The New Yorker Stories

by Callaghan, Morley; Callaghan, Barry;

  “Who is it, Karl?”

  “It’s Mamie. I’m awfully fond of her, Mother.”

  “Tell her to come here and let me see her.”

  Karl was proud of the way Mamie stepped across the room to meet his mother: she seemed to walk across the carpet like a lovely mannequin, with a mysterious smile on her face as though she had been practising for this moment for a long time. She had never looked so elegant as she did now to Karl, so he couldn’t understand why his brother turned his head away and would not look at her, or why Helen began to bite her lip and look angry.

  “What’s the matter, John?” he whispered.

  “Nothing. Nothing at all. What do you mean, Karl?”

  Mamie was saying sweetly, “Good evening, Mrs. Henderson. Karl has often talked about you to me, so of course I’ve been most anxious to meet you,” but she spoke with an almost mechanical sedateness. Then she suddenly smiled and said simply, “What I mean, I guess, is that you’re Karl’s mother and that’s enough for me,” and she grinned broadly. For a long time old Mrs. Henderson stared at her, and then her thin lips began to tremble. Then she said bluntly like one wise woman speaking to another and sure that she will be understood, “Karl is just a boy. I suppose you know he’s just a boy . . . Sit down, though, and have them get you a cup of coffee. Please don’t pay any attention to me. I’m very tired.” The old lady took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and would not open them again.

  Mamie seemed too bewildered to move, something seemed to be holding her to the spot in spite of her resentment, while her face reddened. But she started to laugh and said, “For the love of Mike, why are we all acting so stiff?” And yet she moved over closer to Karl with a kind of independent swagger. The way old Mrs. Henderson had closed her eyes made them all feel uneasy. Young Mrs. Henderson was instantly anxious to be hospitable and friendly to Mamie. But Karl noticed that his brother was still glancing furtively at her in the way men turn on the street to watch a flashy woman who has just passed by, and he did not know whether to like this or not. “Let’s sit down,” he said, “and I’ll tell you a story I heard today.”

  With a fine flow of words and many easy gestures, he told one of his favourite jokes, and for the first time they heard Mamie’s loud, deep, husky laughter.

  “Shall I tell one now, Karl?” she said.

  “Go ahead, Mamie.”

  “I’d better make sure it’s not the one about the salesman and the backwoods daughter,” she said, her eyes crinkling slyly. But she told no story. She began to talk quite wildly, as if she had to keep on chattering or grow desperate, and all the while Karl was trying to motion to her to be quiet. When she did see him staring at her, she grew sullen and did not know what to say. For some reason that he could not figure out, Karl was ashamed. He felt Mamie’s fumbling uneasiness there with his people and he remembered how proud she had been the first time she had taken him to her home. He remembered how her father, a big, rough, tousle-headed, genial man, had jumped up and put down his glasses and his paper and how he had talked to him warmly and with such respect.

  “I’ll go and get the coffee,” young Mrs. Henderson was saying. When she had gone halfway across the room, she stopped, turned, and looked back, looking really at Karl, whom she liked and admired so much because he had such a fine instinct for pleasing people with his impulsive ways, and in this one glance backward trying to figure out what he could see in a buxom, gaudy-looking girl like Mamie, she called out, “Do you want to help me, John?” and she waited so that her husband dared not refuse to follow her.

  As soon as they left, Karl said irritably to Mamie, “I never heard you talking so much. What’s the matter?”

  “I don’t know. I just feel crazy.”

  “What’s the matter, Mamie? Don’t you think they’re nice?”

  “Sure I think they’re nice. They’re fine people, but I just feel crazy. Maybe it’s the way they look at me. I don’t know what I’m saying.”

