The Complete Stories

MASTER MISERY

(1949)

Her high heels, clacking across the marble foyer, made her think of ice cubes rattling in a glass, and the flowers, those autumn chrysanthemums in the urn at the entrance, if touched they would shatter, splinter, she was sure, into frozen dust; yet the house was warm, even somewhat overheated, but cold, and Sylvia shivered, but cold, like the snowy swollen wastes of the secretary’s face: Miss Mozart, who dressed all in white, as though she were a nurse. Perhaps she really was; that, of course, could be the answer. Mr. Revercomb, you are mad, and this is your nurse; she thought about it for a moment; well, no. And now the butler brought her scarf. His beauty touched her: slender, so gentle, a Negro with freckled skin and reddish, unreflecting eyes. As he opened the door, Miss Mozart appeared, her starched uniform rustling dryly in the hall. “We hope you will return,” she said, and handed Sylvia a sealed envelope. “Mr. Revercomb was most particularly pleased.”

Outside, dusk was falling like blue flakes, and Sylvia walked crosstown along the November streets until she reached the lonely upper reaches of Fifth Avenue. It occurred to her then that she might walk home through the park: an act of defiance almost, for Henry and Estelle, always insistent upon their city wisdom, had said over and again, Sylvia, you have no idea how dangerous it is, walking in the park after dark; look what happened to Myrtle Calisher. This isn’t Easton, honey. That was the other thing they said. And said. God, she was sick of it. Still, and aside from a few of the other typists at SnugFare, an underwear company for which she worked, who else in New York did she know? Oh, it would be all right if only she did not have to live with them, if she could afford somewhere a small room of her own; but there in that chintz-cramped apartment she sometimes felt she would choke them both. And why had she come to New York? For whatever reason, and it was indeed becoming vague, a principal cause of leaving Easton had been to rid herself of Henry and Estelle; or rather, their counterparts, though in point of fact Estelle was actually from Easton, a town north of Cincinnati. She and Sylvia had grown up together. The real trouble with Henry and Estelle was that they were so excruciatingly married. Namby-pamby, bootsytotsy, and everything had a name: the telephone was Tinkling Tillie, the sofa, Our Nelle, the bed, Big Bear; yes, and what about those His-Her towels, those He-She pillows? Enough to drive you loony. “Loony!” she said aloud, the quiet park erasing her voice. It was lovely now, and she was right to have walked here, with wind moving through the leaves, and globe lamps, freshly aglow, kindling the chalk drawings of children, pink birds, blue arrows, green hearts. But suddenly, like a pair of obscene words, there appeared on the path two boys: pimple-faced, grinning, they loomed in the dusk like menacing flames, and Sylvia, passing them, felt a burning all through her, quite as though she’d brushed fire. They turned and followed her past a deserted playground, one of them bump-bumping a stick along an iron fence, the other whistling: these two sounds accumulated around her like the gathering roar of an oncoming engine, and when one of the boys, with a laugh, called, “Hey, whatsa hurry?” her mouth twisted for breath. Don’t, she thought, thinking to throw down her purse and run. At that moment, however, a man walking a dog came up a sidepath, and she followed at his heels to the exit. Wouldn’t they feel gratified, Henry and Estelle, wouldn’t they we-told-you-so if she were to tell them? and, what is more, Estelle would write it home and the next thing you knew it would be all over Easton that she’d been raped in Central Park. She spent the rest of the way home despising New York: anonymity, its virtuous terror; and the speaking drainpipe, all-night light, ceaseless footfall, subway corridor, numbered door (3C).

“Shh, honey,” Estelle said, sidling out of the kitchen, “Bootsy’s doing his homework.” Sure enough, Henry, a law student at Columbia, was hunched over his books in the living room, and Sylvia, at Estelle’s request, took off her shoes before tiptoeing through. Once inside her room, she threw herself on the bed and put her hands over her eyes. Had today really happened? Miss Mozart and Mr. Revercomb, were they really in the tall house on Seventy-eighth Street?

“So, honey, what happened today?” Estelle had entered without knocking.

Sylvia sat up on her elbow. “Nothing. Except that I typed ninety-seven letters.”

“About what, honey?” asked Estelle, using Sylvia’s hairbrush.

“Oh, hell, what do you suppose? SnugFare, the shorts that safely support our leaders of Science and Industry.”

“Gee, honey, don’t sound so cross. I don’t know what’s wrong with you sometimes. You sound so cross. Ouch! Why don’t you get a new brush? This one’s just knotted with hair.…”

“Mostly yours.”

“What did you say?”

“Skip it.”

