If Morning Ever Comes

16

Ben Joe came downstairs as slowly and quietly as possible; his feet instinctively veered away from the centers of the steps, where the slightest pressure always brought forth a creaking noise. In his left hand was his suitcase, held high and away from his body so that it wouldn’t bang against anything. His right hand was on the polished stair railing. His whole face seemed to be concentrated on the sleek wood of it and the thin film of wax that clung a little to his skin. He lifted his hand and rubbed his thumb and fingers together, frowning down, and then abruptly dropped his hand to his side and descended to the next step. As yet he had not made a single sound. He could go all the way downstairs and out the front door without anyone’s ever knowing it if he wanted to. But he wasn’t sure he wanted to. If he left without saying good-by, could he really feel he had left for good? He switched the suitcase to his other hand and began descending more rapidly, still frowning at how silly he would feel to announce so suddenly that he was leaving. In the back of his mind he knew he would never leave the house without telling anyone; yet his feet still moved cautiously and he still held the suitcase carefully away from the railing.

Once in the downstairs hall, he moved quickly across the half-lit area between the stairs and the front door. There was a square of warm yellow light on the rug, cast through the wide archway of the living room, and the murmuring voices of his sisters were as clear as if they were out in the hall also, but nobody noticed when he crossed the yellow square. At the front door he stopped, setting his suitcase by his feet, and stood there a minute and then turned back and entered the yellow square again.

“Mom?” he said at the living-room doorway.

“Mmm.” She didn’t look up. She was sitting on the couch, sipping her after-supper Tom Collins and leafing through a Ladies’ Home Journal. Beside her Gram was reading Carol a chapter out of Winnie-the-Pooh, although Carol wasn’t listening, and on the other side of the room Jenny and Tessie and the twins were arguing over a game of gin rummy. The other two were out somewhere — Susannah with the school phys-ed instructor and Joanne with Gary, showing him her home town before they went back to Kansas in the morning. But those who were still at home looked so calm and cheerful, sitting in their lamp-lit room, that Ben Joe almost wished he could stay with them and forget the suitcase at the front door.

“Hey, Mom,” he said.

“What is it?” She looked up, holding one finger in the magazine to mark her place. “Oh, Ben Joe. Why don’t you come on in?”

“ ‘Many happy returns of Eeyore’s birthday,’ ” Gram was saying in her bright, reading-aloud voice. Carol sniffed and bent down to touch the bunny ears on one of her slippers, and Gram glared at her. “I said, ‘Many happy returns of—’ ”

“I’m going back to school,” Ben Joe said.

“ ‘Eeyore’s birthday,’ ” Gram went on, no longer looking at the book but just finishing the sentence automatically. “Where you say you’re going, Ben Joe?”

“To school,” he said.

“You mean, tonight you’re going?”

“Yes’m.”

His mother folded the page over and then closed the magazine. “Well, I don’t see—” she began.

“I just suddenly remembered this test I’ve got, Mom. I really have to go. I’m going to catch that early train …”

His sisters turned around from their card game and looked at him.

“Where’s your suitcase?” Jane asked.

“Out in the hall. I just stopped in to say good-by.”

“Well, I should hope so,” said his mother. “Why didn’t you tell us earlier? Now I don’t know what to do about those shirts of yours that are still in the laundry—”

“Don’t worry about it. You can send them to me later.” He felt awkward, just as he knew he would, standing empty-handed in the doorway with everyone staring at him. His grandmother was the first one to stand up. She came toward him briskly, her arms outstretched to hug him good-by, and he smiled at her and went to meet her halfway.

“If you’d only told us, I could’ve made some cookies,” she said.

“No, I don’t need—”

“Or at least some sandwiches. You want me to whip you up some sandwiches, Ben Joe?”

“I haven’t got time,” he said.

The rest of the family was clustered around him now; Carol had her arms about one of his knees as if he were a tree she was about to climb. Behind his sisters stood his mother, with her face no longer surprised but back to its practical, thoughtful expression.

“I suppose it’s about time,” she said. “Looked as if you’d forgotten school.”

“We’ll drive you to the station,” said Lisa.

“No, thank you, I’ve got plenty of time.”

“But you just said you didn’t have—”

“No, really. I feel like walking. Come kiss me good-by, everyone.”

