his classes were held, the worn tables of the Student Center
disappointed him, as did his fellow students, who slouched along
beneath the campus trees at an indifferent pace, coming to life only
at rallies when the varsity paraded onto the amphitheater stage.
His professors, too, frustrated him; they stood mechanical and grim
beside their desks. One, a graduate student who taught Sammy’s
first English class, had a spark of enthusiasm, but misspelled two
words in writing the first assignments on the board.
In the library he had expected miracles, expected to find himself
lost in a maze of impressive shelves, deep in an intellectual ecstasy.
But the rules prevented him from penetrating beyond the check-
out desk; prim, bored girls brought him the books he requested.
“Lose yourself in that wonderful place, Sammy,” his mother had
told him. ‘Lose this little town, the life in your daddy’s pool hall,
every shackle. Do it, honey, and never forget that you’ve got a mama
who can let go, who can tell you how to let yourself go too!”
Good advice, the expression of a dream. But only teachers or gradu-
ate students with special permits could proceed beyond that miser-
able check-out desk.
His father had added a warning. “Put your cue stick away,” he
 150 The Snooker Shark

had said. “You haven’t got a talent. More like a curse. And never
let anyone up there see how good you are, or you'll be in trouble.
I seen it happen to too many guys, and I know.”
Yet that first semester, before September was gone, he went down
to McNeil’s Pocket Billiard and Snooker Parlor, turning in his dis-
may to this familiar concentration, this therapy. At one of the back
tables, he broke a rack of snooker balls and shot the table clean—
the fifteen one-point red balls, the six two-through-seven-point
“color” balls — missing scarcely at all. He broke two more racks,
played them equally well. When he was finished, he pulled on his
frayed corduroy jacket, paid his bill, and went back to his dormi-
tory room.

In his father’s pool hall Sammy Stahl had long ago forsaken the
more popular game of pocket billiards for the larger table, the
smaller balls and pockets of the game of snooker. At the age of
nine he could beat anyone in Westedge except his father. At thir-
teen he could beat him, and after his fifteenth birthday none of the
old men who came down to watch him, who came to fondle a
beer and talk sports, ever saw Sammy in defeat. It didn’t matter
what handicap his opponents had; he made fantastic runs, left them
impossible angles. He turned everyone, finally, into an admirer of
the game as it ought to be played.
Only twice during his high-school years did Sammy gamble, both
times at the urging of his father, and only to get rid of undesirables
who had drifted into Westedge to hustle a few dollars. Except
for those two times, money was never part of his game. Snooker
remained for Sammy an athletic skill. Long-legged, baby-faced,
wearing bright white sneakers, he moved around the table like a
junior-high basketball player, innocent and eager.
But snooker was never the dream. In the Stah! house knowledge
was always the dream, the vision which kept Westedge in its proper
small corner of the world. Sammy’s parents carefully kindled the
dream with overstatement. “The University, Sammy, ah, there’s
nothing like it,” his mother told him. “A crossroads for ideas. Peo-
ple going someplace, doing things, talking exciting subjects!”
Educational institutions were shrines to his uneducated father
and to his mother, who had once, during the Depression years,
worked as a waitress in order to stay a few months at that very
 WILLIAM HARRISON 15]

university. In their Westedge house —a clapboard bungalow near

the fields of truck gardens south of town his mother scrimped the
grocery money to provide Sammy with installment-plan culture: a
set of encyclopedias, a phonograph, a tolerably good microscope,
subscriptions to magazines. In the pool hall T. R., his father,
preached a gospel of concentration. “Think!” T. R. would cry
out. “Snooker is a subtle game. How you gonna get me hooked
this time? How? Think about your game! Will you go for the
hook, or will you shoot for points? You haven’t thought about it
yet! Put down that cue stick for a minute and use your head!”
Their urging that he educate himself had not been necessary.
He came to the University eager to read, to major in history, to
buttonhole his professors. He came in all his innocent confidence,
believing that education, like snooker, would be difficult but pos-
sible. He would become a storehouse of information, a citadel of
insights; he would travel, absorb, digest; he would teach those who
followed after him. His father, the son of a Belgian farmer, had
seen, in the schoolyards of his childhood, boys carrying young vale-
dictorians on their shoulders, celebrating their accomplishments,
and T. R.’s approval for enthusiasm of this sort was shared
by Sammy. “I’m a serious man,” he sometimes warned his high-
school girl friends. “Ambitious and serious. Take me that way, or
leave me.” If the girls hadn’t heard from their father and brothers
about Sammy’s famous runs on the big snooker tables in Stahl’s
Recreation Hall, they might have laughed at him.

His girl at the University that year was named Sterrett. She was
tall, like Sammy, and wore sneakers like his. Their early dates went
well, but by the Thanksgiving recess they had argued, parted, ex-
changed a series of silly notes, dated again, parted again. They
didn’t know what to make of each other. He wanted her to under-
stand his intellectual dream; she wanted him to be her provider,
with a clear and lucrative ambition.
“Vague,” she said once. “You've got no goals. I mean, what kind
of major is history, after all? What’ll you do with ite”
Or again: “Who do you think you are? Take stock of your-
self! Just a boy from a small town downstate who imagines he
doesn’t need to pledge a fraternity. But you can’t just study
 152 The Snooker Shark

— you've got to live too. I love you, Sammy, but what in the world
do you want?”
“To be an intellectual,” he answered. Simply, as always, just
like that.
“But you can’t want that!”
“Why note?”
“Because that’s like wanting — well, uh, fame. It happens, but
you just can’t want it per se!”
“Sure I can!”
“Oh, sweet, no! Sammy, love, you’re so good. And I adore you!
But why can’t you just be pre-med or something sane like that?”
So Sterrett, in her way, became part of his dismay. Often that
first semester, wrapped in her cashmere embrace, he suspected that
he was inadequate, that his dream was unsubstantial. His parents,
he thought, had never guessed how difficult things would be.
One November weekend afternoon Sterrett lured him from his
books to a picnic at a river resort sixty miles from the campus.
They nibbled hot dogs and sang campfire songs with the sorority
sisters and their dates; they lay on blankets, Sterrett’s warm breath
against his ears; they went for a long stroll in the pine forest. Stand-
ing on the canoe dock that afternoon, he delivered an earnest
speech to Sterrett.
“I’m treated with condescension,’ he complained. “My adviser
gives me idiotic smiles. Have they stopped believing in education?
Have they given up on teaching? I corner them in their offices, you
know, and they put me off. I want to ask questions and have my
say about Livy and de Tocqueville and Will Durant. I want to
hear their cynicisms—if that’s all they have to say. Let ’em say
that history is just a makeshift art, an illusion. But they clam up
on me! Why? And why should I care so much? I think the system
is against serious boys like me, Sterrett. Ah, hell, I could jump in
this slimy river and float away!”
“Your chin,” she answered. “It’s a lovely, melancholy chin,
Sammy, it really is.’ This was his Sterrett: the materialist, the
enemy of critical thought.
Had he been able to communicate with her in any other way, he
wouldn’t, finally, have taken her down to McNeil’s Pocket Billiard
and Snooker Parlor. But he had to show her, make her glimpse the
depth and passion of his academic monasticism. At least that was
WILLIAM HARRISON 153
what he told himself as he led her into that place of stale beer odors
where few females had ever trespassed. Perhaps some residue of
adolescent pride lingered in him as he led her between those rows
of green-felt tables, but he imagined that from his performance
Sterrett might come to understand his determination, his ascetic
flight from the hard physics of the snooker table, that she might
somehow embrace his abstract dream.
But she couldn’t comprehend what she saw. Sammy, frowning
with concentration, ran an amazing seventy-seven points off the
table, and only McNeil himself, lurking by the door to the men’s
room, offered any appreciation. “Gawd,” he sighed, when the run
was over. “I can’t believe it!”
Sammy replaced his cue stick in the wall rack and rolled down
his sleeves.
“Well, what of it?” Sterrett asked.
“Nothing,” Sammy told her flatly. “It’s just that I’m probably
one of the greatest snooker players in the world.”
“Oh, you szlly,” she said.
He shrugged. “It’s true.”
Then McNeil stepped up. “What’s your name, son?” It was the
only identification he asked; he had seen enough.
During the ensuing conversation, Sterrett, slightly confused and
embarrassed by McNeil’s bursts of enthusiasm, drifted away. For
Sammy, as she slipped on her coat and left the poolroom, a vision
blurred, a dream ebbed. “Yeah, yeah,’ McNeil was saying, “I heard
about you. I know you now. I heard about you from two hustlers
who toured downstate. Sure!”

In January, when Sammy returned from the Christmas holidays,

Sterrett was still at home with the flu. Trudging across the icy
campus, he felt terribly alone. The library remained a great stone
fist closed against him. The students threw snowballs and were
frantic about basketball.
Sighing, he turned again to his books, studied hard. On his nar-
row dormitory bed, propped up so that he could see the trees be-
yond his window all heavy with ice, he turned even to Thomas
Wolfe. Naked and alone we come into exile ... we come into
the unspeakable and incommunicable prison of this earth .. .
O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again. It was
 154 The Snooker Shark

just too damned lovely, too true. He wanted to weep. He went to

the small mirror in his room and examined his chin — it did seem
a little melancholy. Sterrett was right, and she was right about his
indecision, his lack of direction and identification. He stood be-
fore the mirror, chin jutted out, remembering the most ex-
citing snooker games with his father, how the crowds had gathered,
how silence and cigar smoke had filled the room. McNeil, he de-
cided. He might understand. At least he’ll know what I’ve given
up.

“Oh, son, yeah, I seen ’em all,” McNeil drawled, pulling the wide
brush across the snooker table. Sammy watched him intently. Mc-
Neil was certainly no demonic figure, no scowling hustler. He wore
a dirty T-shirt, and his jolly keg-sized stomach hung over his belt.
A perpetual smile creased his face, a smile without malice or design.
“Who’s the greatest you’ve ever seen?” Sammy asked. “Minnesota
Fats? Mosconi?”
“Don’t even know his name,” McNeil said. “Came in this very
place wearing a bus-driver’s uniform. He sat quiet until he spotted
Todd Ragsdale, about the best local shooter we ever had. Drank a
soda and just watched Todd. Then he challenged him to a game of
straight pool. I knew right away he was hustling when he wouldn’t
play call shot. The really good shooters try to make their shots look
accidental, you know. Well, he had ninety dollars and some odd
cents, and he lost eighty-five dollars to Todd. Sat back down over
there with another soda. Looked like he might bust out cryin’.”
“What happened then?”
“After a time he got up and started playing around the other
tables with that last five dollars. Cleaned everybody in the place,
then got back to Todd Ragsdale. It was a setup all the way.”
“He beat Todd, IT guess?”
“Son, he must’ve walked out of here with a thousand dollars.
And his shots — hell, I can’t describe ’em! Great, only he’d make
it look like he was just slopping ’em in, and he’d shake his head
and say, ‘Be damned, look at that! Am I ever lucky!’ Best I ever
saw, but I’ll tell you this: He couldn’t beat you at your game. No,
sir! Here, play me a few racks.”
They played. Time and time again Sammy left the cue ball kissed
behind a cluster of other balls or half snugged in a corner pocket,
WILLIAM HARRISON 155
an impossible challenge to McNeil. Then, at the proper moment,
he ran the table.
“Genius!” McNeil cried. “You’re something, Sammy! Have a
beer!”
“I never drink,” Sammy said, smiling.
It went this way for weeks. Sammy came more and more to Mc-
Neil’s, practiced his game, basked in McNeil’s encouragement. He
could hardly bring himself to answer the letter from his father
which arrived in late February.
Sammy:
I see you took your personal cue stick back to school after Xmas
vacation. Didn't see it missing until this week. Yr not minding what
I said. Are you drinking hard liquor too? Smoking stogies? Dating
experienced girls? Send the stick back, Sam, please. It won’t do you
no good up there at school, just make trouble. Enclosed is my little
check for $20. Study hard.
Vr dad wel
One evening as he sat with Sterrett in the parlor of her sorority
house, he learned that she was afraid of him.
“Afraid of me? Why?” he asked.
“Because you're different nowadays. And I know it’s that
place, Sammy, and whatever you're doing there!”
It was true.
Standing idly with his monogrammed cue stick by the great
green snooker table in the center of McNeil’s, watching his oppo-
nent bungle through a few points, feeling the crowd tense and ex-
pectant around him, he was learning his identity. Nearby, on the
bench where he seldom had time to sit before his opponent missed
a shot, there would be a textbook, a marker stuck among its pages.
Occasionally, glancing at it, he would ask himself: Is it so good to
know who I am? Will I be a snooker shark forever? Who knows me?
Ah, professors, Dad, Sterrett, if you could only know! Call me dunce,
call me anything, but know me.
His game improved shamefully, and by April he had begun to
take on visitors, out-of-town shooters who came weekends at Mc-
Neil’s invitation.
Yet snooker remained just an avocation in his thoughts. Around
him at McNeil’s bets went down, but he had no share in them and
 156 The Snooker Shark

accepted only soft drinks and cashews as rewards for his winning
performances. Late in the evening, his feet aching and his clothes
rank with the stale smoke of McNeil’s, he would trudge back to the
library and slump at one of the long oak tables behind a wall of
books. Sterrett, who had come to regard him with increasing awe
and curiosity, would go with him, often just to sit and watch him
as he read.
“The good student can simply overcome a dull school,” he said
one evening, turning to her abruptly.
“That’s right, Sammy.” She smiled, detecting a lack of afhr-
mation in his voice. He was her Sammy now, her companion of
campus reputation, her man. His small confusions didn’t matter
because of his mastery at McNeil’s tables; the game of snooker—
though Sterrett had never fathomed it — had relieved all her anx-
ieties. He’d go through life a champion of sorts, full of assurance,
she told herself.
In May a shooter from Ohio came to town at McNeil’s invitation,
and Sammy agreed to play him. Word got around. On the evening
of the match, boys poured out of the fraternity houses to watch;
McNeil’s big room bulged with spectators. Even Sammy’s adviser,
Professor Whitson, was among the first-row spectators, an old straw
hat jammed down on his wide forehead. Sterrett and a girl friend
stood watching the expanding crowd for a few minutes, then de-
parted. Moments before the match was to begin, while McNeil’s
boys were still arranging chairs and benches and serving big
schooners of beer, Sammy saw his father push through the onlookers.
“I didn’t expect you,” Sammy managed to say.
“So then we surprised each other,” T. R. Stahl replied grumpily.
The Ohio shooter was a thin, hawklike man with long fingers
that formed a delicate bridge for his cue stick. He gambled and
won at the very first, breaking the rack with a hard shot and scor-
ing. Sammy saw his father squirm in his chair, and walked slowly
around the table to him. “Ah, Sammy, Sammy,” T. R. whispered.
Sammy bit his lower lip and said nothing.
The Ohio shooter was taking his time and not missing, but
Sammy couldn’t concern himself with the game. He wanted to say
something to T. R., something like: Our dream wasn’t a true dream,
wasn’t realistic, and I couldn’t wait for another. I wanted to be
somebody. I had to. It’s a petty compensation, T. R., but that’s
 WILLIAM HARRISON 157
what I needed. He watched his father remove his coat. The fa-
miliar gray garters held his sleeves. Vest open. Tie, as usual,
slightly askew. The same old T. R., Sammy thought. My mentor
and tormentor. He imagined a sadness in the curve of his father’s
mouth.
A slow ten minutes passed, and the Ohio shooter still hadn’t
missed. The red balls were all gone now, and the two, three, and
four balls; everyone watched the Ohio man draw a bead on the blue
five ball, saw it topple slowly into a corner pocket — no chance now
for Sammy to win. ‘“That’s game,” McNeil announced. He had
lost one hundred dollars before his protégé even had a turn at the
table, and though it was a long match — ten games at one hundred
dollars each — he seemed a little grave.
Sammy’s father went to the bar and drank a small glass of beer.
Nervous, his hands fussed with his collar and vest. He tipped over
the empty beer glass when he set it back on the bar.
Sammy opened the second game with a safe shot, then went and
stood beside T. R. again.
“Snooker!” T. R. said with derision. “What’s gotten into your
head? What’re you thinking about?”
“I’m thinking about everything,” Sammy said dolefully. “My
whole life.”
T. R. winced and looked down at his shoes. Reaching out, he
patted his son on the ribs. “But you shouldn’t be here,” he said
uncertainly.
“It’s not only snooker,” Sammy said, fumbling. “It’s school too.
It’s people and what’s expected of me. All those idea we had about
the University were too idealistic.”
T. R. frowned, trying to understand. “You were going to study
hard,” he protested.
“I did. I still do. Only no one wants that from me. This is what
they expect of me instead. That’s one of my professors sitting over
there!”
T. R. shook his head sadly, and watched in silence as Sammy and
the Ohio shooter traded safeties.
Between shots, all the questions and doubts of the recent weeks
buzzed in Sammy’s head. Does a talent always possess its owner?
Do I owe my arms and concentration to the world’s silly snooker
tables? Pondering, he stared into the soft blue cloud of cigarette
 158 The Snooker Shark

smoke hovering overhead. Sterrett. It’s partially her fault, he

thought. But excuses No. I’m mostly to blame. Me.
The crowd broke into applause as the Ohio shooter made a diffi-
cult shot and broke up a defiant cluster of red balls on the table.
The game was suddenly wide open again, and everyone could see
that it was going to be another good run for the visitor.
Sammy leaned on his cue stick, waiting. Across the silent room,
suffering, T. R. rested his chin on his fist. Occasionally he looked
up at McNeil and the other spectators, rubbed his eyes, then let
his head sink down again.
Another burst of applause from the crowd brought a thin smile
to the lips of the Ohio shooter. Then, on his next shot, he missed.
With great deliberation, Sammy chalked the tip of his cue. The
Ohio shooter stepped back, and for a moment there was no sound
in the room except the soft scrape of the chalk. Sammy sighed.
T. R. was taking everything so hard. If only I could stand up on the
table and make a long speech explaining everything, he thought.
A long speech with a slide projector, enough pictures so that T. R.
would understand
— Sterrett, the library, old Professor Whitson
asleep under his old straw hat.
T. R. got to his feet again, and came over to Sammy. “You're not
thinking,” T. R. said. “Don’t you know some men in here have
bets on you?’”” They took a long look at each other. A faint hope
was suddenly aroused in Sammy that communication had been es-
tablished, that T. R. knew him. In a moment he was sure that
T. R. did, for his father wagged a finger at him and said in a low
whisper, almost a hiss: “Concentrate!” Then, turning to McNeil,
T. R. produced a thick roll of bills from his pocket. In a voice loud
enough for the entire room to hear, he asked, “Any particular limit
on the side bets in here?”
“Well, how much?” McNeil drawled. He looked at T. R. with
suspicion.
“Oh, two hundred on this game.” Having said this, T. R. swal-
lowed hard.
McNeil took a long look at the table and scoreboard. Though
the Ohio shooter had missed, he was forty points ahead and there
were only the four, five, six, and seven balls left. “Hell, I'll give you
six to one on the boy,’ McNeil said. “On the Ohio feller,
Pl] ——”
WILLIAM HARRISON 159

“Never mind about him,” T. R. said. ‘I'll take your odds on the
boy. I'll take ’em because this kid is maybe just the greatest snooker
player in the world.”
It was too much, a grandstand wager. Something profound
stirred in Sammy, and he wanted to reach out and touch T. R.’s
slumping shoulders.
The Ohio shooter complained about the delay, but the bet had
been made. Sammy came slowly up to the table then, his tennis
shoes squeaking on the floor. His fuzzy adolescent whiskers were
illumined in the harsh slant of light from above the table. He
looked such a mere boy that several in the crowd allowed them-
selves small derisive smiles.
Sammy took his stance — feet together, body low, cue stick leveled
like a rifle, head slightly tilted. With his easiest touch, he left the
cue ball behind the black seven ball.
“Your shot,” he told his opponent.
The object ball was the four, and the Ohio shooter studied the
angles for more than a minute, then tried a two-cushion shot and
missed, losing points.
“The name of the game,” whispered T. R. Stahl to those around
him, “is snooker.”
Sammy glared down his cue stick at the table, hoping that this
sudden capitulation on T. R.’s part was genuine, that his father
somehow understood. Then, measuring his stroke carefully, he
hid the cue ball again, this time behind the blue five ball. When
the Ohio shooter missed again, Sammy gave the scoreboard a quick
glance. He was still far behind, but knew he would win.
Eight times in a row Sammy forced the Ohio shooter to miss and
forfeit points. Then, with a great sigh, he rammed in the remain-
ing, the winning, balls. “Game!” McNeil shouted hoarsely, and
the crowd broke into shouts and applause.
Sammy watched his father. A faint smile had edged into the
corners of T. R.’s mouth, but it wasn’t a smile of relief at having
won the bet. It was not a smile of satisfaction of any sort. A sad
smile, Sammy thought. Resignation.
He didn’t lose again. Methodically, wearing down the Ohio
shooter with hopeless table problems, he won the rest of the games
in the match, and McNeil, for the first time in anyone’s memory,
offered drinks on the house.
 160 The Snooker Shark

That evening, in the town’s leading restaurant, Sammy de-

voured a huge meal: sirloin steak, potatoes, three glasses of milk.
His father and Sterrett sat beside him, T. R. describing the match
for his son’s girl friend, Sterrett saying things like, “Oh, it must’ve
been wonderful!” and “I’d love to have seen it!”
But the next day, before his father went back to Westedge on the
train, when he and Sammy were alone together, there was almost
no mention of snooker. “Your mama is always going to adjust to
anything you do,” T. R. said. “She can let go. She told you so her-
self.”
The afternoon vexed Sammy. A strange uneasiness had grown
between them; his father, sitting with him in the dorm room, then
lunching with him at the Student Center, had offered no admoni-
tion, no regret, nothing more than an unexpected piece of advice
before he stepped onto the train at dusk.
“Don’t let them guys play you free anymore,” he said. “Go ahead
and take your cut. Play the game.”
Sammy still hadn’t wanted to hear that. He had wanted to throw
out his arms and shout: “But the library! It’s still there! I
can’t just give it up! I can’t get what I want from it, and I can’t
forget it either!” And he had wanted to shout: “All the big stimu-
lation I was going to find, it isn’t here! Some of it’s in me, but
buried way down where I can’t dig it out!” But he had known that
such cries would be ridiculous, and he had felt abandoned. Aban-
doned and alone, an exile. He was full of poetic argument, but
kept silent because he sensed — and knew T. R. did too — the in-
evitability of his destiny.
That night he sat on the edge of his bed and stared out at the
dark, fragrant trees. He wished that T. R. hadn’t said those things,
that he had come into McNeil’s poolroom resolute against this in-
evitability. Don’t let them play you free... . It was just T. R.’s
way, Sammy knew, of letting him know that he was a talent, and
therefore a property of the world.
He settled back across the bed and fell asleep. When he woke
the next morning he was thinking about his next match, and Ster-
rett, and the excitement of the coming weekend.
 JUDITH HIGGINS

The Only People

(FROM THE ATLANTIC)

Mommy made me answer the ad for a medical typist. I wanted

to stay home and watch I Love Lucy and The Edge of Night. I was
tired of job-hunting, and I thought my leg needed a rest.
I had polio when I was a child, and I wear a brace on my right
leg. It is attached to my black oxford and runs up to my knee,
where it ends in a padded circle of steel. The leg seems boneless,
and its pinkish-purple hue shows through my nylon. In fact, it
looks like a rag doll’s leg.
I know other people would hate to have such a leg, and looking
at it they thank God it is I who have it and not they. But what
they don’t know is that I don’t always detest my leg. I’ve had to
favor this rag leg for eighteen years, so I’m quite attached to it. At
night when I take off the brace and sit in my bath or when I first
get between the sheets of my bed, I think of my leg rather tenderly.
It seems so vulnerable, how could I wish it further harm? I rub it
gently with my hands or my good foot. I hop from tub to bed,
holding it carefully in the air.
But I sympathize fully with others’ disgust and wish to spare
them the sight of such a leg. That was another reason for my
wanting to stay at home. Let Boston employers have a day off from
the sight of me. But Mommy would not listen to my reasons.
“You’ve had a hard time, but so have I! You're twenty-seven.
Get a job — and keep it for once!”
“No one wants me —” I said. But she was already pushing me
out the door.
 162 The Only People

My mother and I live in the South End. My father left us when

I was three, when I had two nice normal legs and no limp. I won-
der what he would think if he saw what happened to me. Mother
says he would probably take one look and leave on the next train.
He never could, she says, stand any kind of responsibility or trou-
ble. Mother and I both work, or I do most of the time, and on week-
ends we go to the laundromat and wash our hair and cook pot roast,
and on Sundays we go to High Mass and watch Ed Sullivan. Look-
ing at TV is what I always put down under “hobbies” on the job
applications— and I list my programs.
The trip to Downtown Hospital was very hot, and I got lost
once on the MTA. I wanted to turn back, but I was afraid Mommy
would pull out the plug of the TV. She had done that twice before.
“Eighty words a minute. That’s very impressive,” said the per-
sonnel manager at the hospital. “And you’ve used a Dictaphone?”
Yess
“Well, we certainly need somebody. We were without a chief
pathologist for four months when our former one retired, and
there’s a backlog of autopsies to be typed up. Would you be inter-
ested?”
“Oh, yes.” I hate talking to people. I mean, where are you sup-
posed to look—in their eyes the whole time? I think that an-
noys them, and I know I ought to look away every few seconds. But
my eyes stick.
“You'd be working in the pathology lab, near the operating room.
How would you feel about that?”
KOK?
“It wouldn’t upset you?”
eNew
“Good. I'll take you up to Surgery to meet Doctor Wiles. He’s
our new pathologist.”
G. Wilbur Wiles, in his forties I guessed, had red hair, a crew
cut, and a starched white coat. He was much better looking than
anyone on General Hospital or Doctor Kildare. His secretary stood
beside his desk.
“This is Miss Murphy,” said the personnel man. “‘She’s come to
~ help us out on the autopsies. Types eighty words a minute.”
“Tt’s true,” I said, then blushed. I felt like a racehorse that had
suddenly spoken.
JUDITH HIGGINS 163

“Great!” exclaimed Doctor Wiles. He jumped up and shook my

hand. “What’s your first name? I hate this formal business.”
I looked around for the personnel man, but he had gone. “Jane,”
I said.
“Well, Jane, this is Marsha Polanski, my secretary.”
“Hi, Jane!” She came forward and shook my hand, just as heartily
as Doctor Wiles had. “We're glad to have you aboard.” Then she
returned to her place beside Doctor Wiles’s desk. She was younger
than I was, blond and pretty. Her eyes took in my brace in the most
discreet way, and then she never looked down again.
“Well, little one,” said Doctor Wiles, “let’s get Miz Jane started.
Eighty words a minute— gee whiskers, are we lucky!”
They looked at each other and smiled. Marsha said, “Yes. She’s
made our day.”
Facing me, they seemed to present a united front, so at ease. I
knew then that they were Only People. Only People are handsome,
successful, relaxed, and above all they are paid attention to and
taken seriously. In fact, Only People are the only people. The rest
of the population are either Grays or Janes. Grays are harmless but
not very interesting. I suppose Mommy is a Gray; I know she is
not an Only Person or she would not be living in two rooms in the
South End with me. Janes are the creeps of the universe. They
have everything possible the matter with them, and no one would
dream of taking them seriously. Naturally, Only People don’t like
to have to look at Janes, but sometimes they tolerate the Janes
when they prove themselves good workers. I pride myself on being
a good worker and therefore possibly useful to Only People. That
is my one hope, because everyone stays the way he is. Grays stay
gray, and Only People reign forever. It took me a long time to
make myself understand that I would always be a Jane. I had to
put a sign on the wall of my room: Live Without Hope.
Marsha led me down the hall to the office where I would be typ-
ing. People stared at me as I passed, but I kept my eyes on Marsha’s
strapped high heels. That’s one more thing I hate about starting
a new job —the spurt of curiosity I stir up.
My gray steel desk touched another: from behind it a heavy
older woman looked up, rather startled. She pulled the Dicta- °
phone apparatus from her ears and tried to smile at me.
“Miss Lupowitz,” said Marsha, “this is Jane Murphy. She'll be
 164 The Only People

typing the autopsies. Miss Lupowitz enters the specimens in the

surgical book and types our gross surgical descriptions. A gross
is the pathologist’s rough description of the tissue removed during
— its measurements,
an operation appearance, how it feels to the
touch. I type the microscopic description of the same tissue—
how it looks on a slide — and the diagnoses. The surgical report on
a patient consists of gross, then micro, then diagnosis. And of course
I am Doctor Wiles’s secretary.”
“How do you do?” said Miss Lupowitz to me.
Marsha addressed me, smiling. “Sit down, sit down.” She pulled
out my typewriter for me (a manual one), got out paper, and in-
serted a belt in my Dictaphone. No one except Mommy had ever
waited on me like this.
“Everything all right now?”
“Oh, yes, fine. Thank you.”
“If you have any questions, just ask me. Or ask Miss Lupowitz.
She’s been here twenty years.”
“Oh, thank you, I will.”
Miss Lupowitz spoke up. She had an accent of some sort. “Miss
Polanski, here is a belt of micros. Doctor Hendrix handed them to
me a little while ago.”
“Oh. Well, what about it?”
“Well, don’t you want to take it?” The tape fluttered in her out-
stretched hand. Marsha did not take it.
“You start them, Miss Lupowitz. I’d like the surgical reports to
go out today.”
“Of course. If I would have known that you wanted me to do
the micros, I would have started them already. But yesterday you
said that you —”
‘Do the best you can, Miss Lupowitz.” With a smile at me, she
was gone through the swinging door that led from this office into the
lab.
Miss Lupowitz was staring at me with wide eyes. Her cheeks had
turned red. ‘‘She’s twenty years old,” she said to me. I didn’t know
what she wanted, but I couldn’t take time out to ponder it. I had
my work laid out before me.
I am proud of one thing, and that is my typing. If your legs
don’t work, I guess you have to concentrate on the hands. And
that’s what I have done. I knit and I sketch a little and I type.
JUDITH HIGGINS 165

When all is going well, words go in my ears and come out my finger-
tips without any mental interference in between. The thing that
has to be right is the atmosphere. I have to have peace. Then I
get into a kind of dream, and the words from the Dictaphone flow
through me like blood. All the noises and voices around me dis-
appear. My eyes stare only at the letters falling onto the paper,
line after line, as steadily as rain.
The body is that of an emaciated white female, weighing an estt-
mated 98 pounds and measuring 5 feet 5 inches in length. The body
is opened in the usual Y-shaped ventral incision. .
When the door of our office was open, you could see the patients
being rolled by from the operating room to the recovery room. in
their little plastic caps and with the IV. bottles dripping into their
arms, they never spoke. The only noises were the grinding wheels
on the beds and the orderlies saying, “Watch it, watch it.” All day
there was a sound like trains going by our door.
The left lung is surgically absent. The right lung weighs 550
grams. Its pleura is opaque gray and diffusely thickened.
I could scarcely wait to tell Mommy what a good job I had
found and with what nice people. I knew she had not believed that
I would ever get it.

When I took in some mail to him the next morning, Doctor Wiles
he
made me sit down and have coffee with him. I watched while
measured coffee into two cups and poured water from an electric
—I
pot. A doctor in a white coat was making me coffee
could scarcely believe it. “How many sugars?” he asked.
“Oh, that’s all right.”
lady.
He laughed. “Miss Murphy, you're a very agreeable young
two lumps.” He handed me my cup and sat
I'll assume you take
down at his desk. He smiled. “Isn’t this heat brutal? ”
“Yes, it certainly is.”
his
“Pm from Little Rock, but this has me beat.” He touched
staring at it) and said, ‘““These
white coat (I realized I had been
a doc-
damn things don’t help either, but a doctor doesn’t look like
fella his outfit.” And
tor unless he has one on. I envy this little
t of a smiling baby
pulling out his wallet, he showed me a snapsho
in a diaper.
“Ah,” I said.
 166 The Only People

“He’s my new son. Daddies aren’t supposed to praise their off-

spring, I know, but I think this guy’s pretty great.”
“Oh, he is. He’s beautiful.” But not a tenth as good-looking as
you, I thought. Oh, Mommy, if you could see me now—
I had to make myself concentrate on what he was saying. He
was explaining that he was in charge not only of the pathology lab,
where they examined tissue, but of the chemistry lab, where they
examined blood and urine, and the blood bank as well. He wanted
no splits between the three departments or any of the people in
them. “I hate pigeonholes, job roles,” he said. “At the risk of
sounding like a country bumpkin, Miz Jane, when my Boy Scout
troop back in Arkansas went on a camping trip, we all pitched in.
Nobody said, ‘I get to do that because I’m older than you or smarter
than you or because my Dad’s richer than yours.’ And we all co-
operated with the leader. Here people have gotten solidified into
categories, everybody pulling in his own direction. It’s not their
fault they’re lazy. Nobody has ever supervised them properly before.
We can double our output here, and if we double our output, we
double our business. It’s as simple as that.”
We finished our coffee. “Those letters you’ve got, are they for
me, Ma’am?”’
“Yes.” I laid them on his desk.
“Thank you kindly, Ma’am.” And he smiled at me again.
I went away realizing that this was the best job I had ever had.
There were three doctors besides Doctor Wiles who worked in
the pathology laboratory, and often they came out to our office to
use their new Dictaphones or to receive specimens wrapped in green
surgical cloth.
One nurse was very loud and would always call out the organ.
“Stomach! Sign, please.” And Miss Lupowitz would get up, enter
the information in the surgical book, and then bring the organ into
the lab for the doctors to dissect. For her recording she used a ball-
point pen called a NOBLOT Thinrite 442435. I would have liked
one, but she had the only one.
She also had the IBM typewriter. I had to go very carefully on
my manual, because the k and y stuck each time. There were also
the accents to contend with. Doctor Duval and Doctor Chang both
had accents: ““The you-nayree bla-dr ees deestanded and cohn-
tens a-boon-dant torr-beed youreen.”
JUDITH HIGGINS 167

Marsha came in, put her hand on my shoulder, and said to Miss
Lupowitz: “Are you finished with the grosses yet, Miss Lupowitz?”
“No. I am going as fast as I can, Miss Polanski. You used to want
them by twelve o’clock. Now it is only ten o’clock, and already
you are asking for them.”
Her cheeks had turned red again. I felt so comfortable with
Marsha’s hand on my shoulder. How wonderful that she would
want to touch me. It made me want to laugh at Miss Lupowitz.
It was Marsha who laughed. “Ruth doesn’t like Dictaphones,”
she said to me. “She’s used to taking down the doctors’ reports in
longhand.”
“No, no, that’s not the point. I could get used to it if it would
work right. I don’t ask that you should get a new machine for me,
but could you call the repairman? Please. This has been broken
already one week.”
Marsha pushed a stray blond hair behind one ear. Yesterday she
had worn her hair down, and today she wore it up in a bun and
had horn-rimmed spectacles on. It almost seemed that she could
be two different people. “I'll try to call him again, Miss Lupowitz.
That’s not the only thing I have to do.”
A doctor walked in just then carrying a raincoat and a briefcase.
Marsha brightened. In fact, she shone. She pulled her hand from
my shoulder and thrust it at him. “Doctor Norton, hul-lo! It’s de-
lightful to see you again. Doctor Wiles will be delighted also, I am
sure. Won't you follow me to his office? Here, let me carry your
coat.”
“No, no, that’s all right, honey.”
“Doctor Norton, I insist. You’ve come so far for us. You must
tell us, did you have a good flight?”
And away he went, following that little heart-shaped behind. I
was sure that men must find her very attractive. I’m not much to
look at from the back because I’m not symmetrical; on the right
side, where I had polio, my buttock is much smaller; because of
this I never wear tight skirts.
“Stroggling along with these broken machines — it’s terrible,”
Miss Lupowitz muttered. “And then the deadline s. I never know
when they want something. ”
I did not answer her.
“Hi, ladies.” Doctor Wiles stood in the doorway, his hands on
 168 The Only People

the frame. “’Lo,” I mumbled, smiling, and Miss Lupowitz twisted

her face into a smile. I was sure he had heard her; it served her
right if she got into trouble, for being such a poor sport. “Good
morning, sir,” she said, and put the Dictaphone apparatus back into
her ears.
Later on, when he came back into the room —and this is the
truth —he put his arm around my shoulders. First Marsha’s hand
and now Doctor Wiles’s arm — this was really my day.
After what seemed five minutes (and I was afraid my shoulders
were sweating), he said: “Miss Murphy?”
“Yes, yes?”
“Could you type this address on a label, please Ma’am?”
“Oh, yes, Doctor Wiles, I’ll do it right away.” I took the slip of
paper from him, and my hand was shaking. It was, I thought, just
like a scene from The Nurses, everyone working together, the sultry
midday city beyond the window looking like a paper set.
He straightened and withdrew his arm, and said, “Thank you,
Ma’am,” and winked at me.
Oh, God, God, God, I thought, isn’t he wonderful. I was too
happy to be jealous when he said, “Miss Lupowitz?”
She removed her earphones. “Yes, sir?”
“I’m hungry, and I’m going to lunch. Ich wolle haben Mittages-
sen, Ich habe ein grossen Hunger!”
He smiled and waited until she gave a small chuckle (adding that
she did not know much German), and then he departed, his white
coat swirling.

“The cafeteria for the lab help, clerical help, and laundry staff is
located in the sub-basement,” Marsha explained, as Willie the
Negro operator rode us down.
“Oh, I see,” I said, trying to concentrate. I was so happy
— she
had made Miss Lupowitz wait her turn and had asked me to lunch
with her.
“Let’s sit by ourselves,” she said, laughing and tickling me in the
ribs. “I want to talk to you!”
She signed for both our meals and brought them to the table.
“Now, if you will spread these things out while I get our milk and
coffee.” Mommy had not been this nice to me since I was sick.
“Doctor Wiles likes people to feel they’re working with him, not
JUDITH HIGGINS 169

for him.’ As she spoke, her eyes studied my face so eagerly that I
felt it would be wrong to look down at my plate. “You just don’t
say ‘no’ to a doctor. Doctors are special people. You have to show
them you know they're the boss. Doctor Wiles gets irritated with
people who don’t like him. He gives them every opportunity to
show their goodwill, and then if they don’t come across, well . . .”
Her eyes are beautiful, I thought. A pale gray, the color of my
steel desk.
“I worked for him a year at Camden Hospital,” she went on,
never picking up her fork. “I guess you know, he brought me here
with him. At Camden I used to have the grosses on his desk by
noon, so that he could come right back from lunch and dictate the
micros. Then in the afternoon I'd type those up and knock off four
belts of letters.”
She had a piece of bread in her left hand, but had taken only one
bite out of it and had not touched the food on her plate. I was
terribly hungry, but I felt that it would be wrong to chew while
she was talking to me, her face held only a few inches from mine.
“That’s why I become so irritated when people here don’t meet
the deadlines we set up. Miss Lupowitz says this hospital is three
times the size of Camden and has three times as many operations
per day, but she will grab, I have found, at any excuse for slow
production.
“All our jobs depend on one another’s, you see. We're like a
conveyor belt of work. If one person along the way is late, then
everybody after him is late, and the doctors don’t get their reports
on time. The reports should be mailed out to the surgeons the
same day the operation was performed. So far they haven't been,
but I intend to see that they are. Doctor Wiles is counting on it.”
She took a bite of her food, and I took three quick bits of mine.
“The former pathologist was a nice man, but all he was inter-
ested in was pathology. He’d come in, give everyone an encourag-
ing word, and then go about his business. He never checked up on
people. Doctor Wiles and I have had to do that. And we’ve found,
just as you’d expect, that people have been getting away with mur-
der. The girls in hematology and blood bank have been having a
ball. They're never at their desks, which annoys me no end. Betty
and Harold in the chemistry lab will get away with as little work as
they can. We’re watching them closely.”
 170 The Only People

She looked at me thoughtfully. “We must think of something

else for you to do so that you won't be typing all day.”
“Answering the telephone?”
“No, I’d better do that. There’s a way of doing it, you see. You
have to be very polite with doctors — always refer to them as “Doc-
tor.’ They're very sensitive about that. How about making out the
lab bills? Perhaps you could do that. I’ve been doing it, but ’'m
helping Doctor Wiles with research on the book he’s writing —”’
“Oh, are you? How exciting!”
“Yes, it is exciting. Interesting. But in any case, it entails visits
to the library, so I may give you the lab bills to do—”
“Oh, I’d love to!”
“Good.” She laughed. “There, I’ve done it again! Talked shop
the whole time. But I can’t help it, it’s so interesting.” She stood
up, running her fingers up my arm. “Finish that slop, if you want it.
I’ll bus our dishes and ring for the elevator.”
I took only one huge bite of rice, so that I could ride back up
with her.
One day shortly thereafter, Doctor Wiles introduced a sign-in,
sign-out book, which he placed in our office. Marsha explained it to
me at lunch. “We're going to cut down on people slacking off.
Mike in chemistry is always making trips to the supply room— he
says — but we suspect he’s secretly sunning himself in the solarium.
He’s just too tan. And Lilly’s a smart cookie. She comes in at nine-
thirty. Because she’s been here five years, she thinks she can get
away with it. But Doctor Wiles will fire everybody here if he has
tOx
I choked on my Welsh rarebit.
She laid a hand on my arm. “Not you. We're very pleased with
you so far. Doctor Wiles just wants to be sure that people are put-
ting in their cight hours and that they’re on legitimate errands
when they’re away from their desks.” She sighed. “So far, Miss
Lupowitz hasn’t signed the book. We're giving her another day.
That woman just won’t cooperate.”
Later that day Doctor Wiles explained the book in a much less
alarming way. “This is the sign-out book, Miss Lupowitz.” (Of
course, it had been sitting on the corner of her desk all day.) “I’m
signing myself out to chemistry and blood bank. See how useful this
is, Ma’am? If anyone asks for me, why you just have to look at the
JUDITH HIGGINS 171

book to tell them where I am. Now, doesn’t this make a lot of
sense? I know it sure makes sense to me.”
“Yes, sir,” said Miss Lupowitz. Without looking up from my
work, I knew that her cheeks would be flaming red.
Yet despite his special plea, an hour later she was still resisting.
She lingered in the doorway of our office until I looked up. “Pm
just going to the bathroom, Miss Murphy. If he asks.” She laughed.
“Just to urinate, so I won't be long.” She looked as though she were
about to cry. I realized that Marsha was right: Miss Lupowitz just
could not adjust.

be-
“Hey.” Someone was touching me on the shoulder. “I don’t
lieve I know your name.”
It was a fat young man in a white lab coat. “Dick Nalbandian.
. . . Well, you still won’t tell me?”
“Jane Murphy.” My fingers remained arched over the keys; he had
interrupted me in the middle of a sentence.
he went on, “I’ve been trying to introduce myself for
“Gee,”
two days, but you never look up from that machine. I'll be assisting
l.”
the doctors now in your lab. Used to be at New Bank Memoria
at the paper in my typewri ter; I did not type, but
I looked down
come in
I would not talk to him, either. What if Marsha should
y 8759
and find me not working? Besides, I wanted to finish Autops
before noon.
of slides
“Dick!” called one of the doctors. “Did you get that tray
yete”’
“Not yet, Doc. I’m on my way now, Doc. Well,” he said to me,
“take it easy. I'll be seeing you around.”
At noon
Good riddance, I thought. But I had thought too soon.
where Marsha and I were
he brought his food over to the table
convers ation. I hated the
sitting. What nerve, butting in on our
way black hairs crawled out over the collar of his lab coat, and I
kept my eyes on my tuna casserole.
Marsha. “No, don’t
“So tell me about Doctor Wiles,” he said to
and I don’t
look at me that way —I’m serious. He’s my new boss,
he like? He
wanna do anything to upset the applecart. What’s
what sets him
must fly off the handle sometime. I’d like to know
off so as I don’t do it.”
 172 The Only People

“Doctor Wiles is always just as you see him. He doesn't ‘fly

off the handle,’ as you put it.”
“You mean, he’s always that jolly and good-natured with every-
body?”
“Yes, I’ve been asked this question before —what’s the real
Doctor Wiles like? But there is no real Doctor Wiles. I mean, what
you see on the surface is the real Doctor Wiles. He’s a very un-
usual man. He likes people, and he wants them to like him as much
as he likes them.” She waved her hand. “But I’m not giving out
any more information. You'll find out for yourself. If you do your
job well, if you cooperate, you have nothing to worry about.”
He laughed. “Well, thanks.”
On the way up, Marsha confided to me that Dick, who was thirty-
seven, was really nothing more than Lilly’s lab maid, and that she
and Doctor Wiles were watching his performance closely.
“IT knew he was only a Jane!”
“A what?”
“Nothing,” I said, blushing.
The afternoon confirmed my suspicions. Dick was in and out of
our office and the lab, spanked on his fat bottom by the swinging
door. “I’ll do that right away, Doctor. . . . Certainly, Doctor... .
Let me clean that spot out of your jacket, Doctor. ... Can I
sweeten your coffee, Doctor?’ Oh, he was a Jane all right. I detested
him for it.

Marsha had an IBM Selectric typewriter and the only new Dic-
taphone. Again this was proof, if I had needed any, of what she
was: Only People work with only the best materials. Like Miss
Lupowitz, I was having trouble with my Dictaphone, but I didn’t
say anything to Marsha. The repairman had not yet come to fix
Miss Lupowitz’s, and I could see how her complaints were annoy-
ing Marsha.
Typing on a manual typewriter all day tied my shoulders, especi-
ally the right one, in knots. In the evenings Mommy had been rub-
bing them with Ben-Gay. Afterward I would sit with the right one
over the back of a chair as I watched TV. I was missing all the good
shows now because I had to go to bed by nine o’clock. Otherwise I
would not be fresh enough for my work. In addition to five au-
topsies a day (I used to do two), I was now doing the lab bills, ad-
JUDITH HIGGINS 173

dressing envelopes, typing and filing cards on the day’s operations,

and typing over anything that Marsha had made a mistake on and
did not feel like redoing. I think Marsha was surprised at how much
work I was turning out, although she never said anything.
I did not regret missing Doctor Kildare and Run for Your Life,
however. Today Doctor Wiles had put his hand on my shoulder:
“Jane, my girl?”
pes
“Can we make this in triplicate?”
Before I had had a chance to reply, Marsha came in and put her
hand on Doctor Wiles’s shoulder: “Mrs. Wiles called.” “Thank
you, little one,” he said. For a moment we had remained linked
together, the three of us, and for that moment I was not Jane but
one of the Only People. I had never been so happy.
“They are like a couple of Arabs, aren’t they?” Miss Lupowitz
had remarked after Marsha and the doctor had gone back to their
office. “Always pawing a person.”
I was shocked at her. Then I realized that she was jealous—
not only of Marsha (everyone is jealous of Only People) — but of
me. Imagine.
The next evening Marsha offered to drive me home.
“Oh, you don’t have to,” I murmured, astonished.
She pulled down the hem of my skirt (I guess my slip was show-
ing). “Don’t be silly. I’d like to. I have my car with me today.”
And she hopped off to tell Doctor Wiles that we were leaving to-
gether.
Don’t let this go to your head, I kept telling myself as I followed
her out to the parking lot, or you'll be punished. But it was almost
impossible to hold down my happiness. How do you like this, leg,
I said to it as I pulled it in after me into Marsha’s car, no subway
for you tonight.
“Oh, there’s Doctor Wiles!” cried Marsha, and began beeping
her horn. Sure enough, I could see his fuzzy-topped head in a little
car that nosed us over and passed us. When he was ahead,
he winked his left light. She honked three short bursts and flashed
her headlights.
‘“He’s off to suburbia tonight,” she explained to me. “About
three nights a week he works late and stays in town. It’s a long
drive to Minnisocket” (here she drew in her cheeks and talked
 174 The Only People

very soberly), “but when you bring children into the world, you
owe it to them to give them the best possible environment in which
to grow up. And after all, the wife and children are the ones who
have to be home most of the day. For the man, what goes on at his
job is more important than where he puts his family down.”
She went on talking about Doctor Wiles. He had been the young-
est ever to graduate from the University of Pennsylvania Medical
School and had had one of the largest scholarships. He used to be
a gynecologist and obstetrician. But delivering babies was really
the easiest kind of medicine, and much as Doctor Wiles loved deal-
ing with people directly, he was too brilliant to be satisfied
staying with the “carriage trade.” And so he had gone into pa-
thology.
There was a lot more that she said, but I was too nervous to con-
centrate: it had gradually dawned on me — what if she expected
to be invited in? If Marsha were to see those two rooms we lived
in, I would never get a ride from her again, I was sure of it. And
Mommy had gotten so fat. Worse yet, it was very possible that she
would fail to see that Marsha was an Only Person and ought to be
treated the right way; Grays can be stupid like that.
My worries were suddenly dispelled when, parking in front of
the house where we lived, Marsha said, “I won’t come in.”
“Oh,” I said with relief. “I mean —”
“Before you go, there is one thing I want to mention.”
mYesre:
She sighed and traced a circle around the steering wheel with her
fingertips. “As you may have guessed, we’re having our problems
with Miss Lupowitz. She won’t cooperate. It’s very sad. She can’t
learn our ways of doing things, and nothing is ever finished when
we ask for it. I’m not saying that I’m any more qualified than she
is just because I went to medical secretarial school and she never
had the slightest formal training, not the slightest! And yet she
can be so sure of herself!”
She lowered her voice. “Anyway, the point is, leaving Miss Lupo-
witz out of it, we want to be sure you’re on our side. Will you work
with us? If we all work together, we can get out of the hole. It will
take a lot of time, but we can do it. How about it?”
“Oh, yes,” I said. “Oh, yes. I’ll do anything I can.”
 JUDITH HIGGINS bis)

She smiled and patted my thigh. “That’s what I thought you’d

say. OK, run in now.”
She revised that when she saw my hand darting from my brace
to the door handle and back to my leg again. ‘““Take your time,”
she said, stretching. “I’m in no rush tonight.”

