The Intruder

by Charles Beaumont

  Ella forced her thoughts to the coming first day of school; what she would wear and whether Daddy might be talked into giving her the money for a couple of new blouses. She had one in mind that was regulation white, but it had a tailored look to it that set it apart, and it cost $9.95. She considered the blouse in her mind, then went on to her new status as a junior and the possible hardships of the course. She wondered vaguely if one of the Negroes would be assigned to any of her classes. She hoped not, without hoping. Like almost everyone else in Caxton, she assumed that the proposed integration would not actually take place. Something would come up, some loophole or something. The subject dissolved and was replaced by further contemplation of the situation with Hank Kitchen. Perhaps when she became a junior, he’d stop treating her like such an awful child: perhaps he’d sort of suddenly discover she was a woman, the way it so often happened in the movies. He’d be helping her down from a wagon and have her in his arms and they’d be laughing; then, all at once, their eyes would meet and he’d stop laughing. And he’d pull her very close to him. It could happen while they were swimming, too, for that matter. Easily. Hank hadn’t seen her in a bathing suit for quite a while . . .

  But, of course, they weren’t speaking now; and maybe they wouldn’t ever, ever again. Certainly not until he apologized. And he was pretty strong-minded.

  “Hi. How about another coffee?”

  “Okay, but I don’t know how you can drink hot coffee on a day like this.”

  “I don’t, either. It’s all in the way you were brought up, I guess.”

  Ella shook her head and served the young man. The peculiar thing about his eyes, she decided, was that they were old—much older than the rest of him. They didn’t fit, exactly.

  “You must have been brought up in a telephone booth,” she said, laughing.

  He laughed with her, but was obviously not inclined to explain the phone calls. He pulled his shirt away from his flesh. “Don’t you get hot?” he asked.

  “Sure.”

  “But I mean, how do you stay so fresh?”

  Ella shrugged.

  “No pores,” the young man said. “That’s it. Listen, you haven’t answered my question—the one I asked an hour ago.”

  “I can’t remember what it was,” Ella said, glancing over to see if Mr. Higgins was watching. He wasn’t.

  “Now, now. I asked if you’d show me the town. How about tonight? When do you get off work?”

  “At nine-thirty, but I’m afraid—well, see, my father, he always picks me up after work; and besides, you couldn’t see very much of the town in the dark, could you?”

  “You’re right,” the stranger said. “Absolutely and positively one-hundred-percent right. Leave it to a woman, I always say, to look after the practical side of things.”

  Gradually, throughout the conversation, a plan took form in Ella’s mind. She didn’t go out with boys very often, Hank knew that, and maybe that was why he acted the way he did. Maybe if he found out that she had a date with a perfect stranger—from Hollywood!—then he’d be a little nicer and not so big brother about things.

  The young man said, “We could use a flashlight,” and they both chuckled; then he said, “Seriously, are you doing anything tomorrow night?”

  “Gee, I don’t know. I’ve got—”

  “Southern hospitality, remember.”

  “But I don’t even know who you are or what you do or anything.”

  “I told you—I’m Adam Cramer, and I’m going to be working with an organization right here in town, here in Caxton. Why don’t you give me your home address and I’ll drop by and meet your folks. If they don’t like me, I’ll slink away, never to be seen. If they do, we’ll go to a movie. Fair enough?”

  Ella swallowed. Feeling quite sophisticated and adventurous, she said, “I live at 442 Lombard, up the hill on Bradley Street. You know where the post office is?”

  “No, but I’ll find it.” The young man removed a small notebook from his pocket and wrote down the address. “Thanks, Ella,” he said. “Now I don’t feel so alone.”

  She found that she was unable to meet his eyes. “I didn’t promise anything,” she said.

  “Eight o’clock?”

  She shrugged.

  “Eight o’clock. See you then.” He pulled his jacket on, smiled again, and walked out of the store.

  3

  As he pulled up in front of the drugstore, Tom McDaniel thought of the word he had been searching for and tried to find a pencil; but, of course, his pockets were empty.

