Departure (15 page)

“I like you,” she said to him. “I do wish I had met you when you first came.”

“Would it make much difference?”

“Of course it would,” she said. “In a world as rotten and as beautiful as this one, you are a rare, good person.”

“How do you know?”

“What did you do in the war?” she asked him.

“I was an infantryman.”

“And it didn't affect you, and you came back to Herman Melville. Now I've hurt you.”

“You haven't hurt me,” he said, enormously contained.

“Only I wish I could have seen what you saw and been through what you were through.”

“Why?”

“You don't know why, do you?” she asked him curiously.

“Couldn't we get away from here?” he wanted to know. “Couldn't I buy you a beer and couldn't we sit down and talk?”

“Why?” she smiled.

“This is not getting us anywhere, is it?” Carrol said. “I have my ticket on the nine o'clock plane in the morning. I would like to spend an hour with you.”

“That's flattering.”

“No—you know what I mean to say.”

“I don't, really, but I'll see you at the Andrewses' later, won't I?”

“Will you be there?”

“Of course I will. I live there.”

“You live there?”

“I'm the professor's adopted daughter—didn't you know?”

She said it seriously, yet he took it as an awkward jest, and reinforced himself, as he always had, with the failings of others. She was not as bright as he had thought, and having already projected, in an indulgent and inward way, as he had with so many other women—projected but never consummated—a situation in which he followed his fancy, fell completely in love, married, lived his life, he found it neither attractive nor hopeful. And as if she had read his mind, she looked at him almost pityingly before she turned away.

He wanted to speak to her again, but did not have a chance to until much later. Instead, his eyes followed her, wherever she was in the room, picking her up again and again and sometimes meeting her eyes and sometimes finding her smiling at him. Only a part of his mind was in the conversations he fell into here and there. The most of him was with her now in a warm, petulant desire; and while he talked about literature, campus gossip, and the war too, he was erecting in his mind the mechanism whereby he might find time alone with her that evening to at least have a stab at making love. He forced the substitution of a night with her for that endless span which a man had to consider once he admitted to himself that he could love a woman and that perhaps she could love him. Yet he couldn't help wondering what that remark about being the adopted daughter of Andrews meant, feeling at the same time a wave of resentment against Andrews for the fact that she lived with him. His own casualness in terms of any man-woman relationship had long ago convinced him that cohabitation inevitably followed proximity, and the possibility of some sordid triangle within Andrews' home sickened him. More curiously than before, he studied Andrews, a matter-of-fact academic type, in his late thirties, sandy-haired, spectacled, civilized to the high impotence of those few cloistered and cultured beings America boasts, and vegetating quietly in a Middle Western university.

At about eleven o'clock, when the reception showed signs of breaking up, Carrol sought out Lucy Reed and reminded her. “I have my car outside,” she said, “and if you can manage to slip away, I'll take you home with me—if you want to come?”

“To Andrews' place?”

“Yes. Won't you come? After two hours of talking to fifty people, I should imagine you'd like to sit down and talk with two or three.”

“Or one,” said Carrol.

She shook her head, and Carrol said, all right, he'd find some way to get out.

“The car is a little, beat-up Ford coupe,” she said. “I left it at the corner under the lamp post before the convocation, and it's probably still there.”

“In ten minutes,” Carrol said optimistically.

He saw no reason to be secretive about it, and he told Eve Andrews that Lucy was driving him over to their place. “All right,” she said. “It's nice that you can come.” Then he made his excuses, said his good-bys, and got out into the cool spring air. That finished it, and he was glad to be away. It had taken something to get out of there alone, and they would talk about it, but he didn't much care. He found the car, with Lucy already in it, and there was almost a note of casual old acquaintanceship in the way they nodded at each other. She drove to the Andrewses' place in a roundabout route that took them past the edge of an old limestone quarry, filled with a placid pool of water that shimmered gently in the fine moonlight. Feeling that he was expected to kiss her, Carrol tried; she didn't resist, and then he couldn't do anything more than sit beside her lonely and quiet and disturbed until they reached the Andrewses', thinking of what she would say if he blundered out that he loved her, even though he knew nothing more about her or who she was or where she came from or where she thought she was going.

At the Andrewses', aside from the professor and his wife, there was just an amiable young instructor from the law school. There was a good fire in the old-fashioned living room, and they all sat in front of it, drinking bourbon and soda, and talking that kind of literary talk Carrol loved better than anything else. When Carrol remarked, “I'm afraid I took the edge off the reception, bolting out like that,” Andrews observed that the host and hostess were probably everlastingly indebted to him for ending it so early. They made no further reference to his impending departure, but Carrol was conscious by now of their liking for him, a strange liking that was tinged, at least on the part of Eve Andrews, with a curiosity he hardly understood. If it had not been for the very naturalness and warmth of this late evening gathering, he might have sensed something terrible and impending; but how could he when the conversation flowed so normally and well?

They talked about the ten best tales that men had written, and then, enthralled, as people whose work is literature will be, by the process of storytelling and storymaking, they traced the lines of development through many lands and cultures. That kind of talk, Carrol reflected, can be in this world a sort of wine, gentle and civilized, heart-warming and soul-comforting, reclaiming as it does what man has achieved and not what he has destroyed. At first Carrol had to fight down a sort of childish resentment against the young law school instructor, but everything he said and did made it self-evident that he was no more than a good friend to Lucy Reed, while everything Lucy Reed did and said made it plainly apparent to Carrol, if not to everyone else there, that he was a special quality with her. With no self-consciousness, innocently as a small girl, she gave her heart to him, and he would have had to be insensitive indeed not to feel it and respond to it. Withal, she was so easily a part of the group that Carrol found himself completely unable to fathom what relationship she bore to the others.

