“It’s what. Mummy?”
“It absorbs some liquor and that’s a good way to cultivate a taste for it, and, honey, you know what dreadful consequences a taste for liquor can have. It’s bad enough for a man, but for a woman it’s fatal. So when you want ice and sugar, let Mother know and she‘ll prepare some for you, but don’t ever let me catch you eating what’s left in Mr. Pollitt’s glass!”
“Mama?”
“Yes, precious?”
“It’s almost completely dark now. Everybody is turning on their lights or driving out on the river road to cool off. Can’t we go out riding in the electric?”
“No, honey, we can’t till we know Mr. Pollitt’s not—”
“Do you still think he will come?”
“Precious, how can I say? Is Mother a fortuneteller?”
“Oh, here comes the Pierce, Mummy, here comes the Pierce!”
“Is it? Is it the Piercer?”
“Oh, no. No, it isn’t. It’s a Hudson Super Six. Mummy, I’m going to pull up the wickets, now, and water the lawn, because if Mr. Pollitt does come, hell have people with him or won’t be in a condition to play croquet. And when I’ve finished, I want to drive the electric around the block.”
“Drive it around the block, honey, but don’t go into the business district with it.”
“Are you going with me, Mummy?”
“No, precious. I’m going to sit here.”
“It’s cooler in the electric.”
“1 don’t think so. The electric goes too slowly to make much breeze.”
If Mr. Pollitt did finally arrive those evenings, it was likely to be with a caravan of cars that came from Memphis, and then Mrs. Grey would have to receive a raffish assortment of strangers as if she herself had invited them to a party. The party would not confine itself to the downstairs rooms and galleries but would explode quickly and brilliantly as a rocket in all directions, overflowing both floors of the house, spilling out upon the lawn and sometimes even penetrating the little building that housed the electric automobile and the oblong box that held the packed-away croquet set. On those party nights, the fantastically balustraded and gabled and turreted white building would glitter all over, like one of those huge night excursion boats that came downriver from Memphis, and it would be full of ragtime music and laughter. But at some point in the evening there would be, almost invariably, a startling disturbance. Some male guest would utter a savage roar, a woman would scream, you would hear a shattering of glass. Almost immediately afterward, the lights would go out in the house, as if it really were a boat that had collided fatally with a shoal underwater. From all the doors and galleries and stairs, people would come rushing forth, and the dispersion would be more rapid than the arrival had been. A little while later, the police car would pull up in front of the house. The thin, pretty widow would come out on the front gallery to receive the chief of police, and you could hear her light voice tinkling like glass chimes, “Why, it was nothing, it was nothing at all, just somebody who drank a little too much and lost his temper. You know how that Memphis crowd is, Mr. Duggan, there’s always one gentleman in it who can’t hold his liquor. I know it’s late, but we have such a huge lawn—it occupies half the block—that I shouldn’t think anybody who wasn’t overcome with curiosity would have to know that a party had been going on!”
And then something must have happened that made no sound at all.
It wasn’t an actual death, but it had nearly all the external evidence of one. When death occurs in a house, the house is unnaturally quiet for a day or two before the occurrence is finished. During that interval, the enormous, translucent glass bell that seems to enclose and separate one house from those that surround it does not transmit any noise to those who are watching but seems to have thickened invisibly so that very little can be heard through it. That was the way it had been five months ago, when the pleasant young doctor had died of that fierce flower grown in his skull. It had been unnaturally quiet for several days, and then a peculiar grey car with frosted windows had crashed through the bell of silence and the young doctor had emerged from the house in a very curious way, as if he were giving a public demonstration of how to go to sleep on a narrow bed in atmosphere blazing with light and while in motion.
That was five months ago, and it was now early October.
The summer had spelled out a word that had no meaning, and the word was now spelled out and, with or without any meaning, there it was, inscribed with as heavy a touch as the signature of a miser on a check or a boy with chalk on a fence.
One afternoon, a fat and pleasantly smiling man, whom I had seen times without number loitering around in front of the used car lot which adjoined the Paramount movie, came up the front walk of the Greys’ with the excessive nonchalance of a man who is about to commit a robbery. He pushed the bell, waited awhile, pushed it again for a longer moment, and then was admitted through an opening that seemed to be hardly wide enough for his fingers. He came back out almost immediately with something caught in his fist. It was the key to the little building that contained the croquet set and the electric automobile. He entered that building and drew its folding doors all the way open to disclose the ladylike electric sitting there with its usual manner of a lady putting on or taking off her gloves at the entrance to a reception. He stared at it a moment, as if its elegance were momentarily baffling. But then he got in it and he drove it out of the garage, holding the polished black pilot stick with a look on his round face that was like the look of an adult who is a little embarrassed to find himself being amused by a game that was meant for children. He drove it serenely out into the wide, shady street and at an upstairs window of the house there was some kind of quick movement, as if a figure looking out had been startled by something it watched and then had retreated in haste…
Later, after the Greys had left town, I saw the elegant square vehicle, which appeared to be made out of glass and patent leather, standing with an air of haughty self-consciousness among a dozen or so other cars for sale in a lot called “Hi-Class Values” next door to the town’s best movie, and as far as I know, it may be still sitting there, but many degrees less glittering by now.
