“I—yes.”
“Do you realize it’s a deeper commandment with you than any of the Ten? And aside from right-’n-wrong, isn’t it deeper than the deepest, strongest one of all—save thyself? Can’t you see yourself dying under a bush rather than walk naked out on the road and flag a car? ‘Suppose there’s a fire?’ Can’t you see yourself burn to death rather’n jump out a window without your bathrobe?”
She didn’t answer except from her round eyes and her whole heart.
“Does that make any sense, to believe a thing like that?”
“I don’t know,” she whispered. “I—have to think.”
Surprisingly, he said, “Retroactive.” He pointed to the window. “What can we do about that?” he asked.
Absently she glanced at it. “Never mind it tonight, Mr. Bittelman.”
“Sam. Okay. Goodnight, little lady.”
She felt herself, abruptly, tottering on the edge of a bottomless pit. He had walked in here and disoriented her, ripped into shreds a whole idea-matrix which had rested undisturbed in the foundations of her thinking, like a cornerstone. Just at this startled second she had not made the admission, but she would have to admit to herself soon that she must think “retroactive,” as he had put it, and that when she did she would find that the clothes convention was not the only one she would have to reappraise. The inescapable, horizonless, unfamiliar task loomed over her like a black cloud—her only comfort, her only handhold was Sam Bittelman, and he was leaving. “No!” she cried. “No! No! No!”
He turned back, smiling, and that magic happened again, his sureness and ease. She stood gasping as if she had run up a hill.
“It’s all right, little lady.”
“Why did you tell me all this? Why?” she asked pathetically.
“You know something? I didn’t tell you a thing,” he said. “I just asked questions. They were all questions you could’ve asked yourself. And what’s got you scared is answers—answers that came from here—” He put a gentle knuckle against her damp forehead. “—and not from me. You’ve lived with it all quite a while; you got nothing to fear from it now.” And before she could answer he had waved one capable hand, winked, and was gone.
For a long time she stood there, trembling and afraid to think. At last she let her open eyes see again, and although they saw nothing but the open door, it was as if some of Sam’s comfort slipped in with vision. She turned around, and around again, taking in the whole room and reaping comfort and more comfort from the walls, as if Sam had hung it for her to gather like ripe berries. She put it all in the new empty place within her, not to fill, but at least to be there and to live with until she could get more. Suddenly her gaze met the silly little wastebasket sitting against the door, holding it open, and to her utter astonishment she laughed at it. She picked it up, shook her head at it as if it had been a ridiculous puppy which had been eating her talcum powder; she even spanked it lightly, once, and put it down, and closed the door. She got into bed and put out the light without even looking at the window.
V
“Aw, you shouldn’t!” cried Bitty with a joyous sort of chagrin as she pushed open Sue Martin’s door. “Here I’ve got all your fresh linen and you’ve went and made the bed!”
Sue Martin, sleep-tousled and lovely in a dark negligee, rose from the writing desk. “I’m sorry, Bitty. I forgot it was Thursday.”
“Well, Thursday it is,” the older woman scolded, “and now I’ll have to do it up all over again. Young lady, I’ve told and told you I’ll take care of the room.”
“You have plenty to do,” Sue smiled. “Here, I’ll help. What’s Robin up to?”
Together they took down the spread, the light blanket, then the sheets from the big double bed. “Kidnapped by that young idiot O’Banion again. He’s driving out to the new project over Huttonville way and thought Robin might want to see the bulldozers.”
“Robin loves bulldozers. He’s not an idiot.”
“He’s an idiot,” said Bitty gruffly, apparently needing no translation of the two parts of Sue’s statement. “Time this was turned, since we’re both here,” she said, swatting the mattress.
“All right,” Sue Martin loosely folded the spread and blanket and carried them to the chest. “Robin just loves him.”
“So do you.”
