by Paula Fox
After work the next day, Annie bought a small bunch of roses and put them in a glass. She neglected supper to clean her room for Max’s visit. He came around nine. His hair and suit were damp from the slow insistent rain which had been falling all that day. Night had come as a deepening of the grayness of the sky. Max bent over and pushed his face into Annie’s bouquet.
“Will you go and see Eva while I’m gone?”
“She doesn’t like me.”
“No, no…you’ve got it wrong. Anyhow, I’m asking you a favor. It’s you, you know. You don’t like Eva.” Wanting to deny it, Annie said nothing, feeling a vague holiness attached to this occasion, one which obliged her not to dissemble. Max might be killed. She experienced his death, her loss, all in a moment, and turned her face away lest he see her mourning him in his living presence. “I’ll see her,” she said.
“And you’ll write to me. Everything. What you do and think, everything, will you do that?”
“I’ll write to you.”
“I’m being sent to a training camp in Montana. As soon as I have it, I’ll send you an address.”
“You look happy. I haven’t seen you look like that in so long.”
“It’s true. I shouldn’t be, either. You don’t know it yet, but it’s freedom, to find out what I’ve found out about myself.”
She waited.
“No,” he said insistently, as though she’d contradicted him. “It’s not that I’m sure of what I’m doing. But I have a sense of what I’ve done, all along.”
“You want to get away from them,” she murmured, “Eva, the party.”
“Yes. It’s wrong of me. But I’ll come back—to her. You have to bear the consequence…”
“You sound so—you condescend so! Maybe she’s glad you’re going! Maybe you’re the burden!” she cried.
“Oh, I am, I am!” he agreed fervently.
“Oh, God!”
“You’re my friend, aren’t you?”
“Yes, I guess so.”
“You see how ridiculous I am? A scrap, a rag of a person! Thirty-six thousand men have just surrendered on Bataan, and I’m bent on salvation!”
How excited he was! She did not like him this way. She longed for the gravity, the authority of the old Max, on top of his own life, not this man who looked at her so hopefully, as though she, as though anyone, held the power to release him, to forgive him. She laughed angrily, reluctantly, and said, “I forgive you.”
“My dear girl,” he said, putting his arms around her, “you can’t. You only mean you’ll put up with your disappointment in me.” He drew away. With their faces nearly touching, he said, “You still think there’s a world of grown-ups somewhere—a place, a way of being, a message, that will reveal the nature of things. There isn’t! There isn’t.”
“Children, all of us?” she said sarcastically.
“No. Not that either.”
He kissed her forcefully, said, “Thanks for the roses,” and shut the door. She wept a little as she picked up the glass of flowers and held them to her nose. How like him to realize they were for him.
As she lay down upon her bed, she admitted to herself why she had put fresh sheets on it earlier in the evening, admitted it and felt ashamed, and grateful he’d not had the chance to find her out.
She felt stale for days and went about her secretarial duties lifelessly, skipping lunch half the time. At night, she ate some fruit and crackers, whatever was easy, and turned on the radio and fell asleep with it still on, just as she had back in New York City.
Men in the office, the ones who made seventy-five dollars a week in little cells, working on story “projects” that came to nothing, sometimes asked her out.
She turned them down without emphasis, secretly astonished she could resist the compulsion to say yes. She imparted this triumph of will over weakness to Theda. Theda listened with a smile of derision. What was happening to Theda? The patient listener had become querulous, jittery. Annie was frequently mortified by Theda’s responses to her confidences, her reports of office gossip, her efforts to re-establish the old, kindlier relationship. “Oh, so what!” Theda would say wearily, or interrupting Annie midway through a sentence, “What if he is a phony? All that matters to me is whether I like him or not.” And Annie would protest that she hadn’t meant to criticize whoever it was, only to tell Theda something she had hoped would interest her. It was like being slapped lightly across the mouth. She began to be cautious. During the day, she rarely saw Theda; the older woman worked incessantly in her cubbyhole, crumpled sheets of paper strewn about the floor.
