Collected Stories of Carson McCullers (53 page)

"Shut your trap," F. Jasmine said. "Quit always being so evil-minded." She got up from the table, but she did not know where to go. "You didn't say anything about Willis Rhodes. Did he have a mashed thumb or a coat or something?"

"Lord!" said Berenice, and her voice was so sudden and shocked that F. Jasmine turned and went back to the table. "Now that is a story would make the hair rise on your head. You mean to say I never told you about what happened with me and Willis Rhodes?"

"No," F. Jasmine said. Willis Rhodes was the last and the worst of the four husbands, and he was so terrible that Berenice had had to call the Law on him. "What?"

"Well, imagine this!" said Berenice. "Imagine a cold bitter January night. And me laying all by myself in the big parlor bed. Alone in the house, because everybody else had gone for the Saturday night to Forks Falls. Me, mind you, who hates to sleep in a empty old bed all by myself and is nervous in a house alone. Past twelve o'clock on this cold bitter January night. Can you remember wintertime, John Henry?"

John Henry nodded.

"Now imagine this!" said Berenice again. She had begun stacking the dishes so that three dirty plates were piled before her on the table. Her dark eye circled around the table, roping in F. Jasmine and John Henry as her audience. F. Jasmine leaned forward, her mouth open and her hands holding the table edge. John Henry shivered down in his chair and he watched Berenice through his glasses without batting his eyes. Berenice had started in a low and creepy voice, then suddenly she stopped and sat there looking at the two of them.

"So what?" F. Jasmine urged, leaning closer across the table. "What happened?"

But Berenice did not speak. She looked from one of them to the other, and shook her head slowly. Then when she spoke again her voice was completely changed, and she said: "Why, I wish you would look yonder. I wish you would look."

F. Jasmine glanced quickly behind her, but there was only the stove, the wall, the empty stair.

"What?" she asked. "What happened?"

"I wish you would look," Berenice repeated. "Them two little pitchers and them four big ears." She got up suddenly from the table. "Come on, less wash the dishes. Then we going to make some cup cakes to take tomorrow on the trip."

There was nothing F. Jasmine could do to show Berenice how she felt. After a long time, when the table before her was already cleared and Berenice stood washing dishes at the sink, she only said:

"If it's anything I mortally despise it's a person who starts out to tell something and works up people's interest and then stops."

"I admit it," said Berenice. "And I am sorry. But it was just one of them things I suddenly realize I couldn't tell you and John Henry."

John Henry was skipping and scuttling back and forth across the kitchen, from the stairway to the back porch door. "Cup cakes!" he sang. "Cup cakes! Cup cakes!"

"You could have sent him out of the room," F. Jasmine said. "And told me. But don't think I care. I don't care a particle what happened. I just wish Willis Rhodes had come in about that time and slit your throat."

"That is a ugly way to talk," said Berenice. "Especially since I got a surprise for you. Go out on the back porch and look in the wicker basket covered with a newspaper."

F. Jasmine got up, but grudgingly, and she walked in a crippled way to the back porch. Then she stood in the doorway holding the pink organdie dress. Contrary to all that Berenice had maintained, the collar was pleated with tiny little pleats, as it was meant to be. She must have done it before dinner when F. Jasmine was upstairs.

"Well, this is mighty nice of you," she said. "I appreciate it."

She would have liked for her expression to be split into two parts, so that one eye stared at Berenice in an accusing way, and the other eye thanked her with a grateful look. But the human face does not divide like this, and the two expressions canceled out each other.

"Cheer up," said Berenice. "Who can tell what will happen? You might dress up in that fresh pink dress tomorrow and meet the cutest little white boy in Winter Hill you ever seen. It's just on such trips as these that you run into beaus."

"But that's not what I'm talking about," F. Jasmine said. Then, after a while, still leaning against the doorway, she added: "Somehow we got off on the wrong kind of conversation."

