Mother came back in with some lemonade. She stopped short as she entered the portieres.
“Good heavens! Laura? Dancing?”
Her look was absurdly grateful as well as startled.
“But isn’t she stepping all over you, Mr. Delaney?”
“What if she does?” said Jim, with bearish gallantry. “I’m not made of eggs!”
“Well, well, well!” said Mother, senselessly beaming.
“She’s light as a feather!” said Jim. “With a little more practice she’d dance as good as Betty!”
There was a little pause of silence.
“Betty?” said Mother.
“The girl I go out with!” said Jim.
“Oh!” said Mother.
She set the pitcher of lemonade carefully down and with her back to the caller and her eyes on me, she asked him just how often he and the lucky young lady went out together.
“Steady!” said Jim.
Mother’s look, remaining on my face, turned into a glare of fury.
“Tom didn’t mention that you went out with a girl!”
“Nope,” said Jim. “I didn’t mean to let the cat out of the bag. The boys at the warehouse‘ll kid me to death when Slim gives the news away.”
He laughed heartily but his laughter dropped heavily and awkwardly away as even his dull senses were gradually penetrated by the unpleasant sensation the news of Betty had made.
“Are you thinking of getting married?” said Mother.
“First of next month!” he told her.
It took her several moments to pull herself together. Then she said in a dismal tone, “How nice! If Tom had only told us we could have asked you both!”
Jim had picked up his coat.
“Must you be going?” said Mother.
“I hope it don’t seem like I’m rushing off,” said Jim, “but Betty’s gonna get back on the eight o’clock train an’ by the time I get my jalopy down to the Wabash depot—”
“Oh, then, we mustn’t keep you.”
Soon as he’d left, we all sat down, looking dazed.
Laura was the first to speak.
“Wasn’t he nice?” she asked. “And all those freckles!”
“Yes,” said Mother. Then she turned to me.
“You didn’t mention that he was engaged to be married!”
“Well, how did I know that he was engaged to be married?”
“I thought you called him your best friend down at the warehouse?”
“Yes, but I didn’t know he was going to be married!”
“How peculiar!” said Mother. “How very peculiar!”
“No,” said Laura gently, getting up from the sofa. “There’s nothing peculiar about it.”
She picked up one of the records and blew on its surface a little as if it were dusty, then set it softly back down.
“People in love,” she said, “take everything for granted.”
What did she mean by that? I never knew.
She slipped quietly back to her room and closed the door.
Not very long after that I lost my job at the warehouse. I was fired for writing a poem on the lid of a shoe-box. I left Saint Louis and took to moving around. The cities swept about me like dead leaves, leaves that were brightly colored but torn away from the branches. My nature changed. I grew to be firm and sufficient.
In five years’ time I had nearly forgotten home. I had to forget it, I couldn’t carry it with me. But once in a while, usually in a strange town before I have found companions, the shell of deliberate hardness is broken through. A door comes softly and irresistibly open. I hear the tired old music my unknown father left in the place he abandoned as faithlessly as I. I see the faint and sorrowful radiance of the glass, hundreds of little transparent pieces of it in very delicate colors. I hold my breath, for if my sister’s face appears among them—the night is hers!
June 1943 (Published 1948)
The Angel in the Alcove
Suspicion is the occupational disease of landladies and long association with them has left me with an obscure sense of guilt I will probably never be free of. The initial trauma in this category was inflicted by a landlady I had in the old French Quarter of New Orleans when I was barely twenty. She was the archetype of the suspicious landlady. She had a room of her own but preferred to sleep on a rattling cot in the downstairs hall so that none of her tenants could enter or leave the establishment during the night without her grudging permission. When finally I left there I fooled the old woman. I left by way of a balcony and a pair of sheets. I was miles out of town on the Old Spanish Trail to the West before the old woman found out I had gotten past her.
