A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

The Idol with the Clay Bottom

I lay there watching her with that languor some moments have. Such moments have. After-moments, moments of cessation.

On her side of the room there was movement, on my side none. We were the room apart; but we weren’t far, it wasn’t a large room. She moved twice each time; once in actuality, once in the mirror before her. Not flurried movements, but deft, economical, practiced movements. Each one with a purpose, each one no more than its purpose required. Calm to watch, soothing to watch, lulling.

On my side of the room nothing moved but the laced strings, like yarn, toiling above the two cigarettes left pointing together tip-to-tip from opposite rims of the little clay dish. At times they severed from one another in mid-air, those two strings, made an open loop, but quickly caught one another up again, followed the rest of their ascent tangledly intermingled.

I kept watching, not these, but the other, deft, economical, practiced movements across the room. The comb was reinserted in the handbag. Then she took the lipstick out. Made just two brief passes with it, to the right for the upper lip, to the left for the lower. Then she put the lipstick back. Her hand stayed on a moment, hidden down there. Then she found the money I had put into the handbag before.

She didn’t bring it up and reveal it, but I knew that was what her hand was on, that was what she had found down there. By some momentary halt of her arm, fluidly mobile until now, and by the intent look of her eyes, following the line of her arm downward.

I knew she was even counting it, by unaided thumb alone, or perhaps judging its plurality by the thickness-of-layer it offered her tracing thumb. But she never brought it up, and I liked her for that. There were already several other things to add that newest liking to.

Then she looked over at me and said, “You didn’t have to do that,” but with polite insincerity. It was as insincere as it was polite, but it was as polite as it was insincere.

Not to expose it to view, that had been chic, I reflected to myself; but not to have acknowledged it at all, that somehow would have smacked of underhandedness, surreptitiousness. A quality that I liked her for being entirely without, as far as I had been able to discover, up to this point.

I said, “But what would you have done if I hadn’t?” But in a lazy, objective sort of way, as if in academic question, not likely to give offense.

“Oh,” she admitted, “asked you, I guess. ‘For a loan,’ I guess. At the last minute, as I was on my way out.”

I liked the candor of her answer. Any other would have been an untruth, but I liked her refusal to skirt around it. I liked her.

She smiled in offered good-night to me, without speaking it. Most of her was through the doorway now, all but her partingly tilted head and one back-slanted shoulder.

I wanted to ask her something. I don’t know why, but I did. And there was no other moment but this to ask it in, so on the spur of the moment I asked it.

“Were you ever in love?” I blurted out.

She stopped as she was, head and one shoulder still all to be seen. ‘‘Once,” she said quite simply. “Just once.” Her good-night smile had not faded.

I wondered why it had stopped, why it hadn’t gone on, why it had ended in this. A tensile hand within a handbag.

I didn’t ask, because I had no right to know. I hadn’t even had any right to ask as much as I had.

“I’ll tell you about it some time. The next time we run into each other.” Her smile had concluded its goodnight. Her head, her shoulder, had left the doorway. The door closed.

Then she put the comb back, took the lipstick out. Made just two swift passes with it, to the right for the upper lip, to the left for the lower. Then she put the lipstick back. Then her hand stayed on a moment, hidden down there.

Then she looked over at me and said, “You didn’t have to do that,” with polite sincerity. It was as polite as it was sincere, but it was at least as sincere as it was polite.

I didn’t answer. There wasn’t anything to say.

She came back toward my side of the room, for her cigarette, left there beside mine, tip nudging tip. To finish it outside, along her latebound way, I suppose. I thought of her wending her shadowy, solitary way, just this one little transported spark for courage and for company. The streets were so empty and glooming, and she was so alone. She should have more than just a cigarette, I thought. Everyone in this world should have more than just a cigarette. None of us, really, has.

Perhaps that’s why I reminded her, of her promise of the time before. I thought it would be kind to keep her here just a little longer. Kind to her, or kind to me, or kind to both of us.

“You said you were in love once.”

“Everyone is,” she said tiredly.

Then she added with resignation: “You can’t expect to be that lucky: to have it miss you.”

I took her glass, from dose beside mine (everything about us was so close, I thought, except our pasts, our destinies), and swirled it, and emptied it, and filled it up afresh.

“Here,” I said. “Here, sit down here, at the foot.”

She took the glass and she lounged back with it, upright on her elbow.

“But don’t embroider it,” I cautioned her. “Tell it just the way it really was, or else don’t tell it at all. I don’t want stories. I can get those from a book.”

All she said was, “You couldn’t embroider this any.”

Ruby knocked on her door and called through it: “Marie, somebody wants you down at the door.”

Marie reared up on the bed, outraged, and let the newspaper she’d been browsing through disintegrate into separate sheets, a number of which slid to the floor.

“Not on your life!” she shouted back angrily. “It’s four o’clock in the afternoon. These aren’t calling hours. I wouldn’t see anybody right now for love nor money. Tell him to go jump in the river, for all I care.”

“It’s not a visitor,” Ruby tried to explain in a conciliatory voice. “It’s a man got some kind of special-delivery letter you got to sign for. You know Mrs. Burnside won’t let anybody like that in the house, so you’ve got to go down and see him about it yourself.”

“Oh,” said Marie, only partially mollified. “Well, why didn’t you say so in the first place?”

“Why didn’t you give me a chance?” came back in answer. “I don’t get paid for carrying your messages.”

Marie got up off the bed, tightened her lounging-sack around her, and thrust her bare feet into a pair of straw sandals.

“I guess I better tip him,” she thought, and took a quarter out of her secret cache in a small leather change-purse hidden under the lining-paper of her bureau-drawer. Then she changed her mind and made it two dimes instead. It was only a special-delivery letter after all, not a package or anything like that. She tried to be thrifty whenever she thought of it, but it was hard to remember to be at all times.