“Oh, I thought you said something. Anyway, like I was saying, I wish you didn’t have to go to that office and come home every day feeling cross and out of sorts. Personally, and I said this to Bootsy just last night and he agreed with me one hundred percent, I said, Bootsy, I think Sylvia ought to get married: a girl high-strung like that needs her tensions relaxed. There’s no earthly reason why you shouldn’t. I mean maybe you’re not pretty in the ordinary sense, but you have beautiful eyes, and an intelligent, really sincere look. In fact you’re the sort of girl any professional man would be lucky to get. And I should think you would want to … Look what a different person I am since I married Henry. Doesn’t it make you lonesome seeing how happy we are? I’m here to tell you, honey, that there is nothing like lying in bed at night with a man’s arms around you and …”

“Estelle! For Christ’s sake!” Sylvia sat bolt upright in bed, anger on her cheeks like rouge. But after a moment she bit her lip and lowered her eyelids. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I didn’t mean to shout. Only I wish you wouldn’t talk like that.”

“It’s all right,” said Estelle, smiling in a dumb, puzzled way. Then she went over and gave Sylvia a kiss. “I understand, honey. It’s just that you’re plain worn out. And I’ll bet you haven’t had anything to eat either. Come on in the kitchen and I’ll scramble you some eggs.”

When Estelle set the eggs before her, Sylvia felt quite ashamed; after all, Estelle was trying to be nice; and so then, as though to make it all up, she said: “Something did happen today.”

Estelle sat down across from her with a cup of coffee, and Sylvia went on: “I don’t know how to tell about it. It’s so very odd. But—well, I had lunch at the Automat today, and I had to share the table with these three men. I might as well have been invisible because they talked about the most personal things. One of the men said his girl friend was going to have a baby and he didn’t know where he was going to get the money to do anything about it. So one of the other men asked him why didn’t he sell something. He said he didn’t have anything to sell. Whereupon the third man (he was rather delicate and didn’t look as if he belonged with the others) said yes, there was something he could sell: dreams. Even I laughed, but the man shook his head and said very seriously: no, it was perfectly true, his wife’s aunt, Miss Mozart, worked for a rich man who bought dreams, regular night-time dreams—from anybody. And he wrote down the man’s name and address and gave it to his friend; but the man simply left it lying on the table. It was too crazy for him, he said.”

“Me, too,” Estelle put in a little righteously.

“I don’t know,” said Sylvia, lighting a cigarette. “But I couldn’t get it out of my head. The name written on the paper was A. F. Revercomb and the address was on East Seventy-eighth Street. I only glanced at it for a moment, but it was … I don’t know, I couldn’t seem to forget it. It was beginning to give me a headache. So I left the office early …”

Slowly, and with emphasis, Estelle put down her coffee cup. “Honey, listen, you don’t mean you went to see him, this Revercomb nut?”

“I didn’t mean to,” she said, immediately embarrassed. To try and tell about it she now realized was a mistake. Estelle had no imagination, she would never understand. So her eyes narrowed, the way they always did when she composed a lie. “And, as a matter of fact, I didn’t,” she said flatly. “I started to; but then I realized how silly it was, and went for a walk instead.”

“That was sensible of you,” said Estelle as she began stacking dishes in the kitchen sink. “Imagine what might have happened. Buying dreams! Whoever heard? Uh uh, honey, this sure isn’t Easton.”

Before retiring, Sylvia took a Seconal, something she seldom did; but she knew otherwise she would never rest, not with her mind so nimble and somersaulting; then, too, she felt a curious sadness, a sense of loss, as though she’d been the victim of some real or even moral theft, as though, in fact, the boys encountered in the park had snatched (abruptly she switched on the light) her purse. The envelope Miss Mozart had handed her: it was in the purse, and until now she had forgotten it. She tore it open. Inside there was a blue note folded around a bill; on the note there was written: In payment of one dream, $5. And now she believed it; it was true, and she had sold Mr. Revercomb a dream. Could it be really so simple as that? She laughed a little as she turned off the light again. If she were to sell a dream only twice a week, think of what she could do: a place somewhere all her own, she thought, deepening toward sleep; ease, like firelight, wavered over her, and there came the moment of twilit lantern slides, deeply deeper. His lips, his arms: telescoped, descending; and distastefully she kicked away the blanket. Were these cold man-arms the arms Estelle had spoken of? Mr. Revercomb’s lips brushed her ear as he leaned far into her sleep. Tell me? he whispered.

It was a week before she saw him again, a Sunday afternoon in early December. She’d left the apartment intending to see a movie, but somehow, and as though it had happened without her knowledge, she found herself on Madison Avenue, two blocks from Mr. Revercomb’s. It was a cold, silver-skied day, with winds sharp and catching as hollyhock; in store windows icicles of Christmas tinsel twinkled amid mounds of sequined snow: all to Sylvia’s distress, for she hated holidays, those times when one is most alone. In one window she saw a spectacle which made her stop still. It was a life-sized, mechanical Santa Claus; slapping his stomach he rocked back and forth in a frenzy of electrical mirth. You could hear beyond the thick glass his squeaky uproarious laughter. The longer she watched the more evil he seemed, until, finally, with a shudder, she turned and made her way into the street of Mr. Revercomb’s house. It was, from the outside, an ordinary town house, perhaps a trifle less polished, less imposing than some others, but relatively grand all the same. Winter-withered ivy writhed about the leaded windowpanes and trailed in octopus ropes over the door; at the sides of the door were two small stone lions with blind, chipped eyes. Sylvia took a breath, then rang the bell. Mr. Revercomb’s pale and charming Negro recognized her with a courteous smile.

