When he relaxed, when he sat too long in one place, he invariably found himself on the railway platform downtown, with her. The train was coming in—the one they were going to take to Decatur. And there were people walking up and down the platform, waiting to get on. He shoved forward, knowing each time that if he’d only waited—but he didn’t wait. That was the whole trouble. He was trying to get seats for the two of them before all the others got on. If he’d stepped back, he’d have seen the interurban draw up alongside the train. On the other tracks … The interurban had a parlor car that was almost empty. It would have been ever so much better to take that, don’t you see? And turn their train tickets in later. That way they wouldn’t have been exposed. But they had suitcases and all the people were pushing them forward and the train was crowded already. There was nothing to do but go up the steps and onto the train.
“You must take care of yourself, Mr. Morison,” Sophie said. “You’ve got those three young children to think about. If anything happened to you now—”
“Yes,” James said, “you’re quite right.” And sprang up suddenly and began tearing the envelopes open, one after another. He read the letters while he walked back and forth between the fireplace and the windows—read them over and over without retaining what he read. Then he threw envelopes and letters upon the library table and stood perfectly still, pressing his shoulder against the mantel
For two days now (ever since they came into his room at daybreak to tell him) he had been getting on that train. And there was no way, apparently, that he could stop.
2
The coffin was set in the bay window of the living-room, and James wanted to be alone, but almost as soon as the undertaker’s men were out of the house, Wilfred appeared, bringing James’s mother and Bunny.
Bunny was weeping.
James bent down and drew Bunny to him, between his knees, and felt the soft wet cold cheek against his own rough skin.
“There, there,” he said, gently. “You mustn’t, son. You mustn’t take on so. You’ll be sick.” He struggled with the large buttons on the child’s coat.
“I put his rubbers on,” Wilfred said.
James looked at him earnestly.
“I say I put Bunny’s rubbers on.”
“Oh … much obliged to you.”
“That’s all right,” Wilfred said. “Glad to do it, only I think I got them wrong foot to.”
James nodded. If they’d only wait, let him be by himself for a while.
“Clara said to tell you she’d be over this evening right after supper.”
“You must take your coats off,” James said. “You mustn’t stand here in the front hall.” And wondered if his words sounded as desperate to them—and as foolish.
His mother unwound a heavy woolen scarf and looked at him with faded eyes.
“James,” she said solemnly, “she is gone to a better place, where she’ll always be happy. Fourteen years ago your father died—in March. And it doesn’t seem like any time at all….”
Neither does what happened night before last, James wanted to say to her. He was only two rooms down the hall at the hospital, and Thursday night, when she was worse, he lay awake all night, listening. The gas-light came through the transom and cut a rectangular hole in the ceiling. It was through that hole that the sound of her desperate suffocated breathing came to him.
“You don’t know, I said to Clara, how many times I get down on my knees and thank God for taking him, for not letting him suffer.” She allowed Wilfred to help with her coat. “Every few days he’d have a spell of very bad pain. Then we’d have to give him morphine….”
When Bunny stopped weeping and turned to look at her, James separated him from his coat and mittens.
“Sophie is out in the kitchen.” he said. “Why don’t you go out and say hello to her.”
There was no point in a child’s knowing these things.
“I’d been waiting for him to go,” his mother said as they went into the library. “I’d been expecting it ever since he stopped eating. That’s what carried him along, the doctor said—a good appetite. And he’d lost so much flesh….”
With his eyes James begged Wilfred to take her away, but Wilfred was unable or unwilling. He sat down in the largest chair and crossed one knee over the other permanently.
“I don’t think your father weighed much over a hundred and twenty or maybe a hundred and twenty-five, because there was nothing to him but skin and bones. Even so”—she turned and looked into Wilfred’s face to make sure that he was listening—“even so, I didn’t get much rest. It was hard lifting him, you know, and I stayed right in the same room with him for months. He’d rather lie there and suffer than call anybody. And I knew if I was near I’d hear him move. He’d have pain, you know, James. And then he’d take medicine and sleep.”
There was a silence. James said, “Did you have a nice time in Vandalia, Wilfred?”
“In Vandalia? Why, we didn’t go.”
“I thought you and Clara were going down there for Thanksgiving.”
“We did intend to. But we’d have had to go on the train, and with so much sickness about, we were afraid to risk it. But I thought Clara told you all that when you called up about the boys?”
“Yes, I guess she did. Have they been all right? And behaved themselves?”
“Robert’s been sick.”
“Oh … is that so?”
“Yes, Robert’s been a sick boy,” his mother said. “A mighty sick boy!”
“The flu?”
She nodded.
“Yesterday morning,” Wilfred said, “after you called, Robert got up out of bed before he was supposed to. Today, the doctor said. But Clara got in touch with him during the forenoon and he said it was all right if Robert didn’t have any temperature. And he didn’t—this was yesterday—so I guess it will be. He has to keep quiet, of course.”
