by John Updike
“Well, don’t worry, I won’t let him in,” Janice said in the tone of one passing on a particularly frightening piece of gossip. “I’ll tell him you’re not here and I don’t know when you’ll be back.” She was a good-hearted, unfortunate girl, with dusty tangerine hair. Her mother in Rhode Island was being filtered through a series of hopeless operations. Most of her weekends were spent up there, helping her mother die. The salary Janice earned as a stenographer at NBC was consumed by train fares and long-distance phone calls; she never accepted her fee at the end of a night’s sitting without saying, with a soft one-sided smile wherein ages of Irish wit were listlessly deposited, “I hate to take it, but I need the money.”
“Well, no, don’t be rude or anything. Tell him—and I don’t think he’ll come, but just in case—we’ll be here Sunday.”
“The Bridgeses, too,” Liz pointed out.
“Yeah, well, I don’t think he’ll show. If he’s as new here as you said he said he was, he probably can’t find the place again.”
“You know,” Janice said to Liz, “you really can’t be so softhearted. I admire you for it, and I feel as sorry for these people as you do, but in this town, believe me, you don’t dare trust anybody, literally anybody. A girl at work beside me knows a man who’s as healthy as you or me, but he goes around on crutches and makes a hundred and twenty dollars a week. Why, that’s more than any of us who work honestly make.”
James smiled tightly, insulted twice; he made more than that a week, and he did not like to hear he was being defrauded by pitiable souls on the street who he could see were genuinely deformed or feeble-minded or alcoholic.
After a pause, Liz gently asked the girl, “How is your mother?”
Janice’s face brightened and was not quite so overpowered by the orange hair. “Oh, on the phone last night she sounded real high and mighty. The P.-T.A. has given her some job with a drive for funds, something she could do with pencil and paper, without getting up. I’ve told you how active she had been. She was all for getting out of bed. She said she can feel, you know, that it’s out of her body now. But when I talked to the doctor last Sunday, he said we mustn’t hope too much. But he seemed very proud of the operation.”
“Well, good luck,” James said, jingling the change in his pocket.
Janice shook her finger. “You have a good time. He isn’t going to get in if I’m here, that you can depend on,” she assured them, misunderstanding, or perhaps understanding more than necessary.
The picture was excellent, but just at the point where John Wayne, after tracking the Comanches from the snowbound forests of Montana to the blazing dunes of Border Country, was becoming reconciled to the idea of his niece’s cohabiting with a brave, James vividly remembered the bum who had wobbled toward him on Eighth Street—the twisted eye, the coat too small to button, the pulpy mouth with pathetic effort trying to frame the first words. The image made him squirm in his seat and pull away from Liz’s hand. She, as the credits rolled, confided that her eyes smarted from the VistaVision. They were reluctant to go home so early; Janice counted on them to stay away during the easy hours when Martha was asleep. But the bar at the White Horse Tavern was crowded and noisy—it had become a tourist trap—and the main streets of the Village, thronged with gangsters and hermaphrodites, seemed to James a poor place to stroll with his wife. Liz with her innocent open stare caught the attention of every thug and teen-ager they passed. “Stop it,” he said.
“You’ll get me knifed.”
“Darling. There’s no law against people’s eyes.”
“There should be. They think you’re a whore out with her pimp. What makes you stare at everybody?”
“Faces are interesting. Why are you so uninterested in people?”
“Because every other day you call up the office and I have to come rescue you from some damn spook you’ve enticed up the stairs. No wonder Dudevant is getting set to fire me.”
“Let’s go home if you want to rave.”
“We can’t. Janice needs the money, the bloodsucker.”
“It’s nearly ten. She charges a dollar an hour, after all.”
As they advanced down Tenth from Fifth he saw a slight blob by their gate which simply squinting did not erase. He did not expect ever to see Liz’s Negro, who had had his chance at dinner. Yet, when it was clear that a man was standing there, wearing a hat, James hastened forward, glad at last to have the enemy life-sized and under scrutiny. They seemed to know each other well; James said “Hi!” and grasped the quickly offered hand. The palm felt waxy and cool, like a synthetic fabric.
