The Complete Stories of Morley Callaghan: Volume One

by Morley Callaghan

“Where did you come from, Anderson? I’m terribly glad to see you,” Wallace said. He had known Anderson five years ago in Montreal when Anderson had been in a stockbroker’s office.

  “I’ve been around here a little while,” Anderson said.

  “Have you got a place to stay?”

  “No.”

  “Why don’t you stay here with me? I can speak to Mrs. Cosentino.”

  “Are you sure you want me?”

  “I’ve never been so glad to see anybody,” Wallace said, slapping him on the back and hardly noticing his shabby clothes, his peculiar pallor or his nervous movements.

  “I thought you’d be glad to see me,” he said, and looked around the room, then went over to the couch and lay down with his hands behind his head and sighed contentedly.

  They had a cup of coffee and Anderson talked about people they used to know and about his rich uncle in Georgia, and Wallace noticed that he talked about them as if they belonged to a time he hardly remembered. He said he was trying to sell insurance now. That started him laughing and he kept it up till he began to cough. Even when they went to bed and turned out the light he kept chuckling to himself, explaining he had no luck at all. Wallace, who couldn’t sleep listening to the man snickering at his own failure, began to realize that Anderson had probably been in town far longer than he had himself; he got the idea Anderson had been following him around. It was so disturbing he got up and turned on the light and went over to the couch and said: “Tell me something. How did you know I was here, Anderson?”

  “I saw you on the street tonight and I tried to catch up with you,” he said, looking up innocently at Wallace. “I thought you might want us to stay together.”

  “Yeah,” Wallace said, and he went back to bed and couldn’t sleep.

  Anderson agreed to pay Mrs. Cosentino, the plump little Italian who ran the house, more money per week, and she put another bed in the room and he became a part of Wallace’s life. He followed Wallace around everywhere, grinning happily to himself. Times were bad and getting worse but, as thing picked up for Wallace, and he got a little more work from the advertising agencies, he made more friends, among them a radio script writer named Higgins who lived in the next block, and a shrewd blonde named Anna Grant, and late at night he used to go to Anna Grant’s for a cocktail. A couple of times Anderson asked if he could come along. After that, as though it had all been arranged, Anderson began to drop into Higgins’ place by himself; he went to Anna Grant’s place by himself, too, and if he didn’t find Wallace there he chuckled good-humoredly and explained he’d sit around and wait for him.

  It got so that Wallace sometimes couldn’t stand the sight of him. He wanted to get rid of him. He forgot that only two years ago he had been back on his heels himself. If the man had been trying to work it would have been different, but he had no expectation of ever selling a policy. He was only shuffling around the streets with his hands in his pockets and his head down. If he did sell a trifling bit of fire insurance, the whole thing seemed to become a crazy joke. He rushed out and bought a bottle of local wine and came tiptoeing up the stairs with that provoking snicker of his and his big brown eyes bright with surprise, and he sat down and took off his shoes and walked around the floor in his bare feet. Maybe his shoes hurt him, but it was upsetting to watch him padding around the room like that on a cold night, looking for a glass. But he soon made himself comfortable on his couch and grinned and sipped the heavy, sweet wine and kept squenching his cigarette butts on the nearest piece of furniture.

  “In God’s name, man, have some respect for the furniture,” Wallace shouted at him one night.

  “It’s just a habit,” he said. “I’m terribly sorry.”

  “It’s a lousy habit. You got too many of them.”

  “I know it. You’re not going to bawl me out, are you?” he asked, looking very scared. “You don’t need to bawl me out.”

  “No, I’m not bawling you out. What’s the matter with you? You give me the jitters.”

  Anderson put his glass down and said: “I think things are going to get a lot better. I’ve been talking to people. Just wait till the spring. I got about ten great prospects. They’re coming in a bunch.” Listening to him, one would have actually believed that he expected to make a lot of money very quickly and was full of hope. Every time he felt he was apt to be thrown out he burst into this glow of false enthusiasm; it was just a piece of stupid, bad acting.

