The Complete Stories of Morley Callaghan - Volume Three

by Morley Callaghan

  “Yeah — like a clown’s hat,” she whispered. “And why not?”

  “I’m sorry, Jeannie,” he said. “I should have noticed.”

  “Should you?” she blurted out. “Why would you notice?”

  “Why shouldn’t I?” he asked innocently.

  “Because you don’t notice anything that’s happening.”

  “I don’t get it,” he said. “You don’t want to quarrel about a hat. Not tonight, Jeannie. Not about a hat.”

  “I took a lot of time with that hat,” she said fiercely.

  “All right. It was a fine hat,” he said impatiently. “So, it’s ruined and it’s my fault. I’ll get you a new one.”

  “A new one,” she said bitterly. “Sure. Go ahead. Get everything new.”

  “I can do that, too,” he said quickly.

  “And I can get myself a new hat,” she said, her voice breaking. She tried to stop herself; she didn’t want to make the wild protest that would humiliate her, and she told herself desperately it would be all right and unnoticed if she protested fiercely only about the hat. “I sit up at night,” she said angrily. “I sew till my eyes ache—” But he grabbed at her arm, and she jerked away and went running up the street.

  Her galoshes sloshed through the snow, and she ran as fast as she could. “Jeannie!” she heard him call, but she knew he still stood there, because there was only the sound of her own footsteps and it was a terrible sound. Yet when she heard his longer, heavier step and the sound of his curse, as he slipped and fell, she wanted frantically to go faster, to fly far beyond his reach and hear him thudding after her and never be able to catch up to her; she wanted the wild happiness of being beyond him.

  She stumbled up the steps to her door just as his big hand grasped at her shoulder. Whirling around, exhausted, she gasped fiercely, “Leave me alone. You don’t own me.”

  “All right, you little fool,” he said angrily. “And you don’t own me.”

  “That’s the way we’ve played it. Now go away.”

  The melting snow from his hat dripped on her face as he held her hard against his wet coat.

  Struggling with him, she repeated, “Go away. Just go away.”

  “How can I go away?” he asked angrily. Then he softened and got mixed up. “All evening I’ve known I didn’t want to go away and I didn’t know why. I didn’t know I couldn’t go without you. But when we stopped under the streetlight and I happened to look at you — that hat stuck on your head at that crazy angle—”

  “Happened to look,” she repeated.

  “Yeah, like I said.”

  “Just a whim.” She protested, “Oh, it’s unfair.”

  “What’s unfair?” he asked growing bewildered.

  “It couldn’t be like that with me.”

  “Sure it could,” he insisted, but he sounded surprised, himself. Then she knew that in the silence he was sharing her apprehension that the course of their lives could change as a result of a little thing like an unpremeditated glance at a hat. “Maybe that’s the way it goes,” he said awkwardly. “Maybe there’s always one moment — everything can look different at one moment. Yeah,” he said, confused now himself. “Maybe that’s always how it happens, maybe that’s how a guy knows he wants to marry,” he asked helplessly.

  But she was sobbing softly, and he couldn’t console her. All she said was: “It’s just that you’re like you are and I’m like I am, and it gets so hard waiting for — for the right moment — with nothing to fall back on but a homemade hat.”

  “Well, now that we know, Jeannie—” From then on she wasn’t sure what they said except that she was agreeing to go away with him and saying how soon she could be ready; but she wanted to close her eyes and hear again the sound of his footsteps thudding after her.

  When he had kissed her and gone, she took off her shoes and went in quietly. But her mother, hearing her, called out anxiously, “Is that you, Jeannie? It’s nearly dawn.”

  In her own room she stood in a trance, her shoes in her hand, thinking, “I’m really going to marry him.” Then she took off the wet hat and put it carefully on the radiator. While it dried, she undressed. The pink and black silk on the hat wrinkled up in the heat. The crown, as it dried, was twisted out of shape. She would never wear the hat again, but it didn’t matter. Picking it up carefully, she smoothed it and put it on the bureau, and she sat down on the bed and looked at it for a long time with profound surprise.

