The Unpossessed

by Tess Slesinger

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Papenmeyer.”

  “Good day to you, Mrs. Flinders.” He had his dignity too.

  Certainly the street lay quieter now, the air upon it darker, the wind big with solemn tidings. For summer with its suspension of life, its long and endless days of sun like the days without end of one’s childhood, was gone again. And another fall, another year, another round of life (Mr. Papenmeyer was right!) to do again.

  Soon the chestnut vendors would warm their hands in the whistling steam on their little wagons; the Scottsboro boys would be called for re-trial; butter would go up, eggs would go up. Would there be apple-sellers again, crying their fruit on cold corners? The wind would whinny down the chimney; and in the mornings after the alarm-clock one of them must brave the cold to shut the windows while the other cowered in bed, clinging to last night’s nest like a slow-witted chick.

  The Sunday papers would issue their supplementary book sections for the Flinders to strew over the bathroom floor on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. Mr. Worthington would reduce the summer’s amount of ice for the office water-cooler. Elections again; and whether one voted for the Republicans or the Democrats, or tossed one’s vote to the left in futile protest (but Miles said it was not futile) would the scabrous unemployed be swept from one’s sight off the public parks? Then the smell of camphor in the house! its glint where it fell shining and secret in the cracks of the old floor! Soon the last leaf would be off the last tree in Sheridan Square; there would be that feeling in one’s chest of ending and beginning again, expelling the last of one breath and expanding the lungs for the intake of another; sorrow for the departing year curling smaller and smaller until it was dead, excitement and wonder opening their eyes and catching their breath as the winds grow colder, the nights fall quicker, the curtains are early drawn and the fires lit. Was there progress? was there change?

  At the office he let her sign his name with her own hand now, and she marvelled to see how day by day her writing as she flourished Adolph Worthington over Business Manager so gravely typed grew less and less her own. He wondered too at her smiling so much; with your husband gathering pay-cuts right and left, Miss Banner? Miss Banner-that-was, that is, he adds with his daily tic of humor. Ah, signing his name with her own hand! Carrying the only key to The File in her purse! Answering the telephone in the cabalistic tones of the hired, “He is in Conference, We have changed our Policy, We have closed our Autumn List.” Ah, what glory is yours, Maggie—Miss Banner-that-was, Missis Flinders-that-is! As long as you can play school all day at the office with Adolph Worthington, Business Manager; dance home through the shades of the evening to play house all night with Mister Flinders, husband; live the year round, make a leisurely circle through the seasons and come safely back to the starting-point again, the fall. This was progress? this was change? Well, last year she left the letters on his desk for Mr. Worthington to sign; last year it seemed that the Scottsboro boys must hang without much ado; last year Miles’ soul was worn about the edges but displayed no gentle fraying in the seams.

  One got older. One grew soberer. One would like perhaps to see a thread drawn through the years as though they were beads. (Twenty-nine! what was the deadline for babies? for clearing out and starting somewhere else?) This year on Charles Street, last year on Tenth; surely these were stations along some route? One’s world too, which had been a tight nut, expanded; burst; until there you were, stepping out over the broken shells, soberly trotting down a street—toward what, and why, one vaguely wondered. And was there something else?

  There had been small Maggie, child of a family, fastest girl-skater on a city block, most important child in the world (had the world known it? now she had been sure, again it seemed it waited for enlightenment). Growing and growing; then squeezed back into something resembling all other children (she remembered sashes; the day they cut her bangs because her forehead so high and naked made the other children stare) and sent off to school; where to her surprise and terror—and something like relief—she was given not the best desk nor the worst desk nor the farthest nor the nearest nor the most nor the least of anything. The feeling of deprivation! But rising out of it a sense of importance, of social responsibility: the blackboard erasers must be in line, chalk must not strew the school-room floor; one was song-book monitor once a week. So the world of school opened until it took in Saturday morning concerts and Irma Haliburton’s father explaining Damrosch over lunch. And whenever (then) you took stock in the fall, up another grade, maybe a floor higher, granted more freedom this term—you found a newer and bigger world, you belonged to a larger and deeper fraternity. Now you and Miles, you live in a room on Charles Street (the richness of their daring, of their living together and calling the same place home, caught her suddenly unawares), you have never been out of your country or even to the south of it; yet you make out checks from your meager income to send to the Scottsboro boys quaking in Alabama jails; you subscribe to a German paper which names writers you will never read; you visit Russian movies whose characters you comprehend no more than you do their machines.

