I got out and stood irresolute. What do I want of her? I wondered. What shall I say to her?
I saw that I was clinging to the rim of the car door with both hands. I pushed myself away from it, and the unnoticeable propulsion seemed to send me across the sidewalk and up the few iron-railed steps, and into the common doorway.
It was lighted in there, poorly but enough to distinguish the push buttons. They had names below them, for the most part, and one of themwasMcGuire. It was the second one in from the street, so I took that tomean that the flat was on the second floor.
I tried the door without pushing at the button, and I saw that it opened. I went in without further ado, and up the hare-lipped stairs, run over by years of usage. I think I must have been afraid I wouldn’t be admitted if I announced myself from below. I wasn’t conscious of such a thought, but something kept me from pushing the button down there in the street entry.
I gained the little oblong that broke the stairs and stopped before the upstairs door. I was terrified of going further, I was determined against going back. I could hear muted sounds of occupancy, sometimes coming close, sometimes receding into depths of background that deadened them. But they were commonplace sounds, not strident nor acute nor dramatic.
I knocked suddenly, before I had even expected myself to, as if a spasmodic impulse had carried to my hand.
A woman’s voice said, “Go see who that is.”
The door opened rather violently, and a girl of eleven or twelve stood there, blocking the gap with her entire figure and looking up at me.
“It’s a lady, all dressed up,” she reported, without taking her eyes off me.
A large hand suddenly found her shoulder, flung her aside, impatiently but not abusively, and a stout woman in her forties had supplanted her, with the rather abrupt disconnectedness of a change of slides on a magic lantern screen.
She began to wipe her hands on her apron front, more as a gesture of amenity, I imagined, than because she felt they required it.
“Does Eileen McGuire live here?” I said.
“Yes, miss, she does.” She bethought herself of her hair, and wove back a wisp of it, with a sort of nervous rapidity that betokened an overanxiety to please.
“May I speak with her a moment, please?”
“She hasn’t come back yet,” she said. “She should be here any minute.”With that same rapid anxiety she had shown about her hair. Trying to mollify me over the disappointment by her haste of speech. She even called loudly over her shoulder, as an added sop: “Cath-reen! What time is it on the clock?” Then, apologetically, without waiting for the answer, “She’s a little late. Maybe she had to wait for her bus.” She widened the door hospitably. “Would you care to come in and sit down?”
The background view its swinging-away offeredme was so perfectly in character, with herself, and with the building in general— or perhaps I should say with my impressions of both—that paradoxically enough it almost seemed artificially contrived; designed intentionally to point up, to label, a whole mode of life so that there could be no mistaking it, at sight through an open doorway. I do not know what other aspect it could very well have presented, given the milieu, but I do know that it was so pat it struck me almost as strange. You expect deviation; this was the uttermost norm.
The walls had been painted a light, watery green. On the section directly in view hung a massive square frame of gilded wood, intricately scrolled and tortured into complex design. Within this stretched a mat of cherry plush, with an oval opening left in its center. Within this, in turn, peered a bridal photograph of a man and woman, in faded sepia; the man seated, the woman standing.
A center table projected fractionally beyond the door frame as it limited my gaze; on this, halved with almost mathematical precision by the same constricting frame, stood a remarkable lamp. It was a dome of frosted glass, ribbed like an open umbrella, which indeed it vaguely resembled in miniature. From its bottom rim dangled long pendants of glass. A length of mottled, encased wire escaped from under it, and then ran upward in a straight line to a socket overhead in the ceiling.
Before it, chin to tabletop, sat a small boy, smaller even than the girl who had opened the door, staring round-eyed at me, to the willing neglect of what was evidently school homework; for there was a disintegrating book open before him, a sheet of yellow paper spread out, and a pencil stub protruding vertically and point in air from one tightly closed fist. It had made marks all over his upper lip: I think it was that, although it might have been something else.
In the instant or two that was all that elapsed between the woman’s invitation and my refusal, there was a violent interruption at the table, which had nothing to do with me. A layer of folded sleazy white stuff landed soundlessly on it, at the upper end, just out of my sight, protruding no more than a tongue or two to where I could see, but giving vent to an air current that stirred the small boy’s hair and lifted the sheet of paper before him. I heard the girl order him sharply: “You got to move away from there now. I got to set the table for Momma.”
The cascade of white flooded across the table, inundating it and submerging paper and book and almost their user’s whole head as well in its erratic flurries. He withdrew from under it, retrieving the articles that had been before him with a great deal of ballooning of the cloth, and finally nearly pulling it off after him as he suddenly dropped to floor level and became even shorter than he had been before. He struck twice, open-handed, at someone just out of sight, and a hand came back from that direction and struck once at him, also open-handed. All three blows missed by a wide margin. They were delivered with a sort of dutiful retaliation, rather than viciousness.
But meanwhile I had answered the mother. “Thank you, no. I’ll wait for her downstairs.”
“You’re perfectly welcome to come in.”
“I’ll wait for her by the door.”
She wondered who I was, but didn’t know how to bring it out. “Who—who shall I say was asking for her, if you don’t mind?”
“Miss Reid,” I said. “Jean Reid.”
