WHO LISTENS?
No one, said George Mecklin to himself. He had placed his chair so that he could see past the other teachers to a window where for a moment passers-by were framed as they walked down Ninety-eighth Street. The meeting had started at three. Now it was after four. Someone clicked the retractor of a ball-point pen. Someone lit a cigarette. Someone coughed. They had finished with the matter of the fall conference. The headmaster, Harrison Ballot, bent his head over his notes. His short arms and plump hands lay extended and motionless on either side of the papers on the table in front of him.
Above the dark brownstones which lined the street across from the school, George could see a strip of sky the color of tallow. The buildings appeared to be suspended in a viscous gray medium. Was it raining?
“If it was only the high school,” began Ballot, looking up over the heads of his faculty, “but it’s in the lower school too. The fifth grade is absolutely riddled with it.”
“With what?” asked Harvey Walling, a math teacher.
Ballot’s naked skull wrinkled as though something inside it had moved restlessly. “What? What do you think? Injudicious borrowing, that’s what!”
“Cheating,” said a short-haired woman from the English department.
“There are gradations,” Ballot said softly.
“Gobble, gobble, gobble,” mouthed the woman. She looked chagrined.
George stared at the window. Two men, dark, withered and thin-necked, bearing their heads like effigies on sticks, passed by quickly. Puerto Ricans? Then a huge Judy flashed into view, disappeared for an instant and bobbed back as if a lurking Punch had whacked her.
Muttering that the room had grown stuffy, George got up and went to the window and opened it a crack. The woman, red-haired and massive, was shaking a small boy whose head was encased in a transparent bubblelike helmet. On it was printed “Space Scout.” From inside, the boy gazed out coolly like a fish. A blind Negro, his white cane poking out in front of him, hesitated and stopped. The woman shot a furious glance in his direction, then banged on the helmet with her knuckles. The blind man took a step forward and his foot landed on a garbage-can cover. Disconcerted, he stopped and appeared to reflect. At that moment the child wrenched off his helmet and tossed it into the street. The woman smacked his thin bluish cheek and raced after the helmet while the boy cried into one hand, the other gripped against his side. The Negro thrust forward once more. A few raindrops streaked the window, as though the element which held the city so still had begun to melt. George returned to his chair.
“It must be stopped,” Ballot was saying.
“But how? How indeed!” cried Lawrence Rubin, who taught history to the upper forms. He slapped the table top. No one liked him and no one answered him. Walling, sitting across from George, pulled the ends of his black mustache. He was wearing a red suède vest. George wondered if it was to attract women. He had heard that Walling painted.
Half asleep, George listened to the sounds of a committee being formed—there would have to be a special assembly; student council members must be consulted and advised; Ballot would write an editorial for the school paper. Rubin slumped in his chair. “The whole country’s corrupt,” he said to the ceiling. Walling was openly correcting math papers on the table. George ordered himself to listen. He looked down to see what tie he had on.
There was more—an argument over the choice of the senior play; a report on the apple machines in the recreation room (they were wrecked); a description of the newly installed language laboratory aspirated by the head of the language division. Time crawled up one side of the classroom clock and down the other. Then it was over.
With his coat half on, George made for the door. Ballot stood there bowing like a deacon, a faint smile on his white old cat’s face, as the teachers filed out. He touched George’s arm with one fat finger.
“How’s the country?”
“Fine,” George answered.
Rubin thrust himself between them, his large mouth twitching in advance of his words, and George ducked out into the corridor.
He walked down Columbus Avenue to Eighty-ninth Street where his sister, Lila, had two rooms on the second floor of an old town house. Behind the large apartments fronting on Central Park West, the street breathed an air of decay and desolation. It had begun to rain hard; rain fell on the blackening façades of brownstones, on the open refuse cans where cinders turned a fleshy pink, on the toneless gray of the street where animal excreta slowly liquefied and refuse sidled sluggishly toward the drains.
On either side of the entrance to Lila’s building two cement planters held a harvest of rusty nails sunk into the cement at two-inch intervals. As George rang the downstairs bell, a swollen gray cat sitting on the edge of a planter reached out a paw and jabbed at a nail. Aware of only a great emptiness in which he and the cat stared incuriously at each other, he jumped at the answering ring.
Lila Gillis opened the door of her apartment wearing a cowl-like object over her hair. As she peered out into the dark hall, the cowl slid to her shoulders.
“You! What a surprise! Come in. I suppose you’ve only got five minutes? Claude, push off!” She tried to shake free from her seven-year-old son, who clutched her around her waist. As quickly as she disentangled his fingers from her belt, he grabbed handfuls of her skirt. Claude’s head was covered with a paper bag. He made no sound as he struggled to hold onto her.
“I’ve got more than five minutes,” George said as he stepped into the room.