“Thanks just the same, Rube,” she called out as she passed Ruby’s partly open door, so that there wouldn’t be any protracted hard feelings between them. Everybody got a little edgy at times, in a place like this. Especially in the afternoons, with so much time on their hands.

“That’s all right, anytime,” Ruby generously called back in answer.

Going down the stairs, she was a little worried about what it could be, and more particularly, who it could be from. She didn’t like telegrams or registered or special-delivery letters, they made her uneasy. Not that she ever got any. The only letters she ever got here came from her mother, and they came under a plain, ordinary five-cent stamp.

They’d taken the precaution of reclosing the door on the deliveryman while he was waiting for her. When she reopened it and looked out, he said: “Marie Cameron? Are you Miss Cameron?”

She liked that. She seldom heard herself called “Miss” any longer. He must be new on this route, didn’t identify the house. She flashed him a brief but friendly smile of appreciation, and forgot to be worried for a minute.

“Would you sign here, please?” he said.

First she was going to lift her knee and write across that. Then remembering how she was dressed, she turned her back and wrote holding the receipt against the doorframe.

He handed her the letter, and she immediately became uneasy again at sight of it. It wasn’t from her mother, because it was typed, but it was from Allentown, where her mother lived, she could tell that by the postmark. Up in the right-hand corner were three or four combined names, like a business-firm or a law office.

She took it inside with her and closed the door, forgetting completely in her preoccupation to give the man the two dimes she’d intended to.

She turned it this way and that, and then, seeking moral support, carried it up the stairs with her, still unopened. She called Ruby out of her room, held it up for her to see.

“I’m afraid to open this, Rube.”

“Go ahead,” Ruby encouraged her. “How you going to find out what’s in it, otherwise? You’ll never find out if you don’t open it.”

Marie went ahead and tore it open, at the same time enjoining Ruby: “Don’t go ’way. Stay here a minute. I may need you.”

When Ruby noticed the changed look on her face, she asked her: “Is it bad?”

Marie looked up at her and nodded mutely, and tears started to well up in her eyes.

“I lost Mom,” she said. “She’s dead.”

She put her head down on Ruby’s shoulder and began to cry wholeheartedly and unrestrainedly. Ruby stroked her hair awkwardly but sympathetically.

“I cried when I lost mine too,” Ruby remembered.

She took the letter from Marie’s hand and read it across her bowed shoulder.

“She left you some money,” she said.

“I didn’t get down that far,” Marie said.

“You gotta go there and get it.”

“Does it say how much?” Marie asked her. She had stopped crying temporarily, not because she was mercenary but because the new train of thought had momentarily distracted her from her grief.

“It says eight hundred, but it says you gotta pay a tax out of it.”

“I didn’t know Mom had that much,” Marie said mournfully. She cried again a little after that, and then she stopped, and didn’t cry any more from then on.

They went into Ruby’s room and sat down side by side on the edge of the bed and talked it over.

“What do you think you’ll do with it?” Ruby asked, awed.

“I know the first thing I’m going to do,” Marie said determinedly, “and that’s get out of this business.”

“They say it’s awfully hard to do that,” Ruby remarked doubtfully.

“Not if you really want to. I’ve wanted to for a long time. Two-and-a-half years is too long. Now with this money to fall back on. I can go out and hunt for a regular job. It’ll tide me over until I find something. If I don’t quit now, I never will. There isn’t any future in it,” she declared vehemently. “If you got a good job, you can keep on with it after you’re fifty, sixty even. With us, we’re through at forty, sometimes even before. Then what’s left? The gutter.”

Ruby nodded. She knew it was the truth.

As word of Marie’s imminent departure spread throughout the house, one by one its other occupants gathered in Ruby’s room, until finally the entire quota was assembled there. Even some who ordinarily weren’t chummy with the others. Rozelle, the Syrian girl with the harem-type beauty; round moon face and dark liquid eyes. And Louise, the Korean-American girl, who had come over as a soldier’s bride and then been discarded. As somebody had once remarked, “We got a regular United Nations among us.” Even Mrs. Burnside herself finally joined them. Questioned as to whether she would put any difficulties in the way of Marie’s departure, she replied: “This isn’t a jail. She’s free to go, just so long’s her bills are all paid up, and just so long’s she don’t try to compete against the house from the outside. I can always get them to send me a replacement.”

Marie sent down for a bottle of champagne to celebrate her windfall and her leavetaking, and an impromptu but sprightly little party got under way. It was only New York State champagne, but it was very good because it was rather old. Not even a visitor had ordered champagne in over a year and a half.

A few of them gave her little going-away presents, so that it almost became like some kind of a bridal shower. Only, instead of matrimony, in celebration of her return to honesty. Ruby gave her a little bottle of toilet-water, Rozelle a pair of silver filigree earrings from the old country, Louise a string of jade beads. Even Mrs. Burnside entered into the spirit of the thing. She went to her own room and came back with a little musical powder-box, that played a tune when you picked it up and stopped when you put it down. “That’s so’s no one can swipe your face-powder without your knowing it,” she snickered.

By now everyone was a little tight.

When a second bottle of champagne had been brought up (Marie paid for that one too, of course), they all took turns kissing her good-bye. Even Mrs. Burnside. She said to Marie, “You’re one of the nicest girls we’ve ever had with us, and we’ll all miss you. And if you ever feel like coming back again, you know you’re always welcome. You’ll always find the door open.”

Marie almost hated to leave them. They were the only friends she’d had for over two-and-a-half years, and they were all good souls. Lost souls, but good souls.