  When John returned, he was smiling and trying to be very gay. And yet as he walked up and down making many gracious little remarks, he was obviously thinking of the conversation he had had with his wife. He was very fond of his young brother. Every time he passed him, walking up and down, he began to look at him more sympathetically. He never stopped talking to Mamie, but he was talking more quietly and easily now, and sometimes gently as if he knew all about her. The peaceful tone of his brother’s voice suddenly filled Karl with hope, and he became so eager to ask him if he liked Mamie that he said, “Why don’t you go and help Helen with the coffee, Mamie?”

  “All right,” Mamie said reluctantly. But she got up very slowly. She walked across the room with her head down, as if she could not bear to go into the kitchen and be alone with young Mrs. Henderson. Turning once, she looked back, almost pleading with Karl.

  Karl said quickly to his brother, “How do you like her, John?”

  “I like her all right,” John said cautiously. But he would not look directly at his brother. Then he said mildly, “Do you think you’re in love with her, Karl?”

  “I think I am, John.”

  “Where did you meet her?”

  “At Coney Island with a fellow from the office.”

  “I suppose you know all about her.”

  “All there is to know, John.”

  “I don’t know what to say, Karl. She looks like a . . . She looks like a rather easy-going girl.” John was hating himself for speaking this way about his brother’s girl, but he was very fond of Karl and he felt he had to speak. “Like a . . . Maybe I mean not like a girl for you.”

  “You may have noticed the unimportant things,” Karl said. Then he looked tense and said suddenly, “I’m going to marry her.”

  “Don’t do it, Karl. It’ll finish you before you start. You’ll have to go her way the rest of your life. You’ll see later on. Please don’t.”

  Then Mamie and Helen returned with the coffee. But it was impossible now to make easy conversation. Maybe it was because the mother, solemn, aloof, and forbidding, was dozing in her chair and they were suddenly aware of her. They looked at each other and spoke and the sentences trailed away. Mamie had become suddenly quiet; a few fumbling words came to her, then she was still. She had begun to feel very strongly that they were reticent because they had such love for Karl, and she was trying to put it against her own love, and it gave her a wondering, shy, and lonely look. She sat very straight in her bright-green dress, with a cup of coffee in her hand and the light shining on her shoulders and fair hair under her big hat. Her mouth looked wide and red. Karl noticed the simple candor in her eyes as she looked around fearfully, and with this stillness that was in her now she looked as he had so often seen her look when he had loved her most. He felt excited. He kept glancing restlessly at his brother, wondering why he, too, did not notice Mamie now.

  Then Mamie said hesitantly, “I think we’d better go.”

  “Maybe we’d better,” Karl said.

  “You say good-bye to your mother for me,” she said to John.

  At the door, they all shook hands. “Well, I wanted to meet you all and I met you,” Mamie said.

  “Good night.”

  “Good night. Good night, Karl,” they said.

  Outside Karl and Mamie were silent. They walked in step. It was fine and clear out on the street. Karl was thinking, “Why didn’t they look at Mamie when she was sitting there at the end? They would have seen what she’s really like.” He felt angry. “That was the only time they had a chance to see what she was really like.” He went on thinking how splendid she had looked, how she had suddenly been changed and had begun to look like such a fine person. “You’d think they would have noticed it,” he thought. He heard Mamie asking quietly, “What do you think they thought of me?”

  “I don’t know yet,” he said casually. But then he could not stop remembering how his brother had said so earnestly, “Please don’t do it,” and the voice almost coaxing, the voice gentle and full of lov
e. “She looks like a . . .” He heard the voice still trying to finish the sentence. Now there was not fear but dreadful uneasiness and then heavy deadness within him.

  “What do you think of Helen?” he asked.

  “I didn’t like her,” Mamie said, “she’s a little snip.”

  “She was nice to you.”

  “She was nice to me just as if I was her idea of a fallen woman.” Then she added in a rage, “I’d like to wring her neck.”

  “Maybe she didn’t like you either,” he said angrily.

  “I don’t want her to.”

  “She’s nicer than anyone you’ll ever meet,” he said sharply.

