The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  “Clifford,” she protested, “I’m being silly, talking like this.”

  “You haven’t even started,” I said, thinking: If experience on the stage can open one up like that, I ought to urge Pamela to join some theater group.

  “Well,” Margaret said, sighing. “When I was thirteen, I was lying face down on my bed reading a book one day—I remember it was Tom Sawyer, although the particular book didn’t have anything to do with it—when all of a sudden for no reason at all I got a very tight feeling as if the hands of a giant were squeezing me, and then those same hands picked me up and held me in a kind of seismic seizure about a mile above the earth and then let me go, dropped me, and I was falling, falling, plunging down fast and free from that dizzy height, with nothing whatever below me to stop me, and although it scared the everlasting heck out of me I reflected that it had been a wonderful, a really thrilling sensation, and I discovered not long afterward that I could voluntarily make it happen…and it was all so grand that I began to worry if maybe there was something wrong with me, if maybe it was some kind of epilepsy even, or if maybe this was the way God had chosen to punish me, and I knew this thing, this phenomenon, never happened to anybody else, because you could tell it from their faces if it ever did, because once I watched my face in the mirror while it was happening and it looked like this, look: all warped and crooked, with the eyes all pinched and the nose cockled sideways and the mouth agog, astonished, so I began to be frightened, almost terrified, and I quit, I was even religious again for a while, but I quit that thing, I gave it up entirely, and when it happened by itself a couple of times later, I cried, I was so scared I prayed and cried, and eventually it never happened any more. When I was fourteen, this girl friend of mine, Amanda Hadfield, maybe you remember her, the blowzy redhead who was always in trouble with Miss Dorland in the tenth grade, told me that she had experienced similar sensations herself, and she was even about to instruct me in the methods when I warned her that it was a form of punishment from God and that you would die after you had done it a dozen times, and Amanda quit too, she became even more alarmed about it than I had been, it drove her batty. When I was fifteen, my mother married again and I had a stepbrother and two stepsisters and not a one of them had the least bit of decency or modesty or chastity, and although all three of them were younger than I they were continually talking about things I couldn’t understand, all I knew was that it was wicked and I should stay away from them, so I did. When I was sixteen, I never spoke a word to anybody, and I discovered how much I was being excluded from all the activities at high school, all of those things, remember them? the talent assemblies, the awards assemblies, the social clubs and all? When I was seventeen, I started having dates with one of the big shots at high school, a glib, fast, sharp little boxer called Nub Stone, and I liked him and he almost cracked me out of my shell and we had good times together and I probably felt closer to him than to anybody else except my lost father, because he was intelligent, but as it turned out he was wicked too, just as bad as all the rest. When I was eighteen, he gave me up. When I was nineteen, I decided that I didn’t care about anything or anybody, that nothing mattered, that there was nothing I was good for, that since my striving would only turn out an embarrassing failure I would not bother to strive at all, adopting as my motto the first two lines of one of Landor’s cornball quatrains: ‘I strove with none, for none was worth my strife. Nature I loved, and next to nature Art,’ but ignoring the last two less cornball lines of that same quatrain until, after those next eight years of the most unstriving sort of existence you could imagine, I was ready at last to add them: ‘I warmed both hands before the fire of life; it sinks, and I am ready to depart.’ Of course I kept on making errors and mistakes and committing little crimes and stupidities, and I cared too little, and wanted nothing. It was the last, the most recent, of my errors which was my undoing. When I was twenty-seven, which I am, that is: once upon a time, two months ago, I was doing my things at that self-service laundromat on West Seventh Street, and when I took everything out of the dryer and went home I discovered that I had six pairs of white cotton panties with a name label sewed into each: Sister Mary Dolores. I might have folded them neatly and taken them to the diocesan office or even mailed them in, or even given them to the priest who lived two doors down the street, but I didn’t. They were my size, so I wore them. I still wear them, and as a matter of fact I’ve got on a pair right now and I’d show them to you if you didn’t believe me, but I guess you believe me because it really isn’t very incredible at all, but anyway I’m ashamed of myself. Wouldn’t you be? I mean, after all, anybody who would walk around all over God’s earth wearing a pair of nun’s panties…it’s just the kind of thing that is a good reason for wanting to jump off a bridge or something…because, well, because I—”

  “Margaret,” I said. I said Margaret because it had two syllables and she had run out of breath two syllables too short of finishing the poem, two notes too soon before the end of this aria, this elegiac, dirgeful tune.