First thing the next morning, I was summoned into Doctor Wiles’s
office.
“Thank you for the ride,” I said to Marsha. She smiled and closed
the partition between Doctor Wiles’s desk and hers, leaving me
alone with him.
“Sit down, Ma’am,” he said. “Miss Murphy, you look appre-
hensive. Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t look worried.”
I tried not to.
“That’s better.” He lay back in his chair and brushed a hand
back over his crew cut. He had on a short-sleeved shirt (his medi-
cal coat was hanging on the chair), and I couldn’t help noticing
how white the flesh on the underside of his arm was. Shocked at
myself, I switched my eyes at once to his face.
“When I came here three months ago,” he said, folding his
hands across his stomach, “I found a laboratory that would have
been modern about ten years back. The equipment was outdated.
People were using methods of doing things that were twice as slow
as they need be. Well, by now I think — I think — we may be com-
ing out of the Middle Ages. At least I hope so. Some of the new
lab machinery I’ve ordered has already been installed. I’ve gotten
the doctors to use Dictaphones, instead of having Miss Lupowitz
sit in there like a scribe taking it all down. I’m also waiting on the
new multiplex snap-out forms for our surgical reports; they have
built-in carbon paper, which will save you gals in the office one
heck of a lot of time.”
He leaned on the desk with his elbows. “It’s the human end of
things that’s our problem number one. You know, Miz Jane, it’s
almost easier to requisition another radiation unit than it is to get
people to work with you. I have one person I can count on, and
 176 The Only People

that’s Marsha. She’s been coming in’ evenings and on weekends

while we get organized. I need someone like her.
“But Marsha and I can’t straighten out this place alone. We need
the cooperation of everyone here. We can’t have people coming in
here and sealing themselves into their own little slots. We're not
a bunch of artists. We have to work as a team. And if I don’t get
the cooperation I want, there’s going to be a shake-up here that
people won’t forget, and I’m the guy to do it.”
He leaned back in his chair and lit a cigarette. “I guess you're
aware that we have a problem child in the lab.”
“Miss Lupowitz!” I said promptly.
He smiled. “The kindest interpretation of her behavior is that
she is finding it hard to adjust to our ways of doing things. The
former pathologist was an awfully nice man who just wanted to be
left in peace so he could look through his microscope all day. And
he evidently didn’t share my antipathy to rigid ladies who treat
men, doctors at that, like foolish little boys. The result was, we
had this DP running the administrative end of things when I got
here. I have nothing personal against Jews, you understand. They
can be fine people. We just ran into the stereotype in Miss Lupo-
witz.
“She came in here yesterday morning and told me about a mis-
take I had made— and I sure am glad she caught it, but I didn’t
like the way she told me about it. Sort of triumphant. It’s inci-
dents like these that make me suspect she’s not just an old fossil
that can’t adjust —I think she really has it in for me.
“Which brings me to why I asked you in here this morning. I
don’t want to fire the good lady. She’s been here twenty years, and
before we came I’m told that she did get the surgical reports out on
time. But starting right now I’d like to bypass this Rumanian lady
as much as possible. So Jane, my girl, we’re going to give you the
surgical reports to type — Marsha will do the microscopies in the
afternoon — and confine Miss Lupowitz to the autopsies. The time
element isn’t as important on autopsies. She can fool around with
them all day and collect her ninety dollars a week, but she won't
be undermining me. How about it, Miz Jane? Will you work with
us?”
“Oh, yes, I-will. But‘ —”’
“What is it?”
JUDITH HIGGINS hel

“Well, who’s going to tell her? I don’t want to be the one.”

“You won’t have to be. It'll be my pleasure. She'll balk at the
switch, but I'll write up a new job description for her. That Old
World compulsiveness, you know; they have to see everything in
writing.”

When Miss Lupowitz came back from Doctor Wiles’s office, I

knew that she had been told. Her eyes were very bright and her
mouth pinched. “May I have please the autopsies that you have
not done?”
{ handed them to her and went on with my grosses.
While I typed, I was aware every so often of noises from Miss
Lupowitz like “Och!” and “What, what?” And I could hear the
click of her foot again and again on the “repeat” pedal of her Dic-
taphone. “Doctor Duval,” she said at one point, ‘“‘could it be ‘the
bowel spaces are gaping’? You are talking about the kidneys.”
“*Bowman’s spaces,’”’ he called back. Later, “I am sorry to bother
you again, Doctor Duval. I am afraid you will have to come and
listen to this one. It sounds like ‘apple water.’ I can’t make it
out at all.”
He came over in his baggy surgical suit and put the earphones
on. “The ‘ampulla of Vater,” he said. “ “The mehn pan-creatic
duct em-teez the chole-
into the am-pulla of Vater jointly weeth
docus.’”
“Thank you very much, sir. I am sorry to have to keep bother-
ing you. I was so familiar with the vocabulary of the surgical re-
ports. This I have to learn all over again. And they have never
fixed my machine.”
“I know, I know,” he said. ‘Believe me, I have never lived
through such disorganization. I am getting the migrain—I e
can feel it coming over my right eye.”
The truth was, I was having just as much trouble with the sur-
gical reports as Miss Lupowitz was with the autopsies. Every
third word was a new one to me, and I had to play it over many
times. But I did not want to ask the doctors to help me because
she was doing that.
When the telephone rang and Marsha was not in her office to
pick it up, Miss Lupowitz would answer it. Snatches of her replies
occasionally reached me: “You’d better ask Doctor Wiles. I don’t
 178 The Only People
tell you
know how they are planning to handle that, sir. I can only
that may all be change d
the way we used to do it, and of course
ng about that now. I be-
now ... Sir, I would not know anythi
lieve Doctor Wiles’s secretary is handling that from now on.”
by
I guess this was an example of what Doctor Wiles meant
too. She had
her “rigidity.” Really, she was very foreign-looking,
heavy hips, and she wore men’s sweaters and black oxfords like
mine, although she didn’t have to. I honestly disliked her now.
I became all the more desirous of proving that I could do the
erosses faster than she could after twenty years. Marsha would not
find me missing her deadlines. By eleven-thirty I was ready for an-
other belt of grosses. “Doctor Chang,” I called. “I can do your
grosses if you have them dictated.”
He had just come out of the lab and was pulling off his rubber
gloves. “A twenty-one-year-old girl,” he said, to no one in particu-
lar. ‘Married, and four months pregnant, and this is definitely
carcinoma.”
I waited, my fingers arched over the keys. He went on and on,
that the husband was hysterical and that the girl lay in a kind of
happy dream state. “They'll have to take that baby from her. Boy-
oboy, I feel like crying myself.”
He paused, whereupon I said eagerly: “Doctor Chang, do you
have any grosses for me to type?”
“Such a pretty girl, too. What was that, Miss Murphy?”
I had to ask him a third time. I was very annoyed; it was now
eleven-forty.

Marsha seemed rather strange at lunch. Her gray eyes stared past
my shoulder. I missed her talking to me about the progress we
were making and about who was still not pulling his weight. At
the other lab table were two girls from chemistry. “Are those the
girls you and Doctor Wiles are watching?” I asked.
“Two of the ones, yes. Maybe I’m not very sociable,” she re-
marked, spreading out our food, “but I just don’t enjoy sitting with
them. All they talk about is their husbands and their children.
It’s very boring.” She had a beautiful sweater around her shoul-
ders. The flesh on her arm was a lovely tan. She seemed so fresh
and clean-looking; almost everyone else down here was either
JUDITH HIGGINS 179

Puerto Rican or Negro. “I come from a big family myself,” she

added, “‘so I’ve heard my fill.”
“Oh, do you?”
“Yes — seven children.”
It turned out that she came from Roxbury, a neighborhood as
bad as mine. I was shocked. It did not fit. “You don’t still live
there, do you?”
“Qh, no. I have an apartment by myself on Beacon Hill.”
“How nice!” I was so glad she was out of Roxbury.
“Yes, it is nice. I wake up in the morning, with the sun streaming
in my window, and I say to myself, ‘Marsha, my girl, this is the life.
Be glad you're footloose and fancy-free. Would you really want a
brood of screaming brats at your heels?’ ”’
“That’s such a beautiful sweater.”
“Why, thank you. I used to wear a uniform when we were at
Camden, but Doctor Wiles hates women to wear uniforms. I
couldn’t agree more.” She sighed and fell silent.
I had thought she would be in a good mood. ‘Tomorrow began
the Fourth of July weekend, and it meant that we would be off for
three days. I had been imagining her as part of a “gay crowd”:
boys and a convertible, transistors and lying in the sand in a dotted
bikini, kicking up perfect tan legs. But seeing her gloom, I began
to worry that she thought me not fast enough on the grosses. We
were still getting them out a day late to the surgeons. “Maybe I
could come in on Monday,” I suggested, “and do the surgical reports
that are left over.”
Her eyes focused on me slowly. “What?”
I repeated my offer.
“Don’t be silly. Monday's a holiday.”
“JT know, but I wouldn’t mind. I have nothing else to do.”
“Well, thanks, but they won’t be doing any operations except
emergencies on Monday. I think Doctor Chang will be on, but no
ask for
one else.” She sighed. “I had thought Doctor Wiles would
tened
the Fourth so that we could get a number of things straigh
him. He
out, but he won’t be coming in. I can’t say that I blame
y delight ful house. Boston will be hot
has five acres and a perfectl
as Hades this weekend.”
“You've been to his house!”
 180 The Only People

“Don’t shriek. Of course I’ve been to his house.” She frowned

suddenly. “I’m thirsty and fat around the middle. Two of the
seventeen symptoms I have that I’m about to get my period.” She
grimaced. “The ‘curse.’ I'll never understand why women dread
the menopause. I can’t wait.” She lapsed into silence again. When
Lupo-
she looked up, her eyes were much brighter: “What has Miss
witz been doing all morning?”
“An autopsy, I guess.”
“Just one?”
“I guess so.” Something was in the wind. I felt excited, the way
you do at school when the principal has sent for someone — not
you. “Is there something wrong?”
“Yes,” she said firmly. “Yes, I believe there is.” She broke off,
seized at that point by a cramp.

The long weekend of the Fourth seemed interminable. On

Monday, the holiday, Mommy went to the beach with her sister. I
didn’t go because I didn’t want to get sand in my brace. I stayed
home by the fan, fiddling with the TV dial. It was quiet and de-
pressing. None of my programs were on. I thought about how I
would try to beat the speed record I had set last week. And then I
thought about Miss Lupowitz and how Marsha had seemed es-
pecially displeased with her. That cheered me up: something was
brewing, I was sure.
My suspicions were confirmed on Tuesday morning. Every so
often Marsha would come in, stand in our doorway, and survey
Miss Lupowitz and me. Sometimes she would say, ““How’s it coming,
ladies?” She frightened me. She wore her horn-rimmed glasses,
and her hair was drawn back so tightly that her cheekbones and
nose were like three sharp points. I would offer to tell her about
my progress or hand her a sheaf of finished reports, but she would
only nod at me and pass on to Miss Lupowitz’s desk. There she
would stand going through papers on the woman’s desk. I could
see Miss Lupowitz’s eyes dart sideways while she tried to keep on
typing. At last she pulled the Dictaphone apparatus from her ears
and said, “Miss Polanski, what is it you are looking for? If you
would tell me, I could find it for you.”
“No. no, go on with what you're doing.”
JUDITH HIGGINS 18]

“It’s just that you are getting everything out of order.”

“Oh, am I? That’s too bad, Ma’am. I’m looking for finished
autopsies, and I seem to find only four.”
“I’m on my fifth one now —”’
“But so far you’ve completed only four since we started you on
them. Is that right?”
“Miss Polanski, I am doing my best. You and Doctor Wiles knew
I would have to become familiar with this vocabulary all over again.
It’s you who are after me all the time for the autopsies; the doc-
tors aren’t asking for them.”
At this Marsha turned on her heel and walked out.
‘Two nurses who had been in the office the whole time watched
her go. One was the loud nurse. “She’s in a great mood today,” she
said. “I guess he went home to his wife last night.”
“What future does that kid have?” said the other one.
“No future, none at all.”
“He'll have a coronary. Look at the difference in their ages.”
“Yeah, and don’t forget, he has to do two.”
“Pat, you think of everything.”
I felt like bursting into tears. Oh, please stop talking. I can’t
hear my Dictabelt.
Marsha did not come in anymore that morning. I grew hungry
and began waiting for her buzz-buzz, meaning wash your hands,
sign us out, and meet me by the service elevator to go down to
lunch. But the signal never came. At last, screwing up my cour-
age, I called her on the interoffice phone. I tried to sound funny
about it: “I’m hon-greee.” It was a failure: she did not understand
me. “I thought — um, whu-well, do you want to go down to lunch
yet?”
“Why don’t you go ahead,” she said. “I want to speak to Doctor
Wiles about something. I’m sorry —I should have let you know.
Can you manage?”
“Sure, I guess so.””
I would have been very sad and uneasy about going down with-
out her, except that in the hall I passed a man with a tray of sand-
wiches and coffee, and he asked me to direct him to Doctor Wiles’s
office. That changed everything: Marsha and Doctor Wiles were
dining together in his office. What a wonderful idea! The hard-
 182 The Only People

working doctor and his secretary grabbing a fast bite together: it

was better than anything I had seen on Doctor Kildare. I felt so
proud of them for thinking of it.
I brought my lunch to the table where the other lab workers sat.
After a moment they went on talking among themselves, for which
I was thankful. I kept my eyes on my lunch.
Finally one of them asked me, ‘“How’s ‘little one’?”
“I don’t understand,” I replied.
‘Miss Polanski.”
“She’s fine. I —I think she’s eating sandwiches with Doctor
Wiles.”
“Oh, that’s nice. Isn’t that nice, Barbara? She’s smart. This ravi-
oli is murder on your figure” — she knocked her girl friend’s elbow
and smirked — “for them that has to eat it.”
I didn’t understand them and did not care to try. I hurried with
my lunch, bussed my dishes, and rode up with a carful of nurses.
I can walk very quietly if I swing my leg out in a wide arc and step
down on it very slowly. I got to the door of Doctor Wiles’s office
without making a sound. There on the chair outside the door was
the tray, the food gone. There were two sandwich plates, two
coffee cups, and on one of the cups was a smear of lipstick. Smil-
ing, I took a napkin for a souvenir, and then swung and stepped
slowly, swung and stepped slowly, back to my desk.
I found Miss Lupowitz blotting her face with a wet paper towel.
“I am not feeling so good,” she explained. I did not wonder that
she was nervous, having been so rude to Marsha. I stacked the
reports that I had finished that morning in a neat pile (they rose
much higher than Miss Lupowitz’s completed work, I was sure)
and went on to the next one. It would not be good, I felt, for me
to be seen speaking to her.
Toward the end of the afternoon Miss Lupowitz was summoned
by buzzer to go into Doctor Wiles’s office.
“Well, here it is,’ she said to Doctor Hendrix. “A dressing
down.” She pronounced it “drrressink.”
‘Don’t take it to heart, Ruth,’ he said. “In a year those two
won't be here.”
When she came back she began at once to dispose of things in
her drawers and lockers. Doctor Chang and Doctor Hendrix were
watching her. Finally Chang came over to her desk and asked her
JUDITH HIGGINS 183

what had happened. She murmured something. “Really?” he said

“IT don’t believe it.” She simply stared back at him with wet eyes.
“Boyoboy, they’re crazy,” he said, shaking his head and walking
away.
Of course I was dying to know what had been said in Doc-
tor Wiles’s office, but I did not let on. It was exciting, having all
this discord eddying around you but not involving you— the typ-
ing went much faster.

When I arrived at work the next morning there was already a

belt of grosses on my desk, and on the table with the surgical book
there were several specimens in jars or in green cloth waiting to be
entered. “Would you do it,’ Doctor Hendrix asked me, “since
Ruth’s not here?”
I didn’t have time to wonder where she was. ‘Keep calm, keep
calm, you fool,” I told myself as I wrote in the surgical book. “If
you don’t, you’ll make an error.” But I kept mislaying my pencil,
and then every time I got myself seated at the typewriter, think-
ing that perhaps I could get another report done, in would come a
nurse: “Gallbladder. Sign, please.” And I would get up again.
“T told Marsha she could come in a little late this morning,”
said Doctor Wiles to Hendrix and me when he signed in. “She was
here until ten-thirty last night filing slides for me.” He said noth-
ing about Miss Lupowitz.
It was almost noon hour before Marsha came rushing in. Her
long blond hair hung down to her shoulders, and she had on a
violet dress I had never seen before. ‘Oh, you look so beautiful!”
I told her.
“Why, thank you, Miss Jane,” she said, signing in. She looked
like her old happy self again. “How is it coming? Have you finished
the grosses?”
“No, but I came in at eight-thirty so I could get a head start, and
I’ve been entering all the specimens, too. Is it OK? Is it all right
that I haven’t finished all of them yet?”
She gave me a smile. “It’s all right.”
A half-hour later, when I still had a number of reports to do, she
reappeared. “Turn off that machine!” she said gaily. “I’m hungry.”
“Tunch? Can I eat after you do today? Then I can have these
reports for Doctor Chang when he comes back from his lunch.”
 184 The Only People

“Oh, the heck with him.” She stamped her foot playfully.
“Come now. I don’t want to eat alone.”
[OK
Marsha and I were midway through our lunch when she said to
me, “Miss Lupowitz is leaving, you know.”
“What!” I said.
“It was coming for a long time. We kept giving her more work,
and she just wasn’t getting it done. And she couldn't adjust to
the Dictaphone.”
“But it was broken —”’
“Yes, that was her excuse. She had lots of them.” She sighed. Her
voice was very soft. “Doctor Wiles was going to think it over a lit-
tle longer — what to do about her. But yesterday I told him some
of the things she has done and about how uncooperative she’s been
with me, and he just realized it would never work. I would get
worn out fighting her stubbornness, and he wouldn’t want that.
He’s so kind, it breaks his heart to have to fire somebody. I’m the
same way —I hated telling him about her, but it was my duty,
and he was glad I did.” Her voice tightened. “I gather the old
fossil was a little surprised to get the ax, but that’s her problem.
She had no right—no right! —to think she was indispensable.
Why, the agencies are crawling with people who can’t be anything
but typists.”
I was staring at her. The food I had eaten had knotted in my
stomach. I didn’t know why I should feel so apprehensive. They
were Only People, and Only People got to fire nonpeople. As long
as they were pleased with my work, they would keep me. But I felt
frightened nonetheless.
“She wasn’t fired, you know,” Marsha said. “Doctor Wiles simply
asked her to resign. He told her that he was afraid if she stayed,
they’d only lock horns, and he didn’t want that to happen. because
she was such a nice lady and he was fond of her. By the way,” she
added, “we’re very pleased with the way you're working out.”
At that I began to feel better, and the piece of bread that was
stuck slid the rest of the way down my esophageal tract.
When we got upstairs, Marsha asked me to sign her back in. I
guess that she did not want to encounter Miss Lupowitz, who had
come in while we were eating. I found her rolling up her calendar
with the picture of Bucharest on it. She put it in a large box
JUDITH HIGGINS 185

of other papers, little jars of medicine, and wax flowers. ‘Then

she came over to me. My shoulders tensed: Now what?
“Goodbye, Miss Murphy. I am sorry that I had so little time to
talk to you.” She paused, adjusting the box under her arm. “I must
think about where I shall go now. I’ve — I’ve always worked close
to doctors, you see. My father was one, in Rumania” — she laughed
— “before the Germans decided suddenly he doesn’t know any-
thing about medicine anymore. I don’t know what Ill do now.
I’ve sometimes thought if I wouldn’t be working in this hospital, I
would die. I suppose that’s a foolish idea, isn’t it?”
I looked up at her, my fingers remaining poised over the keys.
She seemed to be waiting for me to reply. I could think of nothing
to say but “Well, goodbye.”
When she had gone, I took her NOBLOT Thinrite. I had
wanted it for weeks, and I needed it now. The nurses were com-
ing in constantly with specimens, and it was I, now, who had to en-
ter the patients’ names in the surgical book.
The next day I acquired something bigger. Marsha said, “Why
don’t you sit at the IBM now? There’s no reason why you
shouldn’t have it. It must be tiring typing on a manual all day.”
How kind she was to me! I felt shy but happy. “Yes, but what
if she comes back or something?”
Marsha tweaked my hair. ‘Miss Lupowitz isn’t coming back,”
she said, smiling.
Well, I thought, settling myself in, Miss Lupowitz certainly dis-
appeared fast. But that’s Life. You have to adjust to change or go
under.
“They fired that Rumanian woman,” I told Mommy that night.
I had saved the news until after supper. “I have her IBM now, and
my shoulders don’t hurt a bit. They had to let her go. She just
wasn’t meeting the deadlines.”
 HELEN HUDSON

The Tenant

(FROM THE VIRGINIA QUARTERLY REVIEW)

AFTER IT HAPPENED, the neighbors all said they’d always known

there was something queer about Mr. Markham: the way he came
down stairs, hugging the walls as though making way for some-
body else: his little inverted smile that kept his teeth covered up
and his pleasure to himself: the way he played organ music on the
Vic all the time, turning the whole damned place into a church
seven days a week, so that Mr. Dundee, drinking beer in his kitchen
below, felt he was committing sacrilege in his stocking feet. And
Mr. Kimmel, who lived alone, remembered, suddenly, that he had
seen Mr. Markham on a bench in the middle of the Green one
Wednesday at two in the afternoon. He was staring steadily at the
ground between his shoes as though trying to decide where to leave
his print.
But at the time, Mr. Markham was merely a pale, thin man in
a gray suit and a narrow tie who lived in the attic with his wife,
a good-looking man though his face seemed, somehow, more like
a slightly smudged copy than the real thing. And there was some-
thing faintly foreign about him — in his careful nod and his formal
walk and the huge distances that surrounded him, not to be
bridged by his gentle “Good morning” nor the length of his out-
stretched arm. They never learned where he was from. They only
knew that he did not seem to belong here. He had the terrible
courtesy of the permanent guest.
His accent told them nothing. Nor his name.
“Markbam?” Mrs. Dundee, the landlady said. “Markham?”
 The Tenant
188
the hoe?”
“Edwin Markham?” Mr. Kimmel said. “The man with
h in the
Mr. Kimmel was an educated man who taught Englis
fellows and
high school. He was constantly disappointed in his
his native town in frustra tion, longing for
walked the streets of
the company of Cyrano and Prince Andrey and Lord Jim.
Mrs. Dundee said. “Peter, I think.’’ She had
“No, not Edward,”
seen his hands. They were slender and smooth as though they had
. It was his wife,
lifted nothing heavier. than a knife to cut corners
she thought, who carried the hoe.
even seen
The Markhams were a quiet couple. No one had
them move in. They simply appear ed one evening like old ten-
ants, wiping their feet in the dusk. They were neither tall nor
short, young nor old, a discreet couple protect ing their privacy
by avoiding extremes. They held hands on the mat and wiped
their feet.
them
Mrs. Dundee, looking out of her kitchen window, saw
Mr. Markham , thin
standing there, saw the long, white face of
and smooth as a piece of worn soap. “He needs a_ beard,”
she thought. But imagining him with a beard, she found his face
suddenly too familiar, though she could not think whom he re-
sembled. She only knew that the vision pained. She sat down,
for she was big with still another child she did not want. She turned
her head from the sight of his smooth, helpless face and the stocky
legs of his wife.
Mrs. Dundee had five children, grown up, now, and moved
away, strangers who came back, sometimes, to eat her onion pie
and mangle her Sundays. They gave her nothing but a peck on
the cheek, though they had once occupied her like a house, pos-
sessing her to the fingertips until there was no nook or cranny in
her life they had not appropriated, no minute they did not fill.
And now, when she should have had herself to herself, letting only
air and sunshine into the empty rooms with the hours slack on the
line, now there was this new burden uncurling inside her, invading
more and more of her, until even her ankles were swollen and her
breath writhed beneath the weight.
“Jesus,” her husband said, looking at the pair on his steps. “That
the new tenants?” He was a big, impatient man who resented the
buttons on his shirt and cursed his laces instead of tying them. He
lived in terror of disease and the fires of Hell. He had found reli-
HELEN HUDSON 189

gion in the army during the war, had grabbed it as he grabbed his
gun, fearing some sudden movement in the bush. And he
treated his God as he treated his sergeant, with much spit and pol-
ish and an occasional beer, though he was not above going AWOL
when His back was turned. Still, no matter how much Mr. Dundee
drank on Saturday night, he was always in his pew on Sunday,
groveling before his Maker on flannel knees, weeping in the Con-
fessional. He felt his body regularly for “lumps” and embraced
parenthood without planning. He regarded the couple on his steps
with distaste.
“Christ, he’ll be shouting me up those stairs three times a day
which, as we both know, my heart won’t stand. Looks the type
can’t change a light bulb by himself.”
“Never mind,” Mrs. Dundee said. “She’ll change them.” For
Mrs. Markham was a stocky woman with thick, black hair and
dark eyebrows, and the hand in her husband’s was as big as his.
It was she who had counted out the money that first time, smooth-
ing the bills carefully. But she could not make them stretch far
enough. Mrs. Dundee did not tell her husband that the Markhams
were behind in their rent before they even moved in. For he had
enough to keep him angry: the machine at the shop, the trash on
Monday nights, the snow that covered his sidewalk, and the leaves
that came from all over town to settle on his dollop of lawn. Mrs.
Dundee turned to look at the new couple, patient and peaceful
and self-possessed, holding hands on her mat.
The Markhams lived in the attic where the rooms were private
as pockets, with low ceilings and sloping walls. And their life was
a series of small gestures: they tended their plants every day and
emptied their garbage every night and twice on Sunday. Some-
times they sat in a corner of the backyard with the evening gentle
in their laps, and once in a while they walked to the mailbox half
a block away. They had no radio and no television, only the
phonograph which never told them of revolutions in the Middle
East nor what the weather would be. They bought one stamp at a
time and a quarter of a pound of butter once a week.
Every night she washed his shirt and her blouse and their under-
wear, while he polished his shoes, turning the left one over to ex-
amine the hole. She lived in dread of that hole but could do noth-
ing about it. He had only one pair of shoes. And she knew that
 190 The Tenant

be
slowly the hole would grow and grow until one day there would
nothing but her knitted sock to shield his step.
While she ironed or washed the kitchen floor or tightened loose
buttons, he would read aloud to her: Schiller in German or Baude-
laire in French and even Dante in Italian, crowded with gestures.
knew the
And though she did not understand the words, she
raph, opera now, Mozart and
meaning. Often he played the phonog
Verdi and Donizetti,. singing all the parts, pacing up and down
of
with his head back and the long, pale neck rising like a beam
light from his open shirt. And she would stop to watch him, think-
ing how handsome he was and how talented, wondering again ai
the miracle of finding him all alone and uncommitted that day
at the Frick, staring at Goya’s tough little blacksmiths with his
head back and his profile raised, clear and clean and white on the
crest of the afternoon.
‘How strong they are,” he had said suddenly, without turning
his head. She looked around but they were all alone except for the
guard at the far end of the gallery. She could hear the fountain
in the courtyard splashing softly.
“And how brutal,” she said.
He turned and looked at her then, and she saw his smooth, un-
cluttered face with the features so carefully laid. And she was
aware of the jumble of her own face, made up of stray, unrelated
parts, of whatever was left over after six brothers and sisters. But
he did not seem to see the confusion, only the strength that joined
it and the yearning that covered it like a skin, binding the pieces
together, making it a unit, a whole, a face. Her face. A face to
be loved. He took her hand and led her out of the museum into
the sunshine that stretched like cloth of gold all up and down Fifth
Avenue. That was ten years ago. He was thinner now and paler,
farther than ever from Goya’s tough little blacksmiths. But he was
handsome still, she told herself fiercely, as though his beauty were
some precious possession given to her for safekeeping.
“What is he, your husband?” Mr. Kimmel, the high school
teacher, asked, meeting Mrs. Markham in the hall one day. He was
a long, lanky man with a thin face, pointed as a paper knife, ready
to slit her open. The tip of his nose seemed to quiver with curiosity
and the ends of his red bow tie were stiff with attention.
“What is he?” Mrs. Markham stared. How could she possibly
HELEN HUDSON 19]

tell this man who reached so high only to look down, what Peter
was. He was a man, her husband. He was a lover and a scholar
and a drinker of wine, an explorer by day and a poet by night. But
that, she knew, was not what Mr. Kimmel meant.
“I mean,” he said slowly, impaling her with his chin, “what does
he do?”
“Do?” Why, he does a million things, she thought. He loves
and laughs and grows plants in the attic and remembers the words
of the dead. He observes the points of the compass and the inter-
vals in a chord. How could she possibly number all the things her
husband did?
“I mean, of course,” Mr. Kimmel said, giving her the sharp ends.
of his smile, “what does he do for a living?”
But Mrs. Dundee came out of her apartment just then and asked
Mr. Kimmel would he mind, please, not keeping his empty bottles
in the hall. Mr. Dundee was afraid someone might trip over them.
“For Christ sake, keep the passage clear,” had been his exact words.
He wasn’t going to kick the bucket before his time and go straight
to Hell with a broken neck and his sins whole upon him because
of Horace Kimmel’s 7-Up bottles. Why didn’t he drink beer like a
man and throw the cans away?
Mrs. Markham escaped up the stairs.
Peter was sitting in the big chair by the window with his feet
on the hassock. His head was back, nodding to Bach. She saw the
long, curved line of his throat and the afternoon sun like a golden
pillow behind his head. She saw the hole in his left shoe. It was
getting bigger. She knelt suddenly and put her finger in it.
“Never mind,” he said, rumpling her hair. ‘Tomorrow I shall
find a glorious job filing away all the x’s and y’s and z’s of the world
and we shall both have new shoes. Dozens of shoes. Shoes for
breakfast and shoes for dinner and shoes for kicking off under the
table. Shoes for walking and shoes for running and shoes for waltz-
ing and weeping and watching parades. And a special silver pair
for you— just to sit down and do nothing in.”
She smiled and shook her head. Tomorrow she would ask at the
Public Library for extra work. She did not want to discuss his
job. She did not want to think of that agonizing search, that fearful
attempt to shrink and squeeze and shred himself into bits to fit
an office drawer. He must not go on getting thinner and paler,
 192 The Tenant

filing away his breath with the x’s and the y’s and the z’s. If they
were Beauty and the Beast, let her be the beast of burden as
well, walking back and forth to the bus stop with her lunch in a
paper bag, carrying the books to the shelves and the paycheck home
on Friday nights, dragging the world on a leash. It was easier far,
than watching Peter forever tripping on the lead. She lowered
herself to the floor and put her head on the hassock where she
could not see the hole in, his shoe.
Yet, it was strange that she should be the one to wind the clock
and count the change. For, inside her trim, stocky body, her
nature was soft and passive. She was, basically, so lazy. And
though she moved briskly on her sturdy legs, she longed to fold
them up under her forever. All her life she had looked for some-
one with strong arms, someone who would lift her with ease and
settle her in the proper place like a cushion on a couch. But peo-
ple saw only her hard, functional body. She had run to the butcher
for her mother and up and down stairs for her older brothers and
sisters. By the time she met Peter she had run through years— of
working and waiting and breathless affairs that seemed brief as the
trips to the corner store. But no one, until Peter, had ever really
looked at her face.
Only Peter had seen it, had sorted out the items: the large, dark
eyes and the straight brows and the long, steady nose. Only Peter
had perceived the pattern. He had taken her home and put her
on the couch, among his paintings and his records and his books
with the blinds closed against too much sun. For a long time she
stayed there, passive as a pillow, while he brought the trays and
poured the wine and filled her lap with gifts. She let him turn
the records and open the books and pull the bills from his wallet
while she lay still with her legs curled up. He had even rushed out
to buy a ring the moment she reported she was pregnant. And
when she lost the baby two months later, they were already mar-
ried.
He carried her home again and put her back on the couch. But
the room looked different now, with gaps in the bookcase where
the leather-bound sets had been and the paintings gone from the
walls. The sun, shut out, sulked permanently behind the clouds
and a cold wind rattled the blinds. Peter turned over the last record
and closed the last book. He had, he announced cheerfully, just
HELEN HUDSON 193

gone through the last of Markham’s millions. “Fifty years to

accumulate and five to spend.” Only he wished he had spent it with
her. They had thirty dollars left in the bank and five cans of
smoked oysters on the shelf. She got up at last. She had a new
name and a new ring on her finger. But she had given him noth-
ing, not even a baby. Instead there were the pawn tickets and the
gaps in the wall to show how she filled his life.
But she had made it up to him, she thought now, crouched
on the floor with her cheek against his leg. She had ridden the
buses and brought back the checks and urged him to stay home,
listening to Bach and Schiitz and Frescobaldi with the blinds up
and the sun pouring in. Or to walk in the park in his starched
shirt and narrow tie with the hole still only a pinprick in his left
shoe. For nothing must disturb the symmetry of his face; nothing
new must be added to upset or disarrange it. Yet she knew his
features had changed already, shoved by the worry she had
brought.
For he tried, God knows how he tried. He went through the
Want Ads every night and downtown every morning with his collar
buttoned tight to steady his chin and his hair covered by a dark
gray hat. But when he came home his face had that slightly blurred
look, as though he had been shaken too hard.
He had, occasionally, found jobs, all kinds of jobs: sit-down
jobs and stand-up jobs, indoor jobs and outdoor jobs, crowded
jobs and lonely jobs. Once he ran an elevator in a big department
store where the women pressed so close he could feel the bulge of
their garters against his leg and smell the details of their secret
lives: the cocktail and the Kotex and the hair color. A few days
more and he would recognize the odor of pregnancy and meno-
pause. But on the fifth day he took the car to the third floor (lin-
gerie, Lady-in-Waiting, Bridal Bower) , opened the doors and stepped
out. He never went back.
Once he worked in a newspaper office where he carried papers
from one desk to another, running all the way. For time, in that
office, cut corners. The hours never waited out their sixty minutes
and the clock trembled on the wall. The typewriters screamed and
shook with rage and the men shouted and sweated and at four
o'clock in the afternoon the water cooler in the hall gurgled con-
temptuously and shot two paper cups at him. He went home with
 194 The Tenant

a raging fever and three phones ringing in his ear. But the quiet
jobs drove him wild too, sitting at a desk behind a wall, pounding
words like nails until at last the wall split, letting a wedge of sky
drop in. The whispering would begin then that Mr. Markham
in Promotion was talking to himself. The next day he was fired.
“Maybe a job outdoors, in the country,” he said one evening
when the trees were beginning to put out buds like tiny wings and
the sun bounced against the clouds and the whole park seemed
ready to jump up and take off, leaving only the stone buildings
walling them in and the cement hard under their feet.
But it was almost fall before they found a place where they
were hired as caretakers with a two-room apartment over the
garage and no heat at all except from the wood stove in the
kitchen. Peter chopped trees and spread fertilizer and cleaned the
stables. By Christmas he had lost ten pounds and one toe in the
mower and was coughing steadily. She longed to help him but
dared not. He would only say he could manage and she had
enough to do polishing silver and waxing the floors and scrubbing
out the closets. Instead, she cried herself to sleep and removed
the finish from every piece of furniture in revenge. After New
Year’s they left.
It was a deadly progress, up through Westchester and the Con-
necticut Valley where the large estates waited with winter faces:
the scratchy hedges and the rutted driveways and the trees clawing
the sky. It lasted until the next fall. By then Peter was painfully
thin, even to his hair which changed the shape of his head, giving
him a more worn fragile look, with the gray like a tarnish on the
gold. And his features had begun to take on that faint, slightly
smudged appearance of a carbon too far from the original.
This town, she felt, was their last hope, this small university
town with a patch of green at its center and the ivy gripping the
past. Here, surely, Peter would be safe, in the unused silence of
the stacks and the quiet of the streets. And, indeed he had found
a job, he told her one night, in the map section of the University
Library where he breathed daily upon the corners of the world and
slid the continents into their drawers.
But after two weeks, Mr. Dundee, coming off the early shift at
three in the afternoon, heard the organ music again and com-
plained that so much noise with his beer was giving him ulcers.
 HELEN HUDSON 195

He carried the can to the bathroom, slamming the door. Mr.

Kimmel, with a batch of themes under his arm, stopped to speak
to Mrs. Dundee hanging out the wash. What kind of a job was it,
he wondered, that brought Mr. Markham home so early? Mrs. Dun-
dee went on pinning up her husband’s flannel underwear. She
looked at Mr. Kimmel’s drawn-out face, drooping at the end of his
overstretched body. Poor Mr. Kimmel who had to make so little
go so far. “I don’t know,” she said, bending to the basket. “Some-
thing to do with maps, I think. At the University. Brain work,
probably. Like you, Mr. Kimmel. You don’t work any eight-hour
day either.”
Mr. Kimmel snorted and kicked a clothespin across the lawn.
But he was a man alone, with no one to hang out his wash or no-
tice when he came home. And his long, skinny body, strung up
every fifty minutes for the benefit of hostile students, was riddled
with sneers. Coming home in the afternoon, carrying his cans of
soup and a package of cold meat, he would see the Dundees’ pa-
jamas rubbing legs on the line and hear the Markhams’ phono-
graph wrapping them up together inside the full, flowing chords.
And he would be aware of the intimacies that crowded the other
apartments, leaving his cold and bare. He would fiddle with the
thermostat and thank God his place didn’t smell of hair spray and
stale giggles. Then he would sit down, loosen his tie, and cry be-
tween his fingers before warming up the soup and slicing the cold
meat. So he said nothing, now, but merely picked up Mrs. Dundee’s
empty basket and carried it into the house. But, as he announced
later, he knew there was something funny going on. Strange that
poor little Mrs. Markham never noticed.
But she just ran up the stairs as usual shouting, ‘Hi, darling,”
before she was even through the door. “How was your day?”
“African,” he said and smiled. “Deserts and jungles and yellow
rivers sliding through the forests with closed lids.” But she saw the
gaps in the bookcase. The plants had been watered and the table
set and the pile of records beside the phonograph was high enough
to reach through the afternoon. “And some exotic greens for you,”
he went on, handing her the old, wrinkled bills.
That night, opening a kitchen drawer, she found the bundle of
pawn tickets way at the back, thick as a deck of cards. The book-
cases, she realized, were almost all empty, with most of the books
 The Tenant
196

lying flat as though trying to fill up the spaces. Soon he would have
to start on the records and Mr. Dundee would go mad at the sound
of a single fugue rotating endlessly through the afternoon. But
what would happen when there was nothing left to pawn, when
he could no longer pretend, no longer save what was left of his
poor, ravaged face? He was paler than ever now and his features
blunter, as though they were being rubbed away. And the hole in
his left shoe was big as a quarter. He was disappearing before her
very eyes and she could do nothing to hold him. She felt a sudden
twist of fear. She ran and put her arms around him and realized
how tired she was. She was not really holding him at all, only
leaning. She felt him stiffen and his arms tighten in support.
And something moved across his pale, blurred face, something
that made the features seem sharper and clearer as though they
had been suddenly shaken back into place. She closed her eyes.
The next morning, Mrs. Dundee sat in her tiny May garden
while the last of an even half-dozen children completed itself in
her womb. She felt stuffed and stretched, her insides crowded
together, pushed aside to make room for somebody else. She could
almost feel the sharp little nails and the petulant fists and the hard,
round knees pressing her like a floor. Above her the petals of a
magnolia tree were opening gently, not troubling the twigs, and
the crocuses came up without a gash. But she would be crushed
and pounded by pain, squeezed like a tube and, finally, ripped
apart.
She saw the Markhams walking hand in hand to the bus stop,
their very flesh and bones interlaced, tied together by an intimacy
she had never known. For though she had mingled her blood with
so many and housed them under her heart, they had never really
taken her in. And now she was all alone with only another stran-
ger waiting to be released. Her husband, who had never found
his proper place in this world and lived in terror of the next,
had no wish to be attached to anyone. He kept his hands free,
joining them only to each other— in prayer. She saw Mr. Kimmel
hurrying down the street with his syllabus and his texts and his
grade book, to outline the courses and rank the students. Without
them he would have no sense of direction, no standard of measure-
ment. But the Markhams had a whole world caught between their
locked fingers.
HELEN HUDSON 197

She got up at last, to bake a pie and lay in the beer and run a
bath. For it was the first of May, a day for dancing and flower bas-
kets and ideological parades. But for her it was the day to collect
the rent. She hated it yet treated it with respect, bathing and
dressing and even using a little scent to drown out the smell of
naked money. She had never had tenants who paid automatically
and Mr. Dundee suspected the stairs.
She preferred to do it before dinner, beginning with the Mark-
hams, before Mrs. Markham came home. Mr. Markham always
smiled at her, uncovering his teeth and welcoming her in. She
would walk through his door to the sound of the organ and sit
down in peace by the window. She never stayed long nor could
she remember what they said against that curtain of chords. She
never even knew whether he had paid until she examined her
left pocket, hours later. She only knew that, for a little while, she
was no longer Mrs. Michael Dundee, grotesquely big with child at
forty-nine, whose large red hands reached, periodically, for other
people’s money. She was, instead, Maryanne, bearing nothing but
her own name, a soft, girlish, graceful name, and her own spirit,
and smelling faintly of a mild scent behind the ears.
At noon she heard the organ music begin but by three, when her
husband came home, the sound had stopped. “Thank God for a
bit of peace,” he said. “This is the last time I'll have atheists in my
house, mucking up the week, playing church music to God-knows-
what purpose and not so much as a nod in the other direction in a
year of Sundays. Get them out! Tell them they’ve got till the
end of the month. Then —out! I won’t have the Lord insulted
in my own house.” He sat down and drank his beer in the kitchen.
She saw the bulges and bumps of his stocking feet. She went out
and stood on the porch with one arm around the post. She laid
the other across her stomach and prayed that the new child would
be small and gentle and leave God to His own devices.
Mr. Kimmel came up the street with his pointed chin, sharp
enough to draw his own blood, resting between the spurts of his
red bow tie. “Ah, Madame La Concierge,” he said. He paused and
cocked his head as though listening for the phonograph. “No re-
cital this p.m.? No Passions or Chorales or Oratorios to douse the
day and lift the spirits? Pity. But perhaps May Day, being essen-
tially a pagan affair, is deemed inappropriate. .. .” He stopped
 198 The Tenant

abruptly. “And speaking of inappropriate, Mrs. Dundee, do you

know what our musical friend does for a living? Do you know
what he really is? A janitor, my dear Mrs. D. Yes, indeed. A jani-
tor. I just learned that from a friend of mine who works at the
University and saw him mopping the latrine. But he couldn’t even
do that right. They fired him three weeks ago. Curator of maps,
my foot.” He laughed. “It was mops, Mrs. D. Not maps. Mops!
Mops! Imagine our elegant, aristocratic, musical Mr. Markham
mopping latrines. And couldn’t even do that right.” He went in-
side still laughing, leaving the afternoon behind him rolled up in
a dirty rag. At the foot of the Cross, Mrs. Dundee thought, Mr.
Kimmel would remember that Jesus was a carpenter and wonder
if his nails went straight.
She stood hugging the porch post and felt a sudden pain, felt
the child inside begin to wrench free. She would not be able to
collect the rent after all. She would not see Mr. Markham before
she left. She would have liked to say goodbye to him before sub-
mitting to that terrible struggle, that needless tug-of-war, as if she
and the baby were fighting each other, striving for different ends,
causing so much unnecessary pain. She wondered if the baby felt
it too. She turned and went into the house but the pain had
stopped now. Perhaps she might go up for just a moment, not to
collect the rent but simply to say goodbye, to carry the touch of his
palm to the labor room and his smile to cover her child. She began
to climb the stairs but it seemed strangely quiet without the phono-
graph. It was earlier than her usual visits. He might be napping.
She went back to her own apartment and lay down on the bed,
waiting for the pains to start again, waiting for the organ to sound.
She could not know that upstairs Mr. Markham was waiting for
her.
At five-thirty Mrs. Markham came home hurrying down the
street. ‘Tonight she did not stop to wipe her feet but ran up the
three flights of stairs. At her door she paused, missing the sound
of music. Only silence reached her, heavy-handed, weighting her
down. She turned the knob and took a long step in, as if to avoid
something nasty on the threshold.
The plants had been watered and the phonograph was open,
though only a single record lay on the table beside it. The book-
cases were completely bare and an irritable wind moved across the
HELEN HUDSON 199

shelves. She shivered. Otherwise the apartment seemed exactly

the same, except for a faint smell of soap and shaving lotion and
the heavy silence, denting the cushions. The chair by the window
was empty.
“Hi, darling,” she called. But her voice bumped against the
shelves and settled there. There was no answer. She began to
walk slowly through the rooms, a scream gathering at the back of
her throat. The apartment was spotless and frighteningly neat
like a motel in the afternoon. In the kitchen the floor was still
damp and the dinner table was bare and smelled of furniture
polish. She found him at last in the tiny, unfinished room at the
end of the hall.
She found him there, hiding or waiting, in his starched shirt and
his good gray suit, revolving slowly. He was stretched out high
above her, beyond reach, beyond touch of the ground, with his
head brushing the roof and his feet in mid-air.
He would never again wipe his shoes on the mat, holding her
hand. He would never again bring the Church to Mr. Dundee or
the peace of his palm to Mrs. Dundee, reluctant to take his rent.
He hung like an old, discarded coat in a back room at the end of
the hall, out of his wife’s way forever, leaving her a spotless apart-
ment and the pawn tickets to be redeemed and a bundle of cash
in the kitchen drawer. He hung like a crucifix on the wall, so far
above her that she could see the soles of his feet. She saw the hole
in his left shoe. It was enormous. She began to scream.
She kept on screaming while she ran to the kitchen for a chair
and back again for a knife. She screamed for fifteen minutes by
the clock, Mr. Kimmel reported later. And she was still screaming
when Mrs. Dundee finally reached her. But by then she had cut
him down and was on her knees beside him, untying his left
shoe.
\\
 LEO E. LITWAK

In Shock

(FROM PARTISAN REVIEW)

THE WAR AGAINST GERMANY took a bad turn; several divisions

along the Belgian border were overrun; replacements were needed.
So finally my time had come. What a relief to be drafted. I was
ready for war. They took me from a college campus where I had
been allowed to practice the liberal arts and sent me to a camp in
South Carolina.
I had no talent in the medical line but they made me an aid-
man. I wore Red Cross brassards pinned at each shoulder. My
steel helmet was marked with red crosses on a white field. I bore
pistol
two kits suspended from a shoulder harness, anchored by a
ammonia capsules, small com-
belt. My kits held gauze bandages,
bandage scissors, Merthiola te, sulfa
presses, belly compresses,
packets, sodium amytol tablets, a hypodermic needle for blisters,
tags for the wounded and morphine Syrettes for shock.
Each day after morning calisthenics, we sat baking in a rubble
field, dusted by South Carolina clay, while noncoms lectured us on
the aidman business. I was told all that might happ— en from
blisters to amputation s the proper responses.
— and For blisters
draw the fluid, clean with Merthiolate, cushion with gauze. For
morphine
amputations, apply a tourniquet, cover the stump, inject
keep him
to prevent shock. Get the patient in shock position and
warm. I learned the venereal diseases from clap to lymphogranu-
I alone
loma inguinale. Bare literacy was an achievement for most.
But no one was fooled. The least
volunteered the right answers.
give injection s, apply splints. I
literate of them could draw blood,
 202 In Shock

had no talent for it. I couldn’t even do a proper job bandaging a

compliant buddy simulating a broken clavicle. Instead of a neat
mummy, hand strapped to the chest, the upper torso swathed in
two-inch gauze, there was a tangle of loose folds, undone by the first
movement.
Sergeant Carrol, unstringing my mannequin then rewrapping
with flourishes of gauze, asked me, “How the hell did you ever get
into this outfit?”
Dewey Carrol was a sack of beef with mechanic’s hands, little
eyes in a pumpkin face, his belt notched beneath a swollen paunch.
He knew the whole repertory of bandaging. He could wrap any
part of a man. He had deft fingers and a fumbling mouth. For
lymphogranuloma inguinale he had to say “blue balls.”
I was bigger than most. I had good shoulders and could do fifty
push-ups. I ran the obstacle course on my own time in order to be
ready for the day when I’d meet the dead and dying. But I
showed small promise as a medic. My hands wouldn’t serve me. We
practiced giving each other injections, angling the needle for the
different shots —subcutaneous, intramuscular, intravenous. I
didn’t flinch when my novice buddy punctured my arm. When I
jabbed in return I pierced a vein and stained his forearm with a
bruise.
Dewey Carrol said, “With hands like that you got a tough job
eating breakfast. Too bad you can’t work with your tongue. Then
you’d be champ.” I laughed with him, agreeing to appear as a
clown.
Dewey wasn’t alone in taking that line. The other GI’s spotted
me as an eager-beaver college boy, trying to get ahead with big talk
in lieu of physical grace. They were as suspicious of me as if I were
queer. Yet I could take as much punishment as the best of them.
I never fell out on a march. I made good time around the obstacle
course. I could bear to look at anything. I was even ready to look
at dead men. I knew that I could make myself very still and cold,
and so long as I didn’t stir nothing would offend me. If they didn’t
ask my help I'd be fine. I could always trust my mouth to distract
others from my blunders.
Joe Witty didn’t have to rely on his mouth. He was the other
college boy in the outfit, a premed student from the University
EROLE. LITWAK 203

of Michigan. He was a tall, wiry Irish boy, long-faced, with a hard

chin. He had no intention of allowing anyone to treat him as a
clown. He volunteered no answers. He respected the laconic
tradition of our American knighthood. He only offered his judg-
ment when it was asked. And then he was authoritative. He was
helped by a fine baritone voice whose tone was more convincing
than any good argument. When he took over drill we marched
for him. He was aimed for Officer Candidate School after basic
training. He was a gentleman private who condescended to non-
coms. Dewey Carrol scraped low for Witty, recognizing future brass
and preparing the ground for handouts. Witty meant to rise and he
kept the men in line. He didn’t want screwups in any outfit he
was in. Anyone who lagged in preparing for inspection got
reamed by Witty. He looked like a fighter. He had clever hands.
I admired Witty even though he steered shy of me. He was dis-
gusted, I suppose, by my fumbling. Perhaps he didn’t want anyone
to confuse us. He wanted it made clear that he was a different sort
of collegian.
I wasn’t liked. That I knew. I didn’t know how much until
one day, after a speed march, we lined up naked in the latrine,
waiting a turn at the shower room. Nine miles in two hours, up a
dirt road, one hundred degrees of a naked sun, every man lobster
red, first striding in cadence, then jogging, beginning to gasp
early in the game, wobbling under the burden of full packs, trailed
by an ambulance that inched up on stragglers and accumulated the
fallen. I pushed for my shower, grumbling like the rest, but
pleased to have outsuffered the whole lot. We called to those al-
ready in the shower to hurry it up. Joe Witty, about to enter the
shower room, heard only my voice and it triggered his revulsion.
“Step in here and I'll kick the shit out of you.”
I followed him into the shower room. It was steamy. We slid
along duckboards. Witty shoved me against the wall and hauled
back. Then he dropped his fist.
“Why get in trouble over you?”
He said you as though I were vermin. When he hauled back to
slug me my arms were numb at my sides. [ stayed in the shower
room after he left. None of the boys looked at me. When I came
out Witty was drying himself with a khaki towel.
 204 In Shock

“Let’s go behind the barracks, Witty.”

