The Complete Stories Part 32

"He was not a materialist," Calhoun said. "There were things that meant more to him than plumbing. Independence, for instance."

"Ha," the barber snorted. "He wasn't so independent. Once lightning almost struck him and those that saw it said you should have seen him run. Took off like bees were swarming in his pants.They liked to died laughing," and he gave a hyena-like laugh himself and slapped his knee.

"Loathsome," the boy murmured.

"Another time," the barber continued, "somebody went out there and put a dead cat in his well. Somebody was always doing something to see if they could make him turn loose a little money.Another time..."

Calhoun began fighting his way out of the bib as if it were a net he was caught in. When he was free of it, h thrust his hand in his pocket and brought out a dollar which he flung on the startled barber's shelf. Then he made for the door, letting it slam behind him in judgment on the place.

The walk back to his aunts' did not calm him. The colors of the azaleas had deepened with the approach of sundown and the trees rustled protectively over the old houses. No one here had a thought for Singleton, who lay on a cot in a filthy ward at Quincy. The boy felt now in a concrete way the force of his innocence, and he thought that to do justice to all the man had suffered, he would have to write more than a simple article. He would have to write a novel; he would have to show, not say, how primary injustice operated. Preoccupied with this, he went four doors past his aunts' house and had to turn and go back.

His Aunt Bessie met him at the door and drew him into the hall. "Told you we'd have a sweet surprise [or you!" she said, pulling him by the arm into the parlor.

On the sofa sat a rangy-looking girl in a lime-green dress. "You remember Mary Elizabeth," his Aunt Mattie said, "-the cute little trick you took to the picture show once when you were here."Through his rage he recognized the girl who had been reading under the tree. "Mary Elizabeth is home for the spring holidays," his Aunt Mattie said. "Mary Elizabeth is a real scholar, aren't you, Mary Elizabeth?"

Mary Elizabeth scowled, indicating she was, indifferent to whether she was a real scholar or not. She gave him a Iook which told him plainly she expected to enjoy this no more than he did.

His Aunt Mattie gripped the k.n.o.b of her cane and began to lift herself from her chair. "We're going to have supper early," the other one said, "because Mary Elizabeth is going to take you to the beauty contest and it begins at seven."

"Great," the boy said in a tone that would be lost on them but he hoped not on Mary Elizabeth.

Throughout the meal he ignored the girl completely. His repartee with his aunts was markedly cynical but they did not have sense enough to understand his allusions and laughee like idiots at everything he said. Twice they called him "Babyboy" and the girl smirked. Otherwise she did nothing to suggest she was enjoying herself. Her round face was still childish behind her gla.s.ses. r.e.t.a.r.ded, Calhoun thought.

When the meal was over and they were on the way to the beauty contest, they continued to say nothing to each other. The girl, who was several inches taller than he, walked slight]y n advance of him as if she would like to lose him on the way, but after two blocks she stopped abruptly and began to rummage in a huge gra.s.s bag she carried. She took out a pencil and held it between her teeth while she continued to rummage. After a minute she brought up from the bottom of the bag two tickets and a stenographer's note pad.With these out, she closed the pocketbook and walked on.

"Are you going to take notes;" Calhoun inquired in a tone heavy with irony.

The girl looked around as if trying to identify the speaker. "Yes," she said, "I'm going to take notes."

"You appreciate this sort of thing?" Calhoun asked in the same tone. "You enjoy it?"

"It makes me vomit," she said, "I'm going to finish it off with one swift literary kick."

The boy looked at her blankly.

"Don't let me interfere with your pleasure in it," she said, "but this whole place is false and rotten to the core." Her voice came with a hiss of indignation. "They prost.i.tute azaleas!"

Calhoun was astounded. After a moment he recovered himself."It takes no great mind to come to that conclusion," he said haughtily. "What requires insight is finding a way to transcend it."

"You mean a form to express it in."

"It comes to the same thing," he said.

They walked the next two blocks in silence but both appeared shaken. When the courthouse was in view they crossed the street to it and Mary Elizabeth stuck the tickets at a boy who stood beside an entrance that had been formed by roping in the rest of the square. People were beginning to a.s.semble on the gra.s.s inside.

"And do we stand here while you take notes?" Calhoun asked.

The girl stopped and faced him. "Look, Baby Lamb," she said, "you can do what you please. I'm going up to my father's office in the building where I can work. You can stay down here and help select Miss Partridge Azalea if you want to."

"I shall come," he said, controlling himself, "I'd like to observe a great female writer taking notes."

"Suit yourself," she said.

