Luella Stevens went a little late to mass the next Sunday. She went in timidly like a stranger entering a great cathedral in a foreign city and she stood in the last pew at the back of the church. Those around her, who noticed her, could hardly stop smiling and nudging each other, and if they had not been praying they would have burst into loud, hearty laughter. But Luella felt lost down at the back of the church: she couldn’t remember the last time she had been there, it was so long ago.
Everything went peacefully except that when it was time for her solo Luella began to hum, and then, mechanically, she began to sing, though she kept her voice as low as possible.
A week later she moved up a little closer to the altar where she could feel more at home, and she hummed and hummed and even sang a little louder. Mr. J.T. Higgins, the undertaker, nudged her sternly, but she simply moved away politely as if she understood that he wanted more room. The priest turned uneasily on the altar. Luella, noticing none of these things, was not aware of the rage and contempt they were all feeling for her. The undertaker went on turning page after page of his prayer book, and then finally he leaned over and whispered, “Would you please stop humming and singing? It’s impossible for me to concentrate on spiritual things.”
“My goodness,” Luella whispered. “Has it got so that a poor body can’t hum to herself the songs she’s been singing for forty years?”
But the priest could stand it no longer and turning on the altar and looking over the heads of everybody, he said firmly, “There must be no noise in the church during mass.”
Glaring angrily at the undertaker, Luella tried to say to him with her eyes, “You see, by talking away and making a fuss like a small boy you humiliate both of us in this way. God forgive you,” but she really thought the priest was probably referring to small boys at the back of the church whose parents had raised them to be little savages.
Soon no one would sit in the pew with Luella. By herself, she felt free. She sang quite loudly. It was impossible for those around her to pray. It was impossible for anyone, including the priest, to think of God when she shouted a high note, so they thought, instead, of Luella and what a stupid, arrogant, shameless woman she was, denying them all. They began to hate her. They wanted to hurt her so she would leave the parish forever. The priest, stalking down from the altar with long strides, looked as if he wanted to keep going right down the aisle, out of the church, and out of the town.
While every man and woman in the parish who had self-respect and a love of the church was standing out on the sidewalk muttering and whispering of her scandalous conduct, Luella Stevens went home meekly. In the priest’s house, Father Malone was sending a message to Hector Haines and Henry Barton, two sober, middle-aged, prominent laymen, to come and see him on urgent business.
When the laymen were alone with him in his library, the priest, shrugging his shoulders and throwing up his hands helplessly, said, “I can’t go on saying mass if these things keep on. I’m going to rely on you two men. Lord in heaven, it’s a perfect scandal.” Henry Barton and Hector Haines, two big, substantial men, cleared their throats and expressed a devout indignation. They were flattered to think the priest had come to them for assistance. The three of them talked gravely and bitterly, planning a way to handle Luella Stevens.
In her pew up at the front of the church next Sunday, Luella Stevens, almost cheerful now to be there, found herself singing with the choir as she had done for thirty years. As soon as Catherine Hogan sounded the organ note for Luella’s old hymn, Luella began to shout as though she had never left the choir.
Up on the altar the priest, kneeling with his hands clasped, lowered his dark head deeper into his shoulders and then at last he stood up and said clearly. “Will someone please take that woman out of the church.”
Hector Haines and Henry Barton, who were ready in the pew across the aisle waiting for his signal, stepped over quickly and grabbed Luella by the shoulders, one on each side of her. The priest had said to them, “Be quick, so there will be no confusion.” Luella looked around, speechless and frightened. The faces of the two huge, prominent laymen were red and severe as they clutched her in their big hands and hustled her down the aisle. They towered over the small woman, grabbing her as though they were burly policemen throwing a thug out of a dance hall, rushing her down the center aisle.
