The Complete Stories of Morley Callaghan

by Callaghan, Morley; Atwood, Margaret;

  ✧ VIII ✧

  After that night he had her come to his place as often as she could, although he knew it didn’t help his case at all to have a girl like Annie Laurie as his friend and advocate; she had no reputation herself and had too often made it plain that she was indifferent to those who had. She could only make other people believe they could see the way he was going, having her as his only friend.

  One night when he had come home alone after eating with her, there was soon after a knocking on the door. It had a friendly sound. When he opened the door and saw the plump little woman in the brown coat with a little fur at the neck staring at him, his heart beat heavily. “Oh, Mrs. Bowman, come in,” he said, hopefully, for he was sure she had come to tell him that she knew the truth about him and Scotty.

  “Thank you, Mr. Lane,” she said. It had been snowing out and the snow on her arm had melted and as she brushed against him her wet sleeve touched his hand.

  “Sit down, sit down,” he said, moved by her resolute manner, and when she sat down in the chair by the window where Scotty had sat, he circled around her, waiting nervously. “What can I do for you, Mrs. Bowman?”

  “Mr. Lane,” she said, taking off her gloves and folding them and clutching them with both hands. “It was very painful for me to come here. You’re really the last man I want to see, but my bitterness is strong enough to drive me here.”

  “I thought — I hoped you might know the truth.”

  “Mr. Lane,” she said, and her voice broke with anger. “I know what you’re saying all around town. How could I not help hear about it?”

  “Mrs. Bowman, you don’t understand, I’m telling the truth. I’ve lost my job. I can’t get a job. This thing follows me around. I’m entitled to a little justice. I don’t lie about people. I don’t have to lie about Scotty.” But her head had jerked up and the glint in her round brown eyes made it hard for him to go on pounding away at her husband’s lack of integrity when her good memory of him was all she had left. “What’s the use,” he said, wretchedly. “I say I was not to blame.”

  “I didn’t come here to portion out the blame, Mr. Lane.”

  “Then why do you come here?”

  “I come here,” she said bitterly, “hoping, as there’s a God in heaven, I can show you something. So I can throw at your heart all that’s happened to us because my husband was unfortunate enough to like you, and ask if it’s fair. No, not to ask! To throw it at you.”

  “Tell my why you come here.”

  “Why? Why for the sake of my children, my home. Would anything else drive me here to you?” Then even the strength of her bitterness failed her, and her voice broke and her eyes filled with tears, but her desperate determination, no matter how it humiliated her, was in her wet and shining eyes. “Oh, my God, don’t you understand? I have two boys. One is fifteen and one seventeen. Scotty lost his job and his pension. There’s a mortgage on our house. In the last two years he’s saved nothing. Do you know why? He was attracted to the life of men like you. I can look after myself. I’ve got a job in a chain-store. My seventeen-year-old boy is to go on with his education. Do you hear? I say he’s to go on,” she said fiercely. “He’s not going to quit school, do you hear that? Not for our home or me or his brother. Neither is his brother if I work my fingers to the bone. Do you hear me? I’ll lose the house. I don’t care.” She began to weep while he walked up and down helpless and ashamed. “I was driven here by my own sense of justice. Now, my God, I’m pleading with you. My children have to go on with their education. I don’t care about me. Scotty is dead. He suffered, he was sentenced, but you escaped scot-free. Is that fair? You’re well off. You’re somebody. Is it fair you escaped scot-free?”

  “I escaped scot-free?” he said. “Everybody’s sore because I escaped scot-free. Well, thanks, thanks very much.” But she kept up her sobbing, her voice broke and rose as she repeated herself drearily over and over again, and it made him desolate.