On the previous visit, the parlor in which she had awaited her audience with Mr. Revercomb had been empty except for herself. This time there were others present, women of several appearances, and an excessively nervous, gnat-eyed young man. Had this group been what it resembled, namely, patients in a doctor’s anteroom, he would have seemed either an expectant father or a victim of St. Vitus. Sylvia was seated next to him, and his fidgety eyes unbuttoned her rapidly: whatever he saw apparently intrigued him very little, and Sylvia was grateful when he went back to his twitchy preoccupations. Gradually, though, she became conscious of how interested in her the assemblage seemed; in the dim, doubtful light of the plant-filled room their gazes were more rigid than the chairs upon which they sat; one woman was particularly relentless. Ordinarily, her face would have had a soft commonplace sweetness, but now, watching Sylvia, it was ugly with distrust, jealousy. As though trying to tame some creature which might suddenly spring full-fanged, she sat stroking a flea-bitten neck fur, her stare continuing its assault until the earthquake footstep of Miss Mozart was heard in the hall. Immediately, and like frightened students, the group, separating into their individual identities, came to attention. “You, Mr. Pocker,” accused Miss Mozart, “you’re next!” And Mr. Pocker, wringing his hands, jittering his eyes, followed after her. In the dusk-room the gathering settled again like sun motes.

It began then to rain; melting window reflections quivered on the walls, and Mr. Revercomb’s young butler, seeping through the room, stirred a fire in the grate, set tea things upon a table. Sylvia, nearest the fire, felt drowsy with warmth and the noise of rain; her head tilted sideways, she closed her eyes, neither asleep nor really awake. For a long while only the crystal swingings of a clock scratched the polished silence of Mr. Revercomb’s house. And then, abruptly, there was an enormous commotion in the hall, capsizing the room into a fury of sound: a bull-deep voice, vulgar as red, roared out: “Stop Oreilly? The ballet butler and who else?” The owner of this voice, a tub-shaped, brick-colored little man, shoved his way to the parlor threshold, where he stood drunkenly seesawing from foot to foot. “Well, well, well,” he said, his gin-hoarse voice descending the scale, “and all these ladies before me? But Oreilly is a gentleman, Oreilly waits his turn.”

“Not here, he doesn’t,” said Miss Mozart, stealing up behind him and seizing him sternly by the collar. His face went even redder and his eyes bubbled out: “You’re choking me,” he gasped, but Miss Mozart, whose green-pale hands were as strong as oak roots, jerked his tie still tighter, and propelled him toward the door, which presently slammed with shattering effect: a tea cup tinkled, and dry dahlia leaves tumbled from their heights. The lady with the fur slipped an aspirin into her mouth. “Disgusting,” she said, and the others, all except Sylvia, laughed delicately, admiringly, as Miss Mozart strode past dusting her hands.

It was raining thick and darkly when Sylvia left Mr. Revercomb’s. She looked around the desolate street for a taxi; there was nothing, however, and no one; yes, someone, the drunk man who had caused the disturbance. Like a lonely city child, he was leaning against a parked car and bouncing a rubber ball up and down. “Lookit, kid,” he said to Sylvia, “lookit, I just found this ball. Do you suppose that means good luck?” Sylvia smiled at him; for all his bravado, she thought him rather harmless, and there was a quality in his face, some grinning sadness suggesting a clown minus makeup. Juggling his ball, he skipped along after her as she headed toward Madison Avenue. “I’ll bet I made a fool of myself in there,” he said. “When I do things like that I just want to sit down and cry.” Standing so long in the rain seemed to have sobered him considerably. “But she ought not to have choked me that way; damn, she’s too rough. I’ve known some rough women: my sister Berenice could brand the wildest bull; but that other one, she’s the roughest of the lot. Mark Oreilly’s word, she’s going to end up in the electric chair,” he said, and smacked his lips. “They’ve got no cause to treat me like that. It’s every bit his fault anyhow. I didn’t have an awful lot to begin with, but then he took it every bit, and now I’ve got niente, kid, niente.”

“That’s too bad,” said Sylvia, though she did not know what she was being sympathetic about. “Are you a clown, Mr. Oreilly?”

“Was,” he said.

