Collected Stories Page 6

  My initiator was a little girl named Hattie, who must have been about nine or ten. I don't remember her last name, but there are some other facts about this Hattie that are unforgettable. For one thing, she told me that George Washington was her uncle. Another time she explained to me what made colored people colored. If a girl, said Hattie, kissed a boy she turned into a colored person, and when she was married her children were colored, too. Only brothers were excepted from this law. Hattie was a small child for her age, with snaggled front teeth, and greasy blond hair held back by a jeweled barrette. I was forbidden to play with her, perhaps because my Grandmother or parents sensed an unwholesome element in the relation; if this supposition is true they were quite right. I had once kissed Tit, who was my best friend but only a second cousin, so that day by day I was slowly turning into a colored person. It was summer, and day by day I was turning darker. Perhaps I had some notion that Hattie, having once revealed this fearful transformation, might somehow have the power to stop it. In the dual bondage of guilt and fear, I followed her around the neighborhood, and often she demanded nickels and dimes.

  The memories of childhood have a strange shuttling quality, and areas of darkness ring the spaces of light. The memories of childhood are like clear candles in an acre of night, illuminating fixed scenes from the surrounding darkness. I don't remember where Hattie lived, but one passageway, one room, have an uncanny clarity. Nor do I know how I happened to go to this room, but anyway I was there with Hattie and my cousin, Tit. It was late afternoon, the room was not quite dark. Hattie was wearing an Indian dress, with a headband of bright red feathers, and she had asked if we knew where babies come from. The Indian feathers in her band looked, for some reason, scary to me.

  "They grow in the insides of ladies," Tit said.

  "If you swear you will never tell a living soul then I will show you something."

  We must have sworn, though I remember a reluctance, and a dread of further revelations. Hattie climbed up on a chair and brought down something from a closet shelf. It was a bottle, with something queer and red inside.

  "Do you know what this is?" she asked.

  The thing inside the bottle resembled nothing I had ever seen before. It was Tit who asked: "What is it?"

  Hattie waited and her face beneath the band of feathers wore a crafty expression. After some moments of suspense, she said:

  "It's a dead pickled baby."

  The room was very quiet. Tit and I exchanged a sidelong look of horror. I could not look again at the bottle, but Tit was gazing at it with fascinated dread.

  "Whose?" he asked finally in a low voice.

  "See the little old red head with the mouth. And the little teensy red legs squelched up under it. My brother brought it home when he was learning to be a drug store man."

  Tit reached out a finger and touched the bottle, then put his hands behind his back. He asked again, this time in a whisper: "Whose? Whose baby?"

  "It is an orphan," Hattie said.

  I remember the light whispering sound of our footsteps as we tiptoed from the room, and that the passageway was dark and at the end there was a curtain. That, thank goodness, is my final recollection of this Hattie. But the pickled orphan haunted me for some time; I dreamed once that the Thing had got out of the jar and was scuttling around the Orphans' Home and I was locked in there and It was scuttling after me—Did I believe that in that gloomy, gabled house there were shelves with rows of these eerie bottles? Probably yes—and no. For the child knows two layers of reality—that of the world, which is accepted like an immense collusion of all adults—and the unacknowledged, hidden secret, the profound. In any case, I kept close to my Grandmother when in the late afternoon we passed by the Home on our way from town. At that time I knew none of the orphans, as they went to the Third Street School.

  It was a few years later that two occurrences came about that brought me in a direct relation with the Home. Meanwhile, I looked on myself as a big girl, and had passed the place a thousand times, walking alone, or on skates, or bicycle. The terror had diminished to a sort of special fascination. I always stared at the Home in passing, and sometimes I would see the orphans, walking with Sunday slowness on their way to Sunday school and church, grouped in marching formation with the two biggest orphans leading and the two smallest orphans at the end. I was about eleven when changes occurred that drew me in closer as a spectator, and opened an unexpected area of romance. First, my Grandmother was made a member of the Board of the Orphans' Home. That was in the autumn. Then at the beginning of the spring term the orphans were transferred to the Seventeenth Street School, where I was going, and three of the orphans were in the room with mc in the sixth grade. The transfer was made because of a change in the boundary line of the school districts. My Grandmother was elected to the Board because she enjoyed Boards, Committees, and the meetings of associations, and a former member of the Board had died at about that time.

  My Grandmother visited the Home about once a month, and on her second visit I went with her. It was the best time of the week, a Friday afternoon, spacious with the sense of coming holiday. The afternoon was cold, and the late sunlight made fiery reflections on the windowpanes. Inside, the Home was quite different from the way I had imagined it. The wide hall was bare, and the rooms were uncurtained, rugless, and scantily furnished. Heat came from stoves in the dining room and in the general room that was next to the front parlor. Mrs. Wesley, the matron of the Home, was a large woman, rather hard of hearing, and she kept her mouth slightly ajar when anyone of importance spoke. She always seemed to be short of breath, and she spoke through her nose in a placid voice. My Grandmother had brought some clothes (Mrs. Wesley called them garments) donated by the various churches and they shut themselves in the cold parlor to talk. I was entrusted to a girl of my own age, named Susie, and we went out immediately to the board fenced back yard.

