them
She left. She had in mind a pawnshop two blocks away, with guns in the window, but at the end of the street, standing there and watching her, was a cop.
So it was coming to an end already: there was a cop.
It was Howard Wendall, dressed up as a cop and so he must be a cop though she hadn’t heard. He began to grin at her, and his lazy, sullen eyes traveled up from Rita’s shoes to Loretta’s frozen face, as if he already knew everything and was waiting for her to confess.
“Where’re you coming home from this time of the day?” he said.
Loretta could not answer.
After a moment he said, “Hey, guess what!”
She stared at him.
“Guess where your old man is!”
“Where?”
“He’s sleeping it off downtown. Got picked up.”
Loretta nodded slowly.
“Him and a few other old guys, they got picked up. Sleeping it off right now,” Howard said.
He was a large young man, in his early twenties but with the premature middle-aged look of certain sullen, crafty, but stupid men who mix their suspicions and their enthusiasms. Loretta had known him for years and had talked to him often in that singsong, mock-sweet style in which she talked to certain men, but he had never exactly been interested in her, and now he stood at the end of the block, on the same sidewalk she was on, waiting for her to confess. The uniform had transformed him. He looked taller and stronger. Fox-faced but not thin, with a slight flush spreading along his cheeks, he tried to grin, but the grin faded at her silence.
“He’s all right, just sleeping it off. He ain’t sick or anything,” Howard mumbled.
His dark brown hair was parted on the right, an exact part. The policeman’s uniform, like the pink dress of Rita’s that Loretta now wore, gave notice that a new life had been started; a big change had taken place. Loretta remembered this Howard Wendall as an older kid who was not the most dangerous or the loudest of the kids but who hung around with them, a kind of second lieutenant, an enthusiastic participant in trouble: in short, a familiar kind of boy. His sly, bold face could work its way from looking vicious to looking empty, and what might be behind it, in his brain, was anybody’s guess. She remembered that he and some other boys had dangled Floyd Sloan over the edge of a roof some years ago, and Floyd Sloan himself was a tough kid.
“I’m in awful bad trouble!” Loretta cried.
And so she brought him back to the apartment, up the stairs and into the kitchen, in silence; and there, there was her room, where she would never go. She began to cry. Howard went to the door of her room and looked inside, then he went inside. He was gone only a few minutes. Then he came back and looked at her, embarrassed and sullen. “You better sit down,” he said. Loretta wept. Her fingers were spread out on Rita’s dress, clutching the material and releasing it in jerky spasms. Howard walked around the kitchen. In his uniform he seemed to take up all the room; he bumped into the table, into the stove. “Damn it,” he said. He was bearish in his silence, sullen and red-faced. After a while he opened the door of the icebox. He pushed a milk bottle aside, he stooped over to lift a plate from a bowl, to see what was inside. Finally he said, letting the door swing shut, giving it an angry push, “Jesus, you really got yourself in it now!”
Loretta sat very still. She could hardly see, she was crying so hard.
He walked around the room. He brushed against her, and his touch was a surprise, almost painful. She could hear him breathing hard. “That goddam dirty little punk, him, he got what he deserved! Good for him!” Howard muttered. His breathing got louder; he was looking from one part of the kitchen to another, not seeing anything, very angry. A kind of rage seemed to rise in him, driving him around and around the table. Loretta wiped her face and watched him. “What the hell,” Howard said violently, looking sideways at her as he passed, “he was a goddam punk. He was asking for it one of these days.” His dark, suspicious eyebrows began to work; thoughts rose in his mind with a terrible angry energy. “All the Malins are no goddam good! The old guy beats the mother even, and everybody knows it. If he fell off a roof or was found out on the street, shot up or run over by a trolley, nobody would give a good goddam anyway. His father wouldn’t. I mean, if he was found up in your room or out back in the alley he’s dead as a doornail, the little bastard, he’s every bit as dead either place! The little bastard!” Howard paused and stared at Loretta. His face was quite red. She could see his chest rise and fall with the effort of his breathing. “Well, you got yourself into it now! You’re really in trouble now!” he said. He bumped against the table and, with his leg, knocked one of the chairs aside. He stared at her, his face working. “You made a mistake, huh? You really made a mistake bringing him up here. Jesus, you made a mistake, you really…”
He stared at her as if fascinated; she had never seen anyone look at her like that. She herself was very still, no longer thinking, only waiting. Howard scratched his head. His hair seemed to come apart—it looked wild right away. The part was jagged.
