If Morning Ever Comes

13

Shelley’s face was small and white; her hair was a mass of sausage-shaped curlers, shrouded under a heavy black net. She stood behind her screen door and looked out to where Ben Joe stood on the porch, under the yellow outside light, and to Ben Joe it seemed as if she was suddenly considering every detail of him, weighing him in the back of her faraway mind. With one hand she reached up vaguely to touch her curlers, obeying that part of her that wondered always, no matter what, whether she was fit to be seen. But it was only the most absent-minded gesture. Her eyes were still fixed on him, and she frowned a little and bent forward to see him more clearly.

“It’s me,” Ben Joe said.

“I know.”

She kept watching him. The two of them seemed to be standing between the two ticks of a clock, in a dead silence of time where there was no need to hurry about anything; as long as she stayed silent and watchful they were frozen stock-still between that clock’s ticking. Then she gave up, not finished with whatever it was she was trying to do but just giving up in the middle of it, and, clutching her quilted bathrobe more tightly about her, opened the door for him.

“I’ve been walking for hours,” he said.

She nodded. Nothing seemed to surprise her. When he stepped inside she held up both hands, in a gesture like a doll’s in a toy-shop window, to take the light sweater he was wearing, and he shucked it off and handed it to her.

“I know you weren’t expecting company,” he told her as she turned to hang up his sweater. “You can go on and do whatever you were doing before. I won’t mind.”

She didn’t answer. The hangers in the closet tinkled flatly as she rummaged among them, and when she lifted one from the rod another fell with it, making a blurred explosive sound as it landed on a floor full of old rubbers and high-heeled galoshes. She ignored it; her eyes concentrated upon what suddenly seemed, to Ben Joe, the impossibly complicated task of getting his sweater upon the hanger. What was wrong with Shelley? Her fingers fumbled tightly at the collar of the sweater, taking hours to make it lie straight around the hook of the hanger. If it had been any other night, Ben Joe would have gone on in, would have left her in the hallway and headed for the living-room sofa. But tonight he felt uneasy. He wanted to tread as delicately as possible so that she would turn out to be glad he came. So he stood clenching his cold aching hands together and waiting hopefully for Shelley to finish this interminable business of getting his sweater up, and he never even looked toward the living room.

“I reckon you’ll want some bourbon,” she said.

“No.”

“It’ll do you good, if you’re cold.”

She headed toward the kitchen, making only the softest whispering noise across the floor in her bare feet. After a minute Ben Joe followed her. If she took so long to hang a sweater up, how long would she spend making a drink? And he really didn’t want one; he felt awkward and foolish stumbling in here like this, and he didn’t want to make it worse by accepting anything.

“I’m sorry I came without warning,” he said.

“It’s all right.”

“I should have called first.”

“It’s all right, Ben Joe.”

She stood on tiptoe to reach a liquor bottle from the cupboard, and Ben Joe leaned against the kitchen sink. He was surprised at how messy everything was; ordinarily Shelley was almost old-maidishly tidy. He could remember her spreading peanut butter on a piece of bread and then washing the knife and putting it and the peanut butter away even before she finished making the sandwich. And she had some sort of phobia about seeing that all the cannisters were neatly aligned along the counter and all the measuring spoons hung in order on the wall according to their sizes. But tonight the place was in chaos. Dishes and leftovers littered the counter; a recently washed sweater was balled up in the dish drainer and a shower cap was flung over the towel rack. He looked around at Shelley, trying to figure out what sort of mood she must be in. In her pale flowered bathrobe, a little too small for her, she looked wire-thin and brittle. But that shyness was gone, so much forgotten that she seemed not at all embarrassed at being caught in her bathrobe. In place of the shyness was a sort of heavy sullenness that he hadn’t often seen in her before, that made her face look fuller and the lower lines of her cheeks sag. Her eyebrows had lost the high, uncertain arch they usually had and sat straight over blank eyes, and she was poking out her mouth in a way that made it seem like a pouting child’s mouth. When she poured the drink she did it heavily, with finality.