“I just wanted … thank … such a fine gentleman,” the Negro said, in a voice incredibly thin-spun, the thread of it always breaking.
“Have you been waiting long?” Liz asked.
“No, well … the lady upstairs, she said you’d be back. When the man in the taxi let me go from the station … came on back to thank such wonderful people.”
“I’m awfully sorry,” James told him. “I thought you knew we were going off to the movies.” His own voice sounded huge—a magnificent instrument. He must not be too elaborately courteous. Since his New York success, Liz was sensitive to any sign in him of vanity or condescension. She was unfair; his natural, heartfelt impulse at this moment was toward elaborate courtesy.
“You were at the police station?” Liz asked. Their previous encounter seemed to have attuned her to the man’s speech.
“… how I do appreciate.” He was still speaking to James, ignoring Liz completely. This assumption that he, as head of the family, superseded all its other elements, and that in finding him the Negro had struck the fountainhead of his good fortune, panicked James. He had been raised to believe in strong women and recessive husbands. Further, the little intruder seemed to need specifically maternal attention. He trembled under his coat, and it was not that cold; the night was warmer than the late afternoon had been.
The man’s clothes, in the dimness of outdoors, did not look as shabby as James would have liked. As for his being young, there were few marks of either youth or age.
“Well, come on inside,” James said.
“Aaaah …?”
“Please,” Liz said.
They entered the little overheated vestibule, and immediately the buzzer rasped at the lock, signalling that Janice had been watching from the window. She ran to the banister and shouted down in a whisper, “Did he get in? Has he told you about the taxi driver?”
James, leading the group, attained the top of the stairs. “How was Martha?” he asked, rather plainly putting first things first.
“An absolute angel. How was the movie?”
“Quite good, really. It really was. Long, though.”
“I was honestly afraid he’d kill him.”
They shuffled each other into the room. “I gather you two have met, then,” James said to Janice and the Negro. The girl bared her teeth in a kindly smile that made her look five years older, and the Negro, who had his hat already in his hands and was therefore unable to tip it, bent the brim slightly and swiftly averted his head, confronting a striped canvas Liz had done in art school, titled Swans and Shadows.
At this juncture, Liz deserted him, easing into the bedroom. She was bothered by fears that Martha would stop breathing among the blankets. “Before the doorbell rang, even,” Janice talked on, “I could hear the shouting on the street—Oh, it was something. These terrible things being shouted. And then the bell rang, and I answered it, like you had said to, and he said—” She indicated the Negro, who was still standing, in a quiet plaid sport coat.
“Sit down,” James told him.
“—and he said that the taxi driver wanted money. I said, ‘I don’t have any. I don’t have a red cent, honestly.’ You know, when I come over I never think to bring my purse.” James recalled she could never make change, creating an amount she was left owing them, “toward next time.”
“I tol him,” the Negro said, “there were these fine people, in
this house here. The lady in there, she tol me you’d be here.”
James asked, “Where did you take a taxi from?”
The Negro sought refuge in contemplation of his hat, pendent from one quivering hand. “Please, mister … the lady, she knows about it.” He looked toward the bedroom door.
Janice rescued him, speaking briskly: “He told me the driver wanted two thirty, and I said, ‘I don’t have a cent.’ Then I came in here and hunted, you know, to see if you left any around—sometimes there’s some tens under the silver bowl.”
“Oh, yes,” James said. “I suppose there are.”
“Then I went to the window to signal—I’m scared to death of going downstairs and locking myself out—and down on the street there was this crowd, from across the street at Alex’s, and it looked like, when he went back to tell the driver, the driver grabbed him; there was a lot of shouting, and some woman kept saying ‘Cop. Call a cop.’ ”
Liz reëntered the room.
“He grab me here,” the Negro humbly explained. He touched with his little free hand the open collar of his red wool shirt.
