“Maybe you could tell me,” he said. “All I want is—”
“Yah; sure,” the young man said. “Maybe I awda sockm, Pete. Whadya think?”
“Sockm,” the Mexican said.
He did not even feel the fist. He felt the low stoop strike him across the back, then the grass already damp with dew, before he began to feel his face at all. “Maybe you could tell me—” he said.
“Yah; sure,” the young man said in his hoarse happy voice, “ask me another.” The door slammed. After a while Wilbourne got up. Now he could feel his eye, the whole side of his face, his whole head, the slow painful pounding of the blood, though in the drugstore mirror presently (it was on the first corner he came to, he entered it; he was indeed learning fast the things he should have known before he was nineteen years old) he could see no discoloration yet. But the mark was apparent, something was, because the clerk said,
“What happened to your face, mister?”
“Fight,” he said. “I knocked up my girl. I want something for it.”
For a moment the clerk looked at him, hard. Then he said, “Cost you five bucks.”
“Do you guarantee it?”
“Nah.”
“All right. I’ll take it.”
It was a small tin box, unlettered. It contained five objects which might have been coffee beans. “He said whiskey would help, and moving around. He said to take two of them tonight and go somewhere and dance.” She took all five of them, they went out and got two pints of whiskey and found at last a dance hall full of cheap colored bulbs and khaki uniforms and rentable partners or hostesses.
“Drink some of it too,” she said. “Does your face hurt very bad now?”
“No,” he said. “Drink it. Drink all you can.”
“God,” she said. “You cant dance, can you?”
“No,” he said. “Yes. Yes, I can dance.” They moved about the floor, bumped and shoved and bumping and shoving, somnambulistic and sometimes in step, during each short phase of hysterical music. By eleven oclock she had drunk almost half of one of the bottles but it only made her sick. He waited until she emerged from the washroom, her face the color of putty, the eyes indomitable and yellow. “You lost the pills too,” he said.
“Two of them. I was afraid of that so I used the basin and washed them off and took them again. Where’s the bottle?”
They had to go out for her to drink, then they returned. At twelve she had almost finished the first bottle and the lights were turned off save for a spot light which played on a revolving globe of colored glass, so that the dancers moved with the faces of corpses in a wheeling of colored mote-beams resembling a marine nightmare. There was a man with a megaphone; it was a dancing contest and they did not even know it; the music crashed and ceased, the lights flared on, the air was filled by the bellowing megaphone and the winning couple moved forward. “I’m sick again,” she said. Once more he waited for her—the putty face, the indomitable eyes. “I washed them off again,” she said. “But I cant drink anymore. Come on. They close at one oclock.”
Perhaps they were coffee beans because after three days nothing had happened and after five days even he admitted that the time had passed. Now they did quarrel, he cursing himself for it as he sat on his park benches reading the help wanted columns in newspapers grubbed out of trash bins while he waited for his black eye, his shiner, to disappear so he could apply decently for work, cursing himself because she had borne up for so long and would and could continue to bear up save that he had worn her out at last, knowing he had done this, swearing he would change, stop it. But when he returned to the room (she was thinner now and there was something in her eyes; all the pills and whiskey had done was to put something in her eyes that had not been there before) it would be as if his promises had never been made, she cursing him now and striking at him with her hard fists then catching herself, clinging to him, crying, “Oh, God, Harry, make me stop! Make me hush! Bust the hell out of me!” Then they would lie holding one another, fully dressed now, in a sort of peace for a time.
“It’ll be all right,” he said. “A lot of people have to do it these days. Charity wards are not bad. Then we can find someone to take the baby until I can—”
“No. It wont do, Harry. It wont do.”
“I know it sounds bad at first. Charity. But charity isn’t—”
“Damn charity. Have I ever cared where money comes from, where or how we lived, had to live? It’s not that. They hurt too much.”