  “Are you trying to dodge anybody?” Wallace asked him one day.

  “Me? What made you think of that?” he said, startled. “Nobody’s looking for me. You’re pretty funny, aren’t you?”

  “It’s the way you go around, I guess.”

  “Maybe I’m used to it that way now,” he said, apologetically. “You get used to doing this in a certain way. Haven’t you noticed?” he asked as if an intimacy that came from sharing a bewildering secret had been established between them.

  Wallace had met a few girls and he used to go out to a show with one and to a restaurant afterwards when he had a little money. Yet no matter how happy he felt with the girl he knew that when he got home he would feel worried and unhappy because Anderson would be lying there on his couch rolled up in a blanket, wide awake, a bottle of his wretched local wine at the foot of the bed, waiting for him.

  “How did it go?” he would say, sitting up.

  “How did what go?” Wallace shouted.

  “How did it go with the girl?” he said, as if that had been all he had been thinking about.

  “Listen, Anderson, why don’t you get yourself a girl?”

  “I’ll do it as soon as I get a couple of dollars,” he said apologetically, pulling the blankets up over his head as if he was never really warm.

  Though Anderson hadn’t paid Mrs. Cosentino any room rent since he’d come, he couldn’t have been more cheerful about it. He simply changed his hours, and it was always one o’clock in the morning when he came tiptoeing up the stairs, and he was out at six in the morning before Mrs. Cosentino got up. She never had a chance to abuse him. He liked having a little laugh out of this game he played with her.

  But Mrs. Cosentino said to Wallace one day, “You know, I’m getting no rent from that no-good friend of yours.”

  “Friend of mine! Don’t be silly,” he said.

  “No friend of yours?” she said, surprised.

  He was ashamed and said quickly, “I mean we had a little quarrel. Certainly he’s a friend. The truth is he gives me the extra money to give you on account. Here it is.” He felt he had betrayed Anderson and it suddenly struck him that Anderson was there in his life to remind him that up until the one year he’d gone broke he had been arrogant and contemptuous of many good and simple things, and could easily become just as impatient and arrogant again.

  One day his friend Anna Grant got angry and said, “You’re welcome here at our place, we like you, but hasn’t that terrible man Anderson any life of his own?”

  “I don’t know,” Wallace said. “I’ll ask him.”

  “Tell him to stop hanging around here or I will, and if I tell him he’ll know I mean it,” she said.

  That night Wallace waited for Anderson and said, “This is a bit complicated, but I’d like to ask you what happened in your life.”

  “What life do you mean?”

  “The life you must have had before you went broke, the people you knew, the fun you must have had, the things you must have wanted to do when you were a kid — that life,” Wallace said.

  Anderson lay on the couch, rubbing his head, and then said almost to himself, “I guess I lost it somewhere.” His eyes were furtive as he waited to see how Wallace would take his answer. When he saw that he had only puzzled him, he grinned and got a bag of buns he had brought in from the corner store and sat down to eat the whole half-dozen buns as though he were starving.

  “It was pretty dull over at Anna’s place this afternoon, didn’t you notice?” Wallace began, tactfully.

  “D
ull? What’s the matter with you? What do you want?” he said, chuckling over his buns.

  “That crowd gets on each other’s nerves. They hate each other. Didn’t you notice the sour expression on Anna’s face?”

  “That’s right, I did notice it and couldn’t figure what in hell was the matter with her. I figure she had a quarrel with her boyfriend.”

  Wallace tried again, “This is a lousy town,” he said. “I’m fed up with it. I think I’ll clear out and go back to Montreal.”

  “Clear out of here?” he said, taking the bun out of his mouth, he was so surprised. “I think you’re crazy. I’m just getting to like it here,” and he went out to their little kitchen in his bare feet with the light shining on his toes.

  He looked dreadfully thin, yet he seemed to be doing nothing but eat and lie around the room wrapped up in his blanket. Wallace often kept a fresh loaf of special rye bread in the place, and he liked having it, particularly on Sunday mornings when he got up late and made some toast and coffee. He noticed one morning that the bread was half gone.