  “Please, Mrs. Bowman, please stop,” he said, taking her arm and trying to draw her out of the chair. “You won’t like yourself for going on like this to me. This is awful for both of us.” All he wanted to do was get her out of the room and out of his life. But the feel of her plump arm as he tried to lift her, the weight of her, the anguish and shame in her round motherly face bewildered him; he was stricken by his own crazy painful regret. “Please, please, please,” he said, and then he couldn’t bear her or her friends to believe he had turned her away. “Oh, Lord,” he said, dropping her arm, angrily. “I don’t have any money. They made a great point of that at Scotty’s trial, didn’t they. I’m careless. I’m a spendthrift. What does the injustice of the thing matter to me?” and driven to make one of his reckless gestures he rushed over to his desk and got out his check book. “I got two months’ salary from Sweetman, sixteen hundred dollars. Here,” he said, writing the check rapidly. “Take it for your children.” He got up, holding out the check to her. “Now go Mrs. Bowman, please go and leave me alone.”

  Dabbing her eyes with her handkerchief she stood up and took the check, then she looked around his fine apartment and hesitated half resentful. “You’re young, Mr. Lane,” she said, putting the cheque in her purse. “This will mean very little to you. Well,” and taking a deep breath to recover her grim dignity, she went out.

  Trembling, he rushed to the window and watched the plump little woman go along the street in the snow. “No dignity left for anybody,” he muttered. For a long time he stood there watching the falling snow, and pondered over what he had done, and what it could mean. When people heard that he had given money to Mrs. Bowman they would smile and say he had a bad conscience. But he didn’t care. Nobody believed him anyway. No one among the people who knew him was offering him a job, and suddenly he didn’t want to talk about his case any more.

  In the morning he went to the garage and made arrangements to sell his car. He spent the rest of the week getting a tenant for the apartment, selling all but two of his suits to a secondhand dealer, and he sold his furniture too. At the end of the week, it was the last week in February and very cold, he went down to the Windsor Station late in the afternoon and bought a ticket for Cornwall, seventy-five miles west. He left no forwarding address and told no one where he was going.

  ✧ IX ✧

  When he got off the train and went to the hotel he registered under the name of Harry Lansing. The next day he got a job at a gasoline service station and he took a room near a church with two elderly spinsters.

  His employer, James C. Wilson, a stocky man of forty-five, with a heavy nose and heavy lips and a nice little business, tried to find out something about him. He laughed and told him he had been in many cities. Wilson protested that he wasn’t being nosy, he was only wondering where he had learned so much about cars. But Harry couldn’t keep to himself. He liked Wilson, who was the manager of a midget hockey team, and he liked Mrs. Wilson, a young, plump, jolly woman, who was always inviting him to dinner. In the evenings he began to go with Wilson to the rink to help coach the kids’ hockey team. Everybody in town got to know him.

  Wilson used to kid him about wearing gloves working on the cars so his hands wouldn’t get too badly soiled and roughened, and he would smile to himself and take off his gloves and look at his hands and know he didn’t intend to stay here. He hadn’t made any plans, and yet every night before he fell asleep he felt a little better about himself. All his natural good feeling for people had come back to him. At night, listening to the snow sliding from the roof and the cry of a freight train so very lonely in the country hills, and going over what had happened since the trial, he saw that he had made a bad mistake in trying to attack Scotty. These attacks had provoked people to defend him in their own minds and hearts because he wasn’t there. Scotty’s silence in death had become more effective than his silence in the courtroom. To explain and explain is no good, he thought. It’s like a picture, a poem. There the thing is. There we are. Now it seemed all wrong to try and get peop
le to look back on it and consider his explanations. People wanted to live from day to day in the charm of new things that would destroy all the bad memories. If a man wanted to live he had to be able to forget. Yesterday’s resentments and indignations had to go like the snow on the roof melting in the sun. By the lightness of his thoughts he became aware that in his heart he felt sure the whole case had been dropped.

