You're All Alone (illustrated) (6 page)

Her voice was odd, almost close to tears. “You’d even have had more fun with Midge’s girl-friend.”

“Say, you do have a memory,” he began. Then, turning on her, “Aren’t you really Jane Gregg? Don’t you know Tom Elvested and Midge?”

She shook her head reprovingly and looked up with an uneven smile. “But since you haven’t got a date with anybody but me, Mr. Serious, you’ll have to make the best of my antisocial habits. Let’s see, I could let you look at some other girls undressing on North Clark or West Madison, or we could go to the symphony, or . . .”

They were passing the painfully bright lobby of a movie house, luridly placarded with yellow and purple swirls which seemed to have caught up in their whirlwind folds an unending rout of golden blondes, grim-eyed heroes, money bags, and grasping hands. Jane stopped.

“Or I could take you in here,” she said.

He obediently veered toward the box office, but she kept hold of his arm and walked him past it into the outer lobby.

“You mustn’t be scared of life,” she told him, half gayly, half desperately, he thought. “You must learn to take risks. You really can get away with anything.”

Carr shrugged and held his breath for the inevitable.

They walked straight past the ticket-taker and through the center-aisle door.

Carr puffed out his breath and grinned. He thought, maybe she knows someone here. Or else—who knows?—maybe you
could
get away with almost anything if you did it with enough assurance and picked the right moments.

THE THEATER was only half full.

They sidled through the blinking darkness into one of the empty rows at the back. Soon the gyrations of the gray shadows on the screen took on a little sense.

There were a man and woman getting married, or else remarried after a divorce, it was hard to tell which. Then she left him because she thought that he was interested only in business. Then she came back, but he left her because he thought she was interested only in social affairs. Then he came back, but then they both left each other again, simultaneously.

From all around came the soft breathing and somnolent gum-chewing of drugged humanity.

Then the man and woman both raced to the bedside of their dying little boy, who had been tucked away in a military academy. But the boy recovered, and then the woman left both of them, for their own good, and a little while afterwards the man did the same thing. Then the boy left them.

“Do you play chess?” Jane asked suddenly.

Carr nodded gratefully.

“Come on,” she said. “I know a place.”

They hurried out of the bustling theater district into an empty region of silent gray office buildings—for the Loop is a strange place, where loneliness jostles too much companionship. Looking up at the dark and dingy heights, Carr felt his uneasiness begin to return. There was somethihg exceedingly horrible in the thought of miles on miles of darkened offices, empty but for the endless desks, typewriters, filing cabinets, water coolers. What would a stranger from Mars deduce from them? Surely not human beings.

With a great roar a cavalcade of newspaper trucks careened across the next corner, plunging as frantically as if the fate of nations were at stake. Carr took a backward step, his heart pounding.

Jane smiled at him. “We’re safe tonight,” she said and led him to a massive office building of the last century. Pushing through a side door next to the locked revolving one, she drew him into a dingy lobby floored with tiny white tiles and surrounded by the iron latticework of ancient elevator shafts. A jerkily revolving hand showed that one cage was still in operation, but Jane headed for the shadow-stifled stairs.

“I hope you don’t mind,” she said. “It’s thirteen stories, but I can’t stand elevators.”

Remembering the one at Marcia’s apartment, Carr was glad.

They emerged panting in a hall where the one frosted door that wasn’t dark read CAISSA CHESS CLUB.

Behind the door was a long room. A drab austerity, untidy rows of small tables, and a grimy floor littered with trodden cigarettes, all proclaimed the place to be the headquarters of a somber monomania.

Some oldsters were playing near the door, utterly absorbed in the game. One with a dirty white beard was silently kibitzing, occasionally shaking his head, or pointing out with palsied fingers the move that would have won if it had been made.

Carr and Jane walked quietly beyond them, found a box of men as battered by long use as the half obliterated board, and started to play.

Soon the maddening, years-forgotten excitement gripped Carr tight. He was back in that dreadful little universe where the significance of things is narrowed down to the strategems whereby turreted rooks establish intangible walls of force, bishops slip craftily through bristling barricades, and knights spring out in sudden sidewise attacks, as if from crooked medieval passageways.

They played three slow, merciless games. She won the first two. He finally drew the third, his king just managing to nip off her last runaway pawn. It felt very late, getting on toward morning.

She leaned back massaging her face.

“Nothing like chess,” she mumbled, “to take your mind off things.” Then she dropped her hands.

TWO MEN were still sitting at the first table in their overcoats, napping over the board. They tiptoed past them and out into the hall and went down the stairs. An old woman was wearily scrubbing her way across the lobby, her head bent as if forever.

In the street they paused uncertainly. It had grown quite chilly.

“Where do you live?” Carr asked.

“I’d rather you didn’t—” Jane began and stopped. After a moment she said, “All right, you can take me home. But it’s a long walk and you must still follow the leader.”

The Loop was deserted except for the darkness and the hungry wind. They crossed the black Chicago River on Michigan Boulevard, where the skyscrapers are thickest. It looked like the Styx. They walked rapidly. They didn’t say anything. Carr’s arm was tightly linked around hers. He felt sad and tired and yet very much at peace. He knew he was leaving this girl forever and going back to his own world. Any vague notion he’d had of making her a real friend had died in the cold ebb of night.

Yet at the same time he knew that she had helped him. All his worries and fears, including the big one, were gone. The events of the afternoon and early evening seemed merely bizarre, a mixture of hoaxes and trivial illusions. Tomorrow he must begin all over again, with his job and his pleasures. Marcia, he told himself, had only been playing a fantastic prank—he’d patch things up with her.

As if sensing his thoughts, Jane shrank close to his side.