“We’ve just come from the store.” She wrenched loose from the boy.
“Claude, Claude…” called George. The boy shook his hooded head. “Would you like a plastic space helmet?”
“You’d better get one for me,” said Lila. “As usual, everything is hanging by a thread.”
George turned on the gooseneck lamp which gripped a bookshelf with its rusty claw. The light shone on the marble front of a blocked-up fireplace. A child’s red truck was garaged in the shallow hearth. The rest of the room was in shadow, and there was a smell of dust, as though the windows had been closed for a long time.
“My job ends in a week. They told me this morning,” Lila said. He turned to her. “Don’t get scared,” she said, and smiled then. “I didn’t get fired. The job simply ran down.”
“You’re well out of it.”
“You’re always saying that to me about something or other, aren’t you?”
“You need a real job.”
“Do you want a cup of tea? Awful damned room, isn’t it?”
“You’re always holing up in some half-baked rescue league.”
“Half-baked? Mental health is everybody’s darling. I wrote fine letters to the crazy rich for money for the crazy poor. Campaigns end. Generals go back to their dusty rooms.”
“You ought to remarry.”
“I’ll make some tea.”
Claude was holding out his arms and shaking his wrists up and down. His hands flopped at the end of his arms like cotton-filled gloves.
“Quit that!” Lila said sharply. The boy ran off into the bedroom. George felt Lila watching him. Did she know he found Claude repugnant?
“What about part-time teaching? You always liked making things. You could teach art.”
She made a wry face. “Pipe cleaners and paste?”
He must have uttered a sound of disapproval because she held out her arms suddenly, palms up, asking to be understood. He remembered how when they were children, after Lila had hit him, she would stand back and extend her hands toward him in the same way. He sat down.
She let her arms fall and stood looking down at him. “I’m getting old,” she said. “I think about the past all the time now. Every morning I wake up with one of Mama’s homilies on my mind. She was always talking about preserving things. Do you remember how she covered everything? The whole house was a tea cozy. But everything does wear out, doesn’t it? She must’ve thought about death a good deal. Do you think she did?”
“I don’t know what she thought about. Do you need money?”
She was silent.
“I can give you a check for fifty dollars right now.”
Claude came back. He had taken off the paper bag. On his small fair face there was a look of concentrated distaste as though what he saw, now that he could see, was unalterably offensive to him.
“I can manage,” Lila said. “You need your pennies.”
“Come here and talk to me, Claude,” George said.
Claude flung his arms around his mother. “Juice!” he cried.
“Then let me go.” Holding on, Claude pushed her to the pullman kitchen.
“You’re not letting your mother walk,” George said.
“Give it up,” Lila said.
As she bent over to hand the boy the glass, the large knot of brown hair at the nape of Lila’s neck loosened. Her skin was clear and pale, and where George’s features were somewhat stubby, her’s were fine and thin. Yet she looked plain to him. She filled a small pan with water and placed it on a burner. He suddenly thought her very tiring. There was a rip in her skirt, and she slumped over the stove in an elderly fashion.
“What about teaching? I can ask around.”
“All right,” she said without looking at him. “If you want to.”
“For God’s sake!”
The boy began to run wildly around the room, shouting “Alors!” Lila turned and watched him dispassionately.
“They teach them French in that Episcopalian hothouse he goes to. Or so they say,” she said.
Claude picked up the red truck and brandished it.
“Alors, yourself,” Lila said.
While they were drinking their tea, Lila asked George how he found the country. It was clear she was uninterested.
“Isn’t Emma lonely by herself all day?”
“She hated the city.”
“She could still be lonely.”
“She comes into town.”
“Oh, those country Sundays. How I detested them when we lived in Huntington. Sometimes people came to see us, and when they got ready to leave, I used to want to beg them to take me with them.”
“It’s only been a month,” George said. “We haven’t had a chance to be disappointed yet.” Thinking of his wife, he fell silent. He imagined she was sitting down in some room in the house. Seated, Emma seemed far away. Silently he ordered her to get up. It seemed strange to him that he could not visualize her walking. Claude spun the wheels of his truck.
“Are you making a plan for me?” Lila asked. She smiled at him as though she pitied his poor plans.
“Come up next weekend,” said George. “We’ll figure out something.” He stood up and took ten dollars from his wallet. “Take it,” he said.
“Don’t you want something else? A piece of cheese?”
“I have to catch the train.”
She held out her hand, and he placed the bill in it. At the door he paused. Except for the circle of light from the lamp he had turned on, the room was dark. Claude thrust the truck at him. Lila had one foot out of her shoe. What would they do when the door closed? He touched her arm, wishing he could help her.
“Don’t you ever think of Mama?” she asked sadly.
“Sometimes,” he replied.
“I remember everything that ever happened to me until I was ten,” she said. “But not much after that.”
