“Come in, Donny!” She held the door for him. He looked over his shoulder, down the corridor, at the elevator gates and the big window where feathery trees and the wide sky showed, and then he came into the room. He stood just inside, watching her as she moved to the kitchenette. He looked around the room, looking for policemen, perhaps, for bars on the windows.
There was nothing in the room but its old-not-antique furniture, the bowlegged occasional chair with the new upholstery which surely looked as old as it had before it was redone; there was the gateleg table, now bearing a silver tea-service with a bit of brass showing at the shoulder of the hot-water pot, and a sugar bowl with delicate tongs which did not match the rest of the set. There was the thin rug with its nap quite swept off, and the dustless books; there was the low chair where he had sat before with its tasseled antimacassars on back and arms.
“Make yourself at home,” said her quiet voice, barely competing, but competing easily with the susurrus of steam that rose from the kettle.
He moved a little further in and stopped awkwardly. His Adam’s apple loomed mightily over the straining button of his collar. His tie was blue and red, and he wore a horrendous sports jackct, much too small, with a violent yellow-and-gray tweed weave. His trousers were the color of baked earth, and had as much crease as his shoes had shine, and their soles had more polish than the uppers. But he’d scrubbed his face almost raw, and his hair was raked back so hard that his forehead gleamed like scoured porcelain.
When she faced him he stood his ground and said abruptly, before she could tell him to sit down, “I din’ wanna come.”
“Didn’t you?”
“Well, I did, but I wasn’ gonna.”
“Why did you come, then?”
“I wuz scared not to.”
She crossed the room with a large platter of little sandwiches. There were cheese and Spam and egg salad and liverwurst. They were not delicacies; they were food. She put it down next to a small store-bought chocolate cake and two bowls of olives, one ripe, one green, neither stuffed.
She said, “You had nothing to be afraid of.”
“No, huh?” He wet his lips, took a deep breath. The rehearsed antagonism blurted out. “You done something to me yesterday I don’t know what it was. How I know I ain’t gonna drop dead if I don’t show up or somep’n like that?”
“I did nothing to you, child!”
“Somebuddy sure as h— sure did.”
“You did it to yourself.”
“What?”
She looked at him. “Angry people don’t live very long. Donny, did you know? But sometimes—” Her eyes fell to her hand on the table, and his followed. With one small age-mottled finger she traced around the table’s edge, from the far side around one end. “—Sometimes it takes a long time to hurt them. But the hurt can come short and quickly, like this!” and she drew her finger straight across from side to side.
Don looked at the table as if something were written on it in a strange language. “Awright, but you made it do that.”
“Come and sit down,” she said.
But he hadn’t finished. “I took the watch back.”
“I knew you would.”
“Well, okay then. Thass what I come to tell you. That’s what you wanted me for, isn’t it?”
“I asked you to tea. I didn’t want to bully you and I didn’t want to discuss that silly watch—that matter is closed. It was closed yesterday. Now do come and sit down.”
“Oh,” he said. “I get it. You mean sit down or else.”
She fixed her eyes on his and looked at him without speaking and without any expression at all until his gaze dropped. “Donny, go and open the door.”
He backed away, felt behind him for the knob. He paused there, tense. When she nodded he opened it.
“You’re free to go whenever you like. But before you do, I want you to understand that there are a lot of people I could have tea with. I haven’t asked anyone but you. I haven’t asked the grocery boy or the thief or any of the other people you seem to be sometimes. Just you.”
He pulled the door to and stood yanking at his bony knuckles. “I don’t know about none of that,” he said confusedly. He glanced down between his ribs and his elbow at the doorknob. “I just din’ want you to think you hadda put on no feedbag to fin’ out did I take the watch back.”
“I could have telephoned to Mr. Eckhart.”
“Well, din’t you?”
“Certainly not. There was no need. Was there?”
He came and sat down.
“Sugar?”
“Huh? Yeah—yeah.”
“Lemon, or cream?”
“You mean I can have whichever?”
