The Complete Stories of Morley Callaghan: Volume One

by Morley Callaghan

  “All right,” Mamie said reluctantly. But she got up very slowly. She walked across the room with her head down, as if she could not bear to go into the kitchen and be alone with young Mrs. Henderson. Turning once, she looked back, almost pleading with Karl.

  Karl said quickly to his brother, “How do you like her, John?”

  “I like her all right,” John said cautiously. But he would not look directly at his brother. Then he said mildly, “Do you think you’re in love with her, Karl?”

  “I think I am, John.”

  “Where did you meet her?”

  “At Coney Island with a fellow from the office.”

  “I suppose you know all about her.”

  “All there is to know, John.”

  “I don’t know what to say, Karl. She looks like a . . . She looks like a rather easy-going girl.” John was hating himself for speaking this way about his brother’s girl, but he was very fond of Karl and he felt he had to speak. “Like a . . . Maybe I mean not like a girl for you.”

  “You may have noticed the unimportant things,” Karl said. Then he looked tense and said suddenly, “I’m going to marry her.”

  “Don’t do it, Karl. It’ll finish you before you start. You’ll have to go her way the rest of your life. You’ll see later on. Please don’t.”

  Then Mamie and Helen returned with the coffee. But it was impossible now to make easy conversation. Maybe it was because the mother, solemn, aloof, and forbidding, was dozing in her chair and they were suddenly aware of her. They looked at each other and spoke and the sentences trailed away. Mamie had become suddenly quiet; a few fumbling words came to her, then she was still. She had begun to feel very strongly that they were reticent because they had such love for Karl, and she was trying to put it against her own love, and it gave her a wondering, shy, and lonely look. She sat very straight in her bright-green dress, with a cup of coffee in her hand and the light shining on her shoulders and fair hair under her big hat. Her mouth looked wide and red. Karl noticed the simple candor in her eyes as she looked around fearfully, and with this stillness that was in her now she looked as he had so often seen her look when he had loved her most. He felt excited. He kept glancing restlessly at his brother, wondering why he, too, did not notice Mamie now.

  Then Mamie said hesitantly, “I think we’d better go.”

  “Maybe we’d better,” Karl said.

  “You say goodbye to your mother for me,” she said to John.

  At the door, they all shook hands. “Well, I wanted to meet you all and I met you,” Mamie said.

  “Good night.”

  “Good night. Good night, Karl,” they said.

  Outside Karl and Mamie were silent. They walked in step. It was fine and clear out on the street. Karl was thinking, “Why didn’t they look at Mamie when she was sitting there at the end? They would have seen what she’s really like.” He felt angry. “That was the only time they had a chance to see what she was really like.” He went on thinking how splendid she had looked, how she had suddenly been changed and had begun to look like such a fine person. “You’d think they would have noticed it,” he thought. He heard Mamie asking quietly, “What do you think they thought of me?”

  “I don’t know yet,” he said casually. But then he could not stop remembering how his brother had said so earnestly, “Please don’t do it,” and the voice almost coaxing, the voice gentle and full of love. “She looks like a . . .” He heard the voice still trying to finish the sentence. Now there was not fear but dreadful uneasiness and then heavy deadness within him.

  “What do you think of Helen?” he asked.

  “I didn’t like her,” Mamie said, “she’s a little snip.”

  “She was nice to you.”

  “She was nice to me just as if I was her idea of a fallen woman.” Then she added in a rage, “I’d like to wring her neck.”

  “Maybe she didn’t like you either,” he said angrily.

  “I don’t want her to.”

  “She’s nicer than anyone you’ll ever meet,” he said sharply.

  This sharp hostility, rising so quickly, startled them, but they welcomed it with eagerness. They wanted to hurt each other so they could pull against whatever was holding them together. They kept on hurting each other till she said quickly, “I’ll not walk along here feeling you hate me. Don’t come home with me. I’ll go alone,” and she pushed him away from her and hurried across the road.

