The Loved and the Lost

by Morley Callaghan

  “Sure,” he said, his own heart beating unevenly.

  “I had never seen anything like it in a man’s face. Never in my life, Jim.”

  “He’s sick – defeated,” he said, soothing her. “Maybe he can no longer bear any kind of a rejection.”

  While the snow from her boots melted on the floor she dwelt on the brutality of Malone’s resentment. Normally, he was too lazy and indolent a man to go berserk, she said. But he had it in his mind that she had friends down on St. Antoine, which was all right with him, providing – well, if she had friends down on St. Antoine it should have made her feel he was superior and desirable – willing to give her a break. “Yes, you’re right, I think,” she said, meditating. “When he felt himself rejected, the last remnant of his pride was rejected, and he couldn’t stand it. If he couldn’t retain his belief in his superiority over a few Negroes, then he would go wild with hate, and rape and destroy everything.” She offered these explanations tentatively. What had really terrified her, she said, was her belief for the moment that she was being overwhelmed by vindictiveness from everyone Malone had ever known or admired. “I think that was what was so horrible,” she said, looking up.

  “Sure. He turned into a thug. You’re lucky you didn’t get beaten up,” he said. “I could see it coming.”

  “See what coming?”

  “This trouble. It’s better it should come from Malone in your own hall.”

  “Who else would bother me?”

  “It could happen down in St. Antoine, couldn’t it? If Malone can get violent and become a thug because you’re a white woman, maybe there’s more violence coming your way from some of those Negroes, who can be thugs, too.”

  “You don’t know anything about those people down there and I do. You don’t know how they feel about anything.”

  “I only know the gossip I picked up.”

  “Gossip about me, of course. Oh, it’s a laugh!” she said vehemently, and she did not laugh; she was too exasperated. “If people can’t destroy you one way they try another.” Her cheeks reddened, and her eyes were angry. “Try doing something in your own way sometime, Jim. Try having your own notion of your own integrity, and see what happens. Everybody takes a turn cracking at you. They’ll break their backs trying to bring you in line again, and if you won’t see things the way everybody else does, you’re crazy or perverse or pig-headed or stupid. Everybody’s willing to give you a hand if you’ll only string along and quit. And if you won’t quit— Why don’t I feel sour about people?” she asked bitterly. “All that’s the matter with me is that I’m what I choose to be. Does anyone think of trying to help me? Oh, Lord, no! Everybody wants to put a hole in my head. Look at you. You’ve heard some gossip and you’re wondering if I don’t attract corruption. How do you know I don’t attract what’s corrupt in you?”

  “That should put me in my place,” he said, but after an embarrassed moment he went on doggedly. “But if the trumpet player is actually more violent than Malone—”

  “Who says so, Jim?”

  “Rogers. He says Wilson has a police record down in Memphis.”

  “That Memphis business,” she said. “It was some trouble over a crap game, wasn’t it? You don’t understand such people, Jim. They’re not like Malone.”

  “Peggy, you’re not in love with Wilson, are you?”

  “Oh, dear! There you go!” she said wearily. “You mean, do I sleep with him? The one important question!”

  “I only asked if—”

  “Why don’t you ask if I sleep with Wagstaffe? Or Joe Thomas? Joe’s a pullman porter, the most eloquent man I’ve ever met. You haven’t heard them talk about these things down around St. Antoine,” she said, contemplating one worn spot on the floor where the paint had been scraped off, and her smile was as serene as a nun’s, rebuking him for his lack of charity. “I’ve sat in dirty little back rooms down there; men and women, all poor, just neighbours, patient and troubled, listening to Joe Thomas, and trying to understand this very same thing that bothers you. You ought to see those Negroes just sitting around together, listening and wondering while Joe tried to explain how a good-natured human being like himself can suddenly go berserk. Just listening was wonderful. I loved the way he put it. It went something like this: ‘If a white man, even a bad one, is getting kicked around, he knows he can call a policeman. It’s a feeling deep inside him. From the time he was a kid the authorities have pounded it into him. His authorities! Justice will always have one eye open for him. But when a Negro has a crazy, angry moment he wants to close his eyes, he wants to go blind, he doesn’t want to see the face of justice. It’ll be a white face, so he’s alone with nothing to fall back on but his own blind anger and he has to make a crazy violent protest before he opens his eyes. He knows he’ll hate what he sees when he opens his eyes, and so he likes the angry darkness. Then, of course, he comes to himself, and he’s frightened and on the run, which is no news for him because all his life in one way or another he’s been on the run in a white world. See, Jim?”