It was odd the way those who stared at her frightened face, as she passed, felt that they were seeing the end of something. Mrs. Todd, the flour-and-feed merchant’s wife, ducked her head and suddenly began to weep, and she only looked up to whisper, with her face bursting with indignation, “Oh, dear, this is so shameful.” All the others stirred and shifted miserably in their pews: some wanted to jump up and cry out angrily, “This is an outrage. Who is responsible for this?” and they glared their bitter silent protests at each other. “If she were one of mine there’d be trouble about this, I tell you,” Mr. Higgins, the undertaker, muttered, his face red with resentment. But the quieter ones were so humiliated that they could not bear to raise their heads. The priest, who had not counted on the great zeal of his two prominent laymen, thought, “God help us. What have we done?” and he was so distracted he could hardly go on with the prayers.
1936
RENDEZVOUS
Have you ever known a man you couldn’t insult, humiliate, or drive away? When I was working in an advertising agency in charge of layouts, Lawson Wilks, a freelance commercial artist, came in to see me with all the assurance of a man who expects a warm, fraternal handshake. As soon as I saw him bowing and showing his teeth in a tittering smile, as if he were waiting to burst out laughing, I disliked him. Without saying a word I looked at his work spread out on my desk and, though it was obvious he had some talent, I wasn’t really interested in his work. I was wondering what was so soft and unresisting, yet so audacious about him that made me want to throw him out of the office.
“I’ll get in touch with you if I ever need you,” I said coldly, handing him his folder.
“All right. Thanks a lot,” he said, and stood there grinning at me.
“Is there anything else I can do for you?” I asked.
“Oh, no, nothing. But I’ve wanted to meet you, that’s all.”
“You honor me.”
“I’ve heard about you.”
“What have you heard about me?”
“I know people who know you, and besides, I’ve admired your work a lot. I can open a newspaper and spot a layout that you’ve had a hand in at once.”
“Thanks. Now you flatter me.”
“Are you going out to lunch?”
“I’ve a very important date. I’m meeting my wife.”
“I’ve often talked to my own wife about you. She’d like to meet you sometime,” he said.
“Please thank her for me,” I said. “And now if you’ll excuse me …”
“Listen … let’s have a drink together sometime. That’s one of the two things we have in common,” he said, shaking with soft laughter.
I was so enraged I couldn’t answer for a moment. All my friends knew I had been drinking hard and couldn’t stop and in the late afternoons my nerves used to go to pieces in the office. Sometimes it was terrible waiting for five o’clock so I could run out and get a whiskey and soda. Every day it got harder for me to go to work and, besides, I was doing crazy things with friends at night I couldn’t remember the next morning that used to humiliate me when they were mentioned to me. I thought he was mocking me, but I waited a moment and said, “Drinking, yes! And you might be good enough to tell me what the other thing is we are lucky enough to have in common.”
“Why, I thought you’d notice it,” he said. He was so truly, yet good-naturedly embarrassed, that I was astonished. I stared at him. There he was about my size, plump, dark, overweight, wider across the middle than across the shoulders, and with a little black mustache.
“What is it?” I insisted.
“People have always said I looked like you,” he said wit
h a deprecating, yet easy swing of his arm.
“I see, I see what you mean,” I said, and got up and was walking him toward the door.
“I’ll phone you sometime,” he said, and he wrung my hand very warmly.
As soon as he had gone, I looked in the mirror on the wall and rubbed my hand softly over my face. It was not a flabby face. I was fat, but my shoulders were strong and heavy. I began to make loud, clucking, contemptuous noises with my tongue.
One night a week later my legs went on me and I thought I was losing my mind. My wife begged me to take some kind of a treatment. It was about half past eleven at night and I was lying on the bed in my pajamas trembling, and with strange vivid pictures floating through my thoughts and terrifying me because I kept thinking I would see them next day at the office and I would not be able to do my work. My legs were twitching. I couldn’t keep them still. My wife, who is very gentle and has never failed me at any time since we’ve been married, was kneeling down, rubbing my bare legs and making the blood flow warm and alive in them, till they began to seem as if they belonged to me.