“I’m not getting in trouble over you.” He again said you in that
contemptuous tone.
“You pushed me.”
He left the latrine. “He won’t fight,” I said, but no one was in-
terested in my side of the argument.
I was so numb that if we’d have gone beyond the barracks I
could only have pawed him.
I went to his bed. He was in khaki shorts, putting on khaki
socks. He was lean with ropy muscles.
“You pushed me.”
“So what?”
“Fight me, Witty.”
“Anytime. In the gym. With gloves.”
If I’d answered a challenge that way, they’d have put me down
as yellow. But in the case of Witty it was just a knight refusing to
credit a knave. They were pleased by my humiliation, no mistaking
that. It was evident in blank looks when I hunted for support.
I had a friend, Jason Diedrich, a clerk in Headquarters Com-
pany. We met in the music room of the post USO. He introduced
me to his crew, three Harvard boys, also with Headquarters. They
maintained a bookish world in their off-hours. I read Nightwood
to share their vocabulary. It was a book of loonies. A wise man
crawled in woman’s clothing. Keening ladies embraced. A queer
book, a queer crowd, but I wasn’t put off by that queerness. With
everything about to crack under that Carolina sun, the book only
seemed a foreshadowing.
I went to Jason for relief. “My impulses aren’t good,” I told
him. ‘Why didn’t I swing? I couldn’t move. I stood there as if I
couldn’t be insulted. By the time it gets through to me it’s too late.
I’m numb.”
“Get out of it, Arthur,’ Jason advised me. He spoke with pre-
cision. He deliberated before he spoke. His voice was high-pitched.
He wore spectacles, a raw, lumpy face perched on a long throat. I
was impressed by his calm. I never found him short of advice. He
looked brand-new, only half-made, hair just beginning to sprout
on his chin and upper lip. Yet he claimed an ancient tradition. He
had a monkish faith in the liberal arts. His model was a Frére
mEOe tse ink
tTWA K 205

Lupus Servatus who preserved Ovid despite a shortage of parch-

ment for more pious work. This monk faked allegiance to boors
in order to save what he loved. And Jason, too, wanted to save
what he loved. He lapsed into protective shock during the work-
ing day, appearing servile and unimportant. After hours he at-
tended to the French symbolist poets. He read Baudelaire, Rim-
baud, Valéry, Mallarmé.
Jason invited me to join their otherworldly retreat at Headquar-
ters. He had pull. I, too, could become a clerk. They had a cozy
thing going. They had each other during the day. They had their
own bedroom in the HQ barracks. To Jason, the war was a hold-
ing operation, an intermission between his junior and senior years
at Harvard.
I'd invested too much in the war to settle for anything less than
combat. I’d so often fantasied my ordeal that to stop now, before
anything was proved, would have left me dreamy.
I kept my eye on Witty. He, too, flaunted being a college boy
but somehow he didn’t antagonize. He led the current events
discussion in our Information and Education classes. He rallied
us against the traitor, John L. Lewis. Those goldbrick miners were
striking for a larger share of the pie while we were stuck in the
army getting sixty-five a month. Those slackers were making hay
with the girls. That was how Witty, the college boy, saw current
events. He lived in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, a fancy place. His
father was a big-shot Detroit surgeon. Witty had never worked a
day in his life. About women he was very collegiate, copping feels
at USO dances. And yet he lectured these red-necks and slum kids
about what a rotten deal it was to be deprived the earnings of
sweaty labor and other men’s wives. He took the words right out of
Dewey Carrol’s mouth. Dewey Carrol accepted the word of the
nobleman. He didn’t give any credit to frauds, though, and he
clearly spotted me as a fraud.
“You sure do talk, don’t you, boy?”
That shrewd peasant. He understood that my gabbiness dis-
guised a lack of grace.
I saw Witty at a USO dance go straight for a hostess who was
officer material. He took charge, a confident dancer. He made her
dip with him. He swung her out and back. He ended by forcing
 206 In Shock

arms behind, locking her hands, so that her breasts were

her
shoved against him. He was polished in everything he tried, in
contrast to me who couldn’t hit a man, shoot a man, bandage or
inoculate a man. I was afraid to touch. I knew that I could endure
being hit. I didn’t want to make the first move though.
Dewey Carrol went to Charleston once a month. “To get my
gun off,” he explained. That was the medicine Dewey prescribed
for growing boys. He took Witty with him one weekend. On their
return Witty informed the barracks that anyone who couldn’t
get laid in Charleston didn’t have man’s equipment. The pro-
cedure was to go to a hotel where the bellhops pimped.
So I went to Charleston on a weekend pass. I visited the Citadel.
I went to the Battery and looked out on Fort Sumter. I walked
through streets garlanded with filigree ironwork. I took a room in
a hotel and asked the bellhop for a woman.
“Ten bucks,” he said.
“That’s too much.” He was my age, a shrimp who lacked a chin
and was obviously shrewd enough to avoid the draft. He studied
me as if he could read my competence. I didn’t want to allow him
any advantage.
He asked how much I was willing to pay. I told him five dollars.
“Tl see what I can do.”
I lay down to kill time and it was more than time that was
killed. I could feel the freeze coming over me, the loss of feeling in
my skin, in my limbs, numb in the head, all my senses ducking
down to my belly and cowering there. I lay in my shorts and
saw myself shrivel up. I felt nothing when I touched. I stayed
awake all night but no one came. Next morning I left for camp.
The insult was unavenged and that made me fair game for any-
one in the bullying line. There was a chunky ambulance driver
named Kish. Going over the obstacle course we climbed a wall
and he gave me the hip. Then crawling through a concrete tube
he butted me with his Neanderthal head.
“What gives?” I asked.
“Move, creep.
There was a tug of war. Kish was on the opposite team. Our
anchor man fell and the other boys gave way and we slipped toward
the ditch. Then I dug in. I held against their whole team. I held
against Kish and three others. They couldn’t haul me over. When
ROM Ee) Dal rw AK 207

the rest of my team recovered we pulled Kish and his boys into the
ditch.
That night after lights were out I went to Kish’s bed and sat
down. I said, “Take hold.”
“What do you mean?”
“Get any grip you want.”
He grabbed me from behind. I braced and heaved and threw
him over my head and sprawled on him and wrapped my arm
around his throat and squeezed until he surrendered.
“You're as strong as any man in this outfit,” he said. “You don’t
have to take crap from Witty.”
We were told that when a man’s in shock, his face is gray, he’s
in a cold sweat, his pulse is fluttery, his lips purple. The blood
leaves the brain and collects in the solar plexus and elsewhere.
Blood vessels collapse. The brain brooks no starving and will per-
ish from the insult. Lift the legs, lower the head. Give plasma
to raise the pressure in the veins.
I took the challenge on Witty’s terms and we faced each other
in a corner of the gym, wearing sixteen-ounce gloves, naked save
for GI shorts. I shivered. The blood was in my belly. There was
cold sweat on my face despite the heat. The gym was a great shed
with naked steel beams, sun dazzling through clerestories. We
were beneath an elevated running track. In an opposite corner
were mats for wrestlers and tumblers. Several basketball games
occupied the center of the gym. Balls pounded, shoes thudded,
players called for balls. I heard basket rims vibrate from missed
shots.
We circled each other, alone in our corner.
I launched my arms. He jabbed. Wild swings. We circled,
clinched, pounded backs. I held tight and gasped. Just before the
whistle which summoned us to retreat, he hit me hard in the eye
with the lacings of his glove and for the first time I felt something
and swung with purpose, rapping him on the shoulder, then wind-
ing around his neck. It ended in a clinch.
“Okay,” Witty said, “it’s time.”
We didn’t shake hands. We walked to the locker room without
speaking, both of us breathless.
After the shower I looked in the mirror and saw that he had
blacked my eye.
 208 In Shock

“It’s not enough,” I told him.

“Anytime you want more,” he said.
“Now.”
“It’s time for retreat.”
My eye got worse and by the time we stood retreat I was marked
for everyone to see.
“It’s not enough,” I told Jason. “I didn’t lose. He didn’t hurt
me. I gave as good as I.got. But I’m marked.”
Jason told me to stop being foolish. “He’s not worthy of you,
Arthur. Don’t play his game. It’s unnecessary to expose yourself.”
Why did I resist, he wondered, joining my own at Headquar-
ters?
But I didn’t want to become queer. I wanted revenge for my
eye. Kish, who had learned the strength of my arms and so was a
friend, offered more congenial advice. “Don’t go to a gym. Just
clobber the stuck-up bastard.”
Dewey Carrol stuck me on extra KP and when I complained
he said, ‘““We’re changing the duty assignments. We’re starting at
the end of the alphabet.” Then why not Witty? They were going
to send Witty to a surgical technician’s school for a few weeks.
Basic training was a waste of time for so talented a kid.
When I got back from KP, I saw Witty entertaining a crowd
around his bed. I pushed through.
“What a shame you're leaving, Witty. I hate to see you go. I'll
miss you.”
“To hell with you,” he said, putting the usual stress of contempt
on the you.
“You're leaving with clear eyes. I wanted a chance to fix that.”
Witty jumped up. “Here’s your chance now. Do something.”
“In back of the barracks.”
He led the way out, swaggering for the benefit of the crowd that
followed us. They were his partisans. ‘Finish the job this time,
Joe.” “Wipe the snot off his face.” “Get the other eye, Joe.” “Don’t
forget to shut his mouth for good.”
I was bowled over by their ill wishes.
We were stopped at the door by Carrol. He told us to take our
trouble to the gym or off the post. He would personally like to see
me smeared but being a noncom he had to forgo that pleasure.
ehOo Ee aT WA K 209

Witty was steamed up by their encouragement. “All right,” he

said. “Tomorrow. In town. After retreat, you clown. See this?”
He held his fist close to my face. “I’m going to shove it down
your throat.”
“Tt ‘suits, me.’ ’ I was numb again. They were as offended by
me as though they’d stumbled across the root of evil.
Kish said to me afterwards, “You sure don’t have friends in this
outfit.” He excepted himself. He was also a foulup, a clumsy, ill-
educated loser, an obvious sucker for any malevolent noncom. He
was relieved to have another like himself. He saw my defects clearly
enough.
“You always knock,” he told me.
“I’m not the only one to bitch.”
But Kish told me that when I bitched the tone was wrong. “You
got a way of getting under a guy’s skin.”
“How?”
“Like the other night in the PX you're telling me about gas
engines. It turns out you don’t even know how to drive.”
‘“That’s just high school physics.”
“And speaking up for niggers.”
“Why should we listen to Witty? He’s no authority.”
“He’s no nigger-lover either.” Kish had my interests at heart
and ticked off my faults and I was convinced. When I thought of
meeting Witty the following night, I experienced that familiar re-
treat of my blood to the sanctuary in my belly.
I hunted for Jason to tell him to get me into Headquarters.
The Headquarters gang was in the music room, playing the
Liebestod. They weren’t bigots and saved all traditions irre-
spective of race, creed and nationality. They saved the Kraut, Wag-
ner. They were also interested in African art.
Jason was delighted with my decision. He dreamed of the day
when we’d have enough power to unmask ourselves and flail the
peasants. I was surprised at his venom. The idea of Dewey Carrol
particularly excited Jason. That frail boy was a precocious hater.
His voice became shrill, his body stiff when he thought of the
beasts who ranked above us. They should be groveling at our feet.
He was only twenty years old but knew already how to manipulate
authority by pretending to be obsequious. He despised officers
 210 In Shock

and gentlemen. He favored the black heroes of literature such as

Iago. He called Lear a gassy old man and praised the bastard Ed-
mund.
Jason’s father was a butcher by trade, a taciturn, abstracted man
who came alive in bursts of violence. He once accused Jason’s sister
of being a whore and pursued her with a cleaver. She jumped from
the second floor window and shattered her ankles. That butcher
didn’t trifle with Jason though. Jason was delicate but ferocious.
A Harvard scholarship rescued him from his family.
He dreamed of a day when our kind would be able to force a
redress of grievances. As for now, he was willing to settle for in-
visibility. We had a vantage point in the music room from which
we could see each other. That was enough.
“Get me in, Jason,” I told him. “I don’t want any war.”
The next day, while I was out on rifle range duty, Jason got the
transfer under way. The rifle range was a lazy job for a medic. I
took off my kits and lay under a tree while the men fired at targets.
When they got up from the firing line they staggered. The heat
and noise were stunning. On the right was Battle Village, sur-
rounded by mine fields and barbed wire. Men wiggled beneath the
barbed wire. Machine guns fired overhead. Dynamite blasts simu-
lated artillery. Afterwards the GI’s charged the mocked-up village,
firing at false fronts. Dummies in windows represented snipers.
Immobilized vintage tanks gave bazooka teams a target.
With these cozy sounds of battle as background, I sent my dreams
ahead to scout the terrain of war. I dreamed of what would hap-
pen if someone should cry, “Aidman!” I’d hook up my pistol belt,
run toward the wounded man, dodging shellfire, my hands on my
kits to keep them from flapping. That action was imaginable. I
could face shellfire. When I reached the wounded man, Id look.
And then what? What if it was a chest wound, the cavity pene-
trated, the lungs collapsed? Plug up the hole. With what? What if
the bandages didn’t fit? What if an artery were severed? Walk
away and let him die. I didn’t have the knack of finding pulses or
pressure points. My hands lost their feeling. Use a tourniquet. A
tourniquet tied too long meant gangrene. Any move of mine risked
another man’s life. I was unfit for that responsibility. Let them
send for Witty or Dewey Carrol. They’d plug up the hole. They’d
stop the bleeding. They had sure hands. After retreat those sure
 ISO) AR. hui 211

hands of Joe Witty’s would clobber me. Then I’d withdraw to the
music room and listen to Wagner and hold out till the end of the
war as a clerk. Everyone would be better off.
Someone shrieked. ‘‘Aidman!” Then again, “AIDMAN!” I was
almost asleep and dreamy and had imagined just this call, just this
screechy, desperate wail and I didn’t jump up, but turned on an
elbow and looked toward Battle Village. The dynamite blasts had
stopped. The machine gun had stopped. I saw a GI running
across the fields, tumbling in shell holes, running with wild arms.
He waved to me. “AIDMAN!” Raging, as though I’d done some-
thing terrible. I shivered. I stood numb as he ran up to me. He
shouted in my face, “AIDMAN!” He grabbed my shoulders, his
mouth agape, heaving air, his eyes big, his pupils dilated, his face
gray, a trim platoon sergeant from C Company with a fox face, one
of the permanent cadre who had been to Ranger school and, it was
said, could jog fifteen miles without showing the strain.
“A man got his leg blowed off. Let’s go.”
I woke the ambulance driver. We drove across the field toward
Battle Village.
A squad leader had tripped into a hole just as a dynamite charge
exploded. The sergeant said, “His leg’s off.”
TOR?
“His foot’s in the shoe.”
The ambulance launched off ruts, slammed down on the field,
the carriage groaning. The ambulance driver, saucer-eyed behind
his spectacles, his teeth clicking, hit every furrow and we bounced
high. My kits slammed my thighs. Men were clustered at the side
of a shell hole. We almost drove into them.
A lieutenant crouched over the screaming man who was covered
with a blanket. They stepped aside for me. I saw a shoe some
distance away. I pulled back the blanket and looked. He reared
and bucked. Gone at the calf. The skin pulled back up the leg,
showing the shreds of flesh. A hot, shitty smell. The skin above
was peppered. A tourniquet was tied above the knee. I untied the
tourniquet and blood spurted on the blanket. I could see raw flesh,
gristle, the artery gulping, the veins pinched shut. I retied the
tourniquet. No spurt of blood now. A slow welling. The scissors
came out and I cut away the pant leg. The Syrette came out. I
thrust the plunger into the hollow needle and broke the seal. I
 In Shock
212
zed it out like tooth-
jammed the needle into his thigh and squee
of the stump. He was
paste. I bent down and got a good smell
ng. My hand was
under my hand. I could feel the muscles jumpi
slimy where I’d touched the blanket.
We lifted him on a stretcher into the ambulance.
hing. I tried to
The ambulance driver went fast, hitting everyt
When I raised the leg to get the
figure out how to cover the stump.
ed. I yelled at the driver to slow
bandage-roll underneath he scream
down.
stump and
I took out a belly compress and placed it over the
looped the strings around the upper calf.
He screeched, ‘My balls!”
I cut away the pants and looked at his balls. Darts of powder
peppered the sac and the surrounding flesh.
I told him, “You're all right.”
a stretcher
They were waiting for us at the post hospital with
on wheels. Four orderlies carried him from the ambula nce. A
white-smocked doctor lifted the belly compress as they wheeled
him toward emergency.
him morphine,” I called after them. “An eighth of a
“T gave
grain.” They were already inside when I remembered that I had
t, give
forgotten to fill out the tag. Describe the wound, its treatmen
your name, rank, serial number and medical organization.
The ambulance driver said, “You did great.”
We returned to the rifle range but the day was finished.
They had heard back at battalion. The lieutenant who tied the
tourniquet had called to praise me.
Our CO, a Southern doctor, slapped my back. “Nice going, boy.”
Kish wanted to know what happened to the foot.
It was all so dreamy. I’d made him scream in the ambulance.
The belly compress hadn’t been neatly tied. I looped the free
strings over his leg and fumbled with the knot. A lousy job. And
yet they were awed by my audacity. I had looked at the stump and
wasn’t altered by the sight.
“l’m ready,” I told Joe Witty after retreat.
He invited me to the PX for a beer. “I understand you did a
great job out there.” He was boyish and charming. “I hear the leg
was off. Entirely off. That takes a lot of guts, Artie. Nice going,
buddy.” He tapped my arm with his fist.
meO BE. LITwAK 213

“We were going to fight.”

“Listen,” he said, his Irish face ruddy with sincerity, “I owe you
an apology.’’ His hand reached for mine and before I could pre-
vent it, my hand engaged his.
I had a bloody field jacket. That was good enough credentials
for Joe Witty. I was a bona fide medic, a soldier. What had been
put down as big talk was now reevaluated. I was to be accepted
on different terms.
Witty even became collegiate with me, spoke of campus life,
wanted to sing an old Ann Arbor tune. This hard-chinned Irish
boy was crammed to the brim with nostalgia. “Remember the old
P-Bell on Saturday nights, Artie?” He talked as if we owned a
common experience.
What a disappointment this moment I’d dreamed of in the PX.
The dream of a villain had owned my fantasies. My desperate con-
dition was remedied by something so trivial as a good word and a
slap on the back. We drank beer in the PX and Witty advertised me
as a credit to the battalion. He was no more adequate as a friend
than as a villain. I had allowed him to black my eye. I had been
numb in his presence. And now it was clear that he was only a
fool.
“You got to pay for my eye,” I told him. I interrupted him at
his mellowest. “It’s after retreat. I’m ready.”
He reached for my hand again. “Listen, old buddy, ’m really
and truly sorry about that. It was an accident.”
“But there it is, Witty. An eye for an eye.”
He told me that it had been an accident. A lucky punch. “It was
more of a backhand than a punch. I didn’t even hit you right.”
I pushed Witty against the counter of the PX. The men circled
us. Someone yelled, “Break it up.”
“Hey now,” Witty said, “what gives?” But he didn’t raise his
hands to protect himself. I hauled back my fist but couldn't hit.
“And who wants to get in trouble over you?” I asked.
He came after me, caught my arm. “I know you’re sore,” he said.
“You have every right to be. How can I convince you that I really
am sorry? Really.” And in front of the men we shook hands again.
He was a coward and a fool. Like myself.
I had squeezed a bloody stump and vanquished Joe Witty. What
achievement was that? Still, I didn’t need to withdraw to the
 214 In Shock

music room. I had earned the right to follow my dreams into

combat and there confront the dying and wait for my own death
to swoop down on me, hoping that in the penultimate moment I'd
come out of shock and scream bloody murder.
I can’t begin to tell you what a disappointment it was.
 RIGHARD McKENNA

The Sons of Martha

(FROM HARPER’S MAGAZINE)

ON THAT suip they did not have bunks and the sailors slept on
brown canvas army cots. In the tropics it was too hot to sleep in
the crew’s compartment amidships, so they set up their cots on the
well decks. Every day at one o’clock they would go to the cot locker
in the glory hole and bring up their cots and lay them, still folded,
to claim a place. They all tried to find sheltered places, but there
were not enough sheltered places to go around. The rule of the
ship was that a place belonged to the man who got there first on
that day. No man could know in the morning where he would sleep
that night or whether or not he would be rained upon in his sleep.
In his first days aboard, Reed Kinburn did not try very hard for
one of the sheltered places. He did not talk very much to anyone.
In Port Valdez it rained once or twice every night in gentle,
wandering showers that sometimes fell upon one end of the ship
and not upon the other. Green hills and darker green mangrove
swamps ringed half of Port Valdez, with no buildings or any other
sign of man visible. Kinburn liked that. The other half was a
curving reef upon which the great Pacific swells broke all day and
all night in a crested, tumbling line of white water athwart the
blue vastness. The reef was a living thing of coral, and on the
darkest nights the line of breakers along it was still a ghostly white
from living phosphorescence in the broken water. The rolling,
washing sound of it came gentled by distance to be a part of all
the sailors’ talking and also of their silences.
In his first days Kinburn spent much time looking at the reef
 216 The Sons of Martha

and at the calm water on the hither side of it. No other ship rode
at anchor there. The water was blue shading into green dappled
with lighter greens that became almost a milkiness where coral
heads neared the surface. The color pattern changed constantly
with the tides and sun angles, but it was always a pattern and al-
ways beautiful. Beyond the reef were only and always the blue
swells like titanic muscles working blindly, lifting and coming, end-
lessly from over the world’s edge.
“You ought to see it in a typhoon sometime, kid,’”’ an older sailor
told him once sardonically.
The ship was painted gray, or war color, as the sailors called it,
in unconscious memory of a time long past when white had been
peace color. The sides were waist-high steel bulwarks pierced here
and there with hawse and scupper holes and square freeing ports
with bars across them. There were no guns mounted anywhere
about the decks. There was no strain and no pain, and it was all
somehow connected with the fact that she was station ship for the
Navy island of Levanoa.
The island was larger and more populous than the solitude of
Port Valdez seemed to indicate. During the lazy afternoons the
ship’s boats took liberty parties up a hidden channel to a village
where there was a drinking place called Mama Lottie’s. From
there a road led to a much larger village where there were supposed
to be several drinking places. Few of the sailors bothered to go
ashore and Kinburn did not go at all, for a certain familiar old
reason.
To him still the most special thing about the ship was that
she was his first ship and that he had fallen in love with her name
before he had ever seen her. As with all Navy supply ships, she was
named after a star, and all those names were good ones, but Stella
Maris had seemed to Kinburn the finest one of all from the first
time he read it, typed opposite his name on a transfer list at Goat
Island. He did not yet know what he thought about the ship her-
self.

The movie that night was Janet Gaynor in something very senti-
mental that made the sailors jeer at intervals. Kinburn watched it
lying on his back on No. 4 cargo hatch, his head pillowed on his
folded-up cot. After the movie he did not join the drift back to the
RICHARD MC KENNA 217

poop deck. Instead he unfolded his cot and sat on it. He was fight-
ing a small, familiar old battle with himself.
“Come on back and have a soda pop, Kinburn,” Thorpe said,
passing. “Evergreen’s buying for the gang.”
“No, thanks. Don’t feel like one,’ Kinburn said.
On the poop deck light gleamed through the window of the ship’s
service store, which was always opened right after the movies. In-
side, a swarthy little seaman was selling ice cream and soda pop and
candy bars. The sailors moving by him, going back there, were
still mostly without names or faces for Kinburn. They were just
men in dungarees and Asiatic undershirts and tattoos and all
knowing each other but not him. He knew only a few of them
to speak to, Thorpe and Evergreen, and the big fireman Roach,
who had been assigned to break him in to his fireroom duties.
Kinburn had not reached out very far for friendship.
Some of the sailors in passing glanced curiously at Kinburn. He
had come aboard all by himself rather than with a draft of other
new men, and word had spread from the ship’s office that he had
been a hospital apprentice before his rating was changed to fire-
man third class. Both facts were enough to single him out sharply.
They did not know yet where he would shake down to in their
tight little universe. But all they saw when they glanced at him
was a slender, wiry, brown-haired young man in regulation un-
dershirt and dungarees sitting quietly on his cot. Nothing of the
struggle within him showed on his smooth boy’s face, unless it
was a tense look of his mouth or the bunched muscle along the
clean lines of his jaw.
He felt ashamed to have to fight himself over such a small thing
as a candy bar. His rule was that he would have one every third
night, and this was the third night, but the last time he had gone
up there the devil of his yearning had overcome him and he had
bought and eaten two candy bars. It was easy to slip. You could
only buy with paper tickets which came in booklets, and the swarthy
seaman had to tear them out of your book himself or they were no
good. It was very easy in the sight and smell of it all to blurt out,
“Make that two,” and then be ashamed to countermand the order.
Voices and laughter came from the poop deck. Gyp Joint, the
sailors called that shack, and Gyp Joint was the nickname of the
swarthy sailor who ran it. “Hey, Gyp Joint, open up!” they would
 218 The Sons of Martha
the lights
yell at him sometimes during the lazy afternoons. Finally
went out back there and Kinburn relaxed his jaw.
in.
Men spread cots round about, rolled out bedding, and turned
stars. If
Kinburn thought on into the darkness, under the large
, it
only the Stella Maris did not have that gyp joint, he thought
was
would be all right. It was far better than Mare Island, which
the
loaded with gyp joints and where you had to pay a dime to see
had he escaped that thing which had always been
movies. Not yet
had
an ache and later had become a shame to him as well. Once he
thought to escape at sixteen when he became strong enough to do
work. Tomorrow he would be twenty, and he was very
a man’s
strong and enduring, but he still had not escaped. 2...

“Kinburn. That you, Kinburn?”

It was Roach. His thick fingers masked the beam of his flashlight.
“Something to tell you, Kinburn. Come below. I got the watch.”
“What is it?”
“Come on down. There’s coffee. I got some sugar.”
They had to go through the engine room, down two ladders, and
into a tunnel between the boilers. It was hot and steamy in the
engine room. A clatter and groaning of pumps and the hum of the
generator drowned out the sound of the reef. The fireroom was
more open and clear of jumbled metal and the smell there was
clean and sharp of fuel oil.
“Pour me a cup, too,” Roach said. “I'll be right over.”
The coffee was in an aluminum pitcher on the steel workbench.
The cups were really thick white porcelain soup bowls from the
crew’s mess and they always had oily fingermarks on them. Kin-
burn stirred three spoons of sugar into his own coffee.
Roach was at the other end of the long, narrow space adjust-
ing the fire in the middle furnace of the steaming boiler. A single
furnace on one of the big boilers could make enough steam for
port use. Roach was bent and squinting through the peephole
while he jiggled the diffuser to make the flame as clean as he could.
The three big Scotch boilers side by side looked to Kinburn like
three huge and menacing faces. That was because their upper por-
tions beetled forward to overhang the floor plates. Three cleanout
doors on each one, painted aluminum, made two eyes and a longer,
RICHARD MCKENNA 219

narrower nose beaking down between them. Beneath each door a

circular furnace front, the middle one lower than those on either
side, made an upward-curving mouth. To Kinburn it looked like
the smirk on the face of a cannibal.
Roach came over and took his coffee. He was big and hearty,
with coarse features and coarse black hair, and something was on
his mind that he could not say easily.
“We clean firesides on number three tomorrow,” he began.
“You and me and Rothrock got to do it. Flangeface told me, right
after the movies.”
Kinburn nodded. Flangeface Hogan was the water tender first
class in charge of the fireroom. He was an older man with a face
very like the boiler faces and he seldom spoke. Kinburn feared and
disliked him and he had vowed silently that he would never wait
on Flangeface and bring him coffee, as the other firemen did. Yet
Flangeface had never once spoken to him and hardly seemed to
see him. Roach was watching Kinburn for a reaction. Kinburn
did not reveal any.
“How far you been in school, did you say?” Roach asked.
“Finished high school.”
“No college?”
“Me college? Hell, no!”
“What it takes down here in the stokehole is a strong back and a
weak mind.”
Roach was nodding approvingly, but they had been through that
before. Something else was on Roach’s mind.
“T hear scuttlebutt you just changed your rate over from hosapp,”
Roach said bluntly.
“That’s right.”
Hospital corpsmen learned early that ordinary sailors resented
them. The sailors called them pecker checkers and chancre me-
chanics and pretended to doubt that they were really men. In the
short time that he had been a common sailor himself, Kinburn
had already begun to sympathize with their attitude.
“T didn’t change my rate,” Kinburn said with difficulty. “They
changed it for me.”
“T didn’t mean nothing, only wondering was it true. And how
come they done it to you.”
“Roosevelt done it, same time he cut the pay,” Kinburn said.
 220 The Sons of Martha

all hosapps
“He kicked the veterans out of Navy hospitals. Then
a spe-
second had to change over to seaman or fireman or else take
cial order discharge.”
“You didn’t want a discharge, huh?”
“Christ, no!” Kinburn slopped coffee and Roach laughed. “In
Frisco I seen ’em sleeping in doorways and eating out of garbage
cans,” Kinburn said. “Roach, you guys out here just don’t know.”
“We hear. Guys get letters.” Roach grinned. “We know, all
right.”
It made a sudden bond between them. They talked about the
pay cut. It was really harder on the petty officers, Roach said.
They lost all their longevity too, and 15 per cent of their base pay
was a bigger bite. Flangeface was losing $34 a month. But of
course he still has $71 a month left. Kinburn was only losing $5.40
a month, but he felt a twinge of envy for Flangeface.
“Well, us third-class snipes still get our dollar a day,” Roach
said. “One day, one dollar, what the hell?’ he shrugged.
‘Dollar a day, jolly good pay, lucky to touch it—” Kinburn
broke off the quote. ‘I just wish I did have a dollar a day,” he fin-
ished bitterly.
“Got an allotment, huh?”
“Yeah.”
He did not say how much, but when the first pay list was posted
all hands would know that he had only $13 a month to keep him-
self decent in the world. He could no longer buy used clothing
cheaply, from sailors being medically surveyed, as he had done at
Mare Island. On the other hand, in Port Valdez he did not have to
fight the constant lure of liberty. He did not know yet how he was
going to make out with it.
“Sometimes I help my old man out with a fin. I got a big brother
on the railroad helps too,” Roach said. “I don’t believe in allot-
ments. Once you start one, they say the paymaster won't let you
stop it without you got permission from the other end.”
“I ain't got an old man. All I got is a mother and some little
brothers.”
“Geez, that is tough!’’ Roach shook his head. “I heard about
euys, their mothers wrote to their skippers, and their skippers or-
dered them to make out allotments.”
“IT seen it happen at Mare Island. For a fact.”
RICHARD MCKENNA 221

“Maybe they'll open up rates next quarter. This guy Roose-

velt —”
“He’s the son of a bitch closed ’em!” Kinburn broke in. He
scowled. Roach was scowling too.
“If they do open up rates, them college bastards will get ’em all,”
he said bitterly. “Them brain trusters down in the ice plant.”
They poured themselves more coffee. Roach sighed deeply.
“Well, hell!” he said. “Well, about firesides tomorrow. Come
down in your oldest suit of whites and white hat. After tomorrow
they won’t be no good for anything else.”
“Pretty dirty job, eh?”
“Hah! You got no idea! But it’s more than the dirt and it’s
more than the work. It gets you another way the first time. That’s
what I wanted to tell you. You're kind of high-strung, I thought
BeWELL Aces
“How do you mean?”
Roach screwed up his face in the effort to say it. “It gets inside
of you and underneath of you someway,” he said. “The first time
I cleaned firesides I thought I was gonna die in there.” He shook
his head and grimaced. “Might be easier if you’re braced for it.
So I wanted to tell you.”
“Well, thanks.” Kinburn was wondering if it might not be a
joke buildup, the way hospital corpsmen scared recruits with
references to the square needle and the shot in the left testicle. He
decided that it was not. “Well, thanks,” he repeated. “I'll make
out.”
“Soon as we finish and clean up we always go over to Mama
Lottie’s and drink beer till midnight,” Roach said. “It goes on
Flangeface’s bill, that’s how he wants it. So we always work like
hell. We try to get over there early and cost Flangeface all the beer
we can, for making us clean firesides.”
“T’]] drink his beer,” Kinburn said. He was finishing the last of
his coffee, rolling it with his tongue, tasting the sugar. “Well, maybe
I better go turn in,” he said.
“First tell me how come you picked being a snipe instead of a
deck ape.”
“T had a chance to buy a dress white jumper for half a buck from
a guy getting surveyed,” Kinburn said. “It already had a red watch
mark on it. So...” He shrugged and grinned.
 222 The Sons of Martha

Roach laughed heartily. “Tomorrow you gonna really gut-hate

that guy for not having a blue watch mark,” he said. “You gonna
figure that half a dollar bought you the worst deal in your whole
life.”
“Listen, Roach. I want to tell you something,” Kinburn said.
“You don’t have to believe it, but I want to tell you.” Roach so-
bered. “I made out my allotment of my own free will,” Kinburn
said. “And twice before they changed my rate I put in myself to
have it changed to seaman and they turned me down. I wanted to
go to sea, to get the hell away from there.”
“I believe you.”
“Well, good night, then.”
“Good night. Hope it don’t rain.”

Kinburn ate breakfast in undress whites spotless and smoothly

ironed, just as they had come last from the hospital laundry. He
had cut the red-cross striker’s badge off his sleeve, but much launder-
ing had left two pink impressions of it stained indelibly into the
fabric. He was not wearing underwear or socks, because he did
not want to ruin any more clothing than he could help. Roach and
Rothrock, at the same table, wore undress whites mottled yellow
and brown and with dungaree-cloth patches on knees and elbows.
There was much joking talk about how rough it was cleaning
firesides, none of it addressed directly to Kinburn, but he could
Hl
feel their glances touch him. They were all watching him covertly
except Flangeface Hogan, sitting at the head of the table.
Hogan was a big, dark, slow-moving man with absolutely no
play of expression across his heavy face. His deep, slow voice
seemed to come out of his barrel chest and there was never any
tonal expression in it. He would probably announce that the ship
was sinking in the same way that he asked for the salt. As always,
he wore bleached dungarees and a blue-piped Asiatic undershirt
and polished black shoes. Flangeface Hogan seemed not to know
that Kinburn existed.
In the fireroom Roach was aloof again, as if the friendly talk of
the night before had not taken place. The three fireside cleaners
stood back against the workbench while the rest of the gang rigged
a scaffold in front of No. 3 boiler. Some of them handed the rough,
blackened planks down a trunked hatchway from the starboard
RICHARD MCKENNA 229)

bunker. Others took the small register doors off the three furnace
fronts and pulled out the cone-shaped diffusers. Still others were
unbolting the cleanout doors that overhung the furnace fronts.
They worked with a jump and a drive unlike anything Kinburn
had seen on the ship before. Skip Lea, the nervous little second
class who straw-bossed the gang work, kept shouting at them.
“Higher! Pull them doors level, now!”
The cleanout doors were hinged at the top and they swung out
like three canopies above the scaffold. They revealed vertical tube
sheets, three solid arrays of two-inch tube ends, all clustery black
with soot. A haze of dislodged soot seemed to hang in the air above
the scaffold. In the clean distance beside the fuel-oil heaters
Flangeface Hogan stood watching.
Skip Lea jumped up and down on the scaffold to test its solidity.
He was a gingery, redheaded, sharp-featured little man in dun-
garees and he already had a powdering of soot on him. He jumped
down with a clatter.
“Now, then, you firesiders! Over the top!” he yelled.
Roach and Rothrock jumped for the scaffold. Kinburn climbed
up more slowly. Someone behind him said pensively, in a mock-
cockney accent, “Eyen’t it a shyme! Eyen’t it a shymel”
The center tube sheet had fallen to Kinburn. His array was
longer than those on the sides, but not as wide, and it had the same
number of tubes. The work itself was easy at first. Their brooms
brought the soot down in soundless slithers and fine clouds that
made Kinburn cough. The soot lay so lightly on his white jumper
that he could blow a spot perfectly clean with his breath, but wher-
ever he touched it, however lightly, it would smear an inky black.
The metal under the soot was a reddish-orange.
“That’s corrosion, from the sulfuric acid,” Rothrock told Kin-
burn. “You want to wire-brush good around them tube ends.”
The corrosion came off in reddish dust. Kinburn finished his
tube sheet at the same time as the others. He kept coughing.
Punching tubes was harder work. Each tube was furred thickly
inside with soot and half-full of soot along the bottom. The tube
brushes were larger than the tubes and had to be forced into them
by pushing and turning to compress the springy coils. The brushes
were mounted on heavy steel rods about ten feet along and they
had to be pushed all the way through until they came out the other
 pads The Sons of Martha

end, inside the combustion chamber, where the soot fell. It was
very hard work pushing the brush in but it came back quite easily
and came out with a puff of fine soot.
Kinburn found that he could not punch a tube as fast as the other
two men. His brush would scrape along a few inches under a hard
push, sending a vibration thrilling back to his hands through the
steel rod. Roach and Rothrock sent their brushes through with
long, easy-looking heaves and they had breath enough to spare for
joking with each other past Kinburn working silently and with set
teeth between them. They joked about how much beer they were
going to drink on Flangeface. Under their turned-down white hats
their faces were black with soot, as Kinburn knew his own must be.
Rothrock’s first name was Ezra, and Roach was making a joke of it.
“Izz-rah!’ he would roar, grimacing his whole black face and
baring all his teeth on the /zz, gaping his mouth cavernously on
the rah. “Izz-rah!”
“All right, Cocky Roach. All right, Bugfeller,” Rothrock would
say. “Punch tubes, you ridge-runner!”
And they did punch tubes, drawing steadily ahead of Kinburn.
He poured in all the strength he had, panting and coughing and
feeling sweat trickle down his back and legs. It was no use. He had
about thirty tubes left to go when the others finished.
“Let’s take a blow and have some coffee,” Rothrock told Roach.
“We can still sweep out combustion chambers before chow.”
“Sure enough, we gonna make that three o’clock boat, 1zz-rah.”
Kinburn drove himself on. When his arms became too heavy
and numb he would let them hang and jerk and turn them until
the feeling came back. As soon as he could close his fists all the way
he would seize the rod and drive the brush with angry lunges
through another two or three tubes. He saw Roach and Rothrock
crawl into their respective furnaces through the smail access holes.
Then helpers pulled burlap sack after sack of soot out of those holes
and took them away somewhere. The soot came right through the
mesh of the burlap, each sack trailing a cloud, and the powdery
soot haze filled the fireroom even to where Flangeface Hogan stood
silently watching.
Kinburn was groggy and he almost fell when he climbed down at
last from the scaffold. He took a drink of water from the bucket on
the workbench. A scum of soot floated on the water. His hands
RICHARD MCKENNA 225

were a shiny black. He blew his nose on a piece of cleaning rag and
the stuff was jet black. Kinburn wished that he had not learned so
much, as a hospital corpsman, about the structure of the human
lung. He could not keep his mind off the thousandfold branching
passages and the myriad tiny pockets where air touched blood.
“Take five,” Skip Lea told him. “Have a cup of joe.
“No. I’m rested and I want to catch up,” Kinburn said. ‘‘What
do I do next, inside there?”
Lea squinted an eye. “Maskee, if you want to,” he said. “Til
tell you what you do.”

di-
The furnace proper was a steel tube about thirty inches in
ameter and eight feet long. It was shallowl y corrugat ed, like a bel-
for it was corrugation. Kinburn felt car-
lows tube, and the name
bon grit and crunch beneath him as he crawled through it trail-
were
ing the cord of a portable electric light. The outside men
reached back for the
pushing his other gear in behind him and he
broom.
com-
A massively rounded steel collar made an orifice into the
spilling out
bustion chamber. Soot was banked high in there and
into the corrugation. It would be thigh-deep.
It was so soft and light that he could not feel it with his fingers
ris-
He could not feel his feet sink in. It moved in a sluggish cloud
one
ing that he could not feel. He thrust a wire-brush handle into
his head and hung his light from it, but the
of the tube ends above
anythin g. It did not reveal any form or
light did not illuminate
up the light and did not let it come back.
outline. Blackness soaked
all around
Very faintly he could see blobs and masses of soot hanging
the soot and the tide was rising
above him. His motions had stirred
above his shoulders.
air stained
It had no substance. It was just blackness. It was just
at the bottom, but
black and choking, and the blackness was thicker
and his heart was
it was rising to stop his breath and dim his eyes,
certain little voice
sledging away like a steam pump. Then a clear,
ty:
inside his head spoke with the authority of God Almigh
Get out of here. Fast. Now.
it madly with
His legs tried to obey but his arms fought
, he choking and
the broom, swiping and thrusting with the broom
and the blackn ess swirled about
cursing in panic torn between them,
 226 The Sons of Martha

his face until his light was a lost red spark. Slithering, whispering,
patting gently his face and hands, blackness descended upon him,
and he bit his curses into its sour nothingness until his frantic
broom swept light back into that place in reddish-brown walls and
angles and rows of rivet heads that gave the light back to his clamor-
ing eyes.
He dropped his broom. He was all right now. He knew what
Roach had meant. His stomach rose up and he retched and heaved.
Nothing came but a little sour water. It left him weak and shaky,
but he knew that he was all right. He knew the blackness had
reached and stained indelibly the least, last, tiniest, most hidden
and remote alveolar pocket within him. He had nothing left him
to protect against the blackness, and he would be all right now.
He filled the sacks with a dustpan. The soot came right back
out through the burlap, but something stayed inside to fill the sacks
when he tied them shut, although it had no weight. When the mess
cook brought chow down for the firesiders, Kinburn said he would
wait until he finished filling sacks. He caught a glimpse of Roach
and Rothrock eating at the workbench. They were absolutely
black and exuberant as ever. Before Kinburn was ready to eat they
had gone back in and he could hear the clink of their chipping
hammers in the corrugations on either side of his own.
‘Hand me the chow in,” he told them outside. “I’ll eat it in
here.”
Crouching awkwardly in there he wolfed the food, his black
liands turning the bread black on its way to the blackness of his
i
mouth. He wanted to save a few minutes on eating time.
¢
i He wire-brushed the combustion chamber in a driving fury, his
if
*

ih ears sharp for the continuing hammer clinks of the other two. He
ip
brushed with his left hand when his right arm failed him, so that
he would not lose time while resting it. When he started cleaning
the corrugation at last, he could still hear the hammer clinks.
It was hard carbon rather than soot, and it was crusted rather
loose and crumbly. A few strokes with his chipping hammer would
break up a section and then his scraper could bite into it. He
found a way both to press and to push with the heel of his left hand
on the butt end of his file scraper, while he pulled with his right
hand, and he could bring the carbon showering off in coarse flakes.
Then a few vigorous strokes with the big wire brush would leave
RICHARD MC KENNA 22h

the surface a smooth, clean black. It was very awkward working in

that cramped space, but the steady work noises from either side kept
Kinburn feverishly at it. He was about three-quarters done with
it when the noises stopped. Then he listened for the voices out
there, gathering that Flangeface was inspecting the two wing fur-
naces. He heard a whoop from Roach.
“Okay, Izz-rah! Let’s hit the beach!”
All the noises out there stopped. Kinburn tried to drive himself
faster. When he had finished he swept the coarse stuff into a sack
and dropped it outside without calling for someone to take it. He
threw all his gear out clattering on the floor plates, all but his light,
which he left gleaming on the clean, corrugated surface. Then he
crawled out painfully himself and stood there panting. He was
guessing it had been about twenty minutes since the others had
gone up.
No one was in the fireroom except Skip Lea and the fireman
on watch. Lea came up. He had a strange, quizzical look on his
sharp features.
“Giving up, Kinburn?” he asked. “Had enough for today, have
you?”
“I had enough, all right, but I ain’t giving up,’ Kinburn said.
“Tm through. It’s clean in there.”
“Make finish, hey?”
Lea sounded surprised and doubtful. He looked into the cor-
rugation, then turned to face Kinburn with narrowed eyes. He was
biting his upper lip.
“Maskee,” he said suddenly , after a moment. “I'll go get Flange-
face.
Kinburn sat down wearily on the stacked planks from the dis-
mantled scaffold. They were hard and splintery and black as the
hand with which Kinburn caressed the top one. His mind
wandered off to a thought of timbered hillsides and a sawmill he
remembered, of moist white planks and the smell of fresh sawdust.
Trees fell over and rotted back into the ground, he thought. But
these planks were dry and black and hard and they could endure
forever.
Skip Lea hit the floor plates with a bang and Flangeface Hogan
came soberly behind him. He did not look at Kinburn and
he scarcely more than glanced into the corrugation.
 228 The Sons of Martha

“Tt ain’t clean,” he told Lea.

Kin-
That was all. He turned and walked ponderously away.
wantin g to
burn found himself standing with fists clenched and
him. But no
scream savagely at that broad back going away from
d on Skip
words came and the back vanished and Kinburn rounde
Lea, finding his voice at last.
“That son of a bitch!” he said. “Why ain’t it clean? God damn
it, you tell me why it ain’t clean!”
Skip Lea looked uncomfortable. “You only got off the crusted
“That underneath is the real carbon, and all you
stuff,” he said.
that
done was polish it up with your wire brush.” He could see
believe him. “It’s baked on there almost like
Kinburn did not
paint,” Lea said. ‘You got to chip and scrape it off like it was paint.”
It was in his stomach and bowels that Kinburn could not believe
it. He licked his lips, holding Lea’s eye.
“It ain’t going to end the world for nobody if you let the rest of
it go till tomorrow,” Skip Lea said. “If you had enough for today,
just say so.”
Kinburn was getting hold of it. Tight-lipped still, he pointed to
the wing furnaces.
“Are them two all cleaned?” he asked tautly. “Is there more to
do in them tomorrow?”
“No more cleaning.”
“Then [’ll finish mine.”
“Maskee, if you want to.” Skip Lea shrugged. “You can quit
whenever you figure you had enough.”

He had to fight for every square inch of dull gray metal cleaned
of carbon. He had poured out his strength too lavishly too early
and he had none left for this hardest part of all. It was too nar-
row in there to sit upright and he could not work his arms properly
when he lay flat. He had constantly to brace himself in some awk-
ward position and to straighten his legs convulsively when a cramp
took the muscles. His knees and elbows hurt him. He could see a
score of places where on the first cleaning his hammer had broken
through to true metal, and he could not understand why he had not
seen it then.
Recurrently the conviction came that he could not go on and it
always blurred over into hatred for Flangeface Hogan. There was
RICHARD MC KENNA 229

no decency or feeling or fairness in Flangeface Hogan. He was

some kind of mute, brute animal with arms like human thighs and
a hump of muscle on the back of his neck.
The tube was like a steel bellows, successive hollows and humps
ringing him round, with nowhere a flat surface. Each blow of his
chipping hammer powdered carbon away only along the narrow
line of impact. He beat out a narrow line from one hollow up
the gentle slope and down into the next hollow. Four inches away
he beat out a parallel line. Then he joined their ends with beaten
gray lines like streams along the valleys and he had a four-inch
square blocked out. It did not seem very big. He rough-chipped the
square and cleaned it off with the scraper. The clean gray metal
looked won and set apart and good to him. He started another
line parallel to its edge and four inches away.
The squares end to end followed the gentle hill up the side of
the corrugation and across the top, the most difficult portion. Each
square in itself was not a hard job. Isolating a portion of the car-
bon weakened its power to discourage him. When Kinburn fin-
ished the first half of the hill the second half seemed to go easier, as
if the clean gray surface wanted now to meet itself around the cir-
cle, to close the black gap separating its ends.
Twenty-four of the squares cleared one hill around the circuit.
Twenty-four hills comprised the whole corrugation. It began to
‘seem humanly possible. He broke new ground on the next hill.
Then Skip Lea called in.
“Four o’clock, Kinburn. Time to knock off.”
“I got a little patch to finish,” Kinburn said.
He meant to finish only the square he was on, but a few more
squares would finish the hill and he went on with it. When the
hill was finished he thought for a moment and then began another
one.
Homesteads, he discovered a part of his mind had been calling
those squares for some time now. He encouraged the fantasy to
emerge and he was people taking land. He was explorers blazing
trails and mapping out townships. He was people moving in to
cut down trees, get out stumps and boulders, fence and plow and
plant and harvest the land won from wilderness. It was a pleasant
fantasy and he was just getting it well begun when the fireman on
watch called in.
 230 The Sons of Martha

“Kinburn, your chow’s down here for you.”

“Set it on the workbench,” Kinburn told him. “I'll be out in a
minute.”
“Knock off, for God’s sake!” Skip Lea’s voice came in. “You done
more’n a day’s work now.”
“In a minute. I got a little patch I want to finish.”
He resented the interruption to his land clearing. He wished
he knew more about that, how you drained a swamp and built a
log house and a rail fence. He was not tired anymore. He did not
have to experiment to find a workable position. The steady pace
took him round and round without cramps. He felt the pain in his
knees and elbows, but it did not hurt him. It was like chopping the
tree that last summer at home. Somewhere along the way, he half-
remembered and_half-experienced, Flangeface was calling, had
called in. “Knock off, Kinburn.” I ain’t finished. “Come out, now!
That’s an order!” Go to hell. He did not break for a moment the
rhythm of his hammer.
The land clearing began to sink below the surface of his mind
again, although it went right on and from time to time would break
through. Memories of his hospital life began to play across the sur-
face of his mind like movies on a screen. They were all whiteness,
white surgical gowns, starched and rustling nurses, white tile and
porcelain dressing rooms, white-enameled diet kitchens, white trash
buckets with white lids and a white trash of gauze inside them. The
corpsmen put in long hours but they did not really work, although
they thought they did. They did not even have the idea of work.
They could not imagine it. They were soft and fat and white like
slugs and they thought that made them better than other people.
What they did in the world was to mix themselves into and
measure themselves against the pain and weakness and death of
other men. Pain, weakness, and death were all of a whiteness. Reed
Kinburn had said goodbye to all that. Health, strength, and work
were all of a blackness. He knew himself black and proud and a
man.
Almost with regret he saw that he was finishing. He squeezed
out head first and stood up there, swaying slightly. The popeyed
fireman named Dallas had the watch. He came hesitantly toward
Kinburn.
“Flangeface is waiting up” he said. “‘I’ll go tell him.”
RICHARD MCKENNA 231

Kinburn nodded. He did not have to wait for Flangeface Hogan.