There was a succession of soft, cool cheeks laid against his. His grandmother held Carol up and she kissed him loudly on the chin, leaving a little wet place that he wiped off absent-mindedly with the cuff of his sleeve.

“Look, Mom,” he said, when his mother stepped forward to hug him, “you tell Joanne good-by for me, okay? And Susannah. Tell Joanne I’m sorry to leave without—”

“Of course I will,” she said automatically. “Try to get some sleep on the train, Ben Joe.”

Gram kissed him again, with her usual angry vigor, and said, “Don’t buy a thing on the train if you can help it, Benjy. You never know how much they’re going to upcharge. Me, now, I have some idea, because I used to be a good friend of Simon McCarroll that sold cigarettes and Baby Ruths on the train from here to Raleigh some twenty years back. He used to say to me, ‘Bethy Jay,’ he says, ‘you’ll never know how they upcharge on these here trains,’ and I’d answer back, I’d say—” She stopped, staring off into space. It was her habit, when saying good-by’s, to lead the conversation in another direction and ignore the fact that anyone was leaving. Taking advantage of her pause, Ben Joe’s mother patted him on the shoulder and became brisk and cheerful, just as she always did at such times.

“I know you’ll have a good trip, Ben Joe,” she said.

“You got enough money?” Jenny asked.

“I think so. Jenny, you tell Susannah to take good care of my guitar, will you?”

“I will. Bye, Ben Joe.”

“Good-by.”

His sisters smiled and began turning back to their gin-rummy game. His mother led the way to the front door.

“You’ll tell her too, won’t you?” he said to her. “Tell her it’s a good guitar, and a good hourglass and all. Don’t let her go forgetting—”

“Oh, Ben Joe.” She laughed and pulled the door open for him. “Everything’ll take care of itself.”

“Maybe.”

“Everything works out on its own, with no effects from what anyone does …”

He bent to pick up his suitcase and smiled at her. “Good-by, Mom,” he said.

“Good-by, Ben Joe. I want you to do well on that test.”

He started out across the porch, and the door closed behind him.

When he was across the street from his house he turned and looked back at it. It sat silently in the twilight, with the bay windows lit yellow by the lamps inside and the irregular little stained-glass and rose windows glowing here and there against the vague white clapboards. When he was far away from home, and picturing what it looked like, this wasn’t the way he saw it at all. He saw it as it had been when he was small — a giant of a place, with children playing on the sunlit lawn and yellow flowers growing in two straight lines along the walk. Now, as he looked at the house, he tried to make the real picture stay in his memory. If he remembered it only as it looked right now, would he miss it as much? He couldn’t tell. He stood there for maybe five minutes, but he couldn’t make the house register on his mind at all. It might be any other house on the block; it might be anyone’s.

He turned again and set off for the station. The night was growing rapidly darker, and his eyes seemed wide and cool in his head from straining to see. Occasionally he met people going alone or in two’s on after-supper errands, and because it was not really pitch-dark yet, almost all of them spoke cheerfully or at least nodded to Ben Joe whether they knew him or not. Ben Joe smiled back at them. To the older women, walking their dogs or talking to friends on front walks, he gave a deep nod that was almost a bow, just as his father had done before him. Two children playing hopscotch on white-chalked lines that they could barely see stepped aside to let him pass. He walked between the lines gingerly so as not to mess them up, and didn’t speak until the smaller one, the boy, said hello.

“Hello,” said Ben Joe.

“Hello,” the little boy said again.

“Hello,” Ben Joe called back.

“Hello—”

“You hush now,” his sister whispered.

“Oh,” the little boy said sadly. Ben Joe turned right on Main Street, smiling.

People were gathering sparsely around the glittering little movie house, and he could see dressed-up couples eating opposite each other in the small restaurant he passed. Just before he crossed to head down the gravel road to the station, a huge, red-faced old man in earmuffs stopped beside him and said, “You Dr. Hawkes’s son?”

“Yes,” Ben Joe said.

“Going away?”

“Yes.”

“Funny thing,” the man said, shaking his head. “I outlived my doctor. I outlived my doctor, whaddaya know.”

It was what he always said. Ben Joe smiled, and when the light changed, he crossed the street.

