Too late I realized that this was an irrational and altogether immature thing for me to do, something too embarrassingly akin to the old fantasies which possessed me in the crowded catchpenny Rex, Crescent and Roxy theaters during a certain nervous and wistful period of my boyhood, and if I were soon to be summoned before a prim municipal-court judge and required to account for my rash behavior, I could only plead a temporary insanity resulting from the general besotted condition my emotions had been in all day long. Had Clara chosen to have me indicted in Boston for that other offense, I could only have offered the same plea. Some such defense, I suddenly realized, had better be forthcoming very soon, for the lady turned and, with her free right hand, slapped me. Quite hard.
A stir ensued among our neighbors, and it was this which embarrassed me more than either the smart slap itself or the words which accompanied it, which were: “What do you think you’re doing?” The kids in front of us had turned around to gawk, the young marrieds behind us were all achatter, and as I gazed forlornly into the full face of my hostile lady, I could feel the eyes of the old gentleman on my left, possibly the municipal-court judge himself, burning into the back of my red neck.
“Oh, pardon me,” I hastily mumbled to this outraged maiden. I thought you were somebody else.” I realized I was still desperately clutching her hand, and I looked down at it as I would look at someone’s lost wallet picked up from the sidewalk, and then I dropped it.
Then, because, I suppose, of something about the lift of her eyebrows or the thrust of her small chin, I saw that she was somebody else, somebody who, astonishingly, I knew. And in that same instant, perhaps because my own features had not changed as much as hers, she recognized me as well.
But instead of gasping my name, as I thought she might have done under the circumstances, she simply made a short, deep chuckle in her throat, and breathed back at me, “I am somebody else.”
“Hi, Margaret,” I said feebly, hangdoggedly, “long time no see.”
An usher, or possibly the manager himself, was snapping a flashlight at us from the end of the aisle and rumbling, “What’s going on here?”
The white-maned, gamy colonel on my left leaned across me and asked, “You want me to throw this person out, ma’am?”
The high school boy in front of me turned his head and urged, “Hit im again, lady.”
Our colleagues in the rear continued their babble of startled surmises, ignoring, as everyone else but me seemed to be doing, the fact that Gittel was prostrated in the rear of an ambulance, being whisked away for an emergency gastrectomy.
All of this seemed as embarrassing to her as it was to me; she slunk down in her seat and commenced shaking her head in reply to all questions, including my own: “You want me to leave?”
“It’s all right,” I explained to the senior citizen on my left. “I’m her brother and was just playing a joke on her.”
He grunted, the usher and his flashlight went away, and all of us resumed our absorption in the peptic disorders of Gittel Mosca.
A few moments later she whispered, “Why did you do that?”
“I didn’t know it was you. Honest,” was my sincere reply, and I realized, too late, that this was not the most diplomatic way to phrase it. “An accident, I mean.” She was silent. “I just happened to be here, was all.”
Later she asked, in that same clear and regionless voice which would identify her even in the dark, even in a whisper, “When did you come home?”
“Yesterday morning,” I answered.
“Why?” she asked.
How reply? How discuss it properly without annoying our neighbors? They had been kind enough to leave us alone, let us leave them alone. She was holding the violated left hand with the avenging right hand in the center of her lap. Unnecessary, because I was of no mind to try again anyway. “Homesick, I guess,” I muttered distractedly out of the side of my mouth, pretending I was wrapped up in the movie.
She said nothing more, and I actually did endeavor to concentrate on the picture, but it was no use, partly because Gittel and Jerry were still bickering in the seesaw of their endless colloquy, partly because I could not unwind the coils of my mind from the tense state that this chance encounter had left them in. After all, there once had been a time when I had suspected that she was not sound of mind, which was one reason I had given her up, and perhaps I was contributing to her obsessive dementia by my presence beside her and by that thoughtless little slip of my hand. Although she seemed to remain as outwardly cool as before, still marmoreal, more whitely so than the glow of the screen could have been held responsible for, perhaps she was inwardly seething with a stark, frantic sort of aberration and thus she might at any moment suddenly begin pummeling me, and then nothing I could say to that municipal judge would do me any good.
I had to get away. If only Gittel would do something really dramatic, if she would only stab herself or stab Jerry or jump out a window or simply expire, then maybe in the excitement that followed I could slip past the grizzled codger sitting to the left of me, and gain the aisle, and made a clean getaway. But no, all Gittel could do was talk, talk, talk.
Later, much later, her left arm came up and lay again on the arm rest between us and I studied it with a fascination usually reserved for the gracefully turned limbs of Chippendale highboys, but I was as helpless to do anything about it as I would have been to tamper with a Chippendale design. My tampering days, my bold and meddling moments, were now over and done with: I had gone into the water too far and was so happy to be safe back on shore that I would never ever, God help me, be tempted to do such a thing again. So I left her hand alone, and eventually she sensed that I was either leaving it alone or did not know it was there, or else she had not put it there on purpose anyway, for she took it away once more, and left it away.