  Then she unwound herself from that frenetic pitch, she tamed her eyes and her tongue, she sighed. It had been her best performance. For all I knew, it had been her only performance. Whatever it had been, it was what I wanted, what I had asked for. She had talked to me. Now she looked at the clock and said it was late.

  She walked with me across the street and down the cobble-stoned drive to the train station. Where is your suitcase? she asked. I told her I had already checked it in.

  We walked out onto the elevated platform above the track level. I discovered that we were holding hands. Men were loading baggage onto the train, but it would not leave for a while yet; I wanted to hang on to Margaret until the last minute. We leaned against the railing and looked out across the tracks, and the lights along Cantrell Road, and the sky above the river. Dark and still was the view; darker and stiller were my feelings. We said nothing to each other. I thought again, for a long while, of why I had come home, and why I was leaving. Then abruptly I realized how much the town and this girl had always been bound up together in my mind, even if subconsciously, but consciously too sometimes: how when I thought of Little Rock, I thought of her; when I thought of her, I thought of Little Rock. Is that, really, why I came home? Is she really, though I have not known it, precisely what I was looking for?

  Down below us an aged Negro in a conductor’s uniform was baying Board! at the empty station, his hoarse voice the only sound in all that silence.

  “They’re calling you,” Margaret mused.

  “Ma’am,” I said to her, smiling, “I ain’t gettin on no train.”

  Chapter fifteen

  For hours we walked, talking, excited, making a fuss over each other. Down dark sidewalks, through tunnels of crepe myrtle and flowery abelia and the ubiquitous honeysuckle, tripping over our tongues, we rushed to get it all said. I wondered when, and if, she was going to ask me if I were married yet, because I wasn’t going to tell her if she didn’t ask me. We talked mostly about her.

  Why was this strange girl, so bright and fair, unwed? Hadn’t anybody proposed? I couldn’t ask these questions of her, but gradually I gathered a general notion of the direction her life had taken in the years since I had known her: all the few fellows who had known her (or known of her, because she never had a really close friend) in high school or junior college had long since either married or gone away (I had done both); she would not attend church socials to meet the few prim bachelors still available, dried-up pious finks who crooked their little fingers when holding teacups and got cookie crumbs on their chins; and her succession of petty jobs exposed her to hardly any eligible males except occasional loud swaggering louts, salesmen and minor executives and such, all of them self-appointed Lotharios who wanted to see if that detached, reserved loveliness of hers masked a passionate rutty fire, but who were unwilling to be patient or gentlemanly or even nice about it; or else the already-married and frustrated bucks who saw in her a chance for quick illicit congre
ss and made no attempt to conceal the ugly baseness of their motives; or else the shy and withdrawn idealists in whom she sensed kindred spirits but was not ever able to find out, for the simple reason that apparently these timid souls took it for granted that a pretty girl like her was already spoken for, was already taken, was already out of their league and thus it would be presumptuous of them to approach her even if they had the nerve for approaching anybody. This was her prime failing: that no one knew her or could know her, because if the face, the bearing, the visage was all they had to go on they would learn nothing and make all kinds of misconceptions or distortions, and if they went beyond the surface it was because their interest had nothing to do with anything outside a half-foot radius of her crotch anyway, and their inguinal obsessions got them nowhere, and got her even lesswhere, if that were possible.