“I know that too. But women have been bearing children—You have borne two yourself—”
“Damn pain too. I take easy and breed hard but damn that, I’m used to that, I dont mind that. I said they hurt too much. Too damned much.” Then he understood, knew what she meant; he thought quietly, as he had thought before, that she had already and scarcely knowing him given up more than he would ever possess to relinquish, remembering the old tried true incontrovertible words: Bone of my bone, blood and flesh and even memory of my blood and flesh and memory. You dont beat it, he told himself. You dont beat it that easy. He was about to say, “But this will be ours,” when he realised that this was it, this was exactly it.
But still he could not say yes, could not say “All right.” He could say it to himself on the park benches, he could hold his hand out and it would not shake. But he could not say the word to her; he would lie beside her, holding her while she slept, and he would watch the ultimate last of his courage and manhood leave him. “That’s right,” he would whisper to himself, “stall. Stall. She will be in the fourth month soon, then I can tell myself I know it is too late to risk it; even she will believe then.” Then she would wake and it would start all over—the reasoning which got nowhere becoming the quarreling and then the cursing until she would catch herself and cling to him, crying in frantic despair: “Harry! Harry! What are we doing? We, we, us! Make me hush! Bust me! Knock me cold!” This last time he held her until she was quiet. “Harry, will you make a compact with me?”
“Yes,” he said wearily. “Anything.”
“A compact. And then until it’s up, we will never mention pregnancy again.” She named the date when her next period would have come; it was thirteen days away. “That’s the best time, and after that it will be four months and it will be too late to risk it. So from now until then we wont even talk about it; I will try to make things as easy as possible while you look for a job, a good job that will support three of us—”
“No,” he said. “No! No!”
“Wait,” she said. “You promised. —then if you haven’t found a job by that time, you will do it, take it away from me.”
“No!” he cried. “I wont! Never!”
“But you promised,” she said, quietly, gently, slowly, as if he were a child just learning English. “Dont you see there is nothing else?”
“I promised; yes. But I didn’t mean—”
“I told you once how I believe it isn’t love that dies, it’s the man and the woman, something in the man and the woman that dies, doesn’t deserve the chance anymore to love. And look at us now. We have the child, only we both know we cant have it, cant afford to have it. And they hurt too bad, Harry. Too damned bad. I’m going to hold you to the promise, Harry. And so from now until that day comes, we wont even have to mention it, think about it again. Kiss me.” After a moment he leaned to her. Not touching otherwise, they kissed, as brother and sister might.
Now it was like Chicago again, the first weeks there while he went from hospital to hospital, the interviews which seemed to die, to begin to wilt and fade tranquilly at a given identical instant, he already foreknowing this and expecting it and so meeting the obsequy decently. But not now, not this time. In Chicago he would think I imagine I am going to fail and he would fail; now he knew he was going to fail and he refused to believe it, refused to accept no for an answer until threatened almost with physical violence. He was not trying hospitals alone, he was trying anyone, anything. He told lies, any lie; he a
pproached appointments with a frantic cold maniacal determination which was inherent with its own negation; he promised anyone that he could and would do anything; walking along the street one afternoon he glanced up by sheer chance and saw a doctor’s sign and entered and actually offered to perform any abortions thrown his way for half the fee, stated his experience and (he realised later when comparatively sane again) only his ejection by force forestalled his showing Buckner’s letter as a testimonial to his ability.
Then one day he returned home in the middle of the afternoon. He stood outside his own door for a long time before he opened it. And even then he did not enter but stood instead in the opening with on his head a cheap white bellows-topped peaked cap with a yellow band—the solitary insigne of a rankless W.P.A. school crossing guard—and his heart cold and still with a grief and despair that was almost peaceful. “I get ten dollars a week,” he said.
“Oh you monkey!” she said, then for the last time in his life he saw her cry. “You bastard! You damned bastard! So you can rape little girls in parks on Saturday afternoons!” She came and snatched the cap from his head and hurled it into the fireplace (a broken grate hanging by one side and stuffed with faded frilled paper which had once been either red or purple) and then clung to him, crying hard, the hard tears springing and streaming. “You bastard, you damned bastard, you damned damned damned—”
She boiled the water herself and fetched out the meagre instruments they had supplied him with in Chicago and which he had used but once, then lying on the bed she looked up at him. “It’s all right. It’s simple. You know that; you did it before.”
