The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  “Well,” she said, a trifle crestfallen, “they’re not entirely original, I suppose, because you order the rubber molds from Gutta Percha Enterprises in St. Louis, they send you an assortment of twelve of your choice for a dollar ninety-eight, and instructions for mixing the plaster of Paris, and all, but then of course it’s up to you how you decorate them, you need a lot of ingenuity for mixing the colors and deciding which color goes where and so forth. They’re really cute if you know how to do it.”

  My face frozen in amity, I allowed as how it must be a truly rewarding diversion.

  “Oh yes,” she said. “It’s very relaxing, and it gives you a feeling of satisfaction and workmanship. What are you doing in Little Rock?”

  Caught napping by her question, I mumbled something about how I was taking stock, so to speak, reconsidering the old home town, retracing my steps and so forth.

  “I see,” she said with irksome and officious cheek. She let a couple of moments drift by, then said, “You haven’t changed a bit.”

  Unflattering as this observation was, I knew it was well-intended, because it was what everybody else had said; so I smiled bashfully and did not utter my rejoinder, which was: “Well, at least I shave every day now, and I used to be just downy.”

  Silence, more silence, then she cleared her throat noisily and said, “I guess your job must pay very well.”

  Bad manners! Like my father. As a waitress, probably she had never seen more than fifty dollars a week in her life. “I get along,” I said.

  “Margaret,” she reflected idly, after another of those interminable, uncomfortable pauses which left me with nothing to do but gaze at the gallery of oval-framed chromolithographs, views and genre subjects, which lined the walls of fleur-de-lis flocked wallpaper, “is so much lovelier than she used to be. And you must’ve heard, she’s going to be the star! of a new play! which starts this Saturday night!”

  “Yes” I said, with all the aplomb I could muster.

  “Well, what do you think?” she asked.

  “Very lovely,” I said.

  “Yes, but I mean, what do you think about Little Rock?”

  “A nice town,” I said.

  “So you’ve come back,” she told me, “to get yourself one of our good Southern gals, and settle down.”

  “Oh, I’m already married,” I said.

  Her heavy eyebrows fluttered upward against her will. “I see,” she said, but she didn’t. After another moment she excused herself. There was, she said, a cake or something in the oven. Margaret should be down any minute.

  Alone, I paced the room, inspecting the miscellany of threadbare and horsehairbare furniture, which, the last time I had seen it, had seemed merely an olla-podrida of smothering, inept heirlooms, but now was easily recognizable for what it was: a chaste if somewhat eclectic grouping of Victorian gewgaws, each of which was more or less familiar to me as an authentic piece which probably had been handed down from one of those earlier Austins who had possessed some degree of wealth. This is Louis XVI, I said to myself, running my hand over its smooth walnut. And that is Sheraton, with a touch of Adam. That chiffonier over there is Drawing-Room Gothic, probably about 1874. And so on, my well-posted mind clicking like a computer. But this was a front, a resistance, an intentionally distracting game covering up my real thoughts, which were lost in Margaret, already grilling her for an explanation of her conduct, past and present.

  I sat down again, partly because my knees had begun to quiver, partly because I breathe more efficiently in a sitting position. On the marble top to my left was a stack of magazines. The magazine on top was Reader’s Digest. I flipped indolently and indifferently through it. “Face Adversity and Smile!” advised the condensed memoirs of a retired Marine sergeant who had been through hell and had not blanched. I read it through, ashamed of myself at first for such profanation of my time, but gradually, as the import of the man’s philosophy got through to me, I began to be moved, affected, helped. In my heart of hearts I know that such inspirational stuff is trash of the worst sort, but somehow, once I read it, I cannot help but be inspired, elevated. I guess I’m just a hapless sucker for that kind of thing. Anyway, the ex-Marine had a lot of worthy hints for weathering the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to, and I even took the liberty of transposing a couple of his sentences to my Ring-Master. Nothing, he summed up, is really worth worrying about, nothing is so terrible that we should live in fear and apprehension of it. I thought this was a rather nice dictum. I smiled, helplessly. After the horrors, both military and domestic, of the ex-Marine’s life, the next article, “Let’s Forget the Little Mistakes,” came as a mild and undramatic chaser, but it was just as pithy, just as aphoristic. Written by a warm and pleasant man who was a reformed fault-finder, a penitent ex-nitpicker, it advised that we should endeavor to make this world a pleasanter place of living by ceasing to make mountains out of molehills. Nothing, he summed up, is really worth getting into a stew about, nothing is bad enough to ruffle the dignity and good sense of a benevolent man. Reading these things, I confess, suffused me with cheer, gave to me an almost defenseless feeling of bonhomie and strength and loving-kindness, deliciae humani generis, and I resolved to go straightaway and find Mrs. Austin in the kitchen or wherever she was and tell her there was nothing I would like better than to have a look at her plaster figurines of children in charming postures.

