The Huge Season

by Wright Morris

  “Where do you find the needles for this thing?” Dickie said.

  Foley started to answer but saw that Mrs. Pierce was staring at something. Proctor also, at the door at his back, so he turned and saw Lou Baker—Montana Lou Garbo Baker—in her turtleneck sweater and her hair brushed back in a pompadour. Left Bank Baker, her bare feet in huaraches, her long legs in Proctor’s pajama bottoms, a cigarette in the holder that collapsed like a drinking cup.

  “I thought I’d change,” Lou Baker said when the effect had been properly studied, “into something comfy,” and slunk into the room.

  “I swear,” said Dickie, paused. “Well, I swear I made a mistake.”

  “Didn’t we all, dear?” Lou Baker said, bending toward him like a willow for a light, then picked from her lips the tobacco crumbs that were not there. “Isn’t somebody going to ask the old bag to dance?”

  Foley stepped forward, slipped an arm around her, and felt the heat of the cigarette glowing on his neck.

  “ ‘Body and Soul’ okay?” Proctor said, cranking the handle, and they stood waiting till the music started.

  “Don’t they make a nice couple?” Dickie said. “Chanel Five goes so nicely with Old Spice.”

  As they shuffled around, Lou Baker said, “Same old elevator dancer, no steps,” and he felt the wetness of her hair soak through his shirt. It gave off an odor like a wet suntan. The smell of water when it dried on sun-scorched skin. He said nothing, he avoided the humming that usually indicated how much he liked dancing, because he knew that Lou Baker was in a state of mind. He held her up till the music stopped, and when she put up her face he kissed her.

  “Well, who’s next?” he said and turned to offer her to Proctor. He was in the corner, bent over the pile of records.

  “He’ll probably take his records and go home,” said Dickie, “if he can’t have the last one, the crybaby—”

  “Any particular selection?” Proctor said.

  “ ‘Smoke,’ ” said Lou Baker, “ ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.’ ”

  Dickie did a tit-tat-toe, then sang,

  “ ‘Let’s begin and make a mess of both

  our bright

  young

  livessssss!’”

  “ ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ is cracked,” said Proctor and held it up. They saw it was cracked.

  “They’re all cracked,” said Lou Baker. Foley glanced to see how she meant that, saw the familiar glazed expression. Her lips were parted. The brightly painted false mouth made her face look green.

  “What about ‘Stormy Weather’?” Proctor said.

  “Cracked!” said Lou Baker and snapped her fingers.

  Dickie slipped his arm around her waist. “Music, kid! Let’s have it!”

  “All cracked,” said Lou Baker. “Is no more music.”

  “Dance without it then,” said Dickie, swung her around, and then seemed to lose his balance and almost fell. For a moment Foley thought he was drunk. He was about to say so—kid him a little, that is—when he saw the head of Lou Baker, lying on his shoulder, roll about loosely like that of a doll.

  “The lady’s passed out on me,” Dickie said and held her like a rag doll, her feet just touching the floor, until they pushed up the only stuffed chair in the room and lowered her into it.

  Foley sat on a cushion, his back to the doors through which a cool river draft was blowing, fanning the bloodless mask that appeared to be painted on Lou Baker’s face. The bright carmine mouth had been wiped from her face by Mrs. Pierce, with a dishtowel. Proctor held the brandy to her lips.

  “The excitement,” Foley muttered, “along with the wine.” He had said that many times, like talk about the weather.

  “I can’t say I blame her,” Mrs. Pierce replied, and she had said that too many times, but now she added, “If I’d been in my own place I think I’d have fainted myself.” Which was new. It meant the tension was wearing off. Foley was thinking how it seemed to take something—a flood, an earthquake, a dramatic fainting—to pull together what was forever falling apart. Lou Baker sighed, she moaned rather, and as they leaned forward to gaze at her face Foley felt her heel come down hard on his toe. She moaned again, her eyelids fluttered, and Mrs. Pierce said, “Accidents will happen, goodness knows,” and daubed at Lou Baker’s perspiring forehead.

  “Professor Foley,” said Proctor soberly, “what is an accident?”

