“Yes, sir?”
“Are you the manager?”
“Yes, sir, I am. Victor Garino.”
“I’m looking for Mrs. Loftus. I’m Eric Meecham, a friend of Earl’s, her son.”
Garino’s eyes behind his rimless spectacles looked misty.
“Oh, you are? Earl’s a fine boy. You tried her apartment?”
“Yes.”
“Well, come in, come inside.” He opened the door and Meecham preceded him into a small living room. The room was so crowded with furniture and knickknacks that there was hardly any space to move. In a box beside an electric heater a litter of kittens was mewling, while the mother cat stalked around and around the box with a kind of angry dignity, as if ashamed of the way her children were behaving in front of a stranger.
“You like cats, Mr. Meecham? Yes?”
“Very much.” He had never particularly liked or disliked them but the sight of the tiny furry bodies stirred something inside him.
“Yes, I like all animals, but cats, ah, they’re quiet and quick, and they earn their keep. We never have any complaints about rats,” Garino added proudly. “Never. Sit down, will you? Then I can sit down too. Ah, that’s better. You came from Earl, eh? How is he?”
“The same as usual.”
“Ah, yes. Did you . . .? You knocked on her door very loud, did you? Sometimes she’s hard of hearing. Also she’s a deep sleeper.”
“Also she gets loaded.”
“Yes,” Garino said in a melancholy voice. “She gets loaded very bad. Often’s the time I let myself in her apartment with my passkey just to see she’s not burning the place down or something. She’s a problem. She’s a nice lady but she’s a problem.”
“I can see that.”
“How we found out, Mama and me, was by the incinerator. Rum bottles. Empty rum bottles kept coming down the chute all the time making a fine mess. Mama said it must be Mrs. Loftus. No, I said, no, how could it be, such a nice dignified lady drinking all that rum. Mama was right, though.” Garino’s eyes were sad as a hound’s. “I went up and asked Mrs. Loftus please not to throw rum bottles down the chute. Right away she denied it, acted real shocked. Why, Victor, she said, why, Victor, you know I never touch the stuff. It must be the young couple upstairs, she said.”
The mother cat had settled down beside Garino on the davenport and was purring in her sleep.
“After that,” Garino said, “there were no more rum bottles in the incinerator. She took them out and threw them somewhere. I often saw her go down the street with a paper bag full of bottles. It looked funny, her such a lady walking down the street to dispose of her garbage. Ah, we feel bad, Mama and me. The bottles didn’t make such a great mess, we would have just let her keep on using the incinerator.”
“Maybe you should.”
“It’s too late now. If I went and told her it was all right to use the incinerator she couldn’t pretend any more, she couldn’t have any pride left. That wouldn’t be good. Anyway”—Garino spread his hands—”she’s not such a terrible bother. Her rent is always paid, Earl sends it to me. And she is quiet. No parties, no company. She keeps to herself. Sometimes when she forgets to eat, Mama takes her up a little plate of something. She’s not a common drunkard, you understand. She’s a lady who’s had one sorrow too many. Some people get strong under sorrows. Other people, they snap like twigs, they break, it’s not their fault.”
“What sorrows?” Meecham said.
“First, they lost their money and then her husband ran away, just left one afternoon while she was at a movie. After that her son went out and got married, left her alone. For nearly a year she was alone and then Earl and his wife came back and they all lived together up in Number Five. That was worse than being alone because there were fights all the time, just words, but loud nasty words, between Earl and his wife, and Earl and his mother, and his mother and his wife. Fighting, fighting, over everything.”
“What was his wife’s name?”
“Birdie, they called her. Such a silly name. She wasn’t anything like a bird. She was a big woman, older than Earl, and quite pleasant unless you crossed her. . . . She had a terrible temper, just terrible. Maybe everything would have worked out, though, if the three of them didn’t have to live together, if there wouldn’t’ve been that jealousy between the two women. As it was, Birdie left town—she’d only been here a month or so—and a little while afterwards Earl got a legal notice that she’d divorced him in some other state, Nevada, I think.”
