At this time men from a bakery in the block came in for a lunch, and a smoke, and Jeff, who had got to know some of them, sat at the counter and ordered a cup of coffee and looked around to see who else was in the restaurant. There were two decently dressed girls, sitting at a table talking quietly. When Jeff smiled at the girls without any shyness, because a warm feeling for everyone and everything was in him, they shrugged their shoulders in surprise and laughed at each other.
Then the men from the bakery, with the strong, sweet smell of freshly baked bread on them, and their pants white with flour, came in and sat in a row at the counter and began to order plates of hot food.
Sitting next to Jeff was a big, powerful, fair-haired fellow wearing a little flour-marked cap. The others called him Mike, and Jeff had often seen him in the restaurant. Having finished his plate and wiped his mouth, he winked at Jeff and said, “Hello, kid. You around here again tonight? What’s new?”
“Nothing,” Jeff said. “I’ve just been feeling pretty good.” But he looked so happy as he grinned that Mike puckered up his eyes and appraised him thoughtfully, and the two girls at the table were watching him, too. To seem nonchalant, Jeff whispered to Mike, as he indicated the girls with a nod of his head, “How do you like the look of the blonde doll in the green hat?”
“That one?” Mike said as he turned on his stool and looked at the girls, who were whispering with their heads close together. “That one, son? She’s a cinch. Didn’t you see the glad eye she was giving you? She’s a soft touch. She’d give you no trouble at all.”
“She don’t look like that to me,” Jeff said.
“I guess I can put my finger on them by this time. If you couldn’t go to town with her in two weeks, you ought to quit,” Mike said. Then, as if ashamed to be arguing about women with a kid who was so much younger, he added, “Anyway, she’s too old for you. Lay off her.”
But Jeff kept shifting around on the stool, trying to catch a sudden glimpse of the girl in the green hat, so he could see her as Mike had seen her, yet knowing that to him she still looked quiet and respectable and good-natured. When she smiled suddenly, she seemed like any other friendly girl – a little like Jessie, even. “Maybe Mike could have looked at Jessie and known from the start it would only take a month with her,” he thought. Feeling miserable, he kept staring at the girl, yearning to possess Mike’s wisdom, and with a fierce longing growing in him to know about every intimate moment Jessie had had with the men who had tried to make love to her. “If I had been sure of myself, I guess I could have knocked Jessie over the first night I took her out,” he went on thinking. The elation he had felt after leaving Jessie seemed childish, and he ached with disappointment.
The girls, who had become embarrassed by Jeff’s sullen stare, got up and left the restaurant, and when they had gone Jeff said to Mike, “I get what you mean about the doll in the green hat.”
“What did she do?” Mike asked.
“Nothing, nothing. It was just the way she swung her hips going out of the door,” Jeff lied, and he lit a cigarette and paid his check and went out.
Jeff and his brother, who was a salesman out of work, had a small apartment on West Twenty-Second Street. As soon as Jeff got home, he realized that the sight of the food in the restaurant had made him hungry, and he went to the icebox and got a tomato, intending to cut some bread and make himself a sandwich. He was holding the tomato in his hand when there was the sound of someone rapping on the door.
It was his brother’s girl, Eva, a tall, slim girl with fine brown eyes, who was only about two years older than Jeff. She often came to the apartment to see Jeff’s brother. She was at home with Jeff, and laughed a lot with him, and never minded him having a cup of coffee with them. But tonight she looked dreadfully frightened. Her eyes were red-rimmed and moist, as though she had been crying.
“Hello, Jeff. Is Bill home?” she asked.
“He ought to be home any minute, Eva. I thought he was with you.”
“He was, but he left me, and I thought he’d be here.”
“Why don’t you sit down and wait for him?” Jeff said.
When she had been sitting down a little while and they were talking, Jeff found himself trying to look at her as Mike had looked at the girl in the green hat in the restaurant, looking at the way she held her head, at her legs, at her eyes – with such a strange, shrewd glance that she became uneasy and began to smooth her skirt down over her legs.