He didn’t know what to say.
The train smelled of damp pipes. It moved sluggishly through a wan landscape over which the darkening sky seemed to pulsate faintly. George, thinking of his mother, wondered how Lila’s memory of her could be so different from his own. The winter that George was eight and Lila thirteen, Mr. Mecklin had died of a heart attack. He had been shoveling a path through the snow from the house to the street. George and his mother were watching the shovelfuls of snow fly up and fan down when suddenly Mr. Mecklin had leaned on the shovel as though to rest. Then he had pitched forward abruptly.
His mother had been holding a crochet needle in her hand. Had she plunged it into her other hand at the moment his father had fallen? Had his mother really stopped speaking to him from the time they had stood at the window together until she was old and ill? A body fallen like a tree, a self-inflicted wound, a silent house, the friends in school who had stared at him for a week or two as though they’d never seen his like before…Had it really been like that? Lila couldn’t tell him. She was no help, for whatever point she might start from she always ended up with herself.
During the last years of Mrs. Mecklin’s life, she had developed cataracts in both eyes. Behind her special glasses her glance was magnified, and it had seemed full of disdain and bitterness. His last gift to her had been a special deck of cards whose enlarged symbols made it possible for her to play solitaire. She had cheated openly. When Lila came to visit, she had often let the deck slip from her lap and watched with an ironic smile as Lila scrambled about the floor gathering the cards together.
Then one evening Lila had come home to show off a diamond engagement ring. She was living in New York City by herself, and she disliked the long subway ride, then the trolley out to Warburton Avenue in Yonkers. She was flustered and irritable, and she thrust the ring under her mother’s nose. Rather bitterly, she had described how she had covered her hand in the subway to avoid arousing someone’s cupidity. Mrs. Mecklin had said, “If you’re so afraid it will be stolen, why don’t you swallow it?” George had stood up and for a second had seen a flash of fear in Mrs. Mecklin’s sick old eyes. “A glass of water, please, George,” she had asked humbly. He had pitied her, then.
Lila’s diamond ring had turned out to be the sum of her good fortune. Having given it to her and having married her, her husband, Philip, had settled into a melancholy absorption with making his life earthquake-proof. As the New York agent for a Vermont insurance company, he saw the hazards of almost everything.
George had always wanted to help Lila. But he had never been able to do much except unlatch the door after midnight when she, then in her late adolescence, had begun coming home in the early hours of the morning, hectic and disheveled, the hand which gripped George’s cold and damp, as he led her upstairs in the dark and past their mother’s bedroom.
With a prolonged shudder, the train pulled into the Harmon station. In the parking lot, George’s secondhand English Ford sat under a layer of coal dust.
Driving home, he forgot about Lila. Everything he looked at consoled him: the leafless trees, the rain-blackened rocks, a shabby frame house in whose dark depths he perceived the glow of a shadeless light, the stream which paralleled the road, a boy in a yellow slicker pushing a bicycle up a hill. In the middle of the reservoir, a man sat in a rowboat, huddled over a fishing rod. A black dog raced in front of the car and leaped into the water, then swam straight for the boat like a plumb line dropped into the gray lake. George stopped the car and let the motor idle. The dog’s tail whipped the water. George could hear a wet scratching of claws as the dog tried to climb the gunwale. Suddenly the fisherman brought his arm out and down, lifting the animal into the boat—there was a rattle of oarlocks, a scattered sound of the dog’s nails as it shook itself. The man leaned forward and put his hat on the dog’s head. George heard his laugh, a quick burst, and then the dog’s answering bark.
The scene preoccupied him the mile or so he had still to drive. He envied the man his solitude. Could one cultivate a taste for it? He read a good deal, but usually when Emma was in the room. If she left, his attention wavered. He supposed his nature was essentially gregarious; even his dreams were filled with conversations and half-perceived faces.
He made a left turn where the reservoir road intersected Abraham’s Lane, then drove up a rise passing the Palladino house, a large structure in the colonial style with green shutters fanning out from every window. A hundred yards behind it was the Mecklin cottage, and behind the cottage, scattered over a broad slope, an apple orchard. He drove into the double garage around which the little house was built.
He switched off the ignition and sat for a moment, his eyes fixed on the windshield, his breathing shallow. The stillness felt voluptuous; all the forces of his life were held in abeyance by the pale, empty moment. Then, as though the oncoming night were disgorging itself of an irritant, there was an explosion of wings, and George turned to look out the back window of the car, up toward the orchard. A flight of crows drew a black line across the sky.
As George stepped out into the garage, a breath of wind stirred the tattered newspapers lining the bushel baskets stacked in one corner; it fluttered the dust-laden spiders’ webs hanging from the ladder by the window, and brought him the smell of spring. It was slight—a damp wind, a taste of damp earth. But standing alone in the garage, feeling the seasonal quickening in the air, he was assailed by an undefined but powerful sense of possibilities. It seemed a curious thing that, as a man vaguely oppressed as far back as he could remember, he should feel touched, if only lightly, by luck.