“Your brother took off and you’re the one who’s left, huh? Well, Jesus, you’re really in trouble now!” He made a whooping sound, mirthless and brief. He grinned at her. “It’s going to be a big joke, and people are going to get a big laugh out of it. That little bastard got what he deserved, good for him, good for your brother! But your brother better stay out of town. You’re the one that’s left, huh? You’re left with that bastard in your bed and, Jesus, what a joke—there ain’t anybody in this town that won’t know about it by noon today, I can guarantee you that.”
He gave an abrupt start forward, coming to her. He took hold of her hair and gave her a shake. “Yes, you made a mistake, you got yourself in number-one trouble, kid, you and him thought you were so smart. And don’t you cry either, I don’t like to see people crying.”
She did not try to get away from him. She sat frozen, still, waiting.
“You made a mistake bringing that dirty little punk up here. Why him, what’s so hot about him?” Howard cried. “Don’t you cry, cut it out. I don’t want to see no goddam crying. It makes me nervous to see people cry, and anyway I ain’t said what has to be done. He could just as soon be found out in the alley as up here, he’s dead as a doornail, huh? What’s the difference, huh? Look, what’s the difference?”
He was agitated, red-faced, very strange. Loretta stared up at him. Their eyes were locked together. “Don’t feel bad,” he said.
They stared at each other for a long moment. Loretta felt nothing at all; her skull was hollow, burned out. Then she heard him unzipping his pants. She half rose, maybe to run out of the place or maybe to make it easier for him, and he grabbed hold of her and the two of them stumbled back against the table. He had begun to moan, clumsily and softly, as if in pain. Loretta saw the dishes still piled in the sink. She saw the clock on the icebox but didn’t have time to see what it said.
“Don’t you worry about it, not that little bastard,” Howard said, clutching at her, pulling up her dress, “don’t you think about him, not about him, the hell with him!”
And then, struggling with Howard, struggling to make it easier for him, she did think of Bernie for the first time: he was dead. She had loved him and he was dead and she would never see him again. Never would he come to her the way Howard was trying to come to her. He was dead, it was over, finished, that was the end of her youth. She tried not to think of it again.
3
Pregnant and married, she went to live with him on the south side of town. In boxes and bags, she packed up the few things she had and moved to an apartment his mother had found for them, not far from Mama Wendall’s own house. It was an imposing street to her, with lines of elms blocking the upper windows of old brick homes, and tattered front yards marked off with lengths of string fixed to sticks stuck in the ground. The yards were marked off precisely. Though kids ran through them and knocked the string and the sticks down, sti
ll the yards were marked off, and Loretta liked this touch of privacy. She felt that she was entering a new life. She was finished with her old life—taking care of her father and Brock, living in that dump, working in that dump, unmarried, on the loose. She was going to forget everything about it. She was going to have a baby. She was a different person.
Here, when she was finished cleaning up the apartment, she could walk up and down the street, balloonlike in her maternity dresses, and talk with other young wives like herself, crooning over their babies or fixing her face into a look of sympathetic anger if they spoke of whatever it was they spoke of—things that worried them, the uncertainty of their husband’s jobs, or the uncertainty of the country or of Europe—so she screwed up her face into a look of sorrow, like an apple withering in a flash and unwithering again by magic.