Sue’s eyes widened. She shot a look at the other woman, but Bitty’s back was turned as she bent over the bed. When she spoke, her voice was perfectly controlled. “Yes, for some time.” She went to stand beside Bitty and they laid hold of the mattress straps. “Ready?” Together they heaved and the mattress rose up, teetered for a moment on edge, and fell back the other way. They pulled it straight.
“Well, what are you doing about it?” Bitty demanded.
Sue found her eyes captured by Bitty’s for a strange moment. She saw herself, in a flash of analog, walking purposefully away from some tired, dark place toward something she wanted; and as she walked there appeared humming softly behind her, around her, something like a moving wall. She had a deep certainty that she could not stop nor turn aside; but that as long as she kept moving at the same speed, in the same direction, the moving wall could not affect her. She—and it—were moving toward what she wanted, just as fast as she cared to go. While this was the case, she was not being restrained or compelled, helped nor hindered. So she would not fear this thing, fight it or even question it. It could not possibly change anything. In effect, irresistible as it might be, it need not and therefore did not exist for her. Here and now, some inexplicable something had happened to make it impossible not to answer Bitty’s questions—and this compulsion was of no moment at all for her as long as Bitty asked questions she wanted to answer. “What are you doing about it?” was such a question.
“Everything I should do,” said Sue Martin. “Nothing at all.” Bitty grunted noncommittally. She took a folded sheet from the top of the highboy and shook it out across the bed. Sue Martin went round to the other side and caught it. She said, “He has to know why, that’s all, and he can’t do anything or say anything until he does know.”
“Why what?” Bitty asked bluntly.
“Why he loves me.”
“Oh—you know that, do you?”
This was one question, compulsion or no, that Sue Martin did not bother to answer. It was on the order of “Is this really a bed?” or “Is it Thursday?” So Bitty asked another: “And you’re just waiting, like a little edelweiss on an Alp, for him to climb the mountain and pick you?”
“Waiting?” Sue repeated, puzzled.
“You’re not doing anything about it, are you?”
“I’m being myself,” said Sue Martin. “I’m living my life. What I have to give him—anyone who’s right for me—is all I am, all I do for the rest of my life. As long as he wants something more, or something different, nothing can happen.” She closed her eyes for a moment. “No, I’m not waiting, exactly. Put it this way: I know how to be content with what I am and what I’m doing. Either Tony will knock down that barrier he’s built, or he won’t. Either way I know what’s going to happen, and it’s good.”
“That wall—why don’t you take a pickax and beat it down?”
She flashed the older woman a smile, “He’d defend it. Men get very fond of the things they defend, especially when they find themselves defending something stupid.”
Bitty shook out the second sheet. “And don’t you have any of his kind of trouble—wondering why you love him?”
Sue Martin laughed. “Wouldn’t we live in a funny world if we had to understand everything that was real, or it wouldn’t exist? It’s always good to know why. It isn’t always necessary. Tony’ll find that out one day.” She sobered. “Or he won’t. Hand me a pillowslip.”
They finished their task in silence. Bitty bundled up the old linen and trudged out. Sue Martin stood looking after her. “I hope she wasn’t disappointed,” she murmured, and, “I don’t think so … and what did I mean by that?”
VI
One morning Mary Haunt opened her eyes and refused to believe them. For a moment she lay still looking at the window numbly; there was something wrong with it, and a wrong feeling about the whole room. Then she identified it: there was sunlight streaming in and down through the venetian blind where no sunlight should be at her rising time. She snatched her watch off the night table and squinted at it, and moaned. She reared up in bed and peered at the alarm clock, then turned and punched furiously at the pillow. She bounded out of bed, struggled into her yellow robe, and flew out of the room with her bare feet slapping angrily down the long corridor. Sam Bittelman was sitting at the kitchen table peering at the morning paper over the tops of his black rimmed reading-glasses. Bitty was at the sink. “What ’m I, the forgotten man or something?” Mary Haunt demanded harshly.