He followed her up the courthouse steps and through a side door.His irritation was so extreme that he did not realize he had pa.s.sed through the very door where Singleton had stood to shoot. They walked through an empty barnlike hall and silently up a flight of tobacco-stained steps into another barn like hall. Mary Elizabeth rooted in the gra.s.s bag for a key and then unlocked the door to her father's office. They entered a large threadbare room lined with lawbooks. As if he were an incompetent, the girl dragged two straight chairs from one wall to a window that overlooked the porch.Then she sat down and stared out, apparently absorbed at once in the scene below.

Calhoun sat down in the other chair. To annoy her he began to look her over thoroughly. For what seemed at least five minutes, he did not take his eyes off her as she leaned with her elbows in the window. He stared at her so long that he was afraid her image would be etched forever on his retina. Finally he could stand the silence no longer. "What is your opinion of Singleton?" he asked abruptly.

She raised her head and appeared to look through him. "A Christ-figure," she said.

The boy was stunned.

"I mean as myth," she said scowling. "I'm not a Christian." She returned her attention to the scene outside. Below a bugle sounded."Sixteen girls in bathing suits are about to appear," she drawled."Surely this will be of interest to you?"

"Listen," Calhoun said fiercely, "get this through your head. I'm not interested in the d.a.m.n festival or the d.a.m.n azalea queen. I'm here only because of my sympathy for Singleton. I'm going to write about him. Possibly a novel."

"I intend to write a non-fiction study," the girl said in a tone that made it evident fiction was beneath her.

They looked at each other with open and intense dislike. Calhoun felt that if he probed sufficiently he would expose her essential shallowness. "Since our forms are different," he said, again with his ironical smile, "we might compare findings."

"It's quite simple," the girl said. "He was the scapegoat. While Partridge flings itself about selecting Miss Partridge Azalea, Singleton suffers at Quincy. He expiates..."

"I don't mean your abstract findings," the boy said. "I mean your concrete findings. Have you ever seen him? What did he look like?The novelist is not interested in narrow abstractions-particularly when they're obvious. He's..."

"How many novels have you written?" she asked.

"This will be my first," he said coldly. "Have you ever seen him?"

"No," she said, "that isn't necessary for me. What he looks like makes no difference-whether he has brown eyes or blue-that's nothing to a thinker."

"You are probably," he said, "afraid to look at him. The novelist is never afraid to look at the real object."

"I would not be afraid to look at him," the girl said angrily, "if it were at all necessary. Whether he has brown eyes or blue is nothing to me."

"There is more to it," Calhoun said, "than whether he has brown eyes or blue. You might find your theories enriched by the sight of him. And I don't mean by finding out the color of his eyes. I mean your existential encounter with his personality. The mystery of personality," he said, "is what interests the artist. Life does not abide in abstractions."

"Then what's keeping you from going and having a look at him?" she said. "What are you asking me what he looks like for?Go see for yourself."

The words fell on his head like a sack of rucks. After a moment he said, "Go see for yourself? Go see where?"

"At Quincy," the girl said. "Where do you think?"

"They wouldn't let me see him," he said. The suggestion was appalling to him; for some reason he could not at the moment understand, it struck him as unthinkable.

"They would if you said you were kin to him," she said. "It's only twenty miles from here. What's to stop you?"

He was about to say, "I'm not kin to him." but he stopped and reddened furiously on the edge of the betrayal. They were spiritual kin.

"Go see whether his eyes are brown or blue and have yourself a little old exis..."

"I take it," he said, "that if I go you would like to go along?Since you aren't afraid to see him."

The girl paled. "You won't go," she said. "'You're not up to the old exis..."

"I will go," he said, seeing his opportunity to shut her up. "And if you care to go with me, you can be at my aunts' at nine in the morning.But I doubt," he added, "that I'll see you there."

She thrust forward her long neck and glared at him. "Oh yes you will," she said. "You'll see me there."

She returned her attention to the window and Calhoun looked at nothing. Each seemed sunk suddenly in some mammoth private problem. Raucus cheers came intermittently from outside. Every few minutes there was music and clapping but neither took any notice of it, or of each other. Finally the girl pulled away from the window and said, "If you've got the general idea, we can leave.I prefer to go home and read."

"I had the general idea before I came," Calhoun said.

He saw her to her door and when he had left her, his spirits lifted dizzily for an instant and then collapsed. He knew that the idea of going to see Singleton would never have occurred to him alone. It would be a torturing experience, but it might be his salvation. The sight of Singleton in his misery might cause him suffering sufficient to raise him once and for all from his commercial instincts. Selling was the only thing he had proved himself good at; yet it was impossible for him to believe that every man was not created equally an artist if he could but suffer and achieve it.

As for the girl, he doubted if the sight of Singleton would do anything for her. She had that particular repulsive fanaticism peculiar to smart children-all brain and no emotion.

