John Wescott hesitated in telling his story. He began to stammer. There was a drink set on the table before him and he swallowed it nervously.
There was a certain evening in the fall of the year. He had been working a little late in the office and it was growing dark. He had got up from his desk and was about to go home to his room when she came in.
“She said she was looking for her father but he had been gone for two hours.”
“We went together down the elevator and into the street.”
He explained to A. P. that he had wanted to ask her to have dinner with him at some restaurant but he didn’t dare. “I can’t express myself like you can, A. P., I have always wished that I could.” He had walked along with her that evening, this in the Chicago Loop, and they got over into Michigan Boulevard. There were all sorts of people walking along in the street, some of them well-dressed men and women, very evidently strolling about in the warm summer evening, and others were hurrying to the Illinois Central suburban train. To get to her home the woman he was with also had to take the Illinois Central but, he told A. P., when he was so frightened that he could barely speak, she had got suddenly almost bold. There was a little park over beyond the railroad tracks, to be reached by an overhead bridge and she had proposed that they go there and stand by the lake.
They did go. He tried to tell A. P. about it all.
“It was better out there,” he said. Pretty soon darkness came. As he talked he grew more like A. P. Words came to him more freely. He said that the waves were beating against some piling. “I don’t know why it was, but just looking at the waves, made me feel a little bolder,” he explained.
“I had never in my life kissed any woman but my mother,” he said. It was an explanation forced out of him. He told A. P. that he had been reared in a family where they never did kiss very much. “I never saw my father kiss my mother,” he said.
He spoke a little of his father and mother, telling A. P. that his mother had died when he was little more than a kid and that he had been raised by an uncle, a man who kept a small retail grocery store on a street over on the west side of Chicago.
“I was out there in the dark with her,” he explained, to A. P. “I never did know how it all happened. Suddenly I found myself holding her hand.
“And then we kissed and I asked her to be my wife.” His voice dropped to a half whisper.
“You wouldn’t marry me,” I found myself saying to her, and when she said she would, I was overcome.
“I just couldn’t speak. I couldn’t believe it.”
He said that, after a time . . . he didn’t know how long he stayed out there with her that evening . . . they came out of the little park and were again in the street. They were once more on Michigan Boulevard and he told A. P. that the streets were full of cars. People were going to the theatre, he thought.
“Of course,” he said, “there were, at that time, carriages too.”
He had got his eye fixed on a certain car. He told A. P. that it was standing near the curb and that it was, he thought that night, the grandest, the most beautiful car he had ever seen.
“It was so shiny and nice, and, oh the upholstery,” he said.
He said there was a man sitting in the car. He was trying to tell A. P. of how he had felt.
“I don’t know how to tell you how I felt. I haven’t your gift of words. I have always been so dumb. It was as though, as if that man . . . as if he had suddenly got out of the car and walked over to me . . . is if he had said, ‘Do you want this car? You can have it. Take it away.’
“As if . . . just like that . . . he had given it to me. I felt like that about her saying she would be my wife.”
John Wescott stopped talking and there was an embarrassing silence between the two men. It was A. P. who finally broke it. He got up from his chair and went and put his head out at the door. He called to the bartender.
“Hey,” he called. “Come on, a little service here. Give us two more of the same.”
WHITE SPOT
I AM QUITE sure that some of the women I had during this period never became real to me. I do not remember the names. They exist for me as a kind of fragrance as Ruth, Prudence, Genevieve, Holly, etc., etc. There was the very brutal looking very sensual woman seen one night in a low dive in Chicago. I would have been with certain business men on a spree. The business men were better when drunk. The shrewdness was gone. They became sometimes terrible, sometimes rather sweet children.
For example there was Albert, short, fat, baby faced. He was the president of a certain manufacturing concern for which I wrote advertisements. We got drunk together.
He had a wife who was rather literary and already I had published a few stories. Albert had bragged to her about me and once he took me to his house, in an Illinois town, to dine.
She would have talked only of books, as such women do talk. They can never by any chance be right about anything in the world of the arts. Better if they would keep still. They never do.
Albert being much pleased. “The little wife. You see, Sherwood, in our house also we have a highbrow.” He was proud of her, wanted to be loyal. As woman, in bed with her man, she wouldn’t have been much.
Albert knowing that and wanting in the flesh. He had got himself a little warm thing, bought her fur coats, sent her money. He could never go to her except when he had been drinking.
He explained to me, when we were drunk together. “I am faithful to my wife, Sherwood.” He had his code. “To be sure I sleep with my Mable but I have been faithful. I never kissed her on the lips.” His reserving that as his own rock on which to stand. I thought it as good as most rocks upon which men stand.
* * *
But I was speaking of women, certain women, who touched me vitally in the flesh, left something with me, it all very strange sometimes. I have just thought of that rather big, thick lipped woman seen in a cheap restaurant, half dive in South State Street. There was a little burlesque show a few doors up the street.
Business men, perhaps clients of the firm for which I worked, explaining to me. The president of our company would have been deacon in some suburban church. “Take these men out and entertain them. You do not need to make an itemized account of expenses.