Sam put down his paper and only then began to remove his gaze from it. “M-m-m? Oh, good morning, gal.” Bitty went on with her business.
“Good nothing! Don’t you know what time it is?”
“Sure do.”
“What’s the big fat idea leaving me to sleep like this? You know I got to get to work in the morning.”
“Who called you four times?” said Bitty without turning around or raising her voice. “Who went in and shook you, and got told get out of my room for it?”
Mary Haunt poised between pace and pace, between syllables. Now that Bitty mentioned it, she did half-remember a vague hammering somewhere, a hand on her shoulder … but that was a dream, or the middle of the night or—or had she really chased the old lady out? “Arrgh,” she growled disgustedly. She stamped out into the foyer and snatched up the phone. She dialed. “Get me Muller,” she snapped at the voice that answered.
“Muller,” said the phone.
“Mary Haunt here. I’m sick today. I’m not coming in.”
“So with this phone call,” said the telephone, “I’ll notice.”
“Why you lousy Heine, without me you couldn’t run a yo-yo, let alone a radio station!” she shouted, but she had hung up before she started to shout.
She padded back into the kitchen and sat down at the table. “Got coffee?”
Bitty, still with her back turned, nodded in the appropriate direction and said, “On the stove,” but Sam folded his paper and got up. He went to the stove, touched the pot briefly with the back of his hand, picking up a cup and saucer on the way. “You’ll want milk.”
“You know better than that,” she said, arching her lean body. While she poured herself a cup, Sam sat down at the other end of the table. He leaned his weight on his elbows, his forearms and worn hands flat on the table. Something like the almost-silent whisper from a high-speed fan made her look up. “What are you looking at?”
He didn’t answer her question. “Why do you claim to be twenty-two?” he asked instead, and quick as the rebound of billiard ball from cue ball, propelled by hostility, inclusive as buckshot, her reply jetted up: “What’s it to you?” But it never reached her lips; instead she said, “I have to,” and then sat there astounded. Once she had worn out a favored phonograph record, knew every note, every beat of it, and she had replaced it; and for once the record company had made a mistake and the record was not what the label said it was. The first half-second of that new record was like this, a moment of expectation and stunned disbelief. This was even more immediate and personal, however; it was like mounting ten steps in the dark and finding, shockingly, that there were only nine in the flight. From this moment until she left the kitchen, she was internally numb and frightened, yet fascinated, as her mind formed one set of words and others came out.
“You have to,” asked Sam mildly, “the way you have to be in the movies? You just have to?”
The snarl, have I kept it a secret? came out, “It’s what I want.”
“Is it?”
There didn’t seem to be any answer to that, on any level. She waited, tense.
“What you’re doing—the job at the radio station—living here in this town instead of someplace else—all of it; is what you’re doing the best way to get what you want?”
Why else would I put up with it all—the town, the people—you? But she said, “I think so.” Then she said, “I’ve thought so.”
“Why don’t you talk to young Halvorsen? He might be able to find something you’d do even better’n going to Hollywood.”
“I don’t want to find anything better!” This time there was no confusion.
From the other end of the room, Bitty asked, “Were you always so all-fired pretty, Mary Haunt? Even when you were a little girl?”
“Everyone always said so.”
“Ever wish you weren’t?”
Are you out of your mind? “I … don’t think so,” she whispered.
Gently, Sam asked her, “Did they throw you out, gal? Make you leave home?”
Defiantly, defensively, They treated me like a little princess at home, like a piece of fine glassware. They carried my books and felt good all day if I smiled. They did what I wanted, what they thought I wanted, at home or in town. They acted as if I was too good to walk that ground, breathe that air, they jumped at the chance to take advantage of being at the same place at the same time; they did everything for me they could think of doing, as if they had to hurry or I’d be gone. Throw me out? Why, you old fool! “I left home my own self,” she said. “Because I had to, like—” But here words failed her, and she determined not to cry, and she determined not to cry, and she cried.
