The Disappearance

by Philip Wylie

  It was a provoking, pointless line of meditation. She took a last look at the sun-spangled palmettos and went into the house. Hester’s fire was still smoldering in the yard; Hester herself was washing up the skillet, coffeepot and plates.

  “You’re tired,” Paula said.

  Hester’s eyes responded.

  “There won’t be any use—yet—going into Miami to find your daughters and grandchildren. You go to the guest room and sleep.”

  “In the guest room?”

  “Where else?” Paula answered. “We haven’t any other rooms.”

  “But the guest room! I’m a colored woman, Mrs. Gaunt—”

  “You should thank God for it. At least you can still feel things. Leave the door open, Hester, in case the kids cry. I guess you know we have a boarder? Martha?” She saw that Hester knew. “Before you go, though, how are we on butter-bread-bacon-staples?”

  “Kind of run down.” Paula put her hand on Hester’s shoulder and gently turned her toward the door; Hester went slowly, uncertainly.

  Paula opened the refrigerator, gave its contents an inventorial stare, and winced slightly at the discovery (which she felt she should have made sooner) that, with power off, the box had defrosted. She looked quickly into various cupboards.

  “‘Old Mother Hubbard,’” she murmured.

  She hurried outdoors, slid into one of her two cars and drove toward Coconut Grove. The morning smelled of smoke: a few columns of smoke still rose along the horizon. But these, even if they flared up, could be contained. They had daylight, now, in which to experiment with the fire engines, find dynamite and figure out how to blast. As she drove, her glance dropped to the dashboard and stopped at the gasoline gauge. She frowned: another thing.

  It was still early. But cars were moving. Quite a few women were in their yards, talking to each other. And soon Paula encountered a milk truck. It was driven by a woman who wore a plaid cap. Paula honked hard, slowed, and tried to head off the truck.

  But the driver cut onto somebody’s lawn, yelling about “regular customers.” Her own milk hadn’t come, and Paula also realized that the morning paper hadn’t been lying, folded, in the car porte either. “Damn and damn!” she said.

  In the business center of Coconut Grove man many cars had already arrived and more were arriving—moving slowly, hunting for convenient parking spots. Drivers exhibited their usual Coconut Grove lethargy and, as usual, honored traffic regulations in their flagrant breach. Paula was obliged to go clear through the village: the good parking places were taken. As she drove she realized the other women were doing exactly what she had planned to do: waiting for stores to open.

  They’re going to hoard, she thought—even while she confessed that her own intentions had been no different.

  The filling station she regularly patronized was still closed. A few women in cars waited there, beside the pumps; some of them now and again touched their horn-buttons with the impatience of regular customers used to quick service.

  Paula remembered, then, an obscure side-street station—two battered pumps—

  which was generally tended by a middle-aged woman with a pasty face and a grumpy expression. So she drove on, not quite certain where she had seen the place; but presently she found it. A block-long line of cars had already formed. Paula joined the line. After a while she noticed a pudgy girl with dark curls and a dirty face going from car to car. The child’s visitation irked some of the waiting women for, after she had spoken to them, they pulled out of line with angrily spinning wheels and drove away.

  The girl reached Paula and leaned in, smirking:

  “There isn’t any power to pump gas,” she said with relish, “and Maw has put on a hand crank. You gotta pump your own—Maw’s too tired. And besides, if you want it, it’s a dollar a gallon.”

  “That’s profiteering!” Paula exploded. “Your mother will be put in jail for doing a thing like that at a time like this!”

  “Go call a cop,” the child said derisively. “Just go an’ try it!”

  Paula bit back her vexation and crept forward with the line. She needed fifteen or sixteen gallons to fill her near-empty tank.

  When her turn came, she was enraged to be told by the pallid woman, “It’s two dollars a gallon now. ‘Most gone. I made up my mind to get it while the gettin’s good!

  Lord only knows when there’ll be another truck delivery.”

  Paula said nothing.