I saw her face change. The door opener’s beam slipped from it, and it sobered. No actual ill will came into it, but rather a sort of rueful remonstrance.
I wondered if she would speak of it, and while I was wondering, she already had. She was no hypocrite, at least. “Miss Reid, why did you have to turn my girl out like that?” she said with a reproving, sad-miened air. “I’m sure she was doing her best to please you, from what she tells me.”
It seemed she didn’t know the cause, then, only the effect.
I didn’t answer.
“Oh, she’s found something else to do,” she said. “But she took it hard.”
“I’m sorry,” I said quietly. “I’ll wait downstairs.” I turned away.
The light from within, back of where she was standing, made a pale fan beside me on the wall as I went down. This narrowed, as though the wielder were slowly closing the fan, until the two end-sticks had folded together and there was no more fan to see.
I went down slowly, trailing my hand along the aged rail, where so many hands must have trailed before mine. I came out of the street doorway and went over to my car. I just stood beside it, without opening and re-entering it. I stood looking into it, instead of down or up the street. My back was to the house. I thought perhaps, above, there might be two small faces peering down at me out of the lighted window. She’d filch a quick glance herself, most likely, to see if I were waiting; but then she’d drive her youngsters back and tell them not to peep, it wasn’t proper.
But I didn’t turn to look up and see if I was right or not. Let the whole world stare at me, I didn’t care.
I saw her figure coming from down the street, and I knew it must be she, though I hadn’t seen her walk—at a distance— often enough to know her step, and it was too dark by now to make out her features from that far away. But it was a woman, a very thin woman, and alone, and hurrying to get home; walking fast, and yet dejected with
weariness from long work even as she drove herself forward, her upper body at a slight inclination from its rightful center of gravity, without being actually stooped; so I knew by all this it must be she.
I turned sharply outward from the car, almost pivoted on the space of one heel, and then stood there where I had before, facing her approach now, rigid, taut, and with a curious quickening sensation in my breast that must have been accelerated heartbeat, though I didn’t stop to analyze what it was.
She came closer. Light found her at last. The neutral blue of night-distance left her, washed away by her approach, and the tints of the familiar plaid blanket coat that I had seen once before settled on her figure. And then the knitted cap came into focus; it was like a stocking cap, or the sort of cap boys used to wear for skating on the ice; it had nothing to do with style, it covered the whole head, fitted it tight, and on the top there was a little round ball of wool, the only break in its functionalism.
And then her face, last of all; the wan, anemic, pinched face I remembered. The sort of face that is ageless, for even now in her youth it looked peaked, and so it had little change to make later. And now it looked very tired and drawn, even worse than when she was working in my house. The mouth drooped and the lips were colorless; she had been too tired and too anxious to get home even to redden them.
She noted the car first, as she came up to the doorway, and strangely enough her look passed over me without recognition for a moment. Nor was this artifice, I could tell; no one was of any interest to her, she was too drained of energy to pay heed to figures about her on the street. All she wanted was to get into that doorway and get upstairs, to where she lived.
I wasn’t sure my voice would serve me; my throat felt too constricted. “Eileen,” I called low.
She seemed not to have heard. She went up the three or four low threshold steps.
“Eileen! Wait.”
She stopped and turned, and looked at me. And then she recognized me.
The blankness of questioning became a sulking expression, and she was about to reverse the turn she had just made, and go on again.
I had a feeling of prying myself from a fixed spot to which I had become fast, there beside the car. I lurched over to the foot of the steps, as when you summon too much energy to make a move and therefore project yourself too violently, and caught the handrail with my one hand, and half raised the other upward toward her. She was above me, because of the difference the steps made.
Then I dropped it again, without knowing what its purpose had been. Perhaps just to stay her; perhaps a stifled sort of appeal.
“Don’t you know me? I’m Jean Reid.”
“I know you, Miss Reid.” She spoke with injured coldness.
Then nothing more, for agonizing seconds. I looked up at her; she looked down at me. As though we were mutually hypnotized by each other.
“It—it happened,” I stammered. “I don’t know if you know— Did you know? But it happened.”
I heard her breath go in, with the softness of hisses. “I didn’t—know,” I heard her say. “I didn’t bother picking up a paper—I’m so worn out. My father used to be the one who brought it home, but since he’s gone—”
I heard her saying this, but I couldn’t see her say it. Something happened to my sight. Her image dissolved, broke up into shards like the image of the moon on water, and floated off into the corners of my eyes out of focus. I felt my head go down as though a hand had suddenly bent it with full strength, and my forehead came to rest against the iron handrail, and stayed like that, just rolling slightly from side to side, from temple to temple, as if to relieve an intolerable pressure within my skull by the grateful touch of the cold smooth iron.
I felt her hand touch lightly atmy head, as if trying to alleviate me, and then withdraw again, frightened at its own presumption.
I looked up. Her face coalesced again, became a round whole. I could see then, in that one look, that unmistakably there was no evil there, no rancor, vindictiveness, gloating at my pain. It would have shown if there had been, it could not have kept itself hidden. That insight, gained in an instant, stayed with me from then on.
There was no enmity there.
