The Complete Stories of Morley Callaghan - Volume Three

by Morley Callaghan

  The boys, pleased with themselves, walked home. “You want to hang on to her,” Chuck said.

  “I wonder why she is always nice to me just when she is going away,” Harry said.

  “Would you want her for your girl?”

  “I don’t know. Wouldn’t she be a knockout at the school dance? The old ladies would throw a fit.”

  Mary didn’t write to Harry and didn’t see him for a long time. After two weeks she was fired from the company. She wasn’t a good dancer.

  Many people had a good laugh and Mary stopped talking about her ambitions for a while. Though usually careful, she slipped into easy careless ways with Wilfred Barnes. She never thought of him as she thought of Harry, but he became important to her. Harry was like something she used to pray for when a little girl and never really expected to get.

  It was awkward when Wilfred got into trouble for tampering with the postal boxes that stood on street corners. He had discovered a way of getting all the money people put in the slots for stamps. The police found a big pile of coins hidden in his father’s store. The judge sent him to jail for only two months because his parents were very respectable people. He promised to marry Mary when he came out.

  One afternoon in the late summer they were married by a Presbyterian minister. Mrs. Barnes made it clear that she didn’t think much of the bride. Mr. Barnes said Wilfred would have to go on working in the store. They took three rooms in a big boarding house on Berkley Street.

  Mary cried a little when she wrote to tell Harry she was married. She had always been too independent to cry in that way. She would be his sincere friend and still intended to be successful on the stage, she said. Harry wrote that he was surprised that she had married a fellow just out of jail, even though he seemed to come from respectable people.

  In the dance pavilion at Scarborough beach a month later, she saw Harry. The meeting was unexpected and she was with three frowsy girls from a circus that was in the east end for a week. Mary had on a long blue-knitted cape that the stores were selling cheaply. Harry turned up his nose at the three girls but talked cheerfully to Mary. They danced together. She said that her husband didn’t mind her taking another try at the stage and he wondered if he should say that he had been to the circus. Giggling, and watching him closely, she said she was working for the week in the circus, for the experience. He gave her to understand that always she would do whatever pleased her, and shouldn’t try for a thing that wasn’t natural to her. He wasn’t enthusiastic when she offered to phone him, just curious about what she might do.

  Late in the fall a small part in a local company at the La Plaza for a week was offered to her. She took the job because she detested staying around the house. She wanted Harry to see her really on the stage so she phoned and asked if he would come to the La Plaza on Tuesday night. Good-humoredly he offered to take her dancing afterward. It was funny, he said laughing, that she should be starting all over again at the La Plaza.

  But Harry, sitting solemnly in the theater, watching the ugly girls in tights on the stage, couldn’t pick her out. He wondered what on earth was the matter when he waited at the stage door and she didn’t appear. Disgusted, he went home and didn’t bother about her because he had a nice girl of his own. She never wrote to tell him what was the matter.

  But one warm afternoon in November, Mary took it into her head to sit on the front seat of the rig with Wilfred, delivering groceries. They went east through many streets until they were in the beach district. Wilfred was telling jokes and she was laughing out loud. Once he stopped his wagon, grabbed his basket and went running along a side entrance, yelling, “Grocer!” Mary sat on the wagon seat.

  Three young fellows and a woman were sitting up on a veranda opposite the wagon. She saw Harry looking at her and vaguely wondered how he got there. She didn’t want him to see that she was going to have a baby. Leaning on the veranda rail, he saw that her slimness had passed into the shapelessness of her pregnancy and he knew why she had been kept off the stage that night at the La Plaza. She sat erect and strangely dignified on the seat of the grocery wagon. They didn’t speak. She made up her mind to be hard up for someone to talk to before she bothered him again, as if without going any further she wasn’t as good as he was. She smiled sweetly at Wilfred when he came running out of the alley and jumped on the seat, shouting, “Giddup,” to the horse. They drove on to a customer farther down the street.

