Albert knowing that and wanting in the flesh. He had got himself a little warm thing, bought her fur coats, sent her money. He could never go to her except when he had been drinking.
He explained to me, when we were drunk together. “I am faithful to my wife, Sherwood.” He had his code. “To be sure I sleep with my Mable but I have been faithful. I never kissed her on the lips.” His reserving that as his own rock on which to stand. I thought it as good as most rocks upon which men stand.
* * *
But I was speaking of women, certain women, who touched me vitally in the flesh, left something with me, it all very strange sometimes. I have just thought of that rather big, thick lipped woman seen in a cheap restaurant, half dive in South State Street. There was a little burlesque show a few doors up the street.
Business men, perhaps clients of the firm for which I worked, explaining to me. The president of our company would have been deacon in some suburban church. “Take these men out and entertain them. You do not need to make an itemized account of expenses.
“I would not want company money spent for anything evil.”
Oh thou fraud.
I would have been blowing money. The burlesque women came down along a dirty alleyway from the stage door of the cheap show and into the restaurant, half dive. They may have got a percentage on the cost of the drinks bought for them.
And there was that big one, with the thick lips, sitting and staring at me. “I want you,” and myself wanting her.
Now! Now!
The evil smell of the terrible little place, street women’s pimps sitting about, the business men with me. One of them made a remark. “God, look at that one.” She had one eye gone, torn out perhaps in a fight with some other woman over some man, and there was the scar from a cut on her low forehead.
Above the cut her shining blue-black hair, very thick, very beautiful. I wanted my hands in it.
She knew. She felt as I felt but I was ashamed. I didn’t want the business men with me to know.
What?
That I was a brute. That I was also gentle, modest, that I possessed also a subtle mind.
The women would have been going and coming in at a back door of the place, as the act they did, a kind of weird almost naked dance before yokels, was due to be repeated. I went out into the alleyway and waited and she came.
There were no preliminaries. Now or never. There were some boxes piled up and we got in behind them. What evil smells back in there. I got my two hands buried deep in her beautiful hair.
* * *
And afterwards, her saying when I asked her the question, “Do you want money?” “A little,” she said. Her voice was soft. There were drunken men going up and down. There was the loud rasping sound from a phonograph, playing over and over some dance tune in the burlesque place.
Can a man retain something? I had no feeling of anything unclean. She laughed softly. “Give me something, fifty cents. I don’t like the foolish feeling of giving it away.”
“O.K.”
Myself hurrying back to the business men, not wanting them to suspect.
“You were a long time.”
“Yes.” I would have made up some quick lie.
That other one, met on a train, when the train was delayed because something went wrong with the engine. Is there a sense in which the natural man loves all women? The train stopping by a wood and that woman and I giving into the mood to gather flowers.
Again. “Now. Now. You will be gone. We may never meet again.”
And then our coming back to the train. She going to sit with an older woman, perhaps her mother, taking her the flowers we had got.
* * *
It was Sally, the quiet one, who saw the white spot. It was in a room in a hotel in Chicago, one of that sort. You go in without luggage. You register. “Mr. and Mrs. John James, Buffalo, New York.” I remember a friend, who was a women’s man, telling me that he always used my name.
We were lying in there in the dark at night, in that rabbit warren of a place. For all I knew the place was full of other such couples. We were in the half sleep that follows, lying in black darkness, a moment ago so close, now so far apart.
Sound of trains rattling along a nearby elevated railroad. This may have been on an election night. There was the sound of men cheering and a band played.
We are human, a male and a female. How lonely we are.
It may be that we only come close in art.
No. Wait.
There is something grown evil in men’s minds about contacts.
How we want, want, want. How little we dare take.
It is very silent, here in the darkness. The sounds of the city, of life going on, city life, out there in the street.
A woman cry of animal gratification from a neighboring room.
We exist in infinite dirt, in infinite cleanliness.
Waters of life wash us.
The mind and fancy reaching out.
Now, for an hour, two, three hours, the puzzling lust of the flesh is gone. The mind, the fancy, is free.
It may have been that fancy, the always busy imagination of the artist man she wanted.
She began to talk softly of the white spot. “It floats in the darkness,” she said softly and I think I did understand, almost at once, her need.
After the flesh the spirit. Minds, fancy, draw close now.
It was a wavering white spot, like a tiny snow white cloud in the darkness of a close little room in a Chicago bad house.
“You not wanting what our civilization has made of us.
“It is you men, males, always making the world ugly.
“You have made the dirt. It is you. It is you.”
“Yes. I understand.”
“But do you see the white spot?”
“Yes. It floats there, under the ceiling. Now it descends and floats along the floor.
“It is the thing lost. It eludes us.
“It belongs to us. It is our whiteness.”
A moment of real closeness, with that strange thing to the male, a woman.
* * *
I had a thought I remember. It was a game played with my brother Earl when I was a lad and he not much more than a babe. We slept together for a time and I invented a game. With our minds we stripped the walls of a room in a little yellow house quite away. We swept the ceiling of our room and the floors away. Our bed floated in space. Perhaps I had picked up a line from some poem. “We are between worlds. Earth is far far beneath us. We float over earth.”