The gravel road was just a path of grayish-white under his feet, but he could see well enough to walk without difficulty. Even so, he went very slowly. He stared ahead, to where the station house, with its orange windows, sat beside the railroad tracks. The tracks were mere silver ribbons now, gleaming under tall, curved lamps. All around there was nothing but darkness, marked occasionally by the dark, shining back of some parked car. Ben Joe shivered. He suddenly plunked his suitcase at his feet and after a minute sat on it, folding his arms, staring at the station house and still shivering so hard that he had to clamp his teeth together. He didn’t know what he wanted; he didn’t know whether he wanted Shelley to meet him there or never to show up at all. If she was there, what would he say? Would he be glad to see her? If she wasn’t there, he would climb on the train and leave and then it would be he who was the injured party; something would at last be clearly settled and he could turn his back on it forever. He looked at the blank orange windows, still far away, as if they could by some sign let him know if she was there and tell him what to do about it. No sign appeared. A new idea came; he could wait a while, till after his train had left, and then surreptitiously catch a local to Raleigh and take the later train from there. But what good would that do? The picture arose in his mind of chains of future wakeful nights spent wondering whether he should have gone into the station or not. He rose, picked up his suitcase again, and continued on down the hill.

It was warm and bright inside, and the waiting room smelled of cigar smoke and pulp magazines. Nearest Ben Joe was a group of businessmen, all very noisy and active, who mulled around in a tight little circle calling out nicknames and switching their brief cases to their left hands as they leaned forward to greet someone.

“Excuse me,” Ben Joe said.

They remained cheerfully in his path, too solid and fat to be sidled past. He changed directions, veering to the right of them and continuing down the next aisle. A small Negro man and his family stood there; the man, dressed stiffly and correctly for the trip north, was counting a small pile of wrinkled dollar bills. His wife and children strained forward, watching anxiously; the man wet his lips and fumbled through the bills.

“Excuse me,” Ben Joe said.

The husband moved aside, still counting. With his suitcase held high and tight to his body so as not to bump anyone, Ben Joe edged past them and came into the center of the waiting room. He looked around quickly, for the first time since he had entered the station. His eyes skimmed over two sailors and a group of soldiers and an old woman with a lumber jacket on; then he saw Shelley.

She was sitting in the far corner, next to the door that led out to the tracks. At her feet were two suitcases and a red net grocery bag. Ben Joe let out his breath, not realizing until then that he had been holding it, but he didn’t go over to her right away. He just stood there, holding onto the handle of his suitcase with both hands in front of him as if he were a child with a book satchel. He suddenly felt like a child, like a tiny, long-ago Ben Joe poised outside a crowded living room, knowing that sooner or later he must take that one step to the inside of the room and meet the people there, but hanging back anyway. He shifted the suitcase to one side. At that moment Shelley looked up at him, away from the tips of her new high-heeled shoes and toward the center of the waiting room, where she found, purely by accident, the silent, watchful face of Ben Joe. Ben Joe forced himself to life again. He crossed the floor, his face heavy and self-conscious under Shelley’s grave stare.

“Hello,” he said when he reached her.

“Hello.”

Her dress was one he had not seen before — a waistless, pleated beige thing — and she had a round feathered hat and gloves the same color. So much beige, with her dark blond hair and her pale face, made her look all of one piece, like a tan statue carved from a single rock. Her face seemed tighter and more strained than usual, and her eyes were squinched up from the bright lights.

“Ben Joe?” she asked.

He sat down quickly in the seat opposite her and said, “What?”

For a minute she was silent, concentrating on lining up the pointed toes of her shoes exactly even with each other. In the space of her silence Ben Joe heard the whispery sound of the train, rushing now across the bridge at Dublin Cat River and drawing nearer every second. Men outside ran back and forth calling orders; a boy pushed a baggage cart through the door and drenched them for a second in the cold, sharp air from outside. Ben Joe hunched forward and said, “What is it, Shelley? What’ve you got to tell me?”

“I came by taxi,” she said after a moment.

“What?”

“I said, taxi. I came by taxi.”

“Oh. Taxi.”

He stood up, with his hands in his pockets. Outside the whistle blew, louder and closer this time. The two sailors had risen by now and were moving toward the door.