“Have you got something on your mind?” Ben Joe asked.

She stopped, looked at the bottle, and then reached for another glass and poured a drink for herself.

“If you do,” he said, “I wish you’d tell me. I hate this ferreting things out of people. I ask what’s wrong and they say nothing, and then I say please to tell me and they say no, really, it’s nothing, and I say well, I can just feel something’s wrong. And by then we both hate each other. I keep thinking of everything bad I’ve done in the last ten years, things you wouldn’t even begin to know, but somehow I start thinking maybe you’ve found out—”

“Oh, Ben Joe,” Shelley said tiredly.

She handed him his drink and then picked up her own and headed for the living room. Behind her Ben Joe walked slowly, dragging his feet and watching the back of Shelley’s head. The curlers bobbed up and down cheerfully, but her shoulders were slumped and careless. When they entered the living room, Shelley chose a seat in the wicker chair by the fireplace and Ben Joe had to sit alone on the couch opposite her. He felt exposed and defenseless, with all that bare expanse of couch at either side of him.

“I would do anything to help,” he said. “But I don’t know what’s wrong.”

Shelley raised her eyebrows slightly, as if what he was saying was a curious little toy he had handed her and she wanted to act polite about it. He had forgotten that she could be this way. He had seen her angry only a few times in his life — once or twice when he had dated other girls, and then one memorable time when she had taken three months to knit him a sweater in high school and then found he had grown two inches while she was busy knitting. Each time that she had been angry, the change in her had surprised him all over again. She became suddenly cool and haughty, and she left him feeling bewildered. Tonight no matter how hard he looked at her, no matter how patiently he waited for her to speak, she was unchangingly cool and blank-faced, sitting aloof in her solitary wicker chair. He sighed and took a long drink of the straight warm bourbon. He thought about the bourbon winding slowly to his stomach; with his head cocked, he seemed to be listening to it, noting carefully which part of him it was burning now. Shelley was turned into a carefully shutout inanimate object on the other side of the room. A tune began in his head, hummed nonchalantly by that sexless, anonymous voice that lived inside him and always spoke words as he read them and thoughts as he thought them.

“So I guess I won’t be coming tomorrow night,” he said absently. Shelley’s fingernail, tapping rhythmically against her glass, was suddenly stilled. “I’ve got to go back to New York.”

The fingernail resumed its tapping. Ben Joe watched a specific place on the coffee table, a corner where the dust had gathered between the table top and the raised rim of it in a tiny triangle. He suddenly thought, without meaning to or wanting to, that tomorrow night when he was rattling northward on the rickety little train, this table corner would be exactly the same, would exist solid and untouched no matter where he was. Shelley would wash and neatly stack her dishes, and Gram would roar songs at the top of her lungs while she polished the silver, and everything — the solid little coffee table, the narrow polished windows, the hundreds of curtained front doors, all this still, unchanging world of women — would stay the same while he rushed on through darkness across the garishly lit industrial plains of New Jersey and into the early-morning stillness of New York. He leaned forward, resting his chin on his hand, and stared at the floor.

“Every place I go,” he said, “I miss another place.”

Shelley was silent.

“I don’t know why,” he said, just as if she’d asked. “When I am away from Sandhill, sometimes the picture of it comes drifting toward me — just the picture of it, like some sunny little island I have got to get back to. And there’s my family. Most of the time I seem to see them sort of like a bunch of picnickers in a nineteenth-century painting, sitting around in the grass with their picnic baskets and their pretty dresses and parasols, and floating past on that island. I think, I’ve got to get back. I think, they need me there and I have got to get back to them. But when I go back, they laugh at me and rumple my hair and ask why I’m such a worrier. And I can’t tell them why. There’s nothing I can tell them. Pretty soon I leave again, on account of seeing myself so weak and speechless and worried. I get to thinking about something I just miss like hell in another town, like this tree on a street in Atlanta that has a real electric socket in it, right in the trunk, or the trolley cars in Philadelphia making that faraway lonesome sound as they pass down an empty street in the rain, through old torn-down slum buildings with nothing but a wallpapered sheet of brick and a set of stone steps left standing.…”

Shelley was staring at him now, with her forehead wrinkled, trying to understand and not succeeding. When he saw that he wasn’t making sense he stopped, and spread his hands helplessly.

