The Huge Season

by Wright Morris

  I saw him smile—not at what he saw, but because what he saw forced him to do something—and when that smile just stuck on his face I knew he was beat. He walked back to the line, served the ball well, and even stroked back the one Lawrence hit at him, but that was the limit—he dropped the next one into the net. So the score was 15-40 at that point. Everything he had, and maybe something he didn’t, went into the next ball he served Lawrence, and when it came back he didn’t bother to run for it. He just stood there, and the referee said, “Game Lawrence, one-five.”

  I don’t know how many of us knew the jig was up. We weren’t very many. There were only seven of us in the stands. I think Proctor knew it, and after Lawrence had served his first ball, an ace down the center, I think the referee saw it too. He took a look at his watch as if he thought the sets might run a little long. But they wouldn’t. I could have told him that.

  Later I heard one of the players say that Lawrence’s game kept getting stronger, that he hit the ball sharper, and his flat serve had more pace. I don’t think so. It was the same game from the start. It was always a killing game, and he simply never let up. But the man he was playing was a different player—he fell apart. When that racket began to twist in his hand he had a try at lobbing, he went in for slicing, and he mixed chops and pat balls for a spell. He was smart. He did everything Lawrence had failed to do. He did it all pretty well, but it didn’t do him any good. When Lawrence put the last point away and the kid turned and threw his racket at it, you would no more applaud than if Lawrence had shot him between the eyes. Which he had. The boy wonder was a dead duck. The jig was up, and we all knew that the man with the finest game in the world was not the same as the world’s finest tennis player.

  Lawrence walked along between Proctor and me back to the dorms. I carried his rackets, Proctor had the balls he had used in the last set, and Lawrence wore the sweater with the leather on the elbows looped around his neck. The boys who passed us turned for a look at Lawrence’s face. He looked about the same, except that he looked very good in a sweat. We sat around in the rooms until he had his shower, then we walked over to the mess hall together, where the news had got around and the shock had had time to wear off. When Lawrence stepped into the hall all the boys that were there stood up. There was no hollering or cheering to speak of; they just stood up. Lawrence put up his right hand, gave them that smile, then Proctor and I took the boy with the clap down the long row of tables to the one near the door, where he liked to sit. Lundgren waited on our table, and I saw him watching Lawrence with his bloodshot eyes.

  FOLEY: 7

  As he crossed Twenty-third Street a few drops of rain fell on his sleeve. He tipped back his head and a drop splashed on his face. A swirl of wind lifted the curb dust into the air, a cloud shadow darkened the corner, and east from the Hudson, like a jet diving, came the rolling sound of thunder. Big drops, widely spaced, puffed the dust at his feet. Paper boy on the corner slipping tarpaulin over his magazines. Afternoon editions featured tear-stained divorcée moment after her child, kidnaped by husband, reported safe. In pocket of blouse she was wearing Foley could see king-size pack of cigarettes and make out that she was smoking choice of discriminating people, Herbert Tareytons. Proctor gone from the headlines. Flood of news, like river of silt, left deposit over what had been news in the morning.

  “Journal?” said the boy.

  Foley dropped a coin on the pile, slipped one from beneath the weight, raised it over his head. Wind-whipped sheet of rain, as he walked south, hit him like spray of machine-gun bullets. Or did it? Stopped a moment to consider if that was right. Read it somewhere. Had never been hit by spray of bullets, but as very small boy stray jet from a fire hose had struck him like a wet sandbag in the chest. Rolled back his eyelids. Torn the flesh at the corners of his mouth.

  Foley held the paper over his head and cold trickle of rain ran down sleeve of his trench coat. Felt the coolness where the wet knees of his pants rubbed on his legs. Rain falling in wind-blown sheets with big hollows, puffed out like a sail. Summer squall. He ran along the wall of windows to the first open doorway, ducked inside. Art shop, cards, reproductions along the walls. Remembered how he used to send Lou Baker every new Matisse. Did not remember stopping. But he hadn’t sent her anything for five or six years.

  He stopped to look at the cards displayed in racks, one rack labeled MODERN, mostly French, Gauguin, Cézanne, Seurat, and Picasso, vest-pocket reminders of reproductions that hung in bus stations, lounge cars, bedrooms for guests, hallways that were dark and needed brightening up, dress shops that were chic, coffee shops that were smart, bathrooms with color matching shower curtains, and homes where the hair-oil stains on the paper simply had to be covered with something. And so they were. The French masters had anticipated the need.