“She knew what I was thinking,” Jeff thought, smiling and cynical, and he tried to say with his eyes, “I know a lot more about you tonight than I used to know. I’ll bet if I put my arms around you, you’d snuggle up against me.”
“What’s the matter with you tonight?” Eva said uneasily.
Startled, Jeff said, “Nothing. There’s nothing the matter with me.”
“I guess I’m restless. I can’t sit still. I think I’ll be going,” she said, and with her face flushed, she got up and went out before he could think of anything to say that might keep her there.
When she had gone, Jeff, remembering the look of terror that had been in her eyes when she first came in, grew ashamed of the stupid, leering way he had looked at her. “I’ve driven her away. Thinking of Mike made me act like a fool.” He hurried to the open window and looked down at the street, and he could see her pacing up and down, waiting.
He stayed at the window, watching, till he saw his brother coming along the street. Eva ran up to him, and they stopped under the light and began to talk earnestly. Then Bill took her by the arm very firmly and they started to walk toward the corner, but then they turned and came back and stood talking beneath the window.
In the murmur of their voices the words were indistinguishable, but Jeff knew, from the tone, that his brother was apologetic and fumbling. Then the voices rose a little and seemed to be lifted up to him, and there was a desperate pleading in the snatch of words, an eloquent sound Jeff had never heard in a girl’s voice before. “It’s all right. I wish you’d understand I’m not worrying and I’ll never, never hold it against you.” She stopped suddenly and grabbed at Bill’s arm. Then she let him go and hurried along the street, while Bill stood still, looking after her.
When Bill came in, Jeff said, “Eva was in here waiting for you.”
Throwing his hat on a chair, Bill walked aimlessly toward the bedroom. “I know she was here. I ran into her outside,” he said.
“What did she want?”
“Nothing important.”
“She was worked up about something, all right.”
“Why are you staring at me? What’s the matter with me? What’s the matter with you? Do I look funny?” Bill said.
In Bill’s eyes there was the same scared expression that Jeff had seen on the face of Eva. He was accustomed to having his older brother dominate him, even bully him a little. Bill seemed years older than Jeff, because his hair had got so thin. And now the worry, the wonder, and fright showing in Bill’s eyes made Jeff feel helpless.
“Eva thinks she’s going away, but I’m not going to let her,” Bill said. “I’m going to marry her even if we have to all live here together.”
“Doesn’t she want to marry you?”
“She keeps saying it’s her fault, and I didn’t intend to marry her, and now she’s put me in a hole at a time when we can’t do anything about it. She wants to go away for a while till everything’s all right.” Then Bill, looking straight ahead, said quietly, “I don’t know what I’d do if anything happened to Eva.”
Jeff could still see Eva clutching at his brother’s arm on the street – but not in the way Jessie had clutched at his own arm – and he said hesitantly, “I’ve got a girl of my own. I wouldn’t want to get in the jam you’re in.”
“Nobody does. There’s no use talking about it,” Bill said, and he went into the bedroom and lay down on the bed.
Jeff knew that he was lying there quietly, fearing for Eva, loving her, and longing to protect her.
&n
bsp; As Jeff watched his brother lying inert on the bed, he began to feel all his wretchedness and terror, and he himself grew timid. If he went back to Jessie, it might get for them like it was for Bill and Eva now. Who wouldn’t want to duck that?
He sat and pondered and worried about his brother for a long time. Then he knew suddenly that he was no longer even thinking of his brother; without noticing it, he had begun to dream of the way Jessie had held him against her, and he was thinking of them being together and whispering tomorrow night in her place when it was very late. He could see her lifting her ardent face up to him.
He got up restlessly, realizing that neither Mike’s wisdom nor his brother’s anguish could teach him anything tonight. Standing at the open window, he looked out over the lighted streets where he walked a little while ago, looking over toward Jessie’s place, stirred with a longing for more and more of whatever she would be able to give him. It had started now for them and it would keep going on. And then he was filled with awe, for it seemed like the beginning of a voyage out, with not much he had learned on that night to guide him.