“Oh, well,” he said.

“No, I’m listening.”

“Well.” He paused, trying to arrange his words better, but finally he gave up. “Nothing,” he said. “So you go to Atlanta, and you see the damn electric socket, and you go to Philadelphia and you see the damn trolley cars. So what? They only turn out to be an electric socket and a trolley car, in the long run. Nothing to keep you occupied longer than five minutes, either one of them. Then, in the middle of being loose and strong and on my own, wherever I am, along through my mind floats this island of a town with my family on it, still smiling on the lawn beside their picnic baskets …”

Shelley nodded several times slowly, as if she understood. He couldn’t tell if she really did or not. He thought probably she didn’t, but what mattered more than that right now was whether she was still in that black mood of hers and whether she would tell him why. He looked across at her steadily; her face returned to its original blankness and she stared back at him.

“So you’re going back to New York,” she said.

“I guess.”

She was silent again. He began twirling the bourbon around in his glass, watching it slosh up and leave its oily trail along the sides.

“So you just come,” she said, “and then you leave.”

“Well, that’s what I’ve just been explaining to—”

“You’re not fair, Ben Joe Hawkes.”

He looked up. Shelley’s eyes were narrowed at him and she was angry. As soon as he looked at her she reached one hand up to her curlers again and then began pulling them down, with hasty, fumbling fingers, ripping them out and tossing them into her lap, where her other hand was clenched so hard that the knuckles were white. In spite of all his worries, in spite of being concerned at her anger and sad at the way this whole night had been, a part of Ben Joe wondered detachedly why she was taking her curlers out and why she was choosing this moment to do it. He watched, fascinated. Her hair without the curlers remained still in little sausage shapes around her head, and since she had no comb handy, she began raking her fingers through the curls in order to loosen them. But all the while her face seemed unaware of what was going on, as if this business with her hair was just a nervous habit.

“You come and then you leave,” she repeated, “just like that. You’re not fair. The trouble with you, Ben Joe Hawkes, is you don’t think. You’re a kind enough person when you think about it, but that’s not often, and most of the time you—”

“Don’t think about what?” he asked.

“Your coming and your going.”

“Shelley, for God’s sake.”

“And then on top of all that, there’s your sister.”

He stopped in the middle of putting his drink on the table and looked up. There was something nightmarish about this. It was like one of those dreams in which he was playing the leading role in a play on opening night and had no idea what the play was.

“My sister,” he said.

“Yes, your sister.”

“Which one?”

“Benjamin Hawkes, don’t you joke with me.”

“Well, but what sister?”

“What sister my foot. How can you—”

“I have six,” Ben Joe said patiently. He took another breath to go on and then suddenly, realizing what she meant, let his breath out again and sank back. Once more John Horner and Joanne stood looking at him on the porch steps, stood defensively close together in the Hawkes’s living room, and Ben Joe shook his head at his own stupidity. There was something about Joanne; the minute she met a man, that man seemed to belong to her. Even John Horner, whom Shelley had so definitely identified as her own, was associated in Ben Joe’s mind only with Joanne now that he had seen the two of them together. He had seen them first, after all, the night that Shelley had seemed to forget about John Horner completely. It was too confusing; he shook his head and said, “Lord, I’m stupid.”

“Why?” Shelley asked curiously. She seemed to have expected more of a fight, and now she was temporarily taken aback.

“Joanne, you meant.”