A reaction was trying to flood him. He went slowly up the ladder
holding to the thought that he was black and proud and done with
that job. He was black and proud and weary almost to death.

The ship was asleep. He was alone in the brightly lighted wash-
room. It was large and square and all white enamel paint and
white tile deck with mirrors along one side above the white vitreous
lavatories. On the other side the showers sprayed right out from
the bulkhead, with no partitions or curtains to make a shadow from
the white glare. Standing naked in the middle of the room Kin-
burn began feeling himself to be a shadow without anything to
cast it.
He was absolutely black. Under his foreskin he was black. The
skin was off his knees and elbows and the raw flesh there was more
black than red. He felt almost reluctant and curiously uncertain
about how to begin cleaning himself. A seaman, the quarter-deck
messenger, came in and whistled.
“Sure glad I ain’t a snipe,” he said.
“Most of you deck apes ain’t man enough to be a snipe,” Kin-
burn told him, without anger.
The sluicing shower sent black water across the white tile. The
soap lathered black on his arms and chest and when he rinsed it
off he was black as ever. The tide of reaction was flooding him.
He lathered and scrubbed fiercely, until his cake of soap was worn
thin, and his skin was still dark gray. Six times he lathered and
scrubbed his left forearm, scraping with his fingernails until he drew
blood, and his forearm remained dark gray.
The reaction became very strong and bad. His cake of soap was
gone and he did not know how he could get another one. He be-
gan cursing softly to himself, almost in a whimper.
Flangeface Hogan came into the washroom.
He was smudged and streaked with soot from having been inside
the furnace. He bulked in the doorway and his massive face was as
expressionless as the face on a boiler front. Kinburn met his eyes.
“Cleanest corrugation I ever saw in my life,” Flangeface rum-
bled.
“Loan me a bar of soap, until I can buy some tomorrow,” Kin-
burn said.
 232 The Sons of Martha
he
Flangeface whirled and went out, moving fast. Very shortly
bar of Lifebuo y soap. He
was back with a bucket and a new red
heat it
filled the bucket and bubbled steam through the water to
and set it in one of the lavatories. All the while he talked.
“Shower’s no good for soot. You got to have a bucket. Bucket
and loofah sponge. Here, I'll show you. Turn around
the soap
Ill scrub your back.”
The loofah sponge grated pleasantly across Kinburn’s shoulders.
Loofah sponges were some kind of dried vegetable skeleton used to
filter grease out of the feed water in the hot well down below. Water
made them swell up. While he scrubbed Flangeface kept talking
in his grating rumble.
“Cleaning firesides . . . way to try out a new fireman, see how
much he can take... you was cleaning the thousand-hour fur-
nace, only you didn’t know it.”
Whenever a boiler had a thousand steaming hours, Kinburn
gathered, they cleaned firesides. All the furnaces were lit off when
the ship was under way but only the center furnace was used in
port. When the middle furnace had a thousand hours the wing fur-
naces might have only two or three hundred hours. The center fur-
nace was always by far the worst to clean.
“You done three men’s work today . . . never seen a new man
make it past five o’clock before,” Flangeface rumbled on. “From
the start I figured you was going to, You was outworking both
them other dunnigans punching tubes and everybody down there
knew it except you.”
So Flangeface checked Kinburn’s reaction and turned it back to
pride. It was more than words or any expression in his face or voice.
It was a strong, warm feeling that emanated from him without
VSSft
See
=

mediation. Kinburn looked at his back in the mirror and it was

still a dingy gray.
“The rest has just got to wear off,” Flangeface said. He handed
Kinburn the loofah sponge. ‘Use the same water,” he said, point-
ing to the black suds. ‘““They ain’t wore out, just because they're
black. The blacker the suds, the better they work.”
Kinburn scrubbed himself. Flangeface stood there, talked out
but radiating warmth and approval like a boiler front. Now and
then he found a few more words.
“Your cot’s set up on No. 3 hatch. Sleep as late as you want in
RICHARD MCKENNA 233

the morning. I’ll tell the sheriff . . . Take tomorrow off. Get them
knees fixed up in the sick bay . .
“Go ashore soon as you feel like it. Mama Lottie will know the
beer is on me as soon as she sees your eyes.”
When he knew for sure that Kinburn was all right, Flangeface
said good night and went out. Kinburn finished scrubbing. He was
not white. He had midnight rings around his eyes, knees, and el-
bows because he could not scrub right up into them. But he felt
clean and he liked the clean, carbolic smell of himself. The last
thing he did in there was to put his black uniform to soak in the
bucket of strong black suds.

Stretched out on his cot, he felt the pleasure of rest to the very
center of his bones. He thought it was the most voluptuous feeling
he had ever experienced. No. 3 hatch was beneath the forward
overhang of the prom deck, which the sailors called the front porch,
and it was the most sheltered sleeping place on the main deck.
Hearing the reef, he drifted toward sleep and discovered that
the underneath of his mind was still scraping carbon in the cor-
rugation. Lazily he sought through his feelings for the familiar
bitterness that usually attended upon his sleep. It was not there.
 WILLIAM MOSELEY

The Preacher and Margery Scott

(FROM THE VIRGINIA QUARTERLY REVIEW)

Barret is laughing at Rooster. Rooster walks funny and doesn’t

have good sense. I still like Rooster better than Barrel. Barrel has
good sense but he always makes so much noise.
“Looky yonder.” Barrel grins at the men around him. “Looky
yonder at old Rooster going back for his fourteenth helping to-
night. Hey, Rooster, ain’t yore insides froze yet?”
Rooster frowns and shakes his head. He holds his plate out to
Miz Peden. “I like strawberry.” The first time we went through
the line Rooster was in front of me. He held out his plate but he
didn’t know what to say to get the ice cream. So Miz Joiner said,
“What flavor do you like, Rooster?” and Rooster said, “I like
and Miz Joiner loaded him up with strawberry. Now
strawberry,”
every time he cleans his plate on the other side of the monument
he brings it back to one of the church ladies and says the magic
words, “I like strawberry.” I bet he’ll keep coming back till it’s all
gone.
Rooster takes his plate down to the rock fence where there’s not
much light and eats by himself. I could slip down there and watch
him. But I’d better stay here with Daddy, even if I don't like to
hear Barrel bellow. That’s what Daddy said one time. “That Bar-
rel never talks. He bellows.”
“Man, them ladies sho’ whop upa fine batch of ice cream!” Bar-
rel pats and rubs his belly where it runs over his belt. “It’s most
enough to make a Baptist outta me.”
“Better than army chow, huh Barrel?” says the preacher. Barrel
 236 The Preacher and Margery Scott

was skinny till he came back from the war. The preacher just got
out this year and he came to our church. He was a preacher to the
soldiers. But the war’s about over— “all but the shouting,” Daddy
says. So we won’t need any more soldiers or preachers for soldiers
and we can have ice cream suppers again.
Down at the fence Rooster is not by himself anymore. She is
sitting beside him in the grass drinking an Orange-Crush. Rooster
eives her his plate of strawberry and she eats the rest of it. Now
he is coming back, walking that funny way. One leg goes forward
while the other one goes sideways.
Barrel lights a cigar. No one else will smoke this close to the
ladies or the preacher. It has a good smell, like firing dark tobacco in
the barns early in the fall. Barrel is not really a bad man, even if he
won't go to church. He’s just got a mean streak. Rooster holds out
his plate. “I like strawberry.”
“I'm sorry, Rooster, but there ain’t no more strawberry.”
Rooster’s mouth falls open, the way it does when he goes to sleep
in church, and his hands go down by his side. After a minute he
walks to Mama and pushes his plate at her. “I 1-1-like s-strawberry.”
Barrel is chewing his cigar and holding his belly while he laughs.
His cheeks puff out and push his eyes shut. “Now, Rooster,” Mama
says, “you heard Missis Joiner— we’re out of strawberry.”
“Rooster don’t know no better than to ask for what he wants,”
Red Simpson says to Barrel.
“That’s right,” Barrel says. “He ain’t got enough sense to be
satisfied with what he can git.” I could tell Rooster to say he likes
chocolate or vanilla.
“Peach?” Mama asks. “There’s still a little peach.” Rooster just
shakes his head and his jaw waggles. He puts down his spoon. As
he walks by us with the plate hanging in one hand he is staring at
the ground and looking like he wants to cry.
Barrel makes a smoke cloud. “Hey, Rooster. Can’t you git yore
craw full?” Rooster keeps walking. “F-f-£ .. .” he tries to say. He
is headed for the rock fence.
“You ought not to make so much fun of Rooster,” Daddy says.
“He don’t understand your teasing.”
“It has been my ex-perience,” says Mr. Sears, “my classroom ex-
perience, that the bul-ly is at-tempting to co-ver some weak-ness of
his own.”
WILLIAM MOSELEY 237

Barrel says a bad word and spits a piece of tobacco under the
picnic table. “Yeh, and it has been my ex-perience, my barroom
ex-perience, that nobody has more weaknesses than so-called Chris-
tians.”
“Barrel.” The preacher stands up. He doesn’t say it very loud.
“Watch it. You know you’re welcome here. Anybody in Paradise
Corners is welcome to any function of the Baptist church. But you'll
have to watch — ”
Barrel stands up too. “Can’t git used to not wearing that bar, can
you, lieutenant preacher? Which do you reckon won the war —
yore praying or my fighting?” Barrel is trying to hitch his belt up
over his belly. He’s not even looking at the preacher. “Well, 1
guess I'll just mosey on down to the Paradise and git me somethin’
to melt this bale of ice cream inside me.”
He turns toward the rock fence and stops. He is looking
at Rooster and her on the other side of the monument sitting with
their backs propped against the fence. They are passing the Orange-
Crush bottle back and forth.
“Oh, my.” Barrel is pointing a fat finger. “Looky yonder. Ouu-
weee — look, look, looky yonder. Old Rooster’s feathering his nest
for tonight. He’s been sneaking that ice cream over the fence.”
Barrel looks at the preacher. “You say any citizen of P. C.’s wel-
come here, chaplain? How ’bout Margery Scott? The ang-el of
Lancaster Quarry? How ’bout that keeper of the red lantern?”
The preacher doesn’t move. “They aren't bothering us,” he
says. ‘We don’t need to get involved.” Barrel acts like he doesn't
hear him. I don’t think anybody heard the preacher.
Daddy has gone over to Deacon Hall. They are looking at the
rock fence and talking low. The women have stopped piling up
dirty dishes and are bunching behind the table. Barrel is already
halfway down the hill and past the monument. He is wagging his
hand at Rooster and her and laughing. When he climbs over the
fence he has a fat bull’s bulging behind. He crosses the highway
to the Paradise Café and Service Station.
No one is looking this way. I might walk down as far as the
monument. It’s darker there. I could see Rooster and her, but
they couldn’t see me. I could see where they throw the Orange-
Crush bottle and maybe get it and hide it in the truck. It will make
five and Mr. Everett in the Paradise will give me a dime for them.
 238 The Preacher and Margery Scott

And I could see what she looks like. And I could hear what they
say to each other. And I might find out why she takes Rooster’s
strawberry and why she wasn’t invited to the ice cream supper like
everybody else.
The lights over the picnic tables make the monument a long
shadow that hides me. The dew and the kinky grass tickle my
toes. The monument grows up every night and touches the stars.
When I stand close to the bottom like this and look up I can see
only two black sides getting littler close to the speckled sky, and I
can’t even see the red star at its tip.
They are gone. I wanted to see what she looked like. I have
never seen anyone like her around church. There is a black place
in the grass where they were sitting. Sneaking a bottle is not a
very big sin, not like cussing or getting drunk. Maybe the bottle is
closer to the fence.
It is not an Orange-Crush bottle. It is brown all right, but it is
bigger and it is smooth. There is a piece of paper pasted on it. It
smells bad too, like where a cow peed. So it’s no good and I don't
get to take it. And Rooster is gone and they can’t make fun of him
anymore.
It is Daddy beside me, his legs solid fence posts. The brown glass
shatters against the rock wall. “Don’t you ever let me see you with
a bottle like that in your hands again. Not as long as you live.”
In the monument’s shadow I am cold. My feet are wet with dew
and my mouth is dry. A dirty paper plate comes up from the other
side of the wall. Behind it comes a face. The eyes roll, marbles
spinning.
“ET Like <. <1 J2hike: Se.
“Rooster.” It is like Daddy wants to say something else, but all
he says is “Rooster” again.
Rooster’s jaw is working up and down, but the sounds that come
out don’t make sense. He knows Daddy. He has picked tobacco
worms for us and driven the team at hay baling time. Rooster’s
eyes are white. His whole face is a wadded-up piece of tissue paper.
Something is wrong. Something bad is going to happen.
The other people are coming down to the fence. I can see Red
Simpson get out of his car and shut the door. The men have their
hands in their pockets and the women are walking with their
heads close together.
WILLIAM MOSELEY 239

She is standing beside Rooster. Her face is red. Her hair is

tangled like a cow’s tail caught in cockleburrs. The noise she makes
is high and loud, almost laughing. Her dress is long and loose
and wrinkled, with big flowers. If the dress was black she might be
a witch.
The people stop, then move around her and Rooster in a kind
of circle. She backs away, her mouth big and wide open, still mak-
ing that laughing sound. There is not much light. I can barely see
what she is holding. Her arms are full of brown bottles.
“Rooster, get away,” Daddy says. Rooster’s eyes stop rolling
and his jaw closes. He looks around him at the men and women,
then he jerks away, trying to run, dragging his crippled leg. He is
sweating and making a tired dog sound. I can’t see him as he
crosses the highway but I hear the screen door slam. He is safe in
the Paradise.
Now I know something bad is going to happen. To her or to us.
All the men and women are looking at her. Nobody says anything.
She stops her crazy noise and breathes through her open mouth.
Her eyes start to roll like Rooster’s, but she stops them and stares
back at us. She is standing almost in the middle of the highway,
holding the empty bottles and turning around slow, looking at the
grown-ups one by one.
Nobody moves, except her, turning slow, around and around. I
can’t hear anything but her breathing. Now some of the kids come
down from the playground, running and laughing and yelling, like
they were leaving one game and coming to another one.
She stops dead still. Her legs are spread apart, as wide as the dress
will let them. She starts the high whining laughing noise and shifts
the bottles so she is holding one high over her head in one hand,
while the other arm holds the rest against the big faded flowers.
She is waving her hand, still holding the bottle, back and forth the
way Mr. Sears does when he leads the singing. Her voice is too loud
and high and screechy to be a woman’s. Or anybody’s.
“Now that the congregation is all here, let’s turn to hymn num-
ber three-oh-two ... Has ever’body found the place?”
She drops her arm. “What's ever’body so quiet about? I thought
this here was a celebration. How come you all had this ice cream
supper anyway? Let’s have some music!”
 240 The Preacher and Margery Scott
Her voice is singing and more like a person’s voice. I hear some-
thing else. Red Simpson has brought his guitar.

“In the sweet . . . by-and-by

When we meet on that beau-ti-ful shore.”

Bubba Harris pulls out a French harp and blows it. Kids start
clapping their hands, and some of the women are singing with her.

“In the sweet... by-and-by

We shall meet. ..

Everybody is singing and clapping their hands in time. Mr. Sears

is louder than anybody, waving his arms. The women are smiling,
and some men are looking a little ashamed, but they are all sing-
ing. Everyone is happy. Sis is jumping up and down beside Mama,
trying to sing.
iW si (a
“In the sweet... by-and-by
We shall meet on that beau-ti-ful shore.

The same words over and over. It must be the only church song
she knows. All of us are laughing and singing. It is so loud that I
can barely hear my own voice. She is waving her arm slower. Her
face is redder and slick with sweat.

“We shall meet . . . on that

Beau-tt-ful . . . shore.”

Her arm comes down quick and the bottle flies from it. It hits
the highway, busting like the one Daddy threw against the rock
wall. All at once it is as quiet as it was loud a second go. The pieces
of brown glass skitter across the highway like rocks over a frozen
pond.
“God-damn-Mister-Smith-Lancaster!”’
I knew. I knew. Something bad. Something bad is happening.
I knew.
She throws another bottle against the highway. “And God-damn-
Mister-Everett-Mills!”’
 MOSELEY 241
WILLIAM
big.
The men and women back away from her. Her eyes are
Sweat makes her face shine. She throws another bottle.
“And God-damn-Judge-Garnett!”
Not
Every time she throws a bottle she says a name. She is ugly.
like Rooster. Rooster looks strange, not ugly. She looks ugly.
“And God-damn-Mister-Sylvester-Harris!”’
the way.
The fence is rough and dirty against my face. This isn’t
were singing . The grown- ups
It’s not supposed to end like this. We
happen . The preache r
should have known something bad would
somethi ng. But none of the
ought to know. Somebody has to do
do anything.
erown-ups move, except backwards. Daddy doesn’t
“And God-damn-Mister-Otis-Crenshaw!”
Somebody
We were all singing and happy. She made it wrong.
her bad.
has to make her quit. Stop her. Hurt her. Hurt

and hide his

I saw my boy break away from the crowd
in the semi-dark-
face against the park fence. Nobody else moved
about to run her
ness. Margery had tricked us. Just as we were
she had started a hymn —and we found our-
off for being drunk,
stopped singing and
selves joining in. Then without warning she
reeling off names of
started cussing, throwing beer bottles and
reciting the begats
prominent men in the community like she was
in the Bible.
ry had shocked
We couldn’t move; we couldn’t speak. Marge
shocked us awake into a
us awake in the middle of a good dream,
changed too quickly.
situation we didn’t understand. Things had
All we could do was listen — and wait.
gh the crowd.
The pieces of her last bottle skidded throu
“Okay!” she yelled. “Where’s that preach er?”
for those few min-
Still no one could speak. It was like Margery,
s. She seemed to know
utes, had the only voice in Paradise Corner
upon her. She
that whatever happened next depended completely
say and do. I know every-
was deciding carefully what she would
Marge ry held our world
body felt with me that for the time being
in her dirty hands.
the circle we had
The preacher stepped from the darkness into
flat, as though his
made around Margery. His face was pale and
painted on. He wasn’t
eyes were glass and his nose and mouth just
he wasn’t scared. After
angry. I don’t know what he was. I know
 242 The Preacher and Margery Scott
all, he’d been a chaplain and had seen some of the worst fighting
in the Pacific. I couldn’t guess what was going through his mind,
what he was deciding that very moment to do.
“Okay preacher!” Margery was yelling like he was halfway across
Peace State Park instead of right there in front of her. “You too! I
led a hymn and preached a sermon. Now you pronounce the bene-
diction and we'll all go home!”
He won't, I thought. He can’t. It would be almost admitting
that she had something on him, that he had to do what she said.
Yet he looked around the circle of faces and raised his hand the
way he did when he dismissed Sunday services. That hand wasn’t
needed. We couldn’t have been quieter if all of us had been in
church for a wedding or funeral. There was no noise from the
Paradise, no jukebox, no loud talking of drinkers and pool-shooters.
That late on Saturday, there wasn’t even any traffic on the road.
“God, our judge.” His eyes were closed; his voice was strong.
“We don’t ask you to change what we ourselves have brought about.
We ask only for the courage and the strength of spirit to do what
has to be done.”
I was missing something. The preacher was way ahead of me. I
was just an old country boy after all: something was going on be-
tween him and Margery, but it had nothing to do with her red
lantern or the church or even with Paradise Corners. She had forced
him into taking a part, and he was going to act it through to the
bh end.
iil “For only by doing do we overcome what we are.” Margery’s
ne eyes never left him. “And if— No. That’s all, Lord. Amen.”
i Margery snickered. “A — men!” She started to walk away. “Nice
’
service, Revrend. I’m headed for that beau-ti-ful shore
— Lan-
caster Quarry!”
“Wait.” He said it soft but firm, with the assurance you have
when you give an order to a child or animal that you know will
obey. And with that single word —it didn’t happen during the
prayer —I felt the weight of the world shift from Margery’s hands
to the preacher’s.
She turned back, squinting her eyes and beginning to wobble
a little. “Ain’t the service over?”
“No,” he said in that same firm way. “You forgot about the of-
fering.” ‘There was no anger or hatred, no rebuke, no need for
WILLIAM MOSELEY 243

revenge in his voice. Just certainty and—a kind of doom, I guess.

He kneeled at the edge of the asphalt where Barrel had spread
crushed limestone for the little parking lot beside his garage. Scoop-
ing with both hands, the preacher made two piles of rocks, then
picked up one pile in each hand. He walked back to the center of
the highway and stopped a few yards away from Margery.
The crowd stepped back from its circle to make two lines on the
sides of the road, almost in darkness, outside the blocks of light
from the Paradise. You would not expect it to have been so quiet.
You would think someone would have laughed or yelled. But
everyone stood still, like statues, and not even the kids cried or
asked questions. Margery’s breathing was the only sound. She
gulped in air through her mouth, straining, like a nearly drowned
man dragged out of the water. Her shoulders went up and down,
and her belly went flat every time the air whistled in.
“Okay — Brot Preacher!” It was panting, not breathing.
— her
She was past being tired; she looked almost strong, standing, waiting.
Like us, she must not have believed it was going to happen.
He drew back his right arm and let go with those rocks as hard
as he ever threw a baseball in the church league. And before the
sickening sound they made against Margery had reached all of us,
and
before she even had time to grunt, he drew back his left arm
— awkward as it was — seemed to throw twice as hard. The gravel
striking her was not the soft thud I thought it would be, not a ball
in a mitt or a fist against a mattress. Nor was it the phony sharp
sound of a fist fight in a picture show. It was somewhere between
softness and sharpness, a crunching, I guess, of dead force against
living flesh — I can’t describe it but I could feel it, cutting through
hear
my stomach to my backbone. It was a sound I never want to
again.
Margery grunted then, twice, like a goat hit with a sledge-
a
hammer. But she didn’t go down. She rocked back and forth
little, breathing deep, and raised her left hand slowly to her face.
:
All the time she was looking straight ahead, staring at the preacher
anger or hatred or blame in her face.
like him, she showed no
line. Even
Across one cheek, just above the jaw, was a thin white
blood
in the dim light we could see it turn pink, then red. The
slowly became a small stream,
began in single drops, like sweat, and
the high-
flowing down her chin and dripping onto her dress and
 244 The Preacher and Margery Scott

way. Margery pushed her hand against the cut but never looked
down at the blood.
Now, I thought, now surely someone will laugh or cry or scream.
I felt a busting need to be rid of something myself, and my mouth
was open. But no sound came — only Margery’s breathing and the
pitter-pat of a dog coming up the highway, arriving late for the
excitement.
Suddenly, echoing from deep in the Paradise, high wild laughter.
Barrel’s voice followed quickly, fiercely: “You
— Rooster! Shut
yore damned mouth!” The laughter stopped abruptly with the
crack of a slap.
Yet already a huge sigh had run through the crowd; in the in-
stant between the first wild note of laughter and the slap, we had
begun to breathe again. It was finished. We started moving around
—not talking yet, but moving. The crowd was breaking up; some
strolled back to the park, some to their cars, some to the Paradise
for cold drinks.
Margery had disappeared. Finally I saw her shadow, nearly at
the top of the hill, walking straight and alone toward her shack
behind the rock quarry. Nobody else watched her go, and she
didn’t look back.

As soon as I could find them, I herded my wife and boy and girl
into the cab of the pickup and headed home. I drove slowly at
first, so Margery would have time to be off the pike by the time we
passed the quarry.
The wife sat in the middle, the boy on her right and the girl
drooped in her lap. I thought the girl was asleep. But it wasn’t
long before she mumbled something.
“What, Honey?” her mother asked.
“What did she say? What was all them words she said?”
“Hush, Honey. Go on to sleep like Mama’s good girl.”
The girl had one more question. It was the boy’s to ask, but
tonight he wasn’t asking. He sat rigid against the outer door, not
looking at us and pretending not to listen.
“How come the preacher throwed them rocks at her? He
throwed rocks at her.”
“Hush,” the wife said. “She was a bad woman. Bad. Now think
about how good all that ice cream was, and go to sleep.”
WILLIAM MOSELEY 245

ed
The crushed gravel of Lancaster Pike was a white crumpl
The glare from the
sheet which the truck bounced noisily over.
on both sides. In-
headlights lit up the lower branches of the trees
glow that melted
side the cab the instrument lights made a softer
for us. I
all our faces together. The road was deserted except
to the emptiness
elanced over my shoulder at my family and back
their eyes closed;
beyond the headlights. The wife and the girl had
boy’s eyes were
they were already asleep or soon would be. But the
throug h the
open, wide open. He was leaning forward, staring
ns he could
dusty windshield to the road ahead. There were questio
not ask, just as there were answers I could not give.
to the gravel
I gave the accelerator an extra shove and listened
was beside
flying up and popping under the fenders. My family
cab. What was
me. We were warm and close and free in the dim
about. I wasn’t
Margery to us? There was nothing for me to worry
the way preachers
involved. Suddenly I remembered the prayer and
always say we. Then I knew that we were involved, all of us, and
I was afraid.
 JOANNA OSTROW

Celtic Twilight
(FROM THE NEW YORKER)

MICHAEL’s project, on file with his junior honors tutor at the

University of Edinburgh, was to study “The Superstitions of the
Central Highlands,” with particular reference to one old couple,
the Macdonalds at Croichan, who were to know nothing of what
he was up to at all. Michael was taking his Master’s degree in social
anthropology and wanted a subject for his first field trip, so when,
at a party (Michael did not often go to parties), he met a young
man who had been orphaned in Glasgow during the war and sent
to a foster home in the Highlands, and whose foster parents still
the remote croft named Croichan, near Inverness, then
lived on
Michael grew interested in all this, got more details, and started
making plans. He wrote to the local laird, who gave him the use
at
of a derelict gamekeeper’s cottage near Croichan, and in April,
the beginning of the Easter break, he took his dog and left Edin-
burgh for three weeks in the Highlands. He was glad to leave Edin-
burgh. He had not been happy there.
His project, on paper, may have been “The Superstitions of the
Central Highlands,” but secretly it was something else — to find
some wild and hopeless country, to let his greyhound run loose
Sud-
in it, and to get some peace for himself out of that running.
arrived at the croft, it became somethi ng
denly, not long after he
else again.
He had sworn not to let that greyhound, whose name was Phoebe
of
(and who was not in fact a greyhound but a saluki, an ancestor
—a dog bred since before Egypt to chase and kill
the greyhound
 248 Celtic Twilight
small animals, especially hares, and a dog of ancient and compli-
cated habits of mind), kill things anymore. It was not entirely his
conscious decision. For years now, he had been bothered by cer-
tain dimensions of himself, only half tuned in but nonetheless
persistent and determined, that stuck to him and pushed him
around. They made sick jokes and unspeakable puns, but he put
up with them. Lately, for some reason, they had become anti-blood-
sport. Michael decided that he and his dimensions were moving
toward a kind of Buddhist serenity that was easily fractured, espe-
cially by hunting, his favorite sport. So he said that he would give
up killing, for his own good.
But Michael and Phoebe had been hunters, and campers in
wild places, for a long time. They came from California, where
Michael had done his undergraduate work at Berkeley. First,
he had trained and toughened the young hound by letting her race
over the rocky sand of beaches — Half Moon Bay, Bodega Bay. Mi-
chael would wander and turn over stones, looking for odd ones,
while Phoebe would chase— and keep up with— the circling sea-
gulls. ‘hen, when Phoebe was grown, they went for long trips in
the hills, to hunt jackrabbits in the yellow, monotonous grass. So
Michael’s decision not to hunt was hard on them both. A year in
Edinburgh had helped to cool them off and make them thoughtful,
but now Michael found, to his mixed delight and dismay, that his
real purpose in the Highlands was to kill something, using Phoebe,
and to present it to the old man, Callum Macdonald.
He did not, of course, think about that too often. He found it
hard enough just keeping awake. This country was forgetful, self-
absorbed and jellied in old age; it gave him the pale blueness in the
head that comes in high places. Two points only let Michael fix
himself in space. At night, in the battering wind, he could see the
red lights of a broadcasting tower; that was Inverness. In daylight,
he could look north, down to the River Beauly and across it over to
the hill that the survey map called Beinn a’ Bha’ach Ard. So he
knew where he was. He could have forgotten. To the end of his
stay there, he was always a little dizzy, a little sleepy.
The Macdonalds lived at Croichan, the next-to-last house on the
road, and the keeper’s cottage was the last house, so when Michael
arrived, Phoebe asleep and out of sight in the back of his car, he
drove past their gate. The house and outbuildings stood on a bank
JOANNA OSTROW 249

above the road, just where the larch woods thinned to willow scrub
and open moor. Michael could see one larch tree, windblown into
a puzzle shape, bent above the cowshed. Then Michael had driven
on, west, uphill, to the keeper’s cottage
— above the timberline,
with no tree there at all.
When he reached the cottage, it was getting dark, but, looking
west again, he could make out more scrub, a high fence, and ‘then
the real moor, an immensity that the rural postman, who stopped
by the next morning, called “west the road.” He called it ‘‘the
hill,” too, with a certain formal note in his voice
— pacifying im-
mensity, Michael thought, with the ritual phrase. Michael won-
dered if he was going to find his wild and hopeless country there,
and he began to want, very much, to go west the road.
But business came first. Rule No. 1, he had learned in class, was
to get the confidence of the natives, so Michael went down to
Croichan in the morning alone. He did not want to assault the
Macdonalds with Phoebe’s strangeness toc soon, and, on that first
day, he said, quietly, seeing that the old woman was afraid of him,
“I hear your husband has been ill, Mrs. Macdonald. Here it is April
already. Could I dig up your kitchen garden and plant it for you?”
“We'll no’ bother with it this year,” said Mary Macdonald, who
had, obviously, carried milk pails for so long that she had become
just a shape for carrying milk pails — big hands, broad feet, and a
bent hollow back. She had a brown wool kerchief round her head.
“But I’m up here for the Easter holidays,” said Michael. “I
wanted to do some hill walking, but I haven’t much else to do with
myself. Come on.”
“Och, well,” said Mary, using the Highland substitute for yes,
no, argument, or discussion of any kind, and went into the house.
Michael took it for yes, but he couldn’t find the spade. He went
after Mary — and saw Callum, sitting by the fire, for the first time
— but she had last seen it, for sure, in the byre, in 1948. They did
no’ use it much. It was not in the byre now, or the milkhouse, or
the henhouse, but at last he found a wild cat, part of a dead hen,
and the spade in an old Ford that was rotting in the farmyard.
So he dug and raked the kitchen garden, after disputing the
ground with the rooster. The gravelly patch was half sheltered by
the house wall, but still the April wind made his nose run and then
blew the drops away before he could get to his handkerchief. On
 250 Celtic Twilight
the second day, he fixed the fence, to keep out the hens, and planted
turnips, carrots, and Brussels sprouts that Mary found left over in a
drawer from last year. Both days, Mary called him into the house
five times for the ritual cup of tea, but she would barely speak to
him, and Callum
— a big man, in a wheelchair
— would not look
at him at all.
Michael was sensitive, and he knew he had disturbed the webby
feeling of peace in that house, so he sat in a corner and kept his
mouth shut, feeling the peace rebuild. At last, on the third day, he
put the leash on Phoebe and they went down to Croichan, where
the larch tree was hissing in the wind. They met Mary dragging a
hay bale out through mud and cow dung to the sheep— fat
Cheviot ewes that wandered free around the steading. But while
Michael helped her, all she could do was stare at the dog. Phoebe
was shivering, too wretched with the wind and the strange place to
notice the sheep.
“Would it be a greyhound?” asked Mary, amused.
“More or less,’’ said Michael. “Not exactly.”
“Mercy,” she said. “Show her to Callum.”
Michael saw that he was really invited this time, and not just for
politeness’ cup of tea. He went in. Mary stayed outside, to finish
breaking up the hay bale. A Highland croft was supposed to smell,
romantically, of burning peats, but at Croichan the bottled-gas
stove leaked, so the whole house smelled like rotten onions. Cal-
lum, sitting as usual in his wheelchair by the fire in the main room,
looked straight at Michael for the first time. His eyes were blue,
but sore. And, for the first time, he spoke. “What kind of dog’s that,
then?”
Michael disliked the speech of the Lowland Scots — the uncouth
Edinburgh and the whining, guttural Glasgow talk— but Callum’s
Highland accent pleased him. It was soft, malicious, “Irish,” with
a quick curiosity in it, like a bird cocking its head. Michael felt
nervous suddenly, for no good reason. “A —a saluki,” he said.
“Saluki? What’s that, then?”
“A runner, like a greyhound. They both hunt by sight, and
they’re not allowed to put their noses to the ground.”
“Are they not,” said Callum.
He was a strange man. There was something vague, almost idiot,
about him; at the same time there was a glitter in his soft voice, a
JOANNA OSTROW 251

curious egotism that had nothing to do with his words. Michael

felt tension begin to drift around the room. Then Callum decided,
abruptly, to communicate. “There was this wee tinker fella,” he
said. “He was camping down the road here, by Frazer’s, nine years
ago it must have been; now, he had a greyhound, awful pretty it
was, a black one. But it was bad for chasing the sheep. It killed
one Blackface ewe. It did that.”
Michael kept quiet. Salukis had their own illegal ideas about
sheep. There had been salukis and hunters before there had been
sheep and shepherds; that was why, Michael had decided long ago,
he found it impossible to persuade the Oriental, conservative mind
of his dog that hares were prey but sheep were not. And it remained
a problem.
“It did no’ live long itself, that greyhound. Fochan, the shep-
herd, he shot it.”
Callum watched Phoebe, who watched him, her tail between her
legs— a long tail, and longer legs. She had gazelle eyes and a long
face and looked something like an Afghan hound, but instead of
the Afghan’s grotesque mop of hair she had a discreet, moon-
colored fringe along her ears and tail. There was nothing to hide
the economy and power of her shape. Callum’s face was long, but
sick and blue, and he had no legs. None of his own, anyway. The
big loose body in the chair did not quite match the precision and
stillness of the artificial legs below.
“She’ll be fast,’’ Callum said.
“Not so fast as a racing greyhound,” said Michael, “but tougher.
I used to hunt jackrabbits with her in California; they’re like hares,
you know, only bigger —”
Callum had had enough talk. Without warning, he swung his
chair around so that his broad back was toward Michael,
whose mouth was still open in the middle of a word. And there he
sat, withdrawn into a massive self-confidence that obliterated the
room, Michael, Phoebe, the fire, the slamming of the wind on the
roof of the house. Michael also sat, trying to be objective and not
to be annoyed at the rudeness of a senile old man. He was, how-
ever, more than annoyed. Rule No. 2, he had learned, was that
primitive people were unpredictable but usually polite.
Mary, the wind flapping at her, came in from the steading and,
sot taking off her brown wool kerchief, began to make the tea.
 Celtic Twilight
252
set it with
There was a table in the middle of the room, and she
ry jam, and a lump of pale butter in a glass
scones, oatcake, raspber
dish.
“Cheekie is milking at last,” she said to Michael. “Her calf
would no’ bend, you see, so we sent it
was no good; its hind legs
churnin g last night; the milk is no’ so
away. I was churning and
good yet for the butter, but I got a bittie. You'll have it for your
tea. :
“Yes, thank you,” said Michael. Acceptance at Croichan, it
seemed, was all or nothing. The peace of the house had respun
itself, secret, comfortable. “What do you do for milk in the winter,
then, if the cow’s just starting to milk now?”
“Och, well,” she said, ‘“‘we get the Carnation, in the tins. Callum,
come and get our tea.”
Ignoring them both, Callum wheeled to the table, but all he got
was a square of cheese and an apple, with saccharine for sugar.
“Himself has the diabetes,” said Mary, sweetening his tea and stir-
ring it for him. She patted him with her coarse hand. “And he
has a wee bittie boil on the back of his neck.”
Michael was embarrassed. The shynesses and intimacies of
these people were on a different plane from his own. The fire on
the hearth snapped, flickered up a bit, and began to warm Phoebe,
who had been lying in her formal, heraldic greyhound position,
like a hound on tapestry; now she unfolded and became pure saluki.
ne She was a dog who had fits of obscure amusement, as if she heard
Ie i jokes broadcast on a private hound radio set. She rolled over,
ea yawning a crocodile yawn, making a sound half yodel, half groan,
iM wrapping her forelegs around her head so that all the Macdonalds
i’ could see was one gleaming eye. Then, joke over, she clattered
to her feet and slid her long head against Michael’s thigh.
“Hello, snake face,” he said. “You're not getting any.” He
turned to Mary Macdonald. “She wants my scone,” he explained.
“If she wanted petting, her eyes would be soft and brown, and
her nose would run. It always does when she’s sentimental. But
it’s food this time; her eyes are hard and black and round as two
buttons. Look.”
“Fancy,” said Mary. “They are that. How does she do it?”
Callum came back from his thoughts. “There used to be plenty
JOANNA OSTROW 259

hares up west the road,” he said. “It would be a fine thing, now,
to see her after one of them.”
That was when Michael began to think of hunting again — only,
for anthropology’s sake, to attract and please this diffi-
of course,
cult old man. But he had to make sure. “Not if there are sheep
on the hill,” he said.
“Ts she bad with them, then?” said Callum.
the
Michael knew the danger. He knew that it was not half
a man to kill a man as for a dog to
crime, in the Highlands, for
ed all over again, as she had been
kill a sheep. Mary was frighten
had
the first day, but now she was angry, too. Michael and the dog
suddenly become a threat to the sheep, to her utmost security.
“She must no’ be chasing the sheep,” said Mary.
know,
And Michael found himself quarrelling with her. “I
”?

he said. “I’m not going to let her.” ,

will come for her with his gun,’ said
“Fochan, the shepherd,
Mary.
“Let him try,” said Michael.
“Across
“Wait you,” said Callum, mediating from a great height.
s to Croich an. ‘The
the road there is a field with a fence. It belong
horse is dead now that was there. You can let her loose in the field,
for the now. Fochan will be stopping by soon; he is the laird’s
When he comes, IT will
shepherd, but he sees to our lambs as well.
I think the
be asking him for you are there sheep west the road.
s he has penned
ewes will be there waiting to lamb, but perhap
them up. Wait you.”
room,
So Michael finished his tea in the silence of the disturbed
would go away
and left before he could make Mary any worse. He
would have a
and let her confidence rebuild. Now he and Phoebe
look at Callum’s field.
ridge above the road, overlooked the hills
Croichan, on the
and valley in every direction. Behind the croft to the south were
greenish-black fir tree—s a forestry-reclamation project. The road
s cottage
itself ran east toward Inverness, west toward the keeper'
north, was Callum’s field,
and the high moors, and below the road,
forest along the River
boggy, half wooded, tumbling down to thick
belling out slowly
Beauly. The fence wire was slack, and swung,
at the bottom of
in the wind. Michael could not see if the fence
 Zor Celtic Twilight

as the trees were too

the field, along the river, was in good repair,
and went
thick, but, hoping for the best, he opened the gate
abrupt and
through with the dog. The wind dropped, leaving an
a certain
spooky silence. It was evening, with a new moon and
ground . Not darkne ss yet; transp arency . Michae l and
pallor on the
the trees became more aware of each other.
He was a little scared. He had always — even before those half-
had taken charge of him, pushing him to-
tuned-in dimensions
ward an uneasy serenity— been oppressed by an overactive percep-
tion of Things. This perception had led him to a personal myth-
of
ology, a kind of animism. The world, for Michael, was full
Things leading complic ated, ritual lives of their own, unfrien dly
to him. When Michael went hunting, he was most aware of this
animistic quality of the world about him. Hunting, he even sought
he
that awareness, because it deepened the experience for him; but
would lead him in the end to a
dreaded it, too, because he knew it
more primitive belief in magic, and to halluci nations .
As a child, he had liked this communication with Things—
ponds, trees, stones. Not now. He could no longer find a way of
shutting them out; they distracted him. He spoke fearfully, reli-
giously to himself of Grass and Tree and Stone. And Phoebe played
a double role. Hunting, she was his weapon, and so caused his
involvement; but she was also his outrider, his interpreter. Phoebe
mediated for him with stones.
They went downhill a little way and came into a belt of scrub
willow that ran east-west across the upper third of the field. The
pen-and-ink branches were scribbled with new green leaves. Phoebe
was sand-colored, silvery at the edges, and the branches filigreed
her yellow, Moorish body. As the two went down the hill, the
willows grew bigger; then they came into an open valley with three
small hills in it, like half heads stuck in the ground. One hill grew
grass, the next bracken, and the last heather. A deer jumped out
of the bracken and went crashing for the deeper woods along the
river.
Phoebe took three great leaps in the air to fix the deer in her
sight, then settled into her arching, coursing run. Hunting, she left
even herself behind; she was ancient, the archetype, all hounds
running. Ten yards behind the deer she vanished into the trees.
Michael knew that she was too small to kill a deer, that she would
JOANNA OSTROW 255

lose it quickly in the woods (she couldn’t follow even the freshest
scent) , and that she herself would never get lost— it was her busi-
ness not to. Her ancestors had been Arabian hounds, accustomed
to dealing with deserts. So Michael went on alone down toward the
river. He followed a stream, with whinstone steps, shaggy and smell-
ing of moss, cut alongside. Now he was entirely scared; without his
was not
interpreter, he began to find the woods too complicated. It
of owls, the night noises, that turned him at last but the
the sound
assault of the trees. They were grayish trees, and they did not like
him.
turned, he found it hard to keep from running, but he
Once
g
made himself walk back up the hill, the skin of his back crawlin
in a terror that he knew was either primitiv e or lunatic. He calmed
himself with the thought of the moor. West the road, there would
from the
be peace and the unity of great space; he would be free
even those dimensi ons, quiet today,
multiplicity of Things. Maybe
his head —
but always half there, half buzzing and bossing inside
too, on the moor. If only
maybe they would leave him alone,
there were no sheep.
Phoebe, panting and righteous, met him at the gate.
an on his
He wanted to see Callum again, so he stopped at Croich
way home. Besides, he had his two most important aids to research,
a book and a stone, in his pocket, and he wanted to try them out
on the Macdonalds — as a catalyst, to draw the tales and supersti-
tions out of these Highlanders. The book was a thin, brown
“Proph ecies of the Brahan Seer,” a translation of the sayings of
. The
Kenneth MacKenzie, the seventeenth-century Celtic prophet
that his
stone was a Seeing Stone. Michael admitted to himself
emotio nal
feelings about that stone were less scientific and more
have been. He had found it three years ago while
than they should
on the beach at Half Moon Bay —a smooth, oval
walking Phoebe
known
blue stone with a hole through one end. Even then, he had
what it was. He had read the ‘“Brahan Seer,” and other works on
crystals were
second sight, in which all kinds of Seeing Stones and
h the hole several times, but
described. He had tried looking throug
was a moment when the
the closest he had come to second sight
pearly, and then,
seascape in the small hole had sharpened, gone
. But at the
definitely and with increasing speed, begun to revolve
to the dan-
same time he had felt his perception of Things increase
 256 Celtic Twilight

ger point — something creeping up behind his back— and he had

dropped the stone and turned around quickly to be safe. But he
had kept the Seeing Stone for his researches.
So now he stopped at Croichan and found Mary, in the hissing
white light of the paraffin table lamp, filling out Department of
Agriculture forms, too busy to notice him come in. She seemed to
have forgiven him about the sheep. Callum was sitting, placid, at
one side of the fire, and Michael took the opposite chair, with
Phoebe stretched out between them. Nobody spoke till Mary
reached over the dog and pushed the black kettle onto the fire, to
boil for tea. ‘“Was it a nice walkie, then?” she said.
“Fine, thanks,” said Michael. ““We saw a deer.”
Callum returned from his unguessable thoughts. “Did you?”
“Down by those three little hills.”
“It would be a roe deer, then. The red deer stay west the road,
the other side of the laird’s fence. You’ll have seen the fence, up
past the keeper’s cottage.”
“Can the red deer really jump so high? It must be eight feet, at
least.”
“Och, aye,” said Callum. “Them stags are awful big, you know.
If they got into the corn, there would no’ be much left of it. Did
she get it, then?”
Michael realized he was talking about Phoebe’s deer, and said, “I
should hope not. I don’t want to land in jail for poaching— and
out of season, too.”
Callum chuckled, picking his teeth with a long, filthy fingernail.
False teeth, too — the National Health prescription, gruesome and
elegant in his sunken face. He had probably been given them while
he was at the hospital for his legs. Michael wondered why he wore
the legs, since he never seemed to get out of his chair, and decided
that they were like the teeth—a kind of decoration. He was at
least seventy. “There are no’ so many deer as there used to be,”
said Callum. “At all.”
Michael had his project firmly in mind, and took this opportunity
to set it in motion. ‘‘Well,” he said, “it’s not just the animals, is it?
Aren’t the people leaving this neighborhood, too?’
“They are that. I mind when every croft on the road had a
family,” said Callum. ‘Mind you, even then the children was
mostly foster children, Glasgow orphans. We took two. We did
JOANNA OSTROW 257

no’ have children, you see. But now there is only Frazer at Kil-
duich, with his uncle — he is no’ very bright, the uncle
— Fochan,
the shepherd, at Balmacara, and us. The orphans have gone away,
to Edinburgh.”
Michael nodded. “And do you speak Gaelic much anymore?”
he asked. Michael could not speak it himself, though he loved the
sound of it, and could only recognize and pronounce a few of the
words written.
“Och, well,” said Mary.
“A wordie now and again,” said Callum.
“Tt is not in me, anymore, to speak the Gaelic,” said Mary.
“T guess you’d have to go to the Hebrides to hear it now,” in-
sinuated Michael.
“Och, aye,” said Callum. The white light of the lamp made his
face look silvery, cleaner than it really was. “I’d like fine to see the
Western Isles, and them wee west-coast crofties. But I guess I never
will, now.”
Michael did not know what to say to that. The rural postman
had been gossiping to him about “Callum Croichan,” how he had
been ill for a year, but did he go to the doctor’s? Not him. And
then it was too late, and himself with the thrombosis and gangrene
in both feet. And now there was Callum’s brother, at Glen Affric,
having symptoms, but would he go and get his water tested? Not
him. ‘These people up here — och, well. Z come from Inverness,
you see,” said the postman, superior and proud of it.
Michael suspected that Callum’s immobility was of long stand-
ing and had little to do with the loss of his legs.
The fire, having boiled the kettle, gave up and went cool,
dark. Phoebe was lying in her warm-room position, flat on her side
like a dead horse, but soon she would curl up into her cold-room
snail position.
“I have a book here,” said Michael timidly, taking out the
“Prophecies of the Brahan Seer.”
Mary laughed at it. “The Brahan Seer? Och, aye, Coinneach
Odhar, the daft loon!”
Now, Michael believed in Coinneach Odhar, as she called him
in Gaelic, and it hurt to hear her slang him as if he were Frazer’s
idiot uncle down the road. “But his prophecies came true,” he
said. “Hundreds of years later.”
 258 Celtic Twilight

“Och, well,” said Mary, and giggled.

“What about the Battle of Culloden? The building of the Cale-
donian Canal? They’ve come true.” He looked to Callum for help.
“Aye,” said Callum gravely. “So they have.”
“A ghost gave him his Seeing Stone, to read the future in. Do
you believe in Seeing Stones? I’ve got one myself. Look.” He took
out the smooth, oval blue stone, and held it to the lamp. The light
grew and glittered in the hole.
“And would it be a ghostie giving it to you?” said Mary.
“I found it by chance,” said Michael. “But I haven’t seen the
future in it yet. Will you?’ He gave it to Callum.
As the old man put it first to one inflamed eye, then to the other,
Michael was precisely and horribly split between his scientific de-
tachment and the convictions of his own imagination.
“He is a long time,” remarked Mary. “He is seeing the future,
surely. Or perhaps he is asleep.”
“I’m seeing your dog, down by the fire,” said Callum slowly.
“Herself is a comic great beastie. And I’m seeing the fire in back
of her. Now that is awful pretty, in the wee hole.” He yawned and
put the stone aside. “I’m wanting my tea,” he said.
Walking home in the dark, Phoebe stalking and blurry at his
heels, Michael thought that the anthropology, though not so easy
as he’d hoped, was shaping up a little. But his personal serenity, in
the presence of Callum, was going to hell fast. He felt almost as if
he were falling in love with an elusive and exciting woman. Was
he turning queer at last? But surely when he went queer he’d
pick something better than a dirty, inarticulate old man. No. Cal-
lum stirred something —a kind of religious fear—in him. Mi-
chael felt dizzy. ‘The road ran west from Croichan to his cottage
and again west to the deer fence and the ultimate hill; and all the
road seemed to be on a deep black plate, slowly revolving, sliding
away from the red-lit tower in the valley at Inverness, turning him
toward the moor.
In the keeper’s cottage, with the economy of a longtime camper,
Michael lit the lamp, lit the cooking stove, warmed up a can of beans
for himself and a can of Kenno-meat for Phoebe, refilled Phoebe’s
water bowl and put the kettle on, for instant coffee and hot-water
bottles. Living as he did in Edinburgh digs, with a cold, bony dog
and a willful, inconsistent girl friend, he had learned more than
JOANNA OSTROW 209

most Americans need to know about hot-water bottles. If you over-

fill them, for example, they explode.
Phoebe got one in her bed, he got two. She lay watching him
undress, the lamplight touching her in strange ways so that she
looked, sometimes, like a demon in the darkish room, with flat glow-
ing eyeholes and a long bird’s neck. Then she blinked, and became
a dog, and went to sleep. Michael did not go to sleep. He lay in the
dark. He could smell Phoebe, and his paraffin heating stove, and
himself. He thought about Callum. If he could imagine Callum
as a Buddha, that would, at least, be fashionable. But Callum could
never be plump, gold, and pleasing. He was livid and grizzly — like
the country Michael had seen, briefly, west the road. Michael was
in for a different kind of god here. He was in for trouble.