  He found nothing there, but in a box on the counter, as if it had been painted over the weekend, a pair of haggard lovers floating in a murky, grape-colored space. The woman bore a certain likeness to Lou Baker, the woman of sorrows, the Deirdre of Montana, and the man bore a striking resemblance to Proctor, the eroded saint. It was called “The Tempest,” by Kokoschka—and was one of those things. A somewhat unpleasant expressionistic piece—if you thought, as Foley did, of the pair of them as lovers—with the flesh daubed on carelessly as if it were peeling off. And yet lovers they were, very modern lovers, the eroded salvage expert and his faded blond companion, now sleeping through the tempest that the Senator had brought down upon them. As the current Prince of Darkness, he had power over the elements. He had stirred up a tempest, and this pair of haggard lovers were caught up in it.

  Was it uncanny? This painting was dated 1914. Foresight for Kokoschka, hindsight for Foley, but for the lovers, always at the still point, a timeless tempest in an ever-threatening sea.

  “We have that particular item mounted and ready for framing,” she said. Foley turned, but she kept her eyes off his face. Probably thought he was embarrassed. Odd picture for a man to be looking at.

  “I think this little one will do,” Foley replied and held on to it while he fumbled for some money, then changed his mind and let her have the card as he paid for it. While she walked toward the front of the shop he turned back to the rack. Photographs. Old and new. Some of them blurred. He peered at an old one—dating back, it was clear, before the fast-lens cameras—sharp contrast of the blurred hand and face but acid-etched street detail. Curious feeling, therefore, that these people existed, that they were really there, but by now, as was clear from their clothes, short of some unusual miracle, some freak of longevity, they would be gone. On the card that he faced Foley could see the Seine, with the towers of Notre Dame. Curious and troubled sensation of the melancholy shortness of human life. River, trees, and towers of Notre Dame still there, but the blurred figures were gone. Who were they? Someone, at the time, had called them by their names. Must have felt as immortal as Foley felt—sometimes. Note on back of card said it was view of the Seine, with towers of Notre Dame in the distance, but no mention of the woman with the boa trailing in the breeze. Just a suggestion of a smile, a living face, under the flowered hat. No mention of the man, several steps back, who had turned, who had been caught, that is, in the act of recognizing this woman, or had turned with the intent of recognizing her. Did he know her? Or did he merely have that in mind? Was this moment the beginning of life for him—or just another loose end? Two blurred shadows, caught by the camera, moving in a scene that was itself immortal, or looked immortal, like beetles in amber, in that scene so full of so many timeless objects, the trees and the river, the history-haunted towers, the bookstalls with their freight of what was still surviving—a seemingly permanent scene with these impermanent shadows crossing it. That particular river—the one there on the card—would never dry up or cease to charm this city, and those trees along the bank would never shed their leaves. But what about that creature with the Mona Lisa smile, and the blurred feet? She was not of marble. She was either going toward or fleeing som
ething. Was this man her lover or had she still another rendezvous? The beauty and the mystery of this woman, who had no name, no face, and no destination, seemed to embody, for Foley, the mystery, the charm, and the anxiety of life. All around them was Paris, the immortal city; the delicate trees cast their permanent shadows, but the feet of this woman—like the wings of time—were blurred. Flushed with life, with impermanence, that is, she moved from one solid curbing to another, troubling the waters on the surface of Foley’s mind. Was that where she now lived? Was this trembling reflection her immortality?

  “Fifteen, twenty-five, fifty, one dollar,” she said and placed the coins in Foley’s palm, pressing down on them, then put into his hand the blue envelope containing the card. “Thank you very much,” she said, her eyes on the doorway, where several wet people were gathered, and absently scratched her scalp with the point of the pencil she wore in her hair. “I suppose they need it in the country,” she said and turned back to her work.

  Not down in Foley’s country, Foley was thinking, where the new crop of mold was growing on his books and in the lining of the shoes that he had preserved for twenty years. Glad he hadn’t worn that pair, anyhow, as the rain was hard on them. Looked at pair he was wearing, their tops splattered, and through squall of rain blowing up the street saw poster advertising God’s Half Acre, new nature film. Mrs. Schurz had seen and recommended. Naturally. As good a place as any to sit out the rain. Foley unrolled his paper, raised it over his head, and splashed through the rain into the dark lobby. Elderly woman in ticket booth a little startled, kept her eye on him.

  Taking a bill from his pocket, Foley said, “Is the Disney piece now showing?”