  Is this because the room on the fourth floor is too small, because Charles Street is too narrow? Because one’s horizon must stretch till it takes in the world?

  Here she turned a corner and came upon the last street, and because it was home her heart must do something, it must go up, or it must go down; she must hurry or her feet must lag. She shifted her bundles (the world in her arms had grown heavy; the cider weighed it down) as if in indecision. For the street ran too smug, too sure, between the same rows of houses, too properly studded with corners, with lampposts. There is satisfaction implicit in recognizing, in coming back to the known—the pink house again, the house with one shutter hanging loose, the Italian speakeasy, the only tree. But a finer excitement would lie in change, in things concealed from view. The pink house moved down the block! why the shutter has been taken down at last, the speakeasy closed! The street ought to wind at the middle; the lamp already glowing die: catch your breath as you round the turn! anything might happen! But there was the house again squatting smug on its rump like an injured woman. The fourth floor still there, its windows like a train of cars above the third. O drop the bundles on the nearest stoop; turn round and run, run back, run the wrong way for once up that right street, run and chase the world that hides around the corner!

  For she would come in. She would drop her bags on the kitchen table. There would be Miles in the leather chair, his feet lifted to the wicker one; his New England conscience ticking neatly on his desk, beside the clock. He would look up. He would check her home-coming with a smile, as in the morning he acknowledged the ringing of the clock by pressing down the jigger. Jeffrey called up, he might say—called you up, he would put it if his mood demanded hurt. What happened to you all day, Miles? (The moment of her standing there and waiting, jealous a little of his day which had not held her, fearful at the same time that another day had passed without leaving its mark on him, another day like a sheet of Mr. Worthington’s calendar to be torn off and dropped heedlessly away.) No, what did you do, Margaret? you are the one things are always happening to, you make them up if they don’t, you liar: what did you do all day? . . . And then the cider in the jug. If he didn’t see it, not as cider, but as cider she had bought for him, as cider which had come out of the country from the apple trees specifically and courageously for them, for Miles and Margaret, to sit in a jug on their checkered tablecloth, why then the fine apple-y taste was nothing, the tang was bitter, the color dull.

  Suppose she said What happened! why darling, things happened to me all day long. In the first place the beggar on the subway stairs noticed my straw hat was gone; and then I signed thirty-seven curt letters Adolph Worthington and I crossed the t at thirty-seven different angles; furthermore, Mister Flinders, it is emphatically not our policy to wrap soap in cellophane; at four-seven P. M. the carbons blew off my desk and feeling the breeze anyway on my wrists and under my skirt I knew it wa
s fall again. And celery isn’t good any more, being brown and coarse-fibred, but tomorrow or maybe the day after I think I can promise you the chestnut vendors will be out, and the grocery man’s little girl has a nasty runny cold again and darling I hope you understand I talk this way because I love you. Suppose when she said all that on one breath it didn’t work, it didn’t reduce him to smiling his fine reluctant smile reserved for nonsense, suppose it didn’t bring back to him and so to her the softness of her, the woman-ness of her, that part which passed all day unknown and undesired, by Adolph Worthington Business Manager, by the beggar in the subway, by Mr. Papenmeyer whose little girl had a nasty cold again?

  The street lay cramped between its rows of houses, leading inexorably to its end. Down its center ran a groove; and try as she would to escape, her feet ran down as helpless as a trolley. At one end Mr. Worthington, to whose bell she responded all day, in whose aura she lived all day; on the way home Mr. Papenmeyer (who dared commiserate, because Miles was a New Englander!), a brief stop at Mr. Papenmeyer’s station; and then Miles Flinders, who made his wishes felt not by a bell in her ears but by a constant frightened consciousness in the very lining of her being.