By this time they had reached the avenue, but Sylvia did not even look for a taxi; she wanted to walk on in the rain with the man who had been a clown. “When I was a little girl I only liked clown dolls,” she told him. “My room at home was like a circus.”

“I’ve been other things besides a clown. I have sold insurance also.”

“Oh?” said Sylvia, disappointed. “And what do you do now?”

Oreilly chuckled and threw his ball especially high; after the catch his head still remained tilted upward. “I watch the sky,” he said. “There I am with my suitcase traveling through the blue. It’s where you travel when you’ve got no place else to go. But what do I do on this planet? I have stolen, begged, and sold my dreams—all for purposes of whiskey. A man cannot travel in the blue without a bottle. Which brings us to a point: how’d you take it, baby, if I asked for the loan of a dollar?”

“I’d take it fine,” Sylvia replied, and paused, uncertain of what she’d say next. They wandered along so slowly, the stiff rain enclosing them like an insulating pressure; it was as though she were walking with a childhood doll, one grown miraculous and capable; she reached and held his hand: dear clown traveling in the blue. “But I haven’t got a dollar. All I’ve got is seventy cents.”

“No hard feelings,” said Oreilly. “But honest, is that the kind of money he’s paying nowadays?”

Sylvia knew whom he meant. “No, no—as a matter of fact, I didn’t sell him a dream.” She made no attempt to explain; she didn’t understand it herself. Confronting the graying invisibility of Mr. Revercomb (impeccable, exact as a scale, surrounded in a cologne of clinical odors; flat gray eyes planted like seed in the anonymity of his face and sealed within steel-dull lenses) she could not remember a dream, and so she told of two thieves who had chased her through the park and in and out among the swings of a playground. “Stop, he said for me to stop; there are dreams and dreams, he said, but that is not a real one, that is one you are making up. Now how do you suppose he knew that? So I told him another dream; it was about him, of how he held me in the night with balloons rising and moons falling all around. He said he was not interested in dreams concerning himself.” Miss Mozart, who transcribed the dreams in shorthand, was told to call the next person. “I don’t think I will go back there again,” she said.

“You will,” said Oreilly. “Look at me, even I go back, and he has long since finished with me, Master Misery.”

“Master Misery? Why do you call him that?”

They had reached the corner where the maniacal Santa Claus rocked and bellowed. His laughter echoed in the rainy squeaking street, and a shadow of him swayed in the rainbow lights of the pavement. Oreilly, turning his back upon the Santa Claus, smiled and said: “I call him Master Misery on account of that’s who he is. Master Misery. Only maybe you call him something else; anyway, he is the same fellow, and you must’ve known him. All mothers tell their kids about him: he lives in hollows of trees, he comes down chimneys late at night, he lurks in graveyards and you can hear his step in the attic. The sonofabitch, he is a thief and a threat: he will take everything you have and end by leaving you nothing, not even a dream. Boo!” he shouted, and laughed louder than Santa Claus. “Now do you know who he is?”

Sylvia nodded. “I know who he is. My family called him something else. But I can’t remember what. It was so long ago.”

“But you remember him?”

“Yes, I remember him.”

“Then call him Master Misery,” he said, and, bouncing his ball, walked away from her. “Master Misery,” his voice trailed to a mere moth of sound, “Mas-ter Mis-er-y …”

It was hard to look at Estelle, for she was in front of a window, and the window was filled with windy sun, which hurt Sylvia’s eyes, and the glass rattled, which hurt her head. Also, Estelle was lecturing. Her nasal voice sounded as though her throat were a depository for rusty blades. “I wish you could see yourself,” she was saying. Or was that something she’d said a long while back? Never mind. “I don’t know what’s happened to you: I’ll bet you don’t weigh a hundred pounds, I can see every bone and vein, and your hair! you look like a poodle.”

Sylvia passed a hand over her forehead. “What time is it, Estelle?”

“It’s four,” she said, interrupting herself long enough to look at her watch. “But where is your watch?”

“I sold it,” said Sylvia, too tired to lie. It did not matter. She had sold so many things, including her beaver coat and gold mesh evening bag.

Estelle shook her head. “I give up, honey, I plain give up. And that was the watch your mother gave you for graduation. It’s a shame,” she said, and made an old-maid noise with her mouth, “a pity and a shame. I’ll never understand why you left us. That is your business, I’m sure; only how could you have left us for this … this …?”

“Dump,” supplied Sylvia, using the word advisedly. It was a furnished room in the East Sixties between Second and Third Avenues. Large enough for a daybed and a splintery old bureau with a mirror like a cataracted eye, it had one window, which looked out on a vast vacant lot (you could hear the tough afternoon voices of desperate running boys) and in the distance, like an exclamation point for the skyline, there was the black smokestack of a factory. This smokestack occurred frequently in her dreams; it never failed to arouse Miss Mozart: “Phallic, phallic,” she would mutter, glancing up from her shorthand. The floor of the room was a garbage pail of books begun but never finished, antique newspapers, even orange hulls, fruit cores, underwear, a spilled powder box.

