“Why, son,” his mother said, “what happened?”
“I ran into Meuller and some of the guys down at the corner,” he blurted out, “and I didn’t smack them. See, I didn’t smack them.”
Then Jules’ father got up and began to walk up and down the room. Jules could see how worried he was. His head hung down a little and the patch of white hair at the back stuck up in the light; it was as if something he had been dreading for months were coming at last to a head: the anguish he felt, which he could not conceal now, gave Jules a painful but deep satisfaction. “I was right. This is how they’ve been feeling all along,” he thought.
“What’s Meuller to you, son?” his father said, stopping in front of Jules with his hands out appealingly. “You’re a good boy, see,” he said, taking a step closer, his worried face full of gentle concern. It was as if he wanted to put his arm around Jules but was too shy. “You’re working and doing well, isn’t that so? And we’re proud of you.” His voice broke a little, but he went on, “We’re proud of the way you handle yourself, son.”
“Cut it out,” Jules said harshly. “That isn’t what you’re thinking.”
“It’s the way I’ve been feeling, Jules.”
“Meuller’s a bum, Jules,” his mother said, taking him by the arm and trying to get him to sit down. “Sure you should smack him, but he’s no good. Why should you put your hands on trash? Me and your father only want that you shouldn’t let such things bother you, son, see?” When he didn’t seem to be listening, she said desperately, “You don’t need to worry, you don’t need to worry about anything anybody says. We’re sure of you, son.”
But Jules was looking at his sister Alice, who sat down with her hat on and her hands clasped tight in her lap. She was two years older than Jules. She had never gotten into trouble, she was very pretty, and she had always seemed beyond the reach of any of the neighborhood boys. It was the way she carried herself. But now there was an angry flush on her face. In that flush, and in her silence, Jules thought he saw at last the true picture of the humiliation he would always bring to his family.
When Alice got up grimly and started to go along the hall, Jules followed her and grabbed her arm.
“Go on,” he whispered, “say it.”
“Say, what?”
“I never give you a chance to stop being ashamed of me!”
“Jules —”
“That boyfriend of yours — why don’t you ever bring him around here?”
“You’re going crazy, Jules. He was around here last night.”
“Sure,” he said. “When I wasn’t here.”
Then her eyes blazed, but she looked as if she were going to cry. “Why don’t you get some sense?” she whispered. “What’s the use of hitting Meuller? Nobody’s going around watching you, can’t you see? Jules, can’t you see?”
As she tried to take his arm comfortingly, he knocked it away. “Damn it all, stop sympathizing with me,” he said. He didn’t want to hear anything more. All he wanted to do was go out and find Meuller — or any other guy who would dare open his trap — and beat his brains out.
Going along the street, looking for Meuller, he kept gripping his hands tight, exulting in the release and freedom such violence would bring to him. But when he got to the corner and looked around, there was no one standing near the cigar store. There were no marks even in the snow, nothing to show that they, or he, had ever stood there. Then, as he looked up and down the street, wondering which way he should go, he felt an immense longing to have everything that had ever happened to him up to a few months ago wiped clean, just as the white falling snow had covered up and wiped out his footprints and Meuller’s.
He turned to look into the store through the window, but he couldn’t see in because of the way the snow, swept against the panes, melted and streamed down. Then it got so that he couldn’t even see the window. Spagnola’s fruit market kept coming into his head; he could see nothing but the old shed with the baskets of fruit, the little store, the lane behind. Turning away, he started to walk fast, trying hard to think of other things, like the little soft-eyed girl who had come into the shop where he worked. But it was no good. He couldn’t get the fruit market out of his head. It began to grow feverishly bright.
It was there blocking him every time he tried to move away from it, and while it was there, he could have no big dreams, no great eagerness, no future to work for. Then the magnitude of this one spot in his life began to awe him. He felt he had to see it and look at it again.