“Well, of course.” She put both hands together in her lap and stared down at them. “Mrs. Murphy told me,” she said. “Well, if it hadn’t of been her, it’d been someone else. This town knows everything. I know she’s your sister, Ben Joe, but I tell you she’s just wild. With a husband and a baby, even, she’s wild. She’s wild and no-count and after anyone who’ll pay a little attention to her. Anyone can tell you that. Doesn’t take a detective to figure it out. It’s just you that won’t listen. You don’t hear facts too good if it’s your own precious sister they concern.”

“I hear them,” Ben Joe said. He sat there, not looking at her, twisting his hands aimlessly between his knees.

“Oh, I didn’t mean to go mud-slinging …” Shelley said suddenly. For the first time that evening Ben Joe saw the beginnings of tears in her eyes. She looked up shinily, with her mouth blurred and shaky, and stared hard at a point just above his head to keep from blinking the tears onto her cheeks. Shelley was the kind of girl who cried often, and from years of experience he had learned that with her the best thing was to be cheerful and brisk and to pay as little attention to the tears as possible. The little anonymous voice in his head picked up the tune again and went cheerfully da-da-deeing along. He kept his eyes upon an empty knickknack shelf in the corner behind Shelley’s chair.

“Anyway,” he said finally. He kept his voice pleasant and reasonable. “At least we’ve got to why you’re angry with me.”

“Why?” Shelley asked, and bit her lip hard and went on staring above him.

“Well, you were with me and therefore John went out with Joanne. It was black magic. Once in college I was in love with a coquette. She had a cute little pony tail that bobbed on the back of her head every time she took a step, and I thought she was wonderful. I would go for whole weeks without even looking at other girls, not even looking at one that I just saw on the campus somewhere, because I thought that then she wouldn’t look at another boy. Sometimes it amazes me how superstitious I am. In the end, of course, she ran away and got married to this tuba player from Ditch 29, Arkansas—”

“You are just as lighthearted as a bird,” Shelley said. “I declare, every time a body gets sad, it’s a fact that someone’ll come along all cheerful and tell them their problems, which aren’t a bit more related—”

“I’m sorry,” Ben Joe said. “I thought it was related. I’m sorry.”

He began twisting his hands between his knees again, still not looking at her. When it seemed safe to start speaking again, when he was fairly sure that he hadn’t sent her off into a real crying fit, he said, “All I meant was, that’s why I’m to blame. Because it was me you were with. If you’re superstitious too, of course. But I surely didn’t mean to send John Horner off to my sister. God knows I—”

One of Shelley’s tears must have escaped. She was too far away and the room was too dim for him to tell for sure, but he saw her hand flicker up to her cheek and then back to her lap again.

“Oh, well,” he said, “you’re probably not superstitious at all. It’s probably nothing to do with that. But I’m trying to think what I’ve done and I can’t come up with anything—”

“Oh, you silly,” Shelley said. She hunched forward and began crying in earnest now, without trying to hide it any more, burying her face in her brittle white hands.

“Well,” Ben Joe said for no reason. He searched hurriedly through his pockets, but there wasn’t a handkerchief. On the mantel he spied a purse, a black leather clutch purse with a clasp, that always reminded him of old ladies. He rose and went to it just at the moment when the tune started up in his head again, but this time not even the little voice could drown out the whispery choking sounds behind him. He rushed through the contents of the purse — glasses, keys, coin purse, lipstick, arranged neatly inside — and found beneath them an unused Kleenex. Shaking the folds out of it as he went, he crossed over to Shelley and stuck the Kleenex in her hand.

“The way you talk,” she said in a thick voice as she took the Kleenex, “you haven’t done a thing in the world and are just asking what you did wrong to humor me, like. Well, I’ll tell you what you’ve done.” She blew her nose lightly. Ben Joe, standing over her, felt as if she might be Tessie or Carol. He wanted to say, “Come on now, blow hard. You’ll never breathe again if you blow that way,” but he resisted the urge and only waited silently for her to continue. “You just come to me when you want comforting,” she said, “without ever thinking, without giving it any thought. My own mama told me that, although she thought the world of you. Like when things got bad at home you would drop over to get comforted and then leave, bam, no thought to it, and when it came time for the Pom-Pom prom you asked Dare Georges, who I will say was as flighty as the day is long, her and that little majorette suit she wore everywhere but church—”

“Oh, Shelley,” Ben Joe said wearily, “try and stick to the subject, will you?”