The twilight was white, and it lasted for a long while. Time in August could be divided into four parts: morning, afternoon, twilight, and dark. At twilight the sky became a curious blue-green which soon faded to white. The air was soft gray, and the arbor and trees were slowly darkening. It was the hour when sparrows gathered and whirled above the rooftops of the town, and when in the darkened elms along the street there was the August sound of the cicadas. Noises at twilight had a blurred sound, and they lingered: the slam of a screen door down the street, voices of children, the whir of a lawnmower from a yard somewhere. F. Jasmine brought in the evening newspaper, and dark was coming in the kitchen. The corners in the room at first were dark, then the drawings on the wall faded. The three of them watched the dark come on in silence.

"The army is now in Paris."

"That's good."

They were quiet awhile and then F. Jasmine said: "I have a lot of things to do. I ought to start out now."

But although she stood ready in the doorway, she did not go. On this last evening, the last time with the three of them together in the kitchen, she felt there was some final thing she ought to say or do before she went away. For many months she had been ready to leave this kitchen, never to return again; but now that the time had come, she stood there with her head and shoulder leaning against the door jamb, somehow unready. It was the darkening hour when the remarks they made had a sad and beautiful sound, although there would be nothing sad or beautiful about the meanings of the words.

F. Jasmine said quietly: "I intend to take two baths tonight. One long soaking bath and scrub with a brush. I'm going to try to scrape this brown crust off my elbows. Then let out the dirty water and take a second bath."

"That's a good idea," said Berenice. "I will be glad to see you clean."

"I will take another bath," John Henry said. His voice was thin and sad; she could not see him in the darkening room, since he stood in the corner by the stove. At seven Berenice had bathed him and dressed him in his shorts again. She heard him shuffle carefully across the room, for after the bath he had put on Berenice's hat and was trying to walk in Berenice's high-heeled shoes. Again he asked a question which by itself meant nothing. "Why?" he asked.

"Why what, Baby?" said Berenice.

He did not answer, and it was F. Jasmine who finally said: "Why is it against the law to change your name?"

Berenice sat in a chair against the pale white light of the window. She held the newspaper open before her, and her head was twisted down and to one side as she strained to see what was printed there. When F. Jasmine spoke, she folded the paper and put it away on the table.

"You can figure that out," she said. "Just because. Think of the confusion."

"I don't see why," F. Jasmine said.

"What is that on your neck?" said Berenice. "I thought it was a head you carried on that neck. Just think. Suppose 1 would suddenly up and call myself Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt. And you would begin naming yourself Joe Louis. And John Henry would try to pass off as Henry Ford. Now what kind of confusion do you think that would cause?"

"Don't talk childish," F. Jasmine said. "That is not the kind of changing I mean. I mean from a name that doesn't suit you to a name you prefer. Like I changed from Frankie to F. Jasmine."

"But still it would be a confusion," Berenice insisted. "Suppose we all suddenly change to entirely different names. Nobody would ever know who anybody was talking about. The whole world would go crazy."

"I don't see—"

"Because things accumulate around your name," said Berenice. "You have a name and one thing after another happens to you, and you behave in various ways and do things, so that soon the name begins to have a meaning. Things have accumulated around the name. If it is bad and you have a bad reputation, then you just can't jump out of your name and escape like that. And if it is good and you have a good reputation, then you should be content and satisfied."

"But what had accumulated around my old name?" F. Jasmine asked. Then, when Berenice did not reply at once, F. Jasmine answered her own question. "Nothing! See? My name just didn't mean anything."

"Well, that's not exactly so," said Berenice. "People think of Frankie Addams and it brings to the mind that Frankie is finished with the B section of the seventh grade. And Frankie found the golden egg at the Baptist Easter Hunt. And Frankie lives on Grove Street and—"

"But those things are nothing," F. Jasmine said. "See? They're not worth while. Nothing ever happened to me."

"But it will," said Berenice. "Things will happen."

"What?" F. Jasmine asked.

Berenice sighed and reached for the Chesterfield package inside her bosom. "You pin me down like that and I can't tell you truthfully. If I could I would be a wizard. I wouldn't be sitting here in this kitchen right now, but making a fine living on Wall Street as a wizard. All I can say is that things will happen. Just what, I don't know."

"By the way," F. Jasmine said after a while. "I thought I would go around to your house and see Big Mama. I don't believe in those fortunes, or anything like that, but I thought I might as well."