Past the turn-off to his apartment, past the old white water tower, they kept on down the boulevard. It seemed tremendously wide without cars streaming through it.

They turned down a street where big houses hid behind black space and trees.

Jane stopped in front of a tall iron gate. High on one of the stone pillars supporting it, too high for Jane to see, Carr idly noted a yellow chalk-mark in the shape of a cross with dots between the arms. Wondering if it were a tramps’ sign commenting on the stinginess or generosity of the people inside, Carr suddenly got the picture his mind had been fumbling for all night. It fitted Jane, her untidy expensive clothes, her shy yet arrogant manner. She must be a rich man’s daughter, overprotected, neurotic, futilely rebellious, tyrannized over by relatives and servants. Everything in her life mixed up, futilely and irremediably, in the way only money can manage.

“It’s been so nice,” Jane said in a choked voice, not looking at him, “so nice to pretend.”

She fumbled in her pocket, but whether for a handkerchief or a key Carr could not tell. Something small and white slipped from her hand and fluttered through the fence. She pushed open the gate enough to get through.

“Please don’t come in with me,” she whispered. “And please don’t stay and watch.”

Carr thought he knew why. She didn’t want him to watch the lights wink agitatedly on, perhaps hear the beginning of an anxious tirade. It was her last crumb of freedom—to leave him with the illusion she was free.

He took her in his arms. He felt in the darkness the tears on her cold cheek wetting his. Then she had broken away. There were footsteps running up a gravel drive. He turned and walked swiftly away.

In the sky, between the pale streets, was the first paleness of dawn.

Keep looking straight ahead, brother. It doesn’t do to get too nosy. You may see things going on in the big engine that’ll make you wish you’d never come alive . . .

THROUGH SLITTED, sleep-heavy eyes Carr saw the clock holding up both hands in horror. The room was drenched in sunshine.

But he did not hurl himself out of bed, tear into his clothes, and rush downtown, just because it was half past eleven.

Instead he yawned and closed his eyes, savoring the feeling of self-confidence that filled him. He had a profound sense of being back on the right track.

Odd that a queer neurotic girl could give you so much. But nice.

Grinning, he got up and leisurely bathed and shaved.

He’d have breakfast downtown, he decided. Something a little special. Then amble over to the office about the time his regular lunch hour ended.

He even thought of permitting himself the luxury of taking a cab to the Loop. But as soon as he got outside he changed his mind. The sun and the air, and the blue of lake and sky, and the general feeling of muscle-stretching spring, when even old people crawl out of their holes, were too enticing. He felt fresh. Plenty of time. He’d walk.

The city showed him her best profile. As if he were a god briefly sojourning on earth, he found pleasure in inspecting the shifting scene and’ the passing people.

They seemed to feel as good as he did. Even the ones hurrying fastest somehow gave the impression of strolling. Carr enjoyed sliding past them like a stick drifting in a slow, whimsical current.

If life has a rhythm, he thought, it has sunk to a lazy summer murmur from the strings.

His mind played idly with last night’s events. He wondered if he could find Jane’s imposing home again. He decided he probably could, but felt no curiosity. Already she was beginning to seem like a girl in a dream. They’d met, helped each other, parted. A proper episode.

He came to the bridge. Down on the sparkling river deckhands were washing an excursion steamer. The skyscrapers rose up clean and gray, Cities, he thought, could be lovely places at time, so huge and yet so bright and sane and filled with crowds of people among whom you were indistinguishable and therefore secure. Undoubtedly this was the pleasantest half-hour he’d had in months. To crown it, he decided he’d drop into one of the big department stores and make some totally unnecessary purchase. Necktie perhaps. Say a new blue.

Inside the store the crowd was thicker. Pausing to spy out the proper counter, Carr had the faintest feeling of oppressiveness. For a moment he felt the impulse to hurry outside. But he smiled at it. He located the neckties—they were across the huge room—and started toward them. But before he’d got halfway he stopped again, this time to enjoy a sight as humorously bizarre as a cartoon in
The New Yorker.

Down the center aisle, their eyes fixed stonily ahead, avoiding the shoppers with a casual adroitness, marched four youngish men carrying a window-display mannequin. The four men were wearing identical light-weight black overcoats and black snap-brim hats which looked as if they’d just been purchased this morning. The two in front each held an ankle, the two in back a shoulder. The mannequin was dressed in an ultra-stylish olive green suit, the face and hands were finished in some realistic nude felt, and her arms were rigidly fixed to hold a teacup or an open purse.

THERE WAS something so ludicrous about the costume of the four men and their unconcern, both for the shoppers and for the figure they were carrying, that it was all Carr could do not to burst out laughing. As it was, he was relieved that none of the four men happened to look his way and catch his huge grin.

He studied them delightedly, wondering what weird circumstances had caused this bit of behind-the-scenes department-store business to take place in front of everyone.

Oddly, no one else seemed aware of how amusing they looked. It was something for Carr’s funny-bone alone.

He watched until they were well past him. Almost regretfully, he turned away toward the tie counter. But just then the rigid right arm of the mannequin unfolded and dropped down slackly, and the head fell back, and the dark-lashed eyes flickered and fixed on him a sick, doomed stare.

Carr was not quite sure how he got out of the store without screaming or running. There was a blank space of panic in his memory. The next thing he remembered clearly was pushing his way through the ocean of unseeing faces on State Street. By then he had begun to rationalize the event. Perhaps the mannequin’s arm worked on a pivot, and its swinging down had startled him into imagining the rest. Of course the hand had looked soft and limp and helpless as it dragged along the floor, but that could have been imagination too.

After all, a world in which people could “turn off” other people like clockwork toys and cart them away just wasn’t possible—even if it would help to explain some of the hundreds of mysterious disappearances that occur every month.