“Oh, you know me, Walter. You’ve known me a long time.” A click, and nothing.
5
IT WAS NIGHT AND RAINING when the train reached Saratoga. He’d slept most of the trip, sweating in the hot dampness of the car, and dreamed of an old castle where only old turkeys lived, and dreamed a dream involving his father, Kurt Kuhnhardt, someone no-faced, Margaret and Rosa, Anna Stimson, and a queer fat lady with diamond eyes. He was standing on a long, deserted street; except for an approaching procession of slow, black, funeral-like cars there was no sign of life. Still, he knew, eyes unseen observed his nakedness from every window, and he hailed frantically the first of the limousines; it stopped and a man, his father, invitingly held open the door.
Daddy, he yelled, running forward, and the door slammed shut, mashing off his fingers, and his father, with a great belly-laugh, leaned out of the window to toss an enormous wreath of roses. In the second car was Margaret, in the third the lady with the diamond eyes (wasn’t this Miss Casey, his old algebra teacher?), in the fourth Mr. Kuhnhardt and a new protégé, the no-faced creature.
Each door opened, each closed, all laughed, all threw roses. The procession rolled smoothly away down the silent street. And with a terrible scream Walter fell among the mountain of roses: thorns tore wounds, and a sudden rain, a gray cloudburst, shattered the blooms, and washed pale blood bleeding over the leaves.
By the fixed stare of a woman sitting opposite, he realized at once he’d yelled aloud in his sleep. He smiled at her sheepishly, and she looked away with, he imagined, some embarrassment. She was a cripple; on her left foot she wore a giant shoe. Later, in the Saratoga station, he helped with her luggage, and they shared a taxi; there was no conversation: each sat in his corner looking at the rain, the blurred lights. In New York a few hours before he’d withdrawn from the bank all his savings, locked the door of his apartment, and left no messages; furthermore, there was in this town not a soul who knew him. It was a good feeling.
The hotel was filled: not to mention the racing crowd, there was, the desk clerk told him, a medical convention. No, sorry, he didn’t know of a room anywhere. Maybe tomorrow.
So Walter found the bar. As long as he was going to stay up all night he might as well do it drunk. The bar, very large, very hot and noisy, was brilliant with summer-season grotesques: sagging silver-fox ladies, and little stunted jockeys, and pale loud-voiced men wearing cheap fantastic checks.
After a couple of drinks, though, the noise seemed faraway. Then, glancing around, he saw the cripple. She was alone at a table where she sat primly sipping crème de menthe. They exchanged a smile. Rising, Walter went to join her. “It’s not like we were strangers,” she said, as he sat down. “Here for the races, I suppose?”
“No,” he said, “just a rest. And you?”
She pursed her lips. “Maybe you noticed I’ve got a clubfoot. Oh, sure now, don’t look surprised: you noticed, everybody does. Well, see,” she said, twisting the straw in her glass, “see, my doctor’s going to give a talk at this convention, going to talk about me and my foot on account of I’m pretty special. Gee, I’m scared. I mean I’m going to have to show off my foot.”
Walter said he was sorry, and she said, oh, there was nothing to be sorry about; after all, she was getting a little vacation out of it, wasn’t she? “And I haven’t been out of the city in six years. It was six years ago I spent a week at the Bear Mountain Inn.” Her cheeks were red, rather mottled, and her eyes, set too closely together, were lavender-colored, intense: they seemed never to blink. She wore a gold band on her wedding finger; play-acting, to be sure: it would not have fooled anybody.
“I’m a domestic,” she said, answering a question. “And there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s honest and I like it. The people I work for have the cutest kid, Ronnie. I’m better to him than his mother, and he loves me more; he’s told me so. That one, she stays drunk all the time.”
It was depressing to listen to, but Walter, afraid suddenly to be alone, stayed and drank and talked in the way he’d once talked to Anna Stimson. Shh! she said at one point, for his voice had risen too high, and a good many people were staring. Walter said the hell with them, he didn’t care; it was as if his brain were made of glass, and all the whiskey he’d drunk had turned into a hammer; he could feel the shattered pieces rattling in his head, distorting focus, falsifying shape; the cripple, for instance, seemed not one person, but several: Irving, his mother, a man named Bonaparte, Margaret, all those and others: more and more he came to understand experience is a circle of which no moment can be isolated, forgotten.