  That first visit was awkward. Girls of all ages were playing different games. There was in the yard a joggling board, and an acting bar, and a hopscotch game was marked on the ground. Confusion made me see the yard full of children as an unassorted whole. One little girl came up to me and asked me what was my father. And, as I was slow in answering she said: "My father was a walker on the railroad." Then she ran to the acting bar and swung by her knees—her hair hung straight down from her red face and she wore brown cotton bloomers.

  Instant of the Hour After

  Light as shadows her hands fondled his head and then came placidly to rest; the tips of her fingers hovered on his temples, throbbed to the warm slow beat inside his body, and her palms cupped his hard skull.

  "Reverberating va-cuity," he mumbled so that the syllables lolloped ponderously into each other.

  She looked down at his lax, sound body that stretched the length of the couch. One foot—the sock wrinkled around the ankle—hung limp over the edge. And as she watched his sensitive hand left his side and crept up drunkenly to his mouth—to touch his lips that had remained pursed out and loose after his words. "Immense hollowness—" he mouthed behind his feeling fingers.

  "Enough out of you tonight—my darling," she said. "The show's over and the monkey's dead."

  They had turned off the heat an hour before and the apartment was beginning to chill. She looked at the clock, the hands of which pointed to one. Not much heat anyway at that hour, she thought. No draughts, though; opalescent ribbons of smoke lay motionless close to the ceiling. Speculatively her glance shifted to the whiskey bottle and the confused chessmen on the card table. To a book that lay face downward on the floor—and a lettuce leaf lying forlornly in the corner since Marshall had lost it while waving his sandwich. To the dead little butts of cigarettes and the charred matches scattered.

  "Here cover up," she said absently, unfolding a blanket at the foot of the couch. "You're so susceptible to draughts."

  His eyes opened and stared stolidly up at her—blue-green, the color of the sweater he wore. One of them was shot through at the corne
r with fragile fibers of pink, giving him somehow the guileless expression of an Easter bunny. So much younger than twenty, he always looked—With his head thrown back on her knees so that his neck was arched above his rolled collar and tender seeming with the soft outline of the cords and cartilages. With his dark hair springing from the pallor of his face.

  "Vacant majesty—"

  As he spoke his eyelids drooped until the eyes beneath had been narrowed to a slit that seemed to sneer at her. And she knew with a sudden start that he was not as drunk as he pretended to be.

  "You needn't hold forth any longer," she said. "Phillip's gone home and there's just me."

  "It's in the na-a-ature of things—that such a viewpoint—view—"

  "He's gone home," she repeated. "You talked him out." She had a fleet picture of Phillip bending to pick up the cigarette butts—his agile, blond little body and his calm eyes—"He washed up the dishes we messed and even wanted to sweep the floor, but I made him leave it."

  "He's a—" started Marshall.

  "Seeing you —and how tired I was—he even offered to pull out the couch and get you to bed."

  "A cute procedure—" he mouthed.

  "I made him run along." She remembered for a moment his face as she shut the door between them, the sound of his footsteps going down stairs, and the feeling—half of pity for loneliness, half of warmth—that she always felt when she listened to the sounds of others going out into the night away from them.

  "To listen to him—one would think his reading were rigidly narrowed to—to G. K. Chesterton and George Moore," he said, giving a drunken lilt to the words. "Who won at chess—me or him?"

  "You," she said. "But you did your best work before you got so drunk."

  "Drunk—" he murmured, moving his long body laxly, changing the position of his head. "God! your knees are bony. Bo-ony!"

  "But I thought sure you'd give him the game when you made that idiotic move with your queen's pawn." She thought of their fingers hovering over the carved precision of their pieces, brows frowned, the glow of the light on the bottle beside them.

  His eyes were closed again and his hand had crumpled down on his chest. "Lousy simile—" he mumbled. "Granted about the mountain. Joyce climbed laboriously—O-O-OK—but when he reached the top—top reached—"

  "You can't stand this drinking, darling—" Her hands moved over the soft angle of his chin and rested there.

  "He wouldn't say the world was fla-at. All along that's what they said. Besides the villagers could walk around—around with their jackasses and see that for themselves. With their asses."

  "Hush," she said. "You've talked about that long enough. You get on one subject and go on and on ad infinitum. And don't land anywhere."

  "A crater—" he breathed huskily. "And at least after the immensity of his climb he could have expected—some lovely leaps of Hell fire—some—"

  Her hand clenched on his chin and shook it. "Shut up," she said. "1 heard you when you improvised on that so brilliantly before Phillip left. You were obscene. And I'd almost forgotten."

  A smile crept out across his face and his blue fringed eyes looked up at her. "Obscene—? Why should you put yourself in place of those symbols—sym—"

  "If it were with anyone but Phillip that you talk like that I'd—I'd leave you."

  "Immense va-cuity," he said, closing his eyes again. "Dead hollowness. Hollowness, I say. With maybe in the ashes at the bottom a—"

  "Shut up."