Estelle kicked her way through this trash, and sat down on the daybed. “Honey, you don’t know, but I’ve been worried crazy. I mean I’ve got pride and all that and if you don’t like me, well, o.k.; but you’ve got no right to stay away like this and not let me hear from you in over a month. So today I said to Bootsy, Bootsy, I’ve got a feeling something terrible has happened to Sylvia. You can imagine how I felt when I called your office and they told me you hadn’t worked there for the last four weeks. What happened, were you fired?”

“Yes, I was fired.” Sylvia began to sit up. “Please, Estelle—I’ve got to get ready; I’ve got an appointment.”

“Be still. You’re not going anywhere till I know what’s wrong. The landlady downstairs told me you were found sleepwalking.…”

“What do you mean talking to her? Why are you spying on me?”

Estelle’s eyes puckered, as though she were going to cry. She put her hand over Sylvia’s and petted it gently. “Tell me, honey, is it because of a man?”

“It’s because of a man, yes,” said Sylvia, laughter at the edge of her voice.

“You should have come to me before,” Estelle sighed. “I know about men. That is nothing for you to be ashamed of. A man can have a way with a woman that kind of makes her forget everything else. If Henry wasn’t the fine upstanding potential lawyer that he is, why, I would still love him, and do things for him that before I knew what it was like to be with a man would have seemed shocking and horrible. But honey, this fellow you’re mixed up with, he’s taking advantage of you.”

“It’s not that kind of relationship,” said Sylvia, getting up and locating a pair of stockings in the furor of her bureau drawers. “It hasn’t got anything to do with love. Forget about it. In fact, go home and forget about me altogether.”

Estelle looked at her narrowly. “You scare me, Sylvia; you really scare me.” Sylvia laughed and went on getting dressed. “Do you remember a long time ago when I said you ought to get married?”

“Uh huh. And now you listen.” Sylvia turned around; there was a row of hairpins spaced across her mouth; she extracted them one at a time all the while she talked. “You talk about getting married as though it were the answer absolute; very well, up to a point I agree. Sure, I want to be loved; who the hell doesn’t? But even if I was willing to compromise, where is the man I’m going to marry? Believe me, he must’ve fallen down a manhole. I mean it seriously when I say there are no men in New York—and even if there were, how do you meet them? Every man I ever met here who seemed the slightest bit attractive was either married, too poor to get married, or queer. And anyway, this is no place to fall in love; this is where you ought to come when you want to get over being in love. Sure, I suppose I could marry somebody; but do I want that? Do I?”

Estelle shrugged. “Then what do you want?”

“More than is coming to me.” She poked the last hairpin into place, and smoothed her eyebrows before the mirror. “I have an appointment, Estelle, and it is time for you to go now.”

“I can’t leave you like this,” said Estelle, her hand waving helplessly around the room. “Sylvia, you were my childhood friend.”

“That is just the point: we’re not children any more; at least, I’m not. No, I want you to go home, and I don’t want you to come here again. I just want you to forget about me.”

Estelle fluttered at her eyes with a handkerchief, and by the time she reached the door she was weeping quite loudly. Sylvia could not afford remorse: having been mean, there was nothing to be but meaner. “Go on,” she said, following Estelle into the hall, “and write home any damn nonsense about me you want to!” Letting out a wail that brought other roomers to their doors, Estelle fled down the stairs.

After this Sylvia went back into her room and sucked a piece of sugar to take the sour taste out of her mouth: it was her grandmother’s remedy for bad tempers. Then she got down on her knees and pulled from under the bed a cigar box she kept hidden there. When you opened the box it played a homemade and somewhat disorganized version of “Oh How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning.” Her brother had made the music-box and given it to her on her fourteenth birthday. Eating the sugar, she’d thought of her grandmother, and hearing the tune she thought of her brother; the rooms of the house where they had lived rotated before her, all dark and she like a light moving among them: up the stairs, down, out and through, spring sweet and lilac shadows in the air and the creaking of a porch swing. All gone, she thought, calling their names, and now I am absolutely alone. The music stopped. But it went on in her head; she could hear it bugling above the child-cries of the vacant lot. And it interfered with her reading. She was reading a little diary-like book she kept inside the box. In this book she wrote down the essentials of her dreams; they were endless now, and it was so hard to remember. Today she would tell Mr. Revercomb about the three blind children. He would like that. The prices he paid varied, and she was sure this was at least a ten-dollar dream. The cigar-box anthem followed her down the stairs and through the streets and she longed for it to go away.