6
THE BAR WAS CLOSING. They went Dutch on the check and, while waiting for change, neither spoke. Watching him with her unblinking lavender eyes, she seemed quite controlled, but there was going on inside, he could tell, some subtle agitation. When the waiter returned they divided the change, and she said: “If you want to, you can come to my room.” A rash-like blush covered her face. “I mean, you said you didn’t have any place to sleep …” Walter reached out and took her hand: the smile she gave him was touchingly shy.
Reeking with dime-store perfume, she came out of the bathroom wearing only a sleazy flesh-colored kimono, and the monstrous black shoe. It was then that he realized he could never go through with it. And he’d never felt so sorry for himself: not even Anna Stimson would ever have forgiven him this. “Don’t look,” she said, and there was a trembling in her voice, “I’m funny about anybody seeing my foot.”
He turned to the window, where pressing elm leaves rustled in the rain, and lightning, too far off for sound, winked whitely. “All right,” she said. Walter did not move.
“All right,” she repeated anxiously. “Shall I put out the light? I mean, maybe you like to get ready—in the dark.”
He came to the edge of the bed, and, bending down, kissed her cheek. “I think you’re so very sweet, but …”
The telephone interrupted. She looked at him dumbly. “Jesus God,” she said, and covered the mouthpiece with her hand, “it’s long-distance! I’ll bet it’s about Ronnie! I’ll bet he’s sick, or—hello—what?—Ranney? Gee, no. You’ve got the wrong …”
“Wait,” said Walter, taking the receiver. “This is me, this is Walter Ranney.”
“Hello, Walter.”
The voice, dull and sexless and remote, went straight to the pit of his stomach. The room seemed to seesaw, to buckle. A mustache of sweat sprouted on his upper lip. “Who is this?” he said so slowly the words did not connect coherently.
“Oh, you know me, Walter. You’ve known me a long time.” Then silence: whoever it was had hung up.
“Gee,” said the woman, “now how do you suppose they knew you were in my room? I mean—say, was it bad news? You look kind of …”
Walter fell across her, clutching her to him, pressing his wet cheek against hers. “Hold me,” he said, discovering he could still cry. “Hold me, please.”
“Poor little boy,” she said, patting his back. “My poor little boy: we’re awfully alone in this world, aren’t we?” And presently he went to sleep in her arms.
But he had not slept since, nor could he now, not even listening to the lazy lull of the fan; in its turning he could hear train wheels: Saratoga to New York, New York to New Orleans. And New Orleans he’d chosen for no special reason, except that it was a town of strangers, and a long way off. Four spinning fan blades, wheels and voices, round and round; and after all, as he saw it now, there was to this network of malice no ending, none whatever.
Water flushed down wall pipes, steps passed overhead, keys jangled in the hall, a news commentator rumbled somewhere beyond, next door a little girl said, why? Why? WHY? Yet in the room there was a sense of silence. His feet shining in the transom-light looked like amputated stone: the gleaming toenails were ten small mirrors, all reflecting greenly.
Sitting up, he rubbed sweat off with a towel; now more than anything the heat frightened him, for it made him know tangibly his own helplessness. He threw the towel across the room, where, landing on a lampshade, it swung back and forth. At this moment the telephone rang. And rang. And it was ringing so loud he was sure all the hotel could hear. An army would be pounding at his door. So he pushed his face into the pillow, covered his ears with his hands, and thought: think of nothing things, think of wind.
Jug of Silver
AFTER SCHOOL I USED TO work in the Valhalla drugstore. It was owned by my uncle, Mr. Ed Marshall. I call him Mr. Marshall because everybody, including his wife, called him Mr. Marshall. Nevertheless he was a nice man.
This drugstore was maybe old-fashioned, but it was large and dark and cool: during summer months there was no pleasanter place