Annie suffered. Theda no longer cared for her. She probably talked to Cletus about her, and Cletus talked to others, even strangers. No special intimacy was possible. No use wanting to hold forever someone’s good will. People were carrion crows, bartering fragments of each other among themselves, a vast trading network of crushing judgments. Or perhaps they didn’t have anything so durable as real opinions, only opportune ones. It was a disease of reflectiveness, she told herself, thinking of those who didn’t reflect, the Catalan, Hannah Groops, Melvin, Johnnie Bliss. If she only knew what someone really thought about her, how they saw her! One morning, Theda came to her desk, drinking coffee from a paper cup. She looked down at the girl broodingly.
“I’m tired of apologizing,” she said. “I know you must think me a graceless old bitch. I hope you have some charity left for me, though.” She dropped the empty carton in a basket and smiled wistfully and returned to her office.
Annie’s gratified surprise gave way to confusion. It was worse than she’d imagined! Even she was credited with judgments, begged for charity!
Annie became a newspaper reader. Reading the paper was the high point of her day. She followed the war dispatches so closely that she grew sensitive to the ignorance of the people with whom she worked. They hardly knew where anything was except Santa Monica Beach.
Max wrote to her at last. It was an animated letter, peculiarly noisy, even jocular. He described basic training as a vaudeville routine. “Having seen to the exact angle of your tie, they then send you out to be killed.” She smelled the paper, brought the writing closer to her eyes, looked at the neat signature, “Max.” She phoned Eva and they made a date for dinner the following week. Eva, to Annie’s surprise, was genuinely glad to hear from her.
One night she lay in bed reading a Gide novel, The Counterfeiters, which Theda had loaned her. A small alarm clock, a new one, ticked softly at her bedside. At the foot of the bed, the day’s paper lay, spread out. It was 3:00 A.M. and, bathed and having eaten a good dinner at Theda’s, she felt oddly weightless, as though time had stopped, as though everything was in its place and there was nothing more to do. It wasn’t even important to sleep. The phone rang.
She hardly recognized Cletus’s voice.
“Hospital?” she exclaimed. “You’re in—”
“Wait! Listen!” He seemed to be screaming at her from a distance. “Get this address down. It’s on Ivar Street, a little apartment house. A girl’s there, Lucy Griggs.”
“Cletus!”
“Go to that girl! I’ve been beaten up! She was raped! Just go there, Annie, right now.”
“Cletus, where are you!”
“In the emergency—” Other voices broke in, Cletus protested something. “I’ll come there to that place when they let me out,” his voice came on again, a high screech buried somewhere in it like a shard of glass cutting toward the surface. “Go there.” She heard a street number repeated, then the phone was hung up with a clatter.
Her heart thumping with dread, she dressed, kicking her way into her clothes, gulping for air. The house was still and only a small night light burned in the hall as she fled down the stairs and out into the street. The sound of the car motor was shockingly loud.
In the entrance hall of the small apartment house on Ivar Street, she found a mailbox bearing the name Lucy Griggs and her apartment number. There were two other names scribbled on the
piece of cardboard. It was stale inside; it smelled of marginal decency, soup and garbage. There was no elevator. Annie went up a narrow staircase, the steps of which were covered in gray linoleum. On the third floor, one door was slightly open. She pushed it aside, her hand leaving a damp imprint on the frame. An unmade studio bed stood against the opposite wall and next to it, on a wooden box, a lamp with a colored-glass shade burned with weak pinkness.
“Lucy?” she whispered.
Against another wall ran a counter on which dishes and glasses were carelessly stacked. If the girl wasn’t here—relief flooded over her at the thought. It was so silent. She was frightened by the slovenliness of the room, the lamp burning with such a sickly light, the lateness of the hour, the open door. Where were those other two whose names she’d seen on the mailbox? She shuddered. Had they all been butchered? Were their bodies awaiting her discovery? She heard a long sigh. It was as though the entire apartment had exhaled a breath of sorrow at its wretched condition. She was still holding the front door. She pushed it, recognizing consciously what she had felt and not acknowledged a minute earlier. Someone, something, was obstructing the door. She looked behind it. A small girl lay on the floor across the threshold of a room not much larger than a closet. Her head was cradled in her slender arms. The girl’s bare feet were shoved against the door, Annie’s shove had forced the girl into this accordion position.
