Collected Stories

  “This God damn stuff!” He would look around to find a safe place to set the glass down again. He would select a bare spot of earth between the hydrangea bushes, deposit the glass there as carefully as if he were planting a memorial tree, and then he would straighten up with a great air of relief and expand his chest and flex his arms. “Ha, ha, yep, croquet is a summer game for widows and drinkers, ha ha!”

  For a few moments, standing there in the sun, he would seem as sure and powerful as the sun itself; but then some little shadow of uncertainty would touch him again, get through the wall of his liquor, some tricky little shadow of a thought, as sly as a mouse, quick, dark, too sly to be caught, and without his moving enough for it to be noticed, his still fine body would fall as violently as a giant tree crashes down beneath a final axe stroke, taking with it all the wheeling seasons of sun and stars, whole centuries of them, crashing suddenly into oblivion and rot. He would make this enormous fall without a perceptible movement of his body. At the most, it would show in the faint flicker of something across his face, whose color gave him the name people knew him by. Something flickered across his flame-colored face. Possibly one knee sagged a little forward. Then slowly, slowly, the way a bull trots back from its first wild, challenging plunge into the ring, he would fasten one hand over his belt and raise the other one hesitantly to his head, feeling the scalp and the hard round bowl of the skull underneath it, as if he dimly imagined that by feeling that dome he might be able to guess what was hidden inside it, the dark and wondering stuff beneath that dome of calcium, facing, now, the intricate wickets of the summer to come…

  II

  For one reason or another, Mary Louise Grey was locked out of the house a great deal of the time that summer, and since she was a lonely child with little or no imagination, apparently unable to amuse herself with solitary games—except the endless one of copying her mother—the afternoons that she was excluded from the house “because Mother has a headache” were periods of great affliction. There were several galleries with outside stairs between them, and she patrolled the galleries and wandered forlornly about the lawn, and from time to time, she went down the front walk and sat in the glass box of the electric. She would vary her steps, sometimes walking sedately, sometimes skipping, sometimes hopping and humming, one plump hand always clutching the handkerchief that contained the lump of ice. This lump of ice to rub her mosquito bites had to be replaced at frequent intervals. “Oh, iceman,” the widow would call sweetly from an upstairs window, “don’t forget to leave some extra pieces for little Mary Louise to rub her mosquito bites with!”

  Each time a new bite was suffered Mary Louise would utter a soft cry in a voice that had her mother’s trick of carrying a great distance without being loud.

  “Oh, Mother,” she would moan, “I’m simply being devoured by mosquitoes!”

  “Darling,” her mother would answer, “that’s dreadful, but you know that Mother can’t help it; she didn’t create the mosquitoes and she can’t destroy them for you!”

  “You could let me come in the house. Mama.”

  “No, I can’t let you come in, precious. Not yet.”

  “Why not, Mother?”

  “Because Mother has a sick headache.”

  “I will be quiet.”

  “You say that you will, but you won’t. You must learn to amuse yourself, precious; you mustn’t depend on Mother to amuse you. Nobody can depend on anyone else forever. I’ll tell you what you can do till Mother’s headache is better. You can drive the electric out of the garage. You can drive it around the block, but don’t go into the business district with it, and then you can stop in the shady part of the drive and sit there perfectly comfortably till Mother feels better and can get dressed and come out. And then I think Mr. Pollitt may come over for a game of croquet. Won’t that be lovely?”

  “Do you think he will get here in time to play?”

  “I hope so, precious. It does him so much good to play croquet.”

  “Oh, I think it does all of us good to play croquet,” said Mary Louise in a voice that trembled just at the vision of it.

  Before Brick Pollitt arrived—sometimes half an hour before his coming, as though she could hear his automobile on the highway thirty miles from the house—Mary Louise would bound plumply off the gallery and begin setting up the poles and wickets of the longed-for game. While she was doing this, her plump little buttocks and her beginning breasts and her shoulder-length copper curls would all bob up and down in perfect unison.