  "A squirming, fatbellied cretin."

  It came to her that she must have drunk more than she realized, for the objects in the room seemed to take on a strange look of suffering. The butts of the cigarettes looked overmouthed and limp. The rug, almost brand new, seemed trampled and choked in design by the ashes. Even the last of the whiskey lay pale and quiet in the bottle. "Does it relieve you any?" she asked with slow calm. "I hope that times like this—"

  She felt his body stiffen and, like an aggravating child, he interrupted her words with a sudden burst of unmelodic humming.

  She eased her thighs from beneath his head and stood up. The room seemed to have grown smaller, messier, ranker with smoke and spilled whiskey. Bright lines of white weaved before her eyes. "Get up," she said dully. "I've got to pull out this darn couch and make it up."

  He folded his hands on his stomach and lay solid, unstirring.

  "You are detestable," she said, opening the door of the closet and taking down the sheets and blankets that lay folded on the shelves.

  When she stood above him once more, waiting for him to rise, she felt a moment of pain for the drained pallor of his face. For the shades of darkness that had crept down halfway to his cheekbones, for the pulse that always fluttered in his neck when he was drunk or fatigued.

  "Oh Marshall, it's bestial for us to get all shot like this. Even if you don't have to work tomorrow—there are years—fifty of them maybe—ahead." But the words had a false ring and she could only think of tomorrow.

  He struggled to sit up on the edge of the couch and when he had reached that position his head dropped down to rest in his hands. "Yes, Pollyanna," he mumbled. "Yes, my dear croaking Pol—Pol. Twenty is a lovely lovely age Blessed God."

  His fingers that weaved through his hair and closed into weak fists filled her with a sudden, sharp love. Roughly she snatched at the corners of the blanket and drew them around his shoulders. "Up now. We can't fool around like this all night."

  "Hollowness—" he said wearily, without closing his sagging jaw.

  "Has it made you sick?"

  Holding the blanket close he pulled himself to his feet and lumbered toward the card table. "Can't a person even think, without being called obscene or sick or drunk. No. No understanding of thought. Of deep deep thought in blackness. Of rich morasses. Morrasses. With their asses."

  The sheet billowed down through the air and the round swirls collapsed into wrinkles. Quickly she tucked in the corners and smoothed the blankets on top. When she turned around she saw that he sat hunched over the chessmen—ponderously trying to balance a pawn on a turreted castle. The red checked blanket hung from his shoulders and trailed behind the chair.

  She thought of something clever. "You look," she said, "like a brooding king in a bad-house." She sat on the couch that had become a bed and laughed.

  With an angry gesture he embrangled his hands in the chessmen so that several pieces clattered to the floor. "That's right," he said. "Laugh your silly head off. That's the way it's always been done."

  The laughs shook her body as though every fiber of her muscles had lost its resistance. When she had finished the room was very still.

  After a moment he pushed the blanket away from him so that it crumpled in a heap behind the chair. "He's blind," he said softly. "Almost blind."

  "Watch out, there's probably a draught—Who's blind?"

  "Joyce," he said.

  She felt weak after her laughter and the room stood out before her with painful smallness and clarity. "That's the trouble with you, Marshall," she said. "When you get like this you go on and on so that you wear a person out."

  He looked at her sullenly. "I must say you're pretty when you're drunk," he said.

  "1 don't get drunk—couldn't if I wanted to," she said, feeling a pain beginning to bear down behind her eyes.

  "How 'bout that night when we—"

  "I've told you," she said stiffly between her teeth, "I wasn't drunk. I was ill. And you would make me go out and—"

  "It's all the same," he interrupted. "You were a thing of beauty hanging on to that table. It's all the same. A sick woman—a drunk woman—ugh."

  Nervelessly she watched his eyelids droop down until they had hidden all the goodness in his eyes.

  "And a pregnant woman," he said. "Yeah. It'll be some sweet hour like this when you come to simper your sweet sneakret into my ear. Another cute little Marshall. Ain't we fine—look what we can do. Oh, God, what dreariness."

  "I loathe you," she
said, watching her hands (that were surely not a part of her?) begin to tremble. "This drunk brawling in the middle of the night—"

  As he smiled his mouth seemed to her to take on the same pink, slittcd look that his eyes had. "You love it," he whispered soberly. "What would you do if once a week I didn't get soused. So that—glutinously—you can paw over me. And Marshall darling this and Marshall that. So you can run your greedy little fingers all over my face—Oh yes. You love me best when I suffer. You—you—"

  As he lurched across the room she thought she saw that his shoulders were shaking.

  "Here Mama," he taunted. "Why don't you offer to come help me point." As he slammed the door to the bathroom some vacant coat-hangers that had been hung on the doorknob clashed at each otner with tinny sibilance.

  "I'm leaving you—" she called hollowly when the noise from the coathangers had died down. But the words had no meaning to her. Limp, she sat on the bed and looked at the wilted lettuce leaf across the room. The lampshade had been knocked atilt so that it clung dangerously to the bulb—so that it made a hurtful passage of brightness across the grey disordered room.