  “Yes, I see.” But he pondered, then asked, “Peggy – all this stuff— What are you trying to do with yourself?”

  “With myself?”

  “Yes. What are you up to?”

  “Look, Jim, who’s being inhuman? The supercilious people who have charge of this world, or me? In one way or another there are a lot of people on the run from what’s inhuman. If they rap on my door – well—”

  “Yes, I see.” He wanted to say, “Black or white, a thug is a thug,” but he was helpless when she sounded so sweetly compassionate. Even if the man was a thug it was right that at some ultimate moment in a thug’s life someone should find something good to say for him. “Who knows?” he asked with a sigh. “There might come a time in my own life when I’d need someone like you to put in a good word for me. I think I’d be satisfied if I could hear you.” Then he smiled. “Well, you’d better take those snow boots off. Here. Let me help you.”

  She thrust out her feet and he knelt down, avoiding the little pool of water, and pulled off the boots one at a time, his hands getting wet from the soles.

  “How are they standing up?” he asked, inspecting one of the boots.

  “I think I’ll have to stuff a little paper in the toes.”

  “If they’re too long why not put in an insole?”

  “An insole? Why, of course,” she said. “My slippers are over there by the bed.”

  When he had brought the slippers and was putting them on she said, “You worry a lot about me, don’t you, Jim?”

  “I suppose I do.”

  “I know you do. I’m all right, Jim. I’m fine. I think you worry about me too much,” she added, going to the closet to get her dress. “I don’t want you to worry about me.” With a black dress over her arm, she returned to the bureau and knelt down, pulling out the lower drawer. “I’m going out for dinner with Henry Jackson,” she said apologetically. “Do you want to wait here till I get dressed?”

  “Why, sure,” he said, his pleasure so plain she smiled to herself. She took stockings and underclothes from the drawer and laid them over her arm. She took a few steps toward the door and then, compelled, she turned and looked at him and frowned. His white cuffs shone below the sleeves of his expensive blue suit; the light gleamed on the toes of his well polished good shoes.

  “Why did I turn and look at you?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “I think I wanted you to stay.”

  “Did you?”

  “You look so reliable and secure. I feel – well, as if it might be nice to stay and relax with you.”

  “Why not?” he asked, for he knew she had felt herself being taken in another direction than the one she had been following in dirty factories, narrow dark halls, and shabby rooms. She was making a pattern with her toe on the floor.

  “Well?” he said.

  “Well what?”

  “Were you going to say something?”

  �
�No, nothing. But when I picked up this dress—”

  “Yes? Go on.”

  “Why did I remember another dress I wore one summer in my second year at college? It was a lovely dress, pale Nile green. I had a rakish green straw hat, too. I wore the hat and the dress one day in the park with a student. I remember how we stood on a little bridge and I was looking at our reflections in the stream and I thought he was, too, and then I looked up and he was watching me, and I felt beautiful. Why did you make me remember such things?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It’s odd, isn’t it?” she asked solemnly. Again she made that pattern with her toe; then she opened the door and shuffled along the hall in her slippers.

  His heart took a heavy, slow, painful beat, and he stared at that spot on the floor; he understood what she had wanted to say: she had a doubt about the life she was leading. It didn’t matter whether he himself or Malone had put that doubt in her mind. It was there, it was what he wanted, and he could afford to be happy. Her acceptance of his presence in the room when she came home meant she felt committed to him and knew he loved her. His surprise and his joy blinded him. And he did not realize she had kept her own opinion of the trumpet player.

  When she returned in a simple black dress, her hair combed and twisted into a smooth knot on her neck, he nodded and smiled. “Why, you look beautiful,” he said. Now he knew she had always belonged in his own world. She looked like an exquisite little figurine done with a delicate grace and belonging in some china cabinet. “Those overalls, that bandanna handkerchief you’ve been wearing. Why, it’s all masquerade!” His laugh was so boyish she put her head back and laughed, too. She looked proud; it was the first time he had ever seen her show any pride in