  But as I was rounding the corner out of the parlor door, Margaret came skipping out of the cobwebs down the winding walnut stair. “Clifford!” she hailed me ardently. Dressed in a Florentine scroll print shirt of pink-green-blue silk, and olive-green silk slacks, barefoot, she was a vision, a sight, the handsome incarnation of that phantasmagoric succubus I had seen so often in the trance of sleep or sleeplessness.

  She drifted down, light as a leaf, seized me with long engulfing arms, kissed me: gave me a robust, liquid, durable, throbbing kiss that I will long remember. Pamela’s kisses were as dry as parchment; their relative humidity was always several degrees lower than mine, and her mouth never seemed to fit my mouth, and she never moved her lips once they made contact, and the kiss was over in a few seconds, and she never, never put her arms around me. Margaret’s mouth fit mine like a tooth fits its socket. “Wow!” was all I could say when we disengaged, but instantly I began to wonder if this was the other Margaret, the straightforward courtesan whose heart belonged to Slater.

  “Let’s go sit in the swing on the porch,” she sighed, and linked her arm through mine and ushered me thither.

  I was glad to get out of that house. On the porch we tranquilly swung ourselves and took in the late morning air, now soaked with the merged perfumes of honeysuckles, hyacinths, and primulas. A beetle lacery of gossamer lavender wisteria, wistful and wispy, tingled the trellises all over one end of the porch.

  We sat in silence a long time. I was not going to be the first to speak. If she couldn’t talk herself out of her own shyness, or if she couldn’t think of anything worth saying to me, I was not going to say a word of my own. Perhaps she sensed this, because finally, in that timid, quiet but precisely articulated voice of hers, she began to talk.

  “Sometimes,” she said, her hands resting gracefully palms upward in her lap, her knees flexing rhythmically to make the swing move, “sometimes I think I would like to be a cat. Not a Persian or a Siamese or anything fancy, not even a well-striped tabby, but just an ugly tortoise-shell or something, a plain old felis domesticus, fat and bodacious, unloved but tolerated, sitting all day in the sun on the porch.”

  “Now that’s curious,” I said cordially, although it wasn’t, although it seemed a banal, corny remark for her to make, “because what I’ve always wanted to be was a rat, a small, fierce rattus rattus with cute pink ears.” But, having said this, I regretted it; it was malign and was not altogether true.

  “Ugh,” she said. “Rats are disease-carriers.”

  “So are cats,” I said. “Last year in Boston sixteen cases of hydro-phobia were trace
d to cats.”

  “Rats are lawless,” she said.

  “Cats are conceited,” I said.

  “Rats are vile and vicious and ravenous and…and horrible.”

  “Cats are destructive and unreliable and lazy and obnoxious.”

  “All right,” she said. “I’ll be a rat too, and mate promiscuously all year long.”

  With whom? I wondered. A rat named Slater? I said nothing.

  “Anything is better than being human,” she went on. “When you’re human, you spend the first third of your life waiting for the future, impatiently waiting to be grown up, and then one day you discover that the future is here, and that you are living it, and that it is not at all what you had hoped it would be, had been led to expect it would be. Animals aren’t like that. They live only in the present, from the first moment they are born. When we were growing up, we didn’t even know what the present was. It was just a hypothetical and insubstantial point, a flicker of time, where the past and future met each other. It was tiresome and impatient and we let it slip through our fingers like sand. Now we have nothing else. We are buried in the sandpile that fell around our feet.”