He was four blocks away from home, going down the street where the fruit market was, and he knew within himself that he had been deliberately heading over that way. Keeping on the other side of the road, he walked slowly past the lighted fruit-store window. Through the glistening glass he could see the pyramids of oranges and lemons and purple plums and red apples; and then he saw old Spagnola himself waddle into the light. “There it is. Just like it’ll always be,” he thought.
To get closer, he crossed the road to the lane that ran past the side of the store, the lane where the kids used to meet at night. Out of the store came a shabby woman carrying a big paper bag, and Jules ducked furtively into the lane. As he went along by the fence, he looked back once at the trail of his footprints in the snow. Again he felt the longing to have this place and that couple of years in the reform school dumped magically out of his life.
Then he was at the old gate that led into the yard behind Spagnola’s place. Hundreds of times he had hopped over it when it was locked, at first just to steal an apple or a peach with the other boys — and then go running madly along the lane with Spagnola shouting after them. The gate was open now. Slow, wondering, disbelieving, he went into the yard. There was the shed, the roof a white slope of snow. At the back of the store, on the stoop, was a big pile of empty baskets.
As he got closer to the place his wonder, his unbelief, kept growing. The place suddenly seemed shabby and unimportant. He wanted to cry out bitterly that it was a terrible thing that such a tumbling down blot of a place should always be in his head, should always be there in the eyes of his father and mother when they were worried about him, and in the eyes of everybody who knew him when they looked at him.
On the ground beside him was an empty basket. Swinging his foot savagely, he sent it crashing against the stoop.
At the sound of the crash, a shadow filled the lighted window; then the back door was thrown open — the beam of light fell on Big Jules, standing there, bewildered and motionless.
Rushing out old Spagnola yelled, “Hey, you, hey!” He came rushing at Jules, his arms wide, his white apron flapping like a sail.
Jules turned to run, but slipped in the mud and the snow, and when he looked up and saw Spagnola close to him, the man’s short little arms opened wide to grab him, he felt crazy. It seemed that not only Spagnola but the years around the place when he was growing up, and Meuller and all the other guys, were trying to hold him tight, hold him there forever. He had to break the grip it had on him. He had to destroy it. So he took a leap at Spagnola, like a flying tackle, his head getting him in the chest, sending him sprawling on the snow. Instead of running, Big Jules looked around wildly. Then he started kicking at the pile of baskets. Yelling “Help! Help!” Spagnola got up and jumped on Jules’ back, but he couldn’t hold him. So he went on shouting while Jules crashed against the piled-up baskets and kicked at them and sent the splinters flying in the snow as if he had to keep it up till he smashed the whole place and Spagnola’s fruit market was wiped forever from the earth.
But Spagnola’s weight on his shoulders was pulling him down and exhausting him. At last he crashed on the stoop with Spagnola on top. “I got you, I got you,” Spagnola grunted. But Jules wasn’t even trying to move.
Then Mrs. Spagnola came waddling down the path of light. “Hold him, hold him!” she yelled. “I’ll get the police.”
“He’s crazy. But I got him,” Spagnola said.
Jules lay there dazed, h
ardly hearing anything, but when Mrs. Spagnola, bending down, cried, “Look, look would you! It’s Jules Casson!” he began to tremble.
“So it is,” Spagnola said.
“What was he trying to steal?” she asked.
“But there’s nothing out here to steal in the winter,” he said, astonished.
Hoisting himself up on one elbow, Jules sobbed, “Don’t get the cops. Please don’t get the cops. Can’t you see? I only wanted to get a look at the place — because — because I couldn’t get it out of my head.”
He looked so stricken and bewildered that the Spagnolas shook their heads at each other and shrugged in wonder.
“Only yesterday his father was talking to me about his Jules, saying such good things,” Spagnola said to his wife. Then he said to Jules, “What is this? You should tell us.”