  She had seen, in past years, young men quickly and easily crank a tankful of gasoline. But either they had been stronger than she by a remarkable degree, or this pump was inefficient. Panting, sweating and disheveled, she finally got her gasoline and bitterly handed thirty-three dollars to the woman. It was more than half of the cash she had put in her pocketbook.

  She parked in the nearly filled drugstore lot and crossed the street. Nothing—

  absolutely nothing—seemed open yet. The biggest crowd—perhaps fifty or sixty women—stood in front of Sam’s Market. She joined that group.

  She recognized Mrs. Ed Bantley and the wry important Mrs. Treddon-Stokes. She nodded to Mrs. Clinton Brown and to Ella Evers—who looked dreadful, as usual, in cerise pedal-pushers. The untouchable, stately Myra McCantley was there too, with others Paula knew. The enterprising ones, mainly.

  Now, for the first time, Paula had the opportunity to listen to the reactions of comparatively calmed-down, ordinarily normal housewives, the steady patrons of Sam’s rather expensive market. These were women not easily distracted or upset. In their twenties and thirties they had borne children; then and later they had anticipated in their husbands’ stressful campaigns for success; they had sent sons off to war; they had made for themselves and their families very comfortable, and in some cases palatial homes.

  Thus, through experience, they had grown inured to life’s rugged episodes, however pampered they made themselves appear.

  Most of these women had been crying recently. Their eyes showed it and their voices contained the memory of it. All of them were frightened—and frightened in many different ways at once. All of them tried to hide their fears.

  As Paula came up, Mrs. Treddon-Stokes was saying in a high, stilted tone and with an unprecedented effusiveness, “I spent the night with my Master! When I was sure that Walter had been taken—along with the others—I threw myself in my chaise. I must have spent hours there! Darkness came. I knew prayer was the only thing but I didn’t dare call dear Reverend Connauth for fear of contacting”—her eyes, hollow but still penetrating, beaconed over the listening ladies—”that perfectly impossible woman he had the misfortune to be married by! At last I undressed slowly, prepared a bite for myself from the little upstairs pantry in Walter’s den, and simply cast myself upon the Lord! I felt very near to Him, at first. But as the night passed, and as I perhaps had a little fitful sleep, I seemed to drift farther and farther away. This is a most somber punishment! I hardly feel that all of us deserve it, though the Scriptures make it plain how the innocent must suffer with the guilty. Think of it! Half of them taken straight to hell, I feel most certain, in just agony for their low, immoral ways!”

  Someone in the little audience made a rude sound.

  Mrs. Treddon-Stokes did not turn her high-carried head hut she said, almost as if she had eyes hidden under her tight back hair, “What did you do, Ella?”

  Since it was Ella who had greeted the religiosity with what she would frankly have called a Bronx cheer, it might have been expected that Ella would have been embarrassed. But anyone who knew her, or any stranger who had closely noted the damn-you-all clothes she wore, could have foreseen a different result.

  She gave her medium bob a toss. “A hill,” she said in a theatrical voice. “As soon as I knew, I found myself longing for a hill. A hill to throw myself down on, to let the wind feel over me, to get a perspective from, to watch the blue mystery of the sky, to sense the awe and the wonderment!” It was, Paula knew, satirical.

  “I just cried,” said a lit
tle woman quietly. “Cried all night! And I’m not through.

  Oh! What is it?”

  Mrs. Treddon-Stokes, who towered like a parsimonious steeple over most of the others, gave Ella an acid look. She then noticed, above the general level of clustered heads, the classic part and ashen Psyche knot that, along with her height, distinguished Myra. “And you, my dear! Where were you? What helpful community task occupied you when the Visitation took place?”

  Paula was sure that Myra gave the lank old snob a startled glance. The banker’s wife didn’t speak immediately, either; she licked her lips and formed a smile which it took a second to make acceptable. I wonder, Paula thought, where Myra actually was.

  Some place, evidently, that she’d just as soon nobody knew about. The idea connected with another: recently Paula had listened to a lengthy and detailed rave about Myra by Teddy Barker. Paula gasped at the possibility and then stared thoughtfully at Myra, wanting to laugh and at the same time feeling indignant.

