With Shuddering Fall

  As if Shar knew what was going on, he faced them with a mock grin. He sat down heavily and poured a drink out of the new bottle he had bought. “Karen?” he said. She said “no” and turned aside.

  As the hours passed, the tavern became more crowded and noisy. It was a small, shanty-like building out in the country, not far from a swamp, which Max had noticed on the way into Synderdale and had admired for its authenticity. His own money made by investments in gambling spots and taverns of a more sophisticated nature, Max showed unashamed sentimentality about country taverns. He liked, he had explained, the kind of people one met there; he liked the muddy floors, the jukeboxes, the country girls with their big smiles and strong arms. He liked the old neon signs and the old-fashioned bars and rickety tables and the proud photographs, yellowed by time, that showed local hunters with moose and deer and bears subdued by their guile and skill. “I love their lives,” he cried, waving at the boisterous crowd. “I love to see them so—they’re happy, they enjoy themselves! They don’t think about it—they drink, they dance, the floor shakes with their joy!”

  It shook now, not only with the feverish dancing at the far end of the place, but with scufflings and aborted fist fights. Karen watched them cautiously. She had seen men eying her, at the same time, and in almost the same way that they eyed Shar: it was an envy not far from open spite. At the bar Jerry sat drinking, perched up on a stool with the black-haired woman leaning seriously toward him. The doctor had been forced to move and now sat behind Max, though not at the table with him and Shar and Karen. Groups of men circulated, laughing importantly, calling out friendly insults. Mosquitoes buzzed about the lights as if driven insane by the noise. Karen tried to close her eyes against the whirling faces and eyes and smells, but she was jerked awake by the slow, fond conversation between Shar and Max that was drifting toward her. Max was saying, “I have talked with her and I believe we are getting to know each other better. We are beginning to communicate. She has opened my heart wider, I will see you more clearly, more completely, through her—”

  Two men appeared at the table to interrupt this. One was a young Negro, absurdly dressed; he looked like something professional—doctor, minister, schoolteacher. The other was a slovenly young man with wild hair and a slack, pouting face and clothes stained with grease. From the conversation, Karen gathered that these men were employed by Max. One of them, the Negro, seemed favored; Shar invited him to sit down. The other pulled up a chair as well. Both were fairly drunk.

  Max was eating oysters now. He offered them some: the Negro declined graciously, the other scooped out an oyster and stuffed it into his mouth. Watching him, Karen felt a swirling of nausea. She saw that as he ate his eyes wandered over to her and—incredibly—seemed to hint at recognition, comradeship. She looked away. The talk now centered about the race: moments were relived, details repeated. Snatches of conversations with other people were told. The plump young man—his name was Ponzi—talked with skill, evoking imagery and impressions that showed his imagination. Max and Shar listened to him in silence. The Negro put a hand on his shoulder, looking a little embarrassed, but Ponzi ignored him. “Found me sitting in his room! I was sitting in there when he came in—him and a woman! Such a woman, such big blond hair!” Ponzi said. “He got mad and asked me what I wanted and damned if I could think of it—couldn’t think of it.” He hiccuped sadly. “Found me sitting in the dark. I used to sit in the dark, by myself, in one of the upstairs closets—had to get away from them.”

  Jerry came over to the table, followed by the women. They touched their hair, looking at Shar. One of them, the sly-faced one with black hair, crowded in next to Karen. Ponzi, instead of giving way to these people, instead of taking the hint his Negro friend gave him—that he was annoying Shar and Max—began to talk louder, not even giving himself time to eat any oysters. Jerry reached over Shar’s shoulder and took an oyster, dipped it in the sauce, and ate it with obvious satisfaction. The women, offered some, demurred sweetly; they made tiny gestures with their long painted nails. Clouds of smells—perfume and beer—made Karen feel faint.