“Yes,” he said. “Simple. You just have to let the air in. All you have to do is let the air—” Then he began to tremble again. “Charlotte. Charlotte.”
“That’s all. Just a touch. Then the air gets in and tomorrow it will be all over and I will be all right and it will be us again forever and ever.”
“Yes. Ever and ever. But I’ll have to wait a minute, until my hand—Look. It wont stop. I cant make it stop.”
“All right. We’ll wait a minute. It’s simple. It’s funny. New, I mean. We’ve done this lots of ways but not with knives, have we? There. Now your hand has stopped.”
“Charlotte,” he said. “Charlotte.”
“It’s all right. We know how. What was it you told me nigger women say? Ride me down, Harry.”
And now, sitting on his bench in Audubon Park lush green and bright with the Louisiana summer already fully accomplished although it was not yet June, and filled with the cries of children and the sound of pram wheels like the Chicago apartment had been, he watched against his eyelids the cab (it had been told to wait) stopping before the neat and unremarkable though absolutely unimpugnable door and she getting out of the cab in the dark dress carried a full year and better, for three thousand miles and better, in the bag from last spring and mounting the steps. Now the bell, perhaps the same negro maid: “Why, Miss—” then nothing, remembering who paid the wages, though probably not since by ordinary negroes quit an employment following death or division. And now the room, as he had first seen it, the room in which she said, “Harry—do they call you Harry?—what are we going to do?” (Well, I did it he thought. She will have to admit that) He could see them, the two of them, Rittenmeyer in the double-breasted suit (it might be flannel now but it would be dark flannel, obtruding smoothly its unobtrusive cut and cost); the four of them, Charlotte here and the three others yonder, the two children which were unremarkable, the daughters, the one with the mother’s hair but nothing else, the other, the younger one, with nothing, the younger sitting perhaps on the father’s knee, the other, the older, leaning against him; the three faces, the one impeccable, the two of them invincible and irrevocable, the second cold and unwinking, the third merely unwinking; he could see them, he could hear them:
‘Go speak to your mother, Charlotte. Take Ann with you.’
‘I dont want to.’
‘Go. Take Ann’s hand.’ He could hear, see them: Rittenmeyer setting the little one onto the floor, the older one takes her hand and they approach. And now she will take the little one onto her lap, it staring at her still with that intent absolutely blank detachment of infants, the older one leans to her, obedient, cold, suffering the caress, already withdrawing before the kiss is completed, and returns to her father; an instant later Charlotte sees her beckoning, gesturing in violent surreptitious pantomime to the little one. So Charlotte sets the little one onto the floor again and it returns to the father, turning against his knee and already hunching one buttock toward its father’s lap as children do, still staring at Charlotte with that detachment empty even of curiosity.
‘Let them go,’ Charlotte says.
‘You want them sent away?’
‘Yes. They want to go.’ The children depart. And now he hears her; it is not Charlotte; he knows that as Rittenmeyer never will: ‘So that’s what you have taught them.’
‘I? I taught them? I taught them nothing!’ he cries. ‘Nothing! It wasn’t me who—’
‘I know. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. I have not —Have they been well?’
‘Yes. As I wrote you. If you will recall, for several months I had no address. The letters were returned. You may have them when and if you like. You dont look well yourself. Is that why you came back home? or have you come back home?’
‘To see the children. And to give you this.’ She produces the check, double-signed and perforated against any tampering, the slip of paper more than a year old, creased and intact and only a little worn.
‘You came home on his money then. Then it belongs to him.’
‘No. It’s yours.’
‘I refuse to accept it.’
‘So would he.’
‘Then burn it. Destroy it.’
‘Why? Why do you wish to hurt yourself? Why do you like suffering, when there is so much of it that has to be done, so damned much. Give it to the children. A bequest. If not from me, from Ralph then. He is still their uncle. He has not harmed you.’