The back door was open.
“Emma?”
There was no answer. She might be sleeping. She might even have taken a walk. He turned off a dripping tap in the kitchen. As he walked into the living room he thought he heard the radio playing faintly upstairs and he called Emma again. When there was no response, he opened his briefcase and took from it a worn copy of Moby-Dick, along with a handful of blue notebooks in which were written the answers to an examination he had given his ninth-grade English class. Most of them would have written three pages on the symbolism of the whale’s whiteness. Most of them would not have read the book at all. He didn’t like it himself; the passion for revenge, he thought, was too alien to him. He placed book and examination papers on the card table he used for a desk. The whale wasn’t white at all—it was pale with exhaustion from being hounded by a New England autocrat.
As he started up the stairs the back of his neck prickled delicately. His legs felt thick, heavy. What was wrong with him? He steadied himself against the banister and climbed up to the small upstairs hall. He was about to go into the bathroom when he caught sight of a slight movement of the door to the unused bedroom. His heart began to pound. He felt faint, and when he heard his own breathing, he was struck with terror.
He wanted to run. But danger itself held him fast. “Move!” he groaned. Then with an explosive cry, he flung himself against the door, pushing it until the resistance of the body behind it would let him go no further. He kicked it savagely and heard himself pleading with whatever it was to come out…for God’s sake…come out!
“You’re breaking my head,” a voice cried. George backed away. Someone snuffled. He waited. Then shaping and straightening his crushed hat, a boy of eighteen or nineteen slid sideways from behind the door. They stared at each other, then the boy pouted and pinched his hat.
“Look at that! I just had it two days.”
“Don’t move,” George said.
“Who’s moving? You know how much this hat cost me? It’s wrecked!”
“Sit down!”
The boy sat on the mattress of the spare bed, still turning his hat with short, blunt fingers.
“Who are you?”
The boy placed his hat on the bed and looked at it.
“What’s your name?”
“Ernest.”
“Ernest what?”
He shrugged.
“What if I call the police?”
“Go ahead.”
“Is it worth it? To take the chance?”
“Worth what?”
“The police.”
Ernest smiled. “You always leave your house unlocked?”
“I could turn you in,” George said. The trembling in his legs had stopped.
“I didn’t take anything.”
“Did you ever hear of breaking and entering?”
“I didn’t break in. I just walked in.”
George struck him on the shoulder. The boy rolled over on his back and drew up his legs. Stricken, George bent over him. Ernest looked up at him without expression. Then he lowered his legs slowly.
“Get out!” George cried. The boy righted himself and stood up.
“Out!”
“You say it and you say it again. I told you…. I didn’t take anything. I never do. I like to see the inside when the people are out. That’s all.”
It was only then the thought of Emma, stuffed into a closet, dead, violated, moved dreadfully in his imagination like the fronds of a submerged plant. He ran to the door. Ernest was behind him. “She went out,” he said. “Out to the orchard. Then I came in.”
George pointed at the stairs. Ernest started down.
“I’ve been in all the houses near the reservoir,” Ernest said quickly. “Like your neighbors right there…She’s a lush. She drinks and he plays. That’s the one thing I ever took. A note some girl wrote him. You want to know what it said? I know it by heart.” He stopped and turned. “I’ll say it to you,” he offered.
“That’s rotten.”
“You know the Devlins? They’ve got gin in stone bottles…a thousand records. They owe money—more than you got.”
George raised his hand. The boy ducked.
“I don’t want to hear any more.”
At the bottom of the stairs now, Ernest swiveled around the banister. He looked reflectively at the chipped wood.
“Did you turn the radio on?”
“Yes,” Ernest said, and he laughed softly.
“Sit down,” George said sternly. Ernest fell indolently into a chair.
“Why aren’t you in school?”
“At this time of day?”
“You don’t know what you’re doing. Do you?”
“Do I what?” Ernest took a cigarette from a crushed pack on the table next to the chair. He saw George look at it. He held it stiffly for a minute, then George waved his hand. Ernest took a straight match from his pocket and lit it with his thumbnail.
“Where do you go to school?”
“I was held back in the last year. So I don’t go.”
“What are you? Nineteen?”
“Almost eighteen.”
“What about the draft?”
The boy looked mildly interested. “Yeah?”
“The army.”
“Which army?” he asked. He stood up. “You going to do anything?” He put on his hat. “Because I’m leaving.”
“Do you live with your parents?”
“One puking drunk. You can tell him all about me.…He won’t do anything much.”
“Wait…”
“I’m too old to go to school. What are you looking at my hat for? Listen…I want to go now.”