She was fond of saying to her friends, “Well, people are really good, I found that out. I had a bad problem but somebody helped me out and I can’t complain about the world,” thinking of Howard and how he had saved her, how he had fallen in love with her and married her and changed her life entirely, Howard Wendall appearing out of nowhere early on a Sunday morning, dressed in a policeman’s uniform and come to help her. “Yes, people are really good, deep inside their hearts,” she would say, almost crying, thinking of what her life would have been if Howard had not come along.
Three stories and an attic high, their house was imposing to her too, because, apart from the house her father had had many years before, she’d never really lived in a house. She faced it with a pointed solemnity, gazing up at the peak of the roof so mountainous above her as she turned up the short front walk. Flushed with excitement in the early autumn air, excited by gossip from her new friends and the prospect of this baby she was going to have, she stared up at the very top—the roof of dark green shingles, edged with moss in delicate patches, the great brick chimney soot-darkened and amazingly high, set off against the autumn air. The house itself was made of brick, darkened by time, but very sturdy and like a fortress, and its windows, set in their frames of painted wood, were enormous. The house had been trimmed not long before: window frames and door frames and miscellaneous trimming done in dark green. The house faced another house across the street, not quite identical, the two of them set in opposition like seasoned soldiers wary of each other but withdrawn from action—the kids who played about the front yards and front porches, stirring up noise and splattering mud, made the houses seem all the more gigantic and silent. Their look was silent. Loretta had dreams about this house, about her living alone in it, owning it, being able to lock all the doors and windows and owning everything: her own house!
From the front porch to the sidewalk stretched perhaps ten feet of ground given over to a kind of lawn, its barriers of string and sticks long since broken down but its grass flourishing in odd patches, and in other patches sunk with footprints and the ruts of small wheels; in the spring grass seed had been scattered out here by Mr. St. Onge himself, the landlord, but rain had pushed all the seeds into the deepest gullies and only there did bright green grass thrive. St. Onge liked to catch Loretta going in or out and tell her about his troubles. He was a slight man with worried blue eyes and an inquisitive mouth, and though Howard told her to keep the hell away from him—St. Onge was a troublemaker, always calling the police to report people trying to break into his house or kids fooling around outside—still Loretta hadn’t the heart to avoid him. She let him whine into her polite, glistening face; she let him talk to her about his married daughter, his dead wife, the other roomers in the house, about the people next door and across the street, and about people who had once lived in the house but were now gone, even dead. St. Onge was suspicious about all change. He had his ideas about why the bus routes had been changed. He had his ideas about the Mayor, the Governor, the President. Listening to him, or not quite listening to him, Loretta thought of an advertisement for some kind of insurance—a man and his shadow, that warning shadow, that was a sign maybe of death or old age or trouble to come, an advertisement she saw all the time and that discomforted her.
Loretta’s closest friend, Janette, was a trim little girl with two children already and flashing wicked eyes, who had enticed Loretta into taking part in a worldwide chain letter that promised Loretta $1,000 in cash exactly one year and a day after she paid her dollar—this was done without Howard’s knowing, of course. The girl knew everything, more than St. Onge. Her information was shrewder and crueler than his. She knew about miscarriages women on the block had had, beatings from drunken husbands; she knew about arguments with in-laws, and whose car was being repossessed, and whose younger sister was in trouble. But her main theme was how good this neighborhood was, how clean it was, how much better than the place she had come from that had wops practically around the corner and colored just on the other side of a block of warehouses—and the essence of it was that they had all come very close to the edge of something, their parents especially, and some of the older people had breathed this in and turned terrified and helpless for life, but they, the young, they with their new babies and their new husbands, were on their way up and never would the bottom fall out again. The government in Washington was like a net set up not ten feet below them, to save them.
