Collected Stories

  He looked at her again. He had to say something to keep his lips from spreading into a senseless grin.

  “What time is it?”

  The woman grunted vaguely.

  He hitched at the belt of his trousers.

  “Your man gone into town, has he?”

  “Yeah. Him and my boy have gone into town to get drunk.”

  She laughed shortly.

  “What are you going to do?” he asked her.

  She blew out air through her nostrils and curled up her lips. Her eyes did not stop at his face. They went on down his body. He could almost feel them. He leaned back quickly in response to the suggested caress. His shoulders touched the round bulge of her knee. Soft as though without bone. He wondered what her age was. Forty-five? Forty? Might even be younger than that. She spoke of her boy going out to get drunk with his dad. He must be nearly my age, he thought. But dark races grew up early. For instance the little Greek girl that lived in his block at home. Back in the alley night after night behind her father’s restaurant, between the ash pit and the three huge garbage pails. Mmmm. Panting for breath. With the hard concrete and all those cold wet smells. Potato peelings and cantaloupe rinds and damp coffee grounds. Bits of ash pressed into the palms of his hands. But the hardness around them making the comfort inside her sweeter. Only eleven years old she was. And the nervous spasms and groanings. Not normal perhaps.

  “What are you going to do?” he asked her again.

  “Me? I’m going to make supper.”

  “What have you got for supper?”

  “Meat.”

  “A big piece?”

  “Yes. A pretty big piece.”

  “Enough for two people?”

  “Naw, I don’t know,” she said. “I ought to save some for my boy.”

  “He‘ll probably get some in town.”

  “Naw. I don’t know.”

  He smiled and narrowed his eyes but she looked away. She fixed her eyes on the round orange ball of the sun. It was now sending up wide beams of pale orange light between the feathery masses of pale grey cloud. Very pretty. It made him think of a dress his sister had worn one Easter Sunday. Streets paved with gold. Oh, yes. The black rails. Fire escape? No. Tracks of the viaduct. And the train screaming by. His mother. How clear her voice!—Irma, don’t stand by the window like that. The soot flying in. Confirmation. The five colored eggs in one corner. Pale blue and pink and yellow and green. Hardboiled eggs. He wondered if he had eaten them afterwards. Eggs were good hardboiled. The white coming loose from the yellow center. The yellow a round ball, rich and grainy, forming a paste in the mouth and sticking to the teeth so that the taste remained for a long time afterwards. Mmmm. He’d like to be eating some hardboiled eggs right now.

  “I’m still kind of hungry,” he told her.

  She suddenly stirred. Lifted her hand from her lap and placed it on the back of his head. Ran the fingers down his neck and under the collar of his shirt.

  Inwardly he recoiled from the touch but he kept his eyes on her face.

  “You got nice skin like a girl’s.”

  “Thanks.”

  “How old are you, huh?”

  “Nineteen.”

  “Umph!”

  She grunted as if she had just been stuck with a pin. Got up from the steps and gave him a slight, playful kick with the toe of her dusty slipper.

  “Go on,” she said. “You’re too young!”

  “How do you mean, too young?”

  “Nineteen is just how old my own boy is! You better go ‘way!”

  He looked up at her and saw it was no use to argue. Big, heavy and dark she stood in the door of the trailer, her face set in a slight frown, looking out at the sun. An old dago slut she was. Such women make little rules for themselves, more sacred than Holy Law. If he had said twenty-one or even said twenty, it might have been okay with her, but not nineteen because that was the age of her boy…

  Oh, well.

  He rose easily from the bottom step of the trailer and brushed off the seat of his trousers. Swung the canvas pack over his shoulders again. It felt lighter now. He started off down the road. Chuckled a little and looked back over his shoulder. The car and trailer stood out distinct against the waning gold light. The fields were darkening. Grayish dusk closing in. Just the tip of the orange sun was left on top of the hills like a big conflagration up there. His eyes went down once more to the trailer’s peaked roof. He saw a thin curl of smoke rising up from the tin stovepipe and heard the rattle of pans. The old woman was in there like a catfish caught in a bottle. She was making herself some supper. She would eat it alone. Fat elbows planted on either side of the tin plate and her shoulders crouched way over. Wheezing a little. Washing it down with scalding black coffee. The rich, oily meat. A big piece. The old bitch. Oh, well. She would die some day. Some ugly disease like cancer. It might be already started inside her dark flesh. Just as well. A stingy old bitch like that…

  He went on down the road. The air was fresh. A wind was coming up. He saw ahead of him, dimly, white frame buildings spotted with faint yellow light.

  He could still taste the apple that he had eaten. The inside of his mouth was fresh and sweet with that taste. Maybe it was better that way, just having that taste in his mouth, the clean white taste of the apple.

  c. 1936 (Not previously published)

  The Field of Blue Children

  That final spring at the State University a restlessness came over Myra which she could not understand. It was not merely the restlessness of superabundant youth. There was something a little neurotic about it. Nothing that she did seemed quite satisfying or complete. Even when she returned from a late formal dance, where she had swung from partner to partner the whole evening through, she did not feel quite ready to tumble exhausted into bed. She felt as though there must be something still further to give the night its perfect fullness. Sometimes she had the almost panicky sensation of having lost or forgotten something very important. She would stand quite still for a moment with tightened forehead, trying to remember just what it was that had slipped from her fingers—been left behind in the rumble seat of Kirk’s roommate’s roadster or on the sofa in the dimly lighted fraternity lounge between dances.