  “Where did you learn that pretty little speech?” I asked, rather severely. “From Slater?” But instantly the humane souls of Reader’s Digest, the forbearing elves who dwell in its pages, reminded me: Be nice.

  She pouted, and retreated into her tight silence again.

  “Where shall we go today?” I asked. “Or do you have to go to rehearsals again?” She didn’t answer. A minute passed. “Margaret,” I said, “could I just ask you a few questions?” No response. “Could I, please?” Oh, all right, she said at last. “One,” I said. “Why do you live here in this house?”

  She meditated for a moment, then she said, “I told you, when you asked me that question the other night. Where else can I live? It’s a place to sleep, is all.”

  “You didn’t sleep here last night,” I said, and waited for her to say something about that, but she didn’t. Then I said, “Question number two. Why have you always been so shy and reserved with me? You talked so easily and fluently the other night.”

  “You were desperate then,” she said, “and I thought you were leaving, so it didn’t matter what I said.”

  “Are you sorry I didn’t leave?”

  “Don’t be silly. Of course not.”

  “All right. Question number three. Ready? Are you having an affair with James Royal Slater?”

  “No.”

  Her answer was too immediate. “No?” I challenged her. “Honestly?”

  “It depends on what you mean by an ‘affair.’”

  “I mean, are you sleeping with him?”

  “I’m a virgin, mister,” she said, almost inaudibly.

  “And I’m a celibate but unfrocked priest,” I said.

  “Very funny,” she said.

  “Margaret, look, what I want to know is—I don’t know how to say this—but just what is going on? I mean, I don’t know anything. I feel like a stranger. I’m not trying to pry into your life or anything, but I just wonder where I stand with you.”

  She did not answer for a while. She was looking down at her hands in her lap. Then, without looking at me, she said, “The other night you told me that if you stayed in Little Rock that you and I could go places together and do things together.”

  “Yes, but—”

  She looked up at me. Her voice was dead serious. “Clifford, would you—could you afford—to get a room in a hotel or a motel or somewhere so that I could stay there?”

  My heart leaped up. “You mean you and me?”

  “You wouldn’t have to stay with me if you didn’t want to.”

  “Uh, I, yeah, uh, sure, I—” I stumbled, struggling to get my emotions under control.

  “So I could get out of this house,” she said.

  “Hell yes!” I agreed. “You’ve got to get out of this house, that’s for sure!”

  “It would just be until after the play has finished its run, and then maybe I could find some place else to go.”

  “As long as you want,” I said. “I’m loaded with dough.” Not really, but I had about three hundred dollars in traveler’s checks, and I could always wire my bank for more.

  “You know,” she said, musing, “I’ve never been to dinner at the Embers or the Lamplighter or Brier’s or Bruno’s Little Italy or Mexico Chiquita. Would you take me to those places? And I’ve never been to the Brown Jug or Shakey’s Pizza Parlor. Or gone dancing at the Westwood Club. Or even rode the Ferris wheel at War Memorial Park. Could we do those things?”

  “Sure, anything,” I said.

  “And take long walks at night down all the streets.”

  “Myself, I’m a great one for walking,” I said, nearly bursting with delight and anticipation. I grabbed her hand and held it.

  “I don’t want to live here any more,” she said.

  “I don’t blame you,” I said.

  “I don’t even want to go back up to that room again,” she said. “And I’m not going to. Ever.”

  “Fine,” I said. “To hell with that room.”

  “To hell with it,” she bravely echoed. Then again we lapsed into silence for a time. Eventually she asked, “Does that answer your question?”

  “Which question?”

  “You said you wanted to know where you stand with me.”

  “Oh yes,” I said, but then I remembered that I had been questioning her and had not finished. So I asked casually, almost flippantly, “But what was the extent of your relationship with Slater?”

