Somebody in her family died in Memphis that spring, and she went there to attend the funeral and collect her inheritance, and while she was gone on that profitable journey. Brick Pollitt slipped out from under her thumb a bit. Another death occurred during her absence. That nice young doctor who took care of Brick when he had to be carried to the hospital, he suddenly took sick in a shocking way. An awful flower grew in his brain like a fierce geranium that shattered its pot. All of a sudden the wrong words came out of his mouth; he seemed to be speaking in an unknown tongue; he couldn’t find things with his hands; he made troubled signs over his forehead. His wife led him about the house by one hand, yet he stumbled and fell flat; the breath was knocked out of him, and he had to be put to bed by his wife and the Negro yardman; and he lay there laughing weakly, incredulously, trying to find his wife’s hand with both of his while she looked at him with eyes that she couldn’t keep from blazing with terror. He stayed under drugs for a week, and it was during that time that Brick Pollitt came to see her. Brick came and sat with Isabel Grey by her dying husband’s bed and she couldn’t speak, she could only shake her head, incessantly as a metronome, with no lips visible in her white face, but two pressed narrow bands of a dimmer whiteness that shook as if some white liquid flowed beneath them with an incredible rapidity and violence which made them quiver…
God was the only word she was able to say; but Brick Pollitt somehow understood what she meant by that word, as if it were in a language that she and he, alone of all people, could speak and understand; and when the dying man’s eyes forcibly opened on something they couldn’t bear to look at, it was Brick, his hands suddenly quite sure and steady, who filled the hypodermic needle for her and pumped its contents fiercely into her husband’s hard young arm. And it was over. There was another bed at the back of the house and he and Isabel lay beside each other on that bed for a couple of hours before they let the town know that her husband’s agony was completed, and the only movement between them was the intermittent, spasmodic digging of their fingernails into each other’s clenched palm while their bodies lay stiffly separate, deliberately not touching at any other points as if they abhorred any other contact with each other, while this intolerable thing was ringing like an iron bell through them.
And so you see what the summer game on the violet-shadowed lawn was—it was a running together out of something unbearably hot and bright into something obscure and cool…
The young widow was left with nothing in the way of material possessions except the house and an electric automobile, but by the time Brick’s wife, Margaret, had returned from her profitable journey to Memphis, Brick had taken over the post-catastrophic details of the widow’s life. For a week or two, people thought it was very kind of him, and then all at once public opinion changed and they decided that Brick’s reason for kindness was by no means noble. It appeared to observers that the widow was now his mistress, and this was true. It was true in the limited way that most such opinions are true. It is only the outside of one person’s world that is visible to others, and all opinions are false ones, especially public opinions of individual cases. She was his mistress, but that was not Brick’s reason. His reason had something to do with that chaste interlocking of hands their first time together, after the hypodermic; it had to do with those hours, now receding and fading behind them as all such hours must, but neither of them could have said what it was aside from that. Neither of them was able to think very clearly about the matter. But Brick was able to pull himself together for a while and take command of those post-catastrophic details in the young widow’s life and her daughter’s.
The daughter, Mary Louise, was a plump child of twelve. She was my friend that summer. Mary Louise and I caught lightning bugs and put them in Mason jars to make flickering lanterns, and we played the game of croquet when her mother and Brick Pollitt were not inclined to play it. It was Mary Louise that summer who taught me how to deal with mosquito bites. She was plagued by mosquitoes and so was I. She warned me that scratching the bites would leave scars on my skin, which was as tender as hers. I said that I didn’t care. “Someday you will,” she told me. She carried with her constantly that summer a lump of ice in a handkerchief. Whenever a mosquito bit her, instead of scratching the bite she rubbed it gently with the handkerchief-wrapped lump of ice until the sting was frozen to numbness. Of course, in five minutes it would come back and have to be frozen again, but eventually it would disappear and leave no scar. Mary Louise’s skin, where it was not temporarily mutilated by a mosquito bite or a slight rash that sometimes appeared after eating strawberry ice cream, was ravishingly smooth and tender. The association is not at all a proper one, but how can you recall a summer in childhood without some touches of impropriety? I can’t remember Mary Louise’s plump bare legs and arms, fragrant with sweet pea powder, without also thinking of an afternoon drive we took in the electric automobile to the little art museum that had recently been established in the town. We went there just before the five o’clock closing time, and straight as a bee, Mary Louise led me into a room that was devoted to replicas of famous antique sculptures. There was a reclining male nude (the “Dying Gaul,” I believe) and it was straight to this statue that she led me. I began to blush before we arrived there. It was naked except for a fig leaf, which was of a different colored metal from the bronze of the prostrate figure, and to my astonished horror, that afternoon, Mary Louise, after a quick, sly look in all directions, picked the fig leaf up, removed it from what it covered, and then turned her totally unembarrassed and innocent eyes upon mine and inquired, smiling very brightly, “Is yours like that?”
