While Mortals Sleep Part 8

"Oh sure!" said the driver happily. "Shipping Department. That's the one you want."

All on board sighed with relief, and looked with affectionate pride at the pretty little Southern girl they were taking such good care of.

Amy was now the last pa.s.senger on the bus. The bus was crossing the wasteland between the heart of the works and the railroad yard, a tundra of slag heaps and rusting sc.r.a.p. Out in the wasteland, away from the street, was a constellation of dancing flashlight beams.

"The cops and the dogs," said the driver to Amy.

"Oh?" said Amy absently.

"Started from the office where he broke in last night," said the driver. "The way the dogs are talking it up, they must be pretty close to him."

Amy nodded. My wife-to-be was talking to Miss Hostetter in her imagination. "If you've told the police," she was saying, "you've killed him, just as sure as if you'd aimed a gun at him and pulled the trigger. Don't you understand? Don't you care? Haven't you got an ounce of womanhood in you?"

Two minutes later, the driver let Amy off at the Shipping Department.

When the bus was gone, Amy walked out into the night, and stood on the edge of the railroad yard, a sea of cinders sprinkled with twinkling red, green, and yellow signal lights, and streaked with glinting rails.

As Amy's eyes grew used to the night, her heart beat harder, and from the many hulking forms she chose one, a small, squat building that was almost certainly building 227-where a dying man had said he'd be waiting for a girl with a heart.

The world dropped away, and the night seemed to s.n.a.t.c.h Amy up and spin her like a top, and she was running across the cinders to the building. The building loomed, and my wife-to-be stopped against its weathered clapboards, panting, and trying to listen above the roaring of blood at her temples.

Someone moved inside, and sighed.

Amy worked her way along the outside wall to the door. The padlock and hasp had been pried from the old wood.

Amy knocked on the door. "h.e.l.lo," she whispered, "I brought you something to eat."

Amy heard an intake of breath, nothing more.

She pushed open the door.

In the wedge of frail gray light let in by the door stood Miss Hostetter.

Each woman seemed to look through the other, to wish her out of existence. Their expressions were blank.

"Where is he?" said Amy at last.

"Dead," said Miss Hostetter, "dead-behind the barrels."

Amy began an aimless, shuffling walk about the room, and stopped when she was as far from Miss Hostetter as she could get, her back to the older woman. "Dead?" she murmured.

"As a mackerel," said Miss Hostetter.

"Don't talk about him that way!" said my wife-to-be.

"That's how dead he is," said Miss Hostetter.

Amy turned to face Miss Hostetter angrily. "You had no business taking my record."

"It was anybody's record," said Miss Hostetter. "Besides, I didn't think you had the nerve to do anything about it."

"Well, I did, did," said Amy, "and I thought the least I could expect was to be alone. I thought you'd gone to the police."

"Well, I didn't, didn't," said Miss Hostetter. "You should have expected me to be here-you of all people."

"Nothing ever surprised me more," said Amy.

"You sent me here, dear," said Miss Hostetter. Her face looked for a moment as though it would soften. But her muscles tightened, and the austere lines of her face held firm. "You've said a lot of things about my life, Amy, and I heard them all. They all hurt, and here I am." She looked down at her hands, and worked her fast and accurate fingers slowly. "Am I still a ghost? Does this crazy trip out here to see a dead man make me not a ghost anymore?"

Tears filled the eyes of my wife-to-be. "Oh, Miss Hostetter," she said, "I'm so sorry if I hurt you. You're not a ghost, really you're not. You never were." She was overwhelmed with pity for the stark, lonesome woman. "You're full of love and mercy, Miss Hostetter, or you wouldn't be here."

Miss Hostetter gave no sign that the words moved her. "And what brought you you here, Amy?" here, Amy?"

"I loved him," said Amy. The pride of a woman in love straightened her back and colored her cheeks and made her feel beautiful and important again. "I loved him."

Miss Hostetter shook her homely head sadly. "If you loved him," she said, "take a look at him. He has a lovable knife in his lovable lap, and a lovable grin that will turn your hair white."

Amy's hand went up to her throat. "Oh."

"At least we're friends now, aren't we, Amy?" said Miss Hostetter. "That's something, isn't it?"