Then the phone rang and my wife answered it and came back and said, “A man says he is a friend of yours, a business associate.”
I didn’t want any business associate to know I couldn’t go to the phone so I put on my slippers and groped my way to it and said with great dignity, “Hello. Who is it?”
“It’s Lawson Wilks,” the voice said, and I heard his easy intimate self-possessed laughter.
“What do you want?” I yelled.
“I thought you might want to have a drink with me. I’m not far away. I’m in a tavern just two blocks from your place.”
I suddenly had a craving for a drink and felt like going out to meet him, and then loathed myself and shouted, “No, no, no. I don’t want a drink. I’m not going out. I’m terribly busy. Do you understand?”
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll call you again. I was just thinking about you.”
I saw him in October, about a week after I had taken three months’ leave of absence from the office, trying to get myself in hand so I wouldn’t have to go away to a nursing home. I really wasn’t making much of a fight and sometimes I was ashamed. I looked shabby, twitching a lot. I sat for hours smiling to myself. I couldn’t bear to have anyone see me.
On a dark windy day I was sitting in the Golden Bowl Tavern with a whiskey and soda, promising myself I would not have another drink, not until I had read the Sunday paper at least. Then I looked up and saw that Wilks had come in and was grinning at me with warm delight, as much as I’ve ever seen on a man’s face. While I turned away sullenly, he sat down, ordered a whiskey, and nodding at my glass, said, “The same thing, you see. Didn’t I tell you?”
“Didn’t you tell me what?” I said. He looked pretty terrible to me. His dull eyes were pouchy, and he seemed heavier and softer. As he raised his glass his hand trembled. When he noticed me staring at him, his face lit up with fraternal goodwill. I wanted to insult him. “You better watch out,” I whispered. “The heeby-jeebies’ll get you. They’ll have to take you outa here soon.”
In a tone that maddened me, because he meant no offence, he said, “We’re taking the same trip, my friend.”
“How so?”
“You don’t mind me sitting here, do you?”
“Sit here if you want,” I said. “I’m reading the paper.”
It was a pleasure to see him looking such a wreck. I was delighted sitting there turning the pages of the paper slowly, never looking up at him while his voice droned on, patient, friendly, dead. Surely anyone else in the world would have found it too humiliating, sitting there like that, yet he said, “Do you mind letting me have the comics?”
“Take them,” I said, letting him pull the paper from me.
“I thought I might as well be doing something while I waited for you,” he said.
I folded my paper. “Sorry,” I said, “I have got to go.”
“Let’s walk together to the corner,” he said.
He was so contented on that dark and windy October afternoon that I decided to mock him. I began by asking questions and he told me he really hadn’t been happy for some years. He didn’t make much more than enough to live on and, besides, his wife wasn’t very sympathetic to his work. On the nights when he wanted to drink and be surrounded by jovial companions and talk about his work and about art, literature and drama, his wife, a matter-of-fact woman, wanted to go out with the ladies and play bridge, and it was a game he couldn’t stand.
“How about you? Does your wife play bridge?” he asked.
“She can’t stand the game,” I jeered at him.
“Maybe my wife and I got married too young. Sometimes I feel that she doesn’t really love me at all. How about your wife?”
Full of gratitude to my wife for giving me another chance to widen the gulf between this man and me, I said crisply, “It’s entirely different with us, thank you.” Then I started to laugh openly, knowing I had been mocking him with my pretended interest in his wretched affairs. Chuckling, I left him standing on the corner, with that puzzled yet overwhelming smile of goodwill still on his weak and puffy face.
I didn’t see him for a month. There were nights when I had some terrible experiences and I grew afraid for my wife and myself. I let them put me in the nursing home.
The first weeks were hard, terrifying, yet fascinating. I had a little room to myself and when I was normal and quiet I had the freedom of the house and the grounds, and I had some good conversations with the male nurses. Sometimes they locked me in. The door leading to the corridor had bars on it.