But George didn’t want to let him go. He stood in front of Ernest blocking his way to the kitchen. He was experiencing something extraordinary; he felt a nervous exuberance which made it painful for him to stand still. “I’m a teacher,” he said. Ernest looked at him impassively. “You’ll get caught,” George shouted.
“You caught me.”
The power of his impulse impelled George forward. The boy drew back. “You must get through school,” George said. He heard the intensity in his own voice. Afraid he would alarm the boy, he tried to speak without emphasis. “There’s no place to go any more if you don’t finish up. It’s not the way it used to be. I can help you. I can show you short cuts. What was it that got you down? Listen, Ernest, education’s the pass, the key….”
Listening, but not to George, Ernest shook his head almost imperceptibly. His eyes were vague, but his narrow body expressed a kind of nervous readiness. His dark hair and eyes, the faint amber cast of his skin gave him an impermeable look. He was, George thought, almost beautiful. His features were purely linear, like those of wooden saints in cathedral niches. His narrow-lipped mouth was finely delineated, his cheeks long and flat. But when he turned, how different he was! Then his mouth was thin as thread; his lynxlike lid suggested secretiveness. He seemed bloodless.
Ernest walked past George to the kitchen entrance and instantly retreated, cupping his hand around his cigarette, which he thrust behind him. Emma had come in.
She stood in the doorway, looking from George to the boy.
“I wondered where you were,” George said quickly. “Did you go for a walk?”
“Yes. A short walk,” Emma said, staring at Ernest.
“Not much sun today?”
“It rained this morning.”
“The meeting was longer than I expected. Then I stopped by to see Lila.”
Ernest brought the cigarette to his lips, inhaled strongly and blew the smoke straight up. Was it a message? The moment stretched.
“This is Ernest, Emma,” George said, finally. “He needs some help with schoolwork.”
Emma looked bewildered; then she nodded and took off the jacket she was wearing, letting it drop on the couch. Ernest looked at it.
“It’s wet,” he said to no one in particular.
“It’ll dry,” Emma replied. She walked on to the staircase. The boy slipped into the kitchen and George followed. Emma might have been kinder. After all…a young boy. Sometimes he thought her coolness not so much a cover as the thing itself, an emptiness. There wasn’t anything so puzzling about Ernest’s presence that she even had to abandon good manners, was there?
Ernest stood at the kitchen door, his hand on the knob. “You’d better quit all this,” George said in a low voice. Ernest laughed soundlessly. “It isn’t remotely funny. Someone else might turn you in.”
Ernest looked at him reflectively. “This is the first time I’ve been caught,” he murmured.
“Didn’t you hear me drive in?” George asked.
“It was too late. I thought I could jump through the window onto the roof over the porch. But the window was stuck.” He shrugged. “I don’t know.” The knob turned in his hand. George saw how much he wanted to go. He felt angry and suddenly exhausted.
“How do I know you didn’t take something?” he asked harshly. Ernest, his eyes on George’s face, pulled out the lining of his pockets, one by one. A small pebble fell on the floor. Then he held out his hand, opening his fingers slowly. Two nickels lay in his palm.
“You’d better stay the hell out of peoples’ houses,” George said.
“How come you didn’t tell her?” Ernest asked. George stooped to pick up the pebble. Something about the impersonal curiosity in Ernest’s voice had made him flush. And he was ashamed he had forced the boy to empty his pockets. He stood there, the pebble in his hand.
“If you want help, if you’re serious about finishing school, I’ll see what I can do.”
“If you want to…”
“If I want to! All right. I’ll get in touch with you after I see about my schedule. What’s your last name? Where do you live?”
“I’ll come here. If you’re out, I’ll go.”
“That won’t work.”
“I’m not going to make it,” Ernest said indifferently. “Don’t waste your time.”
“How often can you come?”
Ernest didn’t answer. He opened the door an inch and squinted one eye as he looked through the opening.
“Don’t you want to try?”
“I’m going.”
“My name is George Mecklin.”
“Yeah…I know….” He opened the door and stepped out into the garage.
As George watched him walk down the drive, from the living-room window, he realized there might have been a dozen things with his name on them Ernest could have found. He turned on a light, and the room grew pale, like a face drained of color. He was chilled and unsettled. Emma moved about above. Then the sound of her footsteps stopped. She was looking down at him from the top of the stairs.
“Did you leave the radio on?” she asked. He looked at the pebble that was still in his hand; it was sticky, like a gumdrop.
“I guess I did,” he answered. She continued to stare at him. She is considering what I said, George thought, because she knows I don’t leave radios on. He dropped the pebble behind the radiator.
“I don’t know what to wear tonight.”
He hurried to suggest a dress. He wasn’t up to a clothes list, itemized in a monotone to assure him she was being especially scrupulous not to reproach him for the state of her wardrobe.