The girl’s feet were narrow, thin-toed. Her hair was bright red, her child’s arms freckled.
“Lucy!” Annie called.
The girl stirred and moaned.
Annie sat down on the floor and put her hand on the girl’s shoulder. She shuddered and inched away from Annie’s touch. “Cletus sent me.”
Slowly, the girl turned, revealing a narrow face with half-closed eyes and a bruised mouth. Her skin was blotched, as though she’d been burned. She began to sob.
Annie wedged her arm beneath the girl’s back and, half dragging her, got her over to the bed which took up most of the space in the room. There, the girl curled up again, her knees nearly to her chin. She looked no older than twelve. With a start of fear, Annie closed and locked the front door, then came back and sat on the bed. The thinness of the girl’s skin, the reddishness that shone through it, the long radial bones of the arms, the delicate bird neck, exposed now as the girl clutched at her own hair, gave a somewhat repugnant fragility to the whole body, as though the girl had been born without an adequate covering of flesh.
“Lucy. My name is Annie. Cletus called me from the hospital. He’s all right now. He told me what happened to you.”
The girl’s sobs ceased and she sighed again, that terrible long sigh that whistled and whispered until Annie placed her hand around one of the narrow ankles next to her hand.
“Can’t talk,” she muttered.
“Tell me. It’ll be better.”
The sobbing began again.
Annie sat straight up. What could she do for this misery lying here? The sobs were so sickly, so weak!
“Talk to me,” Annie said loudly.
“Oh!” the girl cried out suddenly. “Oh! Oh!”
“I’m going to make you some tea,” said Annie, looking distractedly at the sink. But the girl’s arm darted out and the narrow finger bones closed around her wrist. She raised herself up and through swollen lids gazed at Annie’s face. “Don’t go.”
Annie slumped back against the wall, aware she’d felt disgust, horror. The tea had been an excuse to free herself from the clutch of the girl’s hand.
A slight smile appeared on the wounded face, a beggar’s mollifying smile. It disappeared almost at once.
“They—” the girl began, then stopped. She began to force herself all the way up, to sit like a broken sack of bones. She pushed tendrils of curly hair from her face.
“Tell me…” Annie said.
“Cletus and I had gone to a rent party. He was bringing me home. Then we were walking up Cahuenga, and this gang of men —” The smile touched her mouth again; her teeth were small and widely separated. “Boys, maybe. They made a circle around us. And they said nigger man and moved closer. A car went by, but it went by. There were maybe four or five of them and one had a cane or a stick. I don’t know what he had…” Her voice rose and Annie loosened the hand on her wrist and held it in her own.
“Easy…”
“Cletus told me to try to run through them where there was a little space, then I saw two older men in a doorway, watching, and I ran past two of those boys to the men and one of them said, Your friend’s in trouble, you’d better come with us, and I begged them to help him, and one of them said, No, those boys got knives, that’s what he said, the fat man said it. I said, But we’ll get the police and the other man said, Yes, there’s a drugstore where we can phone just down the street and I was so scared, I didn’t think how late it was, that there wouldn’t be a drugstore open. And I heard grunts and I saw they were beating up Cletus with that stick and a belt, something shiny I could see in the street light and I started to go back, but the fat man said—he talked very soft and kind—he said they would kill me and Cletus if I went back because that’s why they were beating him, because he was a colored man and I was white. And then Cletus fell down, and the boys ran away, up the hill, and I started to go back again but this time both men were holding me by the arms and I said 1 was going to scream and I did, and they pulled one of my arms behind my back and said they’d kill me right there on the street, they said they’d break my little neck if I let out a peep and I turned just once and saw Cletus getting to his feet and shaking his head. There was a dark streak on his face and I knew it was blood. Then these two men took me for blocks until we came to an old house and they forced me up the stoop and then up the stairs to a room.”