She didn’t remain in Allentown. Although her mother had never known about her, and to the end had innocently written to her thinking she was living in a rooming-house, a lot of the people and neighbors there had known her in her childhood, and she didn’t want anything to mar their recollections or her own. She was afraid something might leak out. So she returned to the city again, where anonymity was so much easier to achieve.

When she came back she look a furnished room — this time in a legitimate rooming-house — banked what was left of the legacy after funeral, medical, tax and legal forfeits had been deducted, and set about looking for a job. To her utter but delighted bewilderment she had found herself one within a day and a half. Remembering the difficulties she had experienced finding anything when she had first come here at seventeen, she had expected a long, disheartening search. She decided that the added five years in age was what accounted for the difference. A girl of twenty-two was far more employable than a youngster of seventeen. She also decided, being a romanticist at heart, that it proved how well and swiftly honesty paid off.

Her job was that of checker at one of the exit-stations in a large supermarket. It was an easy job, but monotonous to the point of anaesthesia. The machine did the computing, so you didn’t even have to be good at figures. You just punched the required keys for each price-item. It wasn’t this that got her down. It was the never-ending stoking and stowing into paper bags that she found tedious. All day long (even though she got two breaks), one after another after another. It was like being on some sort of conveyor belt. Sometimes whole families would come in. to cash their relief checks and buy a month’s supplies at a time.

She stood it for about six weeks, realizing it was better than to have to start looking for a job all over again. But it was a complete dead-end, there was utterly no chance of long-term advancement, for the supermarket was entirely self-service, and in the only two departments where manual workers were employed, the meat counter and the coffee-grinding machine, the pay was no better than where she was and the job almost, if not quite, as tedious. It took years to become a manager, and only men were selected.

Then one night a grouch of an old woman slipped into her lane even after she’d slung the closing-off chain across it. Marie got stuck for an extra five or six minutes, and on a nine-o’clock late-closing night. As if that weren’t bad enough, Marie had no sooner finished packing her than she began a vociferous argument over an alleged seventeen-cent overcharge. Marie went over the long sales-tape with her twice from top to bottom, but she still couldn’t be convinced. The whole towering bundle had to be unpacked first to locate the disputed item, then the manager had to be called, then the store’s price log-book had to be consulted. In the end Marie turned out to have been right.

But she’d had it. She gave in her notice.

She went back the next day simply to finish out the week and round out her pay-check. Then she left for good.

This time she didn’t have to go looking. The job fell into her lap. Since the next day was a Saturday and most places were closed, she decided nothing much could be done until the following Monday. So she went out for a stroll in the sunshine, an element that her last two occupations had almost completely deprived her of. As she was passing a candy-store, one of a well-known chain scattered throughout the city, a sweet tooth she hadn’t realized she had started to kick up. On impulse she went in and bought herself a quarter’s worth of spiced gum-drops. Then noticing that the middle-aged woman who waited on her was alone behind the counter, she asked her: “Could you use any help back there?”

“I have an assistant,” the woman told her. “Only she’s out sick today. But if you’re looking for this kind of work, I’ll give you a tip that may help. We’re opening a new retail store on Monday,” and she gave her the location. “Don’t go there, but go down to the head office and ask for the personnel manager.”

Marie was down there by eight, long before he had arrived himself, and by eleven she had the job. In the interview, she slanted the truth a little, without departing from the letter of it. There had been a candy-store in Allentown she had hung around and haunted as a youngster. More than once she’d been asked to help out behind the counter after school-hours. So that in fact she had previously worked in such a place. All she neglected to add was that she had been twelve, not twenty-two.

He made some mention about sending there for references, but in the meantime Marie went right to work. The references never appeared. Either the store had gone out of business long before, or the inquiry never reached it, or the answering letter became sidetracked somewhere in the piled-up files of the huge organization and just lay there inert. Marie stayed on.

After she’d been with them about seven months, the woman she was working under, who had been married the statutory number of months before, took a temporary leave of absence because of climactic pregnancy, and Marie was moved up into her place in the interim. The former manager never returned — either she gave up work or was sent to manage some other store — and Marie kept the job permanently.

So that all within the space of less than a year-and-a-half she had obtained a small but responsible managerial job, was working in surroundings that were pleasant and predominantly feminine (an important point in her case), had an attractive small-apartment unit of her own, and was leading the secure, conventional — and colorless — existence of the typical big-city bachelorette. Which was pretty good advancement, she told herself whenever she felt downhearted or whenever she felt lonely, for a girl who had come up literally from the bottom.

Such were the main facets of her outer, day-by-day life, its canons, scope, and practice. As for her inner one, her dreams and hopes and aspirations — ah, therein lay the gist of the matter. She was a romanticist, an idealist, she lived in a world of illusion. For her, a straight line ran down the middle of the world. On one side all was black, on the other all was white. She thought perfection existed in this world. In love. She thought it could be found, could be had, even by such as she. A story-book love was waiting for her somewhere along the way. A story-book love with a story-book ending. And she was so naive, so unversed in non commercial love, she refused to compromise, to make any allowances. It must come to her letter-perfect, freshly minted, and go on like that unchanged. “They lived happily ever after.” It had never occurred to her what unhappiness, boredom, and misery could result from that.

Then one night she met a man. The man.

Her life had fallen into a pattern, as all lives do. Every evening she left the candy-store at six, and took a bus over toward where she lived. But the bus didn’t actually pass by there, and so she was left with a gap she had to walk. Close by the bus-stop there was a restaurant, and she usually stopped in there first and had her meal before continuing on her way. Then from there, when she’d finished, she’d walk the rest of the way home. Along this final stretch however there was a neighborhood picture-house, a very nice picture-house really. Not too expensive, and it showed quite good pictures at times, even though it was merely second-run.