“I would not want company money spent for anything evil.”
Oh thou fraud.
I would have been blowing money. The burlesque women came down along a dirty alleyway from the stage door of the cheap show and into the restaurant, half dive. They may have got a percentage on the cost of the drinks bought for them.
And there was that big one, with the thick lips, sitting and staring at me. “I want you,” and myself wanting her.
Now! Now!
The evil smell of the terrible little place, street women’s pimps sitting about, the business men with me. One of them made a remark. “God, look at that one.” She had one eye gone, torn out perhaps in a fight with some other woman over some man, and there was the scar from a cut on her low forehead.
Above the cut her shining blue-black hair, very thick, very beautiful. I wanted my hands in it.
She knew. She felt as I felt but I was ashamed. I didn’t want the business men with me to know.
What?
That I was a brute. That I was also gentle, modest, that I possessed also a subtle mind.
The women would have been going and coming in at a back door of the place, as the act they did, a kind of weird almost naked dance before yokels, was due to be repeated. I went out into the alleyway and waited and she came.
There were no preliminaries. Now or never. There were some boxes piled up and we got in behind them. What evil smells back in there. I got my two hands buried deep in her beautiful hair.
* * *
And afterwards, her saying when I asked her the question, “Do you want money?” “A little,” she said. Her voice was soft. There were drunken men going up and down. There was the loud rasping sound from a phonograph, playing over and over some
dance tune in the burlesque place.
Can a man retain something? I had no feeling of anything unclean. She laughed softly. “Give me something, fifty cents. I don’t like the foolish feeling of giving it away.”
“O.K.”
Myself hurrying back to the business men, not wanting them to suspect.
“You were a long time.”
“Yes.” I would have made up some quick lie.
That other one, met on a train, when the train was delayed because something went wrong with the engine. Is there a sense in which the natural man loves all women? The train stopping by a wood and that woman and I giving into the mood to gather flowers.
Again. “Now. Now. You will be gone. We may never meet again.”
And then our coming back to the train. She going to sit with an older woman, perhaps her mother, taking her the flowers we had got.
* * *
It was Sally, the quiet one, who saw the white spot. It was in a room in a hotel in Chicago, one of that sort. You go in without luggage. You register. “Mr. and Mrs. John James, Buffalo, New York.” I remember a friend, who was a women’s man, telling me that he always used my name.
We were lying in there in the dark at night, in that rabbit warren of a place. For all I knew the place was full of other such couples. We were in the half sleep that follows, lying in black darkness, a moment ago so close, now so far apart.
Sound of trains rattling along a nearby elevated railroad. This may have been on an election night. There was the sound of men cheering and a band played.
We are human, a male and a female. How lonely we are.
It may be that we only come close in art.
No. Wait.
There is something grown evil in men’s minds about contacts.
How we want, want, want. How little we dare take.
It is very silent, here in the darkness. The sounds of the city, of life going on, city life, out there in the street.
A woman cry of animal gratification from a neighboring room.
We exist in infinite dirt, in infinite cleanliness.
Waters of life wash us.
The mind and fancy reaching out.
Now, for an hour, two, three hours, the puzzling lust of the flesh is gone. The mind, the fancy, is free.
It may have been that fancy, the always busy imagination of the artist man she wanted.
She began to talk softly of the white spot. “It floats in the darkness,” she said softly and I think I did understand, almost at once, her need.
After the flesh the spirit. Minds, fancy, draw close now.
It was a wavering white spot, like a tiny snow white cloud in the darkness of a close little room in a Chicago bad house.
“You not wanting what our civilization has made of us.
“It is you men, males, always making the world ugly.
“You have made the dirt. It is you. It is you.”
“Yes. I understand.”
“But do you see the white spot?”
“Yes. It floats there, under the ceiling. Now it descends and floats along the floor.
“It is the thing lost. It eludes us.
“It belongs to us. It is our whiteness.”
A moment of real closeness, with that strange thing to the male, a woman.
* * *
I had a thought I remember. It was a game played with my brother Earl when I was a lad and he not much more than a babe. We slept together for a time and I invented a game. With our minds we stripped the walls of a room in a little yellow house quite away. We swept the ceiling of our room and the floors away. Our bed floated in space. Perhaps I had picked up a line from some poem. “We are between worlds. Earth is far far beneath us. We float over earth.”
All this on a hot August night but we could feel the coolness of outer space. I explained the game to the woman in the room and we played it, following on our floating bed the white drifting spot her fancy had found in that space.
How strange afterwards, going down into the street. It might have been midnight but the street was still crowded with people.
“And so we did float. We did see and follow the white spot and we are here. You make your living writing advertisements and I have a job in an office where they sell patent medicine.
“I am a woman of twenty-eight and unmarried. I live with my sister who is married.”
The cheap little hotel room for such couples as we were had its office on the second floor. There was a little desk with a hotel register. What rows of Jones, Smiths, and, yes, Andersons. That friend of mine might have been in that place. He might have put my real name down there.