Michael and Phoebe went to see the deer fence close up the next
morning— which turned out gray and bitter—and looked
through onto the moor, shivering. The laird was responsible for
the fence, and it was well-kept, tight-strung wire net, a good eight
feet high. But it was more than a fence to keep the stags off the
wretched croft lands and on the moor, where the shooting parties
could get them. It was a barrier, formal, between places where peo-
ple did and did not live. Beyond that fence was no tree, no gorse,
no bracken or grass. There was no house, not even a fallen chim-
ney or a scattered stone wall. No one had ever, ever lived here.
Heather; nothing else. A sour, twiggy growth, one foot high, not
brown, not green or purple, but a livid combination of all three.
It wrapped up the hillside like a cold fur, rising on the left to crags
of blackish rock, falling on the right, north, to the valley of the
River Beauly. The fence made the western barrier of Callum’s
field, and the willow and timber of the field stopped short there.
Ahead, the road, changing to a cart track beyond the gate, ran on
through heather to hills beyond hills; that, eventually, was where
Michael and Phoebe were going. But Michael, though he wanted
the calm and space with all his soul, couldn’t face the moor yet. He
was shivering, and, besides, he had to find out about the sheep; he
could hardly go west the road with his dog on a leash.
They turned back and walked down to Croichan. Callum was in
his chair, well wrapped up, on the edge of the bank above the road.
Mary had given him a pair of field glasses for entertainment.
 260 Celtic Twilight

“Our boy, the Glasgow boy, sent me these from Edinburgh,”

said Callum. “He bought them new; he is doing well. Look in
them. Mackay, across the river, has two new lambs in his field.”
He gave Michael the glasses.
Adjusting them, Michael realized that from the bank Callum
could see not only the fenced field below but the valley of the River
Beauly (the river itself was hidden by trees) , the farms and grazing
on the other side, andsmost of the south face of Beinn a’ Bha’ach
Ard, still webbed with snow. If he turned the glasses west, he
could see the deer fence and a good part of the moor.
“Are you seeing? Across the river, by the two trees. They would
be earlier than us, down there, with the lambs. Ours have no’
started yet.”
“You know,” said Michael, “I was up at the fence just now and
I couldn’t see any sheep west the road. Maybe I could take the dog
there after all.”
“She must no’ be chasing the sheep,” said Callum. “Wait you for
Fochan.”
“I guess so.” To change the subject, Michael said, “Do you
sit here every day?”
“Och, aye,” said Callum indifferently. ‘When it’s no’ raining.
Will you be going to the house?”
“We'll have a walk first.”
As they went through the gate, Michael saw Callum fix the glasses
on them and so follow them down the hill. That was why Mi-
chael was not really surprised when a hare, with a sound like rip-
ping silk, bolted out of a clump of grass at his feet. Callum seemed
so much in charge, so much the incarnation of the place, that he
must have produced the hare, summoned it up for his own diversion.
Michael had seen many jackrabbits and — hunting with Phoebe
once in the North Riding — English hares, but this was a Scottish
blue hare, and for a second he wondered what it was, this stocky,
bouncing animal, patchy white, its spring coat a gleaming iron blue.
Then he forgot his nonviolent resolutions and yelled, “Phoebe!”
with a squawk of excitement in his voice, “Hare! Hare!” and the
dog, not ready for hunting so soon, came up like a girl running for
a bus, dropping packages, collecting her skirts. Then she saw the
black-tipped ears, which were still upright and confident, cruising
through a patch of bog myrtle; her eyes went hard and black and
JOANNA OSTROW 261

she started to run. The hare also saw what was after it— no yap-
ping terrier or imbecile collie — and its ears went down gently, like
a black-tipped shawl, across its back. Without seeming to move any
more violently, it accelerated and skimmed away into the first wil-
lows, Phoebe right behind, before Michael could start to unglue
his feet from the ground. The sky was gray, but as the two animals
went through the trees a slit of sun turned the branches yellow be-
hind them.
Michael cursed himself for yelling. He was involved again, ir-
revocably, though he had no more part in what was happening
now. He couldn’t save the hare, or help the dog. The hare would
probably head for shelter, he thought as he ran. It would run for
the tall bracken on that little hill. If it tired too soon, it could
dodge and twist, confusing the hound and maybe breaking her
It
legs if she tripped doubling back. It could swim the stream.
resort,
could go down a rabbit hole, though that would be its last
and in very bad taste for a hare. It could lead Phoebe to a fresh
hare and so start a relay race that would go on till the hound
But if she once touched it, however lightly, it
dropped dead.
would scream and give up, and keep on screaming till she broke
its neck.
Those were the rules. It was a ritual, part of the general agree-
ment made and held by Things, and Michael, almost unwill-
ingly, had committed himself and Phoebe to it again.
Michael panted down into the valley and up the grass-covered
as if
hill. He could see the two poised at full speed below him,
they were hanging still and the valley unrolling alongsid e. Phoebe
landscape stood still. The hare disappeared. The
gained; the
and right,
dog fell, scrabbled up, leaped into the air looking left
ten feet
and uncoiled again as she saw the grass dividing, subtly,
Then, with awe, Michael saw how well she knew her
to her left.
business. She was no longer chasing the hare. She knew, as he did,
angled to inter-
that it would be heading for the bracken, and she
Michael saw his dog working the
cept it. For about thirty seconds,
to
hare exactly as a rodeo cutting horse works a calf. They seemed
d and tried to break past.
dance and writhe. Then the hare panicke
It
The hound twisted, snapped, and fell. The screaming began.
provocat ive, run-
was a hoarse, bleating an-an-an-an. Hares were
death.
ning, but when they were caught they wallowed in their own
 262 Celtic Twilight

Well, why not, thought Michael, why not yell and make the most
of it? I would. There was such a jerking and screaming in the
tall grass that he wondered who was killing whom. Then quiet,
and the slow curve of Phoebe’s tail above the grass.
He walked over, resigned. No blood; she had broken its neck, in
the proper way, and he praised her formally, sorrowfully, stroking
her and calling her “Hound hare-hunter.” He could hear a faint
scraping sound in her-lungs, and she coughed. It was a sign of over-
strain, a small ruptured blood vessel in the lung, a common thing
with coursing hounds; it was not serious, and would pass. As for
the hare, it could have been any runner, dea d
— horse, deer,
Phoebe herself. They were all alike, these running creatures—
angular, economical. The dog had lost interest. It was not her
business anymore.
It was, unfortunately, Michael’s business — eight
now pounds
of it, three feet long. Callum had seen the hunt and was grinning,
his face pink and almost healthy, as Michael came up the hill with
Phoebe wavering behind him. Michael raised the hare in the
hunter’s way, by the hind legs. Callum took it, pleased, and put it
across his lap. He did not say thanks. Urine from the dead hare
ran down one of his artificial thighs, and its eyes, open but crusted
with dirt, looked at the other.
Mary roasted it for dinner that day, with bacon and a sauce of
prophecy— Michael reading the Brahan Seer to them in the
warm, meat-smelling room while Phoebe coughed by the fire and
Callum, eyes half shut, thought and simmered about something in
his own world. Michael offered Phoebe the hare’s heart, and as
usual she looked insulted until he cut it up small for her. Then
she accepted it, out of a bowl. Mary also made an unspeakable soup
out of the hare’s head and blood, and as it was too rich for a dia-
betic
— Callum was only allowed a small piece of the meat
— Mi-
chael had to eat most of it. The flesh was like turkey, lean and dry,
but rank.
After dinner, Mary scrubbed the wooden table and set out flour,
egos, milk, syrup, and spoons for baking. She made scones daily for
bread, without looking, like a touch typist, and baked them over
the coals on an iron griddle. She still had the brown wool kerchief
on. “It will be hare pie tomorrow,” she said. “We will be weeks
eating it all.”
JOANNA OSTROW 263

“It was the hunting I could see again,” said Callum. ‘That
was a fine sight, the hunting.”
“We'll catch you another,” said Michael, sitting by the fire, turn-
ing the pages of the thin brown book.
“Och, well,” said Callum. “They are not so common now, the
hares, as they used to be. You may not be seeing another.”
“Coinneach Odhar foretold that, too,” said Michael, finding the
prophecy he was looking for. “He knew just what was going to
happen up here. “There will come a time when the jawbone of the
big sheep will put the plough on the rafters.’ Well? That was the
Clearances.”
“Aye, so it was,” admitted Mary.

“When sheep shall become so numerous that the bleating of one

shall be heard by the other from Conchra in Loch-alsh to Bun-da-
Loch in Kintail they shall be at their height in price, and hence-
er.”
forth will go back and deteriorate, until they disappear altogeth

“True,” said Mary. “It is all tourists and shooting and skiing
sheep.”
these days, and even the laird does poorly with the

to strange
“The ancient proprietors of the soil shall give place
the whole Highlands will become one
merchant proprietors, and
desolated and
huge deer forest; the whole country will be so utterly
heard north of
depopulated that the crow of a cock shall not be
now unknown,
Druim-Uachdair; the people will emigrate to Islands
oceans, after
but which shall yet be discovered in the boundless
animal s in the huge wildern ess shall
which the deer and other wild
be exterminated and drowned by horrid black rains.”

of dough on
The room was quiet. Then Mary slapped a round
on flour, and put it down to
the griddle, quartered vie sprinkled
and steamed, with a rich, warm smell.
bake. It swelled
part right enough,” she said. “We
“T’'m liking the emigration
and two in New Zealand. But
have cousins in British Columbia,
the rains.”
I’m no’ understanding that last bittie, about
Odhar was seeing,” said
“Tt was the end of us all Conneach
Callum.
“I think it was the end,” said Michael.
 264 Celtic Twilight
Then Phoebe looked up, her ears in a fluff for listening, and
@allummpsaidhesltuisearcarne
“It is the Land Rover,” said Mary. “Fochan is that bad a driver;
he had the gate off, last time, and he nearly killed the bull.”
When Fochan came in, nobody said hello. They were used to
him. He sat in the corner, and Mary gave him tea. He was a bald
man with big ears, and the responsibility of the laird’s sheep had
shriveled his face to a. look of sullen bad temper. His chief collie
(Michael could see two younger ones in the Land Rover outside)
came in with him and lay under his chair, growling at Phoebe, who
growled back. The two dogs had been bred for thousands of years,
one to kill and the other to keep, and they seemed to take them-
selves seriously. Fochan had the skill and practice to kick a dog
without spilling a drop of his tea. Michael was impressed.
There was the sound of Mary baking, and the crow of a cockerel
outside on the midden. Then Callum startled them all by speaking
in Gaelic to the shepherd: “Bheil caoraich air a mhonadh an
drasd?”
Michael smiled at the lovely, useless words. Fochan’s dog peered
out and sniffed, as if Gaelic smelled new to him, though an older
collie would have slept through English and Gaelic alike. Mary
gigeled.
“Michael has been reading to us out of Coinneach Odhar,” she
said, “and himself will be in a moodie.”
So Fochan smiled, humoring him, and answered, “Tha; tha dha’
na thri thall air taobh an iar @ Loch Garbh Bhreac.’ But then
it took hold of them and they spoke for a while, seriously, but al-
ways with the same undertone of wry self-amusement they had
when they spoke English. It might have been the counterpoint
Gaelic gives to the voice, or the way they felt about their lives. Mi-
chael could not tell. Fochan drank three cups of tea and left to see
to the sheep.
“Och, we were leaving you out,” said Mary to Michael. “But we
got onto the last time we heard the Gaelic spoken. It was Callum’s
old Aunt Maggie, her that died ten years ago; it has been that long.
They put her into a home, you see—she was daft, she was no’
strong enough to look out for herself— and we were all so scared
of her we would no’ go to see her in the home. And when
Callum went at last, she was just wild at him, and she gave him such
JOANNA OSTROW 265

a talking-to in the Gaelic—so that the nurses would no’ under-

And him-
stand, you see — and she kept him at it all the afternoon.
him-
self was just sitting by the bed as quiet as a mousie — imagine
ranting —
self so scared; she was that bad a cailleach while she was
brave enough to
and all he could say was ‘Tha, tha,’ until he was
the sheep
get away. Och, aye, and he was asking Fochan were there
up west the road the now.”
not follow
She made scones as fast as she spoke. Michael could
like birds’ feet,
the knead and slap of her hands or the soft patter,
sheep?
of her voice. He caught up with her at last and said, ‘““The
Are they? Tell me.”
“No,” said Callum.
yet, and even
They hadn’t expected him to speak for a long time
d a scone off the
Mary, Michael noticed, was startled. She droppe
in the room.
eriddle and there was the reek of burned flour
l wondered.
Phoebe sneezed. What was wrong with Mary, Michae
Michae l wished , now, he knew Gaelic.
Couid Callum be lying?
his soft voice. “The sheep are no’ there
“No,” said Callum in
after all. He has penned them for the lambing.”

writing
Michael had to spend the next morning studying and
window and saw Mary half-
up notes. Once, he looked through the
as if she were coming to visit hin,
way up the road from Croichan,
turned back. He admitted
but when he looked up again she had
she seemed, she probably had
to himself that, however friendly
a threat, and would not
not stopped seeing him as a disturbance,
He went back to his work,
have the courage to come to his house.
Phoebe and, at last, they went
until, in the late afternoon, he took
west the road.
ed them, waving, till the
Callum was out on the bank and watch
deer fence and cut them
road curved uphill on its way to the
temporarily out of his sight.
gate in the deer fence
Michael and Phoebe went through the
el had seen deserts and
and he shut it carefully behind him. Micha
ared to this moor. In
sage flats, but they were gardens comp
inhabited yet. But he
America, the bleak spaces were simply not
had lived on the edges
felt something hopeless here, as if people
witho ut ever having the de-
of the moor for thousands of years
anyth ing with it, besides cut-
sire or the ability to live on it, or do
 266 Celtic Twilight

ting a few peats, or running a few hardy Blackface sheep on the

heather, or burying their dead; the survey map showed some an-
cient burial mounds farther in along the road.
No wonder the people spoke of it in ritual phrases
— the hill,
west the road. Michael, like most Americans, had seen ads for
tweeds and whiskey, but those were pretty — or, at least, romantic
— pictures. This was a black hideous country. Still, it was not men-
acing and complicated like the woods below. It felt passive, vacant;
when Callum withdrew into his half-idiot privacy, it was a place
like this he must approach. They went along the cart track. An-
other gray day. Below Michael, but still in the sky, over the Beauly
woods, was one hawk.
Phoebe trotted off, limbering up. She was still coughing, from
the strain of her hunt, but a short walk would do her good.
There was the bell-like cackle of a grouse, and Michael jumped,
thinking it might be a bleat, a sheep. Phoebe chased birds casually,
for amusement; she slithered into them, nose down, as if she were
rooting them out of the heather. Two grouse thundered up and
planed off, squawking, down toward the river. She watched them
go. They were not her business.
In a fold of the hill Michael saw a small loch, like a drop of
lead under the sky. The survey map called it Loch Garbh Bhreac.
That name had a familiar look; perhaps Callum had mentioned it
once. But there was such a gap between written and spoken Gaelic
that it was impossible to tell. Two miles ahead along the road was
Loch Avoch, where the crofters had once cut peats. “Tomorrow
they would go there, and tell Callum — who had probably cut peats
himself there, fifty years ago — how it looked now. The next day,
they would go past Loch Avoch, to the hill where there was no
road.
Now it was getting late— time to turn back. Up here, darkness
started from the ground, as if the heather were exhaling something
cold and he was walking into it. He watched Phoebe, trying to in-
vest himself in her running, trying to find some of the peace he had
been hoping for — watching so hard that he did begin to feel her
freedom, her galloping across the dun-colored, slowly spinning hill.
The great sweep of space began to accept him, and became a com-
fort. He began to lose track of the edges of himself. It was a brief
JOANNA OSTROW 267

tilt of experience, a spillover of sleep, but for that second he was

free of Things, stones, hunting. He was cut loose.
And then, as he approached the deer fence, one of those alternate
selves that had been so quiet the past week remarked dispassion-
ately, ‘““There is, of course, a flock of Blackface sheep at the bottom
of the hill, and Phoebe is after them.”
He looked, and saw the little, moving group of sheep and dog
far away, and started to run down the steep hillside, over bogs
and heather roots, in crazy leaps, but —as in a nightmare — the
sheep and dog refused to come closer. There were eight sheep,
white, pregnant, with mottled black legs and heads. ‘They were
tripping over their coarse winter’s wool. There was his hunting,
sand-colored dog. She grabbed the hind leg of the slowest and most
pregnant sheep, and, like the hare, it gave up the minute it felt her
teeth. It could have easily kicked her away; if it had even turned
to face her, she would have backed down. But this killing-and-be-
ing-killed was a formal game, played by rules. The sheep, unlike the
hare, was silent. It folded up and went to its knees, yellow eyes
looking somewhere else in a perfect passive resistance. One of Mi-
chael’s selves said, ““That sheep would be useful in the fight for
civil rights. Shall we have a demonstration?” And another mur-
mured, “Ewesful.”
Michael was outraged at their bad taste, and also sobbing, for
breath and frustration. The dog would not hear him, or obey if
she did. Now she backed off, tugging like a puppy with a sock, and
white wool spun out across the blackish ground. There began to be
blood. No of struggle— the heather was too soft. At last,
sound
Michael got there and grabbed at the dog, but that, apparently,
was a violation of the rules. Blind and deaf, Phoebe must have
thought the sheep was fighting back; in terror, she twisted free
and bolted up the hill.
“Idiot,” said Michael to everything.
He watched her run; there was nothing else he could do. She was
coughing badly now. The air was cold, smelling of mud. Up on
the bank where Callum, of course, was, the air would be fresher,
even warm. At this distance, Michael could not see Callum— just
a glitter of last light on the wheel spokes and on the field glasses.
But he knew now why Callum had been watching, and how eagerly.
NANCY HUDDLESTON PACKER

Early Morning, Lonely Ride

(FROM THE SOUTHWEST REVIEW)

BENEDICT’S HUSBAND, Emery, was a lawyer. Successful.

FRANCES
nothing.
Frances herself might yet become anything, having tried
and live-in help at
She was only thirty-three. She had three children
s at a rich man’s
home. Sleeping. She was nothing among stranger
party. She said to Emery,
copper
“Notice how new money smells like a cross between wet
and Cashmere Bouquet?”
“Please don’t,” said Emery.
room freshener, I
“Cash, cashmere, coppers, copper, and a can of
Rich peo-
think they call it, wafting in from the downstairs drains.
universe. New
ple always trying to undo the natural odors of the
spray and a
rich. What about dying? Buried with a can of aerosol
going just great,
couple of lavender sachets?” She thought she was
about to zoom off holdin g Emery by the collar.
t her. “Please
“Grow up,” said Emery, making his choice agains
just grow up!”
handwoven
“Right here?” she asked sweetly. “On his gorgeous
rug? Think of the aroma for God’s sake, Emery.”
s momen-
Gazing beyond her with the look of a guest who expect
to ignore her, hav-
tarily to catch the party’s beat, Emery professed
first place. To
ing other fish to fry or why had they come in the
attention. Hell with
cope with her, she believed, required his full
to view the
it. She sat on a pumpkin velvet window seat and vowed
dark Bay all evening. Maybe the rich didn’t like smells, but they
she nodded
sure bought the sights. If anyone noticed. Occasionally
 270 Early Morning, Lonely Ride

amiably about her. Grins hung from her teeth like old moss. Peo-
ple seeing her saw only Revlon and Maidenform. She was just one
of the girls, boys: chic, shrewd, and stupid. Look out. Their
hostess, whose barbiturated face flamed up from a purple dress
that weighed in at close to five hundred dollars, claimed Emery,
rescued a man from his wife. From time to time, the host, porpoise
of body but ferret of eye, came to sit beside Frances and to press
thighs with her. Frances shortly ran out of amusing things to say
and was a wallflower. With contemptuous lack of embarrassment
she warded off other wallflowers seeking solace. She was not a
woman’s woman. With a cold blue mirthless eye she forewarned idle
men she might have ridden straight through the evening. She was
not a man’s woman.
It was Emery’s crowd, not hers. It was a tired coupling of busi-
ness and pleasure. She did not count. She was, if anything at all,
only a helpmeet the color of the background. Forgetting her,
Emery enjoyed himself. At that thought, many grievances sur-
faced. The children slept like tops; like tops they were spinning
on their own. Strings dangled from her hands, cut loose by time
and condition. Nothing short of the rapt attention of everyone
would satisfy her and, sadly, she knew it. She grew restive. This
was the world she lived in, a world she never made, the best of all
possible worlds, but hers, alas, was not the hand that rocked it.
“O brave new world” she said aloud.
“Darling?” asked Emery, standing at the empty fireplace with
their host’s brother-in-law, for all the world as if conducting the
world’s affairs.
“That has such people in it,” she finished.
Emery laughed gaily, apprehensively, and moved away. The
brother-in-law, who smelled of oil and litigation and pine
needles, cast her an appraising and impersonal look. The sort of
man, she decided, who grandly bestowed upon a grateful wife a
white Lincoln Continental. (What’s wrong with that? Emery
might ask. If you don’t know. . . . Did she give him a Cadillac?)
Frances preferred Emery, gentle, rational, accepting. Mutual.
Slyly she coughed for his attention and signaled for them to go
home. He hesitated but then set his face to stay. All right all right
go fly a kite.
A waiter moved among them like a matador, a towel over his
NANCY HUDDLESTON PACKER 27h

arm, a tray of drinks poised for the kill. He was Filipino, colors
of golden hills and black patent leather. The host called him Rob-
ert. Soon, Frances called him Bob. An hour passed and she called
him Bobby. He said, Yes Mrs. Benedict, and she thrilled at the
sound from strange luscious lips. Later, having crossed the hearth
to the other window seat, she caught his eye. One enchanted eve-
ning. His white teeth gleamed for her. She played with the thought
of lust. She saw them naked and exhausted upon hot sand but
found that she had nothing further to say to him. To fill the void,
she curried, combed, painted, filed, smoothed, roughed in order
that she would want to talk to him. Why? Reality, as usual, im-
pinged and she saw him sliding down the corridors of forever, hap-
pily passing drinks to friends of the rich. Let him climb some other
snow-capped mountain. Poor Frances, she thought.
Two in the morning came none too soon, and Emery, she
thought, was none too sober. He did not so much approach as ac-
cost her. He took her elbow. She heard his trumpets blaring and
the martial beat of his drums. He had not forgotten her but he
preferred himself. She was not defenseless but she was demanding.
She reclaimed her elbow. At the front door he swooped down on
a half-finished and deserted drink and after proffering it to her
downed it with a flourish. His gesture was at once a reprimand,
a warning, and a defiance. He apparently felt deeply guilty at
having deserted her, but nonetheless he proclaimed that he was his
own man by right, be quiet.
By reason and a long-standing agreement, she should have driven
By happenstance she did not, for their host marched them
home.
down the stairs to the car. Before such a client as that, dear Emery
lacked the courage to let her drive. She might have insisted, made a
desire
small scene, but she did not, out of pity and fortitude and a
to justify all her grievances.
Gesturing grandly, drunkenly, Emery slid behind the wheel of
the car and unerringly slipped the key in the ignition. Smiling
die
erimly, Frances announced to herself that she was going to
cover of
on the Bloody Bayshore because their host wished, under
darkness, to pat her bottom one more time. She contemplated giv-
a
ing the old fool a punch in his belly and her resentment reached
climax. Is this the age we live in? No one counted her, protected
her, nor was she free and equal. She wished ill on everyone.
 PANES Early Morning, Lonely Ride
As Emery bucked away from the curb, she looked back and saw
their host sprawled face down in the entrance to his house. Now
that, she said, will do for a starter.
“There’s a stop sign,” she said.
“I’m not blind,” said Emery.
“Oh?” said Frances. She withdrew into her most maddening si-
lence.
“Great party,” said Emery, making amends. He glanced at her
quickly as if to judge her mood. What right had he to smile who
had no right not to smile? What gift was this? He drove, did he
not?
“Absolutely tip-top, one in a million,” ’
she said. ‘Shall I drive?”
She extended her hand as if literally to take the wheel.
He heard, saw, ignored. “They’re first-rate people, really first-
rate. Know what I mean?” It was his way of making friends, but
he had no grievance.
“Well now, let me see,” she said. “You mean salt of the earth,
don’t you? May I drive now?”
Emery appeared to ruminate. “It’s going to be a very fruitful
reJationship.”
“He said you were the greatest lawyer since . . . John Jay. I’d
like to drive, Emery.”
He laughed. “That guy never heard of John Jay. I’m doing all
right, ain’t I? Driving?” His voice was so reasonable, not thick,
just very careful and reasonable. He bore no grudge. He was, in
fact, managing the car well enough. He had smoothed out the
clutch and he traveled at moderate speed. All the same, she wanted
to drive.
“In the early years of their marriage,” she intoned as if reading
from a document, “they agreed together, both parties complying
without dissenting voice, that so-called role-playing was less impor-
tant than life-living, that error would be on the side of over-safety,
that should one or the other imbibe too deeply, that one automati-
cally relinquished his or her rights to the wheel of the car, the body
of the baby, the tray of Orrefors, or the handle of the hot pan. It
was a bargain struck in good faith and high reason. It has no
doubt saved them many a goblet.”
“Agreed,” he said, turning up the ramp to the Bayshore. “So?”
She had been acutely alert to him for years and she saw the com-
NANCY HUDDLESTON PACKER 2713

ponents of his resistance, the pride, the threat, the daring, the
fear. Nevertheless, it infuriated her.
“Tomorrow morning you'll give me that cute little crooked
little smile of yours, and you'll say Boy was I crocked last night,
I didn’t know whether I could drive home or not. If we live until
tomorrow.”
“Goddammit,” said Emery, speeding up, “you know I’m not
drunk but you just keep pounding away as if your life depended
on it, just so you can win the round, just so you can show me.”
“Merging traffic,” she said.
“I see the merging traffic.” His face became, for him, brutal and
flushed. Suddenly he braked and swerved to avoid a sideswiping
Thunderbird. His face quieted. “Got your seat belt fastened?”
he asked in rueful apology.
She quoted a headline. “Lawyer and Wife Killed on Bayshore.”
He thought he had her, he looked delicious. “Prominent Lawyer
and Beautiful Wife Only Injured.” When he heard himself, his
smile soured. “Not injured either, dammit. Why do you act this
way? What do you want?”
“Td be mad as hell if I got killed coming home from a party as
nasty as that one,” she said.
At first he laughed at the absurdity of what she had said. And
then he surrendered to her anger and its demands for combat.
you?
He drew back his lips and said, ‘““You just can’t stand it, can
How many years and you just can’t stand it when people are more
interested in me than they are in you. You just got to cut me down
someway.”
her
Her skin felt like plaster of Paris and her teeth ached, but
voice was gay. “It’s a man’s world, you know. Poor Emery. Poor
dear old Emery, with his hag of a nag of a bag of a wife. I mean,
what the hell, if you want to drive while intoxicated, what differ-
ence does it make that I'll get killed too?”
Sour and silent, he drove the car. Stubbornly they built up the
ide
battlements of silence. The Bayshore swept down the countrys
to the flat country and the bay and darkness . The hills to the right
at
held pockets of light. A jet swooped upward from the runway
the airport. The moon vanished. Occasion ally cars sped toward
them on the other side of the parkway. Rarely, a car passed them
heading south. Their own car began to lug. Emery gripped the
 aie Early Morning, Lonely Ride

wheel. He shifted down a gear. The car began to thud and bump.
He switched off the ignition. Understanding struck them both
but Frances rushed to speak it.
DACs aat.<
“T know it’s a flat,” he said, turning off to the shoulder of the
road. “I am not a fool.”
He applied the brakes and the car stopped. His face was sober
and ashamed. She relented at the sight and wished to touch his
face, give comfort, offer love and forgiveness. She devised a smile
but not soon enough.
“You are so superior,” he said. “You never had a flat in your
whole life. You’d have seen the nail, whatever it was.”
Rebuffed, she said warningly, “Perhaps.”
“From you, that’s a concession.”
She knew that all he wished was one kind word, to be asked
to share in the comedy or rue that lay beneath their quarrels. He
was a bookish man, not a fighter. He hated to quarrel, as he in-
evitably, too late, proclaimed. She saw clearly, not for the first
time, how she drove him to it, with her vanities and irritations,
her untapped powers and her vast need for consolation. She saw,
too, that he had not this time consoled her but had instead himself
concocted a grievance. She refused then in all conscience to help
him. Was it ever different?
“You may recall,” she said, “that I asked to drive. Perhaps, just
perhaps but nevertheless perhaps, we might have avoided this
flat.”
“Oh for Christ’s sake stop it.”
“But you had to show everyone how big and tough . . .”
“Can you stop it? Can you please stop it?”
“Tf I wanted to,” she said.
“Can you forgo just this one time the intense pleasure you get
from hammering on me?”
“He said, hammering on her.”
Her stomach cramped and her jaws ached, but she smiled to
prepare herself for further battle. He was what he was, but so was
she. She did not know what laws governed them. But, loving
each other (for all they knew or cared) , they rubbed mild abrasions
into deep rawness. Moments of contempt and anger had always
come and gone, had often wracked and strained them to break-
NANCY HUDDLESTON PACKER 275

ing, and always been inconclusively put away and forgotten. She
was no fool, she of course wished for peace. But she said, “Can you
change a tire?”
‘“That’s helpful, that’s real helpful,” he said. “Leave it to you to
make a man feel manly and confident.”
He got out of the car, took off his coat and folded it neatly,
placed it on the seat, rolled up his sleeves, loosened his necktie,
and idly walked up and down beside the flat tire. Finally he got
his key chain and opened the trunk. Staring ahead at oncoming
lights, Frances listened to his work. She thought that she wished
him success, but she was not sure. He removed the jack from the
trunk and placed it under the back axle. Frances felt the car rise.
She thought of going to stand with him but gave it up. They would
only antagonize each other. She would create his mistakes. Once
he had accomplished his task, he would be so happy that they
would be friends again. He would be irresistible. If he succeeded.
She heard him bump the spare out of the trunk. He popped the
hubcap off the flat tire. She heard his startled cry of pain. She
opened the door and peered back at him. He held the heel of
his thumb to his mouth. Blood darkened his arm and shirt front.
“Damn thing slipped,” he said.
She took the handkerchief from his hip pocket and wrapped it
around the wound. A car coming in their direction slowed. She
raised her hand in greeting but lowered it in fear. Who were they
and why? Emery turned, still holding his hand to his mouth. He
looked at Frances, gleaming and relieved, as the car stopped behind
them. Frances thought that she might herself have changed the
tire. She feared strangers at such an hour.
Three young men got out of the car. They wore sports coats
and white shirts and loosened neckties. They smelled of men’s
cologne and stale whiskey. They stopped before Emery and bowed
low. Their manners were comic, impersonal, and threatening.
“Sir,” said the shortest of the three, a boy of twenty or so with
a crew cut and glasses. The largest one came to stand before
Frances. “Madame,” he said with a low bow.
The third boy said, “You talk entirely too much, bear,” and
all three commenced to laugh. Frances backed away. The big one
did look like a bear, with his short arms and heavy torso and tri-
angular head. A bear.
 276 Early Morning, Lonely Ride

“I’m awfully glad to see you boys,” said Emery. “I seem to have
hurt myself.” He presented his wounded hand for their inspec-
tion. The shortest one grasped it and shook it vigorously. Emery
cried in pain.
“Leave off, Larry,” said the third boy, apparently the leader. He
was sharp-featured, yet soft and sensual. The other two, the bear
and the one called Larry, watched and waited for his reactions.
The three were, it seemed to Frances, a closed group, perform-
ers and audience at once. She and Emery were only props for
them. Or toys. “Okay, doc,” said the leader.
The bear approached Emery and extended his hand. He said,
“I make no pretense at being adept at the healing arts, but may I
Jook at your wound?”
Emery held out his hand and the boy took it. He held the
wound close to his eyes, pulled the handkerchief away and care-
fully pressed open the still bleeding gash in the heel of Emery’s
hand. Emery jerked away.
“What the hell, are you crazy?” he said.
“I wanted to see what was inside,” the bear said.
“Te’s a sadist,” said the leader.
“I was a teen-age sadist,” said the bear. All three boys whooped
with laughter.
“You boys run along,” said Emery. “Find your fun someplace
else.”
Frances wondered where the highway patrol was. The vaunted
highway patrol. Cars were fewer and fewer now.
The smallest of the boys, Larry, pushed his glasses up higher on
his nose and after a glance at the leader walked to peer under the
car. He put his hand on the bumper and gently, slowly began to
rock the car.
“Stop that!” said Emery. With his hand at his mouth, he started
toward Larry. The bear touched Emery’s arm.
“He isn’t hurting you, is he, mister?” The bear shot a glance
at the leader. “Ever heard the story of the Good Samaritans? I
mean, anybody else stop to help you? He’s just trying to help mis-
ter, in his own little way. Don’t kill the instinct for brotherhood,
mister, not in our Larry.”
_ Emery paused. “He’s going to rock the car off the jack.”
NANCY HUDDLESTON PACKER Ze

“Larry ain’t mean, mister,” said the bear. ‘“‘Ain’t a mean bone
in that kid’s body.”
“By accident, maybe,” said Emery. He didn’t look at anyone, nor
did he move. Frances knew that he was uncertain and nervous,
that he was unsure of how to handle the boys. He wouldn’t want
to act on impulse or do anything dangerous. And he did want the
boys’ help. He hesitated, staring at the roadway and sucking the
wound on his hand.
“Larry ain’t accidental, either, mister,” said the bear. “Ain’t an
accidental bone in that kid’s body. Is there, Larry?”
Larry turned toward Emery. He was not smiling, but his ex-
pression was trancelike. He began to shake his head, slowly,
rhythmically, as if dancing. On that signal the other two boys also
began to shake their heads, to wear trancelike expressions, and
to move toward Emery. They moved in quite close, shaking their
heads, but silent. Emery looked at the highway, up and down the
highway. Frances said to herself that the boys were obviously kid-
ding, that they would fold if Emery just showed a little authority,
confidence. They were just kids. Clean kids, at that. Out on a
lark. Showing off for each other. Not dangerous, not if someone
laughed at them and said Fix the flat or go away. Emery said
nothing. He did not feel comfortable or strong, perhaps it was
his aching thumb, or the quarrel. Seconds ticked off. A car whipped
past them.
“You want this tire fixed or not?” asked the bear.
“I seem to have hurt this hand rather badly,” said Emery. He
appealed to them with a smile.
“We ain’t asking for a health report,” said Larry. “You're taking
too much time talking. You want the tire fixed or not?”
Frances said, “Yes,” and Emery said, “Yes, if you would be so
kind.” His voice sounded choked and she knew he was angry to
ask directly for help, from them. He had taken too much from
them. She shrugged off the accusing look he gave her. If she hadn’t
said Yes, would he have said No? She didn’t think so.
“We'd be delighted to be so kind,” said Larry.
The bear walked to Emery and laughed when Emery backed
off. “I won’t hurt you, mister, not a mean bone in my body either.
I don’t want your wife to hear this.” Emery looked suspicious but
 ee

278 Early Morning, Lonely Ride

allowed himself to be involved. The bear cupped his hand around

Emery’s ear as if to whisper and he brought his mouth close. In
a loud shouting voice he said, “You real scared, ain’t you, mister?”
Emery jerked loose and Frances thought he was going to hit the
boy. He stopped himself but his face clenched. ‘“Now look
here,” he said, “you boys are having fun, but I don’t find it at all
funny. What are you up to, what do you want?” He looked from
one to the other, demanding an answer, a rational explanation.
“Easy easy easy,” said the leader in a soft sibilant voice. He held
his hands up and shook them, as if to forestall Emery. He seemed
deeply embarrassed. Emery went on.
“T say, if you are going to help, then help. If you are going to
change the tire, then change it. But if you are going to rob, then
rob. If you are going to hurt, then hurt. If you are going to. . .”
The bear interrupted. “Rape?” he asked.
“Shut up,” said the leader. He gestured for Emery to go on,
that he for one found Emery’s words interesting and he was intent
on listening.
“I’m sick of it,” said Emery. “I’ve had as much of your clowning
as I am going to. Either .. .”
“Inside,” said the leader, gesturing toward the car door.
Emery did not answer. He stared as if he did not believe his
ears. Larry took a step toward him. Spacing his words as if for a
particularly stupid and stubborn person, he said, “Get ...in...
side. We will . J-fix:...: the Hat Getitr=” He tured sto: tic
other two boys and then looked back at Emery. Very quickly he
said, “The lady stays outside.”
“Oh no,” said Emery. He went to Frances and put his arm
protectively about her shoulders. “Oh no,’ he repeated with
finality. Larry went to the back of the car and began to rock it on
the jack, back and forth, back and forth, with increasing tempo. He
smiled sweetly, as if deeply engaged in the music of the rocking car.
The bear began to move his hips and snap his fingers.
Emery pulled Frances farther away and then he turned back in
fury to the boys. Frances put a restraining hand on his arm. His
hands were locked in fists at his sides. She tightened her grip. She
had thought the boys meant no great harm; but if Emery chal-
lenged them, would they be able to resist? What chance had a
paunchy forty against three young bulls who were twenty and rag-
NANCY HUDDLESTON PACKER 279

ing? Emery tugged at his arm but she held fast. Let them have
their fun.
“Don’t be a fool,” she said. She pressed her body against his and
forced him to move backward. They walked away from the car.
She held his elbow and applied a gentling rhythmic pressure. She
said, “They’re just showing off. If you try to take them on,
well . . .”” She slipped her hand into his and they walked off hand
in hand. Emery seemed blind and agonized.
“Christ!” he said. He stopped, forcing her to stop too.
She said, “They could easily rock the car off the jack. What
could you do? You can’t win. They could rock the car off the
jack.”
“Let them,” said Emery. “I don’t have to take their insolence.”
She put her arms around him and leaned her head against his
chest. His head strained over her shoulder, asserting himself at the
boys. Silently the boys watched and waited for Emery’s next move,
to play out their game against him and to defeat him. They de-
spised him and Emery knew it and Frances knew it. But she
thought it was useless for him to try to remedy their opinion of
him.
“I’m in it, too,’ she said. “You can’t just decide by yourself to
start a fight.”
“Start a fight Christ!” said Emery. He put his hands on her
shoulders to shove her aside, but she locked her arms around his
back.
“Get in the car,” she said. ‘Please. For my sake. You aren’t a
child, proving something. What would be gained?”
“I don’t know, something, I don’t know.’ His breath was
staccato, like obstructed sobs. Abruptly the strain left him and he
grew slack, surrendered. She knew he was ready, needing now only
a bit more persuasion. She wondered briefly, had it all been a
charade? his willingness to fight? She did not dwell on the thought
nor did she commit herself to it, but it was there. Automatically
she marshaled the opposing force: his tension, his anger, his self-
respect, and, of course, her own unfortunate instinct to compre-
hend the seamiest motive of everyone. She said,
“For my sake. Think what might happen to me. Those stupid
toughs. Bully-boys. Bulls. Animals. Do it for my sake. Get in the
”?
car.
 280 Early Morning, Lonely Ride

She urged him toward the door, her arms still locked behind
him, as if they were dancing. He stared over her shoulder at the
silent boys, from time to time made as if to challenge them. At the
door of the car, she released her hold on him. Hesitancy gripped
him and then he folded into the back seat.
The bear and Larry began to change the tire. Frances leaned
against the front fender and drew her light jacket tighter. She felt
quite chilled, and as she looked at the sky it seemed to recede and
she seemed to shrink. She was on a vast empty darkened desert.
She was delicate and exposed in a senseless universe and she was
mortal and alone. All else was diversion, and useless.
She became aware of a presence near her, and she was at once her
intact self again. The third boy, the leader, had come to stand be-
side her, leaning, as she did, against the fender.
“You're a tough one, ain’t you, a real tough one,” he said. Pol-
ishing his teeth with his tongue, he nodded his head and looked
at her under lowered lids. “I like tough women. Not cheap:
tough. Know something? You ought to pick on somebody your own
size, not a little guy like that one.” He motioned with his head
toward the car. “I bet not once, not once, you been with a guy
as tough as you are.”
How absurd, Frances cried to herself, how awful, she cried,
and momentarily her body seemed to open wide and to close and
she felt a chill on her neck and a tremble. As if by signal the boy
pushed off from the car and came to stand face to face with her.
He put his hands on his hips, thumbs hooked into his belt. He
rocked back and forth, back and forth, from the balls of his feet
to his heels, swinging closer and closer to Frances. He was grotesque,
and lewd, a caricature, obscene, threatening, appealing. And she
was herself and tough.
“You filthy little animal!” she said. “Don’t dare touch me! You
fix the tire and then leave us alone, all of you.”
The boy laughed hollowly. ‘Tough,’ he said, “see what I
mean?” He moved away and as he walked past the other boys he
said, “Fix the tire like the lady said and then git.” He shook a ciga-
rette from a pack and went on to his own car. The other boys bent
back to work. Frances felt the back end of the car go down and
she heard the trunk slam. They were finished. With the leader at
the wheel and without speaking or acknowledging Frances and
NANCY HUDDLESTON PACKER 281

Emery, the boys got in their car. Whatever they had wanted, they
either had or would never have. Grinding, spitting stones, blowing
smoke and the stench of burning rubber, the car sped away.
“They're gone,” said Frances.
Emery’s muffled voice came to her. “I hope you're satisfied. I
hope one time in your life you're satisfied.”
She did not answer. She knew what he meant, or thought she
did, but she did not know what the truth was. After a moment she
got behind the wheel and started the car. Slowly she gained the
roadway and set out for home. Once home, she would consider
Emery. She would help him. She would restore him with a final
drink, with ice and coldness. She would persuade him, and herself,
that really nothing important to either of them had been at stake.
She would help him to discover the comedy of it all and to laugh.
Slowly, between them, they would begin to build a little anecdote
to relate to friends and to reduce the episode to dust. And in the
darkness they would soothe each other’s frail raw nakedness to a
forgiving sleep. When they got home. But for now, as Emery wept
silently in the back seat, she drove the car and she was exhilarated.
 JOHN PRILELEs

Bleat Blodgette
(FROM THE PARIS REVIEW)

His MOTHER’s FACE had not always looked so round. He could

remember it pale and maidenly, when the cheekbones showed and
when it was soft but not fleshy and relatively unpolluted by woe.
Mrs. Blodgette wasn’t forty yet. Nothing made her face so lumi-
nous as tears could, and she must have been only discovering that
this was so. She seemed to make a cosmetic asset of it: no rouge
or powder flawed her cheeks, to be caked and corrugated by her
tears. The spring twilight gave his mother’s moist skin a near
Rubenesque luster, he believed, being strangely moved by colors at
this his most formative age. Colors had on him the power of stay-
ing his instincts. It was only when he thought he couldn’t stand
another word she said that he’d hit her across the mouth. He was
callow and high-strung; she ought to have known she was putting
him under a great strain.
“My poor boy,” she’d been weeping. “It doesn’t matter about
me, but when he turns his back on his two sons, then I say it is
his black blood coming out. He’s done it before. I knew this would
happen.”
“It’s not, Mah.”
“My poor boy, what are you going to dor”
“It’s not black blood.”
“My poor darling.”
And for this, for this Mrs. Blodgette had come from Eighty-sec-
ond Street to the western Massachusetts village where her son had
almost completed the expensive secondary education his great-aunt
 a Soe eee SS eae date meal es Pee RWEES ee ieTePYOWPree eee arEWeee ESSee eee

284 Bleat Blodgette

was providing him. As it were from Ghent to Aix, she’d sped here
by taxicab and Pullman car and, sparing herself in her desperate
haste none of the inconveniences of travel in that year 1940, had
changed at Springfield to a Greyhound bus— bringing news of
Papa. She also brought for reading on the train a contemporaneous
book of child psychology, As the Twig is Bent. Though an erratic
reader, she plainly had given it considerable attention. He noticed
almost as soon as he saw her that the jacket was torn and there were
smudges of ink where she’d marked certain pages.
He met her on the steps of Headmaster’s House, that reception
place of parents, and saw how her face was radiant with emer-
gency. “What’s the matter, Mah?” — ‘Poor Steven!’’ She tried to
clasp him in her short arms when As the Twig Is Bent flopped open
on the bricks and the torn halves of the jacket were swept off in the
May breeze. He had to chase over the lawn to retrieve them. “How
come you read this junk?” he asked her, although the reason was
on her face. ‘“Something’s happened. Your mother must be the
one who tells you,” she said.
Supper was over at the school and during the short interim be-
fore Evening Prayer, shirt-sleeved boys were all round outdoors
chasing tennis balls and playing nigger baby. His mother was
nervous and frumpy in her brown dress. She was the same height
as her son. Even some severely astigmatic schoolmate pausing
in his play and squinting through the growing dusk might at once
perceive their kinship. They can see us, he realized, with an ex-
cruciation strong and cruel, beyond the categories of every book
of juvenile psychology. He took his little mother, shoved her, all
but hurled her through the screen door. “Oh, Steven!” He tum-
bled after her into Headmaster’s Parlor and the door sprang shut
against his heel.
“Here’s your book,” he said. “Why do you have to read that
junk?”
His mother put the book on the table, where it rested among the
cups and sandwiches. Wednesday afternoons Mrs. Kew, the Head-
master’s wife, served tea to Faculty Wives, but by this hour the
room was abandoned. Entirely to themselves, mother and son, they
had the vase of tulips, the chipped white and green crockery, the
knives and spoons, the curtains of smelly yellow muslin, and the
considerable length of the leather sofa on which they sat at distant
JOHN PHILLIPS 200

ends. He thought of what to say to make up for shoving her

through the door. From now on he would call her Mama as po-
litely as could be; no more talking to her like some slob.
She told him, “Something has happened. You will have to
be brave.”
“About my father,” he said.
“I know you're going to be a brave boy.”
“It’s some lady.”
“No lady.” His mother had the little handkerchief in her hand
ready for when they would need it.
“He got married.”
“Poor darling, how do I explain? You must be brave. Naturally,
it’s not our affair. I was so afraid you'd see it in the newspapers,
because this is a married woman.”
“The hell with the newspapers. Everybody has the right to live
their own life, I guess.”
The mother smote the sofa with her handkerchief. “All his life
Papa has only thought about one person and that person is him-
self!”
She would not stop talking. He only stood there beside the win-
dow as far from her as he could decently be. Outdoors on the
lawns the boys ran free, throwing tennis balls that soared up, and
up in the evening sky. They shouted while his mother talked, and
then he heard the chapel bell tolling down an end to the day’s
frivolity. The boys gathered up their coats and began trudging
off to Evening Prayer, while tightening their neckties, and the
sun cast pale crepuscular colors on their shirts. He felt an impulse
of love for his fellows, those other creatures of this hothouse who
might some day have to fight the world. Their turn would come,
they’d see their family names debauched in newspapers. One boy,
last winter, had his father fall drunk out of a hotel room he was
hiring with a showgirl. A father squashed like an old tomato on
the sidewalk, and this boy learned about it in the morning paper
they showed him at breakfast.
“In Catholic countries,” his mother explained, “the conventions
are different from ours. Divorce is an unusual thing. The Euro-
peans have customs... marriage customs... that may seem
hypocritical to you and me.”
“Mah.” He winced for her; he’d lived in France, he’d written
 i - ~ _ ee

286 Bleat Blodgette

a term paper about Henry the Eighth. “Mah, do you think I’m a
child?” His excruciation for her was worse than last year, on the
occasion of his sixteenth birthday, when she traveled up to the
school convinced it was her Duty — his father having abdicated his
— to explain to him how babies are made.
“She is a rich woman from New Mexico married to an Austrian
nobleman. There isn’t the possibility of a divorce,” his mother
was saying. “She’s Baroness Stoeffenblus and she is not a lady,
Steven. She’s not Austrian either.”
“I still bet she’s French.” He could see the fleeting wraith of
this baroness. A creature of fantastic allure, a courtesan; she had
diamonds and a beauty spot and a towering wig. She was Ethel
Merman, Madame Du Barry, whom he saw on his father’s lap,
kissing his father, tickling his chin, patting the bald spot on his
head. Sugar Daddy. He saw a big photograph of them on the
front page of the New York Journal-American, and a scarlet
headline and columns of soul-baring print.
“She isn’t French,” his mother corrected him, very shrill, “Papa's
Baroness is nothing but the daughter of a cop-per min-er.” Her
voice quailed on the syllables and broke, and he couldn’t stand to
hear her. “A rich vulgar woman who married a fortune hunter
for his name ... poor Steven . . . poor children .. .” She got
going again on the black Blodgette blood.
He would bring her to her senses. “Mah, that’s crazy!” He
would shake her if she made him do it.
“You are my brave boy.”
“Now cut it out, Mah.”
“You are so brave. Now I can tell Aunt Norah and Little How-
ard that you were so brave when I told you.”
He would ask her a question, calm her, divert her. Quickly
ask any old question. “Mah, how do you say that name Stoffus?”
Toward the window and the setting sun, his mother turned her
round, uncomprehending face. “Stoeffenblus?” she asked, and
began by syllables. ‘Stuff —n—” she said. “Stuff—’” The rose-
red light glistening on her moist face gave it almost a Rubens
color that made him forget what was happening. If only she had
sat completely still in that light and not, mistaking his pain for
helplessness, darted on over at him almost jubilantly on her tiny
ballerina’s feet.
JOHN PHILLIPS 287

“My poor boy.” She came at him as if the tears were of joy, and
flung out her arms almost triumphantly to receive him. “My brave
boy.”
His fist flew up high like one of the tennis balls. He sighted for
her open mouth and hit it, he would never be sure how hard. She
recoiled but she didn’t fall. The backs of his fingers felt wet and
tingled from the touch of her teeth, and he believed she was cry-
ing something at him that he couldn’t hear. He was too surprised
to move, and for the first time in his life a vice of pain clamped
round his chest.
“Can I interest anyone in Evening Prayer?”
Dr. Kew, Emmanuel’s Headmaster, poked head and shoulders
through the screen door. It may have been that when he asked his
question he was attempting a quip of his, giving the old “Tennis
anyone?” an ecclesiastical twist. The Reverend Dr. Kew, not heav-
ily endowed with tact, was all the same a kindly man. He passed
the academic year in daily contact with traumata and still he was
no voyeur or glutton; he would never have intruded on this ugly
scene except that the chapel bell was tolling, bringing out his shep-
herd’s instincts. “Last call for prayers,” Dr. Kew called in to the
Blodgettes cheerfully, exactly as he would to any other son and
mother who seemed to have forgotten the hour. “Last call for
chapel.”
“Oh thank God,” Mrs. Blodgette sighed, “Dr. Kew, it’s you.”
The Headmaster stepped into his Parlor, a well-shouldered, fine-
eyed man, trim, vigorously middle-aged, his gray forelock subtly
tousled as if to say that he had been a boy himself and that if he’d
grown up to be an ordained minister, it was because he loved boys
and was interested in their problems. It was a standing joke
in school that Dr. Kew could have doubled for Spencer ‘Tracy any
day as Father Flannigan in Boys Town. A two-fisted man of God,
Dr. Kew arrived on the untidy scene clasping the Book of Com-
mon Prayer against a distinctly Anglican surplice. “Mrs. Blodgette,
good evening. Good evening, Blodgette. You didn’t hear the
bell?” he said. “Something the matter with your hand?”
“Good evening, sir.” Blodgette had his offending fist behind his
back.
“Oh, Dr. Kew, thank God you came,” Mrs. Blodgette said.
“Well now,” the Headmaster began. “Can’t be as bad as that
 ES
So rere eae OOo oOoOrTTr—e—_c eo

Bleat Blodgette
288
this
now, can it?” He had only a minute of his time to soothe
circumst ances, as dispensa tion, he
nerve-racked mother. In these
excused Blodgette from Evening Prayer, and left them.
Wrung with penance, the boy stayed with his mother, to be
kissed, copiously forgiven, and forgiving in his turn. In
squeezed,
a dismal bathroom they washed their faces on Mrs. Kew’s guest
towels. When it was time to go, his mother reached out to kiss him
through the open door of the taxicab. “J forgot my As the Twig
Is Bent!” she said, and he had to run back to the parlor and fetch
the book. For that she kissed him several times. The last thing she
said before he shut the taxi door was that she felt much better,
“much much better.”

