It pinched in the crotch and in the rear drooped like an old man’s B.V.D.’s; the legs were wide as sailor pants, one sleeve stopped above my wrist, the other shot past my fingertips. It wasn’t, as Dolly admitted, very stylish. “But when we’ve painted on the bones …” she said. “Silver paint. Verena bought some once to dress up a flagpole—before she took against the government. It should be somewhere in the attic, that little can. Look under the bed and see if you can locate my slippers.”
She was forbidden to get up, not even Catherine would permit that. “It won’t be any fun if you scold,” she said and found the slippers herself. The courthouse clock had chimed eleven, which meant it was ten-thirty, a dark hour in a town where respectable doors are locked at nine; it seemed later still because in the next room Verena had closed her ledgers and gone to bed. We took an oil lamp from the linen closet and by its tottering light tiptoed up the ladder into the attic. It was cold up there; we set the lamp on a barrel and lingered near it as though it were a hearth. Sawdust heads that once had helped sell St. Louis hats watched while we searched; wherever we put our hands it caused a huffy scuttling of fragile feet. Overturned, a carton of mothballs clattered on the floor. “Oh, dear, oh, dear,” cried Dolly, giggling, “if Verena hears that she’ll call the Sheriff.”
We unearthed numberless brushes; the paint, discovered beneath a welter of dried holiday wreaths, proved not to be silver but gold. “Of course that’s better, isn’t it? Gold, like a king’s ransom. Only do see what else I’ve found.” It was a shoebox secured with twine. “My valuables,” she said, opening it under the lamp. A hollowed honeycomb was demonstrated against the light, a hornet’s nest and a clove-stuck orange that age had robbed of its aroma. She showed me a blue perfect jaybird’s egg cradled in cotton.
“I was too principled. So Catherine stole the egg for me, it was her Christmas present.” She smiled; to me her face seemed a moth suspended beside the lamp’s chimney, as daring, as destructible. “Charlie said that love is a chain of love. I hope you listened and understood him. Because when you can love one thing,” she held the blue egg as preciously as the Judge had held a leaf, “you can love another, and that is owning, that is something to live with. You can forgive everything. Well,” she sighed, “we’re not getting you painted. I want to amaze Catherine; we’ll tell her that while we slept the little people finished your suit. She’ll have a fit.”
Again the courthouse clock was floating its message, each note like a banner stirring above the chilled and sleeping town. “I know it tickles,” she said, drawing a branch of ribs across my chest, “but I’ll make a mess if you don’t hold still.” She dipped the brush and skated it along the sleeves, the trousers, designing golden bones for my arms and legs. “You must remember all the compliments: there should be many,” she said as she immodestly observed her work. “Oh dear, oh dear …” She hugged herself, her laughter rollicked in the rafters. “Don’t you see …”
For I was not unlike the man who painted himself into a corner.
Freshly gilded front and back, I was trapped inside the suit: a fine fix for which I blamed her with a pointing finger.
“You have to whirl,” she teased. “Whirling will dry you.” She blissfully extended her arms and turned in slow ungainly circles across the shadows of the attic floor, her plain kimono billowing and her thin feet wobbling in their slippers. It was as though she had collided with another dancer: she stumbled, a hand on her forehead, a hand on her heart.
Far on the horizon of sound a train whistle howled, and it wakened me to the bewilderment puckering her eyes, the contractions shaking her face. With my arms around her, and the paint bleeding its pattern against her, I called Verena; somebody help me!
Dolly whispered, “Hush now, hush.”
Houses at night announce catastrophe by their sudden pitiable radiance. Catherine dragged from room to room switching on lights unused for years. Shivering inside my wrecked costume I sat in the glare of the entrance hall sharing a bench with the Judge. He had come at once, wearing only a raincoat slung over a flannel nightshirt. Whenever Verena approached he brought his naked legs together primly, like a young girl.
Neighbors, summoned by our bright windows, came softly inquiring. Verena spoke to them on the porch: her sister, Miss Dolly, she’d suffered a stroke. Doctor Carter would allow none of us in her room, and we accepted this, even Catherine who, when she’d set ablaze the last light, stood leaning her head against Dolly’s door.
There was in the hall a hat-tree with many antlers and a mirror. Dolly’s velvet hat hung there, and at sunrise, as breezes trickled through the house, the mirror reflected its quivering veil.
Then I knew as good as anything that Dolly had left us. Some moments past she’d gone by unseen; and in my imagination I followed her. She had crossed the square, had come to the church, now she’d reached the hill. The Indian grass gleamed below her, she had that far to go.
IT WAS A JOURNEY I made with Judge Cool the next September. During the intervening months we had not often encountered each other—once we met on the square and he said to come see him any time I felt like it. I meant to, yet whenever I passed Miss Bell’s boarding house I looked the other way.
I’ve read that past and future are a spiral, one coil containing the next and predicting its theme. Perhaps this is so; but my own life has seemed to me more a series of closed circles, rings that do not evolve with the freedom of a spiral: for me to get from one to the other has meant a leap, not a glide. What weakens me is the lull between, the wait before I know where to jump. After Dolly died I was a long while dangling.
My own idea was to have a good time.
I hung around Phil’s Café winning free beers on the pinball machine; it was illegal to serve me beer, but Phil had it on his mind that someday I would inherit Verena’s money and maybe set him up in the hotel business. I slicked my hair with brilliantine and chased off to dances in other towns, shined flashlights and threw pebbles at girls’ windows late at night. I knew a Negro in the country who sold a brand of gin called Yellow Devil. I courted anyone who owned a car.
Because I didn’t want to spend a waking moment in the Talbo house. It was too thick with air that didn’t move. Some stranger occupied the kitchen, a pigeon-toed colored girl who sang all day, the wavery singing of a child bolstering its spirit in an ominous place. She was a sorry cook. She let the kitchen’s geranium plant perish. I had approved of Verena hiring her. I thought it would bring Catherine back to work.
On the contrary, Catherine showed no interest in routing the new girl. For she’d retired to her house in the vegetable garden. She had taken the radio with her and was very comfortable. “I’ve put down the load, and it’s down to stay. I’m after my leisure,” she said. Leisure fattened her, her feet swelled, she had to cut slits in her shoes. She developed exaggerated versions of Dolly’s habits, such as a craving for sweet foods; she had her suppers delivered from the drugstore, two quarts of ice cream. Candy wrappers rustled in her lap. Until she became too gross, she contrived to squeeze herself into clothes that had belonged to Dolly; it was as though, in this way, she kept her friend with her.
Our visits together were an ordeal, and I made them grudgingly, resenting it that she depended on me for company. I let a day slip by without seeing her, then three, a whole week once. When I returned after an absence I imagined the silences in which we sat, her offhand manner, were meant reproachfully; I was too conscience-ridden to realize the truth, which was that she didn’t care whether or not I came. One afternoon she proved it. Simply, she removed the cotton wads that jacked up her jaws.
Without the cotton her speech was as unintelligible to me as it ordinarily was to others. It happened while I was making an excuse to shorten my call. She lifted the lid of a pot-bellied stove and spit the cotton into the fire; and her cheeks caved in, she looked starved. I think now this was not a vengeful gesture: it was intended to let me know that I was under no obligation: the future was something she preferred not to share.
Occasionally Riley rode me around—but I couldn’t count on him or his car; neither were much available since he’d become a man of affairs. He had a team of tractors clearing ninety acres of land he’d bought on the outskirts of town; he planned to build houses there. Several locally important persons were impressed by another scheme of his: he thought the town should put up a silkmill in which every citizen would be a stockholder; aside from the
