The Early Stories (58 page)

“Poor Liz. It's all right, he didn't expect you to.”

“He kept saying something about his wife, and I
couldn't
understand it.”

“You're O.K. now, aren't you?”

“Yes, I'm O.K., let me finish.”

“You're crying.”

“Well, it was awfully strange.”

“What did he do?”

“He didn't
do
anything. He was very nice. He just wanted to know if there were any odd jobs I could let him do. He'd been all up and down Tenth Street just ringing doorbells, and nobody was home.”

“We don't have any odd jobs.”

“That's what I said. But I gave him ten dollars and said I was sorry but this was all I had in the house. It's all I did have.”

“Good. That was just the right thing.”

“Was it all right?”

“Sure. You say the poor devil came up in a truck?” James was relieved: the shadow of the coal man had passed; the enchantment had worked. It had seemed for a moment, from her voice, that the young Negro was right there in the apartment, squeezing Martha on the sofa.

“The point is, though,” Liz said, “now we don't have any money for the weekend, and Janice is coming tomorrow night so we can go to the movies, and then the Bridgeses on Sunday. You know how she eats. Did you go to the bank?”

“Damn it, no. I forgot.”

“Well,
dar
ling.”

“I keep thinking we have lots of money.” It was true; they did. “Never mind, maybe they'll cash a check here.”

“You think? He was really awfully pathetic, and I couldn't tell if he was a crook or not.”

“Well, even if he was he must have needed the money; crooks need money, too.”

“You think they
will
cash a check?”

“Sure. They love me.”

“The really awful thing I haven't told you. When I gave him the ten dollars he said he wanted to thank you—he seemed awfully interested in you—and I said, Well, fine, but on Saturdays we were in and out all day, so he said he'd come in the evening. He really wants to thank you.”

“He does.”

“I told him we were going to the movies and he said he'd come around before we went.”

“Isn't he rather aggressive? Why didn't he let
you
thank me for him?”

“Darley, I didn't know
what
to say.”

“Then it's not the Bridgeses we need the money for; it's him.”

“No, I don't think so. You made me forget the crucial part: he said
he has gotten a job that starts Monday, so it's just this weekend he needs furniture.”

“Why doesn't he sleep on the floor?” James could imagine himself, in needful circumstances, doing that. In the Army he had done worse.

“He has this
fam
ily, Jim. Did you want me not to give him anything—to run inside and lock the door? It would have been easy to do, you know.”

“No, no, you were a wonderful Christian. I'm proud of you. Anyway, if he comes before the movie he can't very well stay all night.”

This pleasant logic seemed firm enough to conclude on, yet, when she had hung up and her voice was gone, the affair seemed ominous again. It was as if, with the click of the receiver, she had sunk beneath an ocean. His own perch, twelve stories above Madison Avenue, swayed slightly, with the roll of too many cigarettes. He ground his present one into a turquoise ashtray, and looked about him, but his beige office at Dudevant & Smith, Industrial and Package Design, offered an inappropriate kind of comfort. His youth's high hopes—he had thought he was going to be a painter—had been distilled into a few practical solids: a steel desk, an adjustable office chair, a drawing board the size of a dining table, infinitely adjustable lighting fixtures, abundant draftsman's equipment, and a bulletin board so fresh it gave off a scent of cork. Oversized white tacks fixed on the cork several flattering memos from Dudevant, a snapshot, a studio portrait of Liz, and a four-color ad for the Raydo shaver, a shaver that James had designed, though an asterisk next to the object dropped the eye to the right-hand corner, to the firm's name, in modest sans-serif. This was all right; it was in the bargain. James's anonymity had been honestly purchased. Indeed, it seemed they couldn't give him enough; there was always some bonus or adjustment or employee benefit or Christmas present appearing on his desk, in one of those long blue envelopes that spelled “money” to his mind as surely as green engravings.