As Jules looked up at their wondering faces, he saw that there was nothing to fear from them. They were wanting to take him in and help him as if he were some trapped animal they had found when they opened the door. “I . . . I . . .” he stammered, and couldn’t go on. But he kept nodding his head gratefully, as if in their friendly worried faces he had found a release from a bad violent dream about himself.
THE FIDDLER ON TWENTY-THIRD STREET
The basement hand laundry on Twenty-third Street was closed for the night, so Joseph Loney got his fiddle and sat down at the end of the long table littered with shirts and aprons waiting to be ironed and began to play. He played his fiddle every night before he went down to the corner to have a drink with his friend, Jimmie Leonard.
His wife, Mary, stooped a little and thin, was at the window on a level with the street, and she felt sullen and resentful as she waited for her husband to put on his hat and coat and go off for the night. He would spend his money drinking, and sleep late in the morning, and then would have the same old sheepish grin as he scratched his head and tried to joke with customers who grew irritable when the laundry they had been promised wasn’t ready.
Looking out the window Mary saw a little girl in a leather jacket leaning against the lamppost, listening to the fiddle music and, as Mrs. Loney watched, a boy came along and stood beside the girl and listened too.
Mrs. Loney, who had no children of her own, watched the boy and girl with a troubled longing that puzzled her. Turning, she glanced at her husband, whose hairless head shone more brightly under the light than any white stiffened garments hanging on the wall, and she felt she could hardly blame him for going out night after night seeking places where there was laughter and companionship.
Outside, another little girl, holding by the hand a small boy in a red sweater and a red woolen hat, had joined the other children, their faces turned toward the laundry window.
Mrs. Loney called out suddenly, “Play harder, Joseph; make it sound louder.”
Joseph, smiling brightly, scraped away on his fiddle. Mary, pressing her face against the window, saw the little girl who had been holding the boy by the hand start to dance, raising her one hand over her head and putting the other on her hip, going around and around in a circle.
“The children on the sidewalk are listening, Joseph,” Mrs. Loney called. “Maybe they’d love it if we asked them to come in and listen.”
“Sure, ask them in,” he said.
Mrs. Loney called to the children, “How would you like to come in and listen, children? Maybe you could have a concert in here.”
They looked at her shyly; the girl who had been dancing took hold of her little brother’s hand and the bigger boy began to shuffle away.
Yet Mrs. Loney was smiling and still coaxing them. “Do not be shy, children, maybe you’ll be having a lot of fun.”
At last the girl with the straight hair and the short skirt, the one who had first heard the sound of the fiddle, came forward boldly, and then the others, not so timid, followed her down the steps. They huddled together at the end of the long table, smelling the steam and the irons that were still hot, staring at the pile of freshly ironed shirts.
As soon as Joseph started to play again the children, fascinated at the way he puckered up his face and grinned and winked one eye and kept pounding his foot up and down in time with his music, began to smile. Suddenly he jumped up, still playing the fiddle, and danced around the table, grinning over his shoulder as he passed them, encouraging them to follow. He lifted his knees high. The children began to laugh. Mrs. Loney was delighted to see the bolder girl, whose name was Sally, get up and start to follow Joseph, and the boy, Phil, was grinning shyly, and the polite little girl, Margot, who never let go of her small brother’s hand, was tense and wide-eyed with excitement. Mrs. Loney called to her husband, “Maybe you could play something, Joseph, they all could dance to, or maybe they’d all like to take turns doing something.”
Wiping his red face with his handkerchief, Joseph said, “Which one of you is any good with his feet?”
“Margot can do a jig, Margot can do a jig,” Phil shouted. The sedate little girl glared at him angrily, muttering, “You keep quiet, Phil Thompson.”
“Yes, she can,” Sally cried.
“I can’t, I really can’t,” Margot said.
But they pushed her out on the floor, so she took a deep breath, nodded to Joseph Loney to play something for her, raised her hand, and with a gravely solemn face began to dance a jig.