  Rocking Chair

  All the way home from work that evening Thomas Boultbee thought of Easter Sunday, which was only two days away, and of his young wife, Elsie, who had died of pneumonia and been buried in the last winter month. As Thomas Boultbee started to climb the stairs to his apartment he felt very lonely. His feet felt heavy. By the time he got to the landing he seemed unreasonably weary and he rested to take a deep breath. He was a tall, thin young man wearing a baggy tweed suit. He had a fair curling moustache, which he sometimes touched with the tip of his tongue, and his blue eyes behind the heavy tortoiseshell glasses were deep-set and wistful. He had been thinking how all the church bells would ring on Easter Sunday while the choirs sang of the Lord who had risen from the dead, and he hoped it would be a crystal-clear, sunlit day. Last Easter, at a time when he and Elsie had been married only a few weeks, they had gone to the church together and he had held her hand tightly even while they knelt down to pray. Her eyes had been closed as she knelt beside him and he had kept on looking at the expression of contentment on her nervous face half-framed in her bobbed dark hair. “I guess there’s no use thinking of that,” he said, as he started to climb the stairs again, yet he went on thinking stubbornly that all over the country on Sunday there would be a kind of awakening after the winter, in the city the church choirs would chant that the dead had returned to life, and for some reason it stirred him to feel that Elsie was so alive and close to him in his own thoughts.

  In the narrow hall below his own apartment he encountered Hilda Adams, a friend of his wife, who was going out, dressed in a smart blue suit and a little blue straw hat. She was an assertive, fair-haired, solidly built girl. Since Elsie had died Hilda Adams had taken it for granted with too much confidence that Boultbee wanted her to look after him. In the dimly lit hall, she waited, smiling, leaning back against the wall.

  “Hello, Hilda,” he said. “Have you got your new Easter suit on?”

  “I sure have. How do you like it, Tom?” she said, turning and pivoting with one foot off the floor.

  “It looks good. When I was coming along the street I was thinking that Easter was Elsie’s favorite time of the year.”

  “I know, Tom, but be a little fairer to yourself,” she said brusquely, as she pulled on her black gloves. “You oughtn’t to go around always with a long face like that. It isn’t right.” And for no other reason than that she had a malicious disposition and was irritated by his persistent devotion to his dead wife, she said, “Poor little Elsie. I was thinking of her today. She didn’t have much of a chance to enjoy anything, did she? There were even little things she missed.”

  “What little things?” he said.

  “Oh, nothing much,” she said, smoothing her coat at the hips with her gloved hands. “You know, just a few days before she died the poor soul told me about a rocking chair she saw downtown and had her heart set on. Fancy that.”

  “You must have got her wrong,” he said. “She didn’t really want that chair. We were saving to get along. With me studying engineering at nights we needed every nickel. But I had planned to get her the chair for her birthday.”

  Taking a sly, knowing look at him, Hilda Adams patted him on the shoulder, took a deep, sighing breath and said, “Cheer up. See you later, bye-bye.”

  Thomas Boultbee was such a serious young man that as soon as he was alone in his own room he sat down, took off his glasses and thought of the last time he had been downtown with Elsie and they had seen the wicker rocking chair in the furniture department. She had hardly mentioned wanting the chair. When pass
ing along the aisle in the department she had felt tired and had sat down in the rocker and smiled up at him. Then she had got up, still smiling, and had patted the chair with her hand. It had never occurred to him that she would come home and tell Miss Adams that she wanted that chair.

  That night Boultbee did not sleep well: he had a bad dream, and then he lay awake wondering why Elsie had been afraid to ask him for the chair.

  All the next day while at work Boultbee was wishing earnestly that he could find some way to show Elsie that he would not have begrudged her anything in the world. He thought of telling her in a prayer. The more he thought of it the closer she seemed to him, and then he decided at noontime, when he was out in the crowded streets, that he would like to do something more definite than praying. He had just come out of a drugstore after having a sandwich and a cup of coffee and was looking at the noonday crowd passing along the street. A great many of the women were wearing their winter clothes for the last time. On Easter Sunday they would put on their new dresses and if it were a fine clear day they would go for a walk down the avenue. Boultbee and his wife had watched the fashion parade last year. It had been like watching people coming to life in new raiment and getting ready for the new season. As he lit a cigarette, he smiled and thought, “Maybe nothing, or no one, ever dies.”