  “Showing right now,” she said, clawed for his bill, pushed out a ticket as if he might be contagious. At the entrance door Foley stopped and took off his wet coat. He opened the door, then stood there as if an invisible hand held him, while stale, sour draft of air blew into his face. Hot, like the wind from a subway grating. He stopped breathing, pressed his lips tight, stepped forward into the darkness, directly under smell of motor from circulating fan. Inside, the door closed, he inhaled the same air as if it were clean. Stood in the dark for a moment, but no usher came forward to flash a light on him. A bright image flashed on the screen, reflecting the light back into the room, long but very narrow, sloping fast, and for a moment Foley thought it was empty. Then he saw the sailor. Saw the hat, that is, tipped on his face. Sunk low in first seat on the aisle, knees up, asleep. At the back, clear at the back, where the projector was like a bolt hole in a coal stove, the flickering beam picked up the blond hair, the wreath of smoke, over a pair of lovers. That was all. Foley moved down the aisle and dropped into a seat. With what was left of Schrafft’s napkin, folded, soaked up the rain that had wet his hair, then used damp sheet to wipe the splatter off his shoes. Hearing voice from the screen, speaking in farewell tone of Lowell Thomas on rear-train platform, Foley raised his eyes just as God’s Half Acre faded from the screen. Blurred away, out of his grasp, like that woman on the French postcard. They were leaving, but over the scene the narrator’s voice hovered for a moment, pressed for time, reluctant to be torn away. He knew. Also knew that Foley knew. God’s half acre was not part of this world. Fairy story for adults chased off city streets by the rain. Grown-up children at the top of the stairs waiting for bedtime and Winnie the Pooh.

  Foley lidded his eyes—the newsreels could give him a headache in four or five minutes—and wondered if he should wait for God’s Half Acre to come around again. Wouldn’t have to. Mrs. Schurz had already described it very well. He was always very patient with Mrs. Schurz, because Mrs. Schurz was very patient with his cat and on certain rare occasions had taken him in when it stormed. Wiped him off with the towel that hung on the hook with her bag of clothespins. Foley never asked her to feed the cat; the truth was he wouldn’t eat a thing but kidney, and Mrs. Schurz believed that all sensible pets should eat table scraps. Not only that, but the cat, Sour Mash, had to have his kidney served au Foley, neatly snipped up, that is, with a pair of green-handled garden shears and dipped—not stirred—into the yolk of a freshly cracked egg. If the egg was not cracked while he stood there waiting he wouldn’t touch the stuff.

  A cat like that couldn’t be left to a woman who had opposing theories on the subject, or, for that matter, to anybody else. He could be left, for brief intervals, to himself. Certain spring and fall nights, with a full moon waxing, Foley had left him to his own devices, but he had stopped when he began to learn what these devices were. But not that. No, he really didn’t care too much about that. A cat’s monsoonlike passion simply came and went. It was one of those things. Over the years Foley had learned to abide with it. But this other passion, as it proved to be, had not been in the Almanac, books on small mammals, or any report that had seen the light of day. For all Foley knew, it had no precedent. It was something new. God’s half acre, possibly, had the patent on it. But Foley’s own eyes had seen what they had seen, and so had the cat.

  One summer morning, as usual, he had got up to salvage a bird. He slipped on his robe, and as he passed the window he reached for his garden gloves, a pair with leather palms that he reserved for this emergency. Through the window he caught a glimpse of the cat. He was coming through the privet with some very strange feathers in his mouth. As Foley stepped into the light he saw that it was not feathers but the tail of a chipmunk, a very small chipmunk; the head was either gone or did not show. Foley stood there waiting for that little point to be cleared up. There was no point rushing out to save what was already lost. The cat crossed the yard to a piece of flagstone, one of the steps leading out to the garden, where he paused and lowered the chipmunk bottom side up. His tiny paws were in the air—a very dead chipmunk in every respect. The cat settled down, in his customary sphinxstyle, and, very casually, he reached out with a paw and gave the chipmunk a cuff. Very lightly, tenderly almost, and he did this once, twice more—when the chipmunk sprang up like spring-wind toy and began to dance. He danced, his little tail up like a banner, hopping back and forth on the cool flagstone, four, five times—then he suddenly scooted off. The cat, however, had been prepared for that. He was up, pounced on him, and brought him back in his mouth. He lowered him to the flagstone bottom side up, then relaxed once more. After stroking down a spot on his coat he reached out, tenderly, and cuffed the dead-looking chipmunk. Once, twice, and on the next stroke the chipmunk was up. The dance—the same dance precisely—took place again.