My answer was idiotic; I said, “I don’t know!” and I think I was blushing long after we left the museum…
The Greys’ house in the spring when the doctor died of brain cancer was very run down. But soon after Brick Pollitt started coming over to see the young widow, the house was painted; it was painted so white that it was almost a very pale blue; it had the blue-white glitter of a block of ice in the sun. Coolness of appearance seemed to be the most desired of all things that summer. In spite of his red hair. Brick Pollitt had a cool appearance because he was still young and thin, as thin as the widow, and he dressed as she did in clothes of light weight and color. His white shirts looked faintly pink because of his skin underneath them. Once, I saw him through an upstairs window of the widow’s house just a moment before he pulled the shade down. I was in an upstairs room of my house and I saw that Brick Pollitt was divided into two colors as distinct as two stripes of a flag, the upper part of him, which had been exposed to the sun, almost crimson and the lower part of him white as this piece of paper.
While the widow’s house was being repainted (at Brick Pollitt’s expense), she and her daughter lived at the Alcazar Hotel, also at Brick’s expense. Brick supervised the renovation of the widow’s house. He drove in from his plantation every morning to watch the house painters and gardeners at work. Brick’s driving license had been restored to him, and it was an important step forward in his personal renovation—being able to drive his own car again. He drove it with elaborate caution and formality, coming to a dead stop at every cross street in the town, sounding the silver trumpet at every corner, inviting pedestrians to precede him, with smiles and bows and great circular gestures of his hands. But observers did not approve of what Brick Pollitt was doing. They sympathized with his wife, Margaret, that brave little woman who had to put up with so much. As for Dr. Grey’s widow, she had not been very long in the town; the doctor had married her while he was an intern at a big hospital in Baltimore. Nobody had formed a definite opinion of her before the doctor died, so it was no effort, now, to simply condemn her, without any qualification, as a strumpet, common in everything but her “affectations.”
Brick Pollitt, when he talked to the house painters, shouted to them as if they were deaf, so that all the neighbors could hear what he had to say. He was explaining things to the world, especially the matter of his drinkin
g.
“It’s something,” he shouted, “that you can’t cut out completely right away. That’s the big mistake that most drinkers make—they try to cut it out completely, and you can’t do that. You can do it for maybe a month or two months, but all at once you go back on it worse than before you went off it, and then the discouragement is awful—you lose all faith in yourself and just give up. The thing to do, the way to handle the problem, is like a bullfighter handles a bull in a ring. Wear it down little by little, get control of it gradually. That’s how I’m handling this thing! Yep. Now, let’s say that you get up wanting a drink in the morning. Say it’s ten o’clock, maybe. Well, you say to yourself, ‘Just wait half an hour, old boy, and then you can have one.’ Well, at half past ten you still want that drink, and you want it a little bit worse than you did at ten, but you say to yourself, ‘Boy, you could do without it half an hour ago so you can do without it now.’ You see, that’s how you got to argue about it with yourself, because a drinking man is not one person—a man that drinks is two people, one grabbing the bottle, the other one fighting him off it, not one but two people fighting each other to get control of a bottle. Well, sir, if you can talk yourself out of a drink at ten, you can still talk yourself out of a drink at half past ten! But at eleven o’clock the need for the drink is greater. Now here’s the important thing to remember about this struggle. You got to watch those scales, and when they tip too far against your power to resist, you got to give in a little. That’s not weakness. That’s strategy! Because don’t forget what I told you. A drinking man is not one person but two, and it’s a battle of wits going on between them. And so I say at eleven, ‘Well, have your drink at that hour, go on, and have it! One drink at eleven won’t hurt you!’
“What time is it, now? Yep! Eleven…All right. I’m going to have me that one drink. I could do without it, I don’t crave it, but the important thing is…
His voice would trail off as he entered the widow’s house. He would stay in there longer than it took to have one drink, and when he came out, there was a change in his voice as definite as a change of weather or season, the strong and vigorous tone would be a bit filmed over.
Then he would usually talk about his wife. “I don’t say my wife Margaret’s not an intelligent woman. She is, and both of us know it, but she don’t have a good head for property values. Now, you know Dr. Grey, who used to live here before that brain thing killed him. Well, he was my physician, he pulled me through some bad times when
I had that liquor problem. I felt I owed him a lot. Now, that was a terrible thing the way he went, but it was terrible for his widow, too; she was left with this house and that electric automobile and that’s all, and this house was put up for sale to pay off her debts, and—well, I bought it. I bought it, and now I’m giving it back to her. Now, my wife Margaret, she. And a lot of other folks, too. Don’t understand about this…
“What time is it? Twelve? High noon!…This ice is melted…”
He’d drift back into the house and stay there half an hour, and when he came back out, it was rather shyly with a sad and uncertain creaking of the screen door pushed by the hand not holding the tall glass, but after resting a little while on the steps, he would resume his talk to the house painters.
“Yes,” he would say, as if he had only paused a moment before, “it’s the most precious thing that a woman can give to a man—his lost respect for himself—and the meanest thing one human being can do to another human being is take his respect for himself away from him. 1.1 had it took away from me…”
The glass would tilt slowly up and jerkily down, and he’d have to wipe his chin dry.