The downstairs hall of this rooming house on Bourbon Street was totally lightless. You had to grope your way through it with cautious revulsion, trailing your fingers along the damp, cracked plaster until you arrived at the door or the foot of the stairs. You never reached either without the old woman’s challenge. Her ghostly figure would spring bolt upright on the rattling iron cot. She would utter one syllable—Who? If she were not satisfied with the identification given, or suspected that you were taking your luggage out in a stealthy departure or bringing somebody in for carnal enjoyment, a match would be struck on the floor and held toward you for several moments. In its weirdly flickering light she would squint her eyes at you until her doubts were dismissed. Then she would flop back down in a huddle of sour blankets and if you waited to listen you would hear mutterings vicious and coarse as any that drunks in Quarter barrooms ever gave voice to.
She was a woman of paranoidal suspicion and her suspicion of me was unbounded. Often she came in my room with the morning paper and read aloud some item concerning an act of crime in the Quarter. After the reading she would inspect me closely for any guilty change of countenance, and I would nearly always gratify her suspicion with a deep flush and inability to return her look. I am sure she had chalked up dozens of crimes against me and was only waiting for some more concrete betrayal to call the police, a captain of whom, she had warned me, was her first cousin.
The landlady was a victim of dead beats, that much should be admitted in her defense. None of her tenants were regular payers. Some of them clung to their rooms for months and months with only promises given of future payments. One of these was a widow named Mrs. Wayne. Mrs. Wayne was the most adroit sponger in the house. She even succeeded in finagling gratuities from the landlady. Her fortune was in her tongue. She was a wonderful raconteur of horribly morbid or salacious stories. Whenever she smelled food cooking her door would fly open and she would dart forth with a mottled blue and white saucepan held to her bosom coquettishly as a lace fan. Undoubtedly she was half starved and the odor of food set her off like a powerful drug, for there was an abnormal brilliance in her chatter. She tapped on the door from which the seductive smell came but entered before there could be any kind of response. Her tongue would be off before she was fairly inside and no amount of rudeness short of forcible ejection from the room would suffice to discourage her. There was something pitifully winning about the old lady. Even her badsmelling breath became a component of her unwholesome appeal. To me it was the spectacle of so much heroic vitality in so wasted a vessel that warmed my heart toward the widow. I never did any cooking in my attic bedroom. I only met Mrs. Wayne in the landlady’s kitchen on those occasions when I had earned my supper by some small job on the premises. The landlady herself was not entirely immune to Mrs. Wayne’s charm and the stories unmistakably entranced her. As she put things on the stove she would always remark. If the bitch gets a sniff of this cookin’ wild horses won’t hold ‘er!
In eight years’ time such characters disappear, the earth swallows them up, the walls absorb them like moisture. Undoubtedly old Mrs. Wayne and her battered utensil have made their protesting departure and I am not at all sure that with them the world has not lost the greatest pathological genius since Baudelaire or Poe. Her favorite subject was the deaths of relatives and friends which she had att
ended with an eye and ear from which no agonizing detail escaped annotation. Her memory served them up in the landlady’s kitchen so graphically that I would find myself sick with horror and yet so fascinated that the risk of losing my appetite for a hard-earned supper would not prevail upon me to shut my ears. The landlady was equally spellbound. Gradually her gruff mumblings of disbelief and impatient gestures would give way to such morbid enjoyment that her jaws would slacken and dribble. A faraway mesmerized look would come into her usually pin-sharp eyes. All the while Mrs. Wayne with the saucepan held to her bosom would be executing a slow and oblique approach to the great kitchen stove. So powerful was her enchantment that even when she was actually removing the lid from the stewpot and ladling out some of its contents into her saucepan, although the landlady’s look would follow her movements there would not appear to be any recognition. Not until the hapless protagonist of the story had endured his final conclusion—his eyeballs popped from their sockets and ghastly effluvia drenching his bedclothes—did the charm loosen enough to permit the narrator’s listeners any clear knowledge of what went on outside the scene that was painted. By that time Mrs. Wayne had scraped her saucepan clean with wolfish relish and made her way so close to the door that if any unpleasantness attended the landlady’s emergence from trance, the widow could be out of earshot before it achieved a momentum.