Several long and dull weeks later old Jerry finally got sufficiently homesick for his old wife back home in old Omaha, and, after a few parting pumps of the seesaw, ran off and left old Gittel holding the bag, waiting for the next sad old boy to come bumbling through Manhattan in need of her limitless love and the vacant end of the stilled seesaw. The two sides of the plush brocaded curtain ran out to meet each other and did a little dance together, then the house lights went on.
“Well,” I said and turned slowly, casually toward her.
I half expected (or hoped, in some desperate final attempt at wishfulness) that she would be gone, that my eyes would encounter only the empty seat. But she was there, and she was crying.
“Aw,” I frowned, never one to feel poised around weeping women, “I’m sorry. Really.”
She gouged her eyes with the back of her bent wrist, twisting it in, and managed to blot up most of the lacrimal flow. She sniffled and said, “It was the movie. The movie was so sad.”
Yes it was, I allowed, and she had always been overly susceptible to the little sadnesses of this world. I had never known her to cry over her own sorrows, but she was always fluently sobbing about somebody else’s, like the time the whole school was made to assemble in the auditorium for an hour to listen to General MacArthur’s farewell address on the radio after Truman kicked him out of Korea, and when he came to that part about “old soldiers never die,” etc., she began such a flood of tears that both my hip-pocket hankie and my jacket-pocket hankie, not to mention most of my sleeve, were thoroughly soggy before the old soldier finally faded away and left her alone to contemplate in damp silence the mean treatment of Little Rock’s favorite son at the hand of old Give-em-Hell Harry. It had disconcerted me at the time, and it did now.
I stood up. “Well—” I began, marshaling my talents for a graceful leave-taking, but that was as far as I got. I couldn’t just say “Nice to’ve seen you,” and be done with it.
She rose too, and lifted her tweedy gray handbag from the vacant seat on the other side of her. We looked each other in the eye, levelly; just as I had suspected, she had grown a bit since last I had seen her, and now was almost a quarter of an
inch taller than I in my elevators, whereas once there had not been a hair’s-breadth of difference between our heights, and we had made a well-matched pair. I used to love this girl, I mused with no little nostalgia, I used to be just wild about every inky hair on her lovely little head.
I waited for her to say something, but she wouldn’t. She was not looking at me. After a moment I said “Well” again. Then inanely I asked, “How’s tricks?”
“All right,” she said, still not looking at me, then, after another long and painful silence, she looked up, studied my eyes nervously for a moment, and finally spoke: “How long are you going to be here?”
“Oh, I’m leaving right now,” I said. “Just wanted to stretch a bit before going.”
“I didn’t mean here,” she said very quietly, almost inaudibly, pointing at the floor. “I mean here in Little Rock.”
“Oh, I’m leaving right now,” I said, as if I knew what she had meant the first time. I looked at my watch. “My train leaves in a couple of hours.”
“Well,” she said. She was not looking at me again. She heaved her shoulders a little, not a sigh but rather a kind of resigned shrug. “I could give you a ride to the station—”
“Why, thank you—”
“—but I don’t have a car.”
“Oh,” I said.
“I suppose we could walk,” she said. She wasn’t looking at me.
Was she married now? I wondered. I looked down at her hand, searching for a gold band, but her fingers were clinched tightly around the straps of her handbag and I couldn’t see them. If she walked me to the train station, might not her husband be out looking for her, and gun me down? The item in the Gazette about the play had given her name as always, Margaret Austin, but I knew that actresses usually kept their maiden names on the stage. “Oh, I’ll just get a cab,” I said.
She frowned, wrinkling her smooth fair brow as though its marble had abruptly been creased by three savage blows from a sculptor’s chisel. “What will you do for the two hours until your train comes in?”
I drew The Idiot, bent and broken, out of my pocket and flapped it at her. I’ll read,” I said.
“Well,” she said.
Damn you, Clifford Stone! my naive, seraphic, lily-white conscience hissed at me. Don’t be so pococurante! After all—But I interrupted: I’m fed up with this town, I’m sick of it; the sooner I get away the better. After all, my indomitable conscience continued, what are two hours of your precious time? What if this had really been that strange girl you imagined, then what would you have done for these two hours between the end of the show and train time? Are two hours of friendliness too high a price for what she did for you? What did she do? She colored your adolescence. Lord, it really needed coloring, didn’t it? Yes indeedy. But she’s changed, I’d hardly know her, were it not for those eyes. Changed for the better, can’t you see? Slimmer, smoother, straighter, whiter, plain prettier…. And crazier too, no? That’s why I finally broke off with her, ten—or was it nine?—years ago, she bothered me. Those eyes, for pity sakes! they blistered carbuncles on the inside of the back of my skull, they nettled the last shred of my sang-froid; alternately green as grass or gray as graphite, they decorated her face while they desecrated my blood, and look, look! they are still at it.
Avoiding them, I ushered her to the aisle, and there, lacking any words of my own, borrowed Goethe’s: “‘Fair Lady, may I thus make free to offer you my arm and company?’”
Knowing it, she laughed and answered shyly in kind: “‘I am no lady, am not fair, can without escort home repair.’”