“Not that one,” she said. “It’s shiny.”
“We’re only going to the movies,” he said. She left him riffling through the pages of a blue book. “Moby-Dick is an American classic because—” He dropped the book, repelled by the fat, self-admiring letters and their plump, anatomical capitals. That would be Mary Lou Whimple, whose constant smile of infant irony made him especially careful when he marked her papers. He had begun to hate her. One had to be fair to people one hated. He let the book fall back to the table.
It had grown damply dark. A dim light shone from the Palladino house, a near ship in a fogbound sea. The living room felt tacky. George listened to the country silence. The incidents of the day grouped themselves in his consciousness like a charade waiting to be titled—the blind Negro, the swimming dog, Walling’s red suède vest, Lila’s sly smiles of defeat, that moment when he had felt lucky, and Ernest.
Deliberately he turned his attention to money, a subject guaranteed to knock out all other contenders. They would have a little more from now on even though Emma was only working three days a week at Columbia where she was a junior librarian. The ostensible reason for quitting full-time work was that she would be able, one of these days, to return to school to complete the requirements for senior librarian. Actually they had both been worried about her continual fatigue. Emma had said she would certainly have to rest up if they ever wanted to have a child. They had decided they would somehow know when they were ready for that.
The car would cost more now, what with extra fuel and upkeep, but there would be a saving on the insurance. On a yellow piece of paper which George kept in a breast pocket, transferring it to whichever of his three jackets he was wearing, he had assessed their new financial situation the morning after they had moved out from the city. In small numbers, in straight columns, the dollar signs written in green ink, he had covered every eventuality. It had given him deep satisfaction, that piece of paper. It was a claim for order. Yes, the paper covered every eventuality, he thought now, but the money didn’t.
The furniture looked shipwrecked. They had planned to recover what was recoverable and heave out what was borrowed or inherited, but in the end they had loaded everything on the moving van. Emma had thrown a purple serape over the torn upholstery of the big chair. She had begun but not finished several pillows—the unseamed edges were lumpily stuffed into their own cases. She had borrowed an electric sander and taken the black finish off an end table but had given up on the round legs. Tacks and pins held their household together. In a corner stood a basket filled with scraps of material with which Emma planned to make a patchwork quilt. Two sections of an alto recorder—the third had disappeared during the move—lay on a Penguin booklet of Handel melodies, and a straw basket of the kind sold in Japanese shops was placed in the center of the table in front of the couch. The only object in it was an Aztec fetish, a particularly hideous one, George thought, Emma had picked up off the ground during a month’s vacation in Zacatecas. She often paused by the table and absently rolled the figure about with an indifferent finger. It was, she said, her only authentic souvenir. He glared at the little figure with its malignant stone grin directed at the ceiling. He had hoped it would be lost during the move.
His hands in his pockets, his shoulders hunched over, George pressed his forehead against the window. Why was everything so shabby? Between them both, they ought to have enough money to live simply, cleanly. Emma said they lived as though the depression had not ended. But wasn’t shabbiness a minor affliction? Was it really anything to think about?
Suddenly he pictured himself throwing out everything they possessed, sweeping out every corner of the little house, leaving only the washed, sweet air of the country in their four rooms. Then, frightened at the prospect of such nakedness—what would they be without their little wretched accretion of objects?—he ran upstairs.
Emma, bundled in her thick bathrobe, was lying in bed reading a paper Simenon. She glanced up briefly. George took a clean shirt from his bureau and removed the cardboard stiffener.
“Where did you find him?” she asked.
“He found me,” replied George. At once his discovery of Ernest, the fleshy feel of the door as he had pressed himself against it, came back to him, more vividly felt now than then.
“Where did he come from?”
“Peekskill, I suppose.”
“He walked here?”
“It’s only a mile or two.”
“How did he know you were a teacher?”
“People know everything in the country.”
“George, let’s go to Mexico for a year.”
“Sure.”
“You mean it’s out, then? Forever?”
“Someday we might.”
“Please. Tell me about that boy.”
“He dropped out of school. He was held back in his senior year.”
“Was he just hanging around outside when you got home? I didn’t see him before I went out.”
He sat on the bed and felt for her feet beneath the robe. They lay in his hands, cold and narrow and still.
“Are you worried?”
She pulled her feet back and sat up straight. The book fell to the floor. “It was so eerie today,” she said. “Everything so empty. I couldn’t get much done. The house scared me. I don’t know why. I don’t know…. I saw a crow and thought it was fall…everything so gray.” Her face was animated. He forgave her silently for her lack of grace with Ernest.
“Why didn’t you drop in on the Palladinos?”