That they loved her was obvious, but the quality and nature of the love only puzzled Carrol. He habitually made the mistake of so many intellectuals, that of oversimplifying people whom he considered of lesser capacity, and he found himself revising his estimate of Professor Andrews and his wife—and his estimate of Lucy Reed too. Watching her pale, clean-cut, lovely face in the shadows of the firelight, he became more and more convinced that the seemingly aimless flow of events had paused meaningfully as it brought them together, and as the early morning began, he no longer denied to himself that he was completely and wonderfully in love.

During the decade past, he would have strongly and reasonably denied the spirituality of love, the selflessness and wonder of it, and now he accepted it wholly and felt as so many others have felt, that he suddenly was different from and beyond all other human beings. The imminence of age, which only lately had come to prey upon him and bedevil him, turned into a flower of youth, and the youthfulness became a bond between them. His whole future suddenly had turned and fixed upon a woman, and between fragments of conversation, he made plans. He would go to New York, even as he was scheduled to, but in a week at the most he would be back here. He might live and work here for a while; the place would not only be bearable, but charming. After all, he told himself, the attitude which led him to reject this place was a manufactured sophistication; had he not told himself a hundred times, during the war, that any corner of America could be wonderful?

That way, his thoughts roved along, and suddenly it was past one in the morning. Lucy Reed rose and said abruptly:

“I'm very tired. Will you excuse me?”

Carrol got up and took her warm hand in his. “Good night,” she said. She left then and Carrol heard her going upstairs. The evening was over now, and Eve Andrews, catching his eye, said, “I'll drive you home whenever you're ready to go, Brighton.”

“What about a nightcap?” the professor asked. “One more small one.”

The law school instructor stretched his arms and yawned, and at that moment, while Eve Andrews emptied an ash tray into a silent butler, Carrol heard the noise—a harsh grating human noise. Someone was moaning or calling aloud in pain, he thought, but no one else appeared to notice it. The noise came again, and he started and demanded:

“Didn't you hear it? What was that?”

“Lucy,” Eve Andrews said shortly. Suddenly the professor and the law school instructor were contemplatively silent, absorbed in their drinks.

After a long moment, Carrol said, “What do you mean, Lucy?”

“She's ill. She has difficulty keeping anything on her stomach.”

“She doesn't look sick,” Carrol said. “What is it—an ulcer?”

“It's worse than an ulcer,” Eve Andrews said quietly. “It's a kind of cancer called ‘Hodgkin's disease.'”

“Is it bad?”

The professor asked shortly, almost angrily, “How bad can cancer be?”

Driving Carrol back to the Grand Union, where he had boarded during his stay at the University, Eve Andrews was strangely unresponsive to Carrol's horror. “It happens,” she said, almost coldly. “And her family couldn't face it. They couldn't deal with it. Every night the girl went to bed with mortal fear that she wouldn't wake in the morning. She's better since she came to live with us.”

“When—” Carrol began.

“Six months ago was the date they set.”

“But she doesn't look sick or act sick.”

“That's right.”

“And isn't there anything to hope for?” Carrol pleaded.

“A miracle—if you believe in them.”

“No cure, no method …?”

“No cure, that's right.”

“No, it can't be,” Carrol said. “Not that beautiful, wonderful girl. It can't be.”

Eve Andrews shrugged, and Carrol turned on her fiercely and demanded, “How in hell can you be so cold about it?”

“Do you think I'm cold about it?” she said tiredly. “I grew up with Lucy. I'm a year older than she. We played together as kids and then we had dates together. Now we try to make the little bit left normal and worthwhile. You don't want to face that, do you? Were you falling in love with her before you found this out?”

When he didn't answer, she went on. “What have you ever faced? You saw no death in the war, did you? You don't live in a world where people are born and where they die.”

“That's a hell of a thing to say.”

“What do you want me to say? Did you see her eyes tonight? Suppose you had a day or three days or three weeks to live? There's a good deal of nonsense talked about love, but there's something else about love too—or maybe you don't know?”

They had drawn up before the Grand Union now, and for a minute or two, they sat there in silence. Then Eve Andrews said, “Good night, Brighton.”

“Good night,” Carrol said.

Carrol spent a sleepless night. It was not until sunrise that he understood how foolish a quixotic action can be. It was not until sunrise that he could blend peace and pity with a calm understanding that grown men did not fall in love in that fashion. He told himself that he would always remember Lucy Reed with pity and affection; and he also told himself that the quick image he had conceived the night before of marrying a girl in such a position was hardly sensible and beneficial surely to neither.

A few hours later he was boarding his plane, reflecting, as he so often did, on the virtues of a civilized man in a basically uncivilized world.

Dumb Swede

T
OM
A
NDERSON HAD
not been born in the old country, but growing up on the farm among Swedish and Norwegian folk gave him a slight accent that for some reason persisted all his life. He was not very quick with his tongue or his thoughts and perhaps that was what preserved the accent. Sometimes, also, he thought that this same slowness accounted for the fact that he never learned to read or write; while it was true that he had no schooling, ever, again and again he met people without schooling who had learned to read. He never learned, just as he never learned to remove the quality from his speech that marked him as a Swede.

Certainly, he had been around enough. He was eleven years old when he left the farm to work at the mill, and there he spent three years with the taste of flour always in his mouth, flour in his clothes, in his hair, and in every crevice of his skin. How he hated flour, the taste of it, the smell of it, the stinging burn of it! But in those three years he grew a full twelve inches; he broadened out, and at fourteen he was able to heave two hundred-pound sacks onto his back and carry them with ease. When he was able to do that, he figured he was able to take care of himself, and he told the mill operator, Ole Svenson:

“I'm going away now and get a job pays better than four dollars a week”—a speech he had rehearsed slowly and carefully for at least ten days.