Twenty-four hours passed, and then when the gloaming came

again, with the shouts and the tennis balls flying outdoors, Blodg-
ette was summoned to Headmaster’s Study. In this barnlike room
which gave off Headmaster’s Parlor, the Head Man was waiting
there in his vestments. “Well now, Steve, I’m afraid I have sad tid-
ings.”
VCS isin.
He wasn’t going to ask if his mother had swallowed a bunch of
sleeping pills. Or had she by chance defenestrated? He understood
at once that his mother was dead. He saw a vision of the New York
Journal-American that announced her red-headlined death, so hard
and bright he had to blink.
2?
“This afternoon I had a telephone conversation with Mrs. . .
the Headmaster searched for the name. “Mrs. Safford.”
“Yes, sir. She’s my great-aunt.”
“Well now, your aunt is good and mad at you, Steve.” Dr.
Kew was being kindly, and yet even after six years’ acquaintance,
it was embarrassing to have the Head Man call you by the diminu-
tive of your Christian name. “Can you think why?” he asked.
“My aunt’s always mad about something.”
“Well now, your mother has had some sort of attack, I gather.”
“A nervous attack.”
“The doctor has sent her to bed. Complete rest and quiet.”
“Then it’s nothing, sir. Our family lives on nerves.”
“That’s a mighty funny thing for a fellow to say about his fam-
ily, Steve.”
JOHN PHILLIPS 289

“It's a mighty funny family, sir.”

“Well now,” said the Headmaster, low in his throat, that mildly
gruff and yet to many endearing “well now’ which a generation of
Emmanuel graduates had come to mimic, with nostalgia. “Mrs.
Safford — your aunt believes there is a connection between your
mother’s visit yesterday and her . . . and what happened to her
when she got home.’’ Dr. Kew tilted his face upward, his voice
rose heavenward: “Far be it from me to inquire what happened
with Mother in the parlor last evening. There are terrible pow-
ers dwelling inside us. Which one of us does not crave forgiveness
for these terrible powers which visit us from the dark sides of our
souls, Steve, and make us wretched and afraid?”
“Well, we already forgave each other, sir.”
“That’s fine, that’s very good,” said Dr. Kew, who had been
drumming his fingers quite a bit on the cover of his prayer book.
“Well now, but that was before Mother had this ... bad turn,
should I say? I wonder about now, this minute. I wonder if right
now you are enjoying full forgiveness?”
“I don’t suppose I am, Sina
“*The Lord is my shepherd. > 9” Facing the ceiling, the Head-
master uttered some of the Twenty-third Psalm. He said, “To me
these are the most beautiful words ever written. They tell us what
forgiveness means... “Thy Rod and Thy Staff they comfort
me.’” He examined the boy. ‘Are you embarrassed by that? I’m
not.
“His Divine Providence will absolve you. Give you clean hands
and a pure heart. But you must seek It.”
ves c
“Beaman. Manful.”
Vess
“Seek and be manful.”
VESS.,

Blodgette was excused tonight from Study Hour. He was to stay

in chapel after Evening Prayer and offer his solitary conscience to
the Lord, stay until the floodgates opened and bathed him in for-
giveness. He might stay all night, for he had the Headmaster’s
permission,
Emmanuel Academy’s chapel was an architectural anomaly
 ———ee ————————————ae

290 Bleat Blodgette

thrust up from the center of a sedulously Georgian campus that

was a particular pride of old Emmanuelers.
A Yankee cynosure, a panoramic symmetry of bricks and white
columns which, erected as it was foursquare upon Hamilton’s Fed-
eralist terrain, would have delighted even the eccentric Thomas
Jefferson, a rhapsodic alumnus, Torbert Case, ’96, had written in
a fund-raising brochure. Delighted too are Emmanuel’s sons whose
generosity (all the more remarkable in this age of fiscal chaos and
decadent government!) has traditionally maintained the high
order of both buildings and grounds. Our task is a self-perpetuat-
ing one, and one which today more than ever, to employ a phrase,
costs money!
The chapel, though, had been erected in a less chaotic age, the
aftermath of the war with Spain. Considerable of the brutality
and bombast associated with the battleship Maine was captured in
its lines, and the building expense had been borne alone by three
rich alumni in honor of a departed classmate. The architect, like
many Emmanuel graduates, had attended Harvard at least long
enough to join a final club, and he must have fallen in the Vic-
torian-Gothic spell of Memorial Hall — that flabbergasting monu-
ment to the quantity of Harvard men exterminated in the War of
Secession. And evidently this architect had been as well a man of
eclectic taste; the chapel had diminutive flying buttresses on two
of its sides and it was a hybrid phantasy: round and square, flat
and thin, and amalgamating brick, slate, stucco, porphyry, oak,
copper, stained glass and mullion among its ingredients. Set above
the entrance was a hatchment of Vermont marble. It announced the
name and dates of the prominent Emmanueler to whose memory,
as though some insidious alternative to God, this presumptuous
fane was built. And here lay a duplicity scalding to the conscience
of Steven Safford Blodgette, 40, having been baptized in infancy
an Episcopalian Christian of terrifying faith.
Three years ago last February, having come to the Years of Dis-
cretion and having the full Instruction of his church, Blodgette
received the Laying on of Hands — in this chapel — from Diocesan
Bishop Walsh, a graduate of Emmanuel who was by no coincidence
Honorary Chairman of the Academy’s Board of ‘Trustees.
His Confirmation, he fully understood, was the clear conse-
quence of unnatural, inward events that had happened before
JOHN PHILLIPS 291

Christmas vacation. As usual, when he had to go home to

Eighty-second Street, the prospect had brought on such fits of
brooding as theologians have named Tristitia. He thought of be-
ing back with the aged maids, his great-aunt and mother and little
brother in French velvet knickerbockers, all the descendant Saf-
fords fulfilling their destiny like spirits stifled in an attic. He saw
their grotesque significance, the ashen curse upon his stock, his
morbus originis; from this he had a sense of Original Sin more
harrowing than the manly notion that Dr. Kew had in mind in
weekly Christian Studies class when he read to his students ex-
cerpts from Cardinal Newman’s Apologia. Blodgette was fourteen
years old when he experienced that first early terror of being a rab-
bit cast down kicking in the glacial night. All Hell was a frozen
land from which he begged to be redeemed.
The time came when Blodgette took his place in a rank of kneel-
ing boys. He feared his soul would die before he felt on his head
the Bishop’s hand as the Bishop passed from head to head bowed
along the altar rail. In swirling raiment the Bishop hovered over
him and in trembling baritone inflected the mounting phrases of
the liturgy, in half-song, “Defend, O Lord, this thy CHILD with
thy heavenly GRACE...” and on to the next boy. Blodgette’s
scalp thrilled. Fearfully he touched the spot where Bishop Walsh’s
hand had lain. His hair was warm; he could tell that a miraculous
deliverance had been granted him.
Afterward, it was easier to go home and almost painless to rejoin
the family circle. He grew unconscionably jealous of his redemp-
tion. He was afraid of doubts which threatened it, and horribly
afraid of the contempt he felt for the Higgs Memorial Chapel
as a monument to Mammon and degrading to the Lord.
His scorn was centered on the marble hatchment. On it was cut
out a fat cross that got encrusted with bird droppings in the spring.
Below the carved cross the words In Honored Memory of Thy
Faithful Servant were followed by the name and dates of the hon-
ored Higgs. To hear Blodgette decry the inscription as a sacrilege,
his friends were amazed. “It’s the plaque that’s in honor of the
guy,” they would remonstrate. “You wack, that’s different from
the chapel.” “It is, like hell,” Blodgette would say. He was a crack-
pot on this subject. One day he made so bold to bring it up in the
Headmaster’s Christian Studies class.
 292 Bleat Blodgette

They were discussing sanctity; Dr. Kew was asking for defini-
tions of the word. “Sir!” Blodgette raised his hand, was recognized,
and his tongue ran off with his inchoate thought. “Sanctity isn’t
putting up a chapel or something holy like that when it’s supposed
to be for God and then go dedicate it to a graduate of the school, sir.
Just because he used to be a fat-cat millionaire. Sanctity means
it’s supposed to be for God! I mean, don’t you see what I mean?”
‘Well now,” said Di. Kew, the benign Spencer Tracy smiling
on the clear young faces. “Blodgette raises an interesting point.”
He liked a boy who had the grit to speak out what was on his mind
so long as it wasn’t just smart aleck. The Head Man paused to ex-
amine the faces of Blodgette’s classmates. In the averted eyes and
hand-clutched mouths before him was evidence of laughter, and
the Head Man played upon it. “Well now.” He cocked his face to
the ceiling, showed a nice sense of timing. “Td better put it this
way —It may be our friend raises an interesting point . . . but
Blodgette gets so all-fired passionate when he talks that V'll be
double-all-day darned if I can catch a word he says!”
There was a cachinnation in the class, of sheep calls and mirth-
ful voices ragging. ‘“Bleat!” ‘Tell about the chapel, Bleat.”
“Bleat, Bleat, he can’t be beat!” The Headmaster easily ignored
the breach of discipline.
“It’s not funny!” The boy was incensed. “I’m not a smart aleck,
sir. I mean it.”
They laughed as the shepherds laughed at the boy who cried
wolf so much. In the wheels within wheels of schoolboy life, each
presumed to know the other’s fears and foibles better than he knew
his own. Bleat Blodgette had never been serious in his life. If
their disbelief was cruel, Bleat had himself to blame.

He had chosen to be a clown from his first weeks at Emmanuel,

a new boy entering the bottom class. He was small, imberbe, odd
of face, unshorn, looking for all the world like a Bedlington ter-
rier.
Vindictive Mr. Frapp, who taught elementary French, could not
forgive the preposterous boy his fortuitous knowledge of the lan-
guage. This master once caught his overqualified pupil drowsing in
the classroom. “Qu’est-ce que vous avez, Blodgette?” ‘Today’s lesson
was the idiomatic uses of avoir. “Vous AVEZ sommeil?” Mr. Frapp
 JOHN PHILLIPS 293
commenced to enunciate for the class. “Oui, Monsieur Blodgette
A sommeil .. . Monsieur Blodgette A mal a la téte, peut-étre?
- . + Comme il A des cheveux affreux! Il A besoin de se faire couper
les cheveux. Nous AVONS tous honte de Monsieur Blodgette. JAI
horreur de Monsieur Blodgette!” Mr. Frapp stamped his feet; his
pupils were a dull bunch and his fey sally was wasted on them. In
Blodgette, however, he had a whipping post for the vexations of
twenty-five years of teaching school, for his thwarted scholarship
and unacclaimed translations of Pierre Louys. “I give you fair
warning. If you have not been to the barber by tomorrow — to-
morrow, is that clear? I shall with my own razor personally shave
your head until it glows in the light of the moon. Sek ek.” Mr.
Frapp ended with his horrid laugh.
Blodgette came to class the next day shorn in the village bar-
ber’s fruitbowl cut like the tonsure of a novice monk. Where the
ringlet curls dangled over his ears yesterday, his scalp shone a fishy
white.
“Blodgette, let’s have a look at you.” The stridulous tone of his
voice warned that Mr. Frapp was succumbing to a hysterical quirk.
Boys sensed the black anthology of this master’s temper. A slight
person with an aesthete’s moustache, his seizures gave him a rude
strength as he pitched boys across doorsills, and kicked their shins.
Blodgette stepped in the front of the room, and Mr. Frapp
snatched an ear that winged from his shaved scalp. ‘“‘Ow, sir.”
urn:
“Sir, cut that out. Sir, please.”
“Sek ek. So we can have a look at you. Turn.”
Blodgette was twisted full circle on the pivot of his ear so all
could see the barber’s work.
“Sek ek. We have a cropped sheep with us.”
“You better quit that, sir.”
“A cropped sheep, ek.”
“Sir, I said quit that,” Bodgette heard the roots of his ear crunch-
ing; his shoes were sliding and the floor spun. He saw chairfeet,
boysfeet, chalkdust, schoolbooks whirling down on the floor, and
down there he saw a delicate foot in a womanish shoe that tapered
to a vicious point on an oxblood toe. He stamped on Mr. Frapp’s
foot, hard on top of the metatarsal arch. The ear-crunching
stopped; he saw Mr. Frapp’s eyes bug out and mouth open as wide
 go Bleat Blodgette

as it would go. “I didn’t want to hurt you, sir. You were rooking
my ear.”
“Hurt?” The master seized Blodgette by the collar and aban-
doned himself to batter the boy’s shin with his pointed shoe toe.
Blodgette kicked back and an all-out kicking fight was on.
one of their
From their seats the pupils watched, entranced to see
as he
own, hardly more than a decade on this earth, giving as good
Ever after, for year upon year of their
got from the freakish adult.
the skirmish was known as The French Shin
excited discussions,
Fight.
the class was dismissed, they gathered round in the cor-
When
ridor, laughing and laughing for him. It was then that someone
named him “Bleat’” —for his sheep’s look. He had them; he
would ever be secure in his name and fame, and the new power of
being the hero fool. The French Shin Fight, in which his righteous
into slapstick, taught him who Bleat was and
anger had exploded
how to be Bleat. He could always get them to laugh.

Christian Studies class ended and they clustered in the corridor,

making an audience for the hero fool. “Tell us about the chapel.”
“Yeah, tell us the history.” “Tell about Jeff Higgs.” ‘Tell us, tell
us.” How was he to let them down? Bleat stepped a distance apart
and made a face for them, striking a grandiose pose, and gave them
the declamation that by now they knew almost as well as the joker.
“Jefferson Kemp Higgs,” he started to declaim the history, “one
of Emmanuel’s early sons —” No sooner were the first words off
his tongue than they were a silent audience stifling the merriment
he’d provoked only by making the face. Each time he started they
took it for granted their clown would be funnier than ever. ‘To see
him puff his cheeks and sniff through his big haughty nose was
enough to send one or two of the fainter-minded into premature
convulsions, dropping their books on the floor.
In the library once, while hunting for some reference book, Bleat
had come upon an obscure shelf marked “Publications by Gradu-
ates,” and tucked away among other unsuspected lucubrations on
yachting, rock gardening, dog obedience, contract bridge, was
a little volume (privately printed) entitled Emmanuel Academy —
A History. The author, Torbert Case, ’96, was a past president of
JOHN PHILLIPS 295

the Alumni Society and the same rhapsodic alumnus who had writ-
ten some remarkable fund-raising brochures. Mostly Mr. Case’s
volume described the Academy’s origins and the dour, supra-
lapsarian career of the Scottish clergyman Josiah Birch who was its
founder; but near the end was an account, possibly the only one
extant, of the Higgs Memorial Chapel. Bleat had committed this to
memory.
“Jefferson Kemp Higgs, one of Emmanuel’s early sons, belonged
to that proud and public-spirited bank of financiers who, ill content
to rest idle while the nation’s honor was outraged by the bestial
treatment of our defenceless neighbors in Cuba by a foreign despot,
raised in concert their influential voices which finally impressed
upon the Pontian conscience of President McKinley that it was our
duty to extirpate, once and for all time, the decadent Spaniard from
our Hemisphere!”
“Hooray,” they chorused for him. “Hooray for our Hemisphere!”
“On the eighteenth of February, 1898, the USS Maine
was treacherously sunk, and what followed, as every Emmaueler
knows, is a new chapter of our American History!”
“You tell us, Bleatster!”
“Jefferson Higgs, most understandably, took a fatherly interest
in the infant republic and himself acquired lands in Cuba which
were planted to sugar cane!” Bleat had got it down so that he could
take in a breath and declaim a paragraph of Mr. Case in a single
exhalation. He could rock back on his heels and expel the prose
from his lungs. “On returning from Havana in 1901 Jefferson
Higgs fell ill. At ‘Satisfaction, his swmmer ‘chateaw’ on the rock-
bound coast of Bar Harbour, Jefferson Higgs died, unfortunately, of
amoebic dysentery, caught while eating shellfish in the land he had
— fate’s pawn — befriended. A loss mourned not only by his Em-
manuel brothers but by his country as well ... . How do you like
that?” He’d perfected, as well, the knack of shutting it off, of col-
lapsing the entire pose when he chose to interject opinions of his
own. “Here’s this fat-cat millionaire who helps start up a stupid
war. Then they go build the son of a bitch a chapel.”
When he allowed his resentment to flare too high, he dismayed
his audience. Only mention “millionaire” and their faces warned:
that’s meatball talk. Millionaire was a thorny word in their ears, a
 296 Bleat Blodgette

sensitive abstraction, New Deal stuff, like socialistic talk about the
Great Unwashed, meatball talk. It could actually be an insult to
somebody’s father.
“Okay, you don’t agree.” Bleat read their faces. This year he was
cultivating a rude gift for irony. “They build a chapel that’s sup-
posed to be to the greater glory of God. Then they go dedicate it to
this fat-cat millionaire-politician war-starter. Okay, so you don’t
mind that? I do. I think it stinks.”
Somebody said, “You're talking like a meatball.”
In a cold pause he stared the critic down. The boy withdrew and
another and another, while Bleat kept silent and waited to win his
game of cat and mouse. When his audience had almost dissipated
itself, he had only to clap his hands and they ran back laughing.
“Consider!” he declaimed. “Consider the Higgs Memorial
Chapel as it stands today!”
He made the face, he struck the pose. Through the window he
pointed an indignant finger at the offensive steeple and that was
that. He had them like trained seals. He relished the clown’s
power but a contempt came with it, for their letting it be so easy.
“Tell us about the chapel.” “Tell us about the aglopogic blooms!”
Tell us. He never let them down.
“Consider the Higgs Memorial Chapel, as tt stands today, in its
classical, yet not pretentious contours, a form majestic as it ts modest,
which might be described by the classictst’s phrase, ‘multum in
parvo!’”” He brandished his arms to the rhythms of Torbert Case,
96. “Its colored glass and mullionwork, both, are equally ‘first rate,
while travelers have compared its stone buttresses to the ‘very
best Gothic of Cologne and Chartres, while he ts a rare visitor who
fails to agree that its steeple, reaching Godwards in a matutinal sky,
is one of the most majestic in western Massachusetts!
“Noteworthy too are the ivies and bosky shrubs which embrace
and enhance the chapel walls. These are the pride of Grounds
Superintendent Stanislaus Kloczec and his staff of good gardeners.
It is no small tribute to ‘Stan’ that the proudly apogeotropic
blooms of his laurel bushes have won more than one award from
the Springfield County Chapter of the Garden Club of America, a
botanical paean by which the memory of Jefferson Kemp Higgs is,
truly, ‘done proud.’ ”
“Yay, Jeff Higgs!”
 JOHN PHILLIPS 297

“Here’s looking up your old apogologopical bloom!”

Gradually, to see his audience teary-eyed and applauding, drop-
ping their books all over the place, he came to be embarrassed by
them.
He wearied of the Jefferson Higgs thing and soon he stopped
doing it. That was four years ago and the stunt was forgotten now
among all the other stunts he had done for them since.

This evening the Hero Fool slouched toward Evening Prayer

bowed down with his sins. Passing into the shadow of the Higgs
Memorial Chapel made him shudder.
Be a man, Dr. Kew said. Manful. . . . Keep faith with thy God.
Honor thy father and thy mother. Lord have mercy upon us, and
incline our hearts to keep this law.
It’s telling lies to be honest — that’s all. I will kneel down in
there and I’m going to lie. Does that bring forgiveness? I slugged
my mother and I wished she was dead.
Up in the steeple the cast-iron bell banged the harder the closer
he came. He was near enough to see the memorial plaque and the
fat cross with the bird turds that one time, oh funny, he called the
Guano Memorial Plaque. The steeple bell stopped and from the
inside came the noise of Mr. Tryle, Organist-Choirmaster, blasting
away on the hundred-thousand-dollar memorial organ.
Listen to the man take something fantastic by Haydn and turn
it into so much loud wind and honking you can’t stand it. The most
tremendous music and he rooks it. Keep faith with thy God all the
same,
Bleat reached the chapel steps in a drove of schoolmates, and
here he carefully fell behind. They went up the steps tucking shirt-
tails in, cramming tennis balls in jacket pockets, chattering till they
reached the open doors on top. “Shh — quiet.” They walked
into the dark. Bleat stopped on the bottom step, afraid to follow.
They'd had a dry spring. The air was warm and clear, not a cloud
in the May sky. On the chapel wall the ivy looked crisp and the
lawns were unseasonably brown. It was a fact that the celebrated
laurel bushes were late with their apogeotropic bloom, as Grounds
Superintendent Kloczec was only too aware. Every evening as soon
as the sun had sunk behind the chapel, Stan Kloczec would rush to
its eastern side a battery of hoses and lawn sprinklers. Pinwheels
 298 Bleat Blodgette

of water hissed and splattered over the parched turf and garden
beds, wetting down the fertilizers of bone meal and cow manure. A
mizzle of spray hung in the air and sometimes, past the shadow line
of the steeple, miniature rainbows were formed by the sun.
Squinting, Bleat tried to find a rainbow in the vapor. Stan Kloczec
blocked his view: the Academy’s ageless Pole, ruthlessly supervising
a couple of his grandsons.
The young Kloczecs stood more than six feet tall, yet they hadn’t
the brawn of their progenitor, who was built low to the ground
and like the bell in the steeple, dense and cumbrous. Stan’s face
was swarthy, theirs milky and soft. The first one spaded manure
out of the wheelbarrow and the other tamped the fertilizer around
the bush roots, while the grandfather gave them orders in a basso
old-country dialect. No one talked back to Stan; the trees them-
selves, the grasses, the shrubs, owed him obeisance and it was among
the Grounds Superintendent’s prerogatives to choose his ground-
keeping staff from the line of his Polish-American descendants.
Bleat saw him as one of Millet’s peasants, an insuperable grubber
in the earth, hectoring his two weakling epigones who couldn’t
do anything right. Old Kloczec scowled. A bumblebee settled on
the brim of his baseball umpire’s cap. That cap: it was as if he were
never without the grimy black thing resting high on the crown of
his cueball head, so no one could say for sure that Stan was totally
bald. Stan took the bee and carefully squeezed its life out between
his splayed fingers that had been smashed in fuse boxes, gears, buzz
saws, and had survived like garden hose.
There was a lull in the organ music and Bleat heard the grand-
sons singing at their work. They sang no old Polish folk song, but
a “Your Lucky Strike Hit Parade” selection, “Three little fishies in
a itty bitty poo and they thwam and they thwam wight ovah the
dam.” Two voices rose in chorus, “Dink boom sittum down in wat-
tum-choo!” It vexed the old man, he broke into English: ‘Sdupid,
you do that noise beside church! You some sdupid —” He had a
grandson by the collar and was boxing his ears in the old country
fashion. Fighting free, the grandson tripped over the hose and upset
the sprinkler. The device lay on its side, half its rotating arms
caught in the sod so that the water pressure was increased through
its unhampered openings. It struggled throbbing in the grass like
a weird marine creature, squirting to considerable heights the water
JOHN PHILLIPS 299

which fell in lashes to the ground. One of these convulsions splat-

tered from shoulders to skirts the vestments of Dr. Kew, just as he
was entering the vestry door on the side of the chapel.
“Sdupid, whadmadda wi’ you?” Stan Kloczec, mortified, ex-
coriated his grandson.
The Headmaster stepped nimbly through the door, then he
thought to ease the Koczecs’ pain with a quip: “Well now, I expect
that is as close as we Episcos come to total immersion!’’ Chuckling,
he was about to shut the vestry door, when he saw the boy. “You're
coming in, Steve,” Dr. Kew called. “You're not forgetting your
promise?” Once again the organ was blasting away, and he
had to raise his voice, though not harshly: he hated to see a tor-
mented face — and on a boy.
“Nosir.” Bleat shook his head. He ran up the chapel steps as
the organ reached a climactic blast and was the last one in.
The chapel’s transept, the oaken choir stalls and the pews, and all
the white faces which filled them, were romantically dappled in
colored sunbeams falling through the stained Italianate windows.
There were candles on the altar, and lights the shape of candles
burning yellow on the stone walls, and a bronze lamp hung by a
long chain from the ceiling of the nave. The interior was warm
and dry from the spring weather. Throughout the basilica the at-
mosphere varied with the season like the hayloft of an old wood
barn.
Frankincense and myrrh. Who could say what the words meant
exactly? Different-smelling kinds of stuff they used to burn in
churches or old Pharaohs’ tombs. If you ever got deep inside a tomb
of the Pharaohs, you’d probably smell all kinds of smells in there.
Like a regular Chinese restaurant. Smells so stocky that if they got
way up your nose it was hell to get them out. These ideas came to
him literally by way of his nose, when in the first moments of kneel-
ing in his pew in the true schoolboy ritual — an arm draped on back
of the pew ahead and eyes buried in the elbow’s blue-flannel crook
— he essayed a rapid prayer, a casual salutation of his God; but it
was hard to keep his mind on it when he was so conscious of his
classmates squeezed in on him right and left, their salutations done,
and wondering what was taking him so long with his. He realized
through his nostrils tilted down that his neighbor’s sneakers were
awfully smelly.
 Bleat Blodgette
300

he whispered. “Peeyewee. You can’t wear

“Jesus, Goodwiller,”
sneakers in chapel.”
“Shhh.”
“What a stink, Goodwiller.”
“Quiet, you whack.”
“Wear sneakers in chapel.”
“Shinhis, Quletar
They whispered in the terminal hush before the Head Man en-
tered from the vestry and took his place before the altar.
“OQ worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness . . . let the whole
earth stand in awe of Him.” Dr. Kew’s voice rose fantastic from
the nave.
the
The pews and the prayer stools creaked and scraped under
thumping of about seven hundre d knees when Student Body knelt
down simultaneously with Faculty and Faculty Wives. Their various
the girlish high, the faltering, the virile profundo, were
voices,
joined in the common susurruss of the Confession:
“. We have offended against thy holy laws.
“We have left undone those things which we ought to have done.
And we have done those things which we ought not to have done.
“And there is no health in us.”
No words wrung him like these. First, a flash of horror struck
him down to his old perdition and back near to the doomsday
suffocation of before. Strange and fast as it had come, the horror
receded and released him, so he was aware of himself as himself
once again and kneeling in the accepted pose, eyes pressed behind
the elbow of his flannel First Classman’s blazer. It was impossible to
seek the Lord without appearing to do so. Still all his self-conscious-
ness could not quite stifle his rejoicing. (I know that my re-
deemer liveth.) His obedient lips moved in the incantation that
made the chapel rumble with Student Body and Faculty and Wives
beseeching the most meaningful Father to restore the penitent, that
hereafter they might live a godly, righteous, and sober life. The
Confession drew him down in the mighty oceans with Noah, and
when it finished his spirit burst up rejoicing on the sunny beaches.
Amen. Bleat unblinded his eyes and propped his chin on the ridge
of the forward pew, where he could look over the crook of his arm
and contemplate the minister.
“The almighty and merciful Lord grant you absolution and
JOHN PHILLIPS 301

remission of all your sins . . .” The daytime Dr. Kew, the classroom
Christian, was incapable of this. In the evening he had on his robes
and appeared here where his very presence was transformed by the
chanted glories which arose from him, a draped figure part-hidden
in a stall several paces from the altar. Bleat strained his eyes to be
sure it truly was the same Head Man.
“LET US PRAY.”
At once the stones and timbers reverberated under the Lord’s
Prayer. The acoustics were so comforting that Bleat forgot to pray,
and only listened to the blessed roll and soughing of those words,
which took effect on him in a new rush of sentiment for his com-
rades he saw now, heads buried in their arms, as he looked over the
sleeve of his blazer. They too had on, a good many of them, their
blue blazers that were the emblems of their station, worn with
pride; stitched to the breast pockets just over their hearts the E
and the green and white crest of Emmanuel which none but athletes
might wear. A glimpse of his own blazer —a coagulum of egg
yolk on the sleeve, left from a recent breakfast— gave him satisfac-
tion. He wore the blazer and the E because he indeed was coxswain
on the first Emmanuel crews. It had taken five years; going out
shivering on the lake each year when the crocus bloomed and the
tree buds were barely formed, he coxed and learned the high-
minded sport of rowing: from the cumbrous beginners’ barge and
the intermediate wherries until, this spring at last, he coxed the
swift black Pocock shells that were the Academy's pride, worth
thousands of alumni dollars. He learned to take a racing shell over
bending streams and wind-chopped reservoirs, and risk impalement,
in early March for instance, on a chunk of unmelted ice —a_ peril
which Mr. Claud by quaint conceit (a Homeric soul dies hard)
would name Acolia’s Floating Isle. A submerged elm at the dam
end of the lake was Scylla, and Charybdis a shelf of limestone jutting
out from the old quarry. Mr. Claud’s oarsmen were the valorous
Achaeans. And Mr. Claud would be their Agamemnon, the imperi-
ous Classics Master even before he was the stoic Coach of Crew, a
disconsolate ex-English hero who in a distant time had rowed at
Henley, a scholar-soldier of the Georgian stripe, who had a fero-
cious nose, limped romantically for having lost four toes at Gal-
lipoli, played the oboe, mourned the ancient verities, made his
creased bleak face a battlefield of perpetual disappointment. And
 Bleat Blodgette
302
Bleat perforce revered him. As though their two strange natures
Mr. Claud had broken pre-
and two ferocious noses formed a bond,
pet. On seeing his runt
cedent and made Bleat all but openly his
hectoring a crew of
of a cox, one hundred twelve pounds of guile
face had now and
blistered muscle-bulging drudges, the coach’s
said. Odysseus sacker
then smiled. Wily Odysseus, Mr. Claud had
Out on the lake,
of cities. Resourceful Odysseus, stalwart Odysseus.
table power, he faced
snug in the helm of a Pocock, in a seat of illimi
down his oarsman. Chock chock, chock-a-chock; he hit the wooden
ls and beat
erips of the steering guys against the brass-plated gunne
out the stroke for them, and “tn out, hin-hout,” he yelled at them
this boat . .
too. “You’re late number six! . . . I want to move
ped to his head.
move it,” he yelled in the little megaphone strap
Anything he told them to do they did, like apes or galley slaves;
for six afternoons out of seven now as the sprin g grew greener he
was their commander. “Hin- hout, ” he yelled in his megaphone and
pretty sight to see them bendi ng to their
the shell shot forward. A
oars and cleaving the wine- dark waters .
“O Lord, open thou our lips.”
The congregation rose up for the Gloria Patri, then settled down
in a creaking of pews. Dr. Kew read the lesson from the Gospel
according to St. John and gave it his hieratic all, as though the verses
were still in Latin. Bleat took to scratching the egg yolk off his
sleeve, and fell back into his nostalgias. A refrain golden, clear and
slender as a cornet call strengthened this sweet mood: a song like
the evening sunbeams came from the choir stalls where a lonely
mouth, one of the little first sopranos, sang, “LORD now let-test
THOU thy serVANT depart in pea deepaht een pea-ees-ss—
— ce
ac-CORD-ing to thy word.”
Bleat smiled into the sweet sound; the Nunc Dimittis was seal-
ing off in distant, mindlost pleasures, and the spell of it lasted him
through the austerities of the Creed and Collects. The hymn this
evening was “Awake, my soul, stretch every nerve” — a rouser, but
even so, and all blanketed in lusty voices, he didn’t listen. The
service ended very fast. He must not have heard Dr. Kew pronounce
the last Amen. Everybody was going; they were ploughing over his
legs, crowding past him in their haste to leave the pew. “Hey, take
it easy, Goodwiller.”
The chapel doors were thrown wide, the organ boomed
JOHN PHILLIPS 303

and blasted, the debouchment was under way, in groups of Wives

preceding Faculty preceding Student Body, one after the other fol-
lowing down the stone aisles and out of doors. Bleat with his
dreamer’s smile sat and watched them go. He slid his languid
weight to the outer edge and corner of the empty pew and sat limp,
hands crossed on his lap, soundless, gone past so much as breathing,
in a state of suspended animation. He might have been invisible
or at least transparent, because the Chapel Boy didn’t see him.
The Chapel Boy had an ectoplasmic quality: a timid lad several
years Bleat’s junior, named Payler, T., pale and stark as bone, who
went about his sexton’s chores, putting hymnals and prayer stools
in place, and polishing the altar, tending the candles, scraping drip-
pings from the altar, putting God’s house to bed all in a form of
devout regret, even as if, much against his will, Payler, T., had the
bounden duty every day and twice the Sabbath to put to bed God.
And the boy scarcely made a noise in his work, only occasionally
the rebel sneeze — Yahker-chew — of one who is congenitally morti-
fied by hay fever. Yahker-chew. The sneezes caromed off the stones
and vaults and poor Payler, T., would cringe. Scared of his own
sneezes! Bleat felt an affectionate contempt. Well, what do you
expect? He’s Chapel Boy.
The job was a reward for piety. The Headmaster awarded it
each year to a new communicant.
Yahker-chew. Payler, T., was at the organ, dusting off the key-
board, and probably it was the impetus of his sneezing that released
one of the stops. There was a sudden squawk, a belch of wind from
the pipes, and the sounds must have unnerved Paler, T., who hur-
ried down the aisle. The lights went off in the transept; a scuffle of
shoeleather on the steps and the big doors clapped shut. Bleat was
enclosed in the Jefferson Kemp Higgs chapel.
I slugged my mother when I wished she was dead, he remem-
bered very slowly. Red headlines in the middle of the air: Boy’s
Blow Breaks Mother’s Heart, Berserk Mom Died. She daid.
He recited the Lord’s Prayer and listened to it echo back phrase
by phrase, anything to keep back his fear. He sang, “Lord, now
lettest thou thy ser-vant dee-paht een pea-ace.” He sang a clear
Amen up to the darkened windows, but when the echo died, his
misery was greater. He felt start the same imaginary chest pain he
had when he hit her yesterday.
 a a ee

Bleat Blodgette
304
. . . We have
Now I am scared, he said, and fell to his knees.
and there is no
done those things which we ought not to have done
of his arm
health in us. . . . Once more with his head in the crook
divine for-
and blinding himself in the blue flannel, he waited for
was quite
giveness. When it came he would know it at once, he
joyous cur-
sure: first a vibration of the scalp and down his spine a
as when
rent and he would be purged in the spirit and the flesh
Bishop Walsh’s hand lay upon his head. Nothing happened except
ty
his shivers got worse and he turned hot and cold... . Almigh
ways
and most merciful Father, we have erred and strayed from thy
. All he felt was the systole and diastol e of his
like lost sheep. . .
fright mounting on each breath, and he wonde red if he were going
to die there. But nothing happened. So he got up and left the pew.
Going down quickly in the shadows and the dusty smells, he got
to the main aisle where he nearly bolted for the door. When he
it
saw the altar, though, and the cove of electric light falling across
from the ceiling, and saw the burnished porphyry, the cloth of linen,
the cross of bronze, the candelabra, the white candles the Chapel
Boy had lovingly snuffed out, and, lastly, when rising in back (back-
ing the full tableau of holies which Payler, T., was warder of) the
tall altarpiece confronted him, Bleat stood still. The last was a
painting in triptych form, richly gilt and ostentatious, imported
from Italy by Jefferson Kemp Higgs’ classmates; he knew this fact
because Dr. Kew once emphasized to him the left panel, which
showed his name saint being stoned in a fairly shameless imitation
of Fra Angelico’s style. Strangely, it was not the stoning of Stephen
but the big center panel that lured him toward the altar. The light
fell full on this panel and made its bright areas shine with a spe-
cial radiance out of the growing night. From the top a cluster of
white angel-heralds hung, their trumpets aimed down at a band of
panoplied knights on snowy mounts which in turn were suspended
over the head of an elongated man in black robes and whose pale
hand was up in benediction. Who they all were, what exactly they
were doing, he’d never asked; he made for them on slowly dragging
feet and not once took his eyes off them but followed his own eyes.
The vaguely Byzantine figure in the black robe of course made him
think of Bishop Walsh when he hovered over his head in swirling
raiment, chanting, “Defend, O Lord, this thy child... .” About
ten feet from the altar he reached the wooden rail and tried to find
JOHN PHILLIPS 305

the exact spot he’d bowed before the bishop. At the altar rail he
fell on his knees, this time banging them quite painfully on the
stones, so impatient he was to relearn and recover mysteries.
He was praying harder than he knew. He held his back rigid and
knelt now erect from the waist in the most militant supplication.
Shoulders back, chest out, neck and head strained upward, his body
was a lightning rod to catch the sweet flashes from on high... .
God and Father, I have done things I ought not to have done, and
there is no health in us or me. Excuse me. . . . He prayed open-
eyed, boring in his elbows on the railing, keeping stiff his arms and
wrists and fingertips to the point of his chin like Dr. Kew. . . . Ex-
cuse me, Lord; the Lord forgive the thing I did — Father, forgive
me. Bishop Walsh, forgive me. Give me peace. . . . His knees on
the stone floor were sore, so were his elbows on the rail, the tendons
of his hands were starting to ache; the rigors of kneeling disturbed
his prayer. It seemed in the shadows that faces were mocking him.
He was as craven and dishonored as the meanest of his Puritan
forefathers ever to have been put on the pillory. An ancestor of his,
some one of those grisly Pilgrims and Huguenots, must have known
the chagrin of being collared and manacled to the post: the town
booby. His eyes devised a different triptych wherein the man in
black robes was not Bishop Walsh anymore but this penitent ances-
tor whose glowing white head and hands stuck through the holes of
the pillory. The right arm stuck out all the way from the shoul-
der, enabling the hand to salute him.
“No —” He shook his head furiously, he forced himself to pray
aloud. “Our Father —” but he heard a high sniggering burst from
his throat; an ugly shrill little hee-hee-hee laugh which he con-
fessed to be a quirk of his blood. It sounded as bad, as mean, as his
brother at home laughing on a Sunday morning, when little Buddy
stood in the kitchen saying dirty limericks to Aunt Norah’s ag:
grieved, nun-pure, hairpin-spewing biddies coming back from Mass.
“God forgive me,” he muttered and waited, but there was no com-
fort, no peace; he braced his body on the altar rail. This time he
covered his eyes with his hands and sealed off the outer distrac-
tions and apparitions, tight inside his hands, where the black was
thick as cat’s fur. Loathing what he had done, dreading what he
might become, he drove knuckles and fingerbones into the bone of
his forehead even as if trying to hold his cranium intact. . . . There
 306 Bleat Blodgette

is no health, no help in us. Lord, where is this health? Is it You?

. . . Oppressive, ever answerless, his question perished in the black-
ness where he discerned here and there a patch or whorl or lesser
blackness where, conceivably, a match had flickered once in the eitons
and alautons of time before the Creation and the Flood. By push-
ing, he soon discovered, the heels of his thumbs against his eyes he
could explode the black and induce sensations of being inside a
furnace of cold orange fire terrible enough to turn the soul to
stone. When he relaxed the pressure on his eyes, all subsided into
blackness. Several such extrasensory leaps and he was beside him-
self with terror . . . log dog bog she daid begon mom no nodog.
In his final silent gibbering he struggled, although by now his
thoughts had marched down to the ends of the earth.

Mark him well as he leaves off praying for good. In one athletic
surge he rises and hurdles the altar rail. The nave is lighted from
above, so that the same cones of light that fall over the altar, whiten-
ing the faces painted on the triptych, catch his skin too. Everywhere
but here the chapel is dark; the stained Italian windows have turned
so black you can’t tell them from the stone walls. Not a shadow
remains; only the dark, cavernous as the great fish’s belly where
Jonah went to repine; but out of it in this gymnastic instant Bleat
leaps into the light.
He lands hard, his shoe heels smacking on the stones. So unac-
countable a feat surprises him perhaps. (He could have reached
the altar by walking through the opening in the rail, like anybody
else?
As he lands crouched, he freezes, knees bent and arms out.
You might suppose from this posture that the boy is going to leap
again or kneel again, while in fact he is merely contemplating the
triptych from close up. His eyes rotate between the two panels
whence both his martyred saint and his phantasmal black-gowned
Pilgrim ancestor lower down at him. From their spectral gaze he
draws a sort of deicidal energy —or apparently so, for now he
laughs and smartly claps his hands, driving echoes through the
chapel. As if an uproarious joke were detonated between him and
the gods beyond, he laughs and claps, laughs and claps until the
ribald mood has passed and then his nerves fail. Just the scuff of
shoeleather, the glimpse of his white face contorted in the light,
JOHN PHILLIPS 307

the whirl of flannel shoulders before he escapes in the dark. He

bolts up the aisle, his fingers slapping on the pew tops to guide him.
High and low the vaults and stones echo back the clatter of his
shoes, the slamming of his body against the doors. A fierce claus-
trophobia would seem to drive him, since he batters the iron doors
with his mighty-atom weight for some bruising moments until he
remembers to turn the handle.
Outside, drawing in deep breaths, he steals down the chapel steps
under the black sky and deep night. He lifts his head to sniff the
night air. At the same time he rubs the shoulder that hurts him
and he touches his fingers to the lump that’s rising on his forehead.
The night is by far more pungent than sticky smells of frankin-
cense and myrrh. He is already down the steps and stealing away
from the chapel. The moon is up; it is like a cake of white soap
and gives him a hard light to move through like a rodent, fur-
tively. He sniffs the air, testing it for gases. Now he halts and he
lifts his eyes to the firmament. He looks up and he sees the stars,
poisoned stars. On this balmy night the heavens envelope him in an
arctic black, as if he were still praying with his hands on his eyes,
and the white nebulae, the frozen suns and firmaments disdain
him. Maybe it is to rebuke them, make them hear his wrath, that
he cracks his hands together. The noiseis nothing to what he
could make inside the chapel; no echoes from the vaults of sky, but
a moment’s crepitating of hands, a small impertinence that faints
into stillness and the chirping of tree toads in the hemlocks along
the lake a mile off. Close by he hears the hiss and splatter of lawn
sprinklers on the grass.
He steps from the gravel onto the slippery lawn. Step by step as
he moves, the varied odors of the night congeal to a single smell
whose source is in the bushes. He feels an icy lick across his cheek,
and another. The water hisses in his ear. The lawn sprinklers,
their cold whirligigs shooting through the moonbeams, intrigue him
so that he nearly forgets he’s in their range and he ducks ineptly,
trips on the hose, and lands all fours on the soggy greensward. A
loop of hose has snared his foot; no sooner he gets up than it brings
him down. Laughing, talking to himself, trouser knees and blazer
sleeves soaked through, Bleat sits at the edge of the laurel bed,
where the manure smells the rankest, and tries to disengage his
foot.
 308 Bleat Blodgette
wipes off
There is a coating of manure on the hose, some of it
When he is on his feet
on his fingers and he moans, “Aw, come on!”
-
he finds the water has soaked through his trouser seat. Half-hid
with a mound of cow
den by a laurel bush the wheelbarrow rests
manure into which is plunged a spade. No escaping its reek; Bleat’s
nostrils take him to the wheelbarrow whose moist contents in the
moonlight take on a phosphorescent patina, a glow which to his
intense eyes suggests the triptych standing in there on the altar. The
moistly shining laurel blooms and rhododendron clusters scratching
his cheek, he breaks off two or three and pokes the stems in the
manure to garnish the !oad. The effect would seem to provoke him,
for he is able to laugh once more and smack his hands together.
Crack-crack. One reprise of fury, a final spurt of adrenalin is
enough to break the last of the Episcopalian sanctions laid upon his
soul.
Bleat hauls the wheelbarrow out of the shrubbery and onto the
gravel path. He finds the cart compact in his grasp, solid and
powerful; and himself exultantly in control of something warlike,
he pretends, a battering ram or a tank. A Nazi panzer tank, he
thinks, like in the newsreels. “Wah-ROOM,” he makes it a tank
with sound effects, and the garden spade sticking out like a ma-
chine gun. “A-tat-tat-tat-tat, bah-ROOM.” Between these soul-
destroying sounds and his laughing, the night is not so still. The
axle creaks when he pivots the wheelbarrow on the gravel and
aims it at the chapel. The loose wooden sides are rattling. Two
or three strong steps to get momentum and he is borne on behind
the heavy load so inexorably that he almost crashes it into the
chapel steps. Again he pivots and starts to haul the wheel back-
ward, the metal rim scraping the brownstone as it mounts. This
would be hard going by daylight, but here, where the steeple blocks
off the stars, there is no knowing how he will manage to feel his
way. Will the panic come? A bad moment when the spade falls
out and clanks on the paving, but he retrieves and plunges it back
in the load. And his courage holds; he makes it to the top of the
steps.
The school has gone to bed. He can see the yellow light bulbs
burning in the long linoleum corridors that echoed with his name.
Bleat, they shouted. Bad boy. Funny boy. Bleat. Now he only hears
the lawn sprinklers hissing and the clee-peep song of tree toads
JOHN PHILLIPS 309
near the lake. Bad boy, funny boy; he pauses to rest and load and
test his courage, and from the summit of the chapel steps looks
down in castigation at the blackened windows of the classrooms
and dormitories where The French Shin Fight happened, where
Bleat won his name.
He jerks the wheelbarrow. The axle creaks again as he turns
the load around and heads it through the wide flung door at the
chapel’s mouth. His actions are well past the most ludicrous ex-
treme, and still his nerves hold strong when the transept receives
him into its maw.
Dimly seen by the lamp which hangs from the nave are the white
candles Payler, T., blew out, and the white faces on the triptych.
They are throwing stones at Stephen and the Pilgrim forebear
is crouching in the stock. The floor stones rumble under the whee!-
barrow. Bleat blunders down the aisle behind the load, pulled on
after the frantic stench and weight of it, and hard down to the shim-
mering altar. Holy of holies. He gets there, sets down the cart, takes
the spade, and he falls to his work with a will.
“Whadmadda wi’ you, sdupid?”
The question bursts directly in back of him, rising from the floor
stones and caroming through the vaults and timbers of the ceiling.
Not a voice, it seemed, but a noise, some infernal foghorn able
to articulate words. Bleat heard it as though it came out of a tube,
a winding long-clogged drain set into the floor and descending
downwards through layers of ooze and algae to a chthonian larynx.
“Whadyou do wi’ my wheebarra, sdupid?” demanded Grounds
Superintendent Koczec.
“What does it look like I’m doing with it?” Bleat’s reponse was
spontaneous, mindless, and his gaze upon the altar. Between this
and the wheelbarrow he made his stand, tossing on another spade-
ful of the stuff. He checked his arms and for an instant frowned
at the spade, as if he’d quite forgotten that the thing was in his
hands.
“You some fresh kid!’’ The words came from behind him in a
hot breath, wafting into the heady night blends of garlic and per-
spiration. “Whadyou do make big shidpile insita church?”
Bleat turned and confronted inches from his nose a prognathous
jaw, a broad Polish face above a barrel body. The honest gardener
had on his head a baseball umpire’s cap.
 310 Bleat Blodgette

were trembling, he could scarcely speak and he

Bleat’s hands
had at any cost to contrive the gay facade. He set the spade back
carefully in the wheelbarrow, and sought some new diversion, one
more stall for time. “Hey, Stan, where’s the ball game? Hey, don't
you know better than wear a hat in church?”
There came a glottal burst of Polish, and Bleat saw stars and
yelled in pain. For a while the Grounds Superintendent was boxing
his ears. .
“You come. You and me go talk to Hetmasda!” And it ended
there, with the Grounds Superintendent leading him by the scruff
of his blazer, away to a fool’s doom.

