This street hurried along, widening and becoming more populated, until it turned (with the large intersection where four department stores faced one another dourly, each stubbornly insisting that its bargains were more bargainful than the others’, each featuring, in its own decor and color scheme, a Garden Restaurant, or a Spanish Tea Room, or a Black Watch Grill, or a Bayou Terrace) into the center of town, and became a busy, imperative, trafficked Main Street. Here one might find the better dress shops, here were a candy store and a bookstore—which also sold novelties and souvenirs—here were the restaurants with Men’s Grills and Business Men’s Lunches, and the jewelry store and the large hotel with afternoon Thé Dances. Here the buses congregated, and the radio station sent its antenna curiously, skyward. There were offices where secretaries (local girls who could not afford college) typed busily, and a radio store, and a toy store, and a bank.
If a child building with blocks had planned a city, saying, “This is the town, and here is where the people go to shop, and here is where the man lives, and here is where the lady takes her little boy to the dentist, and here is the school, and when you want to go to the park it is here, and then here is where the trains go, and the station with the station man is right here, and . . .”—if such a child, building on a rainy afternoon, had planned a city, he might have planned it to look like this one: square, respectable, carefully designed without criminal or foreign or unsubmissive elements, boasting of its college, fostering within itself a small and very decent community organization, a community playhouse, a health center, a fearless and extraordinarily biased newspaper, and all the other elements necessary in a city to keep its loyal inhabitants from becoming restless, or uncharitable, or content.
Down this street—turning from School Street to Bridge Street and from there onto Main Street, Natalie and Tony came, almost dancing; it was twenty minutes to eight.
“Three of wands,” said Natalie, stopping in front of the antique shop and indicating the three-section candelabra.
Tony, who was required by the rules of the game to give the Tarot meaning of the card symbol Natalie had found, thought for a minute and then said, “Established strength. Trade, commerce, discovery. Ships crossing the sea. Reversed, the end of troubles.”
“I saw three ships a-sailing,” said Natalie meaninglessly, but they both laughed.
“Three of pentacles, then,” said Tony, indicating a pawn-broker’s sign which stood unobtrusively but emphatically just around the corner, as though hiding from preference rather than timidity.
“Nobility, aristocracy,” said Natalie. “Reversed, pettiness.”
“I wonder what the rest of them do with their time?” Tony said absently. “Do you think they go on to their classes as usual? Or has the whole college faded away or blown into dust or collapsed—”
“—or crumbled or snapped out like a light—”
—Just because we’ve gone? Tony thought. “We are on a carpet,” she announced soberly. “It unrolls in front of us, but in back of us it rolls up and there is nothing under it.”
“The immediate spot where we are walking is the only immediate spot there is,” Natalie said.
“Ace of cups,” Tony said, pointing to the fire hydrant.
“House of the true heart,” said Natalie. “Joy, fertility.”
“Reversed, revolution,” Tony said.
“Better still,” Natalie said, “suppose they’re all just frozen where they were when we left? Like in the Arabian Nights, and everything stays like that for a thousand years.”
“They are all turned into black and red and gold fish,” Tony said, “We must come back and strike three times upon the ground with a staff of brass.”
“Ace of wands,” said Natalie immediately.
“The origin of all things. Reversed, ruin.”
There was so much money in fifteen dollars that they had no need to be lavish all at once, always providing that they were correct in assuming that money was actually a medium of exchange. Perhaps, indeed—they never could know for sure, from one dollar to the next—the green bill or heavy silver coin proffered to the man behind the counter might be met with an incredulous stare, or guffaws, and payment insisted upon in blades of grass, or handfuls of milk, or some unidentified substance which everyone could see and touch but themselves. In a strange country one must be extremely cautious; “Shall we have just coffee to start?” Tony asked.