One Thursday, which was the day the weekly change of program took effect, she stopped when she got to it and started to scan the stills displayed out front, to try to ascertain whether or not it was something she might care for. The title was noncommittal, and though the people in it were good, you couldn’t always go by that either, she realized. She disliked mysteries, Westerns, and gangster-pictures, and on the other hand was fond of musicals and romances, the more saccharine the better.

As she bent forward peering intently, trying to judge from the scenic details in the background what type of picture it was, a voice quite close to her said:

“It’s good. I seen it.”

Caught off-guard, she turned around in surprise before she could prevent herself from doing so.

The man’s face had all the anonymity of the crowd in it; she couldn’t have described him even right while she was looking at him. He was standing almost close enough to touch her, but with his back to the stills, facing toward the sidewalk, while she was turned the opposite way.

There was something clandestine about their reversed positions, but he was the one imparted it.

She turned her head away instantly, but the damaging acknowledgement of awareness had already been made.

“I think I seen you before someplace,” he said. Haven’t I?”

This time she rigidly kept from looking at him. By now all thoughts of entering the theatre had left her. She was afraid he might follow her into the darkness inside, and she would be worse off than out here on the open street. She had heard of cases of people being knifed in places like that.

Her onward way, however, lay toward him, not away from him. She backed away from the ill-omened stills, therefore, and circled around him, keeping at as wide a distance as possible. But he moved out in turn and once more blocked her way.

He peered intently square into her face.

“Sure I have,” he said with grim satisfaction. “And I know where now too.”

Her voice wouldn’t come at first. She kept shaking her head frightenedly, without any voice.

“Don’t tell me I haven’t,” he insisted. “I used to visit that place reg’larly once a week for almost a whole year. I seen you up there plenty. Often enough to remember you. Maybe you don’t remember. All them faces every night. But I do.”

Something cold went through her. Cold and clammy. She supposed it was fear. It was a sick kind of fear, though. A curdling kind of fear. She had never felt anything like it before. The past seemed to come rolling back over her, like a surge of dirty water.

Her voice finally came. But fright throttled it to a half-whisper, a half-moan. All she could say was, “No. No. No.”

The fright showed on her face, and he knew he had command of her.

He seized her by the arm, and she tried to pull away, but all her own efforts were able to do was to make her swing loosely, first over to one side, then over to the other, in what could almost have been taken for some kind of a crazy dance-step.

Then she crumpled altogether. Not physically, but emotionally. The cowardice of the guilty conscience. “Please. Leave me alone. Please. I’ve never done anything to you.”

A few of the people passing by hesitated in their stride. Others just looked back. Then a woman, bolder than any of the men, perhaps because she realized her own immunity as a woman, spoke out. “What is it? What’s it about?”

The man tangling with Marie answered: “She’s a pro. She tried to hustle me just now as I come out of the pitcher. I got a connection with the vice squad.”

Even in the midst of her own stress, Marie could clearly read the two conflicting expressions that appeared on the woman’s face. First there was the natural impulse to go to the aid of a fellow-woman against their common enemy, the male molester. Over and against this there was the instinctive feminine distrust, the willingness to believe the worst of some other woman. As if to say, he wouldn’t dare make such an accusation, unless it were true. The latter prevailed.

She moved away. Respectability turning its back on the tramp.

A man’s voice intruded next. He must have just come upon the scene. She couldn’t see him at first, because her aggressor had her turned so that he was between the two of them, she could only hear what he said.

“What’s the matter, miss, he bothering you?”

The question was inane to the point of silliness, it was self-evident that he was, and yet in what other way could it have been put?

She grasped eagerly at the support, which was the first she had been offered so far. “Yes! Oh, yes, he is! Make him get away from me.”

“All right,” the newcomer said. She could tell this was addressed to the other man, not herself. It was couched as a gruff order, not an affirmation.

“You keep out of this, bud,” the one holding her growled truculently.

“No, bud isn’t going to keep out of this,” the first one told him.

She sensed the blow rather than saw it. A swift rush of air, and then she felt the jar, the impact, at secondhand as the bully’s body jolted. His hold on her arm disintegrated, and he kited back against the wall in an upright sprawl, his arms spread out and his legs spread out. He didn’t have a counterblow in him. He scuttled crabwise farther along the wall a yard or two, to widen the distance between himself and any possible second blow. Then he called out vengefully: “You know what she is, don’t you!”

“No, but I know what you are!” growled the other man, and he took an ominous step toward him.

That ended the incident. The pavement-rat promptly turned tail and scurried from sight through the sprinkling of people standing about.

Some of them were still staring curiously at Marie. She averted her gaze and said in a smothered voice, more to herself than to him, “Oh, let me get out of here!”

“Come on,” he said, taking her protectively by the arm. “I’ll walk you.”

From a safe distance, an epithet came zig-zagging back through the scattered people moving along the sidewalk. “Whoremaster!”

She heard it, and she shivered a little, defensively. She couldn’t tell whether or not he had too.

When they had reached the corner he stopped, as though he intended leaving her there. “Which way do you go now?” he said.

“As a matter of fact,” she told him lamely, “I live up the other way. The same direction he went in. But I was afraid if I went that way myself, I might run into him a second time.”

“I’ll walk back with you along the other side of the street,” he volunteered. “That way we can spot him if he’s still hanging around.”

“I’m giving you an awful lot of trouble.”

“No trouble,” he said reassuringly.

Along the way back, he remarked: “He got off easy, at that. Anybody else would’ve called the police on him.”

She dropped her eyes without answering. She knew why she hadn’t. Her own guilty conscience had kept her hands tied.

“This is it,” she said finally.

They both stopped uncertainly, not knowing how to bring the brief association to a deft close.