“When was that?”
“About two years ago. Upped and left just as suddenly as Mr. Loftus had left. After that Earl began to change. No one knew he was sick, he just got quieter and never went out. First we thought it was sadness over Birdie. He was crazy over her, and when she was in a good mood she babied him and fussed over him like a mother. Mrs. Loftus never babied him, being such a baby herself in some ways. Yes, we thought Earl’s trouble was lovesick. But he didn’t get any better. One day he went to Arbana, he wanted to look up some books in the University Library, he was always book crazy. He never came back here. He wrote his mother, he paid her rent, everything was friendly, but he never came back. Maybe it was true what Mrs. Loftus told me—that he had to stay there for hospital treatments. But we have a hospital here. So . . .” He sighed. “Ah well, I’m getting to be an old gossip. More and more, an old gossip.” He got up from the davenport and then reached down and patted the cat’s head as if apologizing for making too abrupt a move. “I’ll go and ask Mama if she saw Mrs. Loftus go out.”
When he opened the kitchen door, a rich odor of oil and garlic spilled out, submerging the smell of paint. Meecham went over to the box of kittens and knelt down beside it. They were all asleep now, piled haphazardly on top of one another in a corner. He touched one of them very gently with his forefinger, and immediately the mother cat sauntered over to the box with the casual but alert air of a policeman who doesn’t want to start trouble but intends to be around if trouble appears.
Garino returned, followed by a short broad woman in a cotton housedress. She obviously wasn’t Italian like her husband. Her hair was light brown, her eyes green, and she had a certain brusqueness of movement and speech that suggested impatience.
Garino started to speak. “Mama said, yes, Mrs. Loftus went out early this morning. To the grocery store, that’s what Mama thought, only Mama thought maybe she’d come back again and . . .”
“I can tell it, Victor,” his wife said. “After all, I’ve got a tongue in my head.” She flashed a glance at Meecham. “I guess Victor told you about her?”
“Yes.”
“Well, there you have it. When she goes out I never know when she’ll come home or how she’ll come home or if she’ll come home. Nobody knows. She doesn’t know herself.” Mrs. Garino crossed her arms on her chest with slightly exaggerated belligerence. “She’s been gone all day. You know what that means, Victor.”
“Yes, Mama.”
“Remember last time.”
“Yes. Yes, Mama.”
“You’d better go and start looking for her.”
Garino glanced at Meecham with an air of apology. “Usually she stays in her apartment and drinks quietly by herself. But sometimes . . .”
“This is a sometime,” his wife said sharply. “You get your coat on, Victor. You find her. We’ve got other tenants to consider too. Remember last time.”
“What happened last time?” Meecham addressed the question to Garino.
Garino looked down at his hands. “She got in trouble, arrested. After that she was in the hospital for two weeks. She was sick.”
“She had the D. T.’s.” Mrs. Garino’s face had gone a little hard. “You hurry up now, Victor.”
“All right, all right.”
“I’ll go with you,” Meecham
said. “I have to find her anyway.”
The woman turned and gave him a long level stare. “Why?”
“I have something for her.”
“Money?”
“Yes.”
Garino had gone into the next room to get his coat. “She’ll blow it all in two days,” his wife said in a low voice. “Victor, in there, he thinks I’m getting sour. Yes, and maybe I am. I’ve got myself to consider too. All this extra work and worry and none of it doing one sliver of good, sure I’m sour. But Victor . . . Ha, Victor thinks she’s a lady, and ladies don’t get to be common ordinary drunks. Ha. Victor’s been in this country for twenty years and he still thinks like a Wop, still talks about ladies. People are people. Everyone’s people.”
Garino stood in the doorway with his hat and coat on and a woolen muffler crossed at his neck. “You talk too much, Mama.” He added, to Meecham, “Scotch women are jealous.”