“Of course.”
“Then both.”
“Both? I think perhaps the cream would curdle.”
“In lemon ice cream it don’t.”
She gave him cream. He drank seven cups of tea, ate all the sandwiches and most of the cake. He ate quickly, not quite glancing over his shoulder to drive away enemies who might snatch the food. He ate with a hunger that was not of hours or days, but the hunger of years. Miss Phoebe patiently passed and refilled and stoked and served until he was done. He loosened his belt, spread out his long legs, wiped his mouth with one sleeve and his brow with the other, closed his eyes and sighed.
“Donny,” she said when his jaws had stopped moving, “have you ever been to a bawdy house?”
The boy literally and immediately fell out of his chair. In this atmosphere of doilies and rectitude he could not have been more jolted by a batted ball on his mountainous Adam’s apple. He floundered on the carpet, bumped the table, slopped her tea, and crawled back into his seat with his face flaming.
“No,” he said, in a strangled voice.
She began then to talk to him quite calmly about social ills of many kinds. She laid out the grub and smut and greed and struggle of his own neighborhood streets as neatly and as competently as she had laid the tea table.
She spoke without any particular emphasis of the bawdy house she had personally closed up, after three reports to the police had no effect. (She had called the desk sergeant, stated her name and intentions, and had asked to be met at the house in twenty minutes. When the police got there she had the girls lined up and two-thirds of their case histories already written.) She spoke of playgrounds and civil defense of pool-rooms, dope pushers, candy stores with beer taps in the soda fountains and the visiting nurse service.
Don listened, fairly humming with reaction. He had seen all the things she mentioned, good and bad. Some he had not understood, some he had not thought about, some he wouldn’t dream of discussing in mixed company. He knew vaguely that things were better than they had been twenty, fifty, a hundred years ago, but he had never before been face to face with one of those who integrate, correlate, extrapolate this progress, who dirty their hands on this person or that in order to work for people.
Sometimes, he bit the insides of his cheeks to keep from laughing at her bluntness and efficiency—he wished he could have seen that desk sergeant’s face!—or to keep from sniggering self-consciously at the way unmentionables rolled off her precise tongue. Sometimes he was puzzled and lost in the complexities of the organizations with which she was so familiar. And sometimes he was slackjawed with fear for her, thinking of the retribution she must surely be in the way of, breaking up rackets like that. But then his own aching back would remind him that she had ways of taking care of herself, and a childlike awe would rise in him.
There was no direct instruction in anything she said. It was purely description. And yet, he began to feel that in this complex lay duties for him to perform. Exactly what they might be did not emerge. It was simply that he felt, as never before, a functioning part, rather than an excrescence, of his own environment.
He was never to remember all the details of that extraordinary communion, nor the one which immediately followed; for somehow she had stopped speaking and there was a long q
uiet between them. His mind was so busy with itself that there seemed no break in this milling and chewing of masses of previously unregarded ideas.
For a time she had been talking, for a time she did not talk, and in it all he was completely submerged. At length she said, “Donny, tell me something ugly.”
“What do you mean ugly?” The question and its answer had flowed through him almost without contact; had she not insisted, he would have lapsed into his busy silence.
“Donny, something that you know about that you’ve done. Anything at all. Something you’ve seen.”
It was easy to turn from introspection to deep recalls. “Went to one of those summer camps that there paper runs for kids. I wus about seven, I guess.”
“Donny,” she said, after what may have been a long time, “go on.”
“Wasps,” he said, negotiating the divided sibilant with some difficulty. “The ones that make paper nests.” Suddenly he turned quite pale. “They stung me, it was on the big porch. The nurse, she came out an’ hugged me and went away and came back with a bottle, ammonia it was, and put it on where I was stung.” He coughed. “Stuff stunk, but it felt fine. Then a counsellor, a big kid from up the street, he came with a long stick. There was a ol’ rag tied on the end, it had kerosene on it. He lit it up with a match, it burned all yellow and smoky. He put it up high by them paper nests. The wasps, they come out howlin’, they flew right into the fire. When they stopped comin’ he pushed at the nest and down it come.