"Oh, yes, yes," said Amy limply. She managed a wan smile. "That's a great deal."

"We'd better leave," said Miss Hostetter. "Here come the men and the dogs."

The two left building 227 as the men and the dogs zigzagged across the wasteland a quarter of a mile away.

The two caught a company bus in front of the Shipping Department, and said nothing to each other during the long, dead trip back to the main gate.

At the main gate, it was time for them to part, each to her own bus stop. With effort, they managed to speak.

"Goodbye," said Amy.

"See you in the morning," said Miss Hostetter.

"It's so hard for a girl to know what to do," said my wife-to-be, swept by longing and a feeling of weakness.

"I don't think it's supposed to be easy," said Miss Hostetter. "I don't think it ever was easy."

Amy nodded soberly.

"And Amy," said Miss Hostetter, laying her hand on Amy's arm, "don't be mad at the company. They can't help it if they want their letters nicely typed."

"I'll try not," said Amy.

"Somewhere," said Miss Hostetter, "a nice young man is looking for a nice young woman like you, and tomorrow's another day.

"What we both need now," said Miss Hostetter, fading, ghost-like, into the smoke and cold of Pittsburgh, "is a good, hot bath."

When Amy scuffed through the fog to her bus stop, ghost-like, she found me standing there, ghost-like.

With dignity, we each pretended that the other was not there.

When suddenly, my wife-to-be was overwhelmed with the terror that she'd held off so long, she burst into tears and leaned against me, and I patted her back.

"My gosh," I said, "another human being."

"You'll never know how human," she said.

"Maybe I will," I said. "I could try."

I did try, and I do try, and I give you the toast of a happy man: May the warm springs of the girl pool never run dry.

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(ill.u.s.tration credit 7)

RUTH.

The two women nodded formally across the apartment's threshold. They were lonely women, widows; one middle-aged and the other young. Their meeting now-ostensibly to defeat their loneliness-only emphasized how solitary each was.

Ruth, the young woman, had travelled a thousand miles for this meeting with a stranger; had endured the clatter and soot and itch of a railroad coach from springtime in an Army town in Georgia to a factory town in a still-frozen New York valley. Now she wondered why it had seemed so right, so imperative that she come. This heavy, elderly woman, who blocked the door and smiled only with difficulty, had seemed in her letters to want this, too.

"So you're the woman who married my Ted," said the older woman coolly.

Ruth tried to imagine herself with a married son, and supposed she might have phrased the question in the same way. She set her bags down in the hall. She had expected to sweep into the apartment amid affectionate greetings, warm herself by a radiator, freshen up, and then begin to talk of Ted. Instead, her husband's mother seemed intent on examining her before letting her in. "Yes, Mrs. Faulkner," said Ruth, "we had five months together before he went overseas." Under the woman's critical stare, she found herself adding, almost defensively, "A happy five months." said Ruth, "we had five months together before he went overseas." Under the woman's critical stare, she found herself adding, almost defensively, "A happy five months."

"Ted was all I had," said Mrs. Faulkner. She said it as though it were a reproach.

"He was a fine man," said Ruth uneasily.

"My little boy," said Mrs. Faulkner. It was an aside to an unseen, sympathetic audience. She shrugged. "You must be cold. Do come in, Miss Hurley." Hurley was Ruth's maiden name.

"I could just as easily stay at a hotel," said Ruth. The woman's gaze made her feel foreign, self-conscious about her drawling speech, about her clothes, which were insubstantial, better suited to a warmer climate.

"I wouldn't hear of your staying anywhere but here. We have so much to talk about. When is Ted's child to be born?"

"In four months." Ruth slid her suitcase just inside the door, and sat, with an air of temporariness, on the edge of a sofa covered with slippery chintz. The only illumination in the overheated room came from a lamp on the mantel, its frail light muddled by a tortoisesh.e.l.l shade. "Ted told me so much about you, I've been dying to meet you," said Ruth.

On the long train ride, Ruth had pretended for hours at a time that she was talking to Mrs. Faulkner, winning her affection from the first. She had rehea.r.s.ed and polished her biography a dozen times in antic.i.p.ation of Mrs. Faulkner's saying, "Now tell me something about yourself." She was ready with her opening line: "Well, I have no relatives, I'm afraid-no close ones, anyway. My father was a colonel in the cavalry, and..." But Ted's mother didn't put the opening question.

