When the cousin got up to go, Florence Domingo would say to her. Now close your eyes and hold out your paper bag and see what you find in it when you get downstairs. This was her playful fashion of making a gift, and the old cousin was forbidden to look in the bag till she had left the house, and so great was her curiosity and her greed that she’d nearly break her neck in her rush to get out after the gift was presented. Usually it turned out to be a remnant of food of some kind, such as a half-eaten apple with the bitten places turned brown and withered about the edges where Florence had left her tooth marks, but once when the conversation had not gone to suit Miss Domingo, it was the corpse of a rat that she had dropped in the held-out paper bag and the visits had been suspended for three months. But now the visits were going on again and the vexation of Susie Patten was well-nigh indescribable. Then an idea came to her. She launched a counteroffensive and a very clever one, too. Susie invented a caller of her own. Susie was very good at speaking in two voices: that is, she would speak in her own voice and then she would answer in a different one as if she were carrying on a conversation with someone. This invented caller of Susie’s, moreover, was not an old woman. It was a gentleman who addressed her as Madam.
Madam, the invented caller would say. You are wearing your beautiful dotted Swiss today!
Oh, do you like it? Susie would cry out.
Yes, it goes with your eyes, the caller would tell her.
Then Susie would make kissing sounds with her mouth, first soft ones, then very loud ones, and then she would rock back and forth rapidly in her rocking chair and go. Huff, huff, huff! And after a suitable interval she would cry out to herself. Oh, no! Then she would rock some more and go. Huff, huff, again, and presently, after another suitable pause, the conversation would be resumed and in due course it would turn to the subject of Florence Domingo. Disparaging comments would be made on the subject and also upon the subject of the Domingo collection of tin-foil wrappings and the Domingo’s female relative with the paper bag held out for a gift when she left.
Madam, cried Susie’s caller, that woman is not fit to live in a respectable house!
No, indeed, she is not, Susie would agree with him loudly, and all this while Florence Domingo would be listening to every word that was spoken and every sound produced in the course of the long social call. Florence was only half sure that the caller existed, but she could not be completely sure that he didn’t, and her doubt and uncertainty on this subject was extremely nerve-racking, and something really had to be done about it.
Something was done about it.
Isabel Holly, the widow who owned the building and suffered this— what shall we call it?—knew there was going to be trouble in the house when she saw Miss Domingo come in the front door one evening with a medium-sized box labeled EXPLOSIVES.
The widow Holly did not wait for eventualities that night. She went right out on the street, dressed as she was, in a pair of rayon bloomers and a brassière. She had hardly gotten around the corner when the whole block shook with a terrible detonation. She kept on running, shuddering in the cold, till she came to the park, the one beside the Cabildo, and there she knelt and prayed for several hours before she dared to turn back toward her home.
When Isabel Holly crept back to the house on Bourbon, she found it a shambles. The rooms were silent. But as she tiptoed past them, she saw here and there the bloody, inert, and hoarsely panting figures of easily twenty tradesmen including the ruffian Cobb. All over the floors and the treads of the stairs were little glittering objects which first she mistook for fragments of glass, but when she picked one up she found it to be coin. Apparently money had been forthcoming from some quarter of the establishment, it had been cast around everywhere, but the creditors of the old man were still in no condition to gather it up. There must have been a great deal of violence preceding the money’s disbursal.
Isabel Holly tried to think about this, but her brain was like a cracked vessel that won’t hold water, and she was staggering with weariness. So she gave it up and dragged herself to her bedroom. In an envelope half thrust under the door she found a message which only increased the widow’s mystification.
The message went as follows:
“My dear Mrs. Holly, I think that with my persuasion the ghastly disturbance has stopped. I am sorry I cannot wait till you return home as I am sure that you must feel a good deal of sorrow and confusion over conditions here. However I shall see you personally soon, and stay a good deal longer. Sincerely, Christopher D. Cosmos.”
The weeks that followed were remarkably tranquil. All three of the incorrigible tenants remained locked in their rooms apparently in a state of intimidation. The violently paid-off creditors called at the house no more. The carpenters came and patched things up in silence. Telegraph messengers tiptoed up the stairs and rapped discreetly at the roomers’ doors. Boxes began to be carried in and out— It soon appeared to Mrs. Holly’s hardly believing mind that general preparations were being made by the terrible two and one to move from the premises.