Late the next morning, alone in the white, sun-drenched infirmary,

he emerged from sedation. The school physician noted contusions
of the right upper humerus and clavicle, left and right tibiac, and
the left kneecap. The patient complained that he still smelled ‘“‘an
awful smell everywhere.” The doctor ordered X-rays of the head
that had battered against the chapel door, and from these he diag-
nosed a concussion from a trauma sustained in the ethmoid region
of the skull, with concomitant pressure upon the olfactory nerve.
This opinion was to receive due attention. A trauma to the olfac-
tory nerve. It was a physiological fact: so much for the addled nos-
trils that could not tell cow manure from “frankincense and myrrh,”
and so much for the less than ingenious attempt at exculpation (“I
just went crazy, sir”) which met with some mild chuckling when
the Headmaster quoted it at Faculty Meeting only that night.
Two nights and a day young Apollyon lay in the bed, heavy-lidded
from the injections which Mrs. Glappis, the Registered Nurse,
kept sticking in his buttocks. She was a chubby, turkey-complected
woman with a seraph’s disposition. Certain favored boys could
without qualrm and to her face call her by the faintly insidious nick-
name of Mother Glap. This was the gently billowing nurse who
through the years had given him enemas and nasal sprays, cared
for his chicken pox and pinkeye, who had laughed with him at a
hundred jokes. There was no question in his mind that she was
on his side no matter what, and he loved her for such innocence of
spirit and simplicity of mind. “Good Mother Glap.” He lolled and
babbled in the bedsheets, seeing her come at him again bearing the
napkin-covered tray on which the hypodermic needle glistened
JOHN PHILLIPS 311

like a scepter. His bed was beside an easy window, and as Nurse
Glappis approached in the sunshine, the crisp starched little hos-
pital cap on her snowy head reflected an aureole of mercy so
powerful that he seemed to bask in it. “Good Mother Glap,” he
laughed. “Are you going to stick me with more truth serum?”
Nurse Glappis failed to laugh, failed to crack a smile, but put
the tray on the bed table with a ghostly chill and a whiff of
denatured alcohol. “You've played your last joke,” was all she
said. “Onto your stomach now and down with those pajamas.” He
felt the goose pimples go up his back and then her icicle fingers
upon his skin and the cold swab of rubbing alcohol, but coldest
of all the needle.
Nobody else would talk to him either, not his fellow patients in
the ward, not the charwoman swabbing down the floor with germi-
cides. As he lay in this state of hebetude and the hypodermics wore
off and the pressure lifted from his olfactory nerve, eventually he
understood that he was getting the silent treatment. On the Head-
master’s orders.
“Apollyonism’”— this word the Headmaster chose. A word
worthy of Cardinal Newman; and taken to mean that Beelzebub
had entered into Blodgette and bound over the boy’s spirit to a black
ordinance — made him indeed “a brother to dragons and a compan-
ion to owls.”
“When he looked for good, then evil came unto him; when he
waited for light, there came darkness.” What other explanation
was there? Was there an alternative to expulsion?
“There is no alternative,’ Dr. Kew answered himself.
“Nosir.”
“You have made me sick at heart.”
esin.
The Head Man stood at the foot of Bleat’s bed wearing in this
parting moment an aspect very different from his usual. The Spen-
cer Tracy in him, the bluff two-fisted Christian, had given way to
the heathen Rhadamanthus who spoke his judgment in thunder.
“To expel you is the severest punishment we can give. In your
case — you were soon to graduate from this school and I can’t be-
lieve it was your own will that determined your actions — this pun-
ishment may seem cruel. I can’t do more in the temporal sphere
for this sick soul of yours than banish it from the scene of . . . its
 Si2 Bleat Blodgette

collapse. It is not for me to grant the remission you will require so

desperately. You must find it for yourself . . . and the Lord will
help you.”
“Will he though, will he? I don’t mean to be fresh, sir.” Bleat
faltered. In the hypodermic’s desperate aftermath, everything he
said was wrong.
“It is not for me to divine His ways,” said Dr. Kew. “But I'll
venture to say that without Him . . . lacking His grace . . . your
evil will smite hard for the rest of your days.”
a Yesitee
‘And you will fear for your immortal soul.”
“Yesir,” he only said, and from then on he did as he was told.
No time for his trunk; they would pack it and send it in due course.
He turned in his books, drew seven dollars, travel allowance,
packed his suitcase, shut himself in his room. His release from the
infirmary had been timed for the lunch hour when he would have
no contact with his schoolmates gathered in the dining hall down-
stairs. He heard the clatter of crockery and the rumor of voices
through the floor, as he sat on his bed and waited for Mr. Claud, the
master Dr. Kew had thoughtfully assigned to take him home. At
the sound of footsteps in the corridor, Bleat hurried to the door
with his suitcase.
“Payler,” he said, “I’m sorry about that.”
It was merely Payler, T., the melancholy Chapel Boy. “I had to
see you. I skipped lunch,” he told Bleat in an angry whisper, a wild
face. “If they catch me talking to you, I could get booted out too,
don’t forget.” It was a martyr’s warning, intended to rub in this
extra salt of shame. ““Why did you do it? I don’t see how anybody
could do a thing that dirty.’ Tears welled in Payler’s eyes; he dabbed
at them with a blue woolen necktie. “You should have seen what
it looked like in the daytime.”
“J said I was sorry. I didn’t do it against you personally, Payler.”
“It took a whole day to clean up. Nobody ever did a thing so
dirty, I bet—not in the whole history of Church!”
“Thanks for the kind words, Payler, boy.” Bleat would have
liked to shrug them off, but they were the last spoken to him at Em-
manuel and quite impossible to forget.
During the slow excruciating train ride to New York, he tried to
talk to Mr. Claud. Mr. Claud, the doleful classicist and Coach of
JOHN PHILLIPS 313
Crew, had been his favorite hero after all, without whose guidance
he could not have won the white E on the brave green shield on
the breast of his blue blazer; all of that polluted now, ruined, fin-
ished, never to be worn again. Bleat asked him, “Sir, will it blow
over, do you think?”
The ferocious-nosed ex-English hero gazed at the floor of the day
coach, his huge oarsman’s hands clutched round the knee of the
leg of the foot that was wounded at Gallipoli, and said what he
could to solace his lost coxswain who sat on the seat beside him:
“It may seem cold comfort to you now, but I suggest that in
twenty years practically everyone will have forgotten.” Because
almost that many years ago, shortly after the Great War, when Mr.
Claud first came to this country, the Rector Peabody had given him
a position as a teacher of Greek at Groton School. An unutterably
malicious desecration was done to the Groton Chapel, a calculated
affront to the Rector — “‘an outside job,” as they say, that had been
carefully planned by a group of brummagem young Harvard stu-
dents who must have borne an inexplicably cruel grudge against
their old school, Groton. Ah, the scandal was furious and the social
opprobrium so great that one of the young men had offered to re-
lease his fiancée from their engagement. “A shocking affair.” Mr.
Claud gave something like a reminiscent sigh. “Yet hardly any-
body remembers it.” A sigh again. “Certain of the detail — which
s
assuredly I shall not dwell upon — were similar to what you were
possessed to do to the Higgs Chapel. Pity. I needn’t say how dis-
tressed I am. Pity. Dreadful to have happened to one’s cox!”
Through these Anglicisms, under the play-up and_play-the-
game pitch of the British accent, Bleat heard a note of compassion.
He didn’t really trust it, because in his next breath the classicist got
archly Homeric and pontifical. ‘Pity that the gods chose to con-
spire against you,” Mr. Claud said, and he quoted a self-conscious
line: “Those whom the gods seek to destroy they first make —”
he observed a heavy caesura— “Steven Blodgette.”
Mr. Claud’s bon mot stayed with Bleat, saying itself over in his
mind for the entire train ride. When he got to his great-aunt’s
house at Eighty-second Street and touched his finger to the door-
bell, he was still listening to it.
Then it was inevitably his mother in a dun-colored negligee
who opened the door, huddling and peeking from behind it, to
 314 Bleat Blodgette

avoid being seen from the street. Awkwardly enough her first
glimpse was of Mr. Claud, a strange man standing right there on
the doorstep, and she recoiled from him as if from a rapist. As soon
as she saw her son, she burst into tears.
3?
“Oh Steven,” his mother cried. “Are you all right, darling
.

That was the end of his formal education.

 LAWRENCE P. SPINGARN

The Ambassador

(FROM THE SOUTHERN HUMANITIES REVIEW)

“AND REMEMBER,” Mrs. Newcomer said to her husband in the

privacy of the back seat, “don’t be too hard on David. After all, we
haven’t seen him in six months. We’ve never met his wife, even.
Six months! How time does fly. . . .”
But as the long black limousine with the diplomatic plates
turned again on the hairpin road, the Ambassador braced himself
for the encounter. Six months were nothing to David. He was
only thirty-four, though in his ten years in France he’d lived a
dozen lives. His letters to the Embassy were proof of a gradual
declension, a perverse unwillingness to take hold of some worth-
while career. And now, having acquired a second wife, David was
building his house on the mountainside above, in view of the river
that flowed shallowly to the warm sea.
“All right, Kay,’ the Ambasssador promised. “I won’t fight
with him —if that’s what worries you. We’ve fought too much
already.”
By keeping silent, Mrs. Newcomer seconded the truth. It was
her way, the Ambassador reflected; she seldom intervened between
him and David. Even in the great heat of their last quarrel, she
had pulled back her chin and sucked in her cheeks, as she was
doing now, like a gray squirrel in its winter coat, her face un-
touched by makeup, her mouth sharpened by the practice of dis-
cipline. Just as she let out her breath, the car reached the center
of the village where David lived: a square barely large enough to
 _

316 The Ambassador

turn in, a moss-grown church, a café with rooms to let above, and
forward and
the inevitable mairic. The Ambassador leaned
opened the glass partition with his gloved hand.
“Here we are, Hans,” he told the chauffeur in his stumbling
German. “I'll get out and ask where the house is.
As he stepped onto the café terrace, the men drinking at the
— too
table looked up respectfully. It was still early in the day
thought, for people to indulge in wine. Since
early, the Ambassador
his heart attack, he’d denied himself even the sparkling Hock from
In his fur-
the Wachau vineyards, but he could not lose weight.
men shook
collared overcoat, he appeared taller than he was. The
their heads as he repeated David’s name.
“Ah!” one of them finally burst out. “L’Américain barbu.”
The bearded American. . . . So that was how David was known
here, and though the Ambassador nodded toward the house that the
men pointed at, he wasn’t smiling. He'd ridden a thousand kilo-
meters down one part of the Alps and past another to learn that
David was nicknamed from the sparse growth of blond hair on his
thin, sunburned face. The photographs that arrived with David's
recent letter told very little of the story, and, as the Ambassador
eot into the car again, he felt a sudden weariness. The paved road
soon gave out. Hans would not go farther on the dirt track,
“There’s no driveway, Excellenz. Shall I park here?”
“Yes, yes,” the Ambassador answered quickly. “Here. We'll have
to walk. Kay, he didn’t even build a driveway. He’s cut himself
off — completely.”
But Mrs. Newcomer, hugging herself inside the gray Loden
cloak, didn’t seem to find this strange. She always defended David
against his father by calling out of her deep reserve the forces of
silence. And now, as they followed the faint downhill path between
the olive trees, the lemon sunlight of the winter-bitten altitude
stippled their gray hair.
“David!” Mrs. Newcomer’s voice floated over the unfinished
roof and vaporized in the thin air. “Oh, Da-avid!”’
With the same tone she’d summoned him from play to supper,
so many years ago, and now, when he did not come promptly into
view, she frowned at the wooden steps that led down to the door
in the stone wall. A girl stood in the doorway, an apron tied around
her waist, her dark eyes alert to smile: David’s wife, Marcelle. Out
LAWRENCE P. SPINGARN 317

of an apprehension that the Ambassador shared, Mrs. Newcomer

drew a long breath of resolve.
“Marcelle?” she said, spreading her arms in the cloak as if ready
to leave the ground. “My dear child, my dear. It’s so nice to meet
Foust Lasts. i
As he went through the door, the Ambassador forgot to duck.
When he stood beside Hans the chauffeur, he was not so large,
but here, after striking his head on the beam and stumbling into
the disordered room, the Ambassador towered above the two
women and his son. David waited by the desk, his hand on the type-
writer, his eyes pale by contrast with his skin, the cast of his face
more sardonic, his body thinner than ever; and then came forward
to welcome his parents.
“You neglected to build a driveway,” the Ambassador said.
“You're cut off from everything, absolutely isolated. We had to
park on the road, if you call it a road, and getting up from Nice
— well, I tell you, it wasn’t a picnic.”
His mother alone kissed David. As she held him a moment, he
gazed straight into the Ambassador’s eyes, unblinking, unaffected
by the harangue.
“It’s not a picnic, Dad. Are you still dieting?”
Marcelle had prepared lunch. When she finally sat down between
David and his father at the homemade trestle table, the wasp that
had flown in where the screen should have been lighted on the
wine bottle. Mrs. Newcomer studied the situation, dipped a crust
of bread in the plate of honey, and set it as a lure at the far edge
of the table. The lure worked: other wasps, drawn to the food,
swarmed around the honeyed crust at the safe distance from the
Ambassador. He found the omelet superb. Although there was
too much oil in the salad, he enjoyed that too. When David went
out to the car with a message and a sandwich for Hans, the Ambas-
sador fixed a paternal glance on his daughter-in-law.
“And you, Marcelle, don’t you miss Paris?”
The girl spoke fair English with only a slight accent. When she
smiled, the Ambassador noted the width between her cheeks and
the breadth of her nostrils. Hers was a peasant’s face that the
sun had covered with golden freckles. She exuded a sluggish
warmth, but she’d answered the Ambassador evasively.
“I mean,” he went on, “what can you do in this village when
 318 The Ambassador

the house is finished, because by summer it will be finished, surely,

and then you will stay in it with David, no?”
His sentence took a roundabout French turn, yet Marcelle, shrug-
ging off the question, brought coffee in cracked mugs, and as David
returned, the Ambassador gazed at the wall.
“I was saying, David, that it must be lonely for Marcelle. Who
are your friends here in Courronges? The policeman, the post-
man, the priest?”
“Exactly,” David answered. “The policeman, the postman, the
priest. We left the others behind in Paris. We gave up Paris.”
“You gave up, all right,” the Ambassador said, stung by his
own bitterness, but Mrs. Newcomer, raising her head and drum-
ming on the table, commanded everyone’s attention.
“Will you show us the house, David dear? I’m sure your father
is anxious to see the house. And Marcelle, the lunch was first-
rate. Just first-rate!”
This time, the Ambassador was careful to stoop. The doors were
lower than the top of his head, though David did not need to stoop,
since he was built small like his mother, like the village people, like
most southern Europeans. As David conducted the tour, Mrs. New-
comer broke into fluting birdcalls of approbation. Her enthusi-
asm, bouncing from the whitewashed stone walls upstairs and down,
made the Ambassador scowl the more. He was silently counting
the monthly sums which, over a period of years, came to more
than twenty-five thousand dollars, and which, on the evidence, had
paid for this house in the mountains; this house cut off from
the road that ended, as the Ambassador had foreseen, nowhere.
But Mrs. Newcomer was vastly impressed: David, working in the
hot sun or the penetrating cold, had raised these walls himself, and
would finally, with just one helper from the village, finish the roof.
As the party returned to the kitchen, Mrs. Newcomer smiled at
Marcelle.
“It’s his Boy Scout training, I think
— because, you know, he
was always clever with his hands. And his head, too, of course. Has
he been writing, Marcelle?”
Marcelle looked at David, then spread her hands in a noncom-
mittal gesture; only the Ambassador observed the signal that passed
between husband and wife. David was smoking one of those foul-
smelling French cigarettes. The tobacco had stained his fingers,
LAWRENCE P. SPINGARN 319

and when his mouth opened, his father saw the blackened and
broken teeth.
“Then it’s another novel,” the Ambassador said, choosing his
words diplomatically. ‘Or was that last book a novel? I don’t seem
to recall much about it. Couldn’t make it out.”
David smiled crookedly, as if he’d waited for such a chance.
“Console yourself, Dad. Only a few could ‘make it out.’ Only
a very few bought it. I’m not a popular writer, not a success. I
haven’t gone to the summit, like you and Mother.”
These remarks, pumped fat with venom, caused Mrs. Newcomer
to stutter and wring her hands. Her black eyes flickered. She raised
her head on its shrunken neck and rounded her lips in a placating
bow.
“Like us, David? Oh, my dear, please don’t think it’s so much
different at the Embassy because, aside from entertaining a good
deal, we try to live plainly and be helpful. It isn’t easy, our posi-
tion, with the world so troubled. Your world too, David. Remem-
ber that!”
The Ambassador cleared his throat. In the past, he had tried to
be constructive. He had subscribed to Mrs. Newcomer’s beliefs,
her Quaker idealism, her sense of responsibility and her knack for
self-denial, but now, looking at their son, he discovered that it was
far easier to project hope than to dwell on failure.
“Of course,” he began, lighting his pipe judiciously, “you’ve
other irons in the fire. Your translating, for instance — that Count
What’s-his-name we’ve banned in the States. Laroche. Latoche.”
“Lagauche,” David said. “Félicien-Jean-Louis de Lagauche.”
“It would seem to me, then, that if you translated five pages a
day at five francs a page, you might earn —”
The addition was too hard for him. As David glared across the
dirty table, the Ambassador was overwhelmed by the old wave of
helplessness that came at such moments.
“Well, I was only suggesting that if you produce steadily,
it might be . . . a source of revenue. A good source.”
Again the silence, the awkwardness of not having spoken out,
and Mrs. Newcomer, for a change, was not chiming in with bell-
like notes that cleared the air. As the Ambassador rose from the
broken springs of the wholly inadequate chair, he observed that
David’s face in shadow looked almost sinister. Lagauche! That was
 Eee

320 The Ambassador

the fellow: orgies of lust in remote castles two hundred years ago,
with whips and torture, debauched women, impotent old nobles,
conniving lackeys — these were the pages that David had chosen to
render into English. But what was the future without a driveway
and still without a full roof, until the next months check, at least,
which Kay would send in an official envelope?
“Is there somewhere I could lie down, David? I take a nap
every afternoon. Doctor’s orders.”
“Our bed,” David answered. “Our bed’s cleaner than the couch.”
“Your bed?” The Ambassador waited, but David did not re-
peat.
It was Marcelle, finally, who led the Ambassador upstairs to that
part of the large, unfinished room where the double bed stood be-
neath mosquito netting, but, as he lay down, still puffing from the
climb, the Ambassador did not close his eyes. He listened to his
own heartbeats, to Marcelle’s retreating footsteps, to the hum of
voices below that moved outdoors, for Hans had to be considered,
and something done with the car. Tonight the Newcomers would
sleep above the café in the square, next to the old church in tem-
porary discomfort that, like all else, was bound to pass. But it
was hard to imagine David and Marcelle sleeping here, where the
April rain came in, and birds and bats: no eighteenth-century
chateau, its enormous chambers given over to refinements of plea-
sure, and yet, as he lay on the lumpy mattress, the Ambassador was
troubled by memory. What had become of David’s first wife,
Laura, the Boston girl he’d met at college? He could see her face
as a reflection of his own, always creased by doubts, doubts aimed
eventually at David. Still, according to David, he and Laura had
parted friends. The divorce had been just a formality.
Perhaps, the Ambassador reflected, this was Laura’s bed, carted
from Paris on a trailer; Marcelle was not the person to object to
using it. Marcelle was a dozen years David’s junior (an early
letter supplied this detail) , and grateful besides. As a child during
the war, she and her mother had nearly starved; gratitude, as the
Ambassador knew, could be kept alive on scraps, on a pittance.
And this bed: no whips and odd devices would match David’s
imagination, Yes, the boy was unpredictable, for just last sum-
mer, meeting his parents at Salzburg, better than halfway, he'd
introduced the blond Austrian as his future wife. Again, some-
LAWRENCE P. SPINGARN oa
thing had changed his mind. The woman and David had quar-
reled openly, where the servants and secretaries could hear them.
And once Kay, poor Kay, walking in to wake David, had found him
in bed with the blond Austrian. Lagauche —to read the fellow
was to realize that David had put much of himself into the trans-
lation. . < .
When the Ambassador opened his eyes, Kay was standing at the
foot of the bed, her hands folded, her face softened by approach-
ing dusk.
“You slept, dear? That’s marvelous. And dear, you were mar-
velous with David and with Marcelle, too, meeting her for the first
time. You won her over. I’m proud of you.”
“Where are they?” the Ambassador inquired cautiously.
“At the inn, unloading the car and getting us settled. The inn
won't be too unbearable. We're only staying till Friday.”
Rising from the bed, the Ambassador went downstairs and into
the room next to the kitchen. He wanted to see this room before
David returned. On the desk between the windows sat the morocco-
bound scurrilities of the Count de Lagauche. A dictionary was
open at the place where David had left off, and the lamp, an oil-
burning lamp, still gave out a bad odor.
“He works hard,’ Mrs. Newcomer observed. “Marcelle told
me that sometimes he stays up all night.”
Even in the kitchen, Mrs. Newcomer stood at the Ambassador’s
back, as if to remind him that all would be well, if only he mas-
tered his impatience, but her devoted presence irritated him more
than the heat of the stove.
“Phew! It’s hot down here, Kay. You'd think they'd sleep down-
stairs, to get the benefit of the stove, but no — David has to do it
the hard way, and suffer. Why? We sent him extra money to buy
the stove, and yet they sleep cold, up there.”
“They're young,” Mrs. Newcomer answered. “Besides, they do
get some heat from below. Doesn’t heat travel upward?”
The Ambassador put his hand over his heart. When he glanced
at his wife, he saw that the years showed less on her. She looked
back at him from a cheerful distance, smiling contentedly.
“You're right,” he admitted. “But I wasn’t thinking about heat.
[ was thinking that David doesn’t like me, doesn’t really admire
me —and the money we give him makes it worse.”
 a

The Ambassador
322

When Mrs. Newcomer looked at the floor and touched her chin,
the few lines in her face vanished altogether.
as long
“He has no profession, Kay. This could go on forever,
as we live, and David refusing to come home and settle down, as I
did, as my father did, as any normal man must.”
him to come
“But, dear,” Mrs. Newcomer put in, “we can’t force
g down’ —a job, a routine,
home. And what do we mean by ‘settlin
We
the struggle you had? Oh, no. We’ve waited this long.
mustn’t despair now.”
“David will be thirty-five next month. Thirty-five, Kay! Where
was I when I became thirty-five?”
“Yes, where were you?” she demanded, her eyes bleak and
every trace of sympathy gone. The Ambassador's mouth fell open.
His full cheeks grew moist, but he could not get out the words he
required.
“In an office. You spent so many hours there that at night, when
you finally finished, we were both in bed. I mean, David especially.
He used to ask for you until he fell asleep, and then you came,
with more papers in your briefcase.”
He turned toward the mountains, toward the last of the light.
By the open window the air was already chilly, but the Ambassador
did not feel cold.
“Shall we walk, Kay? A little stroll before dinner?”
He’d spoken quietly. He did not expect his wife to take his arm
or smile up at him again, but as they approached the outside door,
he forgot how low it was. When he struck the beam, he cried in
pain. Mrs. Newcomer was quick to act. She drew the handkerchief
from the sleeve of her dress, the plain woolen dress that seemed
so much a part of her, ran to the well at the back of the house, and
returned with the wet compress. As they sat on the wooden bench
under the oldest and most gnarled of the olive trees, the Ambassa-
dor gradually felt better. He was not quite himself, however. For
one thing, he was sure that he was lighter than before. He had
dropped something in the doorway, something he would never find
in the dark. At last, by a great effort, he walked slowly up the
slope. The car was no longer in the road, yet he could hear voices
approaching: David and Marcelle. He paused, trying to distinguish
his son’s face, hoping that now David too would be smiling.
 WINSTON WEATHERS

The Games That We Played

(FROM THE GEORGIA REVIEW)

On SATURDAY we cleaned the house. We did so because the next

day was Sunday and proverbially, among the four of us, a day for
guests. And we not only cleaned the house, but we baked and we
cooked and we polished up the silver. Grandmother Fitzpatrick,
crippled as she was and domiciled somewhat forever, it seemed, in
that enormous wheelchair, did her part, too, though it was Mama,
I daresay, who managed it all in that rather determined and serious
manner of hers. And Babette and I, the youngsters, did not have
to listen very carefully to Mama’s direction or even to Grand-
mother’s verbal and unwarranted goadings, for, by the time I was
seven and Babette five, we knew the routine of the day, and even
as the years passed and we grew taller and leaner and lonelier, the
pattern did not change, the chores did not greatly alter. Yet, in
spite of all the regularity and routine and pattern, we never ac-
knowledged it — oh, never in our very spontaneous life — but al-
ways approached all the efforts and labors of that day somewhat
indirectly. Saturday was a game, a game we knew we would always
play, but which we never discussed.
Rather it was approached casually, with the four of us at the
kitchen table, and Grandmother Fitzpatrick, clicking her teeth,
inevitably would sigh, oh, more than that even, moan despairingly.
“T did not sleep well,” she would say. “No, not well. The bed is
not a good one, Clara, and the room is cold.”
And Mama would look up from her coffee. “Ah,” she would say
to all of us, “we must get busy. It is already after seven.”
 — — ee ee

The Games That We Played

O24
mother would con-
“T am too old to sleep on a bad bed,” Grand
tinue.
down on the saucer.
And Mama would snap the coffee cup
turn to Babette. “Take
“There is a lot to do.” Then she would
will eat the rest of it at
the bacon and wrap it in wax paper. We
“And you, Charles, what are you doing
noon.” And then to me,
should be do-
anyway? You were finished a long time ago. You
ing something.”
her head and
And Grandmother would be sighing and shaking
too old.”
clicking her teeth. “I am too old, Clara, I am
“Ah,” Mama would say, “look at this mess. Marmalade on the
y, too. Clean it up, Babette. And you,
table cloth. And on Saturda
Charles, take the broom and sweep the steps. There is much to
dow
“Why is
And Grandmother would slam a fork on her plate.
I ask you that! Why is there much
there much to do? Why, now!
to do?”
And Mama would turn almost fiercely to Grandmother Fitzpat-
rick and say, “Why, who knows? Tomorrow is Sunday and some-
body may be coming to see us and the house needs to be cleaned.”
Then Grandmother's eyes would light up and a mysterious smile
would come upon her face. “You are expecting guests tomorrow,
Clara?”
“Tt will be Sunday won’t it?” Mama would answer.
“Ah,” Grandmother would exclaim. “It will be! It will be in-
deed.”
“And there is nothing baked or cooked,” Mama would say.
“One should have a little something for guests. A little snack at
least.”
And Grandmother Fitzpatrick would nod violently in agreement,
wheeling herself back from the table until she bumped into me,
and then she would cry, “Ah, you rascal! Get busy now! Get busy!
Didn’t you hear your mother? She should whip you more often!”
So off I’d fly through the house, fetching the broom, storming
out the front to sweep the steps, and Grandmother Fitzpatrick
would wheel off to start her first task, that of polishing, and then
after polishing anything and everything, it would be time for
Grandmother to shell peas or snap beans. And Mama would get
out great supplies of soap and wax and oil and mops and clothes,
WINSTON WEATHERS 325

while little Babette

— oh, little Babette, where are you now with
the golden hair? —balanced great stacks of dishes across the
kitchen, great stacks of goblets and bowls and platters, some to be
washed, some to be polished, some to be put away. And so it would
begin, without a single hint on Friday as the dust gathered under
and over the furniture that any such thing should happen come
the morrow. But always by seven-thirty on Saturday the great prep-
arations were under way in order that things would be immacu-
late and decent and presentable for Sunday.
From the steps where I would be sweeping, I could hear Mama
asking Grandmother, “Now what kind of cookies are the tastier do
you think? The molasses or the sugar?”
And there would be the silence while Grandmother Fitzpatrick
pondered the question. Then she would answer with some au-
thority, “Molasses.”
“Ah,” Mama would say then, “I think people in general like the
sugar ones best.”
“Oh, no, no,” Grandmother would cry. “There will be men
coming and the men will like the molasses cookies. I know how
the men are. Didn’t your husband like the molasses ones?”
Then there would be another pause until Mama answered,
in a soft voice, even in a sad voice, “Yes, you are right. Poor fel-
low. He liked the molasses ones best.”
“There now,’ Grandmother would say. “It’s molasses then.”
“But no,” Mama would say. ‘In general people like the sugar
cookies better. Women especially like the sugar ones.”
“Well,” Grandmother would say, vexed, “which are you expect-
ing more of? The men or the women?”
“Well, what do you think?” Mama would ask, a little vexed her-
self. “I would think there would be more women.”
“Oh, well, in that case,” Grandmother would concede, “I'd
fix the sugar ones.”
So it would be sugar cookies in the oven, inevitably, on Satur-
days, and having settled that once and for all and once again,
Mama would whisk into the kitchen to prepare the feast. “Then
I would put the broom down on the steps and slip around the
house, peeking in the window to watch Grandmother. If it were
winter or fall, the windows would be down and Grandmother
would be like a shadow beyond the dusty glass, but if it were spring
—_— : = — I a Seer Settreisiererse: erent ss

326 The Games That We Played

or summer, the windows would be up and I liked to hear Grand-

with that
mother Fitzpatrick talk to herself as she reached out
y vase,” she
ereat gray polishing cloth. “Come here, you rascall
would say, or “Come here, you rascally candy dish.” And she would
pho-
click her teeth and whistle some until she came at last to the
top of the piano, and she would handle them care-
tographs on
fully, calling them by name — Albert and Uncle Peter and Little
Lucy who never grew up and Rosa Lee, and even David's picture,
though it was very small, was propped up with all the rest. She
would even polish the photographs, calling them by name, and
sometimes she would cry a little, seeming to remember some-
thing long gone by or something yet to come. Then Grand-
mother would pounce with the polish cloth down on the piano
keys, and it would sound like she was playing some crazy song on
the piano, and it was like the whole house just waited a minute for
Grandmother Fitzpatrick to get through at the piano. Then she
would wheel across the room to the mantel, but that was across
the room and I couldn’t see her very good and Mama would be
calling me anyway. “Charles, Charles, where in kingdom come
are you?” And I’d scatter on around the house and get all the
trash out of the kitchen and take it out in the alley to burn it.
When the trash burned it would make a little heat and bits of the
burned paper would float up on the heat and all the bad smells
that were there in the trash to begin with would be changed into
the smell of the smoke and I would stand there watching the fire
burning everything up and I would forget we were cleaning the
house or that it was Saturday, until Mama would be at the window
with a great rag wrapped around her head and she would be call-
ing, “Charles, Charles, where in kingdom come are you?” So I
would leave the fire and run back to the house to help get it all
cleaned up.
By about ten o’clock I would be in the little room off the kitchen
which was my room, and I'd be stuffing the things in the closet, and
Babette would come to the door with all my possessions she had
found all over the house in mysterious places— the tin soldier un-
der the cook-stove and the green marble in the bathroom. She
would dump them on my bed, shaking her head disapprovingly.
“Hey, Babette,” I would say, “if you were a boy which would
you rather look at? The egg shells or the pretty rocks?”
WINSTON WEATHERS 327

And Babette would put a finger on her cheek and screw up her
face quite terrible and then decide at last on the pretty rocks.
So then I’d get out the pretty rocks from under the bed and
Babette would get a cloth or something and we’d sit down on the
floor and dust the pretty rocks so that any of the boys who came to-
morrow would have something to look at and to see. We'd put
the box of rocks upon the little table by the window and then
we'd stand off and watch the light fall on the rocks and Babette
would reach out and touch some of the pretty ones and laugh a lit-
tle and we'd stand there, close together, until Mama was calling,
“Where in kingdom come are you two?” and we’d hurry into the
kitchen to help things along there, so Mama wouldn’t be aggra-
vated with trying to get the house cleaned up and everything baked
and cooked.
Mama could talk to you and just keep working at the same time.
“Heaven knows who’ll drop in,” she’d say. And she’d peek in the
oven to see about the sugar cookies. “If you see anything that
needs to be done, now do it!” she’d say. “I needn’t tell you every
move to make.” Then she’d turn with great suspicion on her face.
“Have you tended to the bathroom, Charles? Now have you?”
And she’d shake her head despairingly. “Charles, you’ve got to
Jearn to do that. Scrubbing things up isn’t so bad. Don’t you want
things clean for the company?” And she’d stare me right in the
eye. “Don’t grow up to be that kind. Don’t grow up to be the kind
that doesn’t care.” So I would get the great bucket and the soap
and the mop and go into the bathroom for an hour of torture, get-
ting the soapy water all over myself, especially my knees, which
were also sore from crawling on the floor, and there would be the
smell of the lye in the soap and I would sneeze, great sneezes that
echoed in the bathroom, and at last I would emerge, looking
back over the wooden floor, all wet and slick now, hoping with all
my heart it would dry into the beauty of cleanliness so that the
guests who came would say, “Now isn’t that a very clean and beau-
tiful bathroom floor!”
And by now Grandmother Fitzpatrick would be shelling peas
with great fury, for she would be through polishing everything.
And it was something like a preoccupation with her and whenever
she was shelling peas she wouldn’t notice anything or anyone, but
she would watch the peas fall into the tin bucket and it would be
 The Games That We Played
328
once in awhile she
like she was counting the peas because every
h she’d reached
would look up with a grin and say, “Aha!” as thoug
Sometimes Babette
a hundred or two hundred or maybe even more.
for tomorrow's
would stand watching Grandmother shell the peas
out and slap
dinner, but Grandmother would eventually reach
away, leaving
Babette on the shoulder and Babette would run
smile to her-
Grandmother to the peas. And Grandmother would
Babett e grew a little older, Grand-
self and click her teeth? When
but neither did Ba-
mother didn’t reach out and slap her so much,
mothe r so much, so Grandmother
bette stand and watch Grand
down to a
Fitzpatrick continued always to be happy when she sat
long siege of shelling peas.
of the
And also on Saturday there would be the sweeping
re and the washin g of mirrors
rooms and the dusting of the furnitu
—s
and the shaking of little rug each task a moving toward a ful-
until at last
fillment and a completion of a routine and a pattern,
on,
Mama would march through the rooms in the late afterno
Fitzpat rick wheeli ng
Babette and I with her, and Grandmother
behind, on the great inspection, and there would be the smell of
sugar cookies and furniture oil all mingled together that meant it
was Saturday and guests were to come tomorrow, and Mama
would send Babette to fetch the wax roses and we would put the
wax roses in the blue glass vases, one on the piano with Albert
and Uncle Peter, and one on the mantel beside the broken clock,
and one on the little shelf in the corner where Mama had kept so
long the pins and badges that Papa was supposed to have worn in
his Lodge.
“T ouess things will pass,” Mama would say.
“Well, I hope they aren’t too particular!” Grandmother would
say.
“No, not too particular,” Mama would explain. “We just want
things cleaned up. And a little something fixed in the kitchen.
We don’t want them to think we don’t live nice.” And Mama
would smile and pat Babette on her golden head and Grand-
mother Fitzpatrick on her gray head and me, she would look at me
and wink as though to say, Another Saturday and another clean
house, young man! What do you think of that?
And the game would be done again and Grandmother Fitz-
patrick would wheel away that night to bed and then we would all
WINSTON WEATHERS 329

go to bed and then it would be Sunday and little Babette would

brush her golden hair with the broken brush before the broken mir-
ror and J] would slick my hair down with oil and Grandmother
would sit stiff and starched with the crocheted shawl around her
shoulder and she would not click her teeth on Sunday but sit
posed and poised, very serious about it all, while Mama would
move restlessly from chair to chair, checking on the peas cooking
from time to time, and I would ask Mama, “When do you think
they'll come?”
“Oh, no particular time,” she would say. “People just drop in
you know. Around two or three.” And Mama would smile and
straighten out the roses in the vases.
But in all the twenty years I was with them, in the twenty years
it took for me to become something of a man, in the twenty years
that saw Grandmother Fitzpatrick grow dull and diseased and dy-
ing in the enormous wheelchair until she was something terrible,
wheeling with sigh and sorrow through the little rooms, in the
twenty years that Mama grew older and more frenzied as the wax
roses crumbled and melted and disappeared, and in the twenty
years that little Babette grew taller and lonelier and her golden
hair glistened beautifully midst the ugliness of life and she cried
for her being beautiful and a girl and lonely, in all the twenty years
I was with them in the little house and we cleaned the house on Sat-
urday, cleaned it until it sparkled with all our hopes and dreams,
in all that time, no one ever came at all, no Sunday guests at two or
three, but we would sit there in the immaculate rooms, with the
sweet odor of things to eat, and we would smile at one another,
waiting, as though we had never waited before, spontaneous as it
was all supposed to be.
Then at last Grandmother would click her teeth and sigh, “I’m
too old to sleep in a bad bed.” And Babette and I would run into
the other room and put the pretty rocks away. And Mama, Mama
would sit there for the longest time— Oh, Mama is the house
clean tonight, are the cookies made?
— in the falling shadows, all
alone.
 JANET BRUCE WINN

Dried Rose Petals in a Silver Bowl

(FROM EVIDENCE)

Miss Birp stood less straight than usual, there by the window with
the sun warm on the windowsill. Her legs trembled. She had
known she was wrong, even in the very motion, known that what
she did could hurt the school. But it was more wrong than that.
Something done which ought not to have been done, condemned
by the lessons learned at her mother’s knee. Thou shalt not.
Then how had she?
Sunlight flamed through the trees and the play area was washed
with dancing points of light flickering over the little girls in bright
dresses. Children too small for the discipline of a uniform, yet
they were being bent like supple fruit trees splayed against a mo-
nastic wall, in readiness for the sterner lines of a Bird’s Girl’s life.
They ran and swooped, squatted suddenly, and burst up again as
if at any moment some might take to the air and flutter to the
blossoms in the apple trees above. Miss Bird stood in what was,
by contrast, a profound darkness.
Nonsense to think of herself as old. And the tic in her cheek
twitched. Much of life after childhood is negative, simply not
dying. She believed that to do a wrong was to take away some of
life. hands on the windowsill pressed, bearing much of the
Her
weight down her arms, and the veins swelled and stood away from
the tendons and bones. When she saw them, she lifted them
quickly. Once her hands had been fine. Her skin had held the flesh
more firmly. Now, on the faintly brown-splotched hands, there
 NE. Se PSEsabes: SoSso5 ates ee eee

332 Dried Rose Petals in a Silver Bowl

thread-thin lines, as if the fabric were worn and

were a million
the warp were bared.
have to pull herself together, to face what she had
She would
one
done. Little Mr. O’Brien would tip his pear-shaped head to
out, and he would
side, his narrow, almost nonexistent chin stuck
.. .” and she
say, “Whyr’” He would say “Miss Bird, I wonder if
knew what he was wondering if.
She had
Miss Bird did not cower before the parents of her girls.
than once.
stood up to excited mothers and outraged fathers more
But then, she had always been sure she was right.
braids
A little girl wearing a pinafore pushed one with pale blond
arten
away from a swing. Miss Bird could not see the Kinderg
close
teacher. She must have been sitting just below, on a bench
to the building. Pinafore pulled on pink dress and was kicked so
hard she fell over backwards. She wandered away from the swings
and squatted to look at the soft caterpillars on the asphalt where
two other little girls bent down.
The principal, watching above, rested her forehead on the sharp
edge of the window frame, feeling the wood press into her skin.
She had known before it happened that she was going to make that
mistake. She had been saying inside her head, I must not. But
someone rushing over a waterfall cannot stop himself by saying
No. The anger, like water, swept on.
It began before Miss Stern knocked on the door that morning
and led in the O’Brien girl. Miss Stern herself was a part of it.
Miss Bird suspected that the woman, with her glasses pinching
her nose and her tight, permanently waved curls, was a business
woman first and a lady as it suited her career, an unpleasant sus-
picion to harbor about one’s colleague. Miss Stern had maneu-
vered arrangements for a board of trustees too skillfully.
Miss Bird considered herself capable of running the school with-
out assistance and she had brushed aside Miss Stern’s suggestion
that trustees would help the finances. “Every graduate of this school
knows where her duty lies when we send out the annual Support
Your Alma Mater folder,” Miss Bird had replied. “I do not need
trustees interfering. They would change my school.”
How right she had been!
A deficit at the end of the year did not alter her opinion.
 JANET BRUCE WINN 333
“But we will not always have you with us,” Miss Stern said. Mr.
O’Brien and I have discussed the possibility of setting up just a
small board and he, as chairman, would always consider your
wishes): . .”
Miss Bird had simply turned away.
“He will give us twenty thousand dollars.”
Very ugly, having people make plans for your death, deciding
what they will be doing with the thing you made once you are out
of the way. Miss Bird stood at the window of her office and felt
the wooden frame press into her skin and smelled the rose petals
drying in a silver bowl —a faint, evanescent odor too subtle to
quite catch. She had built something good. The school had grown
and its graduates had become the kind of women she could be
proud of, women of pride, women of dignity. They were never
cheap. They did not wear slacks. She pressed her lips and gave
a little nod. Each of the years had meant white-gowned flower-
bearing, flushed, smiling girls, Thank you, Miss Bird, taking the
Jeather covered diplomas from her hand. She had made them.
When changes threatened, she had been fierce in protecting her
school, her girls. Nothing would be different. All newnes
—sone
could see it so clearly in furnitur—eis shoddy, cheap, tasteless.
But people made plans, they plotted change, and when all their
designs were mimeographed and copies distributed, you began to
feel inconsiderate to stay on. The unpleasant Dr. Devain of the
wiggling mustache had suggested, the very day after he was made
a member of the board, that Miss Bird might retire. Fortunately,
she was at least six inches taller than he. Height added effectively
to the stare she gave him and that subject had not been mentioned
again.
This morning Mr. O’Brien’s girl had come into her office. Or-
dinarily Miss Stern would handle the minor cases. What was it?
Miss Bird had lost track of what the girl did, although she could
not so easily forget her own wrong. She turned away from the
window, into the artificial dusk of the room and waved her hand
over sheets of paper lying on her desk. Ordinarily Miss Bird’s desk
was tidy, the old rosewood gleaming bare except for the orna-
mental keepsakes. But she had become upset when that girl was
in the room. She had worried the papers, fumbling among them,
 334 Dried Rose Petals in a Silver Bowl

hold back
tumbling some to the floor while she talked and tried to
wasn’t
what she was going to do. Why was the child sent in? Why
Miss Stern seeing her?
said, ‘I do
The evening before, at dinner, the vice-principal had
to her
not like to discipline Mr. O’Brien’s Patrisha. She goes back
father with every word as if I had no right to speak to her. It makes
caught getting assistan ce on her geom-
me cross. But she has been
etry lessons.”
Miss Bird nodded.
“The — ah— Nigro girl was helping her.”
“Cheating!” said Miss Bird. She laid down her knife and fork
across her plate. These days she ate little. It was inconsiderate of
Miss Stern to talk of upsetting matters at table. Now the rest of
Miss Bird’s dinner would be wasted. For fifty years the principal
had been adamant about leaving food on plates; it was not toler-
ated. And what one did not permit the young, one did not allow
oneself. But she could not eat now.
“No one who cheats should be permitted to remain in this
school,” she said. “I will tell her so myself.”
“You don’t mean the — ah — Nigro girl?”
“What? No, no, the other, the one getting help. Who was that?
What will become of my school if we have cheating?”
Miss Stern rested a hand on Miss Bird’s arm, a too familiar
gesture. Miss Bird pulled her arm away.
“Now, Miss Bird, we must remember these are young people.
They forget themselves now and then. We must let them learn
eradually. It might not look well to make too much of this.”
“Look well! Honor is not gymnastics to be learned slowly and
sometimes forgotten.” Miss Bird was furious with the woman; she
did not like the way the pince-nez glittered. Miss Stern smiled her
too-sweet, tolerating smile as if she were speaking to a senile old
woman who must be managed instead of to the principal of a suc-
cessful boarding school. “It is part of the nature of a lady to obey
the principles of honor. To cheat is to make oneself less than a
lady.”
“The student is Patrisha O’Brien,” said Miss Stern coldly.
Miss Bird stared at her. Behind thepince-nez must lurk the idea
that a matter of honesty could be compromised for money. “I will
JANET BRUCE WINN 335

see the girl tomorrow morning. She will be dismissed and sent
home on Friday.”
“And we can close the school on Saturday,” said Miss Stern.
“What?”
“TI said, we can close the school. Mr. O’Brien will, of course, with-
draw his gift. All of the water pipes in East House are over fifty
years old and the building will be untenable unless those pipes
are replaced. The roof over the north wing weaks.. .”
“I know all that,” Miss Bird spoke wearily.
“Yes, my dear Miss Bird, you know. But we cannot airily assign
all such problems to the vice-principal to look after and take no
notice of what must be done, can we? You know that we have a
large deficit which the alumnae did not meet.”
The graduates, it was true, had only thinly supported the fund
drive. Miss Bird would have liked to let her back curve into the
pillow in her chair and her eyelids close. But she sat, as always,
quite upright and she continued to stare furiously at Miss Stern.
One of the annoying things about the vice-principal was that she
refused to be impressed by that stare. The winking glass before her
eyes seemed to make her impregnable. She looked at Miss Bird’s
neck, a cruel thing to do to an old woman.
“I will see the girl. I want all the facts in the case. If I feel that
she does not sufficiently understand her wrong and that the wrong
is as serious as it seems, she will be dismissed.” Miss Bird rose from
the table in the manner of one who has finished victorious and
walked, placing the end of her walking stick firmly on the wood
near her feet, toward the door.
Miss Stern watched her leave and then went back to eating her
dinner, and Miss Bird knew that behind her back the vice-principal
wore a small smile of one who has won a victory.
“How did you answer the questions on your geometry lesson,
young lady?” Miss Bird looked across her desk at the girl and
thought, How does a person like this one come to my school?
She is ordinary looking.” Soft curls framed the girl’s face, and
what Miss Bird saw was this faintly flushed, cream-skinned cheek
next to that dust-brown face. A black girl wore the Bird’s School
uniform now and studied with the others. It had been one of the
first moves made by the chairman of the board of trustees.
 Sokeeabebesaleneloesee
See Se ee ea