  “An accident?” said Foley, then lowered his eyes as Lou Baker brought her heel down, hard, on his instep. His eyes closed, he saw before him the headlines:

  TENNIS STAR SURVIVES

  FREAK ACCIDENT

  “Let me put it this way,” Proctor said. “When I shot myself, was it accidental?”

  “You mean—” replied Foley, then paused, sucked in his lip, and waited till the heel on his foot stopped rocking. “You mean,” he continued, “was it God’s will?”

  Proctor did not smile. “I mean, was it a crime?”

  “How in the world would anybody but God know that?” said Mrs. Pierce.

  Proctor kept his gaze on Foley, who said, “I’m not up on just how God would handle it, but I know what Héloïse said to Abélard.”

  “What did she say?” Proctor said, and Foley noticed that Lou Baker’s heel released its pressure. Did she wonder how Héloïse had handled it?

  “Héloïse wrote to Abélard,” Foley began, thinking how much he was like Proctor, “ ‘I have brought thee evil, thou knowest how innocently. Not the result of the act but the disposition of the doer makes the crime: justice does not consider what happens, but through what intent it happens. My intent toward thee thou only hast proved and alone can judge.’ ”

  “You believe that?” Proctor said suddenly.

  “It is the statement of a woman in love,” said Foley.

  “But who in the world can judge something like that?” Mrs. Pierce said.

  “Your peers,” said Dickie, “drawn by lot, providing they don’t have a hair appointment.”

  “If you want to know the truth—” Proctor said, but Foley did not. Not from Proctor. But when he opened his mouth it was merely to cover it with his hand. The pressure on his toe increased, his foot prickled with sleep. “The truth is,” Proctor said, since no one had stopped him, “it was no accident. I did it. I shot myself.”

  Had Foley always known that? Had he been afraid of that truth himself? He kept his eyes off Dickie, wet his lips. “You didn’t want to run the quarter?”

  “I wanted to run it,” Proctor said, his voice rising, “more than I wanted to live. That was why I did it.”

  “Mr. Proctor,” Mrs. Pierce began, “I—”

  Proctor smiled. He gazed at them, unseeing, as he had from the front of the morning paper.

  “You wanted to show him you could take it?” Foley said, and saw Lawrence, Lawrence in the car lights, walking toward the smudgepot, fumbling at the fingers of one glove. But that was not it.

  Still smiling, Proctor shook his head.

  “No?” said Dickie.

  “No,” said Proctor. He looked Foley in the eyes and said, “Any Jew can take it. I wanted to show him a Jew who could give it up.”

  “Ohhhh!” Mrs. Pierce gasped, not at what she heard but at what she saw before heT. Lou Baker, as if rising from the dead, slowly drew herself up. The wet towel dropped from her forehead, and she placed her free hand to her face. “You all right, honey?” Mrs. Pierce said and took the hand that Proctor was holding, patted it on the back, then rubbed it briskly between her own. Lou Baker seemed to be all right.

  She sat there a moment, her eyes closed. Then she opened her eyes, said, “So the old bag couldn’t take it?” She looked around at them sadly.

  “You took more than anybody should be asked to,” Mrs. Pierce replied.

  “How long has it been?” Lou Baker said and turned her gaze on Proctor, who, with the tail of his shirt, was daubing the moisture around her eyes. Foley saw that her face went forward to meet him, and held the pressure of his hand, l
ike a stroked cat. “Was it long?” she asked him.

  “It was long for me, baby,” he said. That was why she had asked him, she saw it was true, and in her bloodless face there were patches of color. Leaning back, she took his hand to steady herself, held on to it.

  “What in the world time is it getting to be?” Mrs. Pierce said.

  Foley glanced at his watch, but it was Dickie who said, “Twenty past ten.”

  “I’ve just got to run then,” Mrs. Pierce said, and Dickie replied, “I’ll run you over to the station, Livingston-Fargo Ulcer Transit.” He saluted, clicking his heels, but only Foley had his eyes on him. “Think Gallagher and Shean less popular today,” Dickie said and buffed his nails on his sleeve.

  “Think I’ll ride along with you if you don’t mind,” Foley said. “Last train my way is about eleven too.”

  “I happen to know that it isn’t,” Lou Baker said.

