CHARACTER STUDY
I have read this story at least a dozen times, yet its ultimate revelations raise the hairs on the back of my neck every time. It ineluctably reminds me that a great many murders have little to do with literal dying—a fact which makes them only the more horrible. The resounding success of such novels as The Friendly Persuasion has done a disservice to this clear-eyed and clear-minded writer; far too many readers connect the name Jessamyn West with gentle Quaker folks thee-ing and thou-ing amid the bright eternal springtime years of this nation’s infancy. But “Night Piece for Julia,” which probes the depths of contemporary human experience, shows the true scope of this remarkable writer’s talent. - J.G.
To be alone in the night, to be cold, to be homeless, fleeing, perhaps: Julia had always feared these things.
Where was she? She couldn’t be sure at first. Just outside Bentonville, perhaps. It was there she tried walking with her shoes off. Her pumps had cut into her heels until they were bleeding. But the icy gravel of the unpaved road hurt her feet more than the shoes. She stood still for a while without courage either to take another step forward or to force her cut feet back into her shoes. I always heard coldness numbed, she thought, but it doesn’t; it hurts, too, and it makes the other hurt more. She could have walked in the half-frozen slush at the side of the road, but she still had a concern for her appearance that would not let her splash, stocking-footed, through the mud. Suddenly, almost spasmodically, she shoved her feet down into the shoes. The pain twisted her face. “I will think of them as outside myself,” she said, “as if they were two animals, pets of mine that suffer.” She laughed a little hysterically. My dogs, she thought. Why, other people have played this game. That’s what soldiers say, and policemen, when they think they can’t take another step. They say, “My dogs hurt,” and walk right on. She looked down at her narrow feet in the rain-soaked, round-toed suede pumps, her ankles and insteps red through the gauzy stockings. “Poor dogs, hundschen,” she said, “it is almost night. We’ll rest soon.”
She managed a few short stiff steps, then, with teeth grating, she swung into an approximation of her usual stride. The rain was turning to sleet, but the wind had veered so it was no longer in her face. She was so cold she could not tell whether the clothes under her coat were wet or not. She got her hand out of her glove and put it inside her coat, but it was so numb she couldn’t tell wet from dry. Well, she thought, if I can’t tell whether I’m wet or dry, what difference does it make?
It had been so dark all afternoon that the added darkness of nightfall was scarcely noticed. It only seemed to her that she could see less clearly than she had, as if her sight were tiring, too. She rubbed the back of her wet glove across her wet face, but still the sodden corn shocks that lined the road were gray and indistinct. In her effort to concentrate on something outside herself, she saw a bird perched on the snake fence beside the road. She was almost as surprised as if it had been a child. “What are you doing out in weather like this?” she said.
She thought she’d been through the town before, but always quickly, in an auto. Two or three sentences would be said, and then, while their dust still lingered in the single block of stores that made up the town, they would have passed beyond it, onto the road between the cornfields. But walking, limping, whipped (words she had no knowledge of before now had meaning so intense she thought their look alone would always in the future hurt her) by the wind-driven sleet, she measured out the short distance by a scale that added infinity to them. She limped from sign to sign, from gas station to gas station. Without these means of marking her progress she could never have gone on. “I will just walk to the next station,” she would say, and when she had reached it, she would hobble on to one more. The road was empty of cars, the service stations tight shut, their glass opaque with condensed moisture. Their swinging signs rattled in the wind with a sound of chains.
By the time she reached the town it was full night. Lights were on in most of the stores and houses. She skirted the main highway, taking a back street that paralleled it through town. She passed three or four shops, all closed; a dry-cleaning plant, a plumber’s, a secondhand furniture store. The furniture store had one window set up as a bedroom, with a bird’s-eye maple dresser, dressing table, and bed of a kind fashionable in the early nineteen hundreds. She leaned against the window, where she was somewhat protected from the sleet, and looked at the bed. It had a cheap factory-made patchwork quilt on it and two pillows in lavender slips. It looked like heaven to Julia, a bed, something she had taken for granted every night of her life before.
I’ll have to ask someplace, she thought. I can’t go on in this cold. I’ll have to risk it. I’ll die if I don’t. She held her hands against the glass. The yellow light behind it made it look warm, but to her icy hands it was only an extension of ice.
She saw herself in the mirror of the dressing table and instinctively tried to tidy herself. Her face looked as hard and white as a stone, like something already frozen. In the mirror her gray eyes were black, her wet yellow hair gray. Her fingers were almost too numb to push the fallen strands of her hair back under her dark cap. She got her lipstick out of her pocket and tried to put lips onto the blue scar the cold had made of her mouth, but her fingers were too stiff for that precise work. She thought she looked sick and water-soaked, but still neat. Now that she was ready to go on, she became aware again of her heels, throbbing with a pulse of pain that seemed to beat even in her eyes.
I’ll stop at the first place, she thought. Everyone has to sleep. No one would refuse me on a night like this. She walked on painfully, unable to joke any longer about her feet. The sleet bit into her face like fire.
She went up the steps of the first house where she saw a woman behind the undrawn blinds. From the street she had looked motherly, a plump, aproned woman with gray hair. She came to the door at once when Julia knocked.
“Well?” she asked in a harsh accusing voice.
“I haven’t any money,” Julia said. “I’m sick. I’ve been walking all afternoon. Will you let me have a bed for the night?”
“I’ll call the authorities,” the woman said. “There’s a place for girls like you.” She turned as if to go to a phone.
“No, no,” Julia cried. “I won’t bother you. I’ll get to where I was going. Thank you.”
The woman shut the door before she could turn around. “I didn’t think she would,” Julia said to console herself. “I didn’t really expect it.”
She got out of town as she had come into it, only more painfully, with more frequent stops. I always heard it was easy to freeze to death, she thought. She was shuddering all over, uncontrollably, so that the shuddering racked and hurt her. All of her body ached, as her hand had ached when, as a child, she had held a piece of ice as long as she could for a dare. “If there were only a snowbank, a bed of white snow where I could lie down and die. I would rest myself in it. I would pull it over me. I would press my cheek to it.” But with this wet, ice-splintered ground, she would have to go on until she fell.
She was about to climb the curve of a small stone bridge when she saw the flicker of a red light beneath it, a fire, a windbreak, something to protect her from the sleet. She stumbled off the road and tried to run down the incline toward the fire. It was small, but really burning. She cupped her numb hands over it. Not until some of the heat had penetrated her skin did she look up, see the face of the man who sat with his back braced against the opposite side of the culvert.
She would have screamed, but a tide of slow cold horror rose in her throat, choking her.
Julia stretched her legs out along the warm smooth sheets and opened her eyes, saw the silver lights on the green ruffled curtains, the acacia spilling over the round bowl. “You almost overdid it tonight,” she told herself. “You almost screamed then.” She put her warm hand on the soft satin over her heart. It was jarred by her heartbeat. She had almost overdone it, but it had worked again.
Remembering that imagined suffering, that formless face, she was able to turn, once again, toward her husband, lying beside her in the warm sweet-smelling bed.
“So,” he said in the tone of one who has been waiting. When he moved his hands slowly over her shallow breasts, she scarcely winced.