  “What’s the matter?” Kirk or somebody else would ask and she would laugh rather sharply.

  “Nothing. I just felt like I’d forgotten something!”

  The feeling persisted even when every article was accounted for. She still felt as though something were missing. When she had returned to the sorority house she went from room to room, exchanging anecdotes of the evening, laughing at them far more than their humor warranted. And when finally everyone else had gone to bed, she stayed up alone in her room and sometimes she cried bitterly without knowing why, crushing the pillow against her mouth so that no one could hear—or else she sat in pajamas on the window seat and looked out across the small university town with all its buildings and trees and open fields a beautiful dusky blue in the spring night, the dome of the administration building like a snowy peak in the distance and the stars astonishingly large and close—she felt as though she would strangle with an emotion whose exact nature or meaning she could not understand.

  When half-drunken groups of serenaders, also restless after late dances, paused beneath her house, she turned on the bed lamp and leaned above them, patting her hands together in a pantomime of delighted applause. When they left, she remained at the window, looking out with the light extinguished, and it was sad, unbearably sad, to hear their hoarse voices retreating down moon-splashed avenues of trees till they could not be heard any longer or else were drowned in the noise of a starting motor whose raucous gravel-kicking departure ebbed quickly to a soft, musical hum and was succeeded at length by the night’s complete blue silence.

  Still seated at the window, she waited with tight throat for the sobbing to commence. When it did, she felt better. When it did not, her vigil would sometimes continue till morning began and the re
stless aching had worn itself out.

  That spring she took Kirk Abbott’s fraternity pin. But this did not radically change her manner of living. She continued to accept dates with other men. She went out almost wherever she was asked with almost whoever asked her, and when Kirk protested she didn’t try to explain the fever that made her behave in this way, she simply kissed him until he stopped talking and was in a mood to forgive her for almost anything that she might conceivably do.

  From the beginning of adolescence, perhaps earlier, Myra had written a little verse. But this spring it became a regular practice. Whenever the rising well of unexplainable emotion became so full that its hurt was intolerable, she found that it helped her a little to scribble things down on paper. Single lines or couplets, sometimes whole stanzas, leapt into her mind with the instant completeness of slides flashed on the screen of a magic lantern. Their beauty startled her: sometimes it was like a moment of religious exaltation. She stood in a frozen attitude; her breath was released in a sigh. Each time she felt as though she were about to penetrate some new area of human thought. She had the sensation of standing upon the verge of a shadowy vastness which might momentarily flower into a marvelous crystal of light, like a ballroom that is dark one moment and in the next moment illuminated by the sunlike brilliance of a hundred glass chandeliers and reflecting mirrors and polished floors. At such times she would turn out the light in her bedroom and go quickly to the window. When she looked out across the purple-dark town and the snowy white dome above the quadrangle, or when she sat as in a spell, listening to the voices that floated down the quiet streets, singers of blues songs or laughing couples in roadsters, the beauty of it no longer tormented her, she felt instead a mysterious quietness as though some disturbing question had been answered and life had accordingly become a much simpler and more pleasurable experience.

  “Words are a net to catch beauty!”

  She wrote this in the back of a notebook toward the close of a lecture on the taxing powers of Congress. It was late in April when she wrote this—and from then on it seemed that she understood what she wanted and the hurt bewilderment in her grew less acute.

  In the Poetry Club to which Myra belonged there was a boy named Homer Stallcup who had been in love with her for a year or more. She could tell this by the way that he looked at her during the club sessions, which were the only occasions on which they met. Homer never looked directly at her, his eyes slid quickly across her face, but something about his expression, even about the tense pose of his body as he sat gripping his knees, made her feel his awareness of her. He avoided sitting next to her or even directly across from her—the chairs were usually arranged in a circle—and because of this she had at first thought that he must dislike her, but she had come gradually to understand that his shyness toward her had an exactly opposite meaning.

  Homer was not a fraternity member. He waited on tables at a campus restaurant, fired furnaces and did chores for his room and board. Nobody in Myra’s social milieu knew him or paid him any attention. He was rather short, stocky and dark. Myra thought him good-looking, but certainly not in any usual way. He had intense black eyes, a straight nose with flaring nostrils, full, mobile lips that sometimes jerked nervously at the corners. All of his movements were overcharged. When he rose from a chair he would nearly upset it. When he lighted a cigarette his face would twist into a terrible scowl and he would fling the burnt match away like a lighted firecracker.

  He went around a great deal with a girl of his own intellectual type, a girl named Hertha something or other, who was rather widely known on the campus because of her odd behavior. In classes she would be carried away by enthusiasm upon some subject, either literary or political, and she would talk so rapidly that nobody could understand what she was saying and she would splutter and gasp and make awkward gestures—as though she were trying to pluck some invisible object out of the air—till the room was in an uproar of amusement and the instructor had to turn his face to the blackboard to conceal his own laughter.