All this on a hot August night but we could feel the coolness of outer space. I explained the game to the woman in the room and we played it, following on our floating bed the white drifting spot her fancy had found in that space.
How strange afterwards, going down into the street. It might have been midnight but the street was still crowded with people.
“And so we did float. We did see and follow the white spot and we are here. You make your living writing advertisements and I have a job in an office where they sell patent medicine.
“I am a woman of twenty-eight and unmarried. I live with my sister who is married.”
The cheap little hotel room for such couples as we were had its office on the second floor. There was a little desk with a hotel register. What rows of Jones, Smiths, and, yes, Andersons. That friend of mine might have been in that place. He might have put my real name down there.
I would have gone down the stairs first, looked up and down the street. “O.K.” The pair of us dodging out. “You’d better take a taxi home. Let me pay.”
“But can you? It is such a long way out. It will cost so much.”
“Yes. Here.”
Who was it invented money? There it lies, the dirty green bill in her hand. The taxi man looking, perhaps listening.
“But, but, does anything of beauty cling to me? Is it to be remembered?”
“Yes. You are very beautiful. Good night.” A lie. There was no beauty. The night, the
street, the city was the night, the street, the city.
Nobody Laughed
* * *
IT wasn’t, more than others of its size, a dull town. Buzz McCleary got drunk regularly once a month and got arrested, and for two summers there was a semi-professional baseball team. Sol Grey managed the promoting of the ball team. He went about town to the druggist, the banker, the local Standard Oil manager and others, and got them to put up money. Some of the players were hired outright. They were college boys having a little fun during their vacation time, getting board and cigarette money, playing under assumed names, not to hurt their amateur standing. Then there were two fellows from the coal mining country a hundred miles to the north in a neighboring state. The handle factory gave these men jobs. Bugs Calloway was one of these. He was a home run hitter and afterwards got into one of the big leagues. That made the town pretty proud. “It puts us on the map,” Sol Grey said.
However, the baseball team couldn’t carry on. It had been in a small league and the league went to pieces. Things got dull after that. In such an emergency the town had to give attention to Hallie and Pinhead Perry.
The Perrys had been in Greenhope since the town was very small. Greenhope was a town of the upper South, and there had been Perrys there ever since long before the Civil War. There were rich Perrys, well-to-do Perrys, a Perry who was a preacher, and one who had been a brigadier general in the Northern army in the Civil War. That didn’t go so well with the other well-to-do Perrys. They liked to keep reminding people that the Perrys were of the old South. “The Perrys are one of the oldest and best families of the old South,” they said. They kept pretty quiet about Brigadier General Perry who went over to the damned Yanks.
As for Pinhead Perry, he, to be sure, belonged to the no-account branch of the Perrys. The tree of even the best Southern family must have some such branches. Look at the Pinametters. But let’s not drag in names.
Pinhead Perry was poor. He was born poor, and he was simpleminded. He was undersized. A girl named Mag Hunter got into trouble with a Perry named Robert, also of the no-account Perrys, and Mag’s father went over to Robert’s father’s house one night with a shotgun. After Robert married Mag he lit out. No one knew where he went, but everyone said he went over into a neighboring state, into the coal mining country. He was a big man with a big nose and hard fists. “What the hell’d I want a wife for? Why keep a cow when milk’s so cheap?” he said before he went away.
They called his son Pinhead, began calling him that when he was a little thing. His mother worked in the kitchen of several well-to-do families in Greenhope but it was a little hard for her to get a job, what with Negro help so cheap and her having Pinhead. Pinhead was a little off in the head from the first, but not so much.
His father was a big man but the only thing big about Pinhead was his nose. It was gigantic. It was a mountain of a nose. It was very red. It looked very strange, even grotesque, sticking on Pinhead. He was such a little scrawny thing, sitting often for a half day at a time on the kitchen step at the back of the house of some well-to-do citizen. He was a very quiet child and his mother, in spite of the rather hard life she had, always dressed him neatly. Other kitchen help, the white kitchen help, what there was of it in Greenhope, wouldn’t have much to do with Mag Perry, and all the other Perrys were indignant at the very idea of her calling herself a Perry. It was confusing, they said. The other white kitchen help whispered. “She was only married to Bob Perry a month when the kid was born,” they said. They avoided Mag.
There was a philosopher in the town, a sharp-tongued lawyer who hadn’t much practice. He explained. “The sex morals of America have to be upheld by the working classes,” he said. “The financial morals are in the hands of the middle-class.
“That keeps them busy,” he said.
* * *
Pinhead Perry grew up and his mother Mag died and Pinhead got married. He married one of the Albright girls . . . her name was Hallie . . . from out by Albright’s Creek. She was the youngest one of eight children and was a cripple. She was a little pale thing and had a twisted foot. “It oughten to be allowed,” people said. They said such bad blood ought not to be allowed to breed. They said, “Look at them Albrights.” The Albrights were always getting into jail. They were horse traders and chicken thieves. They were moon-liquor makers.