She blew her nose and nodded at the floor. When Shelley cried she became almost ugly, with that translucent skin of hers suddenly mottled and blurred. As if she were thinking of this now, she passed one hand across her face and then through her uncombed hair, and she sat up straighter.

“It’s worse this time,” she said. “Worse than the times before, I mean. Because this time I had a steady boyfriend, who was getting serious, and then along you came and superstition nothing, it’s plain fact I had to tell John Sunday night was out because of you. Well, I know it’s my fault going out with you. And I know I shouldn’t be crying if I turned him down for you, but he’s someone, isn’t he? Someone that’ll stay, and think about me sometimes, and let me have a kitchen with pots and pans?”

She had worked herself up to a good crying session again. Her voice was shaky and her chin wobbled. Sometimes Ben Joe thought girls must actually enjoy crying, the way they kept dwelling on what made them sad. He reached down for her drink, which stood almost untouched beside her chair, and bent over her with it.

“Take a good drink,” he said.

“No.”

“Come on.”

He held it to her mouth and she took a swallow and tried to smile. Her face was puffy, with her eyes sleepy little slits, like a child’s, and her mouth smooth and swollen. He thought there must be something about tonight that made it right for crying. First Gram, and then Shelley, and in a way even he felt like crying now.

“One more drink,” he said.

She drank obediently.

“You want a cigarette?”

She pressed her lips together stubbornly and shook her head. “No, thank you,” she said. “They give me halitosis.”

“Oh. Okay.”

He took one for himself and lit it. It was the first he had had all day and it tasted bad, but he kept puffing hard and not looking at her.

“Well, it’s really me to blame,” Shelley said, as if they were in the middle of an unfinished conversation. “It’s me. For years, now, I haven’t let anyone sweep under my feet.”

“Under your—”

“So that I wouldn’t be an old maid. I worry too much about having someone to settle down with, but I can’t help it. Back home, when my family was alive, I would come in from work every day at the same time and climb the front steps of where we all lived thinking, ‘It’s five-ten just like it was yesterday and the day before, and just like then I am climbing these steps with no one but the family to greet me and the family to spend my evening with playing parcheesi and no man to care if I ever get home.’ And I’d come in and head up the stairs toward my room and Mama would call from the parlor, she’d say, ‘That you, Shelley?’ and I’d say, ‘It’s me.’ I’d climb the rest of the stairs and go toward my room and then out of Phoebe’s room Phoebe would call, ‘That you, Shelley?’ and I’d say, ‘It’s me—’ ”

“Shelley, I don’t think we’re really getting anywhere with this,” Ben Joe said.

“I’m explaining something, Ben Joe. I’m explaining. I’d go to my room and change to my house clothes, and I’d hang up my work dress neatly and I’d take my stockings to the bathroom and wash them out and hang them over the shower rail. Then I’d go back to my room and rearrange my underwear drawer, which I’d rearranged the week before, or I’d mend something or work a double crostic. At suppertime there’d be two questions for me. Daddy always said, ‘You have a good day, Shelley?’ and I said, ‘Yes, Daddy,’ and Mama’d say, ‘You going to be doing anything special tonight?’ and I’d say, ‘I don’t guess so, Mama.’ Which was true and which went on and on, so sometimes I think I could have just sent a tape recording home from work with my same old answers on it and done as well—”

“Well, what are you telling me for?”

“I’m explaining why I’m mad at you.”

“You’re still mad?” he asked.

“Course I am.”

“Oh, look now. Look, don’t be mad at me.”

“You come, you go,” she said doggedly.

“I don’t either.”

“You don’t?”

“Well, I won’t,” he said. He had a desperate, sinking feeling; there swam into his mind again the picture of himself on the train and Shelley behind in Sandhill calmly washing dishes as if he’d never been there.