  Ponzi was still talking. “The goddamnedest thing! Mitchie here told me not to tell it—says he ain’t got the stomach or the ears to hear it—Those people on the grass. I went out back just in time to see it—wasn’t trying—hell, I didn’t know it would happen. How would I know that? Did I come on purpose to see that, or the accident either? Mitchie says he took care of two cousins of his that lived with them, that had—that were—” He tapped his forehead decisively. “Says he got along with them good and played with them—so he can take care of me; thinks I’m a little loony! He does!” He gave the Negro a playful punch. A girl dressed as a baton twirler appeared behind the Negro, gripping his shoulders; when he looked around she bent and smiled into his face as if they were well acquainted. With the approach of this girl the two women tensed. They had hardly noticed Karen. “Well, these people piled up like sardines in that what-do-you-call-it—a homemade grandstand some bastard built out of pipes or whatever it was,” Ponzi went on, louder. “On the top they had bottles and were dumping them out on the ones beneath, to make them yell. And they had bags full of lunch, too—eating like pigs. Mostly men on top, a couple of kids. There were five levels. A lot of kids, they jiggled it—probably caused the trouble. A whole lot of people. The cars were going around the farthest turn and somebody probably leaned over to look, or maybe some of the kids scuffling around—and the goddam thing begins to tilt! Starts tilting! Everybody screams. Did you hear that? Or maybe you couldn’t—too much noise already. The people sitting down in the grass around it point and gape like mad and watch it come down—slow as anything—there was enough time for a couple of men to scramble off and jump off the back—they got away. It fell over and crushed them all together! Poor bastards!” Ponzi cried. Karen saw that there was something peculiar about his face—it was mocking and anguished at once. The young girl—she was about Karen’s age—put her arms around the Negro’s neck and leaned against him, peeping over his shoulder at the rest of the people. She had big arms, a little flabby at the tops, but was pretty in a broad, blunt, happy way; her lips glistened. Karen saw Shar watching her. “They screamed and screamed—two or three of them were dead right away, broken necks, and some others had backs broken—or cracked—whatever happens to a back,” Ponzi giggled shrilly. “I don’t know. And wriggling around! Wriggling with arms and legs sticking out of the pipes, wrapped around the pipes, some of them crawling out—blood in their hair—I got over there—some people came to help—I helped them—I—” As if this were saying too much, he returned to his earlier tone. He said with mocking relish, “All around them people sat on on blankets, drinking beer and eating chicken—cold chicken! You could smell it! Some of them gave us their blankets, some came over to help—the ambulance got there then—Most of them kept right on watching the race and eating. They wouldn’t be bothered. I got a blanket away from one of them—dirty bastard!—I put it over a girl to hide her, her face was—it was—She didn’t die, I don’t think she died,” Ponzi said, “but she was—She couldn’t scream, even, it was so—”

  Jerry, catching a glance from Max, went to the young man and poked him in the back with a finger. “Outside,” he said. “You can puke it up outside. We had enough of it.”

  “But I was just telling you!” Ponzi said, blinking as if sweat had run stinging into his eyes. “Thought you’d want to know! Didn’t you want to know?” He leaned around clumsily and looked at Karen, who had drawn back from the table; she stared at him as if he were a creature in a nightmare. The women looked at Karen as if she had just appeared beside them. Shar stared at her—furiously. Karen murmured, without thinking, “You’ve suffered.”

  Ponzi was herded outside. He seemed to go without any protest. Mitchie followed him—he explained to them he had promised to keep Ponzi out of trouble. He wished that crazy white man had let him alone—all white men told him their troubles, that was because he was Negro so
it didn’t count. They could tell him anything they wanted, no matter how bad it made them look. Later on, if they decided to hate him, that was all right too—they would feel good about it. It joined them to the brotherhood of white men! Mitchie got his laugh and turned to leave; he was liked by them, Shar and Max approved of him, though as soon as he left he was forgotten. The girl in the satin outfit sat down plumply in his seat, smiling in a veritable sweat of anticipation.

  “A loud-mouthed bastard,” Jerry said, reaching for another oyster. “I’ll drown him in a pan full of grease tomorrow.”

  Shar had not spoken for some time. During most of Ponzi’s monologue he had been drinking steadily and staring at Karen. When he put down his glass she saw that his hand was trembling. He pointed across the table at her. “What did you say to him! You said something to that fat son of a bitch! I heard you!”

  The women shivered deliciously; the girl, her mouth opening wetly, looked around at Karen. She blinked to see Karen there—she had not noticed her before. “She was sorry for him—nothing more—As we all were,” Max said, putting a hand out on Shar’s arm. To his chagrin, Shar jerked away.

  “A bitch! A cheap bitch!” Shar said. Karen saw how he hated her. “Come crawling to me for it! Left the old man bleeding like a pig—flat on his back in the mud! She did that—she did that! She sucks me,” he said, “sucks me—She kills me—”

  Max looked alarmed, but Jerry, standing back, just watched in amusement. The doctor’s eyes wandered briefly to Shar’s face and then drifted away. Karen sat, feeling everyone’s eyes on her, in a trance of fear—yet, beyond the fear, her mind worked clearly, without confusion; she knew who she was. “Sucks me dry! Sucks me dry!” Shar shouted, showing his teeth. “She wants to kill me!”