I would have gone down the stairs first, looked up and down the street. “O.K.” The pair of us dodging out. “You’d better take a taxi home. Let me pay.”
“But can you? It is such a long way out. It will cost so much.”
“Yes. Here.”
Who was it invented money? There it lies, the dirty green bill in her hand. The taxi man looking, perhaps listening.
“But, but, does anything of beauty cling to me? Is it to be remembered?”
“Yes. You are very beautiful. Good night.” A lie. There was no beauty. The night, the street, the city was the night, the street, the city.
NOBODY LAUGHED
IT WASN’T, MORE than others of its size, a dull town. Buzz McCleary got drunk regularly once a month and got arrested, and for two summers there was a semi-professional baseball team. Sol Grey managed the promoting of the ball team. He went about town to the druggist, the banker, the local Standard Oil manager and others, and got them to put up money. Some of the players were hired outright. They were college boys having a little fun during their vacation time, getting board and cigarette money, playing under assumed names, not to hurt their amateur standing. Then there were two fellows from the coal mining country a hundred miles to the north in a neighboring state. The handle factory gave these men jobs. Bugs Calloway was one of these. He was a home run hitter and afterwards got into one of the big leagues. That made the town pretty proud. “It puts us on the map,” Sol Grey said.
However, the baseball team couldn’t carry on. It had been in a small league and the league went to pieces. Things got dull after that. In such an emergency the town had to give attention to Hallie and Pinhead Perry.
The Perrys had been in Greenhope since the town was very small. Greenhope was a town of the upper South, and there had been Perrys there ever since long before the Civil War. There were rich Perrys, well-to-do Perrys, a Perry who was a preacher, and one who had been a brigadier general in the Northern army in the Civil War. That didn’t go so well with the other well-to-do Perrys. They liked to keep reminding people that the Perrys were of the old South. “The Perrys are one of the oldest and best families of the old South,” they said. They kept pretty quiet about Brigadier General Perry who went over to the damned Yanks.
As for Pinhead Perry, he, to be sure, belonged to the no-account branch of the Perrys. The tree of even the best Southern family must have some such branches. Look at the Pinametters. But let’s not drag in names.
Pinhead Perry was poor. He was born poor, and he was simpleminded. He was undersized. A girl named Mag Hunter got into trouble with a Perry named Robert, also of the no-account Perrys, and Mag’s father went over to Robert’s father’s house one night with a shotgun. After Robert married Mag he lit out. No one knew where he went, but everyone said he went over into a neighboring state, into the coal mining country. He was a big man with a big nose and hard fists. “What the hell’d I want a wife for? Why keep a cow when milk’s so cheap?” he said before he went away.
They called his son Pinhead, began calling him that when he was a little thing. His mother worked in the kitchen of several well-to-do families in Greenhope but it was a little hard for her to get a job, what with Negro help so cheap and her having Pinhead. Pinhead was a little off in the head from the first, but not so much.
His father was a big man but the only thing
big about Pinhead was his nose. It was gigantic. It was a mountain of a nose. It was very red. It looked very strange, even grotesque, sticking on Pinhead. He was such a little scrawny thing, sitting often for a half day at a time on the kitchen step at the back of the house of some well-to-do citizen. He was a very quiet child and his mother, in spite of the rather hard life she had, always dressed him neatly. Other kitchen help, the white kitchen help, what there was of it in Greenhope, wouldn’t have much to do with Mag Perry, and all the other Perrys were indignant at the very idea of her calling herself a Perry. It was confusing, they said. The other white kitchen help whispered. “She was only married to Bob Perry a month when the kid was born,” they said. They avoided Mag.
There was a philosopher in the town, a sharp-tongued lawyer who hadn’t much practice. He explained. “The sex morals of America have to be upheld by the working classes,” he said. “The financial morals are in the hands of the middle-class.
“That keeps them busy,” he said.
* * *
Pinhead Perry grew up and his mother Mag died and Pinhead got married. He married one of the Albright girls . . . her name was Hallie . . . from out by Albright’s Creek. She was the youngest one of eight children and was a cripple. She was a little pale thing and had a twisted foot. “It oughten to be allowed,” people said. They said such bad blood ought not to be allowed to breed. They said, “Look at them Albrights.” The Albrights were always getting into jail. They were horse traders and chicken thieves. They were moon-liquor makers.
But just the same the Albrights were a proud and a defiant lot. Old Will Albright, the father, had land of his own. And he had money. If it came to paying a fine to get one of his boys out of jail, he could do it. He was the kind of man who, although he had less than a hundred acres of land . . . most of it hillside land and not much good, and a big family, mostly boys . . . always getting drunk, always fighting, always getting into jail for chicken stealing or liquor making, in spite, as they said in Greenhope, of hell and high water . . . in spite of everything as, you see, he had money. He didn’t put it in a bank. He carried it. “Old Will’s always got a roll,” people in town said. “It’s big enough to choke a cow,” they said. The town people were impressed. It gave Will Albright a kind of distinction. That family also had big noses and old Will had a big walrus mustache.
Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson Page 297