  The janitor’s wife leaning out the first floor window with a shawl about her shoulders called:

  “Chill in the air, ain’t it, Mrs. Flinders.”

  “Winter is certainly coming, Mrs. Salvemini.”

  There was the bell marked Banner-Flinders. There stood the door which could open and close a thousand times in a day without her knowledge, although it was the door to her home. Perhaps the door had opened and quietly, secretively, released Miles, who might also have sensed the new year waiting round the corner! perhaps he had slid through like a cat never to come home again! (But he would be there, come home ahead and waiting.) The mail-box hung like a sealed packet on Christmas day, that might contain anything; that must contain the world; her nervous fingers crawled and clutched: a milliner’s card came out. (But what did she want, this woman who—surely she loved her husband?) “Madame Bertha invites you . . .” Well what was she after then—a letter from Jeffrey, from Bruno? a letter from Miles, “goodbye, my dear, I’ve gone away”? No, no, it was some thread, some meaning she was looking for; some way of finding the world without reading papers from Germany . . .

  She raced up the stairs in terror, in doubt.

  She burst the door open—and in the pit of her being peace vanquished regret, for there was no change and no sign of a change; for he sat there with his feet on a chair and with all that she loved and all that she hated him for written plainly on his face; he had come home, like a child, for his supper. He took off his glasses and his eyes opened and closed several times patiently like a baby’s growing used to her light. And she herself was taking off her hat to stay (enormously bored, enormously relieved) at the same moment that she advanced to kiss him.

  His hand shot up as though to ward off something. “Old Son-of-a-Bitch cut me again today,” he said; “and before I forget—Jeffrey called, to speak to you I think.” His hand wavered with an air, she thought, of laying a smoke-screen between them. “A ten percent cut,” he said with a certain grim complacence.

  She paused, startled by the irrelevance; “Old Son-ofa-Bitch?” she faltered, trying to focus her wits: her impulse being to cry impatiently “What of it? that has nothing to do with us”; then fluttered, lost to the notion of their being children playing at being adults, pretending to care about such irrelevancies; and rushed to him dropping the bundles, perceiving how his pride lay bleeding out of all proportion, tortured by how, in coming home to him, she had in her mind deserted him, had turned and fled from him twenty times.

  She would pierce his wavering smoke-screen and purge him with her comfort.

  2. MILES

  BUT COMFORT was salt to his wounds. He had been reared to expect just punishment from an angry God; then God was mercilessly withdrawn and since then nothing adequate supplied. In punishment one found the final solace; in repentance the blessing of convalescence, return to grace. All of his life women (his aunts, his frightened mother, now Margaret) had come to him stupidly offering comfort, offering love; handing him sticks of candy when his soul demanded God; and all of his life he had staved them off, put them off, despising their credulity, their single-mindedness, their unreasoning belief that on their bosoms lay peace. For if he were once to give in, to let their softness stop his ears, still the voices that plagued him this way and that, they would be giving him not peace, but death; the living death of the man who has consented to live the woman’s life and turned for oblivion to love as he might have turned to drink.

  For Son-of-a-Bitch he had felt sharp admiration, when the man, by virtue of his superior position, bent to deliver perfunctorily to him the cut. He had bared his chest, had taken the cut without flinching, as his just due from Mr. Pidgeon pinch-hitting admirably for God; and then because he felt complacently like a dog he had wheeled his bleeding chest about and exposed for Mr. Pidgeon’s further flagellation the humble seat of his pants. “Has my work fallen off, Mr. Pidgeon?” And Son-of-a Bitch, stirred by no womanly compunction, led further perhaps by temptation than his original desire would have taken him, added to the cut a well-placed kick in the pants: “We might have cut you anyway, Flinders; but we don’t feel you’ve been getting much punch in your work.”

  Gratefully stung, Miles thanked him; that is, he said in so many words, “Perhaps you’re right.” And felt as he had felt when Uncle Daniel, flogging him with a wand of birch, said “Maybe that will teach you,” and he had answered “I’ll ask God to help me.” There had been a God then. Now God like Uncle Daniel had been a long time dead.