  I would watch her from the steps of my house on the diagonally opposite corner of the street. She worked feverishly against time, for experience had taught her the sooner she completed the preparations for the game the greater would be the chance of getting her mother and Mr. Pollitt to play it. Frequently she was not fast enough, or they were too fast for her. By the time she had finished her perspiring job, the verandah was often deserted. Her wailing cries would begin, punctuating the dusk at intervals only a little less frequent than the passing of cars of people going out for evening drives to cool off.

  “Mama! Mama! The croquet set is ready!”

  Usually there would be a long, long wait for any response to come from the upstairs window toward which the calls were directed. But one time there wasn’t. Almost immediately after the wailing voice was lifted, begging for the commencement of the game, Mary Louise’s thin pretty mother showed herself at the window. She same to the window like a white bird flying into some unnoticed obstruction. That was the time when I saw, between the dividing gauze of the bedroom curtains, her naked breasts, small and beautiful, shaken like two angry fists by her violent motion. She leaned between the curtains to answer Mary Louise not in her usual tone of gentle remonstrance but in a shocking cry of rage: “Oh, be still, for God’s sake, you fat little monster!”

  Mary Louise was shocked into petrified silence that must have lasted for a quarter of an hour. It was probably the word “fat” that struck her so overwhelmingly, for Mary Louise had once told me, when we were circling the block in the electric, that her mother had told her that she was not fat, that she was only plump, and that these cushions of flesh were going to dissolve in two or three more years and then she would be just as thin and pretty as her mother.

  Sometimes Mary Louise would call me over to play croquet with her, but she was not at all satisfied with my game. I had had so little practice and she so much, and besides, more importantly, it was the company of the grown-up people she wanted. She would call me over only when they had disappeared irretrievably into the lightless house or when the game had collapsed owing to Mr. Brick Pollitt’s refusal to take it seriously. When he played seriously, he was even better at it than Mary Louise, who practiced her strokes sometimes all afternoon in preparation for a game. But there were evenings when he would not leave his drink on the porch but would carry it down onto the lawn with him and would play with one hand, more and more capriciously, while in the other hand he carried the tall glass. Then the lawn would become a great stage on which he performed all the immemorial antics of the clown, to the exasperation of Mary Louise and her thin, pretty mother, both of whom would become very severe and dignified on these occasions. They would retire from the croquet lawn and stand off at a little distance, calling softly, “Brick, Brick” and “Mr. Pollitt,” like a pair of complaining doves, both in the same ladylike tones of remonstrance. He was not a middle-aged-looking man—that is, he was not at all big around the middle—and he could leap and run like a boy. He could turn cartwheels and walk on his hands, and sometimes he would grunt and lunge like a wrestler or make long crouching runs like a football player, weaving in and out among the wickets and gaudily painted poles of the croquet lawn. The acrobatics and sports of his youth seemed to haunt him. He called out hoarsely to invisible teammates and adversaries— muffled shouts of defiance and anger and triumph, to which an incongruous counterpoint was continually provided by the faint, cooing voice of the widow, “Brick, Brick, stop now,
please stop. The child is crying. People will think you’ve gone crazy.” For Mary Louise’s mother, despite the extreme ambiguity of her station in life, was a woman with a keener than ordinary sense of propriety. She knew why the lights had gone out on all the screened summer porches and why the automobiles drove past the house at the speed of a funeral procession while Mr. Brick Pollitt was making a circus ring of the croquet lawn.