In the store where the Santa Claus had been there was a new and equally unnerving exhibit. Even when she was late to Mr. Revercomb’s, as now, Sylvia was compelled to pause by the window. A plaster girl with intense glass eyes sat astride a bicycle pedaling at the maddest pace; though its wheel spokes spun hypnotically, the bicycle of course never budged: all that effort and the poor girl going nowhere. It was a pitifully human situation, and one that Sylvia could so exactly identify with herself that she always felt a real pang. The music-box rewound in her head: the tune, her brother, the house, a high-school dance, the house, the tune! Couldn’t Mr. Revercomb hear it? His penetrating gaze carried such dull suspicion. But he seemed pleased with her dream, and, when she left, Miss Mozart gave her an envelope containing ten dollars.

“I had a ten-dollar dream,” she told Oreilly, and Oreilly, rubbing his hands together, said, “Fine! Fine! But that’s just my luck, baby—you should’ve got here sooner ’cause I went and did a terrible thing. I walked into a liquor store up the street, snatched a quart and ran.” Sylvia didn’t believe him until he produced from his pinned-together overcoat a bottle of bourbon, already half gone. “You’re going to get in trouble some day,” she said, “and then what would happen to me? I don’t know what I would do without you.” Oreilly laughed and poured a shot of the whiskey into a water glass. They were sitting in an all-night cafeteria, a great glaring food depot alive with blue mirrors and raw murals. Although to Sylvia it seemed a sordid place, they met there frequently for dinner; but even if she could have afforded it she did not know where else they could go, for together they presented a curious aspect: a young girl and a doddering, drunken man. Even here people often stared at them; if they stared long enough, Oreilly would stiffen with dignity and say: “Hello, hot lips, I remember you from way back. Still working in the men’s room?” But usually they were left to themselves, and sometimes they would sit talking until two and three in the morning.

“It’s a good thing the rest of Master Misery’s crowd don’t know he gave you that ten bucks. One of them would say you stole the dream. I had that happen once. Eaten up, all of ’em, never saw such a bunch of sharks, worse than actors or clowns or businessmen. Crazy, if you think about it: you worry whether you’re going to go to sleep, if you’re going to have a dream, if you’re going to remember the dream. Round and round. So you get a couple of bucks, so you rush to the nearest liquor store—or the nearest sleeping-pill machine. And first thing you know, you’re roaming your way up outhouse alley. Why, baby, you know what it’s like? It’s just like life.”

“No, Oreilly, that’s what it isn’t like. It hasn’t anything to do with life. It has more to do with being dead. I feel as though everything were being taken from me, as though some thief were stealing me down to the bone. Oreilly, I tell you I haven’t an ambition, and there used to be so much. I don’t understand it and I don’t know what to do.”

He grinned. “And you say it isn’t like life? Who understands life and who knows what to do?”

“Be serious,” she said. “Be serious and put away that whiskey and eat your soup before it gets stone cold.” She lighted a cigarette, and the smoke, smarting her eyes, intensified her frown. “If only I knew what he wanted with those dreams, all typed and filed. What does he do with them? You’re right when you say he is Master Misery.… He can’t be simply some silly quack; it can’t be so meaningless as that. But why does he want dreams? Help me, Oreilly, think, think: what does it mean?”

Squinting one eye, Oreilly poured himself another drink; the clownlike twist of his mouth hardened into a line of scholarly straightness. “That is a million-dollar question, kid. Why don’t you ask something easy, like how to cure the common cold? Yes, kid, what does it mean? I have thought about it a good deal. I have thought about it in the process of making love to a woman, and I have thought about it in the middle of a poker game.” He tossed the drink down his throat and shuddered. “Now a sound can start a dream; the noise of one car passing in the night can drop a hundred sleepers into the deep parts of themselves. It’s funny to think of that one car racing through the dark, trailing so many dreams. Sex, a sudden change of light, a pickle, these are little keys that can open up our insides, too. But most dreams begin because there are furies inside of us that blow open all the doors. I don’t believe in Jesus Christ, but I do believe in people’s souls; and I figure it this way, baby: dreams are the mind of the soul and the secret truth about us. Now Master Misery, maybe he hasn’t got a soul, so bit by bit he borrows yours, steals it like he would steal your dolls or the chicken wing off your plate. Hundreds of souls have passed through him and gone into a filing case.”

“Oreilly, be serious,” she said again, annoyed because she thought he was making more jokes. “And look, your soup is …” She stopped abruptly, startled by Oreilly’s peculiar expression. He was looking toward the entrance. Three men were there, two policemen and a civilian wearing a clerk’s cloth jacket. The clerk was pointing toward their table. Oreilly’s eyes circled the room with trapped despair; he sighed then, and leaned back in his seat, ostentatiously pouring himself another drink. “Good evening, gentlemen,” he said, when the official party confronted him, “will you join us for a drink?”