  That had been more than enough for Foley, and he raced from the house, ran into the yard, and chased cat and chipmunk to the woodpile far at the back. There the cat, as per custom, let himself be trapped. When Foley raised him, by the scruff of the neck, he saw the bright beady eye of the chipmunk peering at him from between the cat’s teeth. It was too much: he may have been a little rough, a little overexcited when he put the cat down, opened his jaws, and waited for the chipmunk to scoot away. But he didn’t. He took a single hop to the toe of Foley’s slipper and just perched there, staring at him, till Foley got the strength to lift his other foot and shoo him away. With the cat he had returned to the house. He had locked the door, put the cat in the kitchen, then walked through the house to his bedroom, where he noticed that his hands and face were covered with sweat. He ran a tub full of cold water and cooled off in it.

  Did it really matter that this took place time and time again? All through the summer, with the chipmunk growing fat and having to be carried by the neck, like a kitten, and after putting on her dance lying out on the flagstone with panting sides, like a fat ballerina. Did it matter? Not particularly. It didn’t really matter, because to be believed it had to be shared with one of the species—one of Foley’s species, that is. One who would believe that, in return for some wild yarn of his own. But there was no one in Foley’s little world—not even Lou Baker, who believed in vampires—to whom Foley could whisper what he had seen. It finally led Foley to look into Darwin, into a book he had owned but ne
ver read, and to spend nights brooding on a creative evolution of his own. Founded on what? Well, founded on audacity. The unpredictable behavior that lit up the darkness with something new. That in some audacious moment of the lunar past, at the mouth of some cave, had resulted in man. A turning on the hinges of his own dark past, toward the light. Through some jeweled chink in Mother Nature’s own armor, through some flaw in her own habit of perfection, the glint in some creature’s eye shot new rays into the dark. A cat charmer, a lion tamer, a prophet for a new and holy order of chipmunks, who would say to the cat what Joshua had said to the sun. Perhaps, Foley thought, Mother Nature was originating again. Looking over her children to see which one might amount to something. Maybe she had come to feel, quite a bit like Foley, that she had played her cards wrong in the first place and that the time had come to put a few trial irons into the fire. Like that chipmunk. Something really worth while might come out of that. The Origin of a species based on charm, on audacity, on the powers of the dance, and the music that soothed whatever needed soothing in the savage breast. If what Nature had in mind was survival, Man had ceased to be at the heart of Nature and had gone off on a suicidal impulse of his own. And Foley’s chipmunk, among others, had got wind of it.

  A rumbling sound, so much like thunder that Foley raised his eyes and looked at the ceiling. The blast on the screen, like flash powder, lit up the pattern on the pressed tin ceiling, and the day-old, scattered stubble on the sailor’s face. On the screen itself, awesome but familiar, a mushroom cloud bulged from the earth, unfolding slowly, as though the camera had caught some miraculous birth. The flowering of a plant, the petaled opening of some strange, pollen-driven creature of the deep, bursting with the seeds of life, as this one burst with the seeds of death. As if the earth had become a belching cannon’s mouth. And then the narrator’s voice, the voice of doom speaking out of the smoke rings, out of the thunder, warning Foley, and the sailor, and the pair of lovers, that man now possessed his future in his own hands. He could either save, that is, or destroy himself. On Foley’s face, green with the light that seemed to pour from the scene of destruction, there was an expression more troubling than doom itself. Pity for Foley and his kind. Pity for the doom itself. In the voice of the speaker Foley recognized the everlasting disaster-hungry prophet, since men would rather die, in a righteous foxhole, than come and face the battle of daily life. Doom was it? Extinction? Foley could see the saintly, luminous face of Proctor, the quiet smile radiating a power like doom itself. The power to transform, the raw material made immaterial, heavenly. There seemed to be a law that when faced with evil man turned this power upon himself—those who had the power, that is, to turn and face anything. In the light of this blast, in this moment of revelation, they would turn from the cockroach trapped in the tub, Foley trapped in the past, and take refuge in self-slaughter, or the ultimate truth. The agony in the Garden become the agony in the test tube, the sorrows of Werther become the fission of matter, and that last pair of hounded lovers, energy and matter, were now being probed by the finger of Science, bombarded by a hail of questioning protons, to see what light might flash, what thunder crack, when this final pair was torn asunder.