  “In the Gables at the Salon,” Myra was saying. “Having innumerable things done.”

  The old Trojan horse, Paula thought. That’s Myra’s story and she’s going to stick to it, even if not another living woman ever again has a chance to flirt, let alone commit adultery. You go in the front door and you take a soundproof booth and you get fixed in a hurry and you go out the back door and then between the cedars and you’ve stepped right out of this world for the afternoon—but literally!

  “Don’t you want to talk about it?” Mrs. Treddon-Stokes asked.

  “Why should I?” Myra seemed bitter and edgy, which, Paula thought, was not the expectable or appropriate mood. “Talking doesn’t seem to change anything!”

  “That’s right,” said a woman Paula did not know. “I’ve stood here listening to personal history for nearly an hour! Does anybody in the crowd know that Sam’s is going to be opened?”

  “He has a wife,” Mrs. Treddon-Stokes said with vigor. “After all, with Sam gone, it’s her duty to take up things—”

  “My husband,” Myra said in a cool voice that possibly showed enjoyment at the chance to return one baiting for another, “is a director of the bank down the block. And I assure you, Mrs. T., it hasn’t entered my head to find out how to open the bank—let alone start cashing checks for people or taking deposits!”

  “It ought to have!” the spirelike woman retorted. ‘“It ought to have, indeed! Isn’t it perfectly obvious that all of us women will simply have to take up where our husbands left off? Otherwise, things will go to pieces?”

  “And the women,” said Ella Evers, “whose husbands did absolutely nothing—will have to do the things left over. Like driving garbage trucks.”

  Mrs. Treddon-Stokes said, “Really!” and flushed.

  “What is obvious”—Myra’s voice was now steady—“is that just marrying a man doesn’t teach you his business. I’m sure I’d be utterly helpless in a bank. I wouldn’t know how to deduct a cashed check from the assets, or how to add on a deposit. Would anybody here?”

  No one, it appeared, would know.

  “But what are we going to do?” one of the women wailed.

  “All I’ve got,” said another hysterically, “is eighty-five cents. Sam would have let me charge. But will—somebody else?”

  Paula called, “Ladies!” They turned toward her. “Let’s not get excited. After all, the things you’re worrying about are trifles compared with the things we’re soon going to have to worry about. It’ isn’t just getting checks cashed and getting into grocery stores.

  It’s—for instance—how to refill the stores when we’ve bought them bare.”

  “We’ll go to the wholesale places, direct,” someone said brightly.

  Paula snorted. “There is probably enough food, in Miami, to keep all of us alive for a few weeks. When it’s gone—”

  “Don’t be panicky, Mrs. Gaunt,” another woman said. “After all, we live in the middle of America’s winter truck gardens. And there are cattle ranches simply everywhere—”

  “Will you pick the vegetables?” Paula answered sharply. “Can you drive a truck to bring them in? Can you rope cattle? Can you butcher? Can you run refrigerator trains?

  And if you can do that, can you breed more cattle and plant more crops to keep us going?”

  A woman who had just arrived, as several had, during the discussion, shoved herself forward. She was an unknown—heavy-shouldered, with large breasts and thick ankles. She wore men’s trousers. She had not combed her iron-gray hair that morning or powdered her thick-lipped, snub-nosed face. But she had, apparently, met the crisis with the aid of spirituous liquors. She was drunk but not uncomprehendingly drunk. She was energetically drunk-drunk to the point where her obviously meager ethics were impaired.

  She pushed rudely forward and said in a slattern’s half-shout, “Maybe all you fancy ——s,”—the word made some ladies gasp and left others unaffected, since they had never heard it—“are going to stand around here all day snapping your traps about what to do! I, personally, drove into town just to get some grub and grub I mean to get!”

  What surprised Paula was not that no one interfered with her—few of the women would have reasonably dared to, alone—but that they made way for her and watched her with what seemed, in the case of many, virtual approval.