  When summer came he began to dream of his own neighborhood, of women going into hotels and the trees heavy with leaves on the mountain and the floodlit ballpark and the sessions afterwards in Dorfman’s. He missed the strange, piping whistle of the canal boats and the sound of the church bells. He would lie awake with not a sound outside on the quiet street and the moonlight, broken in patches by the leaves of the tree stretching across his window and touching his bed, and remember that he used to think that no city had as much willingness to live and let live as his own city had, and it was because of the necessary toleration between the French-speaking Catholics and the English-speaking Protestants, the way they got used to each other and learned to live together, and it touched the life of the whole city in all the little ways, and even where it wasn’t wanted; the brothels opened and closed and opened again, and the gambling places put up patiently with police raids, and life went on. In such a city people could always tell, he thought, when a man had goodwill and was willing to live and let live and forget.

  ✧ X ✧

  He came home at the beginning of the heat wave when the city all day had been drenched in sunlight and the thermometer was at ninety-seven degrees. The heat seemed to cling to the pavement and lick at the ankles of people on the street, and French priests in the sunlight in their long black soutanes looked depressingly hot. At night the city seemed to have held in its oven all the heat of the day and there was no evening breeze. People going out to the ballpark for the night game passed the long rows of houses with the outside staircases and balconies jammed with half-naked children, men naked to the waist and women sitting with their legs spread wide, all perched up there as if watching a parade.

  Harry took a room on Mountain Street in a decent house next door to one with a liquor license and girls. A little way up the street in another house a barbotte game had been running all year. It was a mixed-up street, yet it was in his own neighborhood, and he only intended to stay in the front room on the ground floor till he looked around and saw where he stood with his friends. He had saved four hundred dollars. He felt hopeful and prudent and full of goodwill. His landlady, Mrs. Benoit, a lean stern angular woman, who was determined to keep her place respectable, never read the papers and had never heard of him, and he liked this too. Unpacking his bag, he sweated, wiped his head and felt his pants sticking to his legs. He had two suits, the dark one, which he was hanging up, and which had a tear in the leg from a nail on a chair in his room in Cornwall, and the gray suit he had on, both of a winter weight. He made up his mind to get a lightweight tropical suit in the morning; then he washed, shaved and changed his shirt and went out, thinking of Annie Laurie.

  He didn’t want to start off with her, but she was the only one he felt sure of, the only one who had really believed him and he felt a fierce loyalty to her. He went down to the Tahiti looking for her. The smoke-filled beer-smelling place depressed him. In his mind now she didn’t belong there any more than he did. When he saw her sitting at the bar in a pretty oyster-shade dress, her shoulders bare, her dark curly hair just covering the nape of her neck, laughing loudly with a tired sad-eyed girl, he felt angry; then, in the mirror over the bar she saw him standing behind her and swung around on the stool, opening her arms to him. “Harry, is it you, is it really you?” she cried. Even in that room reeking of cheap perfume and beer, she seemed to have all her warm prettiness, and his feeling as he laughed and hugged her bewildered him, for he couldn’t believe he longed for Annie Laurie. “Let’s get out of this dive. Come on,” he said. Outside he said, “Let’s take a walk, just loaf along. I seem to have been away for ten years.”

  If he wanted a long walk, she said, he could walk her home; she had a fine new place on University near the campus, a place she had got very reasonably because she was decorating it herself. Walking along Dorchester he listened eagerly for the sound of the canal boats and the shunting of engines in the station yards, and at Peel, by the hotel, he looked down the hill where the old barouches with their battered horses were lined up by the curb. “Everything in the same place,” he said. “Everything looks good.” He told her where he had been, and she understood why he had gone away and she said she rarely heard anyone mention Scotty Bowman now. About two weeks ago, passing Scotty’s bank, she had heard a man standing at the door say to another man, “Well, about this time Scotty would have been coming out of jail.” Both men had laughed. “I hadn’t thought of that. I mean I didn’t realize he would have been coming out about now,” he said uneasily. “You’re absurd,” she said, giving him a little push. Then she told him that her own luck had been mixed up. When the ball season opened the business manager of the ball team, a wonderful guy, amazingly generous, had met her, and he was like an eager boy. He had said she was the kind of girl he used to dream of on fishing and hunting trips, and he had sent her wires from every city on the circuit. He had told her he wanted to marry her, and then he had suddenly dropped out of her life.