Her face was twisted in sympathy with mine. There was fear there, at least equal to my own. There was helplessness there too, perhaps greater even than any I felt. There was weakness, vast weakness; muted, passive, floundering. Her whole personality was weakness incarnate, buffeted about. But there was no ill will there. There was no sense of personal gain, expressed in grim satisfaction. Of that I could be surer, in that moment I looked at her, than I had ever been sure of anything before.
“Eileen, I should have listened—” I whispered.
“I don’t blame you. Anything you do, you have to do—there isn’t any way of changing—”
She let her arms, which had been held short at waist height, fall down passive full length at her sides. Even sway a little with their own drop, they were so unresistant. There was a brown paper sack in one of them, I remember, and that swayed too, down lower still.
“Is he—? Was he—?”
“I don’t know,” I said numbly. “I haven’t been able to hear— All day I’ve been waiting— He was on it, he must have been. I tried to reach him last night, just before it left, and I was too late—”
“It wouldn’t have been any use. Anything you do, you have to do, and there’s no getting out of it.”
The night seemed darker than it was; the darkness was on the inside, not the out; I could barely see her face, there before me. Will, volition, was like a flickering candle flame going out in all that darkness, going lower, lower, lower, guttering to an end. Leaving the eternal, rayless night of fatalism, of predestination, to suffocate us, herself and me alike.
Then I fought and struck out against it, and coaxed the dimming flame up a little higher. No! No! No! There was will. There was mastery of course. There was improvisation. Things weren’t fated to happen; they just happened, spontaneously. And until they did, they weren’t known, they weren’t waiting, they weren’t. They came into being only as they happened.
She saw me shaking with a curious passion of revolt, and I know she didn’t know what it was, thought it was fear or the tragedy of loss. But it wasn’t; this was another battle entirely. This was battle of the spirit; this was reason fighting its lastditch stand against the forces of darkness, there on the outer steps of this commonplace brick flat.
“Come up a while to my house,” she said pityingly. “You’re ill, you’re tired—”
I shook my head and held my ground. The flame was sinking again, I could feel it. It had nothing to feed on.
“If only he hadn’t gone just now. If only he’d waited until next week—”
“He had to go,” she said softly. “Just like you had to fire me. And just like you had to miss him on the phone. That’s why it was so foolish of me to try to say anything. But it’s hard to learn, you keep forgetting—”
I pressed my hands with sudden violence to my ears, trying to shut her out, and shook my head from side to side. “No! No! That isn’t true! I won’t listen to it! He didn’t have to go. Anything could have stopped him, the slightest little thing, a straw blowing in the wind—”
“Nothing could have stopped him. The only thing is, you don’t know, you don’t believe that. It took me a long time too. You saw what I did, I tried to tell you— As if that could have stopped him.”
My hands had dropped again, freeing my ears. She didn’t know what it was that had just happened. I’m not sure I knew myself. The flame had just gone out. It was very still and very dark, inside of me, and outside, and in the world all around me. There was nothing to fight for, or against, any more.
She stood there watching me, not guessing. Her own soul, perhaps, had been simpler; she hadn’t struggled.
“I wish— If I could only help you—” she said at last.
I looked up at her, and reached, and took the overlap of her coat.
“This friend, this person—Eileen, take me to her. Let me find out. Were they all— Won’t there be anybody? Out of fourteen like that? That’s why I came over here to see you. Eileen, I’ve got to know. I can’t stand it any more, waiting like this, not knowing— It’s like an ax, ready to fall and it never falls—”
I saw her bite her lip, as if in doubt.
I tightened my grip on her coat, pulling it convulsively. “Eileen, at least let me go with you— Let me find out— You said it was some friend—”
“It is.” Then she said, “He doesn’t like to be asked questions, like that. He wouldn’t like it if he knew I’d told you. He doesn’t like others—well, strangers, you know—to know about him.”
So for the first time I learned it was a man.
I could tell by her face she was relenting. She stirred a little in uncertainty; looked behind her into the doorway, then back to me again. Then she twisted her head, glanced upward along the outside face of the house. Toward the windows of her own flat, I surmised, although this was only my own supposition; it could just as well have been some other window her abstract inquiry sought. Then back to me again once more.
I pressed the plea home. “Just at least to know, to be told— It’s this waiting, not knowing, I can’t stand—Eileen, I’ll go mad. Help me. Look, I’m begging of you, if you have any compassion at all—”
She must have read the thought of my intention; seen the little dip my body had begun to make, to bring itself down to its knees before her, there on the grimy doorstep of her shabby house. She quickly caught me, held me as I was, in a little spasm of pitying inflexibility; that was a flash of unwonted firmness, brief as it was, for a character such as hers. Then it was gone again, like a gleaming morsel of mica in soft, shapeless sand.
“Wait,” she said, “I’ll—” And looked behind her, like a child contemplating doing something she is not sure is permissible. “Wait down here, I’ll try to find out—I’ll see if I can talk to him— He doesn’t like it if he thinks you’re asking him direct questions; but maybe I can find out something for you—” Then she quickly added, “You’re sure you’re not afraid? You’re sure you want me to?”
Night Has a Thousand Eyes Page 8