  This sharp hostility, rising so quickly, startled them, but they welcomed it with eagerness. They wanted to hurt each other so they could pull against whatever was holding them together. They kept on hurting each other till she said quickly, “I’ll not walk along here feeling you hate me. Don’t come home with me. I’ll go alone,” and she pushed him away from her and hurried across the road.

  “Let her go if she feels that way,” Karl thought. So he stood and watched her cross the street, watched the swaying of her hips, and the blonde hair at her neck. He almost felt the firmness and warmth and roundness of her passing away from him.

  Then he darted after her and called out, “Mamie!”

  “Go away!” she called as she turned. Her face showed all that was breaking inside her. Her face, bewildered and desolate, showed how well she knew they had rejected her.

  He watched her fading out of sight while he remembered all the happiness he had expected to have with her. He started to follow her slowly, feeling sure he was doing something irrevocable that could not be undone. But he only knew that he dared not let her out of his sight.

  TORONTO’S CALLAGHAN

  By Bernard Preston, January 18, 1936, Saturday Night

  One of the most striking things about Morley Callaghan is that there seems at first glance nothing whatever striking about him. By this is not meant that there is nothing bombastic, or theatrical, nothing of a pose, in his makeup; naturally, one would not anticipate that, after the most cursory reading of his stories.

  Even the physical aspect of him is surprisingly ordinary — though by this term is meant something far removed from what would be implied in the word “commonplace.” Not tall, not large, not athletic-looking for all his record of activity in sports, though abounding in health and vigor, he would to the casual observer be easily overlooked “in a crowd,” except perhaps for the fact that he is more affable than the average. And even this affability might deceive the unanalytical into mistaking it for its much more common imitation, pointless amiability.

  While he talks — and for some time after he has ceased talking — one feels something distinctly vital about him. His loitering gaze seems to focus its latent keenness, though the eyes continue smiling; the full lips, very red and not invested with much impressiveness for all of the slim black moustache above them, seem to become a little more muscular; the nose suddenly appears trenchantly sensitive, an organ of true flair. And the absolute honesty, the sheer common-sense, and the uncompromising scrutiny of his mind radiate a clarity and warmth like that of full sunlight. But there are recesses, many of them, into which only a long-sustained gaze may penetrate, just as the strongest sunlight casts the densest shadows, though these may not be noticed at first, owing to the brilliance of what is immediately visible.

  Mere things evidently do not interest him; there is a noticeable dearth of useless objects in his home. All necessary furniture is there, with comfort and convenience as prime characteristics. A few good rugs, an Italian pottery lamp that delights the eye, some very good pictures — a modern nude, a pencil sketch, himself in oils — and a marvellously intricate batik, these, with book-shelves, seem to furnish his living room more adequately than could any collection of knick-knacks, bibelots, photographs and other supposed ornaments. And this austerity, which has its own grace, is but a reflection of Mr. Callaghan’s mental attitude. No clutter of trivialities there!

  And what does he talk about, this laxly intent artist, this indolently active thinker? The answer is: Everything! Everything, that is, that bears relation to life. He is passionately opposed to ignorance, he must have awareness, and so spends hours daily reading newspapers from all over the world. He feels that the greatest thing in life is to get out of one’s self and fraternizes with any individual who crosses his path. He loves the crowd at a prize-fight, at a football or a hockey game, at a boxing-match. He is intensely interested in politics, in the wide sense of the word, and used to speak in public, for a thirst possesses him to help toward bringing about some measure of social justice for the mass of the people.

  It is this enormous catholicity in the world of ideas that makes him far more ready to be interested in others than to interest others in himself; he will discuss ships and sealing wax with equal impartiality.

  He is so thoroughly detached mentally that he feels readily at home in any realm of thought or any part of the globe. Paris, for instance, he loved. He loved the Paris of streets and parks, of monuments and works of art, of history and romance; all of this he found engrossingly fascinating, and with his amazingly retentive memory recalls vividly long afterward some visual details of landscape, of Gothic architecture, of a painting, that he had at the time scarcely been aware of noting. But he loved too the human Paris, the Paris of his friends and fellow mortals; he made an acute distinction between the night-life of the Parisians’ Paris and of that of the American tourist, and seemed to feel that that brilliant metropolis, emptied of his friends, might lose some of its luster for him.