  “Schism,” he said aloud, “schism,” and walked to the glass door. “The organized Citizens’ Councils are a dangerous schism—”

  He knocked.

  The door was opened by Rolfe Higgins, who wagged his finger. “Late again,” he said.

  “I know. I know.” Tom smiled at Ella. “I got swamped. The second press is out again, and—”

  “—you-just-let-the-time-slip-by.” Higgins laughed and turned to Ella. “It’s a wonder your father remembers to put his pants on in the morning!”

  “Oh, come on,” Tom said. “It isn’t that bad.”

  “Pretty bad. You know, you haven’t picked her up on time since she’s been working here; and there was twice we waited forty minutes and I had to drive her home myself!”

  “Well . . .” Tom grinned sheepishly, secretly wishing that Higgins would shut up. It was good-natured digging, but there was real accusation behind it, somewhere. “Ella understands,” he said. “Don’t you, kitten?”

  Ella said, “Sure.”

  “Tom—” Higgins went behind the counter, poured a glassful of water, drank it. “Why don’t you just forget about sending her to school this term? I’ll raise her to a dollar and a half an hour, if you do.”

  “That’s an idea,” Tom said. The column was only half finished and there was page six to lay out and the letters had to be written, but he tried to keep his voice casual and amused. The truth was, he ought to be grateful for the break. He’d been working since morning and had taken off only for a sandwich at six. “How about it, kitten?”

  Ella giggled.

  “No fooling,” Higgins said. “She’s been a real little help to me. I hate like the very dickens to lose her.”

  “You cut that out. She’s spoiled enough as it is!”

  “You’re wrong. She’s a fine girl.”

  Higgins patted Ella on the back; then he wrote out a check and gave it to her.

  “Next year?” he said.

  Tom nodded. “Next year. If they haven’t condemned the building.”

  He waited for Higgins to unlock the door, then he and Ella walked to the car and got in.

  He asked his daughter if she’d had a hard day and she said that she hadn’t, and he asked her if she was looking forward to school and she said that she was, and then he stopped talking and it was quiet in the car. He loved Ella, and knew that she loved him—at least in the sense that not to love him would entail effort; though he also knew, in an odd, vague, unstated way, that it wasn’t (as he had heard her remark once to a friend) anything personal. Not that the two of them were uncomfortable together. It was just that Ella was a growing girl, with a thousand problems he could never hope to understand (perhaps because she did not bring them to him; or, it had occurred to him, perhaps because he’d never really tried to understand them), and he was, after all, quite busy these days. Of course, with a less demanding job, things would be different. He could then afford to take time off, talk to Ella, get to know her. He could find out what a fifteen-year-old really thought about. Be a friend.

  I’ve got to do it, he told himself, as he had done a thousand times before. I’ve got to make the time. It isn’t right, leaving every­thing for Ruth. A girl needs a father as well as a mother . . .

  Hell!

  He turned sharply into the driveway and inched into a narrow doorless garage.

  “Sorry I was late,” he said, again.

  Ella shrugged and they got out
of the car and walked toward the small red brick house. It was newly built, and looked it. The lawn was just beginning to form a green crust over the earth, and there was the inescapable (though not, to Tom, unpleasant) odor of manure in the air. Across the road stretched a forest of slender, white-gray trees, and sparse foliage. Someday it would be a neighborhood.

  Inside the house there was still the after-smell of dinner pork chops, and the sound of percolating coffee. Tom threw his coat over the couch and walked through the living room. It was large and not yet “lived-in.” There were a few pictures on the tan-painted walls, hundreds of books stacked about in cartons on the floor (Tom planned to build shelves, but he kept pushing the job out of his mind), a number of lamps and knickknacks. In a corner sat the television set, flickering as all television sets in the area did.

  In front of it sat Gramp. He was watching a quiz program.

  Tom went into the kitchen, where Ruth was doing the dishes. She looked young and fresh, much younger and fresher than Tom ever did.