They were far enough into the center of town to find a drugstore easily. They sat together at the counter, looking at each other and at themselves in the mirror facing them. Natalie, on the right (the one on the right was Natalie?) looked very thin and fragile in the black sweater; Tony, (on the left?) seemed dark and saturnine in blue. Neither of them looked at all like the girls in bathing suits who lounged colorfully in the soft drink ads over the mirror. Tony’s face was quite pale in the sanitary fluorescent lights of the drugstore, and beyond their two faces, crowding into the picture and immense in their piled variety, were the wares of the shopkeeper: ointments against the sun, dolls—perhaps charms against the evil spirit? were these natives superstitious?—boxes of candy and boxes of candy without sugar, and an infinite number of articles to be used in the control of light: gadgets to make light, gadgets to shut out light, gadgets to improve and distill light, gadgets that operated only upon light or that operated only upon the absence of light, books questioning the source of light and books wondering about the speed of light and books denying the existence of light or recommending its use as food. There were also an infinite number of articles to control air, and articles to control water, and articles to control fire and wind and rain, and many articles, indeed, to control, most effectively, earth. One section of the store—and only a corner of this could be reflected in the mirror—was devoted entirely to nostrums for controlling the human body, and this department, unlike the others, was small and dignified and its transactions were conducted in low voices. Tony and Natalie in the mirror were exactly at a height, their shoulders touching and beyond their heads the glitter of chromium.
At last Tony said peacefully, “Let’s go to the station.”
Natalie nodded; because the money was in the pocket of the blue raincoat Tony was wearing, it was Tony who offered money to the man behind the counter and it was accepted without comment.
When they came out of the drugstore the town was beginning to fill up with people on their way to work and Tony said carelessly, as they went down the sidewalk, “Be late for work if we don’t move along.”
“I’ve got to do five reports for the old man this morning,” Natalie said immediately. “Got to be in the mail this afternoon. Reports to the higher authorities on people caught doing the same things day after day, recommending the ultimate punishment.”
“Old lady Langdon caught us smoking in the washroom yesterday,” Tony went on, “and said she’d report it to the old man.”
“She wouldn’t dare,” Natalie said. “Anyway, let’s quit. Let’s just not go into the office this morning. Let’s go to Siam instead.”
“They ought to pension off old Langdon,” Tony said. “Let’s go to Peru.”
They passed the town’s biggest hotel; workmen on scaffolds were washing it down with power hoses and Tony and Natalie stopped shamelessly to watch. The fine spray from the hoses drifted down onto them through the foggy drizzle, and settled small drops in their hair.
“This is the only city I know,” Tony said, “where if it’s raining already they throw more water on you.”
They walked on after a while, moving wherever they pleased but always bearing toward the railroad station. They stopped and stared at a cab driver who was trying to clean bird droppings off his windshield; they splashed in the water in the gutter.
They came at last into the railroad station hand in hand, small in the great doorway, dwarfed by the stained-glass window above their heads. At the top of
the great sweeping stairway they paused and looked down on the people below, all so sure of their several destinations; they listened to the message of the train caller standing honorably at his desk beneath the clock and obedient to the will and the distant voices of the trains, translating by permission the great sounds to any who cared to listen.
Natalie and Tony came down the great stairway, down the wide aisle, and slid into seats in one of the rows, listening and watching; they perceived the thin thread of taxicabs which was all that held people in the station to the city outside, the transparent fine barrier of imminent going and coming, of being irresistibly called away or brought back, the conscious virtue of creatures selected to travel with the trains, the harmony of the discipline that controlled his huge, functioning order, where no head was uncounted and no ticket unhonored; they heard the distant paternal urging of the trains.
Oddly enough, Elizabeth Langdon and the rest came here only of necessity, with the intention of leaving this place as soon as they reached it. And yet two people who wanted earnestly to be strangers might sit here for hours and never lose the quick sense of being about to go away, and might probably never see anyone who knew their names, or cared to remember them. After a while Tony and Natalie rose quietly and went down the aisle again and into the station restaurant. They sat down at a table overlooking the nervous movements of the taxicabs and the suitcases set unerringly in the puddles, and ordered ham and eggs and orange juice and toast and griddlecakes and doughnuts and coffee and sweet rolls. They ate lavishly, passing bits of food to one another, regarding contentedly the glass domes on the coffeepot behind the counter, the glass covers on the stacks of English muffins, the round red seats of the stools. When Tony poured herself a third cup of coffee, Natalie said, “Don’t hurry, we have until ten o’clock.”
“I do hope our train’s not late,” Tony said, “We’ll be late enough getting in as it is.”
“We can telegraph from Denver,” Natalie said.
“Or call from Boston,” Tony said. “They’ll be expecting us to call, anyway, probably from New Orleans. We have two hours between trains; I thought we might spend it in some bookstore. We have plenty of money, after all.”
“A week from today we’ll be on the boat.”