“You’ll be all right now,” he said.

“I hope so,” she said. “The only thing is. I come by this way every night on my way home from work. I hope he doesn’t find out about that.” A moment after it was out, she wished she hadn’t said it. It sounded as though she were looking for an excuse to see him again, and in all sincerity she hadn’t meant it that way.

“Well, look,” he said, “I could wait there by the bus-stop, walk you back to your door. The first night or two, anyway. Maybe after that you won’t have to worry about him any more. Around what lime do you usually get there?”

“No. Oh, no,” she balked volubly. “That would be asking too much. I couldn’t let you do that. That would be making a regular bodyguard out of you.”

He touched his finger to where his hat-brim would have been if he’d been wearing a hat. Somehow she knew he’d be there the next night.

He was.

Nothing memorable was said, but they were beginning to become better acquainted more by what was left unspoken than by the words they used.

She hadn’t had her meal yet when she met him, but rather than risk having him think she was trying to get a free meal out of him by referring to it, she refrained from mentioning it and did without it instead. After he’d left her at the door, she went upstairs and made herself a cup of instant coffee from a jar of it she kept there for use on Sunday mornings. She felt the alternative she had chosen to be the eminently more preferable one of the two: a full meal alone, or a cup of instant coffee with his company along the way home.

While she was drinking it, she sat there thinking about him.

Her thoughts were pleasant ones.

The following evening, the bus-stop again. This time he was the one who said: “I haven’t eaten yet. Have you?”

“No,” she said. “I’ll go Dutch with you.”

“I don’t do that,” he said firmly, but then he smiled to take some of the rebuke out of it.

At the table he told her, “I hadn’t eaten yet last night either when I met you, but I was afraid to ask you, afraid you’d turn me down. Would you?”

She thought back carefully. Then she said, “Yes, I would.”

“But you didn’t tonight,” he said.

All she said was, “I know you a day longer.”

She ordered frugally out of consideration for him, reading the menu-card from the right-hand side, where the price was, across to the left, where the item was. She received an impression that he was aware of what she was doing, and liked her all the better for it, though he wouldn’t have wanted to admit it.

Next, he picked her up at the candy-store at closing-time, instead of waiting for her at the other end of the bus-run. “Hello, Marie,” he said a little diffidently, as though wondering whether she’d approve his calling her by her first name.

She answered that for him forthwith. “Hello, Don,” she said. “Be with you in just a few minutes, as soon as I finish locking up.”

Acquaintanceship rapidly became friendship, friendship rapidly became fondness. Fondness started to ripen toward—

She realized he would have had to work terribly hard at disillusioning her to overcome the initial advantage he had started out with: her gratitude for the way he had taken her part and extricated her from her difficulty with the sidewalk-dizard.

Something he’d said kept coming back to her. It’s a lonely town when you’re by yourself.

One night they were sitting in a snack-bar lingering over a couple of cups of coffee, when he started talking to her about himself. About the part of him, that is, that dated from before she had known him. In every friendship, and in every love where the love has outstripped the time required for a true, deep understanding of one another, a time comes for one to tell the other the things about himself that he or she does not yet know. Sometimes little things, sometimes big. Even as he was speaking she realized dimly that she would have to face up to this herself some day, and in her case it was no mere anecdote that was to be told. But as yet this was only a tiny black speck in a whole vast sky of blue, too far away to be feared or thought about.

He didn’t speak well and he didn’t speak artfully, his words were commonplace and sometimes badly put, and sometimes halt and slow in coming, for lack of extensive-enough vocabulary. But it was his story, and so she drank in every word, cheeks propped within her cupped hands, elbows on tabletop.

His mother had died when he was no more than three or four, so he was left with no impression of her. After a fairly longish interval studded with feminine overnight house-guests, his father finally married a fat, ugly-tempered blonde, who never got fully dressed and who lay sprawled on a settee all day drinking beer through the holes punched in cans. This woman developed a hatred of her predecessor, and by the time she was through had managed to discard or get rid of every reminder or memento of her that was to be found around the house. All but one, the living reminder, which there was no way for her to discard or get rid of. So she found another way to vent her venom.

She fell into the habit of spanking him unmercifully while his father was at work. For anything, for nothing, for everything. If he looked at her, she spanked him for that. “Whaddye lookin’ at me for? I’ll teach you not to look at me!” If he didn’t look at her, remembering the last spanking, then she spanked him for not looking. “Look at me when I’m talking to ya! I’ll teach you not to turn your head away!”

She walloped him with anything and everything she could get her hands on — one of her own flat-heeled house-slippers with a wilted pom-pon stitched to it, or a magazine if its pages were stiff enough to be rolled into a good tight bludgeon — but her favorite implement came to be a large, round, shallow aluminum skillet, which had a wooden grip attached to it. This was feather-light in weight, but for some undetermined reason hurt more than all the heavier things did. It was so large in diameter that she couldn’t fail to hit him with at least part of its surface, even in oblique shots. Also it tired her less to wield it. She could bounce it like a yo-yo.

He told Marie sometimes he couldn’t even stand up to walk when she finally released him, he had to get away by crawling along the floor on his hands and knees.

In the beginning he was too small to complain coherently to his father about it. Then later, when he might have been able to, she warned him if he did she would give him such a beating on the day following that it would make all the previous spankings seem to have been like caresses. The whole thing was a moot point, in any case. His father’s paternal instinct was practically nil; all he had was mating-instinct.

Then, on the day that he found that his legs had grown long enough to carry him beyond her reach faster than she could overtake him, the epoch of corporal punishment ended as irrationally as it had begun. She was top-heavy and water-logged with beer, and after a few floundering attempts to go after him during which she nearly brained herself falling over rolling beer-cans and the sides of chairs, she gave up trying.