“They don’t live there,” she answered. “They haunt the place. She never comes outside, and he goes off in the morning with his clothes all wrinkled as though he’d slept in them. She sets the children out on the doorstep like milk bottles, then shuts the door. The kids are so peculiar. They sit there on the step with little things in their hands, toys of some kind I suppose, and pass them back and forth to each other until she comes to let them in again.”
The day they had moved in, Mr. Palladino had walked slowly up the drive and asked with a certain deference if he could be of any help. He seemed uncomfortable; perhaps he had felt intrusive. George wondered at the bland smile, the curious air of uncertainty. He was dressed in a pale brown corduroy suit, and his shirt was faintly soiled. He had made an arrangement with George—continued, he said, from the former tenants—to use half the garage for his car, offering to pay a few dollars a month for the space. George had refused the money, and Palladino had nodded as though he had expected as much.
“He looked nice,” George said.
Emma snorted. “Nice! An actor…A ladies’ man.”
“How do you know what he is?”
“Minnie Devlin told me,” she said.
“Minnie Devlin sneers at rain…. She laughs people to death.”
“She wasn’t sneering. Anyhow, just look at his face. An actor’s face, ripe and rotten.”
He looked at her in surprise. “What’s the matter with you?” he asked.
She laughed irritably. “I don’t like pretty men.”
Minnie had found the house for the Mecklins. Emma had known her briefly in Chicago. Just out of college, she had attached herself tenuously to an amateur theatrical group Minnie was organizing. Shortly after Emma left for New York, Minnie wrote that she had dropped the theater and taken up marriage again. A year later Emma had received a card announcing the birth of Trevor, ten pounds. “Shows you what peasant stock can bring up” Minnie had written on it somewhat prematurely. Last year she had turned up in New York. Chicago wasn’t big enough for Charlie Devlin. The Mecklins hadn’t met him yet. He was frequently out of town hunting down people for his radio program, “Happy People.” Minnie said she was starting a talent agency. George found her tedious and vicious, but Emma said she was funny. When she had telephoned about the little house in the country, George had agreed, if reluctantly, that it was a good thing Emma had kept up with her. Next weekend they were finally going to meet Charlie. The Devlins were giving a party on Saturday.
Dutch gin and debts.
“What are you scowling at?”
George started guiltily. But if Mrs. Palladino was always home, how had Ernest gotten in, he was wondering? He got to his feet abruptly, pushed a chair back into a corner and pulled the shade down on the window which faced the Palladino house.
“You take her seriously,” Emma said. “She’s just a clown.”
“What did you do all day?” he asked, thinking of Palladino, his domestic pocket picked by Ernest, his character anatomized by funny Minnie.
“I filed the spices. They were so dirty, the tops of the cans were still smeared with city grease.”
“You filed them?”
“Alphabetically,” she said. He laughed. She looked at him coldly. He supposed she had meant to illustrate the day’s boredom. “I found this thing in the orchard,” she said and, slipping her hand into the pocket of her robe, drew out a red water pistol, its muzzle broken. “I mean! That’s some day! Isn’t it?”
“It takes time. We’ve lived in the city too long. Wait till spring comes.”
“While I was in the orchard,” Emma continued, “an old man jumped up behind me.”
Were they being invaded? George asked himself.
“He must have been watching me for a long time. When I turned around there he was, hanging on to a tree branch and grinning.”
“Maybe we’d better get a dog.”
“He was feeble,” she said. “He muttered something. I nodded, and he disappeared. Maybe I imagined him!” She laughed excitedly, and he turned from the closet door to look at her. She looked much as she had when he had met her eight years ago, retaining her thin pale young girl’s quality, her head outlined as with a charcoal pencil by a line of fine black hair which she wore in a loose tie in the back. Sometimes when she impatiently tied a string around her hair and wore a cotton skirt and sneakers, she reminded him of one of those wan girls who drift around the periphery of the bohemian world of any city, suffering so intensely yet silently from displacement that they seem heroic.
She was quite different when she dressed for work or an evening out: neat, self-contained, remote, sitting apart from him with her bony delicate ankles placed side by side on the floor.
“You’re gaining weight,” she said. He had been dressing slowly, thinking about her, relieved she had apparently forgotten about Ernest. Ernest who? He looked into the mirror Emma had nailed to the wall. It cut off his head unless he stooped. It was true—he had always been stocky, but now his belly protruded slightly. He didn’t want to be one of those fair fleshy men. He sighed heavily. Never as a young man had he imagined himself at thirty-four. In six years he would be forty. He buttoned his shirt hastily.
“How’s Lila?”
“All right.” There was no point in telling her that Lila had lost her job. Her face guarded, she would try to discover how much money George intended to give his sister.
“I asked her up next weekend. You don’t mind, do you?”
“Why should I? If she could board Claude, I’d be more enthusiastic.”
“He’s not so bad.”
“What do you mean! He’s certifiable. Or else he does it on purpose. Either way…” She began to dress, and for a while they were silent, moving around each other familiarly.