“And two weeks from today,” Tony said, “we’ll be in Venice.”
“In London,” Natalie said.
“In Moscow,” Tony said. “In Lisbon, in Rome.”
“In Stockholm.”
“I only hope that train isn’t late,” Tony said.
“Do you think Juan will be there to meet us?” Natalie asked. “And Hans, and Flavia?”
“And Gracia and Stacia and Marcia,” Tony said. “And Peter and Christopher and Michael.”
“And Langdon,” Natalie said. “Dear pathetic old Langdon, she’ll be so glad to see us, jumping all over everybody and barking.”
“I hope they’ve rememberd to clip her against the heat,” Tony said anxiously. “She does suffer so.”
“She never did quite recover from the spaying,” Natalie said, and they began to laugh helplessly, and the waitress behind the long counter looked at them and then automatically at the clock.
Far away they could hear the voice of the train caller. “Albany,” he was saying, “New York.”
“New York,” Tony said softly. They put their hands together on the table and were silent, listening to the voice of the train caller echoing flatly through the station. “New York,” he shouted urgently.
“We wouldn’t need but one room,” Natalie said. “They’d never find us.”
“I could get a job.” Tony leaned forward eagerly. “I can speak French, after all.”
“I could be a waitress, maybe.”
“We could open a small bookstore. Only the books we like ourselves.”
“And we’ve got fifteen dollars.”
They both took cigarettes from the pack on the table, and Tony lighted them; “Can I get you more coffee?” she asked.
Natalie glanced at the clock. “Yes, thank you. We have plenty of time.”
“Our train doesn’t leave till nearly eleven,” Tony said.
You could live quite comfortably in a railroad station; there was the great arching roof for shelter, and food in the restaurant; there was a ladies’ room and an enchanted spot where you could find books and magazines and little odd colored toys to amuse the children in Paris, in Lisbon, in Rome. It was better, even, than living in a department store, not quite so good, perhaps, as living in a garret in medieval Spain.
It was nearly twelve when they left the station and they went reluctantly, lingering on the stairway in the face of the drizzling rain outside.
“I understand it’s a charming town,” Tony said as they came out into the damp day; over their heads the stained-glass window shone briefly in the reflected light of the restaurant neon sign across the street.
“Very provincial,” Natalie said. “Laughably so.”
“But such beautiful old homes.”
“And such a modern college.”
“And the theaters,” Tony said. “And the stores.”
“We must try to look up old Langdon while we’re here,” Natalie said.
Near the station, for some reason, the world was filled with birds flying; all the movement ever made in the world was concentrated, for a minute or so, in one spot, and Tony surrounded by sweeping birds was a marvel of stillness; Natalie laughed and ran away, and the birds followed her briefly and came back to Tony.
“They think you’ve got fish in your pocket,” Natalie called to Tony, and Tony called back, “I wish I had my dear old falcon Langdon.”
“Still she haunts me phantomwise, Alice moving under skies Never seen by waking eyes,” Natalie said as Tony came running to her.
“Shall we fly?” Tony said, waving back at the birds. “Or would you rather walk?”
“You among the birds,” Natalie said. “Page of swords. Vigilance, secrecy.”
“Look,” Tony said, and held Natalie’s arm to stop her before the posters of a theater; the movie now being shown inside was old, and apparently past any redemption by adjective, so that the management had simply, resignedly let the pictures into the frames outside the theater, and were now presumably hiding away somewhere inside, beyond reach of irate patrons. One of the pictures showed a glorious scene between a man in a cowboy hat and uncomfortable pistols, who backed against a door to face a darker, equally weaponful villain; in the background a damsel wrung her hands and all three seemed to turn anxiously to the camera, which alone could justify the violent emotions they ravished themselves to feel. It was plain from the picture that it was near the end of the day; the sun was setting dramatically outside the backdrop window; the hero had the look of one who would shortly remove his guns and his spurs and go home in a car he had bought but could not afford; the heroine seemed to be thinking, under her beautiful look of fear and concern, that perhaps she should keep the children out of school until this chicken-pox scare was over. The villain, too—who, tired now of jokes about his villainy and being treated mockingly by his friends as a potential murderer, had said to himself, “Just this one more time, and then I shall be myself again”—snarled, and sighed, and snarled again; “It must be a lovely movie,” said Natalie. “Shall we go in?”
Hangsaman Page 22