The Greys were gone from Meridian all in one quick season: the young doctor whom everyone had liked in a hesitant, early way and had said would do well in the town with his understanding eyes and quiet voice; the thin, pretty woman, whom no one had really known except Brick Pollitt; and the plump little girl, who might someday be as pretty and slender as her mother. They had come and gone in one season, yes, like one of those tent shows that suddenly appear in a vacant lot in a southern town and cross the sky at night with mysteriously wheeling lights and unearthly music, and then are gone, and the summer goes on without them, as if they had never come there.
As for Mr. Brick Pollitt, I can remember seeing him only once after the Greys left town, for my time there was also of brief duration. This last time that I saw him was a brilliant fall morning. It was a Saturday morning in October. Brick’s driver’s license had been revoked again for some misadventure on the highway due to insufficient control of the wheel, and it was his legal wife, Margaret, who sat in the driver’s seat of the Pierce Arrow touring car. Brick did not sit beside her. He was on the back seat of the car, pitching this way and that way with the car’s jolting motion, like a loosely wrapped package being delivered somewhere. Margaret Pollitt handled the car with a wonderful male assurance, her bare arms brown and muscular as a Negro field hand’s, and the car’s canvas top had been lowered the better to expose on its back seat the sheepishly grinning and nodding figure of Brick Pollitt. He was clothed and barbered with his usual immaculacy, so that he looked from some distance like the president of a good social fraternity in a gentleman’s college of the South. The knot of his polka dot tie was drawn as tight as strong and eager fingers could knot a tie for an important occasion. One of his large red hands protruded, clasping over the outside of the door to steady his motion, and on it gl
ittered two bands of gold, a small one about a finger, a large one about the wrist. His cream-colored coat was neatly folded on the seat beside him and he wore a shirt of thin white material that was tinted faintly pink by his skin beneath it. He was a man who had been, and even at that time still was, the handsomest you were likely to remember, physical beauty being of all human attributes the most incontinently used and wasted, as if whoever made it despised it, since it is made so often only to be disgraced by painful degrees and drawn through the streets in chains.
Margaret blew the car’s silver trumpet at every intersection. She leaned this way and that way, elevating or thrusting out an arm as she shouted gay greetings to people on porches, merchants beside store entrances, people she barely knew along the walks, calling them all by their familiar names, as if she were running for office in the town, while Brick nodded and grinned with senseless amiability behind her. It was exactly the way that some ancient conqueror, such as Caesar or Alexander the Great or Hannibal, might have led in chains through a capital city the prince of a state newly conquered.
1951-52 (Published 1952)
The Coming of Something to the Widow Holly
The widow Isabel Holly was a rooming house owner. How she had come to be one she hardly knew. It had crept up on her the same as everything else. She had an impression, however, that this was the house where she had lived as a bride. There had been, she also believed, a series of more or less tragic disappointments, the least of which had been Mr. Holly’s decease. In spite of the fact that the late Mr. Holly, whose first name she could no longer remember, had left her with an adequate trust fund, she had somehow felt compelled at one time or another to open her house on Bourbon Street in New Orleans to persons regarding themselves as “paying guests.” In times more recent the payments had dwindled away and now it seemed that the guests were really dependents. They had also dwindled in number. She had an idea that there had once been many, but now there were only three, two middle-aged spinsters and a bachelor in his eighties. They got along not well together. Whenever they met on the stairs or in the hall or at the door of the bathroom, there was invariably some kind of dispute. The bolt on the bathroom door was continually broken, repaired, and broken again. It was impossible to keep any glassware about the place. Mrs. Holly had finally resorted to the use of nothing but aluminum in the way of portable fixtures. And while objects of this material withstood shocks better themselves, they also inflicted considerably more damage on whatever they struck. Time and again one of the terrible three tenants would appear in the morning with a bloodstained bandage about the head, a bruised and swollen mouth or a blackened eye. In view of the circumstances it was reasonable to suppose that they would, at least one of them, move out of the premises. Nothing, however, seemed further from their intention. They clung as leeches to their damp-smelling rooms. All were collectors of things, bottle caps or matchboxes or tin-foil wrappings, and the length of their tenancy was eloquently witnessed by the vast store of such articles stacked about the moldy walls of their bedrooms. It would be hard to say which of the three was the least desirable tenant, but the bachelor in his eighties was certainly the one most embarrassing to a woman of gentle birth and breeding as Isabel Holly unquestionably had been and was.