As a matter of fact a bulletin corroborating this hopeful suspicion appeared in the downstairs hall not very long afterwards.
“We have decided,” said this bulletin, “in view of your cousin’s behavior, not to maintain our residence here any longer. This decision is absolutely unalterable and we would prefer not to discuss it. Signed: Florence Domingo, Susie Patten, Regis de Winter.” (The signatures of the roomers.)
After her roomers’ departure, Isabel Holly found it harder than ever to concentrate on things. Often during the day she would sit down worriedly at the kitchen table or on her unmade bed and clasp her forehead and murmur to herself. I’ve got to think. I’ve simply got to think! But it did no good, it did no good at all. Oh, yes, for a while she would seem to be thinking of something. But in the end it was always pretty much like a lump of sugar making strenuous efforts to preserve its integrity in a steamingly warm cup of tea. The cubic shape of a thought would not keep. It relaxed and dissolved and spread out flat on the bottom or drifted away.
At last one day she paid another visit to the house of the metaphysician. On his door was nailed a notice; “I’ve gone to Florida to stay young forever. Dear Love to all my enemies. Good-bye.” She stared at it hopelessly for a moment and started to turn away. But just in the nick of time, a small white rodent squeezed from beneath the door and dropped at her feet an envelope sealed as the one that Christopher Cosmos had left at her house the time of the last disturbance. She tore it open and read the following message; “I have returned and am sleeping in your bedroom. Do not wake me up till after seven o’clock. We’ve had a long hard trip around the cape of the sun and need much rest before we start back again. Sincerely, Christopher D. Cosmos.”
When Isabel Holly returned, there was, indeed, a sleeping man in her bedroom. She stood in the door and nearly stopped breathing with wonder. Oh, how handsome he was! He had on the uniform of a naval commander. The cloth was crisp and lustrous as deeply banked winter snow: The shoulders of the coat were braided; the braids were clasped to the garment with ruby studs. The buttons were aquamarine. And the chest of the man, exposed by the unbuttoned jacket, was burnished as fine, pale gold with diamond-like beads of perspiration on it.
He opened one eye and winked and murmured ‘hello’and lazily rolled on his stomach and went back to sleep.
She couldn’t decide what action she ought to take. She wandered vaguely about the house for a while, observing the changes which had occurred in her absence.
Everything now was put straight. It was all spick and span as if a regiment of servants had worked industriously for days, scrubbing and polishing, exacting a radiance from the dullest objects. Kitchen utensils worn away with rust and various other truck which could not be renovated had been thrown into or heaped beside an incinerator. GET RID OF THIS NONSENSE was scrawled on a laundry cardboard in the Commander’s handwriting. Also among the stuff which her marvelous visitor had ordained for destruction were various relics of
the late Mr. Holly, his stomach pump, the formidable bearded photograph of his mother in her daredevil outfit, the bucket of mutton tallow he greased himself with thrice weekly in lieu of bathing, the 970-page musical composition called Punitive Measures which he had striven tirelessly to master upon a brass instrument of his own invention—all of this reliquary truck was now heaped inside or beside the giant incinerator.
Wonders will never cease! the widow murmured as she returned upstairs.
A state of irresolution was not unfamiliar to the widow Holly, but this was the first time that it had made her light-footed as well as lightheaded. She rose to the chambers above with no effort of climbing, as a vapor rises from water into first morning light. There was not much light, not even in the parlor that fronted Bourbon Street, there was hardly more light than might have emanated from the uncovered chest of the slumbering young Commander in her bedroom. There was just light enough to show the face of the clock if she leaned toward it as if to invite a kiss. It was seven o’clock—so soon!
The widow did not have a cold, but as she folded some garments over a nest of pine cones in the parlor fireplace, she began to sniff. She sniffed again and again; all of the muscles under the surface of her chilly young skin began to quiver, for somewhere in the house, tremulous with moments coming and going as almost bodiless creatures might rush through a room made of nothing but doors, someone was surely holding a sugar-coated apple on a forked metal stick above a flame’s rapid tongue, until the skin of it hissed and crackled and finally split open, spilling out sweet juices, spitting them into the flame and filling the whole house, now, all of the chill and dim chambers, upstairs and down, with an odor of celebration in the season of Advent.