  Younger Brother

  Just after dark on Sunday evening five fellows from the neighborhood stood on the corner under the light opposite the cigar store. They were dressed in dark overcoats, fedoras, and white scarves, except Jimmie Stevens, the small-est, who was without a hat and the only one without an overcoat. Jimmie was eager to please the big fellows, who did not take him seriously because he was a few years younger. They rarely talked directly to him. So he wanted to show off. He got a laugh out of them, whirling and twisting out to the middle of the road, his body hunched down at the knees, his left arm held out and his right arm moving as though he were playing a violin, like a dancer he had seen on the stage. He sang hoarsely till one of the fellows, Bill Spiers, shouted, “What a voice, put the skids under him!” and he ran out in the road and tackled Jimmie around the waist, though not hard enough to make them both fall. He kept pushing Jimmie across the street.

  Then somebody yelled, “Lay off the kid!” just as Jimmie’s sister, Millie, passed the cigar store, going out for the evening. She was an unusually tall, slim blond girl, grace-ful and stylish in her short beige-colored jacket, who walked with a free, firm stride, fully aware that she was admired by the fellows at the corner, and at the same time faintly amused as though she knew she was far beyond them. She didn’t speak to Jimmie as she passed, for she knew he was always there on a Sunday evening. He was glad she passed so jauntily and was proud and warm with satisfaction because his sister had such fine clean lines to her body and was so smartly independent and utterly beyond any of the corner gang. Sometimes he felt that the big fellows let him hang around because they had so much admiration for his sister, who never spoke to them, though she knew them.

  “She’s smart,” Buck Thompson, a thin fellow, said, looking after her. “If I get some dough one of these days, I’ll take her out and give her a chance.”

  “Fat chance for a little guy like you, just up to her shoulder,” Bill Spiers said.

  “That so?”

  “She got too much class for you, Buck.”

  “I dunno. I’ve known her since she was a kid. I saw her uptown a few months ago with Muddy Maguire.”

  Muddy Maguire, a roughneck, had grown up around the corner and had moved uptown. Jimmie started to snicker: “If my old lady ever heard you say that she’d rip out your tongue.” They all knew Mrs. Stevens, a competent, practical woman, who had left her husband fourteen years ago and she had never let her daughter bring one of the fellows near the house. Jimmie grinned, pleased that they had given Buck the horse laugh for thinking he could get anywhere with his sister.

  Millie passed out of sight by the newsstand and one of the fellows started to sing a love song softly and the others tried to croon with him, harmonizing as much as possible, wishing they had enough money to take Millie Stevens out. For almost an hour they talked intimately about girls, cursing each other.

  It was nearly eleven o’clock when Jimmie went home. The Stevenses lived in a house with freshly painted shutters, third from the corner in a long row of old three-storey brick houses with high steps. They lived on the ground floor and had the basement also. Jimmie was whistling, a thin tune-less whistle, as he went up the steps. A light was in the big front room, shining through the shutters, and Jimmie wondered if his mother, who had been out for the evening, had brought one of the neighbors home with her. He was going along the hall to the kitchen when he thought he heard Millie’s voice, then a man’s voice. He knew at once that his mother had not come home. “Millie’s crazy bringing a guy home here,”
he thought. He went through to the kitchen, but he wanted to see who was talking to his sister, so he went back along the hall and quietly opened one of the big fold-ing doors.

  Millie was sitting on the sofa with Muddy Maguire. Her fur jacket and a bright scarf were tossed carelessly over the back of the sofa. “She must have come home the other way around the block,” Jimmie thought. Maguire was stout with small eyes, his shiny black hair parted in the middle, self-reliant and domineering, his chest too big for his tight vest. As Jimmie saw him sitting there with his sister he felt his whole body become inert with disappointment. “What can Millie see in a guy like that?”

  Millie, leaning toward Muddy, talked earnestly, her face pale, her eyes red as though she had been crying, and Muddy was leaning away from her, looking sour as though there was no mystery in her for him and he didn’t want to be there, at all. Jimmie heard her say “Ma” and then suddenly she must have said something insulting to him, for he slapped her lightly across the face.