“He gone on to the next one, and down the line, twelve, fifteen of them. Every time he come to a new one the wasps they flew into the fire. You could see the wings go, not like burning, not like melting, sort of fzzz! they gone. They fall. They fall all over the floor, they wiggle around, some run like ants, some with they legs burned off they just go around in one place like a phonograph.
“Kids come from all over, watching bugeyed, runnin’ around the porch, stampin’ on them wasps with their wings gone, they can’t sting nobody. Stamp on ’em and squeal and run away an’ run back and stamp some more. I’m back near the door, I’m bawlin’. The nurse is squeezin’ me, watchin’ the wasps, wipin’ the ammonia on me any old place, she’s not watchin’ what she’s doin’.
“An’ all the time the fire goes an’ goes, the wasps fly at it, never once a dumb damn wasp goes to see who’s at the other end of the stick. An’ I’m there with the nurse, bawlin’. Why am I bawlin’?” It came out a deep, basic demand.
“You must have been stung quite badly,” said Miss Phoebe. She was leaning forward, her strange unlovely eyes fixed on him. Her lower lip was wet.
“Nah! Three times, four . . .” He struggled hard to fit rich sensation to a poverty of words. “It was me, see. I guess if I got stung every wasp done it should get killed. Maybe burned even. But them wasps in the nest-es, they din’t sting nobody, an’ here they are all . . . all brave, that’s what, brave, comin’ and fallin’ and comin’ and fallin’ and gettin’ squashed. Why? Fer me, thass why! Me, it was me, I hadda go an’ holler because I got stung an’ make all that happen.” He screwed his eyes tight shut and breathed as if he had been running. Abruptly his eyes opened very wide and he pressed himself upward in his chair, stretching his long bony neck as if he sat in rising water up to his chin. “What am I talkin’ about, wasps? We wasn’t talkin’ about no wasps. How’d we get talkin’ like this?”
She said, “It’s all part of the same thing.” She waited for him to quiet down. He seemed to, at last. “I asked you to tell me something ugly, and you did. Did it make you feel better?”
He looked at her strangely. Wasn’t there something—oh, yes. Yesterday, about the watch. She made him tell and then asked if he didn’t feel better. Was she getting back to that damn watch? I guess not, he thought, and for some reason felt very ashamed. “Yeah, I feel some better.” He looked into himself, found that what he had just said was true, and started in surprise. “Why should that be? he asked, and it was the first time in his whole life he had asked such a question.
“There’s two of us carrying it now,” she explained.
He thought, and then protested, “There was twenty people there.”
“Not one of them knew why you were crying.”
Understanding flashed in him, bloomed almost to revelation. “God damn,” he said softly.
This time she made no comment. Instead she said, “You learned something about bravery that day, didn’t you?”
“Not until . . . now.”
She shrugged. “That doesn’t matter. As long as you understand, it doesn’t matter how long it takes. Now, if all that happened just to make you understand something about bravery, it isn’t an ugly thing at all, is it?”
He did not answer, but his very silence was a response.
“Perhaps one day you will fly into the fire and burn your wings and die, because it’s all you can do to save something dear to you,” she said softly. She let him think about that for a moment and then said, “Perhaps you will be a flame yourself, and see the brave ones fly at you and lose their wings and die. Either way, you’d know a little better what you were doing, because of the wasps, wouldn’t you?”
He nodded.
“The playgrounds,” she said, “the medicines, the air-raid watching, the boys’ clubs, everything we were discussing . . . each single one of them kills something to do its work, and sometimes what is killed is very brave. It isn’t easy to know good from evil.”
“You know,” he blurted.
“Ah,” she said, “but there’s a reason for that. You’d better go now, Donny.”
Everything she had said flew to him as she spoke it, rested lightly on him, soaked in while he waited, and in time found a response. This was no exception. When he understood what she had said he jumped up, guiltily covering the thoughtful and receptive self with self-consciousness like a towel snatched up to cover nakedness.