“I don’t believe you’ll ever change, Ben Joe,” she said.

“Shelley, I won’t come and go. I won’t go on not thinking. Look, you come with me. You come to New York.”

“Oh, now, wouldn’t that give people—”

“No, I mean it. We could … hell, get married. You hear? Come on, Shelley.”

She stopped looking at her hands and stared at him. “I beg your pardon?” she said.

“We could …” The words in his mouth sounded absurd, like another line from the unknown play in his nightmare. He hesitated, and then went on. “Get married,” he said.

“Why, Ben Joe, that wasn’t what I was after. I wasn’t asking—”

“No, I mean it, Shelley. I mean it. Don’t be mad any more. You come with me on the train tomorrow and we’ll be married in New York when we get there. You want to? Just pack a bag, and Jeremy will be our best man …”

She was beginning to believe him. She was sitting up in the chair with her mouth a little open and her face half excited and half doubtful still, trying to search underneath his words to see how much he meant them.

“Sure,” he said. “Oh, hell, who wants to go away and leave you with the dishes—”

“The what?”

“And come back like, I don’t know, Jamie Dower maybe, with no one to recognize him but a girl, and even she went on and married someone else—”

“Ben Joe,” Shelley said, “I’m not following you too well, but if you mean what you say—”

“Of course I do,” Ben Joe said. And he did; he was becoming excited now, watching her face eagerly to see that she was convinced and not angry any more. “Do you want to, Shelley? I’ll meet you at the station for the early-evening train tomorrow. Do you want to?”

“Well, I reckon so,” Shelley said slowly. “I just don’t know …” For the first time that evening she really smiled, even with her eyes, and she rose and crossed over to where he stood. “You won’t be sorry?”

“No, I won’t be sorry.”

“All right,” she said.

“Will you? Be sorry, I mean. Will you?”

“Oh, no. Didn’t I always tell you that, even back in high school?”

“I guess so,” he said.

“Seems like you are always loving the people that fly away from you, Ben Joe, and flying away from the people that love you. But if you’ve decided, this once, to do something the other way, I’ll be happy to agree. I’ll meet you at the station, then.”

She reached up and kissed him and he smiled down at her, relieved.

“What time is it?” he asked.

“About one.”

“Lord. Shelley, if it’s all right with you, I want to sleep on your couch. I can’t face going home right yet, and I’ll be out of here before morning.”

She looked a little doubtful, but then after a minute she nodded. “Won’t do any harm, I guess,” she said.

“But it’s bumpy.”

“That’s all right.”

“Phoebe used to sleep there sometimes. She was a little bit sway-backed, and she said there was a poking-up spring on that couch that would support the curve in her back.”

She gave his cheek a pat and then turned and went quickly over to the hall closet. From the top shelf she took a crazy quilt, permanently dingy from years of use.

“This ought to keep you warm,” she said as she walked back to the couch. “You just hold this end, now, and I’ll wrap you up in it. That’s warmer than just having it over the top of you. Here.”

He kicked off his shoes and then took the end of the quilt she handed him. Shelley walked around him in a circle, winding the blanket about him like a cocoon. When she was done she stood looking him over and then nodded to herself.

“You’ll be fine in that,” she said. “The lamp’s above your head, and if you need anything you just call. Good night, Ben Joe.”

“Good night.”

He stood there by the couch, wrapped tightly in his quilt, until she had smiled for the last time and climbed the stairs to her room. When her bare feet padded gently across the floor above his head he laboriously unwound himself again and tucked the quilt around the foot of the couch. Then he took one of the throw cushions and placed it at the head for a pillow. He did these things with the special businesslike air that he always adopted when he didn’t want to be bothered with thinking; if he let himself think tonight he would never get to sleep at all. So he sat on the couch and worked his feet down under the quilt methodically, concentrating solely upon the mechanical business of getting settled. And once he was in bed he made his mind into nothing but a blank, faceless blackboard, bare of everything that might remind him of the restless puzzling at the back of his mind.