But just the same the Albrights were a proud and a defiant lot. Old Will Albright, the father, had land of his own. And he had money. If it came to paying a fine to get one of his boys out of jail, he could do it. He was the kind of man who, although he had less than a hundred acres of land . . . most of it hillside land and not much good, and a big family, mostly boys . . . always getting drunk, always fighting, always getting into jail for chicken stealing or liquor making, in spite, as they said in Greenhope, of hell and high water . . . in spite of everything as, you see, he had money. He didn’t put it in a bank. He carried it. “Old Will’s always got a roll,” people in town said. “It’s big enough to choke a cow,” they said. The town people were impressed. It gave Will Albright a kind of distinction. That family also had big noses and old Will had a big walrus mustache.
They were rather a dirty and a disorderly lot, the Albrights, and they were sometimes sullen and defiant, but just the same, like the Perrys and other big families of that country, they had family pride. They stuck together. Suppose you had a few drinks in town on a Saturday night, and you felt a little quarrelsome and not averse to a fight yourself, and you met one of the Albright boys, say down in the lower end of town, down by the Greek restaurant, and he got gay and gave you a little of his lip, and you said to him, “Come on, you big stiff, let’s see what you’ve got.”
And you got ready to sock him.
Better not to do that. God only knows how many other Albrights you’d have on your hands. They’d be like Stonewall Jackson at the battle of Chancellorsville. They came down on you suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, out of the woods, as it were.
“Now, you take one of that crew. You can’t trust ’em. One of them’ll stick a knife into you. That’s what he’ll do.”
* * *
And think of it, little, quiet Pinhead Perry, marrying into that crew. He had grown up. But that’s no way to put it. He was still small and rather sick looking. God knows how he had lived since his mother died.
He had become a beggar. That was it. He’d stand before one of the grocery stores when people were coming out with packages in their hands. “Hello!” He called all the other Perrys “cousin” and that was bad. “Hello, Cousin John,” or “Cousin Mary,” or Kate or Harry. He smiled in that rather nice little way he had. His mouth looked very tiny under his big nose and his teeth had got black. He was crazy about bananas. “Hello, Cousin Kate. Give me a dime please. I got to get me some bananas.”
And there were men, the smart-alecks of the town, taking up with him too, men who should have known better, encouraging him.
That lawyer . . . his father was a Yank from Ohio . . . the philosophic one, always making wisecracks about decent people . . . getting Pinhead to sweep out his office . . . he let him sleep up there . . . and Burt McHugh, the plumber, and Ed Cabe, who ran the poolroom down by the tracks.
“Pinhead, I think you’d better go up and see your Cousin Tom. He was asking for you. I think he’ll give you a quarter.” Cousin Tom Perry was cashier of the biggest bank in town. One of those fellows, damn smart-alecks, had seen Judge Buchanan . . . the Perrys and the Buchanans were the two big families of the county . . . they’d seen Judge Buchanan go into the bank. He was a director. There was going to be a directors’ meeting. There were other men going in. You could depend on Pinhead walking right into the directors’ room where they had the big mahogany table and the mahogany chairs. The Buchanans sure liked to take down the Perrys.
“You go in there, Pinhead. Cousin Tom has been asking for you. He wants to give you a quarter.”
“Lordy,” said Burt McHugh, the plumber, “Cousin Tom give him a qua
rter, eh? Why, he’d as soon give him an automobile.”
* * *
Pinhead took up with the Albrights. They liked him. He’d go out there and stay for weeks. The Albright place was three miles out of town. On a Saturday night, and sometimes all day on Sundays, there’d be a party out there.
There’d be moon whiskey, plenty of that, and sometimes some of the men from town, even sometimes men who should have known better, men like Ed Cabe and that smarty lawyer, or even maybe Willy Buchanan, the judge’s youngest son, the one who drank so hard and they said had a cancer.
And all kinds of rough people.
There were two older Albright girls, unmarried, Sally and Katherine, and it was said they were “putting out.”
Drinking and sometimes dancing and singing and general hell-raising and maybe a fight or two.
“What the hell?” old Will Albright said . . . his wife was dead and Sally and Katherine did the housework . . . “What the hell? It’s my farm. It’s my house. A man’s king in his own house, ain’t he?”
Pinhead grew fond of the little crippled Albright girl, little twisted-footed Hallie, and he’d sit out there in that house, dancing and all that kind of a jamboree going on . . . in a corner of the big untidy bare room at the front of the house, two of the Albright boys playing guitars and singing rough songs at the tops of their voices.
If the Albright boys were sullen and looking for a fight when they came to town, they weren’t so much like that at home. They’d be singing some song like “Hand Me Down My Bottle of Moon” and that one about the warden and the prisoners in the prison, you know, on a Christmas morning, the warden trying to be Santa Claus to the boys and what the old hard-boiled prisoner said to him, the two older Albright girls dancing maybe with a couple of the men from town—old Will Albright . . . he was sure boss in his own family . . . sitting over near the fireplace, chewing tobacco and keeping time with his feet. He’d spit clean and sharp right through his walrus mustache and never leave a trace. That lawyer said he could keep perfect time with his feet and his jaws. “Look at it,” he said, “there ain’t another man in the state can spit like old Will.”