Then they were dressed and facing each other at the bedroom door, he in his dark suit, she in her black dress. We still have time for everything, he thought.
The Palladino house was dark as they drove by it.
“All asleep,” he said.
“All dead,” Emma said.
They drove along Abraham’s Lane toward the Peekskill turnpike. “I didn’t like that boy,” she said.
“You don’t know him.”
“Do you? I don’t understand how he got there…or why.”
“No, I don’t know him. How can I judge him?”
“Huff, huff!” she blew out her cheeks. “Some of us are fair and some of us are rats!”
A gust of wind scattered leaves in front of the car’s headlights. “Listen!” George said. In the wake of the wind he caught once again the odor of earth.
They stopped at a restaurant on the highway. It was shaped like a windmill, and several cars were drawn up around it. As they walked toward the entrance they saw, in the yellow strip of light from a window, a child’s doll, its lumpy arms upraised, its glass eyes shining, half buried in the gravel of the parking area. “Help!” squeaked Emma. “The Arabs have left me here to die!” George laughed, and something serious floated out of his mind; he kissed his wife’s girlish neck.
Behind their cardboard menus their glances raced from entree to price. The waitress stood next to their table; her red arms bulged at the sleeve endings of her uniform, as though she were slowly growing out of it. The plastic mats, the hurricane lamp, the soiled pretentious menu, the waitress with her expression of patience in a hurry, and the humble, clotted ketchup dispenser were the elements of a set piece to which they returned again and again. How could he have told of their thousand evenings of the same entertainments without reference to these tangible manifestations of tedium and habit?
Amid the impersonal debris of the outside world, Emma and George grew personal. Sleazy restaurants, bloated cars, the ravaged countryside bleeding into the new highways, the plug-ugliness of modern life gave their being together a moral character. On their evenings out they joined one another: commiserating about what didn’t really matter to them.
Later, after the movie, they recalled the films they had liked as children. Then they left the main highway and turned off onto the blacktop road. George reached over and touched her, and in the dim light from the dashboard he saw his pink hand cupping her narrow knee. Suddenly he felt water on his face and turning in surprise saw that Emma was laughing silently, the water pistol in her hand. He wiped his face with the back of his hand. Her laughter burst out.
“Why did you do that?”
“I thought you’d laugh.”
“Why did you?”
“Oh, for God’s sake!”
“What am I supposed to do now?”
“Dry yourself…. I’m sorry, but it’s all over your face.”
“You put it there.”
She took a Kleenex from her purse and roughly wiped his cheek.
“I wasn’t thinking,” she said. “I loaded it up before we left. It doesn’t really work very well.”
“You must have been thinking then.”
“Of nothing…nothing.”
“It startled me.”
“I can see that.”
“It was the last thing I expected.”
“I didn’t even know what I was going to do with it,” she said; then, impatiently, “The hell with it. I’m sorry.”
“All right. I’m sorry too, that I got angry.”
“Were you?” she asked. “Angry?”
By then they had reached the driveway. Ahead of them was their house, the living room glaring with light.
“Did we leave the lights on?”
“I don’t remember,” George said, remembering clearly that he had turned them off. “We really need curtains.”
He preceded her through the dark kitchen and into the living room. Ernest lay on his back on the sofa asleep. There was a note on his chest; a corner of the paper had been stuffed into a buttonhole of his shirt. “My father locked me out,” George read. “I’ll go early. Thanks.”
George stared down at him. For a moment it seemed to him the boy was dead, marked like an unidentified corpse of a disaster. Then he heard him breathing. His presence, his breath and weight and odor filled up the room. The sneaker-shod feet were crossed fastidiously and protectively. Astonished, George felt himself close to tears.
Then Emma pressed the water pistol into his hand.
“You might need this,” she said grimly. George reached for the light switch. Emma was standing on the stairs staring straight up. She waited. George went by her and took a blanket from a closet in the spare room. Then he went back down, passing Emma again on his way, and covered Ernest with the blanket.
She didn’t speak until they were lying side by side in their bed. “Now what?” she asked, and moved away from him. He had the impression she was propping herself up on the edge of the bed with one hand on the floor. He drew a deep breath and released it slowly. He didn’t know what next.
Wasn’t Ernest appealing to him for salvation? He smiled in the dark at his presumption. He shifted his position as quietly as he could, as though there were a hostile presence in the room and his only safety lay in silence.
In the thick dark—there was no moon tonight—he opened his eyes wide. Where was the little boy now? Asleep in his helmet? Was the red-headed woman watching him from a doorway? And the blind man? Why did he keep on living? Did the blindness itself give him a purpose?
“George?” whispered Emma.
He turned away from her, shaping and hardening his purpose. He heard Ernest move restlessly in his sleep below. He closed his own eyes.