  “Hi.”

  She turned and flashed an automatic glance at the stove clock. “Honestly,” she said, and unplugged the percolator. She poured a strong dark brew into three ready cups. “Why don’t you just live at that office?”

  “I do,” he said, and kissed her. Then he noticed the expression on her face. It was a look of worry, the look he’d come to recognize.

  “Oh-oh, what’s wrong?”

  Ruth smiled. “Well,” she said, “nothing, actually.”

  “Come on, now.”

  “Well—” She turned to Ella. “Honey, why don’t you look at TV with your coffee?”

  “With Gramp?” Ella said. Her grandfather had a remarkable talent for selecting the worst programs on the air. And he always had his way—always.

  “Then read a book or something, would you? I’d like to talk to your father.”

  Tom put up his hand. “You’re forgetting something,” he said, smiling. “Kitten’s a junior now. She’s grown up.”

  Ruth glanced at both of them. “All right. Not that it’s anything, really. But—I got a funny kind of phone call today. Dad took it and he was talking a mile a minute, and I took over to see what was up, you know, and—well, it kind of made me upset.”

  “What was it? A salesman?”

  “No. I don’t know who it was. Sounded like a young fellow. But he’s not the . . .”

  Tom sighed and took a sip of his coffee. There was no way to hurry Ruth.

  “Well,” she went on, “I took the phone from Dad and asked who it was. ‘Who are you?’ they said. I told them. Then they, I mean, this fellow, whoever he was, said, ‘I’m making sort of a survey,’ and would I answer a few questions.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I told him I couldn’t see anything wrong with that, even though I did get stuck with that vacuum cleaner that time. But he sounded like a nice fellow. So he asked me—Ella, now, I wish you’d go into the other room.”

  Ella said “Oh,” pleadingly; she looked very interested.

  “Go on,” Tom said. “Ella’s old enough to take part in what happens around here. What’d the guy ask you?”

  “I’ll—well, I’ll give you his words, exactly. He said: ‘Ma’am, I’d like to know if you have any children in high school.’ I told him yes, I did. A girl. Then he said: ‘I’d like to know what you think about your child going to the same school and maybe sitting in the same classroom with a bunch of niggers.’ ”

  “I see,” Tom said slowly. “Well, what’d you tell him?”

  “I didn’t exactly know what to say, but I told him the truth, that I didn’t like the idea.”

  “Yes. And then what?”

  “He asked me if I was willing to work to keep it from hap­pening.”

  Tom set his coffee cup down on the saucer.

  “I said of course, but what could a person do? He said, ‘Plenty.’ ”

  “Oh, he did?”

  “Yes. He said he was the head of an organization that was perfectly legal and he knew he could get rid of this problem for us in a hurry . . . if we’d all pitch in and help. And he went on like that, and I told him he’d better talk to you, and he said of course and he’d phone you tomorrow or speak to you at the office. I told him who you were and where you worked.”

  Tom leaned back. “That’s pretty interesting, all right,” he said. “Did this fellow ask you for money?”

  “No. At least we didn’t discuss it.”

  “And he says he has a legal way to stop integration.”

  “That’s what he said.”

  “Did he give his name?”

  “He might have, but I forgot.”

  “Well, if he’s on the level, I’ll be glad to see him. It’s probably some crackpot, you know, but I suppose it’s possible that there’s some loophole we didn’t think of. I can’t imagine what it would be.” Tom poured some more coffee. “What’s making you so nervous about it?”

  “Dad,” Ruth said, rubbing her hand on her apron nervously. “He got awful excited, you know, the way he gets some-times.”

  “Oh.”

  “And you know what Doctor Meehan said about him staying absolutely quiet.”

  “That’s a lot of goddamn nonsense!”

  Tom winced. His father-in-law stood in the archway, skin dry and old, wrinkles deep. He’d had cancer of the throat some years back, which made it necessary for him to wear a silver tube in his thorax; a small gauze pad, on the outside, fluttered with his ragged breathing now. He made no attempt to disguise the affliction and was, indeed, quite proud of it, since it made him look grotesque and pitiable, yet did not disturb him in the least. Tom had long ago decided that the old man would never die. The Parkinsons were a hardy clan, with a record for extreme, almost absurd, longevity.