Silent and thoughtful, Mrs. Faulkner poured two tiny gla.s.ses of sherry from an expensive-looking decanter. "The personal effects-" she said at last, "they told me they were sent to you."

Ruth was puzzled for a moment. "Oh, the things he had with him overseas? Yes, I have them. It's customary, I think-I mean, it's a matter of routine to send them to the wife."

"I suppose it's all done automatically by machines in Washington," said Mrs. Faulkner ironically. "A general just pushes a b.u.t.ton, and-" She left the sentence unfinished. "Could I have the things, please?"

"They're mine," said Ruth, and thought how childish that must sound. "I think he wanted me to have them." She looked down at the absurdly small gla.s.s of sherry, and wished for twenty more to take the edge off the ordeal.

"If it comforts you to think so, go right on thinking of them as yours," said Mrs. Faulkner patiently. "I simply want to have everything in one place-what little is left."

"I'm afraid I don't understand."

Mrs. Faulkner turned her back, and spoke softly, piously. "Having it all together makes him just a little nearer." She turned a switch on a floor lamp, suddenly filling the room with white brilliance. "These things will mean nothing to you," she said. "If you were a mother, you might understand how utterly priceless they are to me." She dabbed at a speck of dust on the ornate, gla.s.s-faced cabinet that squatted on lions' paws against the wall. "You see? I've left room in the cabinet for the things I knew you had."

"It's very sweet," said Ruth. She wondered what Ted might have thought of the cabinet-with its baby shoes, the book of nursery rhymes, the penknife, the Boy Scout badge...Apart from its cheap sentimentality, Ted, too, would have sensed something unwholesome, sick about it. Mrs. Faulkner stared at the trinkets wide-eyed, unblinking, bewitched. book of nursery rhymes, the penknife, the Boy Scout badge...Apart from its cheap sentimentality, Ted, too, would have sensed something unwholesome, sick about it. Mrs. Faulkner stared at the trinkets wide-eyed, unblinking, bewitched.

Ruth spoke to break the spell. "Ted told me you were doing awfully well at your shop. Is business as good as ever?"

"I've given it up," said Mrs. Faulkner absently.

"Oh? Then you're giving all your time to your club activities?"

"I've resigned."

"I see." Ruth fidgeted, taking off her gloves and putting them on again. "Ted said you were an awfully clever decorator, and I see he was right. He said you liked to do this place over every year or two. What sort of changes do you plan for next time?"

Mrs. Faulkner turned away from the shelf reluctantly. "Nothing will ever be changed again." She held out her hand. "Are the things in your suitcase?"

"There isn't much," said Ruth. "His billfold-"

"Cordovan, isn't it? I gave it to him in his junior year in high school."

Ruth nodded. She opened a suitcase, and dug into its bottom. "A letter to me, two medals, and a watch."

"The watch, please. The engraving on the back, I believe, says that it was a gift from me on his twenty-first birthday. I have a place ready for it."

Resignedly, Ruth held out the objects to her, cupped in her hands. "The letter I'd like to keep."

"You can certainly keep the letter and the medals. They have nothing to do with the boy I want to remember."

"He was a man, not a boy," said Ruth mildly. "He'd want to be remembered that way."

"That's your way of remembering him," said Mrs. Faulkner. "Respect mine."

"I'm sorry," said Ruth, "I do respect it. But you should be proud of him for being brave and-"

"He was gentle and sensitive and intelligent," interrupted Mrs. Faulkner pa.s.sionately. "They should never have sent him overseas. They may have tried to make him hard and cheap, but at heart he was still my boy."

Ruth stood, and leaned against the cabinet, the shrine. Now she understood what was going on, what was behind Mrs. Faulkner's hostility. To the older woman, Ruth was one of the shadowy, faraway conspirators who had taken Ted.

"For heaven's sake, dear, look out!"

Startled, Ruth jerked her shoulder away from the cabinet. A small object tottered from an open shelf and smashed into white chips on the floor. "Oh!-I'm so so sorry." sorry."