(Published 1953)
Hard Candy
Once upon a time in a southern seaport of America there was a seventy-year-old retired merchant named Mr. Krupper, a man of gross and unattractive appearance and with no close family connections. He had been the owner of a small sweetshop, which he had sold out years before to a distant and much younger cousin with whose parents, no longer living, he had emigrated to America fifty-some years ago. But Mr. Krupper had not altogether relinquished his hold on the shop and this was a matter of grave dissatisfaction to the distant cousin and his wife and their twelve-year-old daughter, whom Mr. Krupper, with an old man’s interminable affection for a worn-out joke, still invariably addressed and referred to as “The Complete Little Citizen of the World,” a title invented for her by the cousin himself when she was a child of five and when her trend to obesity was not so serious a matter as it now appeared. Now it sounded like a malicious jibe to the cousins, although Mr. Krupper always said it with a benevolent air, “How is the complete little citizen of the world today?” as he gave her a quick little pat on the cheek or the shoulder, and the child would answer, “Drop dead!” which the old man never heard, for his high blood pressure gave him a continual singing in the ears which drowned out all remarks that were not shouted at him. At least he seemed not to hear it, but one could not be sure about Mr. Krupper. The degree of his simplicity was hard to determine.
Sick old people live at varying distances from the world. Sometimes they seem to be a thousand miles out on some invisible sea with the sails set in an opposite direction, and nothing on shore seems to reach them, but then, at another time, the slightest gesture or faintest whisper will reach them. But dislike and even hatred seems to be something to which they develop a lack of sensibility with age. It seems to come as naturally as the coarsening of the skin itself. And Mr. Krupper showed no sign of being aware of how deeply his cousins detested his morning calls at the shop. The family of three would retire to the rooms behind the shop when they saw him coming, unless they happened to be detained by customers, but the old man would wait patiently until one of them was forced to reappear. “Don’t hurry, I have got nothing but time,” he used to say. He never left without scooping up a fistful of hard candies which he kept in a paper bag in his pocket. This was the little custom which the cousins found most exasperating of all, but they could do nothing about it.
It was this way; the little shop had maintained itself so poorly since the cousins took over that they had never been able to produce more than the interest on the final payment that was due to Mr. Krupper. So they were forced to permit his depredations. Once the cousin, the male one, sourly remarked that Mr. Krupper must have a very fine set of teeth for a man of his years if he could eat so much hard candy, and the old man had replied that he didn’t eat it himself. “Who does?” inquired the cousin, and the old man said, with a yellow-toothed grin, “The birds!” The cousins had never seen the old man eat a piece of the candy. Sometimes it accumulated in the paper bag till it swelled out of his pocket like a great tumor, and then other times it would be mysteriously depleted, flattened out, barely visible under the shiny blue flap of the pocket, and then the cousin would say to his wife or daughter, “It looks like the birds were hungry.” These ominous and angry little jests had been continuing almost without variation over a very long time. The magnitude of the cousins’dislike for the old man was as difficult to determine as the degree of the old man’s insensibility to it. After all, it was based on nothing important, two or three cents’ worth of hard candies a day and a few little apparently innocent exchanges of words among them, but it had been going on so long, for so many years. The cousins were not imaginative people, not even sufficiently so to complain to themselves about the tepid and colorless regularity of their lives and the heartbreaking fruitlessness of their dull will to go on and do well and keep going, and the little girl blowing up like a rubber toy, continually, senselessly and sadly popping the sweets in her mouth, not even knowing that she was doing it, crying sadly when told that she had to stop it, insisting quite truthfully that she didn’t know she had done it, and five minutes later, doing it again, getting her fat hands slapped and crying again but not remembering later, already fatter than either of her fat parents and developing gross, unladylike habits, such as belching and waiting on customers with a running nose and being called Fatty at school and coming home crying about it. All of these things could easily be associated in some way with the inescapable morning calls of old Mr. Krupper, and all of these little sorrows and resentments could conveniently adopt the old man as their incarnate image, which they did…
In the course of this story, and very soon now, it will be necessary to make some disclosures about Mr. Krupper of a nature too coarse to be dealt with very directly in a work of such brevity. The grossly naturalistic details of a life, contained in the enormously wide context of that life, are softened and qualified by it, but when you attempt to set those details down in a tale, some measure of obscurity or indirection is called for to provide the same, or even approximate, softening effect that existence in time gives to those gross elements in the life itself. When I say that there was a certain mystery in the life of Mr. Krupper, I am beginning to approach those things in the only way possible without a head-on violence that would disgust and destroy and which would actually falsify the story.