She gasped. Her teeth chattered noisily. Annie pulled a blanket from the floor where it had fallen, and carefully covered the girl up to her chin and said, “Let me make you something hot,” but the girl shook her head, no, no. She was silent for a long time, her eyes glassy, staring out into the larger room where the lamp burned.
“I’ll get you a doctor,” Annie said, not knowing how she’d get a doctor, not knowing any doctors except the one who’d taken out her appendix and she’d forgotten his name except it was a bird of some kind, but she could call, she’d seen a phone on the floor on the other side of the studio couch, she’d phone the hospital—
“No!” The girl cried out. “No doctor. I’m going home. I’m going to my own doctor back home.”
“Tell me the rest of it.”
“In that room there was a religious picture of Jesus’s mother on the wall, and a bed and a sink. One of the men—relieved himself into the sink while the other held my arms. There was a suitcase on the floor. I asked them if they believed in Jesus and they said sure, sure, they believed, and now I was to lie down on the floor, and I saw there was someone else in the bed, an old man and he was snoring and all the time I was there on the floor, the old man didn’t wake up once. I prayed to them, but I forgot everything nearly about praying, but they said—listen to what they said—they said they were sorry, but what was going to be done would be done. Then the fat man lay down on me first. The other man was little and smelled mildewed. I cried out—the fat man looked so terrible with his fat hanging over me—but he just took his trousers down and his belly was hanging there. I was afraid to make any noise, I thought if I made noise, the one on the bed would get up and he would have his turn with me too.”
The girl drew her legs up again beneath the blanket. Her inflamed eyes were wet but no tears fell.
“The little fellow kept saying he was sorry but the big one, his name was Mario, I heard him called that, just pulled up his pants and said hurry up to the other. Then they took me to the street and said don’t ever come back here with the police because we’ll be long gone and from now on you stay away from coons because that’s what you get from hanging around with coons. The little man whispered he was sorry again. I walked
home. Nobody I saw asked me anything, even though I was crying and limping. When I got here, Cletus was sitting on the floor in the hall all bloody and half conscious and he started to cry when he saw me, even before I told him. Then I told him, and he said he had to go to the hospital and I must go with him. But I wouldn’t go, and Cletus tried to make me and then I got frightened of Cletus, then someone upstairs came out in the hall and we both came in here and were quiet for a while. Then Cletus went to the hospital.”
Annie got up from the bed. The girl let her go this time, and she went to the refrigerator where she found a half-bottle of milk. There wasn’t anything else on the shelf except a shrunken lemon and a crumpled gardenia lying on a white plate, its petals nearly black.
She found a pan and heated the milk and washed out a cup and brought it back to the girl who drank it down quickly, exclaiming a little at its hotness. They sat there without speaking, Annie holding the empty cup. Through the window over the bed she watched the light change. In the large room, the pink lamp looked feverish as the dawn touched the room.
There were women’s clothes strewn about the floor.
“Where are the others who live here?”
“They went away to Big Bear Lake for the weekend. Harriet and Jean. They’ll be back soon. Jean’s parents are coming today from San Francisco. We were going to clean up the place.”
“Please let me get a doctor for you.”
The girl shook her head. “No. I’m going home. I’m going home today. I’m taking the train home to my town and go to my doctor.”
“Where is that?”
“Oregon. I live in Klamath Falls. I came down here—” then she stopped as if struck by the recollection of all that had led her to this place, this hour. She covered her face with her hands and rocked back and forth, but no sound issued forth from behind her locked fingers.
A while later, she appeared to sleep. Annie examined the closed face minutely. The splotches of red had begun to fade; Lucy’s eyelids were faintly blue; her hands lay one on the other, narrow, childish, the cuticles ragged and bitten. Her breath came softly, innocently.