  Max stood, jarring the table. It was his intention to get Karen out of the tavern, but Shar, yelling across the cluttered, seed-strewn table, kept on, his voice climbing to hysteria: “Sucks me! Sucks me! The old man flat on his back—mud—the other one shriveling up to a bunch of ashes! She comes to me! She comes to me!”

  Max and Jerry got Karen out. They fended their way through the fascinated crowd, Karen closing her eyes against the looks, against the hungry faces of the men around her. At the door Max cried out: some kids were playing with a long, limp snake. “Get it away! Get it away!” Max screamed. When Jerry had taken care of it they went outside to the car. They only had to wait a minute for the doctor, who ran up, panting, and climbed in the back seat. Driving away, they heard a happy roar of music and voices.

  It was fortunate the doctor had come, for Max soon had need of him. To quiet his nerves, to ward off an attack of some sort, he accepted pills that the doctor gave him—his big fingers, still sticky, trembled as he raised them to his mouth. His breath was labored and frightened and he seemed to have forgotten Karen. Jerry, on Karen’s other side, drove fast; he was sullen and angry. “What the hell is he going to do with three of them!” he muttered to himself.

  12

  She could not believe that in the morning her life would not continue as usual. Back in the hotel room she had stood for a while at the window, looking down at the crowded street with the curtains held aside as if she were expecting someone down there to glance up at her suddenly. Her isolation made her feel viciously powerful, yet she was conscious always of the gentle, sickening loss of her power, a failure she could not admit, as she had never been able to admit when she was a child that after some trivial argument her father had really forgotten about her and was not going to seek her out to ask forgiveness. Behind her the room was cluttered, the bed rumpled and dirty. In the sullen light nothing looked familiar, though it was the same room—it was always the same room—she had lived in for months.

  It was not the thought that something was going to happen that paralyzed her with anger, but rather the knowledge that she could not control it. She took a shower, wasting time, standing with her head bowed and her eyes closed. She played back to herself things that had happened that day, thinking of Shar and of Max. Their faces appeared in her mind’s eye like faces in comic strips or cartoons, creatures bereft of life and soul, therefore invulnerable. And had she come so far, she thought angrily, to discover that he was not vulnerable? In the bathroom mirror she watched herself without interest, drying her hair, combing it out. The ceiling light cast shadows down upon her. Little lines appeared about her mouth and under her eyes. She looked older than her sister, her face like a mask as indifferent to itself as to anyone else. Staring at that face, she understood that Shar would not be with her tonight; and she did not wonder at him. He was with another woman. And yet, she thought, her face twisting, becoming so ugly she had to look aside, he would not forget her that easily. He would think of her, just as she thought of him. The fact that she thought of him would force him to think of her; he would not be free. In the other woman’s face he would see her face and when the woman touched him he would feel Karen touching him. . . .

  She walked slowly about the room, pleased at her own calmness. Now and then she stumbled into something and drew back dreamily, setting it straight, picking it up and staring at it, letting it fall again to the floor. She had not just recently learned the value of forced, feigned calm; it had been with her for years. Her father had taught her that. Had she not witnessed the perfect control with which he had faced death?—her own mother’s death, when Karen was still a child, and she and the others had been forbidden to enter that queer-smelling room for so long. Men spoke of his steadiness at hunting; there was some story, some vague story of a wounded bear, she remembered, a dog torn in half, and her father . . . her father doing something, something unexpected and brave. She and her brothers had tried to envision that scene from the fragments they had been given; it had inspired them to ecstasies. Her childish nightmares pitted bear against father, a match of insane brutality that she could not stop, could not look away from, as if the blood had fascinated her. From these dreams she had awakened sobbing with terror, the bedclothes twisted around her like arms or legs, struggling to hold her down.

  The bed was still a little damp. Karen pulled the sheet up and lay on top of it. With the overhead light on—a grimy, fly-filled globe—she lay in a stupor approaching sleep. She knew she should turn out the light but she did not want to get up. At the point at which sleep began her mind warned her against it and jerked her awake. It was as if she were being drawn toward a great dark hole, a kind of mouth. Dreams and fragments of dreams crowded her mind. Shar in the silver auto—Shar with his helmet, his green goggles, walking somewhere as precisely as any machine—yet when she approached him he turned and was someone else. He snatched off the goggles and stared at her in dismay, as if he too were sorry they did not know each other. Karen was seized by a sensation of hatred, and she thought for the first time in her life that hatred charged her, nourished her, prodded her along. She hated all strangers. She hated the vast, strange world that she could not control, that her family could not control, that her father did not even know about. In this town her father might wander down on the street, alone, unrecognized. . . . “I hate all strangers,” Karen said.