1936
AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE
It is true that Luella Stevens at sixty-eight was a little too old to be singing in the choir of our church, but no one in the parish remembered when she had not sung her solo at the eleven o’clock mass. Anyone who glanced up at the delicate face and the detached expression of this plainly dressed, frail little woman realized that if the parish had ever had large attendances at mass, then she, with the possible exception of old Catherine Hogan who played the organ, was the only one who could remember them. For a long time everybody was glad to have Luella Stevens up in the choir.
The new, poorer people in town, or the farmers who drove in to church on Sundays, were uneasy when talking to Luella Stevens because she would never let them forget that she came from an old and once influential family. She had been the only daughter of a doctor. She lived alone now in an unpretentious brick cottage. People used to make up stories about how pretty she had been once, and how she had been in love years ago with a man who had gone to Chicago and become a wealthy merchant and the father of a large family. For a great many years afterwards, they said, she had cherished her secret of unfulfilled love until it was too late to bother with anyone else. Then her father had died; the people she had grown up with had gone away or were dead, too. The town had begun to decline and the only place that remained for Luella through the years, as it had been in her youth, as it had been for her family and the man who had been her lover and gone to Chicago, was the parish church and the choir with Catherine Hogan at the organ.
Yet there was no longer any use pretending that Luella had the beautiful voice of her youth. After mass on Sundays old parishioners like Mrs. Todd, the stout, stubborn-faced wife of the town flour-and-feed merchant, began to say, “My goodness, did you hear Luella Stevens today? I declare upon my soul she was positively shouting. Her voice is gone completely. Someone ought to tell the poor woman.”
When this was said, prominent ladies of the parish, standing on the sidewalk under the trees in front of the church, nodded their heads gravely as if at last a scandal of tremendous importance had crept into the stagnant life of the town. Those who hardly ever listened to the choir made up their minds to listen eagerly the next Sunday.
Not knowing that her neighbors were now listening to her with a new rapt attention, Luella stood up on Sunday and, with as much confidence as she had ever had during the last thirty-five years, shouted at the top of her voice. Luella was aware, of course, that her voice was no longer a girl’s voice, but by attacking the high notes with an extra enthusiasm she imagined she got over them very nicely. On this Sunday, those who had come to pass judgment on frail Luella Stevens turned in their pews and gawked up at her aristocratic old face and soon their own faces were full of indignation at the way she was shouting. The fidgeting young ladies of the choir were aware that at last, judging by the way heads kept turning round, people were noticing Luella: they were so embarrassed that they dropped their own voices in shame and sang so listlessly that the young priest. Father Malone, who had been in the parish only a year, looked up, wondering what was the matter.
After that mass, Mrs. Todd went around to the priest’s house to speak to Father Malone. The priest confessed frankly that he thought Luella Steven’s voice disrupted the whole choir. The wife of the flour-and-feed-merchant and the priest shook their heads sadly, talked in a low grave tone, and wondered who ought to speak to Luella. “Catherine Hogan is the one, she’s been there as long as Luella,” Mrs. Todd said in triumph. “A splendid suggestion,” said the priest. He thanked Mrs. Todd warmly for her exemplary interest in the matter and then accepted an invitation to play cards next Tuesday night with her husband and their family.
So, one Sunday when the two old women, Catherine Hogan and Luella Stevens, were on their way home from church, they got into the discussion about church music and their own choir in particular. Catherine Hogan, the organist, was stooped and withered compared with Luella, who walked proudly upright. “Did you ever think, Luella, of letting some of the younger girls take some of the solos you’ve had so long?” Catherine asked. “Just so there’ll be some chance for their advancement.”
“It never entered my head,” Luella said.
“There are those, and mind now, I’m not saying who they are, who think your voice isn’t what it was, Luella, and that you shouldn’t be singing so much at your age?”