His recent fortunes had been so good, James had for months felt that some harsh blow was due. Cautious, he gave Providence few opportunities to instruct him. Its last chance, except for trips in the car, had been childbirth, and Liz had managed that twenty months ago, one Thursday at dawn, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. As the months passed harmlessly, James's suspicion increased that the city itself, with its aging Art Deco surfaces, its black noon shadows, its godless millions, was poised to strike. He placated the circumambient menace the only way he knew—by giving to beggars. He distributed between one and two dollars
a day to Salvation Army bell ringers, sidewalk violinists, husky blind men standing in the center of the pavement with their beautiful German shepherds, men on crutches offering yellow pencils, mumbling drunks anxious to shake his hand and show him the gash beneath their hats, men noncommittally displaying their metal legs in subway tunnels. Ambulatory ones, given the pick of a large crowd, would approach him; to their vision, though he dressed and looked like anyone else, he must wear, with Byzantine distinctness, the aureole of the soft touch.

Saturday was tense. James awoke feeling the exact shape of his stomach, a disagreeable tuber. The night before, he had tried to draw from Liz more information about her young Negro. “How was he dressed?”

“Not badly.”

“Not badly!”

“A kind of sport coat with a red wool shirt open at the neck, I think.”

“Well, why is he all dolled up if he has no money? He dresses better than I do.”

“It didn't seem terribly strange. He
would
have
one
good outfit.”

“And he brought his wife and
seven
children up here in the cab of a truck?”

“I said seven? I just have the feeling it's seven.”

“Sure. Seven dwarfs, seven lively arts, seven levels of Purgatory …”

“It couldn't have been in the cab, though. It must have been in the truck part. He said they had no furniture or anything except what they wore.”

“Just the rags on their backs. Son of a bitch.”

“This is so unlike you, darling. You're always sending checks to Father Flanagan.”

“He only asks me once a year, and at least he doesn't come crawling up the stairs after my wife.”

James was indignant. The whole tribe of charity seekers, to whom he had been so good, had betrayed him. On Saturday morning, down on Eighth Street buying a book, he deliberately veered away, off the curb and into the gutter, to avoid a bum hopefully eyeing him. At lunch the food lacked taste. The interval between the plate and his face exasperated him; he ate too fast, greedily. In the afternoon, all the way to the park, he maintained a repellent frown. When Liz seemed to dawdle, he took over the pushing of the carriage himself. A young colored man in Levi's descended the steps of a brick four-story and peered up and down the street uncertainly. James's heart tripped. “There he is.”

“Where?”

“Right ahead, looking at you.”

“Aren't you scary? That's not him. Mine was really short.”

At the park his daughter played in the damp sand by herself. No one seemed to love her; the other children romped at selfish games. The slatted shadow of the fence lengthened as the sun drew closer to the tops of the NYU buildings. Beneath this orange dying ball on an asphalt court, a yelping white played tennis with a tall, smooth-stroking black man with a Caribbean accent. Martha tottered from the sandbox to the seesaw to the swings, in her element and fearless. Strange, the fruit of his seed was a native New Yorker; she had been born in a hospital on West Eleventh Street. He rescued her at the entry to the swing section, lifted her into one, and pushed her from the front. Her face dwindled and loomed, dwindled and loomed; she laughed, but none of the other parents or children gave a sign of hearing her. The metal of the swing was icy. This was September; a chill, end-of-summer breeze weighed on the backs of his hands.

When they returned to the apartment, after four, safe, and the Negro was not there, and Liz set about making tea as on any other day, his fears were confounded, and he irrationally ceased expecting anything bad to happen. They gave Martha her bath and ate their dinner in peace; by pure will he was keeping the hateful doorbell smothered. And when it did ring, it was only Janice their baby-sitter, coming up the stairs with her grandmotherly slowness.

He warned her, “There's a slight chance a young Negro will be coming here to find us,” and told her, more or less, the story.