  Late one evening when he was making one of his crazy dashes across the lawn with an imaginary football hugged against his belly, he tripped over a wicket and sprawled on the lawn, and he pretended to be too gravely injured to get back on his feet. His loud groans brought Mary Louise and her mother running from behind the vine-screened end of the verandah and out upon the lawn to assist him. They took him by each hand and tried to haul him up, but with a sudden shout of laughter he pulled them both down on top of him and held them there till both of them were sobbing. He got up, finally, that evening, but it was only to replenish his glass of iced gin, and then returned to the lawn. That evening was a fearfully hot one, and Brick decided to cool and refresh himself with the sprinkler hose while he enjoyed his drink. He turned it on and pulled it out to the center of the lawn. There he rolled about the grass under its leisurely revolving arch of water, and as he rolled about, he began to wriggle out of his clothes. He kicked off his white shoes and one of his pale green socks, tore off his drenched white shirt and grass-stained linen pants, but he never succeeded in getting off his necktie. Finally, he was sprawled, like some grotesque fountain figure, in underwear and necktie and the one remaining pale green sock, while the revolving arch of water moved with cool whispers about him. The arch of water had a faint crystalline iridescence, a mist of delicate colors, as it wheeled under the moon, for the moon had by that time begun to poke with an air of slow astonishment over the roof of the little building that housed the electric. And still the complaining doves of the widow and her daughter cooed at him from various windows of the house, and you could tell their voices apart only by the fact that the mother murmured “Brick, Brick” and Mary Louise still called him Mr. Pollitt. “Oh, Mr. Pollitt, Mother is so unhappy, Mother is crying!”

  That night he talked to himself or to invisible figures on the lawn. One of them was his wife, Margaret. He kept saying, “I’m sorry, Margaret, I’m sorry, Margaret, I’m so sorry, so sorry, Margaret. I’m sorry I’m no good, I’m sorry, Margaret, I’m so sorry, so sorry I’m no good, sorry I’m drunk, sorry I’m no good. I’m so sorry it all had to turn out like this…”

  Later on, much later, after the remarkably slow procession of touring cars stopped passing the house, a little black sedan that belonged to the police came rushing up to the front walk and sat there for a while. In it was the chief of police himself. He called “Brick, Brick,” almost as gently and softly as Mary Louise’s mother had called him from the lightless windows. “Brick, Brick, old boy. Brick, fellow,” till finally the inert fountain figure in underwear and green sock and unremovable necktie staggered out from under the rotating arch of water and stumbled down to the walk and stood there negligently and quietly conversing with the chief of police under the no longer at all astonished, now quite large and indifferent great yellow stare of the August moon. They began to laugh softly together, Mr. Brick Pollitt and the chief of police, and finally the door of the little black car opened and Mr. Brick Pollitt got in beside the chief of police while the common officer got out to collect the clothes, flabby as drenched towels, on the croquet lawn. Then they drove away, and the summer night’s show was over…

  It was not quite over for me, for I had been watching it all that time with unabated interest. And about an hour after the little black car of the very polite officers had driven away, I saw the mother of Mary Louise come out into the lawn; she stood there with an air of desolation for quite a while. Then she went into the small building in back of the house and drove out the electric. The electric went sedately out into the summer night, with its buzzing no louder than a summer insect’s, and perhaps an hour later, for this was a very long night, it came back again containing in its glass show box not only the young and thin and pretty widow but a quiet and chastened Mr. Pollitt. She curved an arm about his immensely tall figure as they went up the front walk, and I heard him say only one word distinctly. It was the name of his wife.

  Early that autumn, which was different from summer in nothing except the quicker coming of dusk, the visits of Mr. Brick Pollitt began to have the spasmodic irregularity of a stricken heart muscle. That faraway boom of a cannon at five o’clock was now the announcement that two ladies in white dresses were waiting on a white gallery for someone who was each time a little more likely to disappoint them than the time before. But disappointment was not a thing that Mary Louise was inured to; it was a country that she was passing through not as an old inhabitant but as a bewildered explorer, and each afternoon she removed the oblong yellow wood box, lugged it out of the little building in which it lived with the electric, ceremoniously opened it upon the center of the silken green lawn, and began to arrange the wickets in their formal pattern between the two gaudily painted poles that meant beginning, middle and end. And the widow, her mother, talked to her from the gallery, under the awning, as if there had been no important alteration in their lives or their prospects. Their almost duplicate voices as they talked back and forth between gallery and lawn rang out as clearly as if the enormous corner lot were enclosed at this hour by a still more enormous and perfectly translucent glass bell which picked up and carried through space whatever was uttered beneath it, and this was true not only when they were talking across the lawn but when they were seated side by side in the white wicker chairs on the gallery. Phrases from these conversations became catchwords, repeated and mocked by the neighbors, for whom the widow and her daughter and Mr. Brick Pollitt had been three players in a sensational drama which had shocked and angered them for two acts but which now, as it approached a conclusion, was declining into unintentional farce, which they could laugh at. It was not difficult to find something ludicrous in the talks between the two ladies or the high-pitched elegance of their voices.