  She had, up until recently, sold shoes at Alexander’s, a cut-price footwear emporium on Lower Main, but she had become progressively disenchanted with the work of dragging out box after box for the rejection of capricious and indecisive ladies who didn’t really want to buy anything anyway but just wanted a place to sit down and somebody to stroke their sweaty feet until the next bus came. The foot is a phallus, Margaret knew; she had read all about it: the foot, an appendage, is dependent, it slips into the shoe, it is a frank substitute for the missing penis that women never had but always wanted. This is why almost all shoe salesmen are men. Margaret got all the lesbians. They oohed and they ahhed and they groaned when she slipped a shoe on their foot. They loved it. It made her sick. One day a fat customer rubbed her the wrong way, and she got angry and said to the customer, “Kiss my foot!” and Mr. Turner, the manager, who liked her, did not fire her but kicked her upstairs into the stock department, where she languished for the duration of her employ, which terminated not long afterward when she told Mr. Turner she couldn’t stand the sight of another shoe, thereby putting her foot in her mouth, as far as he was concerned. But her ultimate unemployment came not because of her incompetence or even the discouragement which had created that incompetence but because of the defeat, the frustration which had created that discouragement: she was thoroughly convinced that she was good for nothing, and it was at this point that her depression took a turn for the worse.

  But she didn’t feel like talking about it, that period of dark depression. She tried to shift the conversation to me, she said she wanted to know about me, what I was doing now, and so forth. She was all right now, she said; she was happy again, and if I would stay in Little Rock, she would be even happier yet. We could go places together, do things, see things that she had never been able to see alone.

  We had stopped now, resting, sitting together on an old carriage stoop beside the sidewalk in a seedy residential area. I couldn’t see her face; some light from the street lamp filtered through the boughs of a giant catalpa overhanging us, but not enough. Her voice sufficed, I guess, it availed my need to remember all the times I had thought of her in the years between, all the times I had not been able to bury the image of what once she had been to me.

  I could not talk to her about myself—not yet, at least. But as a substitute I could let her know why I had not caught that train, and I did. “I guess,” I said, taking one of her hands again suddenly, “I guess I’ve really never forgotten you—I haven’t been able to. All these years I guess I’ve still been meeting you in dreams and idle moments—you’ve been my own private succubus.”

  She laughed, and, my perfect counterpart, replied, “Then you’ve been my own private incubus.”

  Two of a kind, we kissed.

  Disengaging, she somewhat breathlessly asked me, “Would you like to go up to my room?”

  “Your room?” I said. “Sure. Where is it?”

  She turned and gestured behind her. “Here,” she said. I looked up and saw the large and dark old house behind the trees.

  “Hey!” I said, surprised. That’s your same old house, isn’t it?” She nodded. I asked, “Do you mean you still live here?” She nodded again. “Well, I’ll be damned,” I said, thinking again of her mother, a bloated old scatterbrained ex-waitress who had domineered the poor girl and made my rare visits to this house miserable and embarrassing. “Your mother—?” I wondered aloud, my chest pounding.

  “My room is all by itself, way up in the attic, and we could tiptoe up the back stairs. I think I’ve got half a pint of brandy hidden up there, if you like brandy.”

  “Great,” I said, standing up and appraising again the big old house. This house, on Victory Street not five blocks away from the train station, was the same house I had always associated with her in my mind because except for a year in Bowling Green she had lived there all her life. Its present impoverishment was exaggerated by its size: twelve or more wide, high-ceilinged rooms put together in the Reconstruction era into an Arkansas version of Romantic Gothic architecture: balustraded porches and verandas, bracketed and gingerbreaded, docketed and finialed, fretted and beetled, with a small mansard roof drooping above a desultory nest of gables capping a maze of L-shaped masses of room. Once it had all been bright yellow, I suppose, but had not been repainted during Margaret’s liftetime, so that, lurking behind these two outsize catalpas, surrounded by a chaotic privet hedge, and ensnared forever by a profuse web of wisteria and ivy, it might have served as a model of Southern decadence were it not totally lacking in sobriety; a ludicrous, gauche, tawdry old monster which made me smile just to look at it. But now the neighborhood was all seedy and run-down, like this house. Low, squat brindle-bricked business buildings were cropping up all over, and many of the other old houses had been torn down. Nearby were several newly cleared lots with those ubiquitous “Who’s Happy?” signs planted in them.