  “You’ll hear from him, Annie,” he said consolingly.

  “Oh, I’ll hear from him, sure.”

  “Maybe he got amnesia or something,” he said, slipping his arm around her waist, for he understood that someone had got to the business manager and told him there was a jinx on her and that like all ball players he was superstitious; she wouldn’t hear from him again.

  The crowd on St. Catherine Street ambled along in the sultry night under the neon signs. Young fellows, carrying their coats, ogled girls with light print dresses clinging to their legs, who glanced over their shoulders and either slowed down or hurried when a fellow turned. Everybody was lazy, hot and restless. For Harry there was a quiet happiness in loafing along with the crowd. Then they turned up to Sherbrooke and there was the campus with a hot heavy moon throwing a pallid light over the roofs sloping up the mountain with the trees stark and still in that light.

  She had the ground-floor apartment, and on the bare living room floor were two cans of paint on a spread-out newspaper. A stepladder stood near the end wall which she had already painted a shade of pastel green. “I’m doing it all myself,” she said proudly, standing with her hands on her hips, a cigarette hanging from her lips. “Who could do it any better? I think I’m a great natural painter, don’t you think so?” she asked, turning. “Hey, watch out for that paint.” His foot had bumped against one of the cans, and as he looked down, he saw he was standing on an open page of the Sun, and there was Mollie Morris’ column with her picture at the top, the chin raised, the smile bright. “I wonder what she’d say if she saw me here tonight?” he thought; yet he didn’t care what she would say; whatever happened to him he would never need her, and if he did, he could never have any faith in himself again, and he looked up, smiling, for Annie Laurie was gliding around the room, pointing at cracks in the wall she had mended neatly with plaster of Paris, and he compared her with Mollie. She had a simple truthful nature, and it led her to the truth in other people, but she had had no luck, and now she didn’t care what other people thought, and so she was no good; she didn’t have the self-respect to get a job and lead a decent life. But Mollie, in spite of her beauty and fierce self-respect, did not have a simple truthful nature and could not respond to one; she was only wonderfully aware of what other people thought. Part of her identity lay in other people, which seemed to him to be a kind of whoring of the mind in the sepulcher of her sense of respectability.

  “Annie Laurie,” he said gently. “You’re a fine woman.”

  “When you say something like that I feel as cold as charity.”

  “It’s the simple truth.”

  “No, the tru
th is that when I’m with you I’m always wishing I wasn’t such a bum. I’ve got no guts. You’ve got courage. I know I’m a bum.”

  “I say I know you’re an honest woman,” Harry said, and he knew his words were true; for her shrewd slow smile and the wisdom in her eyes had revealed suddenly the enormous self-possession which sustained her and kept her indifferent to bad fortune, and tough and loyal to her own heart. There’s nothing common about her at all, he thought, and stirred by this mystery in her he put his arms around her and drew her close.

  At four o’clock in the morning, monastery bells tolling woke him up, and he thought, “Harry, you haven’t got a case any more, you’ve dropped your case, everybody’s satisfied.” He wished Mollie could see him there with the bells ringing all around him.

  ✧ XI ✧

  It was another very hot day and he wanted to get the lightweight summer suit, and he went out intending to go to his own tailor, but on the way along St. Catherine in the strong sunlight making the street look so shabby, he passed Mike Kon’s shop, which was on the other side of the street. Stopping, he looked over at the small store with the oaken door and window frames and the bolts of cloth in the window. Mike Kon made clothes for the members of the sporting fraternity. He rarely made a suit for a man like him. But Mike had been Scotty Bowman’s good friend, and he had been at Scotty’s trial.