Collected Fiction

by Kris Neville

  He felt no need for conversation. It was pleasant enough just driving quietly along the street. He remembered again the time she had picked up the sparrow without alarming it. (“By thinking right,” she had said, meaning, he supposed, thinking in the correct manner to communicate the harmless nature of her intentions toward it.) A little shudder passed down his spine; and he found he quite enjoyed the sensation. I wonder what Jane suspects? She probably wonders the same thing about me. We’re neither of us going to be as surprised as Bettyann will anticipate . . . But he was curious . . . I wonder, he thought for the hundredth time, what her parents were like?

  Here, around Bettyann, was the town.

  The old longing came to paint. She thought it would be a good idea to take up painting when she went back to Smith. Not that painting was enough. But as a. . . hobby, perhaps. The thing to do, she decided, was to become very wise. (Jerry, she thought. Did I actually manage to put anything in his mind without him knowing it? Can I gain information and pass it along secretly for others to think about. Plant ideas . . . if I ever have ideas?)

  Old man Starke is going to get well, she told herself.

  That was a bulwark against her no longer stridently insistent sense of isolation. She had proved that she was useful; and she had proved, somehow, that she belonged.

  They passed the house where Burton Roscoe and his wife used to live. Bettyann remembered them vaguely, and the sight of the house brought further memories. She wondered if they were dead. After he and his wife had been committed to the State Asylum in the city of Nevada, the town had lost track of them.

  He had been a small, slender man with a thin brown mustache. His wife was more substantial, and between the two of them, they owned considerable property and possessed considerable wealth until they gave it away. (That they had given it away was something the town did not learn until later.) She had been prominent in society before she withdrew suddenly and took to solitary hymn-singing. Shortly thereafter he abandoned his practice, and the two of them moved into a cabin they owned on Spring River. That was in the summer. Passing fishermen remarked that they appeared to be much addicted to Bible reading. The summer passed them as had the world; the leaves turned autumn’s crisp colors. Winter threatened from afar. The first reports came in of savages in the forest, nude, unkempt, eating berries and grasses. The clock had been stopped and time turned back. They had circumscribed the Garden of Eden in the Genesis of their minds as a spot seven miles above Highway Sixty-Six where Spring River encounters a decaying dam. The sheriff, when the first severe frost came, gathered himself a posse and brought them in.

  Bettyann thought of the man and his wife, and her mind was filled with pride and wonder. She wished she could reach out across the land to touch everyone—touch the infinite variety of Everyman—and know his secret soul. She was no longer frightened; she felt her isolation vanishing completely. There was a blend of nobility and foolishness in mankind that was somehow reassuring, and old man Starke would live. She felt now that someday she would be able to understand the people, yes. But perhaps she confused the more valuable and eternal qualities of unvocal love and deep and sustaining faith for understanding—for who can ever understand the people, yes? And out of this she felt that someday she would be able to reach out and touch the distant world that is not composed of steel and stone but of individuals, and in a quiet way and by degrees affect it. But she thought that she might not want to change man even if she could, for fear that in the changing she would lose something of infinite worth. It seemed to her that there was a precious essence that should be inviolate and that what changing one must do should be, paradoxically, in that hard separate world beyond the individual. That world must be changed so that poverty does not subvert justice, so that Everyman will have enough of the physical necessities to be turned—by his own better nature and of his own free will—from blind jealousy and colossal destruction. And all the while, she thought, one should preserve a generous measure of hatred and fear and foolishness—of living—as sublime monuments to imperfection and injunctions to humility.

  Dave stopped the car. Calling, “I’ll be right back,” he went in to get the shotgun. Bettyann relaxed and was grateful for the warmth of the sun and the exciting air.

  Dave came back and headed the car downtown.