  “Later trains to Philly,” Foley said, “but last local out of Philly is about twelve-forty. I’m not cruising in the suburbs on my salary.”

  “You could perfectly well put up here,” said Lou Baker. “We’ve plenty of room, haven’t we, honey?”

  “What’s that, baby?” said Proctor. He hadn’t been listening.

  “I’ve got to get back and feed the cat,” said Foley.

  “That damn cat,” said Lou Baker, who only liked kittens. “Is it the same damn cat as last time?”

  “He’ll be ten the sixth of next month,” Foley said.

  “Everybody else’s cats die young,” said Lou Baker, “the gods love them. But Foley’s cats love Foley.”

  “They like regular habits,” Foley said, getting up. “They’re like me.” He walked into the front room, where he found his coat lying out on the bed, a paper carton beside it. The carton was tied with a cord, and he could see that the gun lay in it crosswise. As he picked up his coat, the pair of haggard lovers—Kokoschka’s storm-tossed lovers, floating in their tempest—slipped from the inside pocket of the coat and dropped on the bed. Foley stooped for the postcard, then leaned forward and slipped it beneath one of the pillows. As he stood up, he heard Dickie say, “Want a hand with that coat?”

  “Think I’ll just carry it,” Foley said and placed the carton inside the coat, folded over the tails. “Warm night,” he added, “little warm myself.”

  “Let me perk up just a bit,” Mrs. Pierce said and stepped into the bathroom, stood facing the mirror. She ran a comb through her hair, said, “In spite of everything, it’s been the grandest party. Honey”—turning to Lou Baker—“I forgot my glasses.” She rolled her lips back from her teeth. “Did I get any on them?”

  “What lovely pearly teeth you have, grandmother,” said Dickie.

  “Isn’t he a character?” Mrs. Pierce said, picked up her handbag, looked in it for something. She found a packet of mints, chlorophyll. “Anybody else like one?”

  “Thank you,” said Lou Baker.

  “Don’t thank her, thank Nature,” said Dickie.

  “I hear they make you glow like a watch,” said Mrs. Pierce, “but I can’t say that I believe it.”

  “Mesdames et Messieurs!” Dickie said, raising his hand for attention. He stepped forward and bowed to Lou Baker, took her hand in his own, kissed it. “Doll, it’s been real.”

  “Oh, Christ!” said Lou Baker.

  “That’s the way they’re doing it now,” said Dickie.

  “I can’t believe it,” said Lou Baker. “I won’t believe it.”

  “You think we’re different, eh?” Dickie said.

  “I think we were different,” Lou Baker replied. Under her gaze Dickie lowered his eyes, flicked the levers on his watch. “They say it’s been real, but we were real,” Lou Baker said.

  Dickie whistled softly, paused, then sang, “Oh, he could dish it out, and she could take it—”

  “They could both dish it out,” Lou Baker said and turned and threw her arms around Proctor. Over her shoulder Proctor gazed into the hall without smiling. His hand stroked her head.

  “We’ll be in touch,” Dickie said, backed from the doorway, herded Mrs. Pierce down the hall to the landing.

  “If Bryan had the faintest notion—” Mrs. Pierce began, and as they went down the stairs Foley saw the lovers, he saw their legs, that is, right where he had left them in the door. One of Lou Baker’s mules dropped off the foot that rose from the floor.

  “They make a nice pair of kids, don’t they?” said Dickie and pushed out the glass side-wings of the windshield, so the draft down the river would not blow away their talk. There were yellow pier lights shining on the water, but the river looked cold.

  “Is it their anniversary?” Mrs. Pierce asked and turned from Foley to Dickie.

  “Their twenty-fifth,” said Dickie, playing with the throttle.

  “It’s been hard on both of them,” she said, “hasn’t it?” Foley agreed, his head wagging, and she said, “You’re married yourself, Mr. Foley?”

  “No, I’m the withered appleseed,” said Foley.

  “You’re so quiet,” she said as if she hadn’t heard that, “I would have sworn you were married.”

  “He’s a very nice item,” Dickie said, “if you’re looking for something in drop-seat flannel.”