  Jimmie expected Millie to tear Maguire’s face with her nails; he couldn’t imagine her taking anything from a guy like that; he wanted to yell at her. He couldn’t understand it at all when she put her hand up to her cheek and began to cry weakly.

  Then Millie said: “You promised, you know you promised.”

  “I was a fool,” he said

  “Then what did you come here for?”

  “I don’t know. ”

  “You were going to tell Ma.”

  Millie turned her head away from him and Muddy shrugged, and then slowly and clumsily let his hands fall on Millie’s shoulder. “All right,” he said, “I’m sorry, Millie.”

  Jimmie, trembling and angry, heard his mother coming up the front steps. He hurried back to the kitchen and waited. Mrs. Stevens, a short woman, almost shapeless in her heavy cloth coat, with firm thin lips and steady pale-blue eyes, said, “What’s the matter, Jimmie?”

  “Millie’s in there with Muddy Maguire.”

  Her face got red. “In this house?” she said.

  He followed his mother to the front room. Millie, resting her head against Maguire’s chest, was crying quietly, both her arms around his neck as if he had become very precious to her.

  Mrs. Stevens had never wanted her daughter to belong to any man, and now she said harshly: “Millie, what is this? What’s the meaning of this?”

  “We wanted to speak to you, Ma,” Millie said timidly

  Mrs. Stevens, a severe, rigid woman, had expected Millie to stand up and move away from Maguire when she spoke to her, and now she was startled to feel that Millie and this fellow were drawing closer together as they stared at her; the emotion that held Maguire and Millie together seemed suddenly to touch Mrs. Stevens and puzzle and weaken her. She stood there, getting ready to speak, yet all the severity and grimness in her own way of living seemed unimportant now. Gravely she realized why they were waiting for her, and why Millie wanted to talk to her. “Millie, my dear,” she said, bending down to her daughter.

  “We just want to have a few words with you, Mrs. Stevens,” Maguire said with an awkward indifference.

  “Go out and close the door, Jimmie,” Mrs. Stevens said, trying to conceal her agitation.

  Jimmie was disgusted with his mother. When Maguire had spoken to her so casually, so sure of his relation with Millie, Jimmie had expected his mother to scorch him with her sharp tongue, and yet, as he closed the door Jimmie heard his mother talking calmly, and only at times resentfully. He heard the mumbling and murmuring of their voices, and he could tell, by the few words he made out, that his mother would agree to let Maguire marry Millie.

  He went back to the kitchen and put his elbows on the white enameled table. “What’s the matter with Ma?” he thought. “She should spin that chuckle-headed sap on his ear. What’s got into her? Ma should do something.”

  As he sat there he remembered the jaunty aloof independence of Millie as she had passed the fellows on the corner that evening, and he realized she must have known she was going to meet Maguire. He began to think of her passing; it seemed tremendously important that she should keep on passing. The more he thought of it the more eager he was, and the more pleasure he got out of thinking of her going by, always aloof and beyond them, clean, with too much class, leaving them with nothing else to do but look after her and croon songs and wish they had enough money to take her out.

  This Man, My Father

  The week I was given a good position in the broker’s office, I moved into a fine new apartment and wrote to my father and mother in Windsor. I hadn’t seen them in five years, and I asked them to come to New York.

  At the station, they came up the iron stairs from the trains very slowly. When my mother looked up and saw me waiting, her round worried face suddenly wrinkled in smiles. By the slow steps she took and the way her hand kept gripping at the rail, I knew her bad leg and her heart must have gotten worse.

  For twenty-five years my father had been a letter carrier in Windsor and he had just been retired on a small pension. While I was kissing my mother, whose arm as she held me trembled, my father, now a stout, white-haired man in a blue serge suit, stood to one side fumbling shyly with his heavy gold watch chain. I had never felt close to my father. When I was a kid, he got excited easily and often shouted at everyone in the family. Even now while we stood together in Pennsylvania Station, I wondered why I had been so delighted to see his face and I tried to figure out why he had looked so glad to see me.