  Then he grinned shyly to himself and said, “I’d like an awful lot to go and buy that chair and take it home and have it in the room for Easter Sunday.” He wouldn’t admit to himself that he was trying to prove he had never begrudged anything to Elsie.

  On Saturday afternoon Boultbee went to the store and into the furniture department. At first he had the notion that the one wicker chair might be gone, but as he stood in the aisle, looking around at long rows of chairs, he at once saw eight or nine brown wicker ones just like the one Elsie had wanted, plain wicker rockers with a little padding on the seat and on the arms. But when the salesman approached him he felt uneasy and foolish. “If I want to buy a chair why can’t I buy a chair?” he thought stubbornly. His sudden amiable grin startled the salesman who had been too tired to notice him particularly. “I’ve had this chair picked out for some time,” Boultbee said as he put his hand in his pocket for the money. Then he surprised himself by adding confidentially, “I had planned to get this chair for my wife. I don’t know why she liked this one particularly.”

  “If she liked it then, she’ll like it now,” the salesman said with judicial assurance. “And it will stand up against a lot of wear, too.”

  “Well, that’s what you always want in a chair,” Boultbee agreed. “It isn’t so much what a chair looks like as what it’ll stand up under,” he added, wanting the fellow to think him a sage and practical man.

  On Easter Sunday when he got up he wouldn’t admit that he was eager, but he was quite pleased with himself. He didn’t wait to dress. He put on his brown dressing gown and his bathroom slippers and went into the living room to look at the rocking chair. There it was by the table. With a gentle motion he rocked it back and forth a few times, a faint, tender smile at the corners of his mouth because it was so easy to imagine that Elsie was sitting there in her pale-blue printed housedress. He began to walk up and down, his slippers slapping the floor. Then he went over to the window and looked out: it was just the kind of a Sunday he had wanted it to be, with a cloudless blue sky and streaming sunlight. For a long time he listened to the clanging church bells and watched the people moving on the sidewalk. “I ought to let Hilda Adams look at the chair and see if she gets the idea at all,” he said.

  He got dressed in a hurry. But when he went downstairs and rapped on Miss Adams’s door he felt both shy and awkward, for it occurred to him it would be hard to explain why he bought the chair, if he were asked, especially if she didn’t get the idea at once. Her blue eyes snapped wide open when she saw him. She held her pink dressing gown across her throat. As she began to show that she was pleased at seeing him there, he said, with a kind of boyish expression on his face, “Say, Hilda, come on upstairs and have a bit of breakfast with me, will you? You know, it’s Easter and we’ll boil a lot of eggs.”

  She almost laughed to herself. “The poor fellow’s lonely and can’t hold out any longer,” she thought. As she ran in and out of her bedroom, daubing powder on her face and twisting her yellow hair back into a knot, she smiled brightly and gaily at him. She began to hum. When they went upstairs to his apartment she had a hold of his arm as if they were going off to some quiet place to have tea.

  “I bought something yesterday. Maybe it’ll surprise you a bit to see it,” he said with a certain diffidence.

  “What is it?”

  “Just something I thought I ought to have around,” he said.

  In his living room he stood behind her to conceal his embarrassment as she glanced quickly at the chair. She turned and he gave her one wistful smile. She seemed to puff out with good humor. “He’s trying to please me by showing me he’s not afraid to spend his money now on something he was too tight to give Elsie,” she thought. Flustered with pleasure, she began to giggle. Then she sat down slowly in the chair, relaxed, put her heels together and rocked back and forth.

  “You’re a dear boy, Tom,” she said. “You really are a dear boy.”

  Running his hand through his mop of hair, he waited for her to participate in his own secret feeling. But she was rocking back and forth, her face creased with little fat smiles, with both her hands on the arms of the chair as if she were solidly established in the room and in his life forever. He felt angry. “The stupid woman,” he thought. He knew she thought he was trying in some clumsy way to please her. As she rocked back and forth, beaming, she looked so comfortable he felt outraged.