  “He not only wrote the play, but also he’s directing it,” she said. “In a sense, he’s my boss. I have to see him every day in the course of rehearsals and so forth.”

  “You’re not his mistress?” I asked. “I heard he had a mistress.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “A friend.”

  “Was it Doyle?” she asked. “Have you seen Doyle?”

  “Yes, I’ve seen him, but he wasn’t the one who told me.”

  “What did he say about me?”

  “Oh, he just told me that he didn’t think I would have much luck if I tried to get a date with you, because you were dating Slater.”

  Margaret smiled. Then she said, “I wonder where he got that idea.”

  “Dall seems to know quite a lot about you,” I said.

  “That’s true,” she said. “I think I must have talked more to him these past couple of months than to everybody else I’ve ever known.”

  “Why?”

  “Why?” She shrugged. “He keeps asking me questions, that’s why. He asks more questions than you do.” She giggled.

  “What’s funny?” I asked.

  “Oh, I was just thinking,” she said. “You know, I used to think I was very stupid, maybe because I never could open my mouth, or when I did open it something stupid came out. But after talking to Doyle so much, I learned that I have some intelligence, anyway.”

  “Anybody would seem intelligent in contrast to Dall,” I said.

  “You think so? Well, let me tell you, Professor, Doyle is one of the most intelligent persons I’ve ever met.”

  “You’ve never met many people,” I said.

  She sighed. “That’s true. But even so—”

  “Why has he asked you so many questions?” I wanted to know.

  “I was very unhappy, I guess. He wanted to know why.”

  “But you’re not unhappy now?”

  “Not really.”

  “Why? Because of Dall? Because of Slater?”

  “Because of you,” she said.

  We held hands and rocked the swing gently. I seemed to hear music playing somewhere, far off, banjos and harmonicas and French horns and violins, soft and tender. I stopped pestering her with prying questions, and we made small talk for a while. She talked about her room, a small attic room. She had tried to fix it up, to decorate it, but it was really a dismal room, stuffy and badly lig
hted, and she didn’t like it, although she had lived in it for fifteen years. There was nowhere else she could go. She hid up there, she shut herself up in that room because nobody could get her there, nobody could find her there to laugh at her or scold her, not even her mother, who was never permitted to come up there. It was her nest, her safe warm snug womb, but now she was going to abandon it forever.

  “I’ve come out of it,” she said, “and discovered that nobody really wants to laugh at me, nobody has anything to scold me about, nobody even notices me, or, if like you and Doyle they do, they don’t really think ill of me, and this makes me glad.” Her voice rose. “Oh, it makes me want to scream with relief and gladness! But if I did, if I screamed with relief and gladness, you’d think I was crazy, wouldn’t you? I mean insane. You don’t really want to start thinking that. Now do you?”

  “No,” I said, in truth, “I don’t.”

  Her voice calmed, she said, “Tell me about your wife. Let’s talk about you now. Your life and your wife.”

  What could I say? I put her off with a few vague, bored, critical remarks about Pamela, and then I didn’t say anything else about myself. My experience with Pamela had taught me a lesson about revealing too much of myself to others. Carefully I steered the conversation back to Margaret, and then I asked her to tell me more about Slater. Oh, she felt sorry for him, she said. He was a strange person—perhaps a deranged person. It could be that he was damned, a fallen angel, under a curse. He was the first person Margaret had ever met who was more wretched than herself. But she personally didn’t think he was awfully talented as a playwright. His early plays, perhaps, but not this one. I asked her to tell me a little about this strangely titled drama, How Many Times Have You Seen the red shoes? She said she didn’t want to give away the plot before I had a chance to see it—and she hoped I would come and see it—she would give me a free ticket. But anyway, she didn’t really like the part. She played a girl named Wanda who is overly idealistic, a dreamer, a petty fool. She felt that Slater hadn’t done a very good job of understanding Wanda. I asked Margaret why she wanted to be in the play if she didn’t like the role or the play. She gave me a surprised look, then said, It’s the only chance I’ve ever had to do anything with myself.” Then she added, “Jimmy thinks I might be able to make a career out of professional theater if I wanted to.”