  Afraid he might say something affectionate, I said quickly, “Is Thelma getting along better with her husband?”

  “Oh, son, son, the way that turned out,” my mother said, taking me by the arm on the way to the taxi. “Your sister has had to come to our house for things like vegetables and canned food. That man never was any good.”

  “That business will stop right now,” my father said firmly. “We’ll have a hard enough time ourselves living on my miserable pension.”

  When we were going into my apartment house on lower Fifth Avenue, the uniformed doorman opened the door for us, and my father, making a low bow to him, said, “Thank you very much.”

  At once I remembered that my father, all his life, had made such humble gestures to strangers. Yet the doorman did not seem to be startled; he even smiled in a new bright way. But when we got into the elevator and my father made the same deep bow to the attendant, I was annoyed at his humility. My mother nudged him. Knowing she had more pride, he looked at her anxiously, and she tried to tell him by her fierce expression that he wasn’t to shame us. In those few moments in the elevator while I was annoyed and my father, rebuked, grew irritable, we quickly reestablished the old relationship among us.

  Before my father got his letter-carrying job we had been very poor, and when I was a kid I used to long for a time such as this when I’d be making money and they’d be coming to see me, so I sat down in the apartment with contentment while they looked around. My father started examining the woodwork and the way the walls were finished. My mother looked at the material in the window drapes. When they started calling to each other and pointing at things like children, I felt a little like crying.

  “I guess it costs an awful lot to live here, son. Are you sure you can afford it?” my mother asked.

  “I’ll be able to from now on. It took a long time waiting, but I was sure it was coming,” I said.

  With her arms folded across her chest and a worried expression on her face, my mother looked around and said, “I hope you didn’t move into this place just because we were coming.” Then, she took a deep breath and turned suddenly and looked at me, and it was as though all the hope she had ever had for me, her son, while I was growing and while I was away from her, was justified in that moment while we smiled at each other.

  My father, making clucking noises with his tongue as he rubbed his hands on the woodwork of the mantel, turned and said, “How much are you paying here?”

  “A few hundred a month. It’s a small place,” I
said.

  He straightened up, glared at me with his face flushed with indignation and burst out, “You must be crazy, man. I hope you’re using your head and know what you’re doing with your money. I hope you’ve got more sense than you used to have and you’re not making a fool of yourself.” While he wagged his finger at me, I felt that old hostile resentment rising in me.

  “Joe, Joe, have you no sense?” my mother said to him sharply. “Why should you talk to him like that? Be quiet. He knows what he’ll be able to afford.” While my father, flustered and ashamed, tried to smile at me, I began to laugh out loud. The thread of a sudden, silly, familiar passionate quarrel among us had made me feel I was at home again.

  “Come on, let’s go out. I’ve been waiting to show you the town,” I said.

  My mother looked down at her ankles, but she got up willingly. Then she sighed and sat down, saying, “I’d love to go, but couldn’t I have a little rest first? Couldn’t you and your father go?”

  My father said rapidly, “He doesn’t want to go just with me, isn’t that right?” and when I nodded he was even more agitated. “Come on, Helen, come on,” he pleaded. “I’ll walk as slow as you want. We’ll come back as soon as you start to get tired.”

  Feeling the shyness between us, my mother laughed and said, “Oh, go on. It’ll do you both good to have a walk before dinner.”

  My father looked at us with his blue eyes, seeing us both together and close to each other, then he said quietly, “All right, I’m ready,” and he buttoned up his coat and put his hat on the back of his head.

  I felt cheated as we went out together. I had looked forward to hearing my mother’s burst of enthusiasm as I showed her the town. But my father was following me a few steps behind and in a way that only annoyed me. He didn’t make his low bow to the doorman either. Maybe what really annoyed me was that the elevator attendant and the doorman had smiled at my father and said, “Good day, sir,” more respectfully and cheerfully than they had ever done to me.