  The houses around them were a stately and dignified two and a half and three stories tall and of another time. Many of them had huge full porches. Nearly all of them had gables or spires or turrets or widow’s walks or other peculiar details of construction that had pleased the fancy of their builders, who had, in their time, the harmless conviction that, because they were respectable and substantial citizens and knew what they wanted, what they wanted was desirable. But the rooms were too large and too numerous. Now, although the lawns and driveways were kept up and the hedges trimmed, the houses looked deserted. The upper windows (often curtainless) seemed to hint that beyond them was a dark, musty void of sealed-off rooms, unfrequented by light and laughter and only occasionally visited by the matron of the house. And even these visits, one might guess, were without immediate physical reasons—were, in reality, nostalgic pilgrimages made out of respect for the past and dead era lying bundled in the steamer trunks, and hovering over the moth-eaten carpets rolled and standing endwise in the corners, and the sheet-draped Victorian chairs and end tables.

  As he drove, Dave thought that the world was changing at an astonishing pace. He thought that during his lifetime a new world had grown up to superimpose itself on the old. Realities were blurring into nonrealities and nonrealities were shimmering into focus. The structure of the real world was changing and the values of the real world were changing. A new world had not yet reached definition; an old world had not yet faded into fantasy and memory. He looked at Bettyann seated beside him. There was more difference between her world and the world of his youth than between his and Shakespeare’s. It was a marvelous thing to consider. Her generation would act upon and be acted upon by a wider variety of events than his generation could dream of.

  “The town has changed a lot since you were born,” Dave said.

  Bettyann thought Dave referred to its physical appearance. “I’ve noticed.” It seemed then the subject for a painting. How would it be, she thought, to show a modern building and paint within it, as a part of it, shadows of other buildings that had stood where it stood now, and the forest before that—all apparent, all integrated, expressing change and continuity and somehow the struggle of building and the faces of men?

  “Here we are,” Dave said. “I’ll let you out. You want me to wait for you?”

  “No, you go on, Dad. I may be an hour or so.”

  “Oh?”

  “Well, I may not.”

  “Okay, see you for lunch.”

  Bettyann hurried up the stairs. Her heart was ready to burst with happiness. It was so good to be alive, to belong, to . . .

  The waiting room was empty. Wing came out of his inner office in answer to the door chime.

  “Hello, Bettyann,” he said. “Evelyn takes Saturday off, so I’m my own receptionist. Come on in.”

  In his office she stood close to him. “I suppose it’s some more tests?”

  “No,” he said. “No, as a matter of fact, it’s not.”

  His tone caused the sunlight to dim. Something caught in her throat.

  “It’s about Mr. Starke. He died last night.”

  A great and terrifying blackness encompassed everything. She knew that Wing was talking, but she was not listening to the words. She could not believe what she had heard. Dead! The floor seemed to crumble away from her and the walls dissolve.

  The room was static and timeless and full of details. The open notebook on the desk. The sharply etched titles in the bookcase full of medical volumes. The sunlight on the pane of the partly open window. The still curtains. The white screen across from the bookcase. The . . .

  She fell into his arms and clung desperately to him as he retreated
in surprise. Jerry, Jerry,” she sobbed against his lapel. She held him frantically, and, perhaps with some unconscious memory of some movie scene, unaware herself of what she was doing, she put both her arms around him tightly. “Jerry, Jerry.”

  “Here, here,” he said. He tried to daub at her eyes.

  She sobbed and stepped back in sudden shame. “I . . . I . . . I’m sorry, Doctor, Dr. Wing. I, I, I’d better go.” She turned and fled to the door.

  It was then Wing noticed that she had two normal arms.

  Bettyann was in the street. The song of the people’s voices around her seemed muttering voices of her alienness, sighing: You don’t belong, you can never belong . . .

  “Hello, Bettyann,” someone said. She trudged on.

  She passed a movie theater that was no longer as well kept as it had been only a few years ago. It was surrendering slowly to the drive-in theater and television. It cried out the old, the changing, the passing, from the marquee, and clung to the periphery of existence.

  She walked by the hitching post which the town kept for sentimental reasons. Horses were not allowed on the square.