“So I guess then they went to the police station,” Janice concluded lamely, disappointed to discover that her information was incomplete.
Liz, assuming that the police-station part of the story had been told when she was out of the room, took this to be the end, and asked, “Who wants some coffee?”
“No thanks, Betty,” Janice said. “It keeps me awake.”
“It keeps everybody awake,” James said. “That’s what it’s supposed to do.”
“Oh, no, ma’am,” the Negro said. “I couldn’t do that.” Uneasily shifting his face toward James, though he kept his eyes on the lamp burning above Janice’s head, he went on, “I tolem at the station how there were these people. I had your address, ’Cause the lady wrote it down on a little slip.”
“Uh-huh.” James assumed there was more to come. Why wasn’t he still at the police station? Who paid the driver? The pause stretched. James felt increasingly remote; it scarcely seemed his room, with so strange a guest in it. He tilted his chair back, and the Negro sharpened as if through the wrong end of a telescope. There was a resemblance between the Negro’s head and the Raydo shaver. The inventive thing about that design—the stroke of mind, in Dudevant’s phrase—had been forth-rightly paring away the space saved by the manufacturer’s improved, smaller motor. Instead of a symmetrical case, then, in form like a tapered sugar sack, a squat, asymmetrical shape was created, which fitted, pleasingly weighty, in the user’s hand like a religious stone, full of mana. Likewise, a part of the Negro’s skull had been eliminated. His eyes were higher in his head than drawing masters teach, and had been shallowly placed on the edges, where the planes of the face turned sideways. With a smothered start James realized that Janice, and Liz leaning in the doorway of the kitchen, and the Negro, too, were expecting him to speak—the man of the situation, the benefactor. “Well, now, what is your trouble?” he asked brutally.
The coffee water sang in its kettle, and Liz, after wrinkling her expressive high forehead at him, turned to the stove.
The Negro feebly rubbed the slant of his skull. “Aaaah?… appreciate the kindness of you and the lady … generous to a poor soul like me nobody wanted to help.”
James prompted. “You and your wife and—how many children?”
“Seven, mister. The oldest boy ten.”
“—have found a place to live. Where?”
“Yes, sir, the man say he give us this room, but he say he can’t put no beds in it, but I found this other man willing to give us on loan, you know, until I go to my job.… But the wife and children, they don’t have no bed to rest their heads. Nothing to eat. My children are tired. They’re gettin’ sick, they so tired.”
James put a cigarette in the center of his mouth and said as it bobbled, “You say you have a job?”
“Oh, yes, mister, I went to this place where they’re building the new road to the tunnel, you know, and he tol me as soon as I get in one day’s work he can give me that money, toward my pay. He ast if I could do the work and I said, ‘Yes, sir, any kind of work you give I can do.’ He said the pay was two dollar seventy cents for every hour you work.”
“Two seventy? For Heaven’s sake. Twenty dollars a day just laboring?”
“Yes, pushing the wheelbarrow … he said two seventy. I said, ‘I can do any kind of work you give. I’m a hard worker.’ ”
To James he looked extremely frail, but the notion of there existing a broad-shouldered foreman willing to make this hapless man a working citizen washed all doubts away. James smiled and insisted, “So it’s really just this weekend you need to get over.”
“Thas right. Starting Monday I’ll be making two seventy every hour. The wife, she’s as happy as anybody could be.”
The wife seemed to have altered underfoot, but James let it pass; the end was in sight. He braced himself to enter the realm of money. Here Janice, the fool, who should have left the minute they came home, interrupted with, “Have you tried any agencies, like the Salvation Army?”
“Oh, yes, miss. All. They don’t care much for fellas like me. They say they’ll give us money to get back, but as for us staying—they won’t do a damn thing. Boy, you come up here in a truck, you’re on your own. Nobody help me except these people.”
The man he probably was with his friends and family was starting to show. James was sleepy. The hard chair hurt; the Negro had the comfortable chair. He resented the man’s becoming at ease. But there was no halting the process; the women were at work now.