  “Let her go if she feels that way,” Karl thought. So he stood and watched her cross the street, watched the swaying of her hips, and the blonde hair at her neck. He almost felt the firmness and warmth and roundness of her passing away from him.

  Then he darted after her and called out, “Mamie!”

  “Go away!” she called as she turned. Her face showed all that was breaking inside her. Her face, bewildered and desolate, showed how well she knew they had rejected her.

  He watched her fading out of sight while he remembered all the happiness he had expected to have with her. He started to follow her slowly, feeling sure he was doing something irrevocable that could not be undone. But he only knew that he dared not let her out of his sight.

  Old Quarrel

  Mrs. Massey, a stout, kindly woman of sixty, full of energy for her age, and red-faced and healthy, except for an occasional pain in her leg which she watched very carefully, had come from Chicago to see her son, who was a doctor. The doctor’s family made a great fuss over her and she felt in such good humor that she said suddenly one night, “I declare, I’ll go and see Mary Woolens. I wonder what’s happened to her? Find out where she lives for me.”

  She had grown up with Mary Woolens. Thirty years ago they had quarreled, she had married and gone west, and they had not seen each other since.

  The next afternoon Mrs. Massey was back in her neighborhood on the avenue at the corner of Christopher Street, staring around longingly for some familiar sight that might recall an incident in her childhood. Looking carefully to the right and left, she had darted forward across the street with a determined look on her face — for traffic now made her nervous — and had arrived on the other side breathless with relief.

  She walked slowly along the street, taking a deep breath after another, and leaning forward to lift some of the weight off her feet. Her face was screwed up as she peered at the numbers on the houses, and as she stopped to put on her glasses she was smiling eagerly like a woman who nurses a secret.

  If she had closed her eyes and stood there, she could have remembered vividly almost every word of her quarrel with Mary Woolens. Mary had been a foolish, rather homely girl who found herself in love with a deceitful man who kept on promising to marry her while he borrowed her money. Then Mary had borrowed a hundred dollars from her, and it turned out that she had given it to the fellow, who had gone away, and of course Mary was not able to pay the money back. There had been so much bitterness. She had wanted to have the man arrested. For a while Mary and she seemed to hate each other, then their friendship was over.

  Now, walking along the street, Mrs. Massey was full of shame to think there had been a quarrel about money. It seemed now that they both had been mean and spiteful, and she couldn’t bear to think Mary might not know that she had forgiven her long ago. “This must be the place here,” she said, looking up at the brownstone house. For a moment she felt awkward and still a bit ashamed, then she went up the steps, feeling like a self-possessed, well-dressed woman in good circumstances.

  It was a clean-looking house with a little sign advertising small apartments and a few rooms for rent. As Mrs. Massey rang the bell in the hall, she peered up the stairs, waiting, and then saw a woman in a plain dark-blue dress and with astonishingly white hair coming toward her. This woman, who had earnest blue eyes and a mild, peaceful expression, asked politely, “Were you wanting to see somebody?”

  “I was wanting to see Miss Woolens,” Mrs. Massey said. Then, “Goodness, you’re Mary. Mary, don’t you really know me?”
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  “I can’t quite see you in that light. If you’d turn your head to the side? There now, well. Elsie Wiggins! It can’t be Elsie Wiggins. I mean Elsie Massey.”

  The little white-haired woman was so startled that her hands, held up to her lips, began to shake. Then she was so pleased she could not move. “I never thought of such a thing in my life,” she said. She was very flustered, so she cried out suddenly, “Oh, I’m so glad to see you; come in, please come in, Elsie,” and she went hurrying along the hall to a room at the back of the house, while Mrs. Massey, following more slowly, smiled to herself with deep enjoyment.

  And even when they were sitting in the big carpeted room with the old-fashioned couch and armchairs, she knew that Mary was still looking at her as though she were a splendid creature from a strange world. Mrs. Massey smiled with indulgent good humor. But Mary had no composure at all. “I just don’t know what to say to you, Elsie. I’m so delighted to see you.” Then darting up like a small bird, she said, “I’ll put on the kettle and we’ll have a cup of tea.”

