The Huge Season

by Wright Morris

  Foley pressed on his eyes, then opened them and gazed on the symbolic zero of Hiroshima, the surrealist’s nightmare of man-made dissolution and vacuity. The camera swept around it, saw that it was bare, that nothing made by man remained in it, then returned to focus on several faint shadows on the asphalt slab. And these? These were the shadows of men—the shadows cast by the blast itself. The shadows of men in the light of their own man-made sun.

  Foley pushed up from his seat, groped for his coat, then went up the aisle without looking at the sailor, or the lovers whom the blast, left undisturbed. Wrapped up, cocoonlike, in each other’s arms. He thrust open the door, stepped into the lobby, and saw on the puddle at the edge of the street the reflection of white clouds coursing across a freshly washed sky. The woman in the ticket booth, her head nodding, appeared to be asleep.

  THE CAPTIVITY: VIII

  Lawrence and Proctor got away a couple days before the rest of us. Lawrence was going to play clay-court tennis all summer. Proctor was going to work. He had accepted a short-term position with a Manhattan advertising firm.

  Lundgren planned to spend the summer in Wyoming, doing a little prospecting around Jackson Hole, and he got a free ride as far as Provo with a Salt Lake frosh. I went back to Chicago on the same mail train that had brought me out.

  My mother said she was glad to see me looking so well. Arlene Miller had asked about me when she was home for Easter. She had stopped raising Belgian hares, but her little brother, who was now old enough, had five white rats that he kept in her old rabbit hutch. They were all very friendly, and he walked around with them inside his shirt.

  My mother received a letter from the dean, saying that my work was a credit to my father and that I had also given of myself generously. My mother interpreted this to mean that I needed a rest. She thought it better that I not go to summer school or take on outside work. I would do a little reading and help her with a few things around the house.

  Arlene Miller did not come home for the summer. She was waiting on tables at the Dells, in Wisconsin, so the evenings on Byron Street were fairly quiet. There was not much noise after the radios were turned off. One night I went into the Loop to see how Chicago struck me after a year in California, and how the shows stood up after the Colton Visiting Artists course. I found the bands were not quite as smooth as those on the coast. Wayne King was all right, but he struck me as a little monotonous. I didn’t care too much for what I heard on the radio. If I heard something pretty good I bought it, like “You’re the Cream in My Coffee,” and a very smooth version of “You Took Advantage of Me.”

  In the sports section of the Sunday paper, usually toward the back, with the Want Ads, I might find something about the tennis situation, and Lawrence. One week in July I saw he was playing up at Lake Forest. When his picture turned up in the rotogravure my mother recognized it. She read aloud to me, at Sunday breakfast, that Charles Lawrence, the West Coast sensation, was staying with his uncle, Clayton Gans, while he took part in the Lake Forest tournament. Clayton Gans was president of Gans, Hardwicke & Bollinger. There was no mention of the kidnaping incident. Clayton Gans was big enough, I guess, to put the damper on something like that.

  Near the middle of July I had a card from Lundgren, mailed from Jackson Hole, Wyoming, with what I suppose was part of the Hole on the front of it.

  This is country, baby.

  was all it said on the back. My mother waited for me to bring it up, but when I hadn’t brought it up, three days later, she asked me if it was customary for young college men to call each other baby. I said it was not customary, but Lundgren was very tall, sort of shy, and he seemed to be inclined to refer that way to people he liked. As an example of what I meant I referred to Babe Ruth. My mother had never thought of it in just that light.

  I knew I wouldn’t hear from Lawrence, but I was surprised not to hear from Proctor. He liked to correspond. But I didn’t get a line from him. I sent off a card or two, one showing the statue of Lincoln by St. Gaudens, with a quote from Rimbaud on the back of it, but he didn’t respond. I decided advertising was probably taking all his time.

  We had a very bad August, with no breeze at night, and I slept on a sheet in the downstairs hallway, where toward morning it might turn a little cool. Most of the day I spent over in Lincoln Park. I would take along a book or two and sprawl somewhere in the grass. The lunchroom over the boathouse was open, and I would sit there, usually on the balcony, with the sandwich my mother had made and a bottle of Orange-Crush. It was hot on the balcony, but it looked cool out on the pond. On a good afternoon most of the boats were out on it. The water, that late in the summer, was like the duck pond at the Zoo, covered with Cracker Jack, popcorn, crusts of bread, and the boats the kids made out of the Cracker Jack boxes. But it was water and sounded wet when it dripped from the oars. I could hear the creak of the oarlocks even when I sprawled in the grass.