“I had it took away from me! I won’t tell you how, but maybe, being men about my age, you’re able to guess it. That was how. Some of them don’t want it. They cut it off. They cut it right off a man, and half the time he don’t even know when they cut it off him. Well, I knew it all right. I could feel it being cut off me. Do you know what I mean?…That’s right…
“But once in a while there’s one—and they don’t come often—that wants for a man to keep it, and those are the women that God made and put on this earth. The other kind come out of hell, or out of…I don’t know what. I’m talking too much. Sure. I know I’m talking too much about private matters. But that’s all right. This property is mine.
I’m talking on my own property and I don’t give a s— who hears me!
I’m not shouting about it, but I’m not sneaking around about it neither. Whatever I do, I do it without any shame, and I’ve got a right to do it. I’ve been through a hell of a lot that nobody knows. But I’m coming out of it now. God damn it, yes, I am! I can’t take all the credit. And yet I’m proud. I’m goddam proud of myself, because I was in a pitiful condition with that liquor problem of mine, but now the worst is over. I’ve got it just about licked. That’s my car out there and I drove it up here myself. It’s no short drive, it’s almost a hundred miles, and I drive it each morning and drive it back each night. I’ve got back my driver’s license, and I fired the man that was working for my wife, looking after our place. I fired that man and not only fired him but give him a kick in the britches that’ll make him eat standing up for the next week or two. It wasn’t because I thought he was fooling around. It wasn’t that. But him and her both took about the same attitude toward me, and I didn’t like the attitude they took. They would talk about me right in front of me, as if I wasn’t there. ‘Is it time for his medicine?’ Yes, they were giving me dope! So one day I played possum. I was lying out there on the sofa and she said to him, ‘I guess he’s passed out now.’ And he said, ‘Jesus, dead drunk at half past one in the afternoon!’ Well. I got up slowly. I wasn’t drunk at that hour, I wasn’t even half drunk. I stood up straight and walked slowly toward him. I walked straight up to them both, and you should of seen the eyes of them both bug out! ‘Yes, Jesus,’ I said, ‘at half past one!’ And I grabbed him by his collar and by the seat of his britches and turkey-trotted him right on out of the house and pitched him on his face in a big mud puddle at the foot of the steps to the front verandah. And as far as I know or care, maybe he’s still laying there and she’s still screaming, ’Stop, Brick!’ But I believe I did hit her. Yes, I did. I did hit her. There’s times when you got to hit them, and that was one of those times. I ain’t been to the house since. I moved in the little place we lived in before the big one was built, on the other side of the bayou, and ain’t crossed over there since…
“Well, sir, that’s all over with now. I got back my power of attorney which I’d give to that woman and I got back my driver’s license and I bought this piece of property in town and signed my own check for it and I’m having it completely done over to make it as handsome a piece of residential property as you can find in this town, and I’m having that lawn out there prepared for the game of croquet.”
Then he’d look at the glass in his hands as if he had just then noticed that he was holding it; he’d give it a look of slightly pained surprise, as if he had cut his hand and just now noticed that it was cut and bleeding. Then he would sigh like an old-time actor in a tragic role. He would put the tall glass down on the balustrade with great, great care, look back at it to make sure that it wasn’t going to fall over, and walk very straight and steady to the porch steps and just as steady but with more concentration down them. When he arrived at the foot of the steps, he would laugh as if someone had made a comical remark; he would duck his head genially and shout to the house painters something like this; “Well, I’m not making any predictions because I’m no fortuneteller, but I’ve got a strong idea that I’m going to lick my liquor problem this summer, ha ha. I’m going to lick it this summer! I’m not going to take no cure and I’m not going to take no pledge. I’m just going to prove I’m a man with his balls back on him! I’m going to do it step by little step, the way that people play the game of croquet. You know how you play that game. You hit the ball through the wicket and then you drive it through the n
ext one. You hit it through that wicket and then you drive on to another. You go from wicket to wicket, and it’s a game of precision—it’s a game that takes concentration and precision, and that’s what makes it a wonderful game for a drinker. It takes a sober man to play a game of precision. It’s better than shooting pool, because a pool hall is always next door to a gin mill, and you never see a pool player that don’t have his liquor glass on the edge of the table or somewhere pretty near it, and croquet is also a better game than golf, because in golf you’ve always got that nineteenth hole waiting for you. Nope, for a man with a liquor problem, croquet is a summer game and it may seem a little bit sissy, but let me tell you, it’s a game of precision. You go from wicket to wicket until you arrive at that big final pole, and then, bang, you’ve hit it, the game is finished, you’re there! And then, and not until then, you can go up here to the porch and have you a cool gin drink, a buck or a Collins— Hey! Where did I leave that glass? Aw! Yeah, hand it down to me, will you? Ha ha—thanks.”
He would take a birdlike sip, make a fiercely wry face, and shake his head violently as if somebody had drenched it with scalding water.