Janette’s husband drove a truck, which was common; but Howard, a patrolman, took on the stature of a dangerous man, better kept at a distance, but admired and feared. Loretta’s little friend prodded and teased her to talk about him. What kind of a man was he? Was he very brave? Did he use his gun much on the job? Had he ever killed anybody? Was he very loving to Loretta? Was he happy about her being pregnant? Shyly Loretta drew back from discussing him; not that she wasn’t puzzled at times by his silence or the sudden eruption of his words and anger or his beery, abrupt love-making, but she was demure enough to keep such things to herself, away even from Howard and Howard’s mother, who urged her to come over all the time—she was a good girl, she knew enough not to tell secrets, she knew that there were certain things you must never say out loud.
Janette had crazy ideas: on their walks she would look up at the houses they passed, and if it happened somehow that all the shades in the front windows formed a straight line, even and neat, she would grab hold of Loretta’s arm and say, “Now, that means good luck. Lucky for us.” Or, seeing an aged, mean-looking woman, the same woman it seemed they were always seeing, she would grab hold of Loretta’s arm and say, “I bet that old hag is fixing a curse on us. Because she’s old and we’re young.” It worried Loretta to think that maybe the future might be decided that way; she knew that such things were wrong, the Church said they were wrong, but still they worried her. She said nothing about Janette to Howard. He didn’t like Janette, just as he didn’t like St. Onge or the men he worked with, though nothing in his life suggested he would get anything better, so Loretta kept quiet about Janette, and when Howard came home at night she talked to him about things they needed for the apartment, things she had seen downtown, or she talked about her father and his troubles or what Mama Wendall had said that day.
She had come into the fulfillment of her life, Loretta thought, and it was a solid, good feeling to think that she would probably live here forever, watching the kids in the neighborhood growing up, sharing complaints and good news with all her friends, urging her husband to play pinochle with their husbands, bringing up her children. Everything was fixed and settled, good. There would be a time, even, when Mama Wendall would not be around. Loretta liked Howard’s mother well enough but imagined surprise deaths for her, accidents. But really she liked his mother. Janette said, “I don’t see how you can stand that old bitch,” but Loretta never answered. The two of them played Chinese checkers often, out on the porch, and leafed through romance comic books with pages softened by dirt.
The veranda of the house was furnished with several wicker chairs and a wicker sofa, painted black but now chipped a little, and cushions that had to be taken in at night, and on the broad
railing there were plants with flat thin leaves. The veranda was partly shaded. During the day someone kept a radio on nearby and Loretta could hear it, a soft murmur of music and words, a kind of lullaby; most of the songs were about love. She herself did not think about love any longer, but she liked the music and she went around singing the words. Life had stopped for her and she could relax, sleep. She liked to go to the movies with Janette once or twice a week—Ginger Rogers dancing, Errol Flynn fighting—and the movies passed before her eyes and left her a little more content, as if her life were somehow becoming more settled. It was like the odor that pervaded the house, something you couldn’t figure out. It was not just a smell of food—it seemed to have coal dust mixed up in it; it was not really unpleasant. On humid days it was heavy. There was a slightly sulphurous, oniony tinge to the air, so different from the stale, sickish odor of the apartment where her father still lived. And she liked Howard’s cigars, the smoke that somehow cleared a certain territory in their own apartment, pushing other odors away. Everything was taken in, absorbed, woven into the sweet, slumbrous density of her married life, for which she had even been given a new body.
One day she went to take a few dollars over to her father. But the old man was gone, the apartment empty, and she had to ask around the building to find out what had happened. Someone told her he’d been taken to the hospital. Which hospital? Loretta asked, but the woman didn’t know. So she went to the main hospital, but he wasn’t there; the receptionist told her he must be at the State Hospital. “The State Hospital is for crazy people,” Loretta said, stunned. She hurried away to get out of that woman’s sight. State Hospital! Her father was committed! She took a trolley back to the old neighborhood, perspiring in the early October heat, and anxious to see a familiar face, and she finally went over to the place where Rita worked and asked her if she knew anything.