  One Saturday in August I sat up to see what the Goodyear blimp was advertising, and watched it go north along the shore and turn in toward Wrigley Field. I was still watching it when I heard somebody on the walk. Hundreds of people went by all the time, but this walker limped, he took one quick stride, as if it hurt him, then came down hard on the other foot. I had to wait till he came from behind the bushes, but I knew that it was Proctor; he had been walking with a limp like that for two weeks before he left. I yelled “Hey!” and put up my hand, but right at that point a streetcar was passing, and the park was full of kids who were yelling “Hey” all the time. He didn’t hear me, he went on by, and I didn’t yell at him again when I saw that he was wearing Lawrence’s clothes. He had a pair of Lawrence’s dirty buckskin shoes on his feet. The pants may have been his own—they looked a little tight in the seat for Lawrence—but he had one of Lawrence’s crew-neck sweaters around his neck. Not on, just the leather-patched sleeves around his neck. Under the sweater he had one of Lawrence’s T-shirts, with the short sleeves. The only thing that belonged to him was the limp.

  With that limp he was easy to follow, and we went around the pond, toured the Zoo, then came back to the pond, where he bought himself a hotdog and a candied apple. He stood there on the pier, watching the boats mill around on the dirty water, and guzzled down the core of the apple, pips and all. He kept the stick to chew on, and headed southeast toward the lake.

  I lost him in the crowd around one of the ball-games, then I passed within ten feet of him on one of the benches along the Michigan bridle path. Hot as it was, he had put that sweater on. He would have seen me, but he had his eye on the big apartment house across the street; on a pair of French doors that stood open, about nine floors up. There were chairs out on the balcony, but no one was sitting in them. He kept his eye up there, as if somebody might, then he crossed the street and stepped into the lobby—he went around in the revolving doors, that is, and came right out. He stood around for a while under the sidewalk awning, as if that was where he lived, then he walked along the street where the limousines were parked. He passed four or five, then he eased over to the curb, like a kid, and let the fingers of one hand glide along the fender of that car. It was one of those old Pierce-Arrows, with the fender lights. He let his fingers just glide along the fender, and then, with hardly any limp, he went off in a hurry toward Clark Street, a couple blocks west.

  When I went under the sidewalk awning I made note of the address, painted on the awning, and I had a good look at the old Pierce-Arrow parked at the Curb. It had Indiana plates, and there were several racket presses in the back seat. A pair of soiled tennis sneakers was on the floor up front. I had to run to keep Proctor in sight, but over on Clark Street he began to limp, worse than ever, and up near the park he stopped for a Coke. While he was having a Coke I sat in the phone booth across the street. It had just occurred to me that the name of Lawrence might be in the book. There were quite a few Lawrences, as it turned out, but Mrs. Charles Gans Lawrence was down in the book at the same address I had seen on the sidewalk awning. Then I looked up
Gans, Harwicke & Bollinger, who had offices in the Palmolive Building, and since I was sitting there in the phone booth I gave them a ring. A girl answered the phone, and I asked to speak to Mr. Jesse Proctor. She was sorry, she said, but the offices were closed on Saturday afternoon. I asked her if she could tell me where he lived, and she said Ludlow Terrace, wherever that was. I thanked her very much, and sat there till Proctor finished his Coke.

  Ludlow was a short dead-end street that angled off the park. To get there, Proctor walked through the park, because the grass was easier on his feet, and I sat in the park and watched him walk down to the place where he lived. Ludlow Terrace had once been quite a place. There were concrete flower urns in the yard, a glass-roofed solarium on one side, and out in back, behind the garden, a copper-guttered carriage house. But the solarium was now full of fruit boxes, and a tarpaulin covered the holes in the roof. In the big bay windows on the front there were “Ice” cards and “For Rent” signs.

  When I stepped into the hall a woman stood there, talking on the phone. She covered the mouthpiece with her hand and said, “You lookin’ for Lois, honey?”

  “I’m looking for Mr. Proctor,” I replied.

  “Second floor, clean to the back,” she said and pointed up the stairs with the receiver. When I started up she added, “Clean all the way back, last one on your right.” She turned back to the phone and said, “Now wouldn’t it be like her to be up there with him! That kid!” she said, then turned to wave me on.

  I went up the stairs and down the hall toward the back. All the transoms were open, and someone was playing “Bye Bye Blackbird” on a mouth organ. A woman said, “Will you play somethin’ else, for chris-sakes?” and for a moment it was quiet. Then “Bye Bye Blackbird” began again.

  “You find it okay?” the woman yelled from below.

  “Sure,” I replied, and on the last door on the right knocked loud enough so she could hear.

  “Come in, Sugar,” Proctor said, and I opened the door, stepped into the room. Proctor sat at a desk in the back corner, on a piano stool. He had changed to an old pair of moleskins, one of the Colton gym shirts, and wore a towel looped like a scarf around his neck. He sat there gazing at the palm of his left hand. He had the elbow on his desk, the palm facing my direction, and where the fold creased the palm he had drawn a large human eye, using red and green ink. When he half closed the palm of that hand the eye winked. He didn’t look at me. He sat there winking the eye for Sugar’s benefit.

  I didn’t speak up because I knew it would give him a start. On the wall above his desk he had pictures of Lawrence, maybe fifteen or twenty of them, cut from all the papers and the college magazines. On the desk he had a loose pile of yellow paper, a jelly glass with a bunch of sharpened pencils, a pint bottle of milk, and a cake of Fleischman’s yeast. A box of graham crackers with one end torn open sat in his lap.