  “Hello, Bettyann.”

  “Hello,” she said tonelessly.

  She was moving automatically, trying not to think. The huge Gothic courthouse in the middle of the square stood like the world. From where she was, she could not touch it. The world was beyond her.

  The winter slush whispered against her moving feet. The sky was so blue it hurt her eyes.

  She walked on, unaware of the extent to which site would someday change the world. When, in time, she explored completely and understood fully the strange compartment of her alienness, she would be able, if she wished, to take a drop of muddy water such as now lay beneath her feet and holding it before her, transform it into iridescent dew. And then, if she wished, she would be able to reach into its essential core of nondiscrete particles and, telling them like beads, move them each from each.

  But she thought: the world is so far away from me that I cannot touch it, and these pale passing faces are strangers.

  He died. He died. He is dead in spite of all I could do; I could do nothing.

  He is dead.

  Wing locked his office and drove over to see Dave and Jane. He was calm, and, as he drove, the world around him seemed good.

  He knocked.

  “Come in, Jerry.” Dave’s eyebrows elevated with a worried question. “I just left Bettyann down at your office.”

  “I’d like to talk to you and Jane.”

  “Jane!” Dave called. “Oh, Jane! Come down here, will you?”

  “Who is it?”

  “It’s Jerry Wing!” He turned to the doctor. “She’ll be right down.”

  In the living room, Dave stood uncertainly before the bookcase. He told himself that he had nothing to fear. Wing sat uneasily on the edge of the sofa. Jane perched insecurely on the arm of a chair.

  “She’s not your child,” Wing said.

  “It’s no secret,” Dave said, trying to still the heavy beating of his heart. “We adopted her.”

  Wing tried to remember if he had ever been told that she was an adopted daughter. Doubtless he had, and the information had been relegated to some obscure corner of his mind. “You couldn’t tell by looking at her,” he said. “I’ve never seen a child look more like her parents.”

  “We’ve often noticed that,” Jane said. Her hands lay still and tense in her lap.

  Wing took a deep breath. “I’ve just found out something about her today. Dave, Jane. . . Bettyann isn’t . . . she . . . isn’t . . . Bettyann is not human.”

  The room was quiet. Nothing moved. As if from a great distance came the sound of a passing car. Out of the silence now, unheard before, came the ticking of a clock, recording the minute, inexorable progress of the tomorrow.

  “That depends on what you mean by human,” Dave said.

  Wing looked at him and then at Jane. Jane smiled tentatively.

  Wing looked down at his hands. “I believe she arrested the development of cancer in Mr. Starke. That’s why she collapsed over at his house. It was almost too much for her. He died last night of starvation. That was inevitable. But I took a bit of tissue. She’d stopped the cancer.”

  Dave cleared his throat.

  “What is she?” Wing asked. “I saw her just a few minutes ago, and both her arms were normal.”

  Dave’s heart pulsed sharply with surprise. He knew now how she must have felt when she discovered her own nature. And the surprise passed, and he marveled.

  “I don’t understand it,” Wing said. “My God! Dave, what else can she do?”

  “What else can she do?” Dave said. “That’s a good question, Jerry. I think, I think we’ll have to wait and find out. I think . . . I think we’ll have to wait until she knows.”

  “She’s pretty upset right now,” Jane said. “You can’t blame her.”

  Dave felt a thrill of undiluted pride. What could Bettyann do? He could not even guess.

  They were silent, thinking.

  For a second time today Dave said, “The world is changing.” He looked out the window where the sunlight was. “She’ll help it along, she’ll do her share, changing it. And what are we going to do? We’re going to watch because that’s all we an do, and we’re going along with the world because we can’t do anything else.” He could almost feel the sense of change in his blood and bones. “If she can do half as much a I imagine she can, the world isn’t ever going to be the same again. I only know one thing. I’m not going to be afraid of her Do you see what I mean?”