James caught a glimpse of a pocket knife: Wilfred was going to pare his finger nails.
“He didn’t seem to take it as hard as Bunny did. But then I always thought Bunny showed his mother more affection.” Wilfred closed the knife blade with a sigh. “Clara was going to tell you but in case she forgets—if you want to bring the baby home after the funeral, we’d be only too glad to take it and look after it for you.”
James sat up. “I don’t know.” He steadied himself carefully with his hands. “They’re going to keep the baby at the hospital for a week or so. The baby’s all right, I guess, but they want to keep it there. And after that I don’t know exactly what I want to do. I haven’t had time to think about it.”
The front door opened while James was speaking.
“We want to be of help,” Wilfred said, “in any way that we possibly can.”
“That’s very kind of you.”
“Until you get straightened around,” Wilfred said.
Irene appeared in a draft of cold air. Her coat was half unbuttoned. She spoke to each of them. Then gravely, without any expression on her face, she made her way around Wilfred’s feet and drew the curtains together across the library windows. With grateful eyes James followed her. She turned on the table lamp, and in the blue bowl on the mantel found matches to light the fire. When Bunny came in, the room was bright and habitable.
She smiled at him. “You know your agate?” she said, and took the blue bowl down from the mantel. “The yellow agate that you told me was lost? Well I’ve found it.”
Bunny went on looking at her face.
“Here it is.”
“Irene,” Bunny said, “it’s so terrible here!” And buried his face in the lining of her coat.
Irene’s smile went all to pieces. She knelt down and put her arms about him. “Everything’s going to be all right,” she said. “Only you mustn’t cry, do you hear? You mustn’t cry.”
Bunny dried his face with the back of his hand, and took the bowl and the yellow agate.
“I know,” he said, and sat down on the floor to play.
“He isn’t, I guess.”
“Why not?”
“He’s been sick.”
“I know he has. I just came from there.”
“Clara doesn’t think Robert ought to come home,” Wilfred began. “He wasn’t even supposed to——”
Irene interrupted him. “I called Dr. Macgregor and he said he’d seen Robert early this morning, and that it was all right if we wanted to bring him home…. Clara wouldn’t listen, James. I told her … I told her everything Dr. Macgregor said. But she said Robert was going to stay there just the same…. I left him sitting in a chair by the front window with his rubbers on.”
“If Clara doesn’t think he ought to come home,” James said, “perhaps it would be just as well to—”
“Don’t you want him here?”
“Certainly I want him.”
“Well do you mind if I call and tell her that?”
James shut his eyes. “Tell her anything you like.”
He would have shut his mind, too, if it had been possible. He was very tired. And weak. And there was no reason why they could not make these arrangements among themselves.
From what Wilfred was saying—a word now and then, or a phrase—James gathered that the churches had been closed on account of the epidemic, but they were soon to be opened again. As for the epidemic, Wilfred said, that was on the wane. No new cases had been reported yesterday or the day before.
Against his will James listened and heard Irene’s voice locked in argument
“I know, Clara, but the doctor says it’s all right … yes…. Yes, James wants him here….”
They had traced the epidemic, Wilfred said, to the original source and found that it was brought to this country in German submarines.
“Yes…. Yes, Clara…. Yes, I know!”
James turned and looked at Irene uneasily. There was no color in her face.
“Yes,” she said, very slowly. “Yes … yes …”
The brilliant unreasonable laughter shocked them all and furthermore it didn’t stop when it should have, but went on and on into the mouthpiece of the telephone.
3
It was Wilfred who took the receiver out of Irene’s hand and told Clara to have the boy ready in fifteen minutes. For that James would be grateful always. Ethel came in from the late afternoon train and went upstairs right away to look after Irene. When his mother and Wilfred had gone, James stood with his back to the fire until the little brass clock on the mantel tick-tick-tick-ticked itself out of existence and the room grew quiet around him.
At five-thirty Robert came in. He had a book under one arm and the box of soldiers under the other, and he limped more noticeably than usual. When Robert was tired, he did not care how he walked, but led with his good leg, in spite of all that James had told him, and dragged his artificial leg behind.
Robert shook hands with his father solemnly and put the soldiers and the book on the library table. Then he went over to the windows and sat down.
“How are you feeling, son?”
“All right,” Robert said.
“Weak?”
“Yes.”
“So am I. We’ll have to be careful for a while. Both of us.”
Their eyes met and they agreed that there was something in the house which was not to be talked about. The best and possibly the only solution, so far as James could see, was for Clara to take the baby. And the boys, too. For he couldn’t keep the house going—that was certain. He’d have to store what furniture he wanted. That wasn’t much. He had never cared for antiques the way Elizabeth did. And sell all the rest. Sell the house, too, for what he could get.