  “That better, Sugar?” he said, winking the eye again, but when Sugar didn’t answer he turned and looked. For just a split second what he saw almost scared him to death. He got up, spilling the graham crackers, and took one step toward me. “Foley!” he yelled. “For chrissakes, Foley!”

  “How are you, old man?” I said, and to help calm him down I picked up some of the crackers he’d spilled.

  “Old man—” he said, but he couldn’t go on, and wiped the palm of his hand on the leg of his pants. His hand was so sweaty the red and green ink wiped right off. “I’m awfully sorry, old man,” he went on. “Thought you were Lois, little chick that lives here.” I let that pass, and he said, “Old man, I’m supposed to be in hiding.”

  “I was going north on Clark,” I said, “when I saw you in the park. Saw you cross Clark Street.”

  “What was it gave me away, old man,” he said, “the limp?”

  “Well, I did notice the limp,” I said.

  He shook his head sadly. “Well, I did what I could, mon vieux. Picked a room in the slums, brought in my own food, only took a walk when I needed an airing.” He took the towel from around his neck, wiped the sweat from his face. Then he looped it around his neck again and gripped the two ends like a well-trained fighter.

  “You didn’t want to be seen?” I said.

  He took a swig of milk from the bottle on his desk. “Sorry to hurt your feelings, old man, but when you’re working on something like a novel—”

  “You’re writing a novel?”

  “When you’re engaged in the first draft of a novel, one with the opening scenes in Chicago—” He closed his eyes, spread out his hands, and let me work out the finer details for myself.

  “Well, if I’d only known—” I said.

  “Old man,” he said, “if you knew I was here, you’d naturally wonder what the hell I was doing in this place. You’d naturally wonder what old Proctor was doing in the slums. Right? One thing would just lead to another, and when it did I’d probably have to hurt your feelings.” He wagged his head, smiling sadly.

  “What’s your novel about?” I said and glanced at the yellow sheets on the desk. A small pile of typed sheets were in the case for his typewriter. A big photograph of Lawrence, smashing one away, was under the jelly glass full of sharpened pencils. “It wouldn’t be about a tennis player?” I said.

  He wiped his face with the towel again. “Old man, a book can have Chicago in it, and not be about Chicago. It can have a tennis player in it without being about a tennis player.”

  I didn’t get it. I probably looked it, for he went on, “Take this book here, old man—” and held up one of the books he had swiped from some library. Along with the numbers I could see Hemingway’s name on the spine. “There’s a prizefighter in it, old man, but it’s not about a prizefighter.”

  “Is it about the sun rising?” I said. I knew that was part of the title.

  “Goddam if I know what it’s about,” he said and opened it up, as if he might have overlooked it.

  “Well, it’s your headache,” I said and turned to see who was rapping on the window. My mother used to make the sound when she tapped with a hairbrush to call me in. The tapping came again, but when I looked at Proctor he had his nose in the book. I figured that must be his Sugar, so I stepped forward, jerked on the cord, and let the blind roll up. Just as I did, Proctor made a lunge for it, but too late. So there we were, facing the window, and about a yard away, across the airwell, was a woman without a stitch of clothes on her, combing her hair. She was in one of those poses you see on postcards, and on the postcard it might have been pretty fetching. Her long blond hair hung to her waist. The garter rings were bright red on her white legs.

  “Keee-rist!” I said, gave a yank on the blind cord, and brought my hand down on the sill, my knuckles hitting the edge of a metal ashtray. I didn’t feel much, but when I looked at my knuckles they were covered with blood.

  “Damnation!” Proctor said and passed me his towel. I wiped the blood off and saw that I’d sliced them pretty bad. “We better go rinse them off, old man,” he said and led me across the hall to the bathroom, where I sat on the stool and let my hand hang over the sink. “Let the chlorine sterilize it,” he said and turned on the cold-water faucet; then he walked back and slipped the bolt in the door. He still had the Hemingway in his hand, but there was no place in the bathroom he could put it, so he just stood there with it, his finger marking the place.

  As he probably felt worse than I did, I said, “I don’t see how you get much work done.”

  “Opening scenes owe a lot to her, old man.”

  “There’s a poule in it too?”

  “Where’d you think he gets the clap, old man—off the stool seat?”

  I hadn’t known Proctor knew about the clap at all. “I understood he got it in Paris,” I said.

  “Old man,” said Proctor, sitting down on the tub, “we don’t have much, but we’ve got the clap. You don’t have to leave the country to pick up that.”

  “If I were writing a novel,” I said, “I’d have him get the clap in Paris.”

/>   “The Chicago clap is good enough for me,” Proctor said.

  It was for me too, but sitting there on the stool, after what had happened, I felt the need for conversation. Through the transom we could hear that kid playing “Bye Bye Blackbird” again. The room was nearly dark except for the tub, the rim shiny from people sitting on it, and the white knob on the door, which somebody rattled every now and then.

  “Old man,” he said, “you think I’m a goddam heel?”