In this old house it was either deathly quiet or else the high plaster walls were ringing like fire bells with angry voices, with quarrels over the use of the lavatory or accusations of theft or threats of eviction. I had no door to my room which was in the attic, only a ragged curtain that couldn’t exclude the barrage of human wretchedness often exploding. The walls of my room were pink and green stippled plaster and there was an alcove window. This alcove window shone faintly in the night. There was a low bench beneath it. Now and again when the room was otherwise lightless a misty grey figure would appear to be seated on this bench in the alcove. It was the tender and melancholy figure of an angel or some dim, elderly madonna. The apparition occurred in the alcove most often on those winter nights in New Orleans when slow rain is falling from a sky not clouded heavily enough to altogether separate the town from the moon. New Orleans and the moon have always seemed to me to have an understanding between them, an intimacy of sisters grown old together, no longer needing more than a speechless look to communicate their feelings to each other. This lunar atmosphere of the city draws me back whenever the waves of energy which removed me to more vital towns have spent themselves and a time of recession is called for. Each time I have felt some rather profound psychic wound, a loss or a failure, I have returned to this city. At such periods I would seem to belong there and no place else in the country.
During this first period in New Orleans none of the small encouragements in my life as a writer had yet come along and I had already accepted the terms of anonymity and failure. I had already learned to make a religion of endurance and a secret of my desperation. The nights were comforting. When the naked lightbulb had been turned off and everything visible gone except the misty alcove set deeply and narrowly into the wall above Bourbon, I would seem to slip into another state of being which had no trying associations with the world. For a while the alcove would remain empty, just a recess that light came faintly into: but after my thoughts had made some dreamy excursion or other and I turned again to look in that direction, the transparent figure would noiselessly have entered and seated herself on the bench below the window and begun that patient watching which put me to sleep. The hands of the figure were folded among the colorless draperies of her lap and her eyes were fixed up on me with a gentle, unquestioning look which I came to remember as having belonged to my grandmother during her sieges of illness when I used to go to her room and sit by her bed and want to say something or put my hand over hers but could not do either, knowing that if I did I would burst into tears that would trouble her more than her illness.
The appearance of this grey figure in the alcove never preceded the time of falling asleep by more than a few moments. When I saw her there I thought comfortably. Ah, now, I’m about to slip away, it will all be gone in a moment and won’t come back until morning…
On one of those nights a more substantial visitor came to my room. I was jolted out of sleep by a warmth that was not my own, and I awoke to find that someone had entered my room and was crouching over the bed. I jumped up and nearly cried out, but the arms of the visitor passionately restrained me. He whispered his name which was that of a tubercular young artist who slept in the room adjoining. I want to, I want to, he whispered. So I lay back and let him do what he wanted until he was finished. Then without any speech he got up and left my room. For a while afterwards I heard him coughing and muttering to himself through the wall between us. Turbulent feelings were on both sides of the wall. But at last I was drowsy again. I cocked an eye toward the alcove. Yes, she was there. I wondered if she had witnessed the strange goings on and what her attitude was toward perversions of longing. But nothing gave any sign. The two weightless hands so loosely clasping each other among the colorless draperies of the lap, the cool and believing grey eyes in the faint pearly face, were immobile as statuary. I felt that she had permitted the act to occur and had neither blamed nor approved, and so I went off to sleep.
Not long after the episode in my room the artist was involved in a terrible scene with the landlady. His disease was entering the final stage, he coughed all the time but managed to go on working. He was a quicksketch artist at the Court of the Two Parrots which was around the corner on Toulouse. He did not trust anybody or anything. He lived in a world completely hostile to him, unrelentingly hostile, and no other being could enter the walls about him for more than the frantic moments desire drove him to. He would not give in to the mortal fever which licked all the time at his nerves. He invented all sorts of trivial complaints and grudges to hide from himself the knowledge that he was dying. One of these subterfuges to which he resorted was a nightly preoccupation with bedbugs. He claimed that his mattress was infested with them, and every morning he made an angry report to the landlady on the number that had bitten him during the night. These numbers grew and grew to appalling figures. The old woman wouldn’t believe him. Finally one morning he did get her into the room to take a look at the bedclothes.