An uneasy armed truce existed between them for a brief period after this — no more than a week, possibly — during which, if he had to go past her, he went past on the outside, with some table or chair between them. Then this too ended, and a state of complete neutrality set in. They ignored each other from then on, for the rest of the time she remained in the house. Whatever spark of malignancy had existed in her mind that had made her want to maltreat him had dimmed and gone out for lack of anything to feed on. Or perhaps she had convinced herself to her own satisfaction by now that she was a better woman than the first wife.

They never exchanged a direct word from then on, communicating only through his father.

Then, around the time he was entering his teens, his father finally got tired of her marathon, around-the-clock drinking and threw her out of the house. Paradoxically, he no sooner had than he started drinking heavily himself. He lost his job, and Don had to support the two of them by whatever means he could, working as a grocery delivery-boy and anything else he could rummage up. When he was seventeen his father finally had to be taken away to an institution. And that about ended all further family-life, as far as Don was concerned.

The rest, for the ten-odd years or so that followed until he met Marie, was just humdrum but honest hard work. Little rooms in rooming-houses run by motherly women (who sometimes washed and hung his socks for him while he was at work). No real friends, just the men he worked alongside. No individual girls, just an occasional transient, without any commitment.

And that was he, the part she didn’t know.

A curious sort of regression seemed to have taken place in him during the course of the simple, plaintive little recital; she couldn’t tell whether it was just in her imagination or not. He seemed to have grown younger. He seemed less mature than he had at the start. Whether in mien, or posture, or whether it was because of the substance of what he’d been telling her, she couldn’t divine. When he’d first begun, he’d been sitting there adult, casual, self-sure, hand curled at case on table, cigarette spiking its knuckles. By the time he was done, he was huddled like an awkward, abashed boy, hunched forward over his lap, hands limply linked as if to wring them, feet slanted toward each other on the floor, toe to toe. He harassedly brushed some hair that wasn’t there back from his forehead.

She felt a sudden urge to put her arms around him and hold him to her, and she couldn’t understand it, it almost frightened her a little, for she knew it wasn’t love, the mutual love of the equal for the equal, but something else. And how could she, anyone like she, have any of the maternal in her?

But as a matter of fact, even in the larger, over-all picture, something parallel to this had been going on, unobtrusively but steadily, almost from the time she’d first known him. That first day on the sidewalk, her quick, confused impression of him had been that of a seasoned, hard-bitten man, who knew the score, who knew what he was doing, every move of it; who threw a punch and then calmly walked her off with him. Not a word wasted, not a motion wasted.

Then, as she got to know him better, as the artichoke-leaves of his heart slowly peeled off one by one beneath her tender, prying fingers, he seemed to become younger, or at least less mature, all the time. This wasn’t a physical thing, a thing of appearance, it was more a matter of outlook, of attitude, of occasional remarks and unguarded responses and unpremeditated reactions, the pattern of the personality.

There were even times when she felt as if she were the older of the two, which was absurd of course.

It came at last, and when it came it came quite impromptu, as everything between them had so far.

They were out walking together, aimlessly, contentedly, the crowd streaming all around them, their hands hanging loosely down between them, just linked by their hooked pinkeys.

“Know something?” he said.

“No, what?”

“Gee, I’d like to be married to you.”

Her face blazed with joy like a bonfire. “You would!”

Then she saw that he was waiting for more than that, so she gave it to him. “I’d like to be married to you too, Don.”

And that was all there was to it. There went her balcony-scene, her suitor on bended knee, her moonlight, mandolins and magnolias.

They just stopped and stood there where they were, pressed close to each other but not embracing, he looking down into her eyes, she looking up into his, his hands resting on her shoulders, hers within the crook of his arms. The people coursing by had to split into two streams to pass them, then came together again farther on. One or two noticed them and smiled. Most of them didn’t even see them.

They only said two things in all that time they stood there.

They said, “Don.”

They said, “Marie.”

That night, alone in her room, alone in her bed, alone with her happiness, for the first lime that little black speck, that single cinder in all the immensity of her serene blue sky, started to whirl nearer, to enlarge, to elongate like the black funnel-cloud of an onrushing tornado into the semblance of a looming, brow beating exclamation-point.

Something inside her kept saying, I’ve got to tell him, now that we’re going to get married. I can’t marry him without telling him.

But something else, less dogmatic or maybe just less brave, answered: “Or can I? Others have, and gotten away with it. Why can’t I?”

You never can, you never do. Just as that man recognized you on the sidewalk that day, someone else will surely come along some day and wreck everything you and he have built; your home, your trust in one another, your happiness. Isn’t it better to tell him now of your own accord—

And risk losing him, losing the one chance I’ve ever had to be the same as other people are?

— than to live in dread and insecurity for years to come, never knowing when the revelation will occur. Isn’t it better to lose him now, if you must, than to lose him later? Won’t it hurt less, won’t it cost less? And lose him or not, at least then you can hold your head up high all the rest of your days.

She got very little sleep that night, but her sleeplessness wasn’t due to anticipations of coming happiness.

And in the candy-store all the next day the problem rode her back like a monkey, whispering first in one ear, whispering next in the other, whispering now yes, whispering now no.

And even when she was with him that evening, it wouldn’t let her be, making her smile less, making her miss things that he said, taking the edge off her contentment at being with him. Until finally he noticed it himself, and asked her what it was, and whether she regretted her decision.

“No,” she said fervently. “No. Oh, no.”

In the meantime all their little preparations, which to them were not little at all, were going on apace. They went apartment-hunting, in the evenings and on Sundays, which was the only free time they had, but finally had to give it up. Most of the places they looked at were priced too high for them to afford, and those that weren’t were sordid. They finally temporized by agreeing that he would give up his own room, which was the smaller of the two, and move in with her, but he insisted that he take over the rent.