“I got my ticket,” Shelley said. “And I’ve got, wait a minute …” She dug through the beige pocketbook beside her and came up with a navy-blue checkbook. “Travelers’ checks,” she said. “I don’t want my money stolen. We didn’t talk about it, but, Ben Joe, I want you to know I am going to get a job and all, so money won’t be any—”

The train was roaring in now. It had a steamy, streamlined sound and it clattered to a stop so noisily that Shelley’s words were lost. All Ben Joe could hear was the steaming and the shouts and above all that the garbled, rasping voice of the loud-speaker. Shelley was looking up at him with her eyes glass-clear and waiting, and he knew by her face she must have asked a question.

“What’d you say?” he asked when the train had stopped.

“I said, I wondered, do you still want me to come?”

She started lining up the toes of her shoes again. All he could see of her face were her pale lashes, lying in two semicircles against her cheeks, and the tip of her nose. When the shoes were as exactly even as they could get she looked up again, and it seemed to him suddenly that he could see himself through her eyes for a minute — Ben Joe Hawkes, pacing in front of her with his hands in his pockets, setting out in pure thoughtlessness toward his own narrow world while she looked hopefully up at him.

“Course I still want you,” he said finally.

She smiled and at once began bustling around, checking in her purse for her ticket, leaping up to push all her baggage out into the middle of the floor and then stand frowning at it.

“We’ll never get it all in,” she said. “I tried to take just necessities and save the rest to be shipped, but—”

“Come on.” He grabbed her two suitcases and left her to carry the grocery bag, which seemed to be filled with hair curlers and Kleenex, and his own, lighter suitcase. When she had picked them up, he held the door open for her, and they followed the straggling soldiers out into the cold night air, across the platform and up the clanging steps to the railroad car.

“Passengers to New York and Boston take the car to the right!” the conductor sang out cheerfully. He put one hand under Shelley’s elbow to boost her up the steps. “Watch it there, lady, watch it—”

A thin white cloud of steam came out of Ben Joe’s mouth every time he breathed. Ahead of them the soldiers paused, looking over the seats in the car, and Ben Joe was left half inside and half out, with his arms rigidly close to his body to keep himself warm. He looked at the back of Shelley’s head. A few wisps of blond hair were straggling out from under her felt hat, and he couldn’t stop staring at them. They looked so real; he could see each tiny hair. In that moment he almost threw down the suitcases and turned around to run, but then the soldiers found their seats and they could go on down the aisle.

The car was full of smoke and much too hot. They maneuvered their baggage past dusty seats where all they could see of the passengers were the tops of their heads, and then toward the end the car became more empty. Shelley ducked into the first vacant seat, but Ben Joe touched her shoulder.

“Keep going,” he said. “There’re two seats facing each other at the back.”

She nodded, and got up again and continued down the aisle ahead of him. It seemed strangely silent here after the noise outside. All he could hear were the rustlings of newspapers and their own footsteps, and his voice sounded too loud in his ears.

At the last seat they stopped. Ben Joe put their luggage up on the rack, and then he took Shelley’s coat and folded it carefully and put it on top of the luggage.

“Sit down,” he told her.

She sat, obediently, and moved over to the window. When Ben Joe had put his own coat away he sat down opposite her, rubbing the backs of his hands against his knees to get them warm again.

“Are you comfortable?” he asked.

Shelley nodded. Her face had lost that strained look, and she seemed serene and unworried now. With one gloved finger she wiped the steam from the window and began staring out, watching the scattered people who stood in the lamplight outside.

“Mrs. Fogarty is seeing someone off,” she said after a minute. “You remember Mrs. Fogarty; she’s got that husband in the nursing home in Parten and every year she gives him a birthday party, with nothing but wild rice and birthday cake to eat because that’s the only two things he likes. She mustn’t of seen us. If she had she wouldn’t still be here; she’d be running off to tell—”

She stopped and turned back to him, placing the palms of her hands together. “What did your family say?” she asked.

“I didn’t tell them.”

“Well, when will you tell them?”

“I don’t know.”

She frowned. “Won’t it bother you, having to tell them we did this so sneaky-like?”

“They won’t care,” he said.

“Well. I still can’t believe we’re really going through this, somehow.”

Ben Joe stopped rubbing his hands. “You mean more than usual you can’t?” he asked.

“What?”

“You mean it’s harder to believe than it usually is?”

“I don’t follow your meaning,” she said. “It’s not usual for me to get married.”

“Well, I know, but …” He gave up and settled back in his seat again, but Shelley was still watching him puzzledly. “What I meant,” he said, “is it harder for you to believe a thing now than it was a week ago?”