Mrs. Garino’s face was white. “Jealous! Me, jealous!”
“Yes, you are.” Garino went over and kissed her affectionately on the forehead. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
“As if I cared.”
“You could make some fresh coffee and have it ready.”
“I wouldn’t make you any coffee for all the money in the world.”
“I’m not offering you money.”
“Me, jealous. That’s funny. That’s a scream.”
“Get me a clean handkerchief, will you, Mama?”
She went into the next room, muttering under her breath. When she returned with the handkerchief she didn’t hand it to him; she threw it at him from the doorway. He caught it, one-handed, and then he went out the door, smiling. Meecham followed him up the steps and through the lobby and into the street.
Garino was still smiling. “Ah, now, you mustn’t be embarrassed, Mr. Meecham. That wasn’t a quarrel. Mama and I have been married for twenty-one years. When I get home there will be fresh coffee on the stove and I will tell Mama I love her and she will admit she’s a little jealous.”
“That’s all there is to it, eh?”
“Not at first, no. But after twenty-one years we have worked out some short cuts. We have a system.”
“My car’s across the road,” Meecham said.
“We could walk. I know some of the places where she goes, only two or three blocks away. But then, maybe you don’t like walking?”
“It’s all right for women and children.”
They crossed the street and got into Meecham’s car.
13
At half-past eight they were still searching, and Garino was getting hungry and beginning to worry about what his wife would say when he got home.
“Always before, I’ve found her,” Garino said. “She doesn’t go from place to place, a drink here, a drink there, like some people. She’s shy of strangers. There are only two or three little bars that she ever goes to.”
The two or three little bars had expanded into twenty, of all sizes. No one had seen, or admitted having seen, Mrs. Loftus.
Making a sudden decision, Meecham swung the car around in a U-turn at the next corner. “I’ll take you home, Garino.”
“No, no. Mama said, find her. I’ve got to . . .”
“There’s no point in both of us wasting time and this is my job, not yours,” Meecham said. The fact was, that although he enjoyed Garino’s company, Garino slowed him down; he seemed to know everyone in town and he stopped to chat, shake hands, inquire after wives and children, like a politician touring the city, not forgetting the details in spite of more important issues in his mind. Meecham’s impatience had spread from the weather and the ugly little city to the Garinos and to Mrs. Loftus herself. She was a pathetic figure, but her very pathos was a burden and a nuisance. He wished he had never heard of her.
“This is my job,” he repeated. “You’ve done what you could, Garino.”
“Little enough,” Garino said gloomily. “I don’t know where else. She has no friends anymore.”
“I’ll take you home.”
“To tell the truth, I have a stomach-ache. Yes, and the cats. . . I have to look after the cats. And the furnace too, suppose it needs shaking down and Mama can’t shake it down right, and the complaints start coming in, no heat, no hot water . . .”
His voice trailed away. Meecham turned left, in the direction of Oak Street, while Garino sat, stiff and uncomfortable, his back barely touching the back of the seat, as if he was unaccustomed to driving in cars and wasn’t sure what disaster the next corner would bring.
“Do you think you’ll find her?” Garino said.
“Yes.”
“Then what? Then you bring her home, she goes to sleep, and in the morning it starts all over again. One day is like another. Sometimes,” he said soberly, “sometimes I think, ah, the hell with everything.”
Meecham stopped the car in front of the white-brick apartment building. He could see Mrs. Garino peering out of the window of the basement apartment. She had her face right up against the glass with both hands cupped around her eyes to shut out the kitchen light behind her. When she saw the car, and Garino getting out, she ducked her head in guilty haste.
“I hope you find her soon,” Garino said nervously.
“I hope so.”
“I will wait up, to see things are all right. Where will you go?”