“Isn’t that awful,” Janice said. “You wonder why they have these agencies.”
“You say you need help, your wife ain’t got a place to put her head, they give you money to go back.”
Liz entered with two cups of coffee. Hers, James noticed, was just half full; he was to bear the larger burden of insomnia. The cup was too hot to hold. He set it on the rug, feeling soft-skinned and effeminate in the eyes of this hard worker worth twenty dollars a day.
“Why did you decide to leave North Carolina?” Liz asked.
“Missis, a man like me, there’s no chance there for him. I worked in the cotton and they give me thirty-five cents an hour.”
“Thirty-five cents?” James said. “That’s illegal, isn’t it?”
The Negro smiled sardonically, his first facial expression of the evening. “Down there you don’t tell them what’s legal.” To Liz he added, “The wife, ma’am, she’s the bravest woman. When I say, ‘Less go,’ she say, ‘Thas right, let’s give oursels a chance.’ So this man promise he’d take us up in the cab of the truck he had.…”
“With all seven children?” James asked.
The Negro looked at him without the usual wavering. “We don’t have anybody to leave them behind.”
“And you have no friends or relatives here?” Liz asked.
“No, we don’t have no friends, and until you were so kind it didn’t look like we’d find any either.”
Friends! In indignation James rose and, on his feet, had to go through the long-planned action of placing two ten-dollar bills on the table next to the Negro. The Negro ignored them, bowing his head. James made his speech. “Now, I don’t know how much furniture costs—my wife gave me the impression that you were going to make the necessary payment with the ten. But here is twenty. It’s all we can spare. This should carry you over until Monday, when you say you can get part of your salary for working on the Lincoln Tunnel. I think it was very courageous of you to bring your family up here, and we want to wish you lots of luck. I’m sure you and your wife will manage.” Flushing with shame, he resumed his post in the hard chair.
Janice bit her lip to cure a smile and looked toward Liz, who said nothing.
The Negro said, “Aeeh … Mister … can’t find words to press, such fine people.” And, while the three of them sat there, trapped and stunned, he tried to make himself cry. He pinched the bridge of his nose
and shook his head and squeezed soft high animal sounds from his throat, but when he looked up, the grainy whites of his eyes were dry. Uncoördinated with this failure, his lips writhed in grief. He kept brushing his temple as if something were humming there. “Gee,” he said. “The wife … she tol me, You got to go back and thank that man.…”
The Negro’s sense of exit seemed as defective as his other theatrical skills. He just sat there, shaking his head and touching his nose. The bills on the table remained ignored—taboo, perhaps, until a sufficiently exhausting ritual of gratitude was performed. James, to whom rudeness came hard, teetered in his chair, avoiding all eyes; at the root of the Negro’s demonstration there was either the plight he described or a plight that had made him lie. In either case, the man must be borne. Yet James found him all but unbearable; the thought of his life as he described it, swinging from one tenuous vine of charity to the next—the truck driver, the landlord, Liz, the furniture man, the foreman, now James—was sickening, giddying. James said courteously, “Maybe you’d better be getting back to her.”
“Iiih,” the Negro sighed, on an irrelevant high note, as if he produced the sound with a pitch pipe.
James dreaded that Liz would start offering blankets and food if the Negro delayed further—as he did, whimpering and passing the hat brim through his hands like an endless rope. While Liz was in the kitchen filling a paper bag for him, the Negro found breath to tell James that he wanted to bring his wife and all his family to see him and his missis, tomorrow, so they could all express gratitude. “Maybe there’s some work … washing the floors, anything, she’s so happy, until we can pay back. Twenty, gee.” His hand fled to his eyes.
“No, don’t you worry about us. That thirty dollars”—the first ten seemed already forgotten—“you can think of as a gift from the city.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t have it no other way. You let my wife do all your work tomorrow.”
“You and she get settled. Forget us.”
Liz appeared with an awkward paper bag. There were to be no blankets, he deduced; she wasn’t as soft as he feared.