“You can’t arrest him,” cried Sylvia, “you can’t arrest a clown!” She threw her ten-dollar bill at them, but the policemen did not pay any attention, and she began to pound the table. All the customers in the place were staring, and the manager came running up, wringing his hands. The police said for Oreilly to get to his feet. “Certainly,” Oreilly said, “though I do think it shocking you have to trouble yourselves with such petty crimes as mine when everywhere there are master thieves afoot. For instance, this pretty child,” he stepped between the officers and pointed to Sylvia, “she is the recent victim of a major theft: poor baby, she has had her soul stolen.”

For two days following Oreilly’s arrest Sylvia did not leave her room: sun on the window, then dark. By the third day she had run out of cigarettes, so she ventured as far as the corner delicatessen. She bought a package of cupcakes, a can of sardines, a newspaper and cigarettes. In all this time she’d not eaten and it was a light, delicious, sharpening sensation; but the climb back up the stairs, the relief of closing the door, these so exhausted her she could not quite make the daybed. She slid down to the floor and did not move until it was day again. She thought afterwards that she’d been there about twenty minutes. Turning on the radio as loud as it would go, she dragged a chair up to the window and opened the newspaper on her lap: Lana Denies, Russia Rejects, Miners Conciliate: of all things this was saddest, that life goes on: if one leaves one’s lover, life should stop for him, and if one disappears from the world, then the world should stop, too: and it never did. And that was the real reason for most people getting up in the morning: not because it would matter but because it wouldn’t. But if Mr. Revercomb succeeded finally in collecting all the dreams out of every head, perhaps—the idea slipped, became entangled with radio and newspaper. Falling Temperatures. A snowstorm moving across Colorado, across the West, falling upon all the small towns, yellowing every light, filling every footfall, falling now and here: but how quickly it had come, the snowstorm: the roofs, the vacant lot, the distance deep in white and deepening, like sleep. She looked at the paper and she looked at the snow. But it must have been snowing all day. It could not have just started. There was no sound of traffic; in the swirling wastes of the vacant lot children circled a bonfire; a car, buried at the curb, winked its headlights: help! help! silent, like the heart’s distress. She crumbled a cupcake and sprinkled it on the windowsill: north-birds would come to keep her company. And she left the window open for them; snow-wind scattered flakes that dissolved on the floor like April-fool jewels. Presents Life Can Be Beautiful: turn down that radio! The witch of the woods was tapping at her door: Yes, Mrs. Halloran, she said, and turned off the radio altogether. Snow-quiet, sleep-silent, only the fun-fire faraway songsinging of children; and the room was blue with cold, colder than the cold of fairytales: lie down my heart among the igloo flowers of snow. Mr. Revercomb, why do you wait upon the threshold? Ah, do come inside, it is so cold out there.

But her moment of waking was warm and held. The window was closed, and a man’s arms were around her. He was singing to her, his voice gentle but jaunty: cherryberry, moneyberry, happyberry pie, but the best old pie is a loveberry pie …

“Oreilly, is it—is it really you?”

He squeezed her. “Baby’s awake now. And how does she feel?”

“I had thought I was dead,” she said, and happiness winged around inside her like a bird lamed but still flying. She tried to hug him and she was too weak. “I love you, Oreilly; you are my only friend and I was so frightened. I thought I would never see you again.” She paused, remembering. “But why aren’t you in jail?”

Oreilly’s face got all tickled and pink. “I was never in jail,” he said mysteriously. “But first, let’s have something to eat. I brought some things up from the delicatessen this morning.”

She had a sudden feeling of floating. “How long have you been here?”

“Since yesterday,” he said, fussing around with bundles and paper plates. “You let me in yourself.”

“That’s impossible. I don’t remember it at all.”

“I know,” he said, leaving it at that. “Here, drink your milk like a good kid and I’ll tell you a real wicked story. Oh, it’s wild,” he promised, slapping his sides gladly and looking more than ever like a clown. “Well, like I said, I never was in jail and this bit of fortune came to me because there I was being hustled down the street by those bindlestiffs when who should I see come swinging along but the gorilla woman: you guessed it, Miss Mozart. Hi, I says to her, off to the barber shop for a shave? It’s about time you were put under arrest, she says, and smiles at one of the cops. Do your duty, officer. Oh, I says to her, I’m not under arrest. Me, I’m just on my way to the station house to give them the lowdown on you, you dirty communist. You can imagine what sort of holler she set up then; she grabbed hold of me and the cops grabbed hold of her. Can’t say I didn’t warn them: careful, boys, I said, she’s got hair on her chest. And she sure did lay about her. So I just sort of walked off down the street. Never have believed in standing around watching fistfights the way people do in this city.”