  Creeping up the driveway toward the rear of the house with Margaret, I quietly asked her, “Why do you still live here?”

  But she wouldn’t answer. I had to ask her again, insistently. “Can’t you ever get away from your mother? Why do you want to stay here at home?” Still she would not answer. I continued to pester her about it, and she hushed me.

  “Oh, Clifford,” she paused to say, tiredly, before opening the back door. “I just take what I can get, that’s all. I tried to move into a place of my own once, but it didn’t work. I live here because it’s a place to live.” She touched my lips with her fingers. “Now be very quiet,” she said. Then she opened the door.

  I am an expert at soundless stealth, and so, I discovered, was she. The only sound, as we pussyfooted up the steep rear stairway, was our gentle breathing. It is difficult for me to understand how anybody could have heard us. But somebody did.

  As we were rounding the turning of the stairs at the second floor, a hall light flashed suddenly on, and there, emerging from a bedroom, was an enormous ogress, spectral in a floor-length nightie and her hair all up in curlers, swiftly approaching. Unable to sink through the floor, I could only stand and hold my breath and tremble.

  “Margaret, what on earth!” she boomed in a shrill flighty voice that I well remembered. She outweighed me by a good fifty pounds. One of her large forefingers shot out and touched the tip of my nose. “And who is this?” she demanded.

  “This is Clifford, Mother. Don’t you remember Clifford Stone?” Margaret’s voice was calm, but her face—good Lord, her face wore an expression unlike any I had ever seen before: a mingling of fear and loathing such as one might see on the face of a convict confronting the jailer.

  The woman glanced down at me with a thoroughly contemptuous expression, removed her finger from my nose, and returned to her daughter. “Do you know what time it is? Do you? A quarter past three! Who gave you permission to go out? And where have you been?”

  “I went to the movies,” Margaret said in a small, cowed voice.

  “Alone? Did you go out all by yourself again?”

  “No. Clifford took me.”

  The woman glanced at me, and I nodded my head. Then she said to Margaret, “We’ve been looking all! over! town!
for you. Dall and the police and everybody! I just don’t know what to think of you. And now! Now what do you think you’re doing, child? Bringing this…this…this man into the house. Do you think you’re going to make a doll out of him and take him to bed with your other dolls?”

  “Mother—” Margaret said.

  “Enough!” She pointed her finger down the stairs from whence we came. “Out!” she said to me.

  I glanced at Margaret for confirmation of this command, and she nodded her head resignedly, then she suddenly put her arms around me and, there in front of her mother, gave me a long kiss. Then she whispered in my ear, “Call me tomorrow, please.”

  I nodded. She released me. Her mother took her by the arm and led her away. I went on back down the stairs.

  Half an hour later, sneaking into my father’s house, I suddenly realized that my suitcase was probably halfway to St. Louis or beyond. When is the next train? I wondered.

  Chapter sixteen

  Wednesday morning, after a fitful and dreamful sleep wherein a tangled skein of old images played one upon another as though a cedar box of family snapshots were upset and jumbled into an omnium-gatherum of queer but familiar arms and ears and noses, I woke up shortly before noon and discovered that I was, oddly enough, filled with cheer and zeal. I had a mission now, I realized, I had a duty, a function: to help this girl. The Fates had destined me, had lured me to Little Rock, had appointed me this poor girl’s rescuer. Jumping out of bed, I faced the day with a smile. Sybil gave me a big fine brunch, and then announced that she had changed her mind: she was so glad that I hadn’t really left town after all, she said, that I could have her now if I wanted her. I thought about it. At length, impressed with the loyal celibacy Margaret had left imbedded in my usually fiery groin, I turned her down. Then I called Margaret immediately. Her mother answered. I did not identify myself but asked for Margaret. Her mother said that Margaret had gone to rehearsals. I asked her when Margaret would be back. She couldn’t—or wouldn’t—say. I asked her to tell me where Margaret was rehearsing, but she claimed she didn’t know. I asked her why she had kept Margaret at home all these years, and she hung up on me.