“Yeah I got to, what time is it?” he muttered. “Well,” he said, “yeah. I guess I should.” He looked about him as if he had forgotten some indefinable thing, turned and gave her a vacillating smile and went to the door. He opened it and turned. Silently and with great difficulty his mouth moved. He pressed the lips together.
“Good-by, Donny.”
“Yeah. Take it easy,” he said.
As he spoke he saw himself in the full-length mirror fixed to the closet door. His eyes widened. It was himself he saw there—no doubt of that. But there was no sharp-cut, seam-strained sports jacket, no dull and tattered shoes, no slicked-down hair, smooth in front and down-pointing shag at the nape. In the reflection, he was dressed in a dark suit. The coat matched the trousers. The tie was a solid color, maroon, and was held by a clasp so low down that it could barely be seen in the V of the jacket. The shoes gleamed, not like enamel but like the sheen of a new black-iron frying pan.
He gasped and blinked, and in that second the reflection told him only that he was what he was, flashy and clumsy and very much out of place here. He turned one long scared glance on Miss Phoebe and bolted through the door.
Don quit his job at the market. He quit jobs often, and usually needed no reason, but he had one this time. The idea of delivering another package to Miss Phoebe made him sweat, and the sweat was copious and cold. He did not know if it was fear or awe or shame, because he did not investigate the revulsion. He acknowledged it and acted upon it and otherwise locked the broad category labeled “Miss Phoebe” in the most guarded passages of his mind.
He was, unquestionably, haunted. Although he refused to acknowledge its source, he could not escape what can only be described as a sense of function. When he sharked around the pool halls to pick up some change—he carried ordinary seaman’s papers, so could get a forty-cent bed at the Seaman’s Institute—he was of the nonproductive froth on the brackish edges of a backwater, and he knew it acutely.
When he worked as helper in a dockside shop, refurbishing outdated streetcars to be shipped to South America, his hand was unavoidab
ly a link in a chain of vision and enterprise starting with an idea and ending with a peasant who, at this very moment, walked, but who would inevitably ride. Between that idea and that shambling peasant were months and miles and dollars, but the process passed through Don’s hands every time they lifted a wrench, and he would watch them with mingled wonder and resentment.
He was a piece of nerve tissue becoming aware of the proximity of a ganglion, and dimly conscious of the existence, somewhere, of a brain. His resentment stemmed from a nagging sense of loss. In ignorance he had possessed a kind of freedom—he’d have called it loneliness while he had it—which in retrospect filled him with nostalgia. He carried his inescapable sense of belonging like a bundle of thorns, light but most irritating. It was with him in drunkenness and the fights, the movies and the statistical shoutings of the baseball season. He never slept, but was among those who slept. He could not laugh without the realization that he was among the laughers. He no longer moved in a static universe, or rested while the world went by, for his every action had too obvious a reaction. Unbidden, his mind made analogies to remind him of this invert-unwanted duality.
The street, he found, pressed upward to his feet with a force equal to his weight. A new job and he approached one another with an equal magnetism, and he lost it or claimed it not by his effort or lack of it, but by an intricate resultant compounded of all the forces working with him matched against those opposed.
On going to bed he would remove one shoe, and wake from a reverie ten minutes later to find with annoyance that he had sat motionless all that time to contemplate the weight of the shoe versus the upward force of the hand that held it. No birth is painless, and the stirrings of departure from a reactive existence are most troubling, since habit opposes it and there is no equipment to define the motivating ambition.
His own perceptions began to plague him. There had been a time when he was capable of tuning out that which did not concern him. But whatever it was that was growing within him extended its implacable sense of kinship to more areas than those of human endeavor. Why, he would ask himself insistently, is the wet end of a towel darker than the dry end? What do spiders do with their silk when they climb up a single strand? What makes the brows of so many big executives tilt downward from the center?
Foundations of Fear Page 71