They even did a certain amount of window-shopping for furniture, and when they passed for instance a glossy walnut dining-table with a bowl of wax fruit on it, would stop and say “We’ll get something like that some day,” even though they knew it would be a long, long time before they could afford the eighty-nine-fifty that was asked for it. “Let’s see how we’d look at it.” Then they would both dip their knees a little and crouch down, standing out there on the sidewalk, so that their reflections on the showcase-glass seemed to be sitting down at the table.

“Did you see the faces of any small kids peeking up over the edge of the table just then?” he asked her.

“I saw one,” she said. “How many did you see?”

“I saw two,” he said.

She smiled, and took his arm more closely than before.

They took out the license, took their blood-tests, were okayed, and everything was in readiness for the coming Saturday, and still she hadn’t told him.

Now that she had a deadline to meet, the problem became insupportable, crushing. She almost couldn’t breathe with the weight of it. It was taking the joy out of what should have been some of the happiest days of her life. She had even considered going to a priest and asking his advice, although she had no formalized religious beliefs and had never been a churchgoer. But instinctively she realized that the decision must come from her, she must be the one to make it, for it would be lacking by that much in grace, less worthy by that much of remission, of indulgence, if it came only at the behest of some stranger of the cloth and not from the depths of her own heart.

If she had had a week’s grace more, she probably would have taken that week, that much more time, trying to make up her mind, and still not have succeeded. But there was no more time left. This was Thursday, and they were being married Saturday. The shortness of it forced the issue. It had to be tonight or not at all. She couldn’t wait until the very night before they were married to tell him; there would have been something indecent about doing that. And unfair to him, not giving him time, curtailing his power to make a decision.

It was settled, then. In both regards. She was going to tell him, and she was going to tell him tonight, this very night.

When they met at their usual place, which was still the bus-stop of their early days, and he made some remark about dinner, she quickly put him off.

“No, not just yet. I want to tell you something first. We can eat later on, if we cat at all.”

“Go ahead, tell,” he grinned amiably.

She looked around her at the teeming foot-traffic. “Not right here.”

“Let’s go in someplace and get a cup of coffee, then.”

But she felt she needed something stronger to brace her, to see her through this ordeal that lay immediately ahead. She had drunk only sparingly in her old life, and since then not at all. But she needed courage, a back stop, to face what she had to do now.

“I could use a beer instead,” she told him. “It might help to — lubricate my throat.”

They found this pseudo-German bierstube. Or possibly it was authentic, but it overdid itself being Teutonic. The waitresses all wore dirndls and laced bodices and had flaxen braids, whether real or fastened-on, hanging to their waists in front. The place was packed at that hour, but they managed to get one of the plank tables set into benched partitions along the walls by slipping in almost as the last occupants were extricating themselves.

The first glass of beer became two, the two became three, the three four. First there was the uphill climb toward courage. Then when courage had been attained in a topaze-amber glow, it became a matter of hating to shatter the ambrosial mood they were sharing together, eyes meeting eyes, smile meeting smile, hand meeting hand in tender rapport across the table.

In one way it had a good effect, in one way a bad. It took away the jagged edges of her fear, all right. Made it easier to tell him, easier to say. But on the other hand, it lulled her, made it seem less urgent, less crucial, whether she told him at once and got it over with, or waited a little while longer. Or even didn’t tell him at all.

His smile at her was uninterrupted, never leaving his face, and if it was a little fatuous, it was nevertheless honest, and warm and sweet as freshly given cow’s milk. Some of his syllables were becoming a little mushy around their edges now and then.

He gave no other signs than that.

She knew she couldn’t wait any longer, or what she had to tell him might not only not be adequately told, it might not even be fully understood. But first, as one last reflex, she decided to retouch her face, to give herself that much better a chance, to make herself look that much better when his suddenly knowing eyes sought her out about to pass their judgment.

She raised the flap of her handbag, which had a mirror glued to the underside of it, and brought out a lipstick. But she was nervous with the imminence of the long-deferred moment now at hand, and her fingers weren’t steady. In trying to unscrew the cap, the little cylinder slipped from her grasp, fell to the table, and started to roll. Her hand went after it, but not quickly enough. It went over the edge, dropped to the floor, and rolled some more down there, out of sight.

He jumped right up, went around to the open, outer side of the banquette, and crouched down under it, to see if he could get it for her.

She heard him strike a match and saw its submerged glow coming from below.

Then she heard him say, “I see it. It’s right by your foot. Don’t move, or you’ll step on it,” and he blew the match out.

He must have extended one aim out before him to reach for it. In doing so he unwittingly stretched one leg still further out in back of him, so that it lay across the aisle.

At this moment one of the hefty Brünnhildes came bustling along with a trayful of empty schooners on her way back to the bar drain-board with them. Her toe stubbed into his leg, and she started to go sprawling forward, her waitress’ instinct causing her to hold onto the tray for dear life to the very last. It struck Don on the rump, the only part of him that wasn’t protected by the overhang of the table, with a calamitous impact. It was lightweight, some sort of composition, but evidently resilient, for it continued to reverberate for moments afterward. The schooners went rolling all around like ninepins, but they were so sturdily made not one of them broke. The girl went down to one side of Don and tray, but managed to stay up on one elbow.

Heads turned all over the room, but since Don couldn’t be seen by most of them from where they were, they thought the girl was the solo participant in the accident and they went back to their own concerns.

The girl was the first one to pick herself up. Too fearful of the anger and recrimination that she was sure were coming to show any anger herself, she scrabbled about on the floor re-collecting the schooners. She stood them aside. Then she began to apologize and placate Don even before he was well out of his unlucky lair.