  David Parkinson was exceptionally fit. Despite the warnings of various physicians, he made his regular weekly trip to town where he would catch a bus and go to Rusty’s for however many beers he desired, usually five.

  Tom would have to pick him up, of course, and the old man would invariably be drunk, but it never seemed to affect him. When reprimanded, he would begin to grumble or cry, claiming that it was his sole pleasure. Actually, he had many pleasures: life was full and rich for him. But he was spoiled. To Tom’s mind he was nothing more than a stupid, willful child, insisting on his way no matter what the circumstances.

  Gramp had come to live with Ruth and Tom in 1944, after they’d been married nine years. He had no particular reason for doing this, except that he was “lonely” and “terribly, terribly ill of cancer.” Living alone in a room was all right enough for a well man, but when you can sink at any moment, sink so fast you can’t even reach a telephone (if, Tom would think, he had ever learned how to use a telephone in the first place), then it was a goddamn sin. Then, too, his wife had passed on to her reward, and if his own daughter couldn’t comfort him and take care of him, what in the name of hell kind of a world was it?

  The truth was—or so Tom felt—that the old bastard simply wanted to cause trouble and have things done for him instead of doing them himself. He was, discounting the cancer, which had been halted, as healthy as a dray horse. And at eighty, if past experience meant anything, he had another ten solid years to go before weakening. Unlike his brother Llewellyn, who managed to get himself killed by an automobile at the age of seventy-four (“Cut off in his prime!”), Gramp would pass the ninety mark. There was no doubt of that.

  He stood there, sternly. His fists were balled. “Nonsense,” he repeated, and entered the kitchen.

  “Program over, Gramp?” Tom asked, with some irritation.

  “What? No. Them are all put-up deals anyway, them quiz shows. They think they’re fooling everybody, but they ain’t. Any fool son-of-a-bitch who’d get took in by that bullshit deserves it.”

  “Dad,” Ruth said, although she knew, as they all did, that it would do no good. Her father’s tongue would never be laundered.

  “I guess yo
u drunk the coffee up.”

  “No. I’ll pour you—”

  “Never mind. It’s all right, I know I don’t rate. Listen, Tom, now: I think maybe you’re gonna have to get up off your dead ass and do something on that fool paper. We got a telephone call from—”

  “I know all about it, Gramp,” Tom said.

  Gramp groaned slightly and sat down in one of the kitchen chairs. “I been wondering,” he said, “how long you-all was gonna sit around and play with yourself in this here thing.”

  Tom’s eyes flashed angrily. The old man was bearable most of the time because most of the time he sat in front of the television screen, mouth open, silent. Sometimes, though, Gramp got off on a talking spree—and this was clearly going to be one of them.

  “Cut out that kind of language in front of Ella.”

  “You ain’t gonna tell me how to talk, mister. Get that straight right here and now. I’ll talk the way I damn please.”

  “Not in front of Ella.”

  “In front of anybody. Anybody!”

  Tom slammed his hand down on the table. “That’s enough,” he said. “Either clean up your mouth or get out of the kitchen.”

  “Tom!” Ruth said.

  Gramp trembled. Then his shoulders sagged. “All right,” he said, “all right. It’s your house, and I guess I ain’t gonna forget that; no, I guess not.”

  Ruth McDaniel got up and began to wash the cups and saucers nervously.

  There was a pause.

  Then Gramp said, “Well, all this pussyfooting around you been doing is sure done a lot of good. I expect it don’t matter none to you, though. I expect you don’t care whether little Ella here marries a coon or not.”

  Ruth said, “Dad, for heaven’s sake.”

  “You keep quiet! I seen the news tonight. Twelve black-ass niggers is going to the school. Young bucks, some of them. Big husky fellas.”