“Well, no.”

He nodded, not entirely satisfied. What if marrying Shelley meant that she would end up just like him, unable to realize a thing’s happening or a moment’s passing? What if it were like a contagious disease, so that soon she would be wandering around in a daze and incapable of putting her finger on any given thing and saying, that is that? He looked over at her, frightened now. Shelley smiled at him. Her lipstick was soft and worn away, with only the outlines of her lips a bright pink still, and her lashes were white at the tips. He smiled back, and relaxed against the cushions.

“When we get there,” he said, “we’ll look for an apartment to settle down in.”

She smiled happily. “I tell you one thing,” she said. “I always have read a lot of homemaking magazines and I have picked up all kinds of advice from them. You take a piece of driftwood, for instance, and you spray it with gold-colored—”

The train started up. It gave a little jerk and then hummed slowly out of the station and into the dark, and the tiny lights of the town began flickering past the black window.

“I bought me a white dress,” Shelley was saying. “I know it’s silly but I wanted to. Do you think it’s silly?”

“No. No, I think it’s fine.”

“Even if we just go to a J.P., I wanted to wear white. And it won’t bother me about going to a J.P.…”

The Petersoll barbecue house, flashing its neon-lit, curly-tailed pig, swam across the windowpane. In its place came the drive-in movie screen, where Ava Gardner loomed so close to the camera that only her purple, smiling mouth and half-closed eyes fitted on the screen. Then she vanished too. Across from Ben Joe, in her corner between the wall and the back of her seat, Shelley yawned and closed her eyes.

“Trains always make me sleepy,” she said.

Ben Joe put his feet up on the seat beside her and leaned back, watching her face. Her skin seemed paper-thin and too white. Every now and then her blue-veined eyelids fluttered a little, not quite opening, and the corner of her mouth twitched. He watched her intently, even though his own eyes were growing heavy with the sleepy ryhthm of the train. What was she thinking, back behind the darkness of her eyelids?

Behind his own eyelids the future rolled out like a long, deep rug, as real as the past or the present ever was. He knew for a certainty the exact look of amazement on Jeremy’s face, the exact look of anxiety that would be in Shelley’s eyes when they reached New York. And the flustered wedding that would embarrass him to pieces, and the careful little apartment where Shelley would always be waiting for him, like his own little piece of Sandhill transplanted, and asking what was wrong if he acted different from the husbands in the homemaking magazines but loving him anyway, in spite of all that. And then years on top of years, with Shelley growing older and smaller, looking the way her mother had, knowing by then all his habits and all his smallest secrets and at night, when his nightmares came, waking him and crooning to him until he drifted back to sleep, away from the thin, warm arms. And they might even have a baby, a boy with round blue eyes and small, struggling feet that she would cover in the night, crooning to him too. Ben Joe would watch, as he watched tonight, keeping guard and making up for all the hurried unthinking things that he had ever done. He shifted in his seat then, frowning; what future was ever a certainty? Who knew how many other people, myriads of people that he had met and loved before, might lie beneath the surface of the single smooth-faced person he loved now?

“Ticket, please,” the conductor said.

Ben Joe handed him his ticket and then reached forward and gently took Shelley’s ticket from her purse. The conductor tore one section off each, swaying above Ben Joe.

“Won’t have to change,” he said.

Ben Joe took his suit jacket off and folded it up on the seat beside him. He put his feet back on the opposite seat and slouched down as low as he could get, with his hands across his stomach, so that he could rest without going all the way to sleep. But his eyes kept wanting to sleep; he opened them wide and shook his mind awake. Shelley turned to face the aisle, and he fastened his eyes determinedly upon her, still keeping guard. His eyes drooped shut, and his head swayed back against the seat.

In that instant before sleep, with his mind loose and spinning, he saw Shelley and his son like two white dancing figures at the far end of his mind. They were suspended a minute, still and obedient, before his watching eyes and then they danced off again and he let them go; he knew he had to let them. One part of them was faraway and closed to him, as unreachable as his own sisters, as blank-faced as the white house he was born in. Even his wife and son were that way. Even Ben Joe Hawkes.

His head tipped sideways as he slept, with the yellow of his hair fluffed against the dusty plush. The conductor walked through, whistling, and the train went rattling along its tracks.