  While she waited, Mrs. Massey felt a twinge of uneasiness, wondering how she would mention that she had long ago forgiven Mary, for she was sure that was what was making the poor woman so flustered, even though, so far, she was pretending there had never been bitterness between them. With a pot of tea on a tray, and beaming with childish warmth, Mary returned, saying, “I was just trying to count up the years since we last saw each other.”

  “It must be thirty years, fancy that,” Mrs. Massey said.

  “But I’ve heard about you, Elsie. I once met a woman who had lived in Chicago, and she told me that you had a son who was a doctor, and I read about some wonderful operation he performed in one of the hospitals here. It was in all the papers. You must be awfully proud, Elsie. Who does he look like?”

  “They always said he looked like his father.”

  “Maybe so. But of course I always think of him as Elsie’s boy.”

  “Has your health been good, Mary?”

  “I’ve nothing to complain about. I don’t look strong do I? But outside of a pain in my head that the doctor says might be caused by an old tooth, I’m in good health. You look fine, though.”

  “Well, I am and I’m not. I’ve a pain in the leg and sometimes a swelling here, just at the ankle, that may be from my heart. Never mind. Have the years been good to you, Mary? What’s happened?”

  “Why, nothing. Nothing at all, I suppose,” Mary said, looking around the room as though puzzled. As she smiled, she looked sweet and frail. “I look after the house here. I learned to save my money,” she said. All of a sudden she added, “Tell me about your son, the doctor,” and she leaned forward, as though seeking a confirmation of many things she might have dreamed. “I ought to pour the tea now,” she said, “but you go right on talking. I’ll hear everything you say.”

  Mrs. Massey began to talk quietly with a subdued pride about her son, and sometimes she looked up at Mary, who was pouring the tea with a thin trembling hand. The flush of excitement was still on Mary’s face. Her chest looked almost hollow. She was a woman who, of course, had worked hard for years, every day wearing clothes that looked the same, seeing that her house was cleaned in the morning, going to the same stores every afternoon, and getting much pleasure out of a bit of lively gossip with a neighbor on the street.

  “I need more hot water,” she said, and hurried to the kitchen with short steps, and then, when she returned, she stood with a cup in her hand, lost in her thoughts. “Goodness,” she said. “There are so many things to say I don’t know what I’m doing.”

  Mrs. Massey continued to talk with gentle tolerance, remembering that her own life had been rich and fruitful, and having pity for Mary, who had remained alone. But when a bit of sunlight from the window shone on Mary’s white head and thin face as she sat with a teacup in her hand, her face held so much sweetness and gentleness that Mrs. Massey was puzzled, for Mary had been a rather homely girl.

  “It troubled me terribly to stand on the corner and feel so strange,” Mrs. Massey was saying.

  “Elsie, heavens above! I didn’t ask about Will, your husband.”

  “Will? Why, Will’s been dead five years, Mary.”

  “Dead. Think of that. I hardly knew him. It seems like yesterday.”

  “We were married twenty-five years.”

  “You used to love him very much, didn’t you Elsie? I remember that. He was a good-living man, wasn’t he?”

  “He was a good man,” Mrs. Massey said vaguely, and they both sat there, silent now, having their own thoughts.

  Mary Woolens, white-haired, was leaning forward quite eagerly. But Mrs. Massey, stout and red-faced, sighed, thinking of the long, steady years of married life; and though there had been children and some bright moments and some hopes fulfilled, she was strangely discontented now, troubled by a longing for something she could not see or understand.

  Perhaps it was Mary’s eagerness that was stirring her, but she aroused herself by thinking, “Has she forgotten I once told her I hated her? Won’t she mention it at all?” Since she had been the one who had held the old grievance, she felt resentful, for the old mean quarrel had bothered her a long time, had filled her with shame so that she had been eager to forgive Mary; and now Mary seemed to have forgotten it.

  She looked full into Mary’s face, and then couldn’t help wondering what was making her smile so happily. “What are you thinking of, Mary?” she asked.