  Hertha and this boy, Homer, made a queer picture together, she nearly a foot taller, often rushing along a foot or more in advance of him, clutching him by the coat sleeve as though afraid that he might escape from her, and every minute or so one or both of them bursting into violent laughter that could be heard for a block.

  Homer wrote poetry of a difficult sort. It was uneven. Parts of it were reminiscent of Hart Crane, parts were almost as naively lucid as Sara Teasdale’s. But there were lines and phrases which stabbed at you with their poignant imagery, their fresh observation. When he had given a reading at a symposium, Hertha would always leap out of her chair as though animated by an electric charge, her blinking, nearsighted eyes tensely sweeping the circle of superciliously smiling faces, first demanding, then begging that they concur in the extravagant praise which her moist lips babbled. Only Myra would say anything when Hertha was finished. The rest were too baffled or too indifferent or even too hostile. And Homer’s face, darkly flushed, would be turned to his lap throughout the rest of the meeting. His fingers would fold down corners of the neat pages as though the poetry had been erased from them or had never been written on them, as though these pages were simply blank pieces of paper for his fingers to play with.

  Myra always wanted to say something more, but her critical vocabularly was slight.

  “I think that was lovely,” she would say. Or “I liked that very much.” And Homer would not lift his eyes, his face would turn even darker, and she would bite her tongue as though in remorse for an unkind speech. She wanted to put her hands over his fingers, to make them stop crumpling the neat pages, to make them be still.

  It was not till the last meeting of the year, in early June, that Myra had the courage to approach him. After that meeting she saw him standing by the water fountain at the end of the corridor. She rushed impulsively up to him and told him, all in one breath, that his was the best unpublished verse she’d ever heard, that he should submit it to some of the good literary magazines, that she thought the other members of the club were absolute fools for not understanding.

  Homer stood with his fists clenched in his pockets. He did not look at her face the whole time she was speaking. When she had stopped, his excitement burst through. He tore a sheaf of manuscripts from his brief case and thrust them into her hands.

  “Please read them” he begged, “and let me know what you think.”

  They went downstairs together. On the bottom step he tripped or slid and she had to catch his arm to prevent him from falling. She was both touched and amused by this awkwardness and by his apparent delight in walking beside her. As they went out of the white stone building the late afternoon sun, yellow as lemon, met their faces in a beneficent flood. The air was filled with the ringing of five-thirty bells and the pliant voices of pigeons. A white feather from one of the stirring wings floated down and lighted upon Myra’s hair. Homer lifted it off and thrust it in his hatband, and all the way home, after leaving him, Myra could feel that quick, light touch of his fingers. She wondered if he would keep the pigeon’s feather; treasure it, possibly, for a long while afterward because it had once touched her person.

  That night, when the sorority house was submerged in darkness, she took out the sheaf of poems and read them through without stopping. As she read she felt a rising excitement. She did not understand very much of what she was reading, but there was a cumulative effect, a growing intensity in the sequence. When she had finished she found herself trembling; trembling as when you step from warm water into chill air.

  She dressed and went downstairs. She didn’t know what she was planning to do. Her movements were without any conscious direction. And yet she had never moved with more certainty.

  She opened the front door of the sorority house, ran down the brickpaved walk, turned to the left and continued swiftly through the moonlit streets till she had reached Homer’s residence. It startled her to find herself there. There were cicadas burring in the large o
aks—she had not heard them until this moment. And when she looked upward she saw a close group of stars above the western gable of the large frame house. The Seven Sisters. They were huddled together like virgin wanderers through a dark forest. She listened and there was not a voice anywhere, nothing except the chant of cicadas and the faint, faint rustling of her white skirt when she moved.

  She went quickly around the side of the house to the door that she had seen Homer come out of in the mornings. She gave two short, distinct raps, then flattened herself against the brick wall. She was breathing rapidly. After waiting a while, she knocked again. Through the glass pane she could see down a flight of stairs into the basement. The door of a lamplit room was open. She saw first a moving shadow, then the boy himself, catching a heavy brown robe about his body and frowning up at the door as he mounted toward it.

  As the door came open she gasped his name.

  For a whole minute, it seemed, he said nothing. Then he caught her arm and pulled her inside the door.

  “Myra, it’s you.”

  “Yes, it’s me,” she laughed. “I don’t know what came over me. I’ve been reading your poetry and I just felt like I had to see you at once and tell you…”

  Her breath gave out. She leaned against the closed door. It was her eyes this time, and not his, that looked for concealment. She looked down at the bottom of his ugly brown bathrobe and she saw his bare feet beneath it, large and bony and white, and the sight of them frightened her. She remembered the intense, fleeting way of his eyes sliding over her face and body and the way he trembled that afternoon when she came up to him in the corridor, how those large feet had tripped on the bottom stair and she had been forced to catch him to keep him from falling.

  “There was one thing in particular,” she went on with a struggle. “There was something about a field of blue flowers…”