Dried Rose Petals in a Silver Bowl

336

“You must understand about appearances, Miss Bird,” he had

said. Foolish little man. “One Negro, just one,” he had insisted.
Patrisha hung her head and fluttered her thick eyelashes prettily
over her cheeks.
A dry, sunny sweet smell came from the bowl of rose petals on
the table.
“I asked you a question. I expect you to look at ier
Patrisha looked up. Large tears stood in her eyes. “T am so sorry,
Miss Bird, I have such a terrible time doing geometry. I know it
was wrong, but I was so afraid I'd flunk it and...” she smiled
a little, timid smile that made dimples flicker in her cheeks, “I
couldn’t bear to flunk out of this school. I— love it so.”
Miss Bird was warmed. She smiled, feeling the stiffened muscles
in her face moving. “You do realize you did something dishonest
and that a lady is never, never dishonest?”
“Oh, yes, Miss Bird.”
“You won’t let it happen again?”
“Oh, no, Miss Bird.”
The principal was gratified by the little curtsey the girl made
after each answer. The proper thing and so few girls these days
remembered the graceful manners unless they were taught young
and constantly reminded. ‘Well, my dear, it was a serious breach
and you will have to make up for it by spending a great deal of
extra time at your lesson s
— without benefit of help.” Perhaps it
had made the new girl, the stranger, feel a little more comfortable
to help someone. Miss Bird held out her hand.
“Anyway, it was Denise’s idea. Daddy said I don’t have to make
friends with her specially, just be polite. But she wanted to do
the geometry. Of course she doesn’t get bawled out. She’s colored,
so she’s got to be treated carefully.” Patrisha reached to shake the
proffered hand.
But Miss Bird drew back. She felt it rising like the tide of
ugly low income housing that rose in the slums. The school took
in a child it did not want, right there a dishonest posture, done for
the publicity. Then the sin was compounded by telling the girls,
you don’t have to be her friend. Where had gone the right to select
one’s associates? How could one maintain one’s integrity while
assuming such masks? “It would look well to have a black girl
JANET BRUCE WINN Sor

here,” Mr. O’Brien had said. Indeed! And then tell his daughter
she need not be the friend of a Bird’s girl!
“What is that?” Miss Bird pointed to the hand held toward her.
Patrisha looked confused.
“On your nails, young woman.”
Each nail bore a crust of bright red around the edges.
“T tried to clean it off, Miss Bird.” Patrisha sounded very humble.
She spoke softly, as Bird’s girls were taught to do.
‘What was it doing on there in the first place?”
“Oh, I was out with my parents, Miss Bird. I wouldn't wear it
at school, Miss Bird.”
That was when Miss Bird first felt she wanted to slap the girl.
“No,” she said. “Just the dirty remains, the garbage. It is disgust-
ing. It says, Look how common I am.”
Miss Bird did not like the way the girl simpered. She had begun
to find the dimples cloying. Now she spoke harshly. “Do you think
you come to this school to behave like a lady only as long as you
are on these premises and that you can remove the quality of gen-
tility along with your uniform as soon as you are outside? No real
lady wears nail polish at any time, under any circumstances.”
“My mother wears it,” the child said pertly, and closed her baby
mouth tightly. She must have believed she had cornered the prin-
cipal. She flounced a step away from the desk, giving a hitch to
her hips that looked deliberately saucy.
Miss Bird’s shoulders ached. “Young woman,” she said, and was
aware that her voice could probably be heard in the hall outside
and that her hands were shaking, “you have been impertinent.
You have failed to recognize the seriousness of your dishonesty and
you have come into this office, my office, wearing paint on your
nails. Do you not understand that posing as a Bird’s girl and then
putting on paint behind our backs is not straight? If you can apply
it, you can remove it, and I suggest that you do so at once—
after —” she roared, because the girl started toward the door, “after
I have heard your apology.”
“For which thing— Miss Bird?” There was now no trace of the
former timidity, which, the old woman realized, had probably
been a pose. She was sure that she was going to slap that soft,
very coarse face. She stood behind her desk and stared and the girl
 Dried Rose Petals in a Silver Bowl
338
her hip, giv-
dropped her eyes, but one hand slipped up to rest on
ing her stance an air of defianc e.
had they
How many changes that gesture represented. When
Slipping in, as imperceptibly as the coming of twilight or
come?
a little
the passage of a lifetime, new ways had come, a little here,
had though t of herself as staunch ly
there, and now Miss Bird, who
attempt s to lower the standar ds of
unmovable in the face of all
the same school at all. She held
her school, saw that this was not
made
on tightly to the edge of her desk and fought the rage that
her heart pound and the blood in her temples throb. Where this
of today’s
girl stood, a whole generation of girls, even the mothers
before this desk. And
students, had once stood, on this same carpet,
this one stood for all that had gone wrong. In the past there had
a demure young
been, in the office, the clean, good soap smell of
lady and as the tears fell, Miss Bird had known the sweet-edged
sense of accoinplishment and seen that she was moulding the clay
well. She had taught those girls that to hold the precious shape,
to keep that quality of fineness, a lady must not mingle with any
except her own kind. In the years since, the skirts had risen from
the floor, higher and higher. ‘Too high, and Miss Bird had called
a stop. No lady’s knee could show. Other changes were more
subtle. Girls made too much of their bosoms now. They wore
their hair in unbecoming styles. Their speech was not demure.
They had picked up the sounds of the street, the hard twang.
Miss Bird was most struck, however, by the way they carried them-
selves. The walk, the posture, the very way one tilted a head,
was not ladylike. As this girl with her hand on her hip had assumed
the carriage of a hussy. For a few hot minutes she felt that if she
struck this one, all the changes would be gone.
The smell of the apple blossoms floated on a breeze that stirred
the curtains and then came odors from the kitchen, onions and
tomatoes stewing for the midday meal. Miss Bird sighed. She had
kept the girl a long time. The bell for the end of a period buzzed.
It was muffled in this corridor. Miss Bird did not like the grating
sound, and had had old James, the arthritic Negro janitor, with the
school for thirty-eight years, climb up a ladder and stuff wads of
thick cotton batting under the metal dome. The softened burr led
a rush of feet on the stairs and through the hall. She could hear
them. Did they think she had become deaf? They would slow and
JANET BRUCE WINN 339

walk quietly just past her door. Hypocrisy. In this school, an-
other form of dissimulating.
The girl looked boldly at Miss Bird.
“T shall expect a written apology from you before the spring va-
cation. Since you seem poorly equipped with manners, perhaps I
must tell you why. You owe me an apology for being insolent, for
wearing the remains of paint on your nails, for lowering the stand-
ards of this school by cheating, because, young woman, every girl
here makes a part of the quality of the school.”
She heard herself and became confused. Somewhere the whole
reason for the school had slipped, like a page of a letter blown off
the desk, to be lost behind the radiator. One offered to parents the
opportunity to know that their daughters would meet and mingle
with only the nicest girls. Their speech would have the pastel tones
of refinement, their words the rubbed and buffed glow of education,
their manner the rare patina — of what
of else, if not of class?
But now? These children were taught that no such thing as class
existed. And perhaps it was so. She rubbed her eyes, making yel-
low swirls shoot across her vision. Equality was the cry of the streets
and of the politicians, these days. Mr. O’Brien must know the
pulse of the land. He had diagnosed the fever as rampant and
insisted that Miss Bird’s School take the medicine. One Negro girl.
Miss Bird had placed her hands on the shining smoothness of the
board room table and lifted herself to her feet. “How can you
dare?”
But Mr. O’Brien, without even the courtesy to stand, had pa-
one.
tiently explained again. “We must,” he had insisted. “Just
We can find a bright girl from a solid middle-class home. You
know, some of these people, the professionals, doctors, lawyers,
teachers, they do a very strict and careful job raising their children.”
“How could you?”
He had won. All the board agreed it was too bad, but it had to
come. And one old lady was estranged from herself. If one Negro
girl could come, then why only one? If equality was God’s way,
then had she been wrong for a lifetime?
Miss Bird had seen the little white gloves, the hat, the tailored
coat. The new student pulled off the gloves, dark hands inside the
white cotton, and stood with sober mien the principal’s inspection.
Her handshake was quick and diffident. Miss Bird heard a slight
 340 Dried Rose Petals in a Silver Bowl

hesitation in the girl’s speech, but she spoke the courteous words
hair
and the woman returned them, looking at the so very black
combed back neatly, the almond eyes lustrous in the coffee-with-
cream face. It was a shock when the girl took off her coat and
the Bird’s School uniform was there, the white collar stark against
the Negro skin. But Miss Bird was noticing, too, that the child
chewed her lip, that she was afraid, would need protection. For
young Denise the new order was perhaps as difficult as for herself,
Miss Bird observed.
Not so for the hard, the indifferent. This Patrisha who stood
waiting. “You will be permitted to remain with us,” Miss Bird told
the trustee’s daughter, “if you write a satisfactory letter.” She
smiled down at her wearily. “See that the spelling is correct.”
“Well, Daddy practically runs this school, he’s put so much
money in it. He says it’s about time somebody brought it up to
date.”
Miss Bird heard a singing in her ears. Her pulse was heavy and
blood throbbed through her hands and feet. “J am the principal.
I started this school fifty-three years ago.”
“But Daddy says you won’t be around so long.”
Miss Bird’s hand flashed out and she felt the sting of contact on
the palm; she saw red flame in parallel lines, the marks of her own
fingers, across the girl’s cheek. The child was crying. She ran out
of the room and Miss Bird stood alone in her office. She had struck
a student. First the level of anger had reached a peak where it was
inevitable that she would strike her. That had carried her over the
edge, a mere stick swept in flood-filled river suddenly descending
over a lip of rock, water crashing and foaming down and with it
carrying the frail wood. From that point on, she had been all but
drowned, had she not, in her rage, because it had become multi-
plied by anger with herself which had rebounded to the girl and
back to herself?
But no. She had a will. She could not divest herself of guilt by
this pretense.
When the O’Briens came, she would tell them how wrong they
and their daughter were. Thoughts of the rusted pipes in the walls
of East House, gracious old East House, and of Mr. O’Brien’s
chinless pink face, merged and she brushed them all aside. Her
shoulders sagged. What of herself? She had scolded Patrisha for
JANET BRUCE WINN 341

nail polish and for impertinence when she should have scolded
her for the way she spoke of a fellow Bird’s girl. She had slapped
the child because she, Miss Bird, was an old woman confused by
change.
She went to the window and stood looking out over the wide
lawns. The aroma of dried roses mingled with dust and stewing
onions. A little girl in the play yard was singing in a high, piping
voice.
BUOG REVEAL. INO das
Biographical Notes

James BaLpwin was born in 1924 and grew up in Harlem where his
father was a minister. At twenty-four he went to Europe and
stayed for almost ten years, chiefly in Paris. Mr. Baldwin’s many
prominent books include Nobody Knows My Name, Another
Country, The Fire Next Time, Notes of a Native Son and Go Tell
It on the Mountain. His most recent novel, published in June
1968, is Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone from which
the story in this collection has been taken.
Since 1957 Mr. Baldwin has made his home in New York City,
and in recent years he has gained international recognition as
a spokesman for Negro rights.
Joun Deck was born in Compton, California, and has lived in New
York City, Spain, and Puerto Rico. He is currently on leave from
the University of Puerto Rico, where he teaches English, and is
living in San Francisco. “Greased Samba” won the Atlantic First
Award for 1967. Mr. Deck’s first novel, One Morning, For Pleas-
ure, will be published in the autumn of 1968.
James T. FarRELL, who was born in Chicago in 1904, is the author
of the Studs Lonigan trilogy and many other novels. He also
writes biographical articles for the New York Times and other
publications. Currently, Mr. Farrell is working on a series of
twenty-seven novels called “The Universe of Time.” Three of
these have already been published. Mr. Farrell now lives in New
York City and lectures at colleges throughout the country.
began
Grorce H. Freitac, who was born in Canton, Ohio, in 1909,
 346 Biographical Notes

to write stories in 1934. They have appeared in The American

Mercury,
Spectator, The Atlantic Monthly, Collier’s, American,
he
Harper’s, The New Yorker, and other magazines. In 1947
published a novel called The Lost Land. Since 1953 Mr. Freitag
has lived in San Bernardino, California, where he teaches short
story writing at night schools. During the day he manages a sign
business and writes his stories standing at a long sign bench.
GARDNER, born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1934, began his
Herp
professional life as a sculptor and cartoonist. His cartoons, ‘““The
Nebishes,” were nationally syndicated here and appeared in The
London Observer until 1961, when he abandoned commercial art
A
to devote full time to writing. His works include a novel,
Piece of the Action, publishe d in 1958, the play and the screen-
play of A Thousand Clowns for which he won the Screenwriters
Guild Award for the Best Comedy of 1966, and an Academy
Award nomination for Best Picture of the Year. His new play,
The Goodbye People, which he will also direct, will open on
Broadway in the fall of 1968.
Wiiu1AMm H. Gass was born in North Dakota in 1924 and received
his B.A. from Kenyon College in Ohio and his Ph.D. from Cornell
University. Dr. Gass and his wife taught at the College of Woos-
ter in Wooster, Ohio, for four years, and since 1955 he has been
professor of Philosophy at Purdue University. He spent 1965-66
in London on a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. Dr. Gass
is the author of Omensetter’s Luck, a novel published in 1966 to
wide acclaim. His latest book is a collection of short stories, In the
Heart of the Heart of the Country, the title story of which appears
in this collection. He and his family live in West Lafayette,
Indiana.
Mary Lapp GAVELL was born in Cuero, Texas, in 1919 and was
eraduated from Texas College of Arts and Indusiries. She re-
ceived her Master’s degree in linguistics from the University of
Texas. During World War II she was a writer with the War
Production Board and after the war she was a staff member of
the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. She
became managing editor of Psychiatry in 1955. “The Rotifer” is
her first published short story; it originally appeared as a memor-
ial to her in Psychiatry. Mrs. Gavell died in January, 1967.
DoNALD GRopMAN, who was born in Boston in 1936 and now lives
 Biographical Notes 347

in Brookline, Massachusetts, was educated at Brandeis University,

State University of Iowa, and San Francisco State College. He is
currently preparing a short story collection and completing a
novel. “The Heart of This or That Man” was his second pub-
lished story.
WILLIAM Harrison was born in Dallas, Texas, and has taught in
colleges and universities in North Carolina, Iowa, and Texas.
At present he directs the program in creative writing at the Uni-
versity of Arkansas. His stories have appeared frequently in The
Saturday Evening Post and Cosmopolitan and his first novel,
The Theologian, was published in 1965.
JupitH Hiccins grew up in New Jersey and attended Pembroke
College and Trinity College, Dublin. She is married and lives in
New York City, where she does free-lance work for a publishing
house. “The Only People” is her first published story.
HELEN Hupson has had her stories published in The Sewance
Review, The Antioch Review, The Reporter, Mademoiselle, The
Virginia Quarterly Review, The Quarterly Review of Literature,
The Northwest Review, Ladies’ Home Journal and other maga-
zines. She has written two novels, Tell the Time To None and
Meyer, Meyer. A collection of her short stories, The Listener, is
to be published in the fall of 1968.
Leo Litwak, born in Detroit, Michigan, lives in San Francisco and
teaches at San Francisco State College. His articles and stories
have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Esquire, Partisan
Review, Midstream, and other magazines. A novel, To the Hang-
ing Gardens, appeared in 1964. Mr. Litwak has recently com-
pleted his second novel, In O’Brien’s House.
RicHARD McKENNA was born in Mountain Home, Idaho. At the
age of eighteen, he enlisted in the Navy and served for ten years
in the Far East. After twenty-two years of service, he retired to
enter the University of North Carolina where he received a degree
in English. He has written a novel, The Sand Pebbles, and The
Sons of Martha, from which his story in this collection is taken.
Mr. McKenna died in November, 1964.
Wi1Lu1AM MosELEyY was born and raised on a farm in Eastern Ken-
tucky during the last years of the Depression and the begin-
ning of World War II. After graduating from the University of
———————————

Kentucky, he spent two years in the Army, then taught in a high

 Biographical Notes
348
ed by grad-
school near Cape Kennedy, Florida. This was follow
Mr. Moseley
uate work at the University of Southern California.
ng creative writing
now lives in Miami, Florida, where he is teachi
and a short
at Miami-Dade Junior College and working on stories
novel.
was born in New York City, was educated at
JoANNA OSTROW
1959 on a
Queens College, and went to Stanford University in
and is now
Writing Fellowship. She lived in Scotland for six years
has appear ed in various British newspap ers,
in Ottawa. Her work
in The New
on the BBC, in The Massachusetts Review, and
Yorker.
D.C., and
Nancy HuppLeEstoN PackER was born in Washington,
Alabama . Her stories have appeared
erew up in Birmingham,
The Kenyon Review, Harper's , The
in The Southwest Review,
Reporte r, and other magazin es. She
Yale Review, Contact, The
,
now lives with her husband and their two children in Stanford
California, where she teaches at the Writing Center of Stanford
University.
JouN Puitiies was born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and graduated
from Harvard. He served in Europe with the Army in World
War IL and then worked in editorial jobs at mass circulation
magazines in New York. His novel, The Second Happiest Day,
was published in 1953. Since then he has lived in London, Athens,
and Paris. His fiction and journalism have appeared in anthologies
and in many magazines. Mr. Phillips now divides his time be-
tween Manhattan and Martha’s Vineyard.
LAWRENCE P, SPINGARN, born in Jersey City, New Jersey, was edu-
cated at Bowdoin College and the universities of Michigan and
California. His work has appeared in Harper's, The New Yorker,
Paris Review, Saturday Review, The Southern Review, and The
Transatlantic Review. Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and the
Huntington Hartford Foundation have given him resident fellow-
ships or financial grants. He has just published his fourth collec-
tion of poems, Madame Bidet and Other Fixtures, and written
two unpublished novels. He is currently teaching English at Los
Angeles Valley College.
Winston WEATHERS is a professor of English at the University of
Tulsa. A graduate of the University of Oklahoma, he received
the Elinor Frost Scholarship in Poetry to Bread Loaf in 1952 and
Biographical Notes 349
a scholarship to the MacDowell Colony in 1954. He has pub-
lished poetry and fiction in such magazines as New Mexico Quar-
terly, Motive, Focus/Midwest, Argosy (London), North American
Review, and Texas Quarterly. His monograph The Archetype
and the Psyche: Essays in World Literature was recently published
by the University of Tulsa; his critical essay on Par Lagerkvist
will be published later this year by Wm. B. Eerdmans; and he is
coauthor of two writing texts: The Strategy of Style and The
Prevalent Forms of Prose.
JANET Bruce WINN was born in Orange, New Jersey, graduated
from Vassar College, and earned a Master’s degree in philosophy
from Stanford University. She has taught courses in schools in
California and New York, and some of her short stories and
articles have appeared in music and literary magazines. Cur-
rently she is working on a series of historical novels for teen-age
boys. She now lives near Poughkeepsie, New York, with her hus-
band, who is a poet and English professor, and their four children.
 THE

YEARBOOK
OF THE
AMERICAN SHORT STORY

January I to December 31, 1967

 Roll of Honor, 1967

I. American Authors

BALDWIN, JAMES Frirp, Eric Wor

Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Worship to Greenland. Epoch, Fall.
Gone. McCall’s, Feb.
BREWSTER, HARRY GARDNER, Herp
Where the Trout Sing. Sewanee Re- Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why
view, Jan.-Mar. Is He Saying Those Terrible
BuMPUws, JERRY Things About Me? Saturday Eve-
A World of Beautiful Children. ning Post, Mar. 11.
Colorado State Review, Spring. Gass, WILLIAM H.
In the Heart of the Heart of the
CHEEVER, JOHN Country. New American Review,
Another Story. New Yorker, Feb. 25. No. I.
CLERC, CHARLES GAVELL, Mary LApp
The Rake’s Progress. Satire Newslet- The Rotifer. Psychiatry, May.
ter, Fall GILLESPIE, ALFRED
The Witness. Saturday Evening
DeEcK, JOHN Post, Aug. 12.
Greased Samba. Atlantic, Nov. Gop, HERBERT
Dickson, J. W. A Selfish Story. Harper’s, May.
The Water Carriers. Prairie Schooner, Gorpdon, ROBERT
Spring. Something Like a Temple. Forum,
DokeEy, RiCHARD Autumn.
Sanchez. Southwest Review, Au- GRoPMAN, DONALD
tumn. The Heart of This or That Man.
Literary Review, Summer.
FARRELL, JAMES T. GUSEWELLE, C. W.
An American Student in Paris. The Lion Makers. Virginia Quar-
Southern Review, Autumn. terly Review, Autumn.
FRANCIS, H. E. GuTnreik, A. B., JR.
Summer Is the Suffering Time Here. Loco, Esquire, Nov.
North American Review, May.
FREITAG, GEORGE HALE, NANCY
An Old Man and His Hat. Har- The Innocent. Virginia Quarterly
per’s, June. Review, Spring.
 oo. The Yearbook of the American Short Story

HARINGTON, DONALD MATTHEWS, JACK

A Second Career. Esquire, Jan. The Fish Pond. Southern Human-
Down in the Dumps. Esquire, Feb. ities Review, Spring.
Harris, MARILYN In the Neighborhood of Dark. North
The Clay Man. Trace, Fall. American Review, Sept.
HARRISON, WILLIAM MorGAN, BERRY
The Snooker Shark. Saturday Eve- Barrand’s Landing. New Yorker,
ning Post, July 29. Mar. 11.
HEYMAN, ARLENE Morris, REBECCA
Would Grow. The Good Humor Man. New
Something That
Epoch, Fall. Yorker, June 17.
HicciIns, JUDITH MOosELEY, WILLIAM
The Only People. Atlantic, June. The Preacher and Margery Scott.
HOAGLAND, EDWARD Virginia Quarterly Review, Sum-
The Witness. Paris Review, Sum- mer.
mer-Fall. Mountzoures, H. L.
Hoop, HucHu Fathers. New Yorker, Jan. 21.
Brother André, Pére Lamarche, and The Empire of Things. New
My Grandmother, Eugénie. Al- Yorker, Sept. 23:
phabet, June.
Hupson, HELEN
NEwMAN, C, J.
Hofmannstahl. Northwest Review,
My Brother Solomon, The Bible and
Summer.
the Bicycle. Tamarack Review,
The Tenant. Virginia Quarterly
Spring.
Review, Autumn,
HUNTER, EVAN
The Sharers. Playboy, Nov. OatTEs, JOYCE CAROL
Two Poets. Northwest Review,
Torio, JOHN J. Spring.
The Man in the Black Apron. South- The Sweet Enemy. Southern Re-
ern Review, Autumn. view, July.
The Wheel of Love. Esquire, Oct.
KEYES, DANIEL OSIER, JOHN
The Spellbinder. North American Dry Leaves. Georgia Review, Win-
Review, May. ter.
KJELGAARD, BETTY Ostrow, JOANNA
Too Bad, So Sad. Ladies’ Home Celtic Twilight. New Yorker, Apr.
Journal, Sept. 20;
KRAUSE, ERVIN D.
The Witch. Northwest Review,
Spring. PACKER, NANCY HUDDLESTON
End of a Game. Ararat, Autumn.
LAVIN, MARY Early Morning, Lonely Ride.
A Gentle Soul. Atlantic, May. Southwest Review, Autumn.
Litwak, LEo E. PALEY, GRACE
In Shock. Partisan Review, Fall. Distance. Atlantic, Dec.
PHILLIPS, JOHN
McKeEnNNA, RICHARD Bleat Blodgette. Paris Review, Sum-
The Sons of Martha. Harper’s, Feb. mer-Fall.
MacLeop, JAMES L. Procror, Roy
The Jesus Flag. Georgia Review, Sat’day Night’s Lovin’ Night, Mis-
Summer. tuh Webb. Descant, Fall.
Roll of Honor, 1967 355
RICHTER, TELMUND TAYLOR, PETER
The Million Dollar Salesman. Uni- Mrs. Billingsly’s Wine. New Yorker,
versity Review, Summer. Oct. 14.
RINDFLEISCH, NORVAL THOMAS, DoroTHy
The Summer of His Discontent. Violets Are Brief. Redbook, April.
Literary Review, Autumn. TUCKER, HELEN
Rotu, Henry H. Such a Quiet Thing. Ladies’ Home
Of Frail Pigeons and Red Roses. Journal, Nov.
Quest, Fall. TYNER, PAUL
How You Play the Game. New
Yorker, Jan. 28.
SAROYAN, WILLIAM
Three Tales. Saturday Evening Post, UPDIKE, JOHN
Oct I: Your Lover Just Called. Harper’s,
SPENCER, ELIZABETH Jan.
Those Bickfords. McCall’s, Jan.
SPINGARN, LAWRENCE P. WEATHERS, WINSTON
The Ambassador. Southern Humani- The Games That We Played. Geor-
ties Review, Spring. gia Review, Spring.
STACTON, DAVID WEEKS, JACK
Little Brother Nun. Virginia Quar- A Big, Bloody Cockbird. Saturday
terly Review, Spring. Evening Post, Mar. 11.
STONE, ROBERT WEESNER, —THEODORE
Farley the Sailor. Saturday Evening Andrew His Son. New Yorker, Nov.
Post, Jan. 14. 4.
Thunderbolts in Red, White and WHITE, VERA RANDAL
Blue. Saturday Evening Post, Jan. You Can’t Buy People. Saturday
28. Evening Post, May 6.
STUART, JESSE WHITEHILL, JOSEPH
How to Thread a Needle. Ohio Uni- Bobby. Atlantic, May.
versity Review. WINN, JANET BRUCE
Dried Rose Petals in a Silver Bowl.
Evidence, No. 10.
TAKAHASHI, HIROMI Wolwobe, L.
The Duel at Yamazaki Daira. On This Day. New Yorker, Sept. 9.
Greensboro Review, Winter. Pheasants. New Yorker, Nov. 18.
TaAytor, MAry ANN Woop, MARGERY
Trespass. Sewanee Review, Jan.-Mar. The Bride. Miscellany, Fall.

Il. Foreign Authors

CLARKE, AUSTIN C. GREENE, GRAHAM

The Collector. Transatlantic Re- Chagrin in Three Parts. Cosmopoli-
view, Spring. tan, Aug.
A Wedding in Toronto. Tamarack
Review, Autumn. HAZZARD, SHIRLEY
The Separation of Dinah Delbanco,
Guitia, ALECU IWAN New Yorker, July 22.
Negostina. Literary Review, Sum-
mer. KAWALEC, JULIAN
GorDIMER, NADINE Homecoming. Literary Review,
The Bride of Christ. Atlantic, Aug. Spring.
 $56 The Yearbook of the American Short Story

Kirty, BENEDICT PRITCHETT, V. F.

Wild Rover No More. Northwest Debt of Honor. New Yorker, Dec. 30.
Review, Spring.g
REBREANU, VASILE
LITVINOFF, Ivy The Colt. Literary Review, Sum-
Farewell to the Dacha. New Yorker, mer.
Sept. 16.
ToLkiEN, J. R. R.
MARTIN, CLAIRE Major. Redbook,
Smith of Wootton
Three Points in My Life. Tamarack
Dec.
Review, Spring.
METCALF, JOHN
Keys and Watercress. Tamarack Re- WARNER, SYLVIA TOWNSEND
view, Autumn. A Visionary Gleam, New Yorker,
June 3.
O'FAOLAIN, JULIA WEST, ANTHONY
Pray for Grace, Poor Little Sinner. Mr. Keogh. New Yorker, July 8.
Miss Millard. New Yorker, Nov. 11.
Saturday Evening Post, Feb. 25.
Distinctive Short Stories
in American Magazines, 1967

I. American Authors

ALTER, ROBERT EDMOND The Door on West Tenth Street.

Crossback, Argosy, Aug. New Yorker, Oct. 7.
ALVAREZ, JOAN MAXWELL BREWSTER, HARRY
The Recital. Virginia Quarterly Re- Where the Trout Sing. Sewanee Re-
view, Winter. view, Jan.-March.
ASPINWALL, ALICE BuMPUS, JERRY
Last Walk to the River. Georgia Re- A World of Beautiful Children.
view, Spring. Colorado State Review, Spring.

BALDWIN, JAMES Capote, TRUMAN

Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been The Thanksgiving Visitor. McCall's,
Gone. McCall's, Feb. Nov.
BArRTH, JOHN CARVER, RAYMOND
Lost in the Funhouse. Atlantic, Sometimes a Woman Can Just About
Nov. Ruin a Man. Colorado State Re-
Bieri, NORBERT view, Summer.
The Basement. The Minnesota Re- Dummy. Discourse, Summer.
view, Nos. 3 and 4. CATALINA, DON
BLooM, THEODORE Buck Fenn. Transatlantic Review,
A Four-Day Wait. Quarterly Review Summer.
of Literature, Nos. 3 and 4. CHARYN, MARLENE
BLUESTONE, GEORGE Last One Home. Ararat, Autumn.
Raccoon in the Zinnia Bed. North- CHEEVER, JOHN
west Review, Winter. Another Story. New Yorker, Feb. 25.
BONELLIE, JANET CLARKE, JOHN HENDRICK
Why Are the People Staring. The How Many Were Going to St. Ives?
Tamarack Review, Summer. North American Review, March.
BRENNAN, MAEVE CLERC, CHARLES
A Snowy Night on West Forty-Ninth The Rake’s Progress. Satire News-
Street. New Yorker, Jan. 21. letter, Fall.
 358 The Yearbook of the American Short Story
COHEN, FLORENCE CHANOCK FREITAG, GrorGE H.
Confessions From a Seashell About a An Old Man and His Hat. Harper’s
Writer in Wales. Epoch, Fall. Magazine, June.
Cop, JoHN O. Frizp, Eric WOLF
The Rime of the Efficient Dog Grin- Worship to Greenland. Epoch, Fall.
der. Ante, Spring FRIEDMAN, BRUCE JAY
CONNELL, EvAN S. The Scientist. Esquire, Apr.
The Voyeur. Lillabulero, Winter.
CorFMAN, EUNICE Luccock
To Be An Athlete. Harpér’s, Nov.
GAINES, CHARLES
DECK, JOHN The Recruitment. Harper’s Maga-
Greased Samba. Atlantic, Nov. zine, Dec.
Dickson, J. W. GALLANT, MAVIS
The Water Carriers. Prairie The End of the World. New Yorker,
Schooner, Spring. June 10.
Disco, THOMAS M. GARDNER, HERB
Slaves. Transatlantic Review, Sept. Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why
DoKey, RICHARD Is He Saying Those ‘Terrible
Sanchez. Southwest Review, Autumn. Things About Me? Saturday Even-
DRAKE, ROBERT ing Post, Mar. 11.
The Tower and the Pear Tree. Gass, WILLIAM H.
Georgia Review, Fall. In the Heart of the Heart of the
DRISKELL, LEON V. Country. New American Review,
He Heard the Nickel Go Down. Phy- No. 1.
lon, Winter. GAVELL, MAry LApp

EssLINcER, Pat M. The Rotifer. Psychiatry, May.

GILLESPIE, ALFRED
Desire Is a Bus. Phylon. Fall.
The Witness. Saturday Evening Post,
FAESSLER, SHIRLEY Aug. 12.
Maybe Later It Will Come Back to Gop, HERBERT
My Mind. Atlantic, Apr. A Selfish Story. Harper’s Magazine,
FAINLIGHT, RUTH May.
Daylife and Nightlife. Transatlantic GOLDGAR, HARRY
Review, No. 26, Sept. The Passing of Mrs. Blossom. Colo-
FARRELL, JAMES T. rado State Review, Vol. 11, No. 1.
An American Student in Paris. GorboN, ROBERT
Southern Review, Autumn. Something Like a Temple. Forum,
FETLER, ANDREW Autumn.
In Line for Lemonade. Malahat Re- GRAU, SHIRLEY ANN
view, Jan. Sea Change. Atlantic, Nov.
FINEMAN, MORTON GRAY, FRANCINE DU PLESSIN
Distress Signals. Saturday Evening Lucien, Octave, Victoire, Emile. New
Post, Dec. 3 and Jan. 7. Yorker, July 29.
FLYNN, ROBERT GROPMAN, DONALD
Babe in the Wilderness. Saturday The Heart of This or That Man.
Evening Post, Apr. 22. The Literary Review, Summer.
Forb, Jessie Hitt GUSEWELLE, C. W.
Winterkill. Esquire, Sept. The Lion Makers. Virginia Review,
Francis, H. E. Autumn,
Summer Is the Suffering Time Here. GuTurigE, A. B., Jr.
North American Review, May. Loco. Esquire, Nov.
Distinctive Short Stories, 1967 300
HAHN, EMILY HUMPHREY, WILLIAM
Pawpaw Pie. New Yorker, Apr. 15. The Rainmaker. Saturday Evening
HAIMoOWI1Z, BENJAMIN Post, Dec. 2.
The General and the Liver. Ararat, HUNTER, EVAN
Autumn. The Sharers. Playboy, Nov.
HALE, NANCY
The Innocent. Virginia Quarterly Toro, JOHN J.
Review, Spring. The Man in the Black Apron. South-
HALL, JAMEs B. ern Review, Autumn.
Getting Married. Virginia Quarterly Rahab. The Quest, Fall.
Review, Summer.
HARRINGTON, DONALD
KEYES, DANIEL
A Second Career, Esquire, Jan.
The Spellbinder. North American
Down in the Dumps. Esquire, Feb.
Review, May.
Harris, MARILYN
KJELGAARD, BETTY
The Clay Man. Trace, Fall-Winter.
Too Bad, So Sad. Ladies’ Home
HARRISON, WILLIAM
Journal, Sept.
The Snooker Shark. Saturday Even-
KLEIN, NORMA
ing Post, July 29.
A Toast for Sybil. North American
Hayes, Puiie T.
Review, Nov.
The Stubborn Old Lady. Redbook,
KRAUSE, ERVIN
Aug.
The Witch. Northwest Review,
HENDERSON, ROBERT
Spring.
Avizandum. New Yorker, Sept. 2.
The Shooters. Northwest Review,
HERSCH, BURTON
Winter.
The Out-of-Doors and Solomon
Eichorn. Transatlantic Review,
Summer. LAVIN, MARY
HEYMAN, ARLENE A Gentle Soul. Atlantic, May.
Something That Wouldn’t Crow. LeAny, JACK
Epoch, Fall. The Freeway. Descant, Fall.
HicGINs, JUDITH LiTwak, LEo E.
The Only People. Atlantic, June. In Shock. Partisan Review, Fall.
HOAGLAND, EDWARD Lowry, JOHN
The Witness. Paris Review, Sum- The Great Dog. Georgia Review,
mer-Fall. Spring.
Hoop, Hucu
Brother André, Pére Lamarche, and McKENNA, RICHARD
My Grandmother, Eugénie. Alpha- The Sons of Martha. Harper’s Maga-
zine, Feb.
bet, June.
MACLEOD, JAMEs L.
Horowitz, FLoyp Ross
The Jesus Flag. Georgia Review,
A Visit to Chiah. Kansas Magazine.
Summer.
Hovne, A. J.
McMvrrow, FRED
Picnic at the Lake. December, Dec.
Confession. Saturday Evening Post,
Hoyer, LINDA GRACE
OctaZie
The Predator. New Yorker, May 13. McNEVIN, MICHAEL
Hupson, HELEN Getting to Know Julie. New Yorker,
Hofmannstahl. Northwest Review, Novy. ll.
Summer. MCcCPHERSON, SHIRLEY
The Tenant. Virginia Quarterly Re- My Friends in Argentina. The Quest,
view, Autumn. Fall.
 360 The Yearbook of the American Short Story

MALKOoFF, KARL Norris, HOKE

It’s Not Far, but I Don’t Know the
Adrian or Not. Ararat, Autumn.
MALONEY, RALPH Way. Playboy, June.
What I Need Don’t Come in Suit-
cases. Atlantic, Oct. OaTEs, JOYCE CAROL
Two Poets. Northwest Review,
MATTHEWS, JACK
A Slightly Different World. North Spring.
American Review, March. In the Warehouse. Transatlantic Re-
The Fish Pond. Southern Humani- view, Summer.
ties Review, Spring. The Sweet Enemy. Southern Review,
In the Neighborhood of Dark. July.
The Wheel of Love. Esquire, Oct.
North American Review, Sept.
MEYERS, WILLIAM O’DONNELL, MARY KATHLEEN
Sequatchie. Esquire, July. Mirage. Atlantic, Oct.
MICHAELSON, L. W. OcBURN, CHARLTON, JR.
The Concert-Goer. North American The Yard. Harper’s Magazine, July.
Review, March. O’HARA, JOHN
How Old, How Young. New Yorker,
MILLs, JOHN
The Road Runner. Evidence, No. 10. July 1.
MorcGAN, BERRY Barred. Saturday Evening Post, Oct.
Barrand’s Landing, New Yorker, tle
Mar. 11. OPPENHEIMER, MORTON
The Pepper Trick. New Yorker, A Day of Magic. Redbook, Aug.
Apr. 22. OsIER, JOHN
Morris, HERBERT Dry Leaves. Georgia Review, Winter.
Everything Fortunate and Deep with OsTROW, JOANNA
Love. Trace, Fall-Winter. Celtic Twilight. New Yorker, Apr.
Morris, REBECCA 29°
The Good Humor Man. New
Yorker, June 17. PACKER, NANCY HUDDLESTON
MosELEY, WILLIAM End of a Game. Ararat, Autumn.
The Preacher and Margery Scott. Early Morning, Lonely Ride. South-
Virginia Quarterly Review, Sum- west Review, Autumn.
mer. PALEY, GRACE
Mountzoures, H. L. Distance. Atlantic, Dec.
Fathers. New Yorker, Jan. 21. PARIS, ELIZABETH
The Empire of Things. New Yorker, A Summer of Fans. Georgia Review,
Sept. 23. Spring.
PHILLIPS, JOHN
Bleat Blodgette. Paris Review, Sum-
NeMeEc, DaAvid mer-Fall.
On the Produce Dock. Transatlan- PoTTER, DANIEL
tic Review, Sept. Midnight Watch. McCall’s, June.
NEUGEBOREN, JAY Potter, Nancy A. J.
Something Is Rotten in the Borough In Union Sweet. Prairie Schooner,
of Brooklyn. Ararat, Autumn. Fall.
Ebbets Field. Transatlantic Review,
Spring. REHDER, JESSIE
NEWMAN, C. J. The Surgeon. Lillabulero, Winter.
My Brother Solomon, The Bible and REYNOLDS, LAWRENCE JUDSON
the Bicycle. Tamarack Review, Jacob and the Faith Healer. Greens-
Spring. boro Review, Winter.
Distincttve Short Stories, 1967 361
RICHTER, TELMUND STEWART, JESSE
The Million Dollar Salesman. Uni- Two Worlds. Georgia Review, Win-
versity Review, Summer. ter.
RINDFLEISCH, NORVAL STONE, ROBERT
The Summer of His Discontent. The Farley the Sailor, Saturday Evening
Literary Review, Autumn. Post, Jan. 14.
RocHiItI, EDOUARD Thunderbolts in Red, White and
The Boubissa’s Pilgrimage. The Lit- Blue. Saturday Evening Post, Jan.
erary Review, Autumn. 28.
ROHDE, BARBARA Stout, ROBERT JOE
Rise Up and Hear the Bells. Mc- Christmas at Aunt Sarah’s. The
Call's, July. Quest, Fall.
ROOKE, LEON STUART, JESSE
When Swimmers on the Beach Have How to Thread a Needle. The Ohio
All Gone. Louisiana, Sept.-Oct. University Review.
RotH, HENry H.
Of Frail Pigeons and Red Roses. TAKAHASHI, HIROMI
The Quest, Fall. The Duel at Yamasaki Daira.
Rota, PHILIP Greensboro Review, Winter.
A Jewish Patient Begins His Analy- TAUBE, Myron
sis. Esquire, Apr. The Tree. Discourse, Summer.
TAYLOR, CHET
SANDBERG-DIMENT, ERIK The Man Who Would Not Speak to
The Golden Mirrors of Yesterday. His Wife. Northwese Review,
South Dakota Review, Winter. Winter.
SAROYAN, WILLIAM TAYLor, Harry H.
Madness in the Family. Saturday Will the Walls Come Down. Kansas
Evening Post, June 17. Magazine.
Three Tales. Saturday Evening Post, TAYLOR, MARY ANN
Ocbri- Trespass. Sewanee, Jan.-Mar.
SCHAEFER, JACK TAYLOR, PETER
Last Dollar. Argosy, Aug. Mrs. Billingsly’s Wine. New Yorker,
SHAW, IRWIN Oct. 14.
The Mannichon Solution. Playboy, TAYLOR, THEODORE
Dec. The Girl Who Took Risks. Satur:
SHOCKLEY, ANN ALLEN day Evening Post, July 15.
The Funeral. Phylon, Spring. THOMAS, DoroTHy
SILVERMAN, ROSEMARY Violets Are Brief. Redbook, Apr.
Friday. Texas Quarterly, Summer. Tort, JOSEPH
SINGER, ISAAC BASHEVIS Pumpkin. Alphabet, June.
The Lecture. Playboy, Dec. Trevor, WILLIAM
SKILLINGS, R. D. Miss Smith. ‘Transatlantic Review,
An Atrocity. Trace, May. Summer.
SPENCER, ELIZABETH TUCKER, HELEN
A Bad Cold. New Yorker, May 27. Such a Quiet Thing. Ladies’ Home
‘Those Bufords. McCall’s, Jan. Journal, Nov.
SPINGARN, LAWRENCE P. TyYLer, ANNE
The Ambassador. Southern Humani- The Feather Behind the Rock. New
ties Review, Spring. Yorker, Aug. 12.
STAETON, DAVID TYNer, PAUL
Little Brother Nun. Virginia Quar- How You Play the Game. New
terly Review, Spring. Yorker, Jan, 28.
 362 The Yearbook of the American Short Story
UppDIKE, JOHN WHITEHILL, JOSEPH
Your Love Just Called. Harper’s Bobby. Atlantic, May.
Magazine, Jan. WINN, JANET BRUCE
The Taste of Metal. New Yorker, Dried Rose Petals in a Silver Bowl.
Mar. 11. Evidence, No. 10.
Museums and Women. New Yorker, WoIlwobE, L.
Nov. 18. On This Day. New Yorker, Sept. 9.
The History Lesson. New Yorker,
Sept. 30.
WALKER, DON . Pheasants. New Yorker, Nov. 18.
Beyond a Far Country. Western Woop, MARGERY
Humanities Review, Summer. The Bride. Miscellany, Fall.
WEATHERS, WINSTON Wooton, CARL
The Games That We Played. Under Silent Stars. Georgia Review,
Georgia Review, Spring. Summer.
WEEKS, JACK Final Arrangements. Forum, Au-
A Big, Bloody Cockbird. Saturday tumn.
Evening Post, Mar. 11.
WEIDMAN, JEROME Yu-Hwa, LEE
Good Man, Bad Man. Saturday Eve- An Afternoon of Surmises. South-
ning Post, July 1. west Review, Autumn.
WHITE, VERA RANDAL YurIcK, SOL
You Can’t Buy People. Saturday Not With a Whimper, but...
Evening Post, May 6 Transatlantic Review, Summer.
WHITE, WILLIAM M. ZIMMERMAN, JOAN
A Man’s Day in Court. Forum, Au- Everybody Loves Saturday Night.
tumn. December, Dec.

Il. Foreign Authors

ANAND, MULK RAJ CULFF, ROBERT

Birth. Literary Review, Autumn. Citadels of Hard Glass. Works, Au-
ANDRZEJEWSKI, JERZY tumn.

The Court Hearing. Literary Re-

view, Spring.
FInirpowicz, KORNEL
BAtesu, Ion A Quiet Afternoon. Literary Re-
A Disease Without a Name. Literary view, Spring.
Review, Summer. FUENTES, CARLOS
Bo.irHo, HECTOR The Two Elenas. Tamarack Review,
The ‘Twist of the Knife. fliexas Summer.
Quarterly, Summer.

CLARKE, AUSTIN C. GuHiLiA, ALECU IWAN

The Collector. Transatlantic Re- Negostina. Literary Review, Sum-
view, Spring. mer.
A Wedding in Toronto. Tamarack GORDIMER, NADINE
Review, Autumn. The Bride of Christ. Atlantic, Aug.
CorrdAzar, JULIO GREENE, GRAHAM
The Night Face Up. New Yorker, Chagrin in Three Parts. Cosmopoli-
Apr. 22. tan, Aug.
Distinctive Short Stories, 1967 9
363
HIAzZarp, SHIRLEY O'BRIEN, EDNA
Swoboda’s Tragedy. New Yorker, The Love Object. New Yorker, May
May 20. 13.
Official Life. New Yorker, June 24. O’FAOLAIN, JULIA
The Separation of Dinah Delbanco. Pray for Grace, Poor Little Sinner.
New Yorker, July 22. Saturday Evening Post, Feb. 25.
The Everlasting Delight. New
Yorker, Aug. 19. PRITCHETT, V. F.
Debt of Honor. New Yorker, Dec.
30.
IWASZKIEWICZ, JAROSLAW
The Badger. Literary Review, REBREANU, VASILE
Spring. The Colt. Literary Review, Summer.
RUDNICKI, ADOLF
JHARVALA, R. PRAWER
Yom Kippur. Literary Review,
Spring.
An Indian Citizen. New Yorker,
Sept. 30.
SADOVEANU, MIHAIL
A Letter from the Actress Olimbiada.
KAWALEC, JULIAN Literary Review, Summer.
Homecoming. Literary Review, SIMION, Poy
Spring. The Triangle. Literary Review,
KIELY, BENEDICT Summer.
Wild Rover. Northwest Review, SOENBARJO, BIBSY
Spring. The Butterfly and the Sun. Literary
Review, Autumn.
STRANGER, JOYCE
LitvINoFF, Ivy Breed of Giants, Saturday Evening
Farewell to the Dacha. New Yorker, Post, June 3.
Sept. 16. STRINDBERG, AUGUST
The Sound Sleeper. Quest, Fall.
MarriTIN, CLAIRE
TOLKIEN, J. R. R.
Three Points in My Life. Tamarack
Smith of Wootton Major. Redbook,
Review, Spring.
Dec.
METCALF, JOHN
Keys and Watercress. Tamarack
WALKER, TED
Review, Autumn.
The Bow. New Yorker, Sept. 2.
MUNTEANU, FRANCISC
The Haircut. New Yorker, Sept. 23.
A Slice of Bread. Literary Review,
WARNER, SYLVIA ‘TOWNSEND
Summer.
A Visionary Gleam. New Yorker,
June 3.
NATKOWSKA, ZOFIA West, ANTHONY
Beside the Railroad Track. Literary Mr. Keogh. New Yorker, July 8.
Review, Spring. Miss Milliard. New Yorker, Nov. 11.
 Addresses of American and Canadian
Magazines Publishing Short Stories

Alphabet, 276 Huron Street, London, Ontario, Canada

Ann Arbor Review, 115 Allen Drive, Ann Arbor, Michigan
Ante, Box 22915, Los Angeles, California 90029
Antioch Review, 212 Xenia Avenue, Yellow Springs, Ohio 45387
Argosy, 205 East 42nd Street, New York, New York 10017
Arizona Quarterly, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona 85721
Atlantic, 8 Arlington Street, Boston, Massachusetts 02116
Ave Maria, Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
Canadian Forum, 30 Front Street West, Toronto 1, Ontario, Canada
Canadian Home Journal, 71 Richmond Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Carleton Miscellany, Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota 55057
Carolina Quarterly, Box 1117, Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Catholic World, 304 West 58th Street, New York, New York 10019
Cavalier, 67 West 44th Street, New York, New York 10036
Chicago Review, Reynolds Club, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois
60637
Colorado Quarterly, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado
Colorado State Review, 360 Liberal Arts, Colorado State University, Fort
Collins, Colorado 80521
Commentary, 165 East 56th Street, New York, New York 10022
Critic, 180 North Wabash Avenue, Chicago, Illinois 60601
December, Box 274, Western Springs, Illinois
Denver Quarterly, University of Denver, Denver, Colorado 80210
Descant, Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, Texas 76129
Edge, Box 4067, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, 505 Park Avenue, New York, New York
10022
Epoch, 252 Goldwin Smith Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York
14850
Esquire, 488 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10022
Evergreen Review, 80 University Place, New York, New York 10003
Evidence, Box 245, Station F., Toronto, Ontario, Canada
 366 The Yearbook of the American Short Story

347 East 53rd Street, New York, New York

Fantasy and Science Fiction,
10022
Forum, Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana
College, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19143
Four Quarters, LaSalle
10022
Gentleman’s Quarterly, 488 Madison Avenue, New York, New York
Georgia Review, Universit y of Georgia, Athens, Georgia 30601
Glamour, 420 Lexington Avenue, New York, New York 10017
Good Housekeeping, 959 Eighth Avenue, New York, New York 10019
Greensboro Review, University of Greensboro, Greensboro, North Carolina
Harper’s Bazaar, 572 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10022
Harper’s Magazine, 2 Park Avenue, New York, New York 10016
Holiday, 641 Lexington Avenue, New York, New York 10022
Hudson Review, 65 East 55th Street, New York, New York 10022
Husk, Cornell College, Mount Vernon, Towa 52314
Inland, Box 685, Salt Lake City, Utah
Kenyon Review, Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio 43022
Ladies’ Home Journal, 641 Lexington Avenue, New York, New York 10022
Laurel Review, West Virginia Wesleyan College, Buckhannon, West Vir-
ginia 26201
Lillabulero, Box 1027, Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27514
Literary Review, Fairleigh Dickinson University, Teaneck, New Jersey
07666
McCall’s, 230 Park Avenue, New York, New York 10017
MacLean’s, 481 University Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Mademoiselle, 420 Lexington Avenue, New York, New York 10017
Mainstream, 832 Broadway, New York, New York 10018
The Malahat Review, University of Victoria, Victoria, British Columbia,
Canada
Manhattan Review, 229 East 12th Street, New York, New York 10003
Massachusetts Review, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Massachusetts
01003
Michigan Quarterly Review, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan
48104
Midstream, 515 Park Avenue, New York, New York 10022
Minnesota Review, Box 4068, University Station, Minneapolis, Minnesota
55414
Motive, Box $71, Nashville, Tennessee 37202
MSS, 670 Fifth Avenue, Chico, California 95926
New American Review, 1301 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York
New Campus Review, Metropolitan State College, Room 608, 250 West
14th Avenue, Denver, Colorado
New Mexico Quarterly, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New
Mexico 87106
New Yorker, 25 West 43rd Street, New York, New York 10036
North American Review, Cornell College, Mount Vernon, Iowa 52314
Northwest Review, Erb Memorial Union, University of Oregon, Eugene,
Oregon 97403
Ohio University Review, Athens, Ohio
Addresses of American and Canadian Magazines 367

Paris Review, 45-39 171 Place, Flushing, New York 11358

Partisan Review, 22 East 17th Street, New York, New York
Per Se, Box 2377, Stanford, California 94305
Perspective, Washington University Post Office, St. Louis, Missouri 63130
Phoenix, Ida Noyes Hall, 1212 East 59th Street, Chicago 37, Illinois
Phylon, Atlanta University, Atlanta, Georgia 30314
Playboy, 232 East Ohio Street, Chicago, Hlinois 60611
Prairie Schooner, Andrews Hall, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Ne-
braska 68508
Prism Internationa], University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British
Columbia, Canada
Quarterly Review of Literature, Box 287, Bard College, Annandale-on-
Hudson, New York 12504
Queens Quarterly, Queens University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada
Redbook, 230 Park Avenue, New York, New York 10017
Red Clay Reader, 2221 Westminster Place, Charlotte, North Carolina
28207
Reflections, Box 109, Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27514
Reporter, 660 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10021
Rogue, 1236 Sherman Avenue, Evanston, Illinois
San Francisco Review, Box 671, San Francisco, California
Satire, State University College, Oneonta, New York 13820
Saturday Evening Post, 641 Lexington Avenue, New York, New York 10022
Seventeen, 320 Park Avenue, New York, New York 10022
Sewanee Review, University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee 37375
Shenandoah, Box 722, Lexington, Virginia 24450
Sound, 15918 60th West, Edmonds, Washington 98020
South Dakota Review, Box 111, University Exchange, University of South
Dakota, Vermillion, South Dakota 57069
Southern Humanities Review, Auburn University, Auburn, Alabama
Southern Review, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana
70803
Southwest Review, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas 75222
Tamarack Review, Box 159, Postal Station K, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Texas Quarterly, Box 7527, University Station, Austin, Texas 78712
Transatlantic Review, Box 3348, Grand Central P.O., New York, New York
10017
University Review, University of Kansas City, Kansas City, Missouri
Vagabond, Collierstrasse 5, 8 Munich 12, Germany
Virginia Quarterly Review, 1 West Range, Charlottesville, Virginia 22903
Voyages, 2034 Allen Place, N.W., Washington, D. C. 20009
Wagner Literary Magazine, Grymes Hills, Staten Island, New York
Weird Tales, 9 Rockefeller Plaza, New York, New York 10020
Western Humanities Review, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah
84112
Wisconsin Review, Wisconsin State University, Oshkosh, Wisconsin
Yale Review, Box 1729, New Haven, Connecticut 06520
Yankee, Dublin, New Hampshire 03444
—-
continued from front flap
covery of a certain personal strength. Read-
ers of this year’s selections will discover
many strongly portrayed, unforgettable char-
acters, involved in various ways with the
problems of living and relating to other
people.
The stories collected in this book first
appeared in a wide variety of magazines,
from publications with a large circulation,
such as The Saturday Evening Post and The
New Yorker, to so-called “little magazines.”

The Editors
Martha Foley has had a long and dis-
tinguished editorial career in all fields of
publishing. She has been a newspaper cor-
respondent, an editor of books and maga-
zines, a lecturer on short stories at Columbia
University, and both co-founder and editor
of Story magazine. Miss Foley has edited
The Best American Short Stories since 1941.
David Burnett is a young American artist
whose painting is known both in this country
and abroad. He has contributed illustrations
to The Paris Review and Mademoiselle and
has designed book jackets. While a student
in Paris, he founded New Story and was
the first editor to publish the work of Jean
Genet (in English), James Baldwin, Terry
Southern and other important writers.

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

2 Park Street
Boston, Massachusetts 02107
 CONTENTS

Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone James Baldwin

sreased Samba John Deck
\n American Student in Paris James T. Farrell
\n Old Man and His Hat George H. Freitag

Nho Is Harry Kellerman and Herb Gardner

Nhy Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me?

n the Heart of the Heart of the Country. William H. Gass

The Rotifer Mary Ladd Gavell
‘he Heart of This or That Man Donald Gropman
‘he Snooker Shark William Harrison
‘he Only People Judith Higgins
‘he Tenant | Helen Hudson
n Shock sel Gea aaa Tea OREM Keo E. Litwak
‘he Sons of Martha Richard McKenna
‘he Preacher and Margery Scott William Moseley
eltic Twiligh ae we Joanna Ostrow
arly Morning, Lonely Ride Nancy Packer .
<2. stay xia)
“afr gee
leat Blodgette.. Rs & 4
de
y
We
John Phillips
he Ambassador Lawrence P. Spingarn

he Games That We Played Winston Weathers

ried Rose Petals in a Silver Bowl Janet Bruce Winn

6-85771