  Contact with alert minds is as the breath of his nostrils to him; yet such is his power of projection that he can reside for long stretches in an utterly uninspired milieu and yet achieve this contact at a distance. Space as well as matter seems not to exist all-importantly for him.

  He is vastly amused by the tendency of the literati to label, to classify him. Merely because the Nation, on the appearance of his first novel, “Strange Fugitive,” announced him as “the fashionable hard-boiled novelist of 1929” he fails to find insight in the dicta of those who still term him hard-boiled, as he has not since then written in that key, modulating indeed into that of tenderness. Others persist in thinking of him as an exponent of the underworld; and others, despite his adaptability and independent unclannishness “wish on him” the influence of an Irish-Catholic background, of which he maintains he is quite unconscious.

  Swift dashes of insight come surprisingly. A surmise, deftly sketched in a few incisive words, of what a certain individual would appear like to another gives a rather breath-taking portrait of both. Of a friend, a colleague in the world of letters, he will speak with illuminating analysis, with generous appreciation and with unsentimental recognition of an occasional weakness, all without at all touching on the fact of the personal relations between them; his friendship does not happen to be what he is talking about. On the other hand the infectious imagery, in which he indulges quite naturally, flashes before the listener vivid pictures worthy of a Francis Thompson. Another colleague, of whom he does not approve and for whom he cannot, one suspects, at bottom feel aught but disgust, he still contrives to discuss equably, giving full due when he can, and mitigating his final verdict with mercy. Blind Justice herself is not more impartial.

  New York, restless and aimless to so many, seems to him to be aiming at some very definite goal. The coolness of the finger which he lays upon her fevered pulse enables him to diagnose without bias what may be the portent of her throbbings. He admits readily, with no sense of confession, that he likes New York better than any other place. He finds doubtless that there he can enjoy not only a freer interchange of ideas, but that ideas are much more rife and original than in most centres. The very air teems with stimulation, which to him would seem much more wholesome than the “inspiration” of some revered locality. Again, the contact of minds as preferable to i
nterest in dead things: it is better than a city should be productive of interest rather than of sentiment. Also, since he is eminently practical, he naturally and quite defensibly responds to the tangible appreciation of the enormous reading public led by Manhattan.

  His stories appear regularly in the New Yorker, Esquire, Scribner’s, Harper’s Bazaar, the Atlantic Monthly and others of the great American magazines. It was the house of Scribner that enthusiastically first brought him out, having noticed his work in periodicals abroad. For the remarkable fact is that his early writings, conceived in Toronto, began to appear in little magazines published in English by expatriates in Paris and elsewhere, such as Transition, This Quarter, The Exile (published in Rapal o by Ezra Pound), some of his fellow-contributors bearing the well-known names of James Joyce, Carl Sandburg, Ernest Hemingway, and Pound himself.

  His book, “Such Is My Beloved,” is to appear this spring in England, with the authoritative Methuen imprint, owing to the keen interest of the famous E.V. Lucas, chairman of the board of directors of the firm, who first read it in America and immediately determined that an English edition should appear. His latest opus, “They Shall Inherit the Earth,” issued in September, is the only novel that has been vouchsafed the privilege of first seeing the light of day in the Modern Library, in all of the eight replete years since this well-known series was established by Random House.

  His prehensile healthy curiosity will perhaps seize upon one word, dropped unconsciously, and start him on a course of inquiry leading to any topic that may develop interest. But he will just as readily drop the investigation, such is his good-nature, if it appears not to be a welcome subject to his interlocutor. With no pretense of false modesty, he will willingly talk about his own reactions, but with engaging humility he may abandon this subject — so all -engrossing to most mortals — to discuss the other fellow’s.