In the morning I often felt that I had floated out of my body at night and had remarkably interesting encounters in space with friends who were dear to me, interesting because they seemed to enlarge the borders of reality for me.
Then one morning one of the nurses said, “We have a patient just across the corridor who knows you.”
“Who?”
“A Mr. Lawson Wilks.”
“How is he?”
“Very bad for the most part.”
“Look here,” I begged. “I don’t want to see him at all, you understand?”
It seemed terrible that he should be there making me hate him when I was better and looking forward to getting out of the place. I refused to go to the door to look across the corridor. I knew he was standing there looking across at my room and I had a truly savage pleasure in never letting him see me.
During one very bad night, the last bad night I had, I felt that part of myself that was truly me hovering around overhead, right overhead from where I was, except, of course, that I wasn’t confined at all. I was smiling at Lawson Wilks, who had joined me, and we were having a very friendly and easy conversation about many simple things. We laughed a lot and liked each other and I was happier than I had been in years.
In the morning when I woke up, I lay in the bed a long time remembering the night and growing, bit by bit, more puzzled. Then I couldn’t help getting up and sneaking over to the door and peering at Lawson Wilks’ room.
When I got to the door I saw Lawson Wilks standing there looking over at me, and when he saw that I’d come at last to the door, he nodded his head in encouragement. His warm smile seemed even kindlier now. “You and me, we had a good time, didn’t we?”
“We did?” I said, with a little cracked smile.
Pointing high over his head, he grinned and said, “It was wonderful last night, wasn’t it?”
1937
THE WHITE PONY
It was a very beautiful white pony, and as it went round and round the stage of the village theater the two clowns would leap over its back or whistle and make it flap its ears and shake its long white mane. Tony Jarvis, like every other kid in the audience that summer afternoon, wondered if there wasn’t some way he could get close to the pony after the show and slip his arm around its neck.
If he could persuade the owners to let him ride the pony down the
street, or if he could just touch it or feed it a little sugar, that would be enough. After the show he went up the alley to the back of the theater to wait for the clowns and the pony. But the alley was jammed with kids – all the summer crowd from the city as well as the village boys – and Tony couldn’t get close to the back door of the theater. The two clowns came out, their faces still colored with bright paint; then a big red-headed man, apparently the trainer, led the pony out. It shook its head and neighed, and all the kids laughed and rushed at it.
The big redhead, in blue overalls and an old felt hat that had the brim cut off, yelled, “Out of the way, you kids! Go on, or I’ll pull the pants off you!” He began to laugh. It was the wildest, craziest, rolling laugh Tony had ever heard. The man was huge. His red hair stuck out at all angles under the lopped-off hat. He had a scar on his left cheek and his nose looked broken. Whenever the kids came close he swung his arm and they ducked, but they weren’t frightened – only a little more excited. As he walked along, leading the white pony, a wide grin on his face, he seemed to be just the kind of giant for the job. If the pony started to prance or was frightened by the traffic, the big man would make a clucking noise and the pony would swing its head over to him and lick his hand with its rough tongue.
Tony followed the troupe along the street to the old garage they were using as a stable. Then the redhead yelled, “All right, beat it, kids!” and led the pony inside and closed the door. The kids stood around the closed door, wondering if accidentally it mightn’t swing open. It was then that Tony left the gang and sneaked to the back of the garage. When he saw an old porch there, his heart pounded. He climbed up to the roof and crawled across the rotting shingles to the edge of a big window. At first he could see nothing. Then, with his eyes accustomed to the inner darkness, he saw the two clowns. Squatting in front of mirrors propped up on old boxes, they were scraping the paint off their faces. With a pail in his hand and singing at the top of his voice, the redhead walked over to a corner of the garage. Tony could see the pony’s tail swishing back and forth.
Ancient Lineage and Other Stories Page 19