‘A bequest?’ he says. Then she tells him. Oh yes, Wilbourne told himself, she will tell him; he could see it, hear it—the two people between whom something like love must have existed once, or who at least had known together the physical striving with which alone the flesh can try to capture what little it is ever to know of love. Oh, she will tell him; he could see and hear her as she lays the check upon the table at her hand and tells him:
‘It was a month ago. It was all right, only I kept on losing blood and it got to be pretty bad. Then all of a sudden two days ago the blood stopped and so there is something wrong, which might be something badder still—what do they call it? toxemia, septicemia? It doesn’t matter—that we are watching for. Waiting for.’
The men who passed the bench he sat on walked in linen suits, and now he began to notice a general exodus from the park—the negro nursemaids who managed to lend a quality bizarre and dazzling even to their starched white-crossed blue, the children moving with thin cries in bright random like blown petals, across the green. It was near noon; Charlotte would have been in the house more than half an hour. Because it will take that long he thought, seeing and hearing them: He is trying to persuade her to go to a hospital at once, the best, the best doctors; he will assume all blame, tell all the lies; he insists, calm, not at all importunate and not to be denied.
‘No. H —he knows a place. On the Mississippi coast. We are going there. We will get a doctor there if necessary.’
‘The Mississippi coast? Why in God’s name the Mississippi coast? A country doctor in a little lost Mississippi shrimping village when in New Orleans there are the best, the very best—’
‘We may not need a doctor after all. And we can live cheaper there until we find out.’
‘You have money for coast vacations then.’
‘We have money.’ It was dead noon now; the air fell still, the stippled shadows unmoving upon his lap, upon the six bills in his ha
nd, the two twenties, the five, the three ones, hearing them, seeing them:
‘Take up the check again. It is not mine.’
‘Nor mine. Let me go my way, Francis. A year ago you let me choose and I chose. I will stick to it. I wont have you retract, break your oath to yourself. But I want to ask one thing of you.’
‘Of me? A favor?’
‘If you like. I dont ask a promise. Maybe what I am trying to express is just a wish. Not hope; wish. If anything happens to me.’
‘If anything happens to you. What am I to do?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Nothing?’
‘Yes. Against him. I dont ask it for his sake nor even for mine. I ask it for the sake of—of—I dont even know what I am trying to say. For the sake of all the men and women who ever lived and blundered but meant the best and all that ever will live and blunder but mean the best. For your sake maybe, since yours is suffering too—if there is any such thing as suffering, if any of us ever did, if any of us were ever born strong enough and good enough to be worthy to love or suffer either. Maybe what I am trying to say is justice.’
‘Justice?’ And now he could hear Rittenmeyer laughing, who had never laughed since laughter is the yesterday’s slight beard, the negligee among emotions. ‘Justice? This, to me? Justice?’ Now she rises; he too: they face one another.
‘I didn’t ask a promise,’ she says. ‘That would have been too much to ask.’
‘Of me.’
‘Of anyone. Any man or woman. Not only you.’
‘But it is I who give none. Remember. Remember. I said you could come back home when you wished, and I would take you back, into my house at least. But can you expect that again? from any man? Tell me; you spoke once of justice; tell me that.’
‘I dont expect it. I told you before that maybe what I was trying to say was hope.’ She will turn now, he told himself, approaching the door, and they will stand looking at one another and maybe it will be like McCord and me in the Chicago station that night last—He stopped. He was about to say ‘last year’ and he ceased and sat perfectly still and said aloud in quiet amazement, “That night was not five months ago.”—and they will both know they will never see one another again and neither of them will say it. ‘Goodbye, Rat,’ she says. And he will not answer he thought No. He will not answer, this man of ultimatums, upon whom for the rest of his life will yearly devolve the necessity for decrees which he knows before hand he cannot support, who would have denied the promise she did not ask yet would perform the act and she to know this well, too well too well;—this face impeccable and invincible upon which all existing light in the room will have seemed to gather as though in benediction, affirmation not of righteousness but rightness, having been consistently and incontrovertibly right; and withal tragic too since in the being right there was nothing of consolation nor of peace.