  “Please don’t sit in that chair,” he said in a mild voice.

  “What’s the matter with me sitting here, Tom?”

  He felt that he was going to appear absurd, so he said, coaxing her, “I just want you to come over here by the window, that’s all.”

  “This chair’s so comfortable. You come here,” she said coyly.

  “Why do you want to stay there?” he said impatiently. “You can’t have your breakfast there, can you?”

  Reluctant, she got up, and as she came towards him, humming, she started to sway her hips. But he went right past her to the chair and sat down himself with a stubborn expression on his face while he blinked his eyes and watched her putting her hands on her hips and her head on one side in exasperation. He watched her embarrassment increase. Her face got red. With sober angry faces they kept on staring at each other. “My, you’re rude,” she said at last. “Such a stupid way to act.”

  He took off his glasses and wiped them with his handkerchief because his eyes felt moist. “I suppose I didn’t want anybody to sit in this chair,” he said, trying to make a decent apology. “It’s something I thought Elsie would like, that’s all.”

  “I see, I see,” she said sharply as she tried to prevent herself from going into a jealous rage. “Of course I see. But I can’t help thinking you’re a fool,” she said. “You can’t blame me for that. Though I suppose it’s more likely you went out and bought the chair for yourself.” Nodding her head up and down, she said contemptuously, “Imagine you going out and buying that chair after refusing it to your poor wife.”

  “You don’t get the idea at all,” he said.

  “Maybe I don’t,” she said. “But I’ll be hanged if I stay and have breakfast with anybody as rude as you.” She gave him one bitter glance and walked out of the room.

  He put his glasses on and adjusted them on his nose. Then he closed his eyes and with his hands on the arms of the chair he rocked back and forth, back and forth. “What did I expect anyway?” he thought. He pondered the matter: in the beginning he had been thinking of the church choirs that would sing “Christ the Lord has risen today.” He stopped rocking and leaned forward with his eyes open and his hands gripped between his knees, “But what did I expect the chair to do? Did I actually think it wou
ld help bring Elsie closer to me?” Then he started to rock again, and frowning he wondered why he had bought the chair at all. Outside, the last of the church bells were ringing. Closing his eyes, he went rocking, rocking, back and forth.

  A Wedding Dress

  For fifteen years Miss Lena Schwartz had waited for Sam Hilton to get a good job so they could get married. She lived in a quiet boarding house on Wellesley Street, the only woman among seven men boarders. The landlady, Mrs. McNab, did not want women boarders; the house might get a bad reputation in the neighborhood, but Miss Schwartz had been with her a long time. Miss Schwartz was thirty-two, her hair was straight, her nose turned up a little and she was thin.

  Sam got a good job in Windsor and she was going there to marry him. She was glad to think that Sam still wanted to marry her, because he was a Catholic and went to church every Sunday. Sam liked her so much he wrote a cramped homely letter four times a week.

  When Miss Schwarz knew definitely that she was going to Windsor, she read part of a letter to Mrs. McNab. The men heard about the letter at the table and talked as if Lena were an old maid. “I guess it will really happen to her all right,” they said, nudging one another. “The Lord knows she waited long enough.”

  Miss Schwartz quit work in the millinery shop one afternoon in the middle of February. She was to travel by night, arrive in Windsor early next morning and marry Sam as soon as possible.

  That afternoon the downtown streets were slushy and the snow was thick alongside the curb. Miss Schwartz ate a little lunch at a soda fountain, not much because she was excited. She had to do some shopping, buy some flimsy underclothes and a new dress. The dress was important. She wanted it charming enough to be married in and serviceable for wear on Sundays. Sitting on the counter stool she ate slowly and remembered how she had often thought marrying Sam would be a matter of course. His lovemaking had become casual and good-natured; she could grow old with him and be respected by other women. But now she had a funny aching feeling inside. Her arms and legs seemed almost strange to her.