“Better drink your coffee.”
She did, and then she wanted something to eat with it, but couldn’t bear to sit with these people any longer. She sniffed angrily. “I don’t know what’s the matter with me,” she said. “I never overslept before.”
“Long as you know what you want,” said Sam, and whether that was the stupid, non-sequitur remark of a doddering dotard, or something quite different, she did not know. “Well,” she said, rising abruptly; and then felt foolish because there was nothing else to say. She escaped back to her room and to bed, and huddled there most of the day dully regarding the two coddled ends of her life, pampering in the past and pampering in the future, while trying to ignore today with its empty stomach and its buzzing head.
VII
During Prohibition it had been a restaurant, in that category which is better than just “nice” but not as good as “exclusive”; the town was too small then to have anything exclusive. Now it was a bar as well, and although there was imitation Carrara on some walls, and a good deal of cove-lighting, the balcony had never been altered and still boasted the turned-spoke railing all the way around, looking like a picket fence that had gone to heaven. There was a little service bar up there, and a man could stay all evening watching what went on down below without being seen. This was what Tony O’Banion was doing, and he was doing it because he had felt like a drink and had never been to the club before, and he wanted to see what kind of place it was and what Sue Martin did there; and every one of these reasons were superficial—if he preceded them with “Why,” he felt lost. Within him were the things he believed, about the right sort of people, about background, breeding, and blood. Around him was this place, as real as the things he believed in. Why he was here, why he wanted a drink just now, why he wanted to see the place and what happened in it—this was a bridge between one reality and the other, and a misty, maddening, nebulous bridge it was. He drank, and waited to see her emerge from the small door by the bandstand, and when she did he watched her move to the piano and help the pianist, a disheveled young man, stack and restack and shuffle his music, and he drank. He drank, and watched her go to the cashier and spend a time over a ledger and a pile of checks. She disappeared through the swinging doors into the kitchen, and he drank; he drank and she came out talking to a glossy man in a tuxedo, and he winced when they laughed.
At length the lights dimmed and the glossy man introduced her and she sang in a full, pleasant voice something about a boy next door, and
someone else played an accordion which was the barest shade out of tune with the piano. Then the piano had a solo, and the man sang the last chorus, after which the lights came up again and he asked the folks to stick around for the main show at ten sharp. Then the accordion and the piano began to make dance music. It was all unremarkable, and Tony didn’t know why he stayed. He stayed, though: “Waiter! Do it again.”
“Do it twice.”
Tony spun around. “Time someone else bought, hm?” said Sam Bittelman. He sat down.
“Sam! Well, sit down. Oh, you are.” Tony laughed embarrassedly. His tongue was thick and he was immeasurably glad to see the old man. He was going to wonder why until he remembered that he’d sworn off wondering why just now. He was going to ask what Sam was doing there and then decided Sam would only ask him the same, and it was a question he didn’t want to fool with just now. Yes he did.
“I’m down here slumming in the fleshpots and watching the lower orders cavorting and carousing,” he blurted, making an immense effort to be funny. He wasn’t funny. He sounded like a little snob, and a tight little snob at that.
Sam regarded him gravely, not disapproving, not approving. “Sue Martin know you’re here?”
“No.”
“Good.”
The waiter came just in time; Sam’s single syllable had given him a hard hurt; but for all the pain, it was an impersonal thing, like getting hit by a golfer on his backswing. When the waiter had gone Sam asked quietly, “Why don’t you marry the girl?”
“What’re ya—kidding?”
Sam shook his head. O’Banion looked into his eyes and away, then down at Sue Martin where she leaned against the piano, leafing through some music. Why don’t you marry the girl? “You mean if she’d have me?” It was not the way he felt, but it was something to say. He glanced at Sam’s face, which was still waiting for a real answer. All right then. “It wouldn’t be right.”
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