Mrs. Loney coaxed the children to perform, and praised their talents lavishly. The bold girl, Sally, was a Catholic, and when it was her turn she told how her aunt had been dying for months and how she had got to like saying the prayers for the sick at the aunt’s house, and she asked them if it would be all right if she knelt down and said the prayers that she liked best.
Soon, they were all laughing and praying and singing, and Mary Loney realized her husband had forgotten about going out for a drink. With the fiddle and bow clutched in his left hand, he sat on the edge of his chair leaning over the children who were on the floor at his feet, his voice rising and falling, and his face glowed. Mary Loney felt such a sudden contentment that she was afraid to speak for fear of distracting them. She was full of thankfulness that she had some little biscuits left from dinner.
That night she lay awake a long time, listening to her husband breathing steadily beside her, marveling at the look of pleasure on his face all evening.
Hardly a night passed after that when she did not say to her husband as soon as he had finished his dinner, “Aren’t you going to play a tune on the fiddle tonight, Joseph?”
He lit his pipe, then got his fiddle, and she watched at the window for the children to come. Sometimes they all came together, sometimes one by one, all fond of Sally’s prayers, and they loved to kneel down on the floor with her and repeat the prayers while Joseph plucked at the fiddle with his thumb in a kind of accompaniment.
The children grew to love Joseph Loney and often seemed to forget that his wife was there with them. Knowing this made the delight she got from their company seem like a precious secret. She hadn’t felt so contented in years. She was ready to feed them when they grew tired and were thinking of going home.
But one night when the children came over Joseph Loney was not there with his fiddle. His old friend, Jimmie Leonard, had come looking for him, and they had gone out together.
The children came at the same time the next night. When Mary Loney let them in they saw she had been crying. “He didn’t come home last night and he hasn’t come home yet,” she said to them.
“Oh, something terrible’s happened,” they said.
“I don’t know what to do,” she said.
Instead of going home, the children, fascinated by Mary Loney’s despair, sat down on the floor and stared at her. It was silent while she worked her lips and swallowed hard, and then her eyes suddenly filled with tears, her lips trembled and she began to cry.
Growing frightened, the children felt that Joseph Loney was close to death wherever he was. Suddenly Margot asked, “Was he wearing a brown coat? I saw a man that l
ooked like him wearing a brown coat and he was getting into a car near Madison Square.”
The rest of the children looked at Margot in envy, and then Sally cried, “Oh, now I remember. I saw a crowd down at the corner last night and I was sure I saw Mr. Loney . . .”
Mrs. Loney, realizing the bright imaginations of the children were making them conjure up things that had never happened, cried angrily, “Please be quiet, and don’t tell lies.”
Sally said, “Oh, now is the time when we ought to pray for him. Let’s all kneel and say a little prayer.” She knelt on the floor, and the others knelt too, with their faces full of excitement.
“Look! Over there,” Sally said, pointing at a little table against the wall that had a bowl of artificial flowers on a clean white cloth. “That will be the altar.” She clasped her hands against her breast and bowed her head and had them repeat after her, “Oh, dear Lord, let nothing happen to him, and bring him home safe and sound.”
This prayer that had such a simple beginning turned out to be long and rambling, with Sally pausing from time to time to hear her words repeated, and Mary Loney, listening to their childish whispers and watching their earnest faces, began to feel that somehow her life had reached a turning point.
Then they all heard the sound of a trumpet, a beautiful soothing sound, and then the sweet harmony of a cornet and a stringed instrument. The children got up off their knees, sure their prayers had been answered. For a moment they were too scared to move, and they looked at Mrs. Loney whose own heart began to beat unevenly and she, too, was frightened.
Crowding around and looking out of the window, they saw two men with horns and one with a mandolin, each with a little framed and printed sign hanging from a button on his coat, shuffling slowly along the sidewalk in the way blind men do, while they made their music, and a small boy walked a little ahead carrying a tin cup.
Still startled, Margot said, “Just the same, it was funny.”
The Complete Stories of Morley Callaghan Page 10