  “Where did the bread go?” he shouted at Anderson.

  “Don’t ask me,” Anderson said, and Wallace knew by the frightened look on his face that he was lying.

  It was hard to catch him, but he grew more reckless and great chunks of the bread disappeared. One cold Sunday morning there was no loaf at all for Wallace when he got up, and he rushed at Anderson, who was sleeping on the couch and shouted at him, “Wake up you bum, wake up,” and he shook him and watched his thin face rocking from side to side on the pillow. He hated him while he shook him.

  “What’s the matter?” Anderson said, rubbing his head.

  “You took my bread again. You took it all last night and you knew I’d want it Sunday morning.”

  “I took a little piece.”

  “You took the whole loaf, crammed it into you like a pig.”

  “I was a little hungry last night.”

  “You’re always hungry. You’re sitting around here like a wolf all the time. That’s all you do, wolf everything up and lie about it. I’m fed up with your living on me. You’ve wormed your way into my life.”

  Without looking at Wallace, Anderson got up and walked along the hall to the bathroom in his bare feet, scared, and when he returned he said: “Do you think maybe I’d better go?”

  “What do you think?” said Wallace.

  “I think I’d better,” he said, quietly, and since he had no packing to do, no bag to carry, he simply put on his coat and hat and made no noise going down the stairs.

  Wallace sat there hating him, hating him not just for the loaf of bread, which was nothing, but for grafting himself onto his life and bringing him one humiliation after another. But the thought of parting with him over a loaf of bread began to fill him with such shame he got dressed and rushed out looking for him. He went over to Higgins’ place, he went to Anna Grant’s, but no one remembered having seen him. He began to hate himself. He got into a panic remembering the time three years ago when he himself had been light-headed from hunger, and he looked in the taverns thinking all the time of Anderson sitting alone somewhere trying to get warm and coughing, or flitting by people so quickly they didn’t notice him. That night he sat up for hours longing for him to come sneaking up the stairs and forgive him.

  It was two weeks before he heard that soft, furtive knock on the door, but he was waiting and he jumped out of bed and yelled out, overjoyed, “Anderson, Anderson, come in.” Wallace was filled with such gratitude to him for coming back that he couldn’t speak. The sight of his face made him terribly happy. “Don’t stand there, come in,” he cried.

  “I thought you’d be glad,” Anderson said, as he sat down on the couch and took a deep breath and looked around the room.

  “You knew I’d be, and you were good to come. It was a generous thing to do.”

  “I was sure you’d be glad by this time,” he said innocently, as he began to pull off his shoes.

  “Don’t remind me of it, please. I was ashamed.”

  “I waited,” he said, smiling.

  “Please don’t go on like that,” Wallace said. Then he saw that Anderson was flushed and trembling. He rushed and got him his blanket, and when he saw him pulling it up around his ears, leaving those terrible bare feet of his sticking out at the end, he knew he was sick and he whispered, “What’s the matter with you?”

  “It’s a pain in my back, maybe my lung,” he said. “I had pleurisy a couple of years ago.”

  “I’ll get a doctor, we’ll fix you up.”

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “For God’s sake don’t go phoning a doctor this late at night.”

  “Why?”

  “He might get sore.”

  “Let him get sore. To hell with him.”

  “No, listen, Wallace, I wanted to tell you you were right.”

  “What about?”

  “The bread.”

  “Please, please don’t mention that now. You wouldn’t be sick if it weren’t for that bread.”

  “Yes, I would. Thanks. Look, don’t tell anyone about the bread, will you, promise?”

  Wallace promised and sat at the foot of the couch sharing that old peculiar intimate secret with Anderson who was breathing very heavily. When his eyes were closed, he had a very peaceful smile on his face.

  Doctors came who wanted to take Anderson to the hospital, but he begged Wallace to let him stay there with him. The doctors shrugged and let him stay. In a week’s time he was dying of pneumonia. Wallace, watching him a few minutes before he lost consciousness, saw that furtive little smile hovering around his thick lips. Bending down to him he whispered, “Anderson, I’m here with you.”