  “Do you remember how we grew up around here, and were little bits of kids together?”

  “I sort of remember.”

  “I sort of half remember.”

  “Do you remember when we were such little things, we used to sit together on the steps and you used to tell me all kinds of fairy stories, making them up? I’ll bet you can’t remember.”

  “I do remember,” Mrs. Massey said, leaning forward.

  “There was another girl used to sit with us sometimes, Bertha, Bertha — oh, dear, now, what was it?”

  “Bertha Madison. We wore big hair ribbons. I can remember some of the fairy stories now. The night I read about your son being the fine surgeon and performing that wonderful operation, I lay in bed thinking about you, and I remembered the stories. It used to seem so wonderful that you could make up such fine stories as you went along, and it seemed just right, when I thought about it, that your boy should be doing the things he was: I remember there was one story you kept carrying on, and like a whole lot of bright patches it was.”

  “I remember,” Mrs. Massey said.

  Mary looked up suddenly. Her face was flushed, her blue eyes brilliant. She was looking up with a kind of desperate rapt interest and mysterious delight. Mrs. Massey was leaning forward, her heavy face holding a little smile that kept her lips parted. They were leaning close to each other, almost breathing together, while they were silent. Then, without any warning, Mary began to cry, shaking her head from side to side, and dabbing at her eyes with a small handkerchief.

  “Mary, dear, Mary! What is the matter? Why are you crying?”

  “I don’t know,” Mary said.

  “You shouldn’t go on like that, then,” Mrs. Massey said, fretfully. But she, too, felt her eyes moistening. “Oh, dear, oh, dear, Mary,” she said, rocking from side to side, “oh, dear, oh, dear.” She tried bravely to smile, but it no longer seemed important that they had once quarreled bitterly, or that her life had been full and Mary’s quite barren — just that they had been young together, and now they were old.

  The Shining Red Apple

  It was the look of longing on the boy’s face that made Joe Cosentino, dealer in fruits and vegetables, notice him. Joe was sitting on his high stool at the end of the counter where he sat every afternoon, looking out of the window at the bunches of bananas and the cauliflowers and the tomatoes and apples piled on the street stand, and he was watching to see that the kids on the way home from school didn’t touch any of the fruit.

  A skinny little
boy, who was wearing a red sweater and blue overalls, stood near the end of the fruit stand by a pyramid of big red apples. With his hands linked loosely together in front of him, and his head, with the straight, untidy brown hair that hung almost down to his blue eyes, cocked over to one side, he stood looking with longing at the apples. If he moved a little to the right, he would be out of sight of the window, but even so, if he reached his hand out to take an apple, Joe, sitting at the end of the counter and watching, would surely see the hand. The sleeves of Joe’s khaki shirt were rolled up, and as he sat on his stool he folded his hairy forearms across his deep chest. There wasn’t much business, there seemed to be a little less every day, and sitting there week after week, he grew a little fatter and a little slower and much more meditative. The store was untidy, and the fruit and the vegetables no longer had the cool, fresh appearance they had in the stores of merchants who were prosperous.

  If the kid, standing outside, had been a big, resolute-looking boy, Joe would have been alert and suspicious, but as it was, it was amusing to sit there and pretend he could feel the kid’s longing for the apple growing stronger. As though making the first move in a game, Joe leaned forward suddenly, and the boy, lowering his head, shuffled a few feet away. Then Joe, whistling thinly, as if he hadn’t noticed anything, got up and went out, took his handkerchief and started to polish a few of the apples on the pile. They were big, juicy-looking apples, a little overripe and going soft. He polished them till they gleamed and glistened in the sun. Then he said to the kid, “Fine day, eh, son?”

  “Yeah,” the kid said timidly.

  “You live around here?”

  “No.”

  “New around here?” Joe said.

  The kid, nodding his head shyly, didn’t offer to tell where he lived, so Joe, chuckling to himself, and feeling powerful because he knew so surely just what would happen, went back to the store and sat down on the stool.