  Mary Louise would ask, “Will Mr. Pollitt get here in time for croquet?”

  “I hope so, precious. It does him so much good.”

  “Hell have to come soon or it will be too dark to see the wickets.”

  “That’s true, precious.”

  “Mother, why is it dark so early now?”

  “Honey, you know why. The sun goes south.”

  “But why does it go south?”

  “Precious, Mother cannot explain the movements of the heavenly bodies, you know that as well as Mother knows it. Those things are controlled by certain mysterious laws that people on earth don’t know or understand.”

  “Mother, are we going east?”

  “When, precious?”

  “Before school starts.”

  “Honey, you know it’s impossible for Mother to make any definite plans.”

  “I hope we do. I don’t want to go to school here.”

  “Why not, precious? Are you afraid of the children?”

  “No, Mother, but they don’t like me, they make fun of me.”

  “How do they make fun of you?”

  “They mimic the way I talk and they walk in front of me with their stomachs pushed out and giggle.”

  “That’s because they’re children and children are cruel.”

  “Will they stop being cruel when they grow up?”

  “Why, I suppose some of them will and some of them won’t.”

  “Well, I hope we go east before school opens.”

  “Mother can’t make any plans or promises, honey.”

  “No, but Mr. Brick Pollitt—”

  “Honey, lower your voice! Ladies talk softly.”

  “Oh, my goodness!”

  “What is it, precious?”

  “A mosquito just bit me!”

  “That’s too bad, but don’t scratch it. Scr
atching can leave a permanent scar on the skin.”

  “I’m not scratching it. I’m just sucking it, Mother.”

  “Honey, Mother has told you time and again that the thing to do when you have a mosquito bite is to get a small piece of ice and wrap it up in a handkerchief and rub the bite gently with it until the sting is removed.”

  “That’s what I do, but my lump of ice is melted!”

  “Get you another piece, honey. You know where the icebox is!”

  “There’s not much left. You put so much in the ice bag for your headache.”

  “There must be some left, honey.”

  “There’s just enough left for Mr. Pollitt’s drinks.”

  “Never mind that…”

  “He needs it for his drinks. Mother.”

  “Yes, Mother knows what he wants the ice for, precious.”

  “There’s only a little piece left. It’s hardly enough to rub a mosquito bite with.”

  “Well, use it for that purpose, that purpose is better, and anyhow when Mr. Pollitt comes over as late as this, he doesn’t deserve to have any ice saved for him.”

  “Mother?”

  “Yes, precious?”

  “I love ice and sugar!”

  “What did you say, precious?”

  “I said I loved ice and sugar!”

  “Ice and sugar, precious?”

  “Yes, I love the ice and sugar in the bottom of Mr. Pollitt’s glass when he’s through with it.”

  “Honey, you mustn’t eat the ice in the bottom of Mr. Pollitt’s glass!”

  “Why not. Mother?”

  “Because it’s got liquor in it!”

  “Oh, no. Mother, it’s just ice and sugar when Mr. Pollitt’s through with it.”

  “Honey, there’s always a little liquor left in it.”

  “Oh, no, not a drop’s left when Mr. Pollitt’s through with it!”

  “But you say there’s sugar left in it, and, honey, you know that sugar is very absorbent.”