To have hatred and contempt for a person, as the cousins had for old Mr. Krupper, calls for the assumption that you know practically everything of any significance about him. If you admit that he is a mystery, you admit that the hostility may be unjust. So the cousins failed to see anything mysterious about the old man and his existence. Sometimes the male cousin or his wife would follow him to the door when he went out of the shop, they would stand at the door and stare after him as he shuffled along the block, usually with one hand clasped over the pocket containing the bag of hard candies as if it were a bird that might spring out again, but it was not curiosity about him, it was not interested speculation concerning the old man’s goings and comings that motivated their stares at his departing back, it was only the sort of look that you turn to give a rock on which you have stubbed your toe, a senselessly vicious look turned upon an insensibly malign object. There was not room in the doorway for both o
f the grown cousins, fat as they were, to stare after him at once. The one that got there first was the one that stared after him and the one that uttered the “faugh” of disgust as he finally disappeared from view, a “faugh” as disgusted as if they had penetrated to the very core of those mysteries about him which we are approaching by cautious indirection. The other one of the cousins, the one that had failed to achieve first place at the door, would be standing close behind but with a blocked vision, and the old man’s progress down the street and his eventual turning would be a vicarious spectacle enjoyed, or rather detested, only through the commentary provided by the cousin in the favored position. Naturally there was not much to comment upon. An old man’s progress down a city block is not eventful. Sometimes the one in the door would say. He has picked up something on the sidewalk. The other one would answer. Faugh! What?— momentarily alarmed that it might have been something of value, gratified to learn that the old man had dropped it again some paces beyond. Or the reporter would say. He is looking into a window! Which one? The haberdashery window! Faugh! He’ll never buy nothing… But the comments would always end with the announcement that he had crossed the street to the small public square in which Mr. Krupper seemed to spend all his mornings after the call at the sweetshop. The comments and the stares and the faughs of disgust betrayed no real interest or curiosity or speculation about him, only the fiercely senseless attention given to something acknowledged to have no mysteries whatsoever…
For that matter, it would be hard for anybody to discover, from outside observation not carried to the point of actual sleuthing, what it was that gave Mr. Krupper the certain air he had of being engaged in something far more momentous than the ordinary meanderings of an old man retired from business and without close family ties. To notice something you would have to be looking for something, and even then a morning might pass or part of an afternoon or even sometimes a whole day without anything meeting your observation that would strike you as a notable difference. Yes, he was like almost any other old man of the sort that you see stooping painfully over to collect the scattering pages of an abandoned newspaper or shuffling out of a public lavatory with fingers fumbling at buttons or loitering upon a corner as if for a while undecided which way to turn. Unattached and aimless, these old men are always infatuated with little certainties and regularities such as those that ordered the life of Mr. Krupper as seen from outside. Habit is living. Anything unexpected reminds them of death. They will stand for half an hour staring fiercely at an occupied bench rather than take one which is empty but which is not familiar and therefore seems insecure to them, the sort of a cold bench on which the heart might flutter and stop or the bowels suddenly loosen a hot flow of blood. These old men are always picking little things up and are very hesitant about putting anything down, even if it is something quite worthless which they had picked up only a moment before out of simple lack of attention. They usually have on a hat, and in the South, it is usually a very old white one turned yellow as their teeth or gray as their cracked fingernails and stubbly beards. And they have a way of removing this hat now and then with a gesture that looks like a deferential salute, as if some great invisible lady had passed before them and given them a slight bow of recognition; and then, a few moments later, when the faint breeze has tickled and tousled their scalps a bit, the hat goes back on, more slowly and carefully than it had been removed; and then they gently change their position on the bench, always first curving their fingers tenderly under the ransacked home of their gender. Sighs and grunts are their language with themselves, speaking always of a weariness and a dull confusion, either alleviated by some little change or momentarily aggravated by it. Ordinarily there is no more mystery in their lives than there is in a gray dollar-watch which is almost consumed by the moments that it has ticked off. They are the nice old men, the sweet old men and the clean old men of the world. But our old man, Mr. Krupper, is a bird of a different feather, and it is now time, in fact it is probably already past time, to follow him further than the public square into which he turned when the cousins no longer could watch him. It is necessary to advance the hour of the day, to skip past the morning and the early afternoon, spent in the public square and the streets of that vicinity, and it is necessary to follow Mr. Krupper by streetcar into another section of the city.