This octogenarian recluse had run up a great many debts. The last few years he had seemed to be holding an almost continual audience with his creditors. They stamped in and out of the house, in and out, not only during the day but sometimes at the most unlikely hours of the night. The widow Holly’s establishment was located in that part of the old French Quarter given over mostly to honky-tonks and bars. The old man’s creditors were heavy drinkers, most of them, and when the bars closed against them at night, the liquor having inflamed their tempers, they would stop off at Mrs. Holly’s to renew their relentless siege of her tenant, and if he declined to answer the loud ringing and banging at the door, missiles of various kinds were thrown through the panes of the windows wherever the shutters were fallen off or unfastened. In New Orleans the weather is sometimes remarkably good. When this was the case, the creditors of the old man were less obnoxious, at times merely presenting their bills at the door and marching quietly away. But when it was bad outside, when the weather was nasty, the language the creditors used in making demands was indescribably awful. Poor Mrs. Holly had formed the habit of holding her hands to her ears on days when the sun wasn’t out. There was one particular tradesman, a man named Cobb who represented some mortician’s establishment, who had the habit of using the worst epithet in the English language at the top of his voice, over and over again with increasing frenzy. Only the middle-aged women, Florence and Susie, could cope with the tradesman Cobb. When they acted together, he could be driven away, but only at the sacrifice of broken banisters.
The widow Holly had only once made any allusion to these painful scenes between the tradesman Cobb and her bachelor tenant. On that occasion, after a particularly disagreeable session in the downstairs hall, she had timidly inquired of the old man if some kind of settlement couldn’t be reached with his friend from the undertakers.
Not till I’m dead, he told her.
And then he went on to explain, while bandaging his head, that he had ordered a casket, the finest casket procurable, that it had been especially designed and built for him—now the unreasonable Mr. Cobb wished him to pay for it, even before his decease.
This son of an illegitimate child, said the roomer, suspects me of being immortal! I wish it were true, he sighed, but my doctor assures me that my life expectancy is barely another eighty-seven years!
Oh, said poor Mrs. Holly.
Mild as her nature was, she was nearly ready to ask him if he expected to stay in the rooming house all that time—but just at this moment, one of the two indistinguishable female tenants, Florence or Susie, opened the door of her bedroom and stuck her head out.
This awful disturbance has got to stop! she yelled.
To emphasize her demand, she tossed an aluminum washbasin in their direction. It glanced off the head of the man who had ordered his casket and struck Mrs. Holly a terrible blow in the bosom. The octogenerian’s head was bandaged with flannel, several layers of it, and padded with damp cardboard, so the blow did not hurt him nor even catch him off guard. But as Isabel Holly fled in pain down the stairs to the cellar—her usual sanctuary—she glanced behind her to see the powerful old gentleman yanking a wooden post from the balustrade and shouting at Florence or Susie the very same unrepeatable word that the undertaker had used.
FOR PROBLEMS CONFER WITH
A. ROSE, METAPHYSICIAN!
This was the legend which Isabel Holly found on a business card stuck under her door facing Bourbon.
She went at once to the address of the consultant and found him seemingly waiting to receive her.
My dear Mrs. Holly, he said, you seem to be troubled.
Troubled? she said. Oh, yes. I’m terribly troubled. There seems to be something important left out of the picture.
What picture? he asked her gently.
My life, she told him.
And what is the element which appears to be missing?
An explanation.
Oh—an explanation! Not many people ask for that anymore.
Why? Why don’t they? she asked.
Well, you see— Ah, but it’s useless to tell you!
Then why did you wish me to come here?
The old man took off his glasses and closed a ledger.
My dear Mrs. Holly, he said, the fact of the matter is that you have a very unusual destiny in store. You are the first of your kind and character ever to be transplanted to this earth from a certain star in another universe!
And what is that going to result in?
Be patient, my dear. Endure your present trials as well as you can. A change is coming, a very momentous change, not only for you but for practically all others confined to this lunatic sphere!
Mrs. Holly went home and, before long, this
interview, like everything else in the past, had faded almost completely out of her mind. The days behind her were like an unclear, fuzzy negative of a film that faded when exposed to the present. They were like a dull piece of thread she would like to cut and be done with. Yes, to be done with forever, like a thread from a raveled hem that catches on things when you walk. But where had she put the scissors? Where had she put away everything sharp in her life, everything which was capable of incision? Sometimes she searched about her for something that had an edge that she could cut with. But everything about her was rounded or soft.
The trouble in the house went on and on.
Florence Domingo and Susie Patten had quarreled. Jealousy was the reason.
Florence Domingo had an aged female relative who came to pay her a call about once a month, bringing an empty paper bag in the usually vain hope that Florence would give her something of relative value to take away in it. This indigent old cousin was extremely deaf, as deaf, you might say, as a fence pole, and consequently her conversations with Florence Domingo had to be carried on at the top of both their lungs, and since these conversations were almost entirely concerned with the other roomers at Mrs. Holly’s, whatever degree of peace had prevailed under the roof before one of these visits was very drastically reduced right after one took place and sometimes even during its progress. Now Susie Patten never received a visitor and this comparative unpopularity of Susie’s was not allowed to pass without comment by Florence and her caller.
How is old Susie Patten? the cousin would shriek.
Terrible. Same as ever, Florence would shout back.
Does she ever go out anywhere to pay a call? the cousin would yell.
Never, never! Florence would reply at the top of her lungs, and nobody comes to see her! She is a friendless soul, completely alone in the world.
Nobody comes to her?
Nobody!
Never?
Never! Absolutely never!