Oreilly stayed with her in the room over the weekend. It was like the most beautiful party Sylvia could remember; she’d never laughed so much, for one thing, and no one, certainly no one in her family, had ever made her feel so loved. Oreilly was a fine cook, and he fixed delicious dishes on the little electric stove; once he scooped snow off the windowsill and made sherbet flavored with strawberry syrup. By Sunday she was strong enough to dance. They turned on the radio and she danced until she fell to her knees, windless and laughing. “I’ll never be afraid again,” she said. “I hardly know what I was afraid of to begin with.”

“The same things you’ll be afraid of the next time,” Oreilly told her quietly. “That is a quality of Master Misery: no one ever knows what he is—not even children, and they know mostly everything.”

Sylvia went to the window; an arctic whiteness lay over the city, but the snow had stopped, and the night sky was as clear as ice: there, riding above the river, she saw the first star of evening. “I see the first star,” she said, crossing her fingers.

“And what do you wish when you see the first star?”

“I wish to see another star,” she said. “At least that is what I usually wish.”

“But tonight?”

She sat down on the floor and leaned her head against his knee. “Tonight I wished that I could have back my dreams.”

“Don’t we all?” Oreilly said, stroking her hair. “But then what would you do? I mean what would you do if you could have them back?”

Sylvia was silent a moment; when she spoke her eyes were gravely distant. “I would go home,” she said slowly. “And that is a terrible decision, for it would mean giving up most of my other dreams. But if Mr. Revercomb would let me have them back, then I would go home tomorrow.”

Saying nothing, Oreilly went to the closet and brought back her coat. “But why?” she asked as he helped her on with it. “Never mind,” he said, “just do what I tell you. We’re going to pay Mr. Revercomb a call, and you’re going to ask him to give you back your dreams. It’s a chance.”

Sylvia balked at the door. “Please, Oreilly, don’t make me go. I can’t, please, I’m afraid.”

“I thought you said you’d never be afraid again.”

But once in the street he hurried her so quickly against the wind she did not have time to be frightened. It was Sunday, stores were closed and the traffic lights seemed to wink only for them, for there were no moving cars along the snow-deep avenue. Sylvia even forgot where they were going, and chattered of trivial oddments: right here at this corner is where she’d seen Garbo, and over there, that is where the old woman was run over. Presently, however, she stopped, out of breath and overwhelmed with sudden realization. “I can’t, Oreilly,” she said, pulling back. “What can I say to him?”

“Make it like a business deal,” said Oreilly. “Tell him straight out that you want your dreams, and if he’ll give them to you you’ll pay back all the money: on the installment plan, naturally. It’s simple enough, kid. Why the hell couldn’t he give them back? They are all right there in a filing case.”

This speech was somehow convincing and, stamping her frozen feet, Sylvia went ahead with a certain courage. “That’s the kid,” he said. They separated on Third Avenue, Oreilly being of the opinion that Mr. Revercomb’s immediate neighborhood was not for the moment precisely safe. He confined himself in a doorway, now and then lighting a match and singing aloud: but the best old pie is a whiskeyberry pie! Like a wolf, a long thin dog came padding over the moon-slats under the elevated, and across the street there were the misty shapes of men ganged around a bar: the idea of maybe cadging a drink in there made him groggy.

Just as he had decided on perhaps trying something of the sort, Sylvia appeared. And she was in his arms before he knew that it was really her. “It can’t be so bad, sweetheart,” he said softly, holding her as best he could. “Don’t cry, baby; it’s too cold to cry: you’ll chap your face.” As she strangled for words, her crying evolved into a tremulous, unnatural laugh. The air was filled with the smoke of her laughter. “Do you know what he said?” she gasped. “Do you know what he said when I asked for my dreams?” Her head fell back, and her laughter rose and carried over the street like an abandoned, wildly colored kite. Oreilly had finally to shake her by the shoulders. “He said—I couldn’t have them back because—because he’d used them all up.”

She was silent then, her face smoothing into an expressionless calm. She put her arm through Oreilly’s, and together they moved down the street; but it was as if they were friends pacing a platform, each waiting for the other’s train, and when they reached the corner he cleared his throat and said: “I guess I’d better turn off here. It’s as likely a spot as any.”

Sylvia held on to his sleeve. “But where will you go, Oreilly?”

“Traveling in the blue,” he said, trying a smile that didn’t work out very well.

She opened her purse. “A man cannot travel in the blue without a bottle,” she said, and, kissing him on the cheek, slipped five dollars in his pocket.

“Bless you, baby.”

It did not matter that it was the last of her money, that now she would have to walk home, and alone. The pilings of snow were like the white waves of a white sea, and she rode upon them, carried by winds and tides of the moon. I do not know what I want, and perhaps I shall never know, but my only wish from every star will always be another star; and truly I am not afraid, she thought. Two boys came out of a bar and stared at her; in some park some long time ago she’d seen two boys and they might be the same. Truly I am not afraid, she thought, hearing their snowy footsteps following after her: and anyway, there was nothing left to steal.