  And sitting at supper (to which the aunts timidly bade him come) on the raw stripes of Uncle Daniel’s licking, he would be filled with a righteous exaltation. It was more blessed to sit on stripes than on a bottom unlawfully padded with deceit. Uncle Dan flogged harder than the immediate sin deserved; this was because Uncle Daniel, wise, like God, knew vaguely of many other sins which had not come to light, which might have been stored up on a small boy’s conscience almost since his birth. In this Uncle Daniel was a loyal representative of God. So before his eyes, as before God’s, he lowered his own; in fear—for something in him loathed those floggings; in guilt—if ever all the sins were guessed then flogging was not enough; and also, obscurely, in hope, for once they were all read that one lacked the strength to own to, then would come absolution complete: an end to evil thoughts preventing sleep at night, end to the sudden threats of God sounding in guilty ears—one would be like “other children” that the aunts, not knowing, dimly fancied.

  Here came Margaret, at him, it seemed (a wistful aunt, a helpless mother, ill-disguised) with that peculiar look of hope planned to seduce him; he described it to her fondly, at times when he could bear it, as her “balmy” look. Dropping the bags at his feet as though she brought a sick child toys from the Five and Ten and fully expecting his fever to go down at sight of them, not knowing them for trash! Poor little Maggie; it took stooping to enter the doll’s house in which she lived; which she furnished so tenderly with chairs that were too little and too soft, always struggling to draw the curtains so a man could not see out; and rushing to the miniature door with her hands outstretched, her face gone “balmy” with her filmy hopefulness, begging a man to come in and be stifled. He could have borne it better if her face had sprung to life for Jeffrey.

  He waved her back: “Ten percent. So now you will be bringing home most of the bacon”; and watched her, with compunction yet with pleasure, withdraw and stoop as though for refuge to the bags. Her face looked hurt as though his need for hurt hurt her. But since she would not stab him, he longed to reach and scratch out forever the “balmy” look from her mild, uncomprehending face.

  “Leave them, leave them,” he said, slumped in his chair. “We have time before we eat.” The paper corner on the bulkiest lifted suddenly with a crackle, like the ear of an animal, ra
ther hurt. He prodded it with one toe and shoved it an inch or two farther from his chair.

  So lately had she held it! He could feel his toe gently prodding her shoulder where the helpless bag had lain. Well, now was her chance: why didn’t she scream out in anger and strike him back? When would she learn that a man could not live with such unrelenting kindness?

  “But darling!” she protested. “I—” She stopped. She seemed to eye him humbly; perhaps ashamed of her bucolic unawareness, her gift to him of vegetables! She sighed, her protest skillfully withdrawn. She has her own way, he thought, of knifing me! her cowardly pulling out the sword—that wounds!

  “But what did he say—Mr. Pidgeon?” she asked, as though rousing herself (concession number one!) to pretend acquaintance with his world of facts; so might his aunts have inquired kindly about a game of baseball played at school. “Old Son-of-a-Bitch?” she added painfully (concession number two!); did she think to win him with this condescending loyalty?

  “He doesn’t matter.” Contemptuously Miles dropped Mr. Pidgeon along with Margaret’s concessions out of his picture. “He is just a symbol. He gets his from the higher-ups, just as I get mine from him.”

  She was choked with silly laughter. “Such a fat symbol, honey! I mean, it’s hard to recognize a symbol with a belly like that—and so many warts . . .”

  He wished to God she wouldn’t use nursery humor on him. She’d had a good malicious wit before she was a wife.

  “You wouldn’t see a social trend,” he said, “unless it was crammed down your own personal throat: and then you’d try to think it funny. You know what I mean when I say Pidgeon is a symbol.”

  “Then doesn’t it seem wrong to call him Son-of-a-Bitch,” she said thoughtfully. “I mean—an epithet—if he doesn’t himself determine his status, if it’s all—” she waved her arm; deprecated her own ignorance, but falsely, he thought—“if it’s all, as you say, ec-o-nom-ic.”