He spent a restless night, dreaming in s.n.a.t.c.hes of Singleton. At one point he dreamed he was driving to Quincy to sell Singleton a refrigerator. When he awoke in the morning, a slow rain was descending indifferently. He turned his head to the gray window pane. He could not remember what he had dreamed but he sensed it had been unpleasant. A vision of the girl's flat face came to him.He thought of Quincy and saw rows and rows of low red buildings with rough heads sticking out of barred windows. He tried to concentrate on Singleton but his mind shied from the thought. He did not wish to go to Quincy. He remembered that it was a novel he was going to write. His desire to write a novel had gone down overnight like a defective tire.

While he lay in bed, the drizzle turned into a steady downpour.The rain might keep the girl from coming, or at least she might think she could use it as an excuse. He decided to wait until exactly nine o'clock and if she had not shown up by then to be off. He would not go to Quincy but would go home. It would be better to see Singleton at a later date when he would perhaps have responded to treatment. He got up and wrote the girl a note to be left with his aunts, saying he presumed she had decided, upon consideration, that she was not equal to the experience. It was a very concise note and he ended it, "Cordially yours."

She arrived at five minutes to nine and stood dripping in his aunts' hall, a tubular bundle of baby-blue plastic from which nothing showed but her face. She was holding a damp paper sack and her large mouth was twisted in an uncertain smile. Overnight she had apparently lost some of her self-a.s.surance.

Calhoun was barely able to be polite. His aunts, who thought this was a romantic outing in the rain, kissed him out the door and stood on the porch idiotically waving their handkerchiefs until he and Mary Elizabeth were in the car and gone.

The girl was much too big for the small car. She kept shifting about and twisting inside her raincoat. "The rain has beat the azaleas down," she observed in a neutral tone.

Calhoun rudely kept silent. He was trying to obliterate her from his consciousness so that he could reestablish Singleton there. He had lost Singleton completely. The rain was coming down in gray swaths. When they reached the highway, they could barely see across the fields to a faint line of woods. The girl kept leaning forward, squinting into the opaque windshield. "If a truck were to come out of that," she said with a gawkish laugh, "that would be the end of us."

Calhoun stopped the car. "I'll be glad to take you back and go on by myself," he said.

"I have to go," she said hoa.r.s.ely, staring at him. "I have to see him." Behind her spectacles, her eyes appeared larger than they should have been and suspiciously liquid. "I have to face this," she said.

Roughly, he started the car again.

"You have to prove to yourself that you can stand there and watch a man be crucified," she said. "You have to go through it with him. I thought about it all night."

"It may give you," Calhoun muttered, "a more balanced view of life."

"This is personal," she said. "You wouldn't understand," and she turned her head to the window.

Calhoun tried to concentrate on Singleton. Feature by feature, he brought the face together in his mind and each time he had it almost constructed, it fell apart and he was left with nothing. He drove in silence, at a reckless speed as if he would like to hit a hole in the road and see the girl go through the windshield. Every now and then she blew her nose weakly. After fifteen mlies or so the rain slackened and stopped. The treeline on either side of them became black and clear and the fields intensely green. They would have an unmistakable view of the hospital grounds as soon as these should come in sight.

"Christ only had to take it three hours," the girl said all at once in a high voice, "but he'll be in this place the rest of his life!"

Calhoun cut his eyes toward her. There was a fresh wet line down the side of her face. He turned his eyes away, awed and furious."If you can't stand this," he said, "I can still take you home and come back by myself."

"You wouldn't come back by yourself," she said, "and we're almost there." She blew her nose. "I want him to know that somebody takes his side. I want to say that to him no matter what it does to me."

Through his rage, the terrible thought occurred to the boy that he would have to say something to Singleton. What could he say to him in the presence of this woman? She had shattered the communion between them. "We've come to listen I hope you understand," he burst out, "I haven't driven all this way to hear you startle Singleton with your wisdom. I've come to listen to him him."

"We should have brought a tape recorder!" she cried, "then we'd have what he says all our lives!"

"You don't have elementary understanding," Calhoun said, "if you think you approach a man like this with a tape recorder."

"Stop!" she shrieked, leaning toward the windshield, "that's it!"

Calhoun slammed on his brakes and looked forward wildly.

A cl.u.s.ter of low buildings, hardly noticeable, rose like a rich growth of warts on the hill to their right.

The boy sat helpless while the car, as if of its own volition, turned and headed toward the entrance. The letters QUINCY STATE HOSPITAL were cut in a concrete arch which it rolled effortlessly through.

"Abandon hope all ye who enter here," the girl murmured.

They had to stop within a hundred yards of the gate while a fat white-capped nurse led a line of patients, straggling like elderly schoolchildren, across the road in front of them, Ac snaggle-toothed woman in a candy-striped dress and black wool hat shook her fist at them, and a baldheaded man waved energetically. A few threw malevolent looks as the line shuffled off across the green to another building.

After a moment the car rolled forward again, "Park in front of that center building," Mary Elizabeth directed, "They won't let us see him," he mumbled.

