Perhaps they were coffee beans because after three days nothing had happened and after five days even he admitted that the time had passed. Now they did quarrel, he cursing himself for it as he sat on his park benches reading the help wanted columns in newspapers grubbed out of trash bins while he waited for his black eye, his shiner, to disappear so he could apply decently for work, cursing himself because she had borne up for so long and would and could continue to bear up save that he had worn her out at last, knowing he had done this, swearing he would change, stop it.
But when he returned to the room (she was thinner now and there was something in her eyes; all the pills and whiskey had done was to put something in her eyes that had not been there before) it would be as if his promises had never been made, she cursing him now and striking at him with her hard fists then catching herself, clinging to him, crying, “Oh, God, Harry, make me stop! Make me hush! Bust the hell out of me!” Then they would lie holding one another, fully dressed now, in a sort of peace for a time.
“It’ll be all right,” he said. “A lot of people have to do it these days. Charity wards are not bad. Then we can find someone to take the baby until I can—”
“No. It wont do, Harry. It wont do.”
“I know it sounds bad at first. Charity. But charity isn’t—”
“Damn charity. Have I ever cared where money comes from, where or how we lived, had to live? It’s not that. They hurt too much.”
“I know that too. But women have been bearing children—You have borne two yourself—”
“Damn pain too. I take easy and breed hard but damn that, I’m used to that, I don’t mind that. I said they hurt too much. Too damned much.” Then he understood, knew what she meant; he thought quietly, as he had thought before, that she had already and scarcely knowing him given up more than he would ever possess to relinquish, remembering the old tried true incontrovertible words: Bone of my bone, blood and flesh and even memory of my blood and flesh and memory. You dont beat it, he told himself. You dont beat it that easy. He was about to say, “But this will be ours,” when he realised that this was it, this was exactly it.
But still he could not say yes, could not say “All right.” He could say it to himself on the park benches, he could hold his hand out and it would not shake. But he could not say the word to her; he would lie beside her, holding her while she slept, and he would watch the ultimate last of his courage and manhood leave him. “That’s right,” he would whisper to himself, “stall. Stall. She will be in the fourth month soon, then I can tell myself I know it is too late to risk it; even she will believe then.” Then she would wake and it would start all over—the reasoning which got nowhere becoming the quarreling and then the cursing until she would catch herself and cling to him, crying in frantic despair: “Harry! Harry! What are we doing? We, we, us! Make me hush! Bust me! Knock me cold!” This last time he held her until she was quiet. “Harry, will you make a compact with me?”
“Yes,” he said wearily. “Anything.”
“A compact. And then until it’s up, we will never mention pregnancy again.” She named the date when her next period would have come; it was thirteen days away. “That’s the best time, and after that it will be four months and it will be too late to risk it. So from now until then we wont even talk about it; I will try to make things as easy as possible while you look for a job, a good job that will support three of us—”
“No,” he said. “No! No!”
“Wait,” she said. “You promised.—Then if you haven’t found a job by that time, you will do it, take it away from me.”
“No!” he cried. “I wont! Never!”
“But you promised,” she said, quietly, gently, slowly, as if he were a child just learning English. “Dont you see there is nothing else?”
“I promised; yes. But I didn’t mean—”
“I told you once how I believe it isn’t love that dies, it’s the man and the woman, something in the man and the woman that dies, doesn’t deserve the chance any more to love. And look at us now. We have the child, only we both know we cant have it, cant afford to have it. And they hurt too bad, Harry. Too damned bad. I’m going to hold you to the promise, Harry. And so from now until that day comes, we wont even have to mention it, think about it again. Kiss me.” After a moment he leaned to her. Not touching otherwise, they kissed, as brother and sister might.
Now it was like Chicago again, the first weeks there while he went from hospital to hospital, the interviews which seemed to die, to begin to wilt and fade tranquilly at a given identical instant, he already foreknowing this and expecting it and so meeting the obsequy decently. But not now, not this time. In Chicago he would think, I imagine I am going to fail and he would fail; now he knew he was going to fail and he refused to believe it, refused to accept no for an answer until threatened almost with physical violence. He was not trying hospitals alone, he was trying anyone, anything.
He told lies, any lie; he approached appointments with a frantic cold maniacal determination which was inherent with its own negation; he promised anyone that he could and would do anything; walking along the street one afternoon he glanced up by sheer chance and saw a doctor’s sign and entered and actually offered to perform any abortions thrown his way for half the fee, stated his experience and (he realised later when comparatively sane again) only his ejection by force forestalled his showing Buckner’s letter as a testimonial to his ability.
Then one day he returned home in the middle of the afternoon. He stood outside his own door for a long time before he opened it. And even then he did not enter but stood instead in the opening with on his head a cheap white bellows-topped peaked cap with a yellow band—the solitary insignia of a rankless W.P.A. school-crossing guard—and his heart cold and still with a grief and despair that was almost peaceful. “I get ten dollars a week,” he said.
“Oh, you monkey!” she said, then for the last time in his life he saw her cry. “You bastard! You damned bastard! So you can rape little girls in parks on Saturday afternoons!” She came and snatched the cap from his head and hurled it into the fireplace (a broken grate hanging by one side and stuffed with faded frilled paper which had once been either red or purple) and then clung to him, crying hard, the hard tears springing and streaming. “You bastard, you damned bastard, you damned damned damned—”
She boiled the water herself and fetched out the meager instruments they had supplied him with in Chicago and which he had used but once, then lying on the bed she looked up at him. “It’s all right. It’s simple. You know that; you did it before.”
“Yes,” he said. “Simple. You just have to let the air in. All you have to do is let the air—” Then he began to tremble again. “Charlotte. Charlotte.”
“That’s all. Just a touch. Then the air gets in and tomorrow it will be all over and I will be all right and it will be us again forever and ever.”
“Yes. Ever and ever. But I’ll have to wait a minute, until my hand—Look. It wont stop. I cant make it stop.”
“All right. We’ll wait a minute. It’s simple. It’s funny. New, I mean. We’ve done this lots of ways but not with knives, have we? There. Now your hand has stopped.”
“Charlotte,” he said. “Charlotte.”
“It’s all right. We know how. What was it you told me nigger women say? Ride me down, Harry.”
And now, sitting on his bench in Audubon Park lush green and bright with the Louisiana summer already fully accomplished although it was not yet June, and filled with the cries of children and the sound of pram wheels like the Chicago apartment had been, he watched against his eyelids the cab (it had been told to wait) stopping before the neat and unremarkable though absolutely unimpugnable door and she getting out of the cab in the dark dress carried a full year and better, for three thousand miles and better, in the bag from last spring and mounting the steps. Now the bell, perhaps the same negro maid: “Why, Miss—” then nothing, remembering who paid the wages, though probably not since by ordinary