“I’m not sure,” Meecham said. He was almost sure, though. Pulling away from the curb he tried to recall Loftus’ words about his mother: “She may want to come, she may have everything arranged, even get as far as the bus depot . . .”
The depot was on a little side street toward the west side of town. Half of the small waiting room was taken up by rows of benches and the other half by a newsstand and a lunch counter. A bus had just left, or was loaded and ready to leave, because the benches were empty except for a man with a little girl about ten. Both the man and the little girl were completely absorbed in comic books.
Meecham sat down at the lunch counter and ordered coffee. There was only one other customer, an intense- looking, pimply young man in a bus-driver’s uniform.
“I’ve got a few minutes yet,” the driver said. “Give me another cherry coke, Charley.”
“The way you guzzle that stuff, it’s coating the insides of your stomach.” Charley put the drink on the counter and wiped his hands on his apron. He was a big burly man with a round face and a worried little smile. “I heard on the radio, more snow coming.”
“Snow don’t bother me. It’s the people asking questions and craning their necks all over the place trying to drive the bus.”
“Say, did the old lady get on all right?”
“I didn’t see any old lady.”
“She bought a ticket. Maybe she’s in the rest room and didn’t hear the announcement. You better go and check, Roy.”
“Listen, Charley, I drive a bus, I don’t run no old-ladies’ home. You want to check, check.”
“Jesus, no one moves a muscle around this place excepting me.”
Charley took off his apron and chef’s hat and went toward the rest room. Meecham got up and followed him.
“I heard you talking,” Meecham said. “About an old lady.”
Charley paused at the door of the rest room, his hand on the knob. “So?”
“I’m looking for the mother of a friend of mine, woman in her late sixties, white hair, nice-looking, refined.”
“Could be her. Myself, I don’t pay much attention to old ladies.”
Charley glanced around carefully to see that no one else had come in, and that the man and the little girl weren’t watching, before he opened the door of the rest room.
It was a small square box of a room equipped with a chair and a moth-eaten couch, and smelling heavily of wet
paper towels and disinfectant.
She was lying on her back on the couch with her eyes closed, a tiny woman, thin to the point of atrophy. Her face had the same look of fragility and innocence as her son’s: high cheekbones with shadowed hollows underneath, wide serene forehead, and brown lashes thick and straight as bristles. She was dressed for a winter day in a black cloth coat with a lamb collar and high velvet carriage boots trimmed with black-dyed rabbit fur. Where the boots touched the calves of her withered legs, the fur was entirely rubbed away. At the foot of the couch, on the floor, was a paper bag and a stained and battered calfskin purse with a chain handle.
“I never been in here before,” Charley said with interest. “I guess women don’t write on walls.”
“Mrs. Loftus,” Meecham said.
Her breathing paused at the mention of her name, just for a fraction of a second, and then it went on as before, heavy and uneven. Her hands were at her sides, palms up, in a supplicating way, as if she was asking for something, money, help, mercy, love, or just another drink. She wore short kid gloves, and protruding from the wrist of the right glove was her bus ticket. She had put it, not in her purse as a grown woman would, but in her glove for safekeeping. It reminded Meecham of the Sunday School collection nickels he had carried when he was a boy, in the thumb of his mitten or the toe of his shoe; the uncomfortable but wonderfully virtuous feeling of that nickel-for-the-Lord in his shoe. The old lady and the old memory pierced him like unexpected arrows from a long bow.
“Hey, lady,” Charley said. “Wake up. Your bus is leaving.”
She moved her head to one side and her hat slipped to the floor, exposing her white silky hair, a little yellowed in places from neglect and curling tongs. Charley bent down to pick up the hat, but he didn’t reach it. He straightened up with a grunt of surprise. “Hell, she’s drunk. Catch that breath, will you? She’s kayoed.”
The bus driver, too, had come into the room. He stared down at the woman with his pale lips pressed together in disapproval. “It’s a fine thing, isn’t it, having people like that hanging around our depot.”
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