Wilfred had not offered to take the boys, but it would be all right, probably. James would give Clara so much a month for boarding them and for their clothes—because he would not have Wilfred or anybody else paying for the support of his children. And he’d get a room near by. Clara’s wasn’t the kind of home they were used to, perhaps. But it would do until such time as he was able to make a better arrangement.
In the long run it was a mistake to have children. James did not understand them. He never knew what was going on in their minds. But that was Elizabeth’s doing, after all. It was she who had wanted them.
There were some men who had a natural way with children. Tom Macgregor, for instance. They came to him in a room full of people, and pestered the life out of him. When Bunny and Robert were little, they would come to their father sometimes to have cigar smoke blown into their ears—Bunny did still—when they had the earache. But not very often. If they had been girls it might have been different. James felt more at ease with little girls. They came and sat on his lap and played with his watch-fob. And they seemed to like very much the riddles he told them. Robert and Bunny were forever arguing, contending with each other like Cain and Abel. So that it was mostly a matter of keeping them separated and making each one play with his own toys. And without her … James went into the front hall and stared for a long time at the umbrella-stand. Without Elizabeth it was more than he could manage.
On the second trip into the front hall he went through the white columns and into the living-room. Then into the library by the door at the farther end. If he could only go back, if he could remember everything during the last ten days, why then he might—it was foolish of course, but the same idea occurred to him over and over—he might be able to change what had already happened.
In his whole life he had never been sick before—not seriously. And being sick, he could not make people do the things he wanted them to. They would not even let him get up and go into her room at the hospital and see her—except that once, late Wednesday afternoon.
The nurse brought a chair for him and made him sit some distance away from the bed. Elizabeth was better, she said. But he could not help seeing how difficult it was for her to breathe. It seemed to take all her strength for that.
He looked at her hair spread out over the pillow, and remembered the first time he had ever seen her. She was driving a pony cart on Tremont Street and she had two little girls in the cart with her and the little girls wore big blue hair-ribbons.
He leaned forward to ask her if she remembered meeting him that day on Tremont Street, but just then the nurse came in. The nurse had the baby with her, wrapped in a white blanket. And Elizabeth smiled her slow smile and said, Look, James, another peeing boy….
4
Each time that James passed through the living-room he was careful to look at the sofa or the French windows which led into the back part of the house. Nevertheless, he was drawn, pulled toward the bay window, until at last he could get no farther. The coffin was grey with silver handles. And if it was really Elizabeth, James thought—if he should see her when he stepped up to it (her dark hair and her forehead and the slope of her throat)—he did not know what he would do.
He stood there a few feet away, with his heart racing wildly like a machine, and Sophie had to call him twice to dinner before he understood.
Ethel and the boys were waiting for him in the dining-room.
“Would you like me to serve, James?” she said.
James looked at her in bewilderment. She pronounced her words precisely the way a school-teacher would.
“I always do the serving,” he said.
“Yes, but I thought that perhaps if you weren’t feeling well—”
“I’m all right,” James said. “I’m quite all right.”
They sat down together—Ethel in Elizabeth’s place at the end of the table. When James was with her he found himself on guard for fear that he would make some mistake in his English. He spoke as well as the average person, he supposed. As well as anyone ought to speak. But Ethel had gone East to school. She had gone to Bryn Mawr and she never seemed to want to marry. When she was younger and before her hair turned grey, she was attractive
enough. James knew of several men that she could have had. But she was too well educated for a woman and she didn’t want any of them.
“For Miss Blaney,” he said. And when Sophie took the plate that he handed her, James noticed that she was self-conscious on account of her mouth.
“How much are they going to cost, Sophie?” he said when she returned to his end of the table.
“What, Mr. Morison?”
“Your teeth.”
“I don’t know, exactly,” she said, with the color mounting upward into her face, “About fifty dollars.” She set Bunny’s plate in front of him. “But if I’d known how much it would take, I don’t guess I’d of had them out. But they were hurting me so, night and day—”
“You did the right thing, I’m sure,” Ethel said. “And Robert needs more water.”
James wondered if he had said something that he shouldn’t have, if he had said something unkind. “When the time comes to get your new teeth, let me know, Sophie. I might be able to help you with them.” He took up the carving-knife and began sharpening it. And Sophie beside him pulled the hem out of her apron in an access of gratitude.
When Robert had been served, she returned once more to the head of the table.
“That Karl is here …”
James unfolded his napkin.
“Tell him I’ll be out as soon as we’re through dinner,” he said.
Sophie disappeared through the swinging doors, and James took up his knife and fork. When he tried to eat, the food turned solid in his throat and would not go down. There was nothing to do but sit with his plate untouched before him, and watch his sons, who were still too young to confuse grief with a good appetite.
When Robert passed things it was always without speaking and without looking up—as if the interruption were barely tolerable. With Bunny it seemed to be largely a matter of making him hear, for he ate with his eyes on some object (the corner of a dish now) and there was no telling where his mind was.
They Came Like Swallows Page 11