"Suit yourself. However, I don't think it is necessary."

"I suppose I ought to leave now," F. Jasmine said.

But still she waited in the darkening door and did not go away. The sounds of the summer twilight crossed within the silence of the kitchen. Mr. Schwarzenbaum had finished tuning the piano, and for the past quarter of an hour he had been playing little pieces. He played music memorized by note, and he was a nervous spry old man who reminded F. Jasmine of a silver spider. His music was spry and stiff also, and he played faint jerking waltzes and nervous lullabies. Farther down the block a solemn radio announced something they could not hear. In the O'Neils' back yard, next door, children were calling and swatting a ball. The sounds of evening canceled out each other, and they were faded in the darkening twilight air. The kitchen itself was very quiet.

"Listen," F. Jasmine said. "What I've been trying to say is this. Doesn't it strike you as strange that I am I, and you are you? I am F. Jasmine Addams. And you are Berenice Sadie Brown. And we can look at each other, and touch each other, and stay together year in and year out in the same room. Yet always I am I, and you are you. And I can't ever be anything else but me, and you can't ever be anything else but you. Have you ever thought of that? And does it seem to you strange?"

Berenice had been rocking slighdy in the chair. She was not sitting in a rocking chair, but she had been tilting back in the straight chair, then letting the front legs hit the floor with little taps, her dark stiff hand held to the table edge for balance. She stopped rocking herself when F. Jasmine spoke. And finally she said: "I have thought of it occasionally."

It was the hour when the shapes in the kitchen darkened and voices bloomed. They spoke sofdy and their voices bloomed like flowers—if sounds can be like flowers and voices bloom. F. Jasmine stood with her hands clasped behind her head, facing the darkening room. She had the feeling that unknown words were in her throat, and she was ready to speak them. Strange words were flowering in her throat and now was the time for her to name them.

"This," she said. "I see a green tree. And to me it is green. And you would call the tree green also. And we would agree on this. But is the color you see as green the same color I see as green? Or say we both call a color black. But how do we know that what you see as black is the same color I sec as black?"

Berenice said after a moment: "Those things we just cannot prove."

F. Jasmine scraped her head against the door, and put her hand up Co her throat. Her voice shattered and died. "That's not what I meant to say, anyway."

The smoke of Berenice's cigarette lay bitter and warm and stagnant in the room. John Henry shufHed in the high-heeled shoes from the stove to the table and back again. A rat ratded behind the wall.

"This is what I mean," F. Jasmine said. "You are walking down a street and you meet somebody. Anybody. And you look at each other. And you are you. And he is him. Yet when you look at each other, the eyes make a connection. Then you go off one way. And he goes off another way. You go off into different parts of town, and maybe you never see each other again. Not in your whole life. Do you see what I mean?"

"Not exactly," said Berenice.

"I'm talking about this town," F. Jasmine said in a higher voice. "There are all these people here I don't even know by sight or name. And we pass alongside each other and don't have any connection. And they don't know me and I don't know them. And now I'm leaving town and there are all these people I will never know."

"But who do you want to know?" asked Berenice.

F. Jasmine answered: "Everybody. In the world. Everybody in the world."

"Why, I wish you would listen to that," said Berenice. "How about people like Willis Rhodes? How about them Germans? Them Japanese?"

F. Jasmine knocked her head against the door jamb and looked up at the dark ceiling. Her voice broke, and again she said: "That's not what I mean. That's not what I'm talking about."

"Well, what
is
you talking about?" asked Berenice.

F. Jasmine shook her head, almost as though she did not know. Her heart was dark and silent, and from her heart the unknown words flowered and bloomed and she waited to name them. From next door there was the evening sound of children's baseball and the long call: Batteruup! Batteruup! Then the hollow pock of a ball and the clatter of a thrown bat and running footsteps and wild voices. The window was a rectangle of pale clear light and a child ran across the yard and under the dark arbor after the ball. The child was quick as a shadow and F. Jasmine did not see his face—his white shirttails flapped loose behind him like queer wings. Beyond the window the twilight was lasting and pale and still.