I heard him breathing hoarsely while the old woman shuffled and rattled about the corner his bed was in.
Well, she finally grunted, I ain’t found nothin‘.
Christ, said the artist, you’re blind!
Okay! You show me! What is there on this bed?
Look at that! said the artist.
What?
That spot of blood on the pillow.
Well?
That’s where I smashed a bedbug as big as my thumbnail!
Ho, ho, ho, said the landlady. That’s where you spit up blood!
There was a pause in which his breathing grew hoarser. His speech when it burst out again was dreadfully altered.
How dare you, God damn you, say that!
Ho, ho, ho! I guess you claim you never spit up no blood?
No, no, never! he shouted.
Ho, ho, ho! You spit up blood all the time. I’ve seen you spit on the stairs and in the hall and on the floor of this bedroom. You leave a trail of it everywhere that you go, a bloody track like a chicken that runs with its head off. You hawk and you spit and you spread contamination. And that ain’t all that you do by a long shot neither!
Now, yelled the artist—What kind of a dirty insinuation is that?
Ho, ho, ho! Insinuation of nothin’ but what’s known facts!
Get out! he shouted.
I’m in my own house and 111 say what I want where I please! I know all about you degenerates in the Quarter. I ain’t let rooms ten years in the Quarter for nothin’. A bunch of rotten half-breeds and drunks an’ degenerates, that’s what I’ve had to cope with. But you’re the worst of the bunch, barring none! And it’s not just here but a
t the Two Parrots, too. Your awful condition’s become the main topic of talk at the place where you work. You spit all around your easel in the courtyard. It’s got to be mopped with a strong disinfectant each night. The management is disgusted. They wish you would fold up your easel and get to hell out. They only don’t ask you because you’re a pitiful case. Why, one of the waitresses told me some customers left without paying their bill because you was hawking and spitting right next to their table. That’s how it is, and the management’s fed up with it!
You’re making up lies!
It’s God’s own truth! I got it from the cashier!
I ought to hit you!
Go on!
I ought to knock your ugly old lying face in!
Go on, go on, just try it! I got a nephew that’s a captain on the police force! Hit me an you’ll land smack in the House of Detention! A rubber hose on your back is what you#x2019;ll git in there!
I ought to twist those dirty lies out of your neck!
Ho, ho, just try it! Even the effort would kill you!
You#x2019;ll be punished, he gasped. One of these nights you#x2019;ll get a knife stuck in you!
By you, I suppose? Ho, ho! You#x2019;ll die on the street, you#x2019;ll cough up your lungs in the gutter! You#x2019;ll go to the morgue. Nobody will claim that skinny cadaver of yours. You#x2019;ll go in a box and be dumped off a barge in the river. The sooner the better is how I look at it, too. A case like you is a public nuisance and danger. You’ve got no right to expose healthy people to you. You ought to go into the charity ward at Saint Vincent’s. That is the place for a person in dying condition who ain’t got the sense to know what is really wrong with him but goes about raising a stink about bugs putting blood on his pillow. Huh! Bugs! You’re the bugs that puts blood all over this linen! It’s you, not bugs, that makes such a filthy mess at the Court of Two Parrots it’s got to be scoured with lye when you leave ev’ry night! It’s you, not bugs, that drives the customers off without paying their checks. The management’s not disgusted with bugs, but with you! And if you don’t leave of your own sweet accord pretty quick you’ll be given y’ur notice. And I’m not keepin’ yuh neither. Not after y’ur threats an’ the scene that you’ve made this mawnin’. I want you to gather all of y’ur old junk up, all of y’ur dirty old handkerchiefs an’ y’ur bottles, and get ‘em all out of here by twelve o’clock noon, or by God, an’ by Jesus, anything that’s left here is going straight down to the incinerator! I’ll gather it up on the end of a ten-foot pole and dump it into the fire, cause nothing you touch is safe for human contact!