But departing from the script, she repaired not home but instead with me, after a ten-block walk in diffident silence, to the environs of the Missouri Pacific terminal, where we located a beer café, one of those drab bored trainmen’s oases, and sat down to a couple of bottles of cold Busch and a conversation of sorts. She had removed her khaki trench coat and draped it over the back of the bentwood chair; she sat straight with her arms laid out on the table surrounding her glass and bottle. She was wearing a fetching red paisley dress, silk, and a choker of lumpy turquoise stones. The bright red of her dress, the deep black of her hair, the pale white of her skin, reminded me of those sharp red-black-white color cadences of the Netherlandish primitives. Roger van der Weyden would have loved her.
For a long time before either of us spoke, I feasted my eyes on her, my giddy brain flooded suddenly with a host of old memories, not all of them unpleasant, and then I asked her the question that came first to my mind: “Margaret, are you married now?”
Slowly, almost imperceptibly and still without looking at me, she shook her head.
Chapter fourteen
Why not? I almost asked, but I didn’t need to. (I had earned my lunches as a busboy for the teachers’ dining room in high school, and once I had eavesdropped as an English teacher was explaining Margaret to the guidance counselor: That girl is just a straw in the wind. She won’t ever marry.) It wasn’t that she wasn’t nubile; personally I had never met a girl, or a woman, whose muliebrity was so much an almost visible aura as Margaret’s. But neither had I ever encountered such an overwhelming inferiority complex in a person, and I suppose it was her bashful withdrawal, her helpless isolation, which had kept her out of wedlock. I think I must have been the only fellow in high school who had ever had a date with her.
I had known her, or known of her, since the seventh grade. My first image of her was still sharply engraved into my memory. It was Martinmas of 1949—somehow I even remembered the day, as well as the year—and she was in her first year at West Side Junior High. She was crossing the playground that bright November morning on the sunny side of the school building, when she arrived at an opened door, an unmarked door leading directly from the playground into the bowels of the basement, a door which she had perhaps never used before simply because nobody had ever told her to use it, and she paused there, peering into the interior, which at first must have been as dark as a cave but became rapidly clearer as her eyes readjusted and a shifting cloud permitted the sunshine to illuminate fully that obscure chamber. Almost immediately she was struck with a great rolling roar of heinously hyenaen laughter, such as would attend a hysteric Saturnalia, but she continued gazing at the scene without any immediate constraint or comprehension. Knowing as I did the curious but green and uncertain mind which Margaret had in those days of early adolescence, I suppose she remained standing there for quite a long moment before finally realizing that she was facing the entire third-period boys’ gym class in various states of nakedness, tout ensemble, in their locker room, the door to which someone had so carelessly left open. Knowing also the character of her domestic environment, which was as seraphic and righteous as any obsessively religious mother could provide without transferring her allegiance to the Holy Rollers, I could understand her reluctance to depart abruptly despite her awful bashfulness: she had never seen so wondrous an apparatus of nature as a boy’s genitalia, let alone a whole room full of them, and was simply fascinated, moral codes be damned. Delight of discovery admits of no guilt. Or perhaps she did not know that we could see her. Ultimately, unfortunately, she had to withdraw from that doorway, for soon the shrill laughter, the shrieks of glee had become so raucous that the whole school threatened to be disturbed, and several of the unclad bacchantes were becoming uninhibited exhibitionists; their inelegant dancing was too much for her. I happened to know about this incident because I was one of those bacchants…in fact, the one closest to the door. Margaret never admitted to me, years later, that this had been the first time she became aware of the fundamental physical difference between the sexes, but I suspect it was, for she was an only child until, at the age of fifteen, she acquired a stepfather and stepsisters…and a stepbrother who finally took pity on her ignorance and, taking her aside (or, I will assume, up to the attic), explained to her the basic facts of life.
Now also I remembered another reason I had given her up: all around me in the junior and senior y
ears of high school my cronies were boasting of their sexual adventures with their girls, while I, time after time, failed to get anywhere with Margaret; she was still a virgin when I left her.
Pouring more beer into our glasses, I groped for a mot juste, or a mot pour rire, to get the conversation going. Are you still a virgin? No, not that yet. I thought it best, for the sake of my honor, to attempt to explain why I had accidentally held her hand at the movie. I tried “About the movie—” I began. “When I held your hand, I mean. You see, I—”
Musing, she said: “Your hand was cold.”
I said: “It was not.”
She: “Yes It was. Like ice.”
I: “No it wasn’t. Yours was hot.”
She: “It wasn’t either.”
I: “Was.”
She: “Wasn’t.”
“Was.” I touched it again, like testing an iron, but without spitting on my finger first. “Ha! It still is. Feel it.”
She did. “It’s not. Your finger is cold.”
“No it isn’t.”
“It is too.”
“Then feel it.”
“I did.”
“No you didn’t,” I said.
“The trouble,” she said, again in that quiet, practically soundless voice, “Is that we both are prejudiced in the sense of having a personal bias in favor of our individual temperatures. It’s the same thing that makes the Orientals think we stink, and vice versa.”
“All right. Let’s talk about something else, hey?”
She nodded. Timidly she asked, “Light my cigarette first.”
“I don’t have any matches.”
She handed me her tiny Ronson. “Use mine,” she said.
“Thank you,” I said.
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3 Page 152