  Wing felt a weariness lift from his body. It was a weariness that he had never been conscious of before because it had been so much a part of him. I am not afraid, he thought.

  “We’re going to send her back to Smith,” Jane said. “That will keep her busy for a little while.”

  Jane and Dave were looking at hint. He started to smile, and they smiled with him. A sense of wonder and waiting and hope and excitement filled the air.

  “. . . I hated to have to tell tier Mr. Starke was dead,” Wing said. “She must have thought it was very important to her, to keep him alive.”

  “A lot of things are important at that age,” Dave said. “The world is important, and the people in it.”

  A lot of things are important at that age, Wing thought. I remember what you mean, he thought. And suddenly he felt that it was he, himself, who had forgotten how to grow up; suddenly he felt that Bettyann was older than he. He wanted to ask her to wait for him. I’ll be here in the summer when you get back, he thought. If you’ll wait for me, he thought, I’ll be here.

  “You go find her, Dave, and drive her home,” Jane said.

  “Let her alone for now,” Dave said. “There’s nothing we can do but let her alone. Now that he’s dead, she’s got to be alone for a little while.”

  The world is important, Wing thought. Those lost, beautiful words: the world is important, and the people in it. He had known that once, and forgotten it, and now knew it again. He felt young and bashful, and he wanted to tell everybody—most of all Bettyann—that he was in love. His throat was choked with the longing to speak. Bettyann, he thought, Bettyann. I wonder if she’ll understand? be thought. I’ve got to talk to her and tell her . . . tell her . . . ask her. . . Bettyann, Bettyann . . .

  “I know what you mean,” Wing said. “I don’t think we need be afraid.”

  Bettyann turned front the square. The great steeple of the courthouse was behind her. Beneath its shadow on the snow, spring things lay waiting to grow and turn the world green with new life. Decay sat under the eaves where the pigeons roosted and beneath its marble facade, time kneaded the paneling and the beams and the floorings. But the courthouse could never vanish entirely, for its roots went deep into art and history and mankind, and nothing later built upon that spot could fail to reflect its solid majesty.

  Gloom and black despair hovered around Bettyann and filled her eyes with bitter tea
rs. She was a stranger alone in a darkling world.

  She felt mute, helpless, and insignificant. The world was huge and distant and she bore no relation to it. She felt she was a tiny mote, unseen because there was no light upon it, drifting to no purpose and alone upon currents of air from afar.

  She saw Whistling Red coming toward her down the street. She could not bear the thought of meeting him in passing and having him read in the remoteness of her face the terror of her failure and the eternity of her alienness. She crossed the street in the middle of the block to escape him.

  Whistling Red’s eyes twinkled at the sight of her. It was pleasant to watch her: the lithe, unconscious movement of her hips, the vitality of her body, the grave and innocent eyes . . . Philosophically, he began to whistle his eternal and changeless tune. And for once it varied itself and took flight and soared and sparkled and danced in the air, yet all the while retaining its identity, an identity that was part of himself, part of the town, and perhaps part of all of us.

  1957

  MORAL EQUIVALENT

  Why shouldn’t a culture mimic another right down to the last little detail? Because the last detail may be just that—the final one!

  THE planet Lanit II had dwindled to a luminous speck. They were in clear space now, at Breakoff Point. Beliakoff held the ship in position while Kelly set dials for the jump into the hyperspatial drift opening, which deep-space men knew as the Slot.

  Beliakoff cracked his bony knuckles nervously. “Now, Johnny,” he said, “easy this time. Real easy. Gentle her into it. She’s not a new ship. She resents being slammed into the Slot.”

  “She’ll take it,” Kelly said, with a boyish grin of almost suicidal abandon.

  “Maybe she will, but how about us? You sort of creased the Slot getting us off Torriang. A little closer and—”

  “I was still getting the touch. You ought to be glad I’m an instinctive astrogator.”

  He set the last dial with a rapid twirl and reached for the kissoff switch.