  They came off the bridge into City Hall square, swung around it to the right, then headed north on Broadway. Almost empty. A vacant Broadway bus coasted by. The wind in his face, the open car, made Foley think of the long night rides with Lawrence. They had been real, but it seemed a little crazy to think of it now. Time and the river, man’s hunger in his youth, and the shadow of the ghost, the middleaging voyager, cruising down a street where the fires of the city were banked for the night.

  “Is this the same street?” Mrs. Pierce said. “It wasn’t like this when we drove over.”

  They crossed Eighth Street, curved past Wanamaker’s, crossed Fourteenth with the changing lights, and Foley said, “You can let me off around Thirty-second, little walk do me good.”

  Did Dickie hear that? He did not reply. In the windshield Foley saw that his eyes reflected the lights. As they shifted from red to green, running up the dark street like a phosphorescent zipper, a perceptible change appeared in his face. He leaned forward on the wheel. The tires increased their whine on the cobbles. Foley watched the floating needle drift up to fifty, hover there, drift past, as the row of green lights went up to where the night seemed to end. The smoking neon glow over Times Square and Forty-second Street.

  “If you’ll drop me off here,” Foley said again, pulling in his head so Dickie would hear him, just as they flashed into the open on Thirty-fourth, then tunneled again. The coonskin hat squashed low on his head, the tail flying out behind him, Dickie was not in the car, not in New York, but in the current that passed from signal to signal, in the green lights that exploded, like a rocket, far up ahead.

  Leaning toward him, Mrs. Pierce said, “I think Mr. Foley wants off,” and she nudged him, but another light passed before he was able to bring the car to a stop.

  “You say you want out, old man?” he said and let one tire screech along the curbing. Foley groped for the handle of the door, let himself out. Mrs. Pierce gave him her hand, and he smiled at her friendly, motherly face.

  “It’s been a great pleasure, Mrs. Pierce,” he said. “You were very kind to come to our crazy party.”

  “I don’t really know when I’ve had so much fun,” Mrs. Pierce said. Did she wink at him? Or was it merely a tic in that eye? Tired. Sort of thing a little too much high-life brought on.

  Dickie reached Foley a hand, said, “It’s been simply realer than life, old boy,” and the eyes under the coon-skin cap were those of a Space Cadet.

  “We’ll keep in touch,” Foley said, who had flunked a student for talking such gibberish.

  “Next time you come up,” Dickie said, giving an urgent flick to the throttle, “you give me a blast, old man, and we’ll have lunch.”

  Foley nodded, stood there wi
th his right hand raised in the air. The car went off, leaped off, actually, leaving a dark film of rubber on the asphalt, and the arm that Mrs. Pierce had raised to wave clamped down on her hat. Up ahead, toward the captive future, the lights changed from red to green.

  THE CAPTIVITY: XII

  After I left Proctor I walked back to the pension and went to bed. I didn’t sleep, but I lay there till four, when the girls began to fool around with ping-pong, then I got up, shaved, and walked up Raspail to the American club. They were serving tea again, and the girls were dancing to American jazz. A few English boys were also dancing, if that was what you could call it, and the American boys were playing chess or reading Balzac. I walked up to Montparnasse, used the men’s room in the Dôme, then took a table near the walk at the Coupole. I hadn’t been there ten minutes when Montana Lou Baker strolled by. I let her go up one side, down the other, then I moved to a table where she couldn’t help see me. She saw me and said, “Boy, is this seat taken?” and sat down on it. She had on the same dirty camel’s-hair coat, but underneath she wore a cash-mere sweater.

  “Where are your chums?” I said, though it came out more like “thums,” because my tongue was still sore.

  “You have a very nice cedilla,” she said. “You should go to Spain.”

  “I am thinking of Majorca,” I said, “to get away from the States.”

  “They’ve gone to Laperouse,” she said, indicating that sort of thing was beneath her. “She simply adores riz de veau Melba, and he said you should take me to Fouquet’s.”

  “What do they serve at Fouquet’s?” I said.

  “Nothing you should eat before breakfast,” she said and turned away from my café noir. I tried to think of something cutting, but her standards were too high. “We’ll sit here for a while,” she said, “then we’ll take a walk till you feel better.” She patted my hand, turned down her coat collar, and as she ran a comb through her hair I caught a whiff of a scent she hadn’t been wearing the night before.