“At my age, Catherine Hogan? And doesn’t anyone seem to remember that you, at seventy-two, are four years older than I am? Where’s your own memory, Catherine? Why, when I was a child I always thought you were too old for me to play with. You know you were always far ahead of me in school like one of the older girls. I’ve always thought of you like that and will to my dying day. Isn’t your eyesight failing you, Catherine?”
Catherine Hogan was full of rage, knowing Luella was deliberately making her out to be an old woman when everybody in town knew she could play the organ blindfolded, that it didn’t matter if she had to be carried into the choir on a bed with her eyesight gone, she would still know the music. She was so offended she made up her mind never to mention the subject to Luella again.
When she was alone in her cottage, cooking her dinner, Luella, muttering to herself, said, “Old Catherine’s mind must be wandering, the poor thing.” She simply couldn’t bear to think of leaving the choir. Instead of eating the food she had cooked she sat at the end of the table remembering all the tiffs she had had with Catherine in the last forty years; she thought of jealous women, of newer ones in the parish scheming to have their daughters take her place in the choir, and she grew frightened, wondering what there would be left in her life if her enemies were successful. She stood rigid, her lips began to move and soon she was giving everyone in the parish who had ever displeased her a thorough tongue-lashing.
On Sunday, as if to threaten those who would deprive her of her rightful place, she gave full throat to her favorite hymn, singing more bravely than ever. Yet never was it so apparent as on that morning that the woman was simply shouting, that the last bit of sweetness had gone forever from her voice. Young people, who by this time had taken an interest in the matter, began to snicker. Mrs. Todd and Mr. J.T. Higgins, the undertaker, turned and looked up at Luella with a withering severity, and then, glancing at each other and screwing up their lips in disgust, they felt they positively despised the arrogant woman. The whole congregation, looking up at Luella when she had finished singing, began to feel that somehow she was making a shameful mockery of them all by refusing to retire. When they bent their heads piously to pray they felt she really had become their enemy.
After the mass the priest, a tall man with powerful shoulders and a blunt nervous way of speaking, was white-faced, and when he left the altar he fumbled with his vestment, calling sharply to the altar boys who were beside him, “Quick, go up to the choir and tell Miss Stevens I want to speak to he
r.”
When Miss Stevens came in, smiling benevolently at the young priest because she was always anxious to help, he stopped pacing up and down and dropped his hands to his sides. He wanted to blurt out, “You’ve become a perfect nuisance, I tell you. You distract me. I can’t offer up the mass. I can’t pray and listen to your terrible shouting,” but controlling himself and taking a deep breath, he said, “Miss Stevens. I noticed for the first time today that your voice was failing. I noticed your voice distinctly. Perhaps you feel you’ve served the choir long enough.”
“For over thirty years,” she said coldly.
“Yes, indeed, I believe you’re sixty-eight.”
“Catherine Hogan was seventy-two last July,” Luella said triumphantly.
“I don’t care how old Catherine Hogan is,” the priest, who was exasperated, said. “I don’t want to be harsh. I’d like to have you pick up the suggestion yourself. However, I’ll say frankly I think you ought to leave the choir.”
“I understand,” Luella said tartly. Bowing coldly, she went out. She meant she understood that those who were scheming for her position were now successful, and with her head tossing, she walked past the little crowd of people standing in the sunlight in front of the church, not noticing how outraged they were as they stared at her.
It was only when she was going down the old gray dust road, the road she had taken every Sunday of her life, that she began to feel frightened. By the time she got to the bridge over Swinnerton’s Creek, she was dazed. Leaning against the rail, she trembled and looked back over the road she had come. It had gotten so that now there was only one main road in her life, the road from her cottage to the church. She wondered what had happened to her life, for though she had stood on this bridge often when she was a little girl, and often, too, when she was in love, and many times afterwards when she was alone, she had never had such a helpless feeling as she had now.
Ancient Lineage and Other Stories Page 18