"Not if you have anything to do with it," she said. "Park and let me out. I'll handle this." Her cheek had dried and her voice was businesslike. He parked and she got out. He watched her disappear into the building, thinking with grim satisfaction hat she would soon turn into a full-grown ogre-false intellect, false emotions, maximum efficiency, all operating to produce the dominant hair-splitting Ph. D. Another line of patients pa.s.sed in the road and several of them pointed at the small car. Calhoun did not look but he sensed he was being watched. "Hup up there," he heard the nurse say.He looked again and gave a little cry A gentle face, wrapped around with a green hand towel, was in his, window, smiling toothlessly but with an agonizing tenderness.

"Get a move on, sweetie," the nurse said and the face retreated.

The boy rolled his window up rapidly but his heart was wrenched.He saw again the agonized face in the stocks-the slightly mismatched eyes, the wide mouth parted in a stifled useless cry. The vision lasted only a moment but when it pa.s.sed, he was certain that the sight of Singleton was going to effect a change in him, that after this visit, some strange tranquility he had not before conceived of would be his. He sat for ten minute with his eyes closed, knowing that a revelation was near and trying to prepare himself for it.

All at once the car door opened and the girl folded herself, panting, in beside him. Her face was pale. She held up two green permission slips and pointed to the names written on them: Calhoun Singleton on one, Mary Elizabeth Singleton on the other. For a moment they stared at the slips, then at each other. Both appeared to recognize that in their common kinship with him, a kinship with each other was unavoidable. Generously, Calhoun held out his hand.She shook it. "He's in the fifth building to the left," she said.

They drove to the fifth building and parked. It was a low red brick structure with barred windows, like all the others except that the outside of it was streaked with black stains. In one window two hands hung out, palms downward. Mary Elizabeth opened the paper sack she had brought and began to take out presents for Singleton.She had brought a box of candy, a carton of cigarettes and three Bookss-a Modern Library Thus Spake Zarathustra, a paperback Revolt of the Ma.s.ses, and a thin decorated volume of Housman. She handed the cigarettes and the candy to Calhoun and got out of the car with the books herself. She started forward, but halfway to the door she stopped and put her hand to her mouth. "I can't take it," she murmured.

"Now now," Calhoun said kindly. He put his hand on her back and gave her a slight push and she began to move forward again.

They entered a stained linoleum-covered hall where a peculiar odor met them at once like an invisible official. There was a desk facing the door, behind which sat a frail hara.s.sed-looking nurse whose eyes darted to right and left as if she expected ultimately to be hit from behind. Mary Elizabeth handed her the two green permits.The woman looked at them and groaned. "Go in yonder and wait," she said in a weary insult-bearing voice, 'He'll have to be got ready. They shouldn't have give you these over there. What do they know about what goes on over here and what do them doctors care anyhow? If it was up to me, the ones that don't cooperate wouldn't see n.o.body."

"We're his kin," Calhoun said. "We have every right to see him."

The nurse threw her head back in a soundless laugh and went off muttering.

Calhoun put his hand on the girl's back again and guided her into the waitng room where they sat down close together on a mammoth black leather sofa which faced an identical piece of furniture five feet away. There was nothing else in the room but a rickety table in lone corner with an empty white vase on it. A barred window cast squares of damp light on the floor at their feet. There seemed an intense stillness about them although the place was anything but quiet. From one end of the building came a continuous mourning sound as delicate as the fluttering wail of owls; at the other end they heard rocketing peals of laughter. Closer at hand, a steady monotonous cursing broke the silence around it with a machine-like regularity. Each noise seemed to exist isolated from every other.

The two sat together as if they were waiting for some momentous event in their lives-a marriage or instantaneous deaths. They seemed already joined in a predestined convergence. At the same instant each made an involuntary motion as if to run but it was too late. Heavy footsteps were almost at the door and the machine-like curses were bearing down.

Two burly attendants entered with Singleton spider-like between them. He was holding his feet high up off the floor so that the attendants had to carry him. It was from him the curses were coming.He had on a hospital gown of the type that opens and ties up the back and his feet were stuck in black shoes from which the laces had been removed. On his head was a black hat, not the kind countrymen wear, but a black derby hat such as might be worn by a gunman in the movies. The two attendants came up to the empty sofa from behind and swung him over the back of it, then still holding him, each pa.s.sed around the sofa arms and sat down beside him, grinning. They might have been twins for though one was blond and the other bald, they had identical looks of goodnatured stupidity.

As for Singleton, he fixed Calhoun with his green slightly mismatched eyes. "Whadaya want with me?" he shrilled. "Speak up!My time is valuable." They were almost exactly the eyes that Calhoun had seen in the paper, except that the penetrating gleam in them had a slight reptilian quality.

The boy sat mesmerized.