  This woke her. She sat up suddenly as if she supposed herself in danger. Her arms and legs were stiff and her throat dry. When she went to the window and looked out she sensed that it was hours later, perhaps almost dawn. The street was deserted and the hotel was quiet. Her hands clasped before her, she looked around as if she expected to see Shar. In the light the room was yellowed and tattered, the wallpaper stained at the ceiling with brown watermarks. One of them was in the shape of a gigantic cockroach; this caught her eye. She wondered what she would say to Shar in the morning. For the first time silence might fail her. It might not be strong enough. She had always felt her silent, limp passivity to be powerful, a bloodless power she knew was not admirable but could not be matched by real passion. Shar’s violence would burn itself out, but Karen’s silence was static and could not be wearied. When, after a one-sided argument, Shar would seize
her and press his face against her and tell her he was sorry, he was sorry, she felt how precarious was his strength and how tormented he was by her quiet assurances that he had not hurt her, she was all right. She would pretend not to understand his anguish. Yet if he came to her in silence and did not hide his face, if he simply looked at her in this ugly light, judging and assessing her, she did not believe herself strong enough to face him. Her fingers twitched. They might have been yearning for something—the scissors in the kitchen drawer at home, the fishing knife one of her brothers had found.

  But at the back of her mind, dreamily, was the stubborn conviction that nothing had changed. He could not have gone to another woman, she did not believe it. She could not imagine it. Had he really so much freedom apart from her that he could do things she could not even imagine? She did not believe it. It was impossible that she could be unfaithful to him—she was disgusted by the thought—and so it was impossible that he could be unfaithful to her. Before this knowledge her superficial worries ebbed dizzily. Such things did not happen. Yet, at the window, she closed her fist in the curtain. If it were true, somehow, it would still mean nothing. At the instant of his passion he could think only of her—in his imagination it would be Karen who held him. He would never be free of her.

  She opened the closet door. Idly she looked through her clothes, as if they might tell her something. The blue dress she had worn to the race: once she and Shar had been walking somewhere and she had had that dress on and she had noticed him glancing at her—how fiercely proud she had been, how she had wanted to take his arm and feel his hard muscle under her fingers! And the white dress, now a little soiled. Karen had bought it one afternoon by herself, wasting time again until Shar was finished at the track. In the store mirror her smug little reflection had stared back at her coldly, contrived by her art to look ageless. She had been isolated, complete; a stranger. The other women in the store were commonplace, they bustled about and touched things, asked prices, chatted with saleswomen; not Karen. She had felt feverishly isolated. What pride, what ferocious satisfaction! The ordinary lives of those ordinary women trailed in and out of the store and were not capable, even, of assessing Karen; she had felt that. Watching herself in the mirror, her shoulders taut, her eyes deliberating, avoiding the pleased face of the saleswoman at her shoulder, she had held her jaw so rigid that her teeth had begun to ache. And now she remembered what she had thought then, what had come to her suddenly without preparation: she had thought, I am losing my mind. She had wanted to lean forward and touch the mirror, perhaps embrace her image in it, but of course she had done nothing. She had stood with her arms stiff at her sides and her jaws paralyzed until the moment passed. Her terror had been such that she might have been staring out into some future room, that reflection staring past her and into the future and yet seeing nothing. So that was her mirrored self—a face unrelated to her, to her soul, a mockery of what she knew she was (for she knew who she was, always; inside her, somewhere in her heart, or in her brain, somewhere, was her true self), a distraction. Only to herself was her soul revealed. It was defined only in terms of what it had surrendered itself to: to claims of blood and duty, to love, to religious ecstasy. In itself it had no existence. It was like, she thought wildly, the things that lay about this dirty room—clothes, shoes, suitcases—things that had no existence without her to see them. “We are kin,” Max had said to her once, seated fatly in some other hotel room just like this one, when Shar was away. And that was true, Karen thought. For just as Karen realized she had no existence without the greater presence of someone to acknowledge her (her father; God), so did Max realize that his existence depended upon the life of others. If some men supposed themselves free it was only because they did not understand that they were imprisoned—bars could be made of any shadowy substance, any dreamy loss of light.