“Och, gentleman, I’m so sorry. I couldn’t help. I didn’t see you down there, was under my face the tray.” And all the while, though no beer had been spilled, she kept making little half-furtive, half-ingratiating dabs and passes at him, as though to dry him off.

He rose to his feet very slowly, unnaturally so. Absently, in a far-away manner, as though his thoughts were on some other time and place.

His face was shockingly pale, almost livid, Marie saw. Then, as she watched it, the color began to come back, rising in almost visible gradations like something seen under a slide, until he was the hue of a red plum. At first she thought it was slowly mounting anger, and couldn’t understand why it should reach such intensity because of what had after all been only a grotesque but not too grievous accident. But the dark, taut lines of anger weren’t on his face, so she knew it wasn’t that. Then she thought it must be embarrassment, deep mortification, at being made a spectacle of in front of a whole roomful of people. But the wavering, hangdog look of that wasn’t there either. Then suddenly she recognized it for what it was. She didn’t want to believe it even then, but there was nothing else for her to do but believe it.

He was excited. He had been stimulated beyond the point of reticence, or secrecy, or even of control.

He looked at the girl, looked at her thick blonde braids.

Then he picked up the tray from where she’d set it aside, and he thrust it toward her, to try to force her to take hold of it. “Again!” he said with a sort of quiet fierceness. “Again!” But she backed away a step, fearful and misunderstanding. She thought he was threatening her, challenging her, as if saying: Do that again and see what happens to you. Try that again and I’ll get you fired. All she could do was stand there and keep shaking her head from side to side, mutely and helplessly.

Once more he stepped closer, once more offered the tray. “Again, I say. Again, hear me?”

But the girl had reached the breaking point, couldn’t take any more. She backed her hand against her open mouth in a sort of terrified awe. “He must be crazy!” she said to no one in particular. Then she turned and fled stompingly down the aisle, sobbing loudly and looking back at him first over the one shoulder and then a second time over the other.

Marie had risen to her feet. “Don!” she said, in a sickened, choking voice.

He didn’t hear her. He saw a blonde silting with a man in the booth immediately adjoining the one he and Marie had been in, and he launched himself toward her. “Then you!” he importuned her desperately. “Come on, then you!” She squealed, half in alarm but half equally in hilarity, and edged away along the seat until her back was against the wall. The man with her aimed his leg at Don and tried to kick him with it. “Get away from here, you bum!” he growled. “Whatta you been drinking?”

Across the aisle there was a brunette. On her his eye rested only briefly, then passed her by. He made his way toward another blonde farther along the row of booths.

The place was in an uproar by this time. People started throwing things at him, crusts of roll and empty cardboard cigarette-boxes and rolled-up napkins, the way you bait a stray dog. Several women across the room stood up on their chairs to be able to see what was going on over the heads of others. And intermittently the tray clanged out, as someone, beery and cruel, entered into the spirit of the thing.

Marie by this time was running for dear life to get out of the place, but even so she wasn’t granted the mercy of a fast exit, for he and the milling people around him were blocking the near aisle, and she had to cross the room and run down the aisle on that side, seeing it and hearing it and living through it that much longer. She had no pity, had no compunction, but still as she ran the anguished thought flitted through her head: “Oh, the poor tortured clown! His agony making others laugh.”

She ran up the entrance-steps and onto the sidewalk, and turned, which way it didn’t matter, and kept on running, until at last she had to stop to get her breath back. And with her panting breaths came sobs — the death-rattle of what had once been love.

Behind her somewhere there was a momentary upsurge of hubbub as a door opened and then crashed closed, and when she turned to look he was lying sprawled across the sidewalk.

He got up on one knee and called out to her, “Marie! Wait! Don’t run out on me! Don’t leave me!”

“Geddaway from me!” she shrilled back rabidly. “You’re queer for paddywhacks!” And again she ran, ran until he was out of her sight and out of her life.

At last when she couldn’t run any more she slowed to a stumbling walk, and then came to a halt altogether, her shoulders hunched defensively against a wall. After a while she took out a cigarette and lit it.

Presently she moved on from there. Her cigarette was gone now, and her happy ending was gone now. And her trust in God’s plan was gone too.

She didn’t know where she was, but that didn’t matter, she wasn’t lost in that way, only the other. She didn’t want her job any more and she didn’t want her room any more, they’d both become too closely associated with him. He already had some of his clothes in the latter. A great blanket of hopelessness, twilight-gray and clammy-cold, settled down over her, blotting out every light in the world.

She came to a halt again, like something that has run down, and just stood there numbed, gazing down at the sidewalk before her.

In a little while footsteps passed her, but she didn’t raise her eyes. They slackened, then they stopped.

“Hello, sister,” a man’s voice said with a soft slur.

“Hello, mister,” she answered dully, and kept on looking down at the ground, waiting for him to come alongside her.

Nothing moved but the laced strings, like yarn, toiling above the two cigarettes left pointing together tip-to-tip, like a smouldering kiss, from opposite rims of the little clay dish. Nothing moved but a carbonated bead, hindmost of the long procession, straggling upward in the residue in one of the glasses, to find the surface and its own extinction.

Then she put the arrested comb back, into the hand-bag where she’d found it. Then she took the lipstick out, made just two strokes, once to, once fro. Then she put the lipstick back.

Her hand stayed on a moment, hidden down there. Finding nothing.

She just glanced at me for a moment in quizzical inquiry. Unreproachful, accepting the fact, but merely wondering about it with her eyes.

I answered her in kind. Shook my head slightly.

“Not that way, any more,” I said quietly. “You see, I’m starting to fall in love with you, myself.”