“Well, don't worry, I won't let him in,” Janice said in the tone of one passing on a particularly frightening piece of gossip. “I'll tell him you're not here and I don't know when you'll be back.” She was a good-hearted, unfortunate girl, with dusty tangerine hair. Her mother in Rhode Island was being filtered through a series of hopeless operations. Most of her weekends were spent up there, helping her mother die. The salary Janice earned as a stenographer at NBC was consumed by train fares and long-distance phone calls; she never accepted her fee at the end of a night's sitting without saying, with a soft one-sided smile wherein ages of Irish wit were listlessly deposited, “I hate to take it, but I need the money.”

“Well, no, don't be rude or anything. Tell him—and I don't think he'll come, but just in case—we'll be here Sunday.”

“The Bridgeses, too,” Liz pointed out.

“Yeah, well, I don't think he'll show. If he's as new here as you said he said he was, he probably can't find the place again.”

“You know,” Janice said to Liz, “you really can't be so softhearted. I admire you for it, and I feel as sorry for these people as you do, but in this town, believe me, you don't dare trust anybody, literally
any
body. A girl at work beside me knows a man who's as healthy as you or me, but he goes around on crutches and makes a hundred and twenty dollars a week. Why, that's more than any of us who work honestly make.”

James smiled tightly, insulted twice; he made more than that a week, and he did not like to hear he was being defrauded by pitiable souls on the street who he could see were genuinely deformed or feeble-minded or alcoholic.

After a pause, Liz gently asked the girl, “How is your mother?”

Janice's face brightened and was not quite so overpowered by the orange hair. “Oh, on the phone last night she sounded real high and mighty. The P.-T.A. has given her some job with a drive for funds, something she could do with pencil and paper, without getting up. I've told you how active she had been. She was all for getting out of bed. She said she can feel, you know, that it's out of her body now. But when I talked to the doctor last Sunday, he said we mustn't hope too much. But he seemed very proud of the operation.”

“Well, good luck,” James said, jingling the change in his pocket.

Janice shook her finger. “You have a good time. He isn't going to get in if I'm here,
that
you can depend on,” she assured them, misunderstanding, or perhaps understanding more than necessary.

The picture was excellent, but just at the point where John Wayne, after tracking the Comanches from the snowbound forests of Montana to the blazing dunes of Border Country, was becoming reconciled to the idea of his niece's cohabiting with a brave, James vividly remembered the bum who had wobbled toward him on Eighth Street—the twisted eye, the coat too small to button, the pulpy mouth with pathetic effort trying to frame the first words. The image made him squirm in his seat and pull away from Liz's hand. She, as the credits rolled, confided that her eyes smarted from the VistaVision. They were reluctant to go home so early; Janice counted on them to stay away during the easy hours when Martha was asleep. But the bar at the White Horse Tavern was crowded and noisy—it had become a tourist trap—and the main streets of the Village, thronged with gangsters and hermaphrodites, seemed to James a poor place to stroll with his wife. Liz with her innocent open stare caught the attention of every thug and teen-ager they passed. “Stop it,” he said.

“You'll get me knifed.”

“Darling. There's no law against people's eyes.”

“There should be. They think you're a whore out with her pimp. What makes you stare at everybody?”

“Faces are
interesting
. Why are you so uninterested in people?”

“Because every other day you call up the office and I have to come rescue you from some damn spook you've enticed up the stairs. No wonder Dudevant is getting set to fire me.”

“Let's go home if you want to rave.”

“We can't. Janice needs the money, the bloodsucker.”

“It's nearly ten. She charges a dollar an hour, after all.”

As they advanced down Tenth from Fifth he saw a slight blob by their gate which simply squinting did not erase. He did not expect ever to see Liz's Negro, who had had his chance at dinner. Yet, when it was clear that a man
was
standing there, wearing a hat, James hastened forward, glad at last to have the enemy life-sized and under scrutiny. They seemed to know each other well; James said “Hi!” and grasped the quickly offered hand. The palm felt waxy and cool, like a synthetic fabric.

“I just wanted
 … thank …
such a fine gentleman,” the Negro said, in a voice incredibly thin-spun, the thread of it always breaking.