  The woman walked up to the locked glass double doors of Sam’s. She rattled them. She shielded her face from the sun with her arm and peered in. She backed away and surveyed the two streets that formed a comer behind the crowd. Across one of them was a cottage with a white board fence. The woman strode to the fence and took hold of a board. She ripped it loose. With this she came back. Way was made for her again. She turned her side toward the door and brought down the board. It took several blows to break the glass and several more to knock out the jagged edges.

  Reaching through, the woman found the knob and swung back the door. “Come on!” she bawled over her shoulder. “Let’s get it while it’s here!”

  For a few moments the crowd merely watched, some through the door and some through the plate-glass windows. The woman inside grabbed a handcart and began to hurry among the shelves and piles of foodstuffs, helping herself.

  “It’s the only thing to do!” a voice murmured tentatively.

  “It is not! It’s criminal!”

  Paula recognized Bella. She hadn’t seen her arrive—but Bella Elliot was a tiny woman.

  “We’ve got to eat!” another voice protested.

  And a woman watching at the door shouted, “She’s taking ten packages of butter!”

  Bella pushed her way to the place where the glass was broken. “We just simply can’t start acting like this!” She wore her affectionate smile and her bobbed brown hair shone in the bright sun. She had spoken loudly but much as a mother would speak to a panicky child.

  “And,” another watcher shouted, “fifty pounds of sugar—and she doesn’t even shop here! I never saw her in my life!”

  Still, Bella might have prevailed. Bella, with help. For Paula and Ella Evers now reached the door. Paula shouted, “She’s right! We’ve got to wait till Mrs. Vilmak gets here—”

  “Who is Mrs. Vilmak?” Myra called.

  “You ought to know! You’ve shopped here years longer than I have. It’s Sam’s wife! That’s their name—Vilmak.” Paula stood shoulder to shoulder with Bella. “Either that, or until some form of rationing is set up.”

  “Rationing!” another woman cried in a loud, sneering voice. “Will we have to put up with that forever?”

  The ladies were frightened. They were worried about food. But they were not lawless, at least not in such categories of lawlessness as include breaking and entering, barefaced robbery, or other forms of public violence. They might not have assaulted Sam’s store but for a new factor.

  Up the street, with horns blowing, came a small cavalcade of disreputable cars filled with women who matched the vehicles. The noisy procession presently slowed and stopped about a bloc
k away, in the middle of the street. Women—dozens of them—

  poured out of the cars. They raced up on the sidewalk. There was a sound of shattering glass and a surge as the women followed their fusillade into a small jewelry store.

  “Let’s go!”

  “That settles it!” someone said sharply. “If we don’t get it—others will!”

  “We ought to go and stop them!” Bella wasn’t smiling any more.

  Mrs. Treddon-Stokes caused the stampede. “What we can do, since we’re all thoroughly responsible people, is to leave signed lists of what we take—so Mrs. Sam can collect!”

  That suggestion salved consciences. It had, furthermore, he loftiest social sanction. Paula and Bella were pushed aside and the women streamed into the big market.

  Bella had tears in her eyes. Paula put an arm around her. “Maybe the only thing left to do now is to go in ourselves.”

  “You go,” Bella said wretchedly.

  “How will you feed Sarah?”

  The other woman shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  “Come on! They’ll strip the place!”

  “It’s a crime!”

  “Sure,” Paula said, “it’s a crime. Or is it? When only the fittest survive—who’s fit?’”

  “I’d rather die—!”

  “And I’d rather not!”

  Already some of the women who had entered the store were coming out with laden arms; a few pushed loaded wire carts. They hurried to their cars. Some drove off.

  Others returned for a second load. And now Paula saw a woman whom she did now know commence to load her sedan, not from the store, but from groceries deposited in other cars. The ladies of Coconut Grove were not yet accustomed to all the aspects of thieving.

  Paula murmured to Bella, “Watch that creature with the frizzy blonde hair! See what she’s doing?” She waited for Bella’s nod. “Then think! Nobody’s going to get out of here with groceries enough for more than a couple of days! If a person is really going to help him· self, he ought to be smart about it. You and I could stock up—if you’d help.