  “I knew you’d be,” he replied. His eyes, as he opened them and rolled them around, looked very soft and brown. He tried to take Wallace by the hand. “I want to thank you for the hideout,” he said.

  “It’s your place. You weren’t hiding here.”

  “I don’t mind going now,” he said, and he closed his eyes, smiled a little, and while he smiled like that Wallace knew Anderson was more deeply imbedded in his own life than he had ever been. He died that night.

  Mrs. Cosentino was very angry at him for dying in her place and they got him to an undertaker’s parlor as quickly as possible. The funeral was just as private and furtive a gesture as any Anderson had ever made. Wallace was the only one who went to the funeral. It was zero weather and there was a little snow in the wind. The undertaker’s assistants looked ridiculous in their wing collars as they shivered, and when they were lowering the casket one of them said, “I think we may dispense with the ceremony of taking our hats off under these difficult conditions.”

  A Predicament

  Father Francis, the youngest priest at the cathedral, was hearing confessions on a Saturday afternoon. He stepped out of the confessional to stretch his legs a moment and walked up the left aisle toward the flickering red light of the Precious Blood, mystical in the twilight of the cathedral. Father Francis walked back to the confessional because too many women were waiting on the penitent bench. There were not so many men.

  Sitting again in the confessional, he said a short prayer to the Virgin Mary to get in the mood for hearing confessions. He wiped his lips with his handkerchief, cleared his throat, and pushed back the panel, inclining his ear to hear a woman’s confession. The panel slid back with a sharp grating noise. Father Francis whispered his ritual prayer and made the sign of the cross. The woman hadn’t been to confession for three months and had missed mass twice for no good reason. He questioned her determinedly, indignant with this woman who had missed mass for no good reason. In a steady whisper he told her the story of an old woman who had crawled on the ice to get to mass. The woman hesitated, then told about missing her morning prayers . . . “Yes, my child, yes, my child . . .” “And about certain thoughts . . .” “Now about these thoughts; let’s look at it in this way . . .” He gave the woman absolution and told her to say
the beads once for her penance.

  Closing the panel on the women’s side, he sat quietly for a moment in the darkness of the confessional. He was a young priest, very interested in confessions.

  Father Francis turned to the other side, pushing back the panel to hear some man’s confession. Resting his chin on his hand after making the sign of the cross, he did not bother trying to discern the outline of the head and shoulders of the man kneeling in the corner.

  The man said in a husky voice: “I wanna get off at the corner of King and Yonge Street.”

  Father Francis sat up straight, peering through the wirework. The man’s head was moving. He could see his nose and his eyes. His heart began to beat unevenly. He sat back quietly.

  “Cancha hear me, wasamatter, I wanna get off at King and Yonge,” the man said insistently, pushing his nose through the wirework.

  On the man’s breath there was a strong smell of whiskey. Father Francis nervously slid the panel back into position. As the panel slid into place he knew it sounded like the closing of doors on a bus or streetcar. There he was hearing confessions, and a drunken man on the other side of the panel thought him a conductor on a streetcar. He would go into the vestry and tell Father Marlow.

  Father Francis stepped out of the confessional to look around the cathedral. Men and women in the pews and on the penitents’ benches wondered why he had come out of the confessional twice in the last few minutes when so many were waiting. Father Francis wasn’t feeling well, that was the trouble. Walking up the aisle, he rubbed his smooth cheek with his hand, thinking hard. If he had the man thrown out he might be a tough customer and there would be a disturbance in the cathedral. Such a disturbance would be sure to get in the papers. Everything got in the papers. There was no use telling it to anybody. Walking erectly he went back to the confessional. Father Francis was sweating.

  Rubbing his shoulder blades uneasily against the back of the confessional, he decided to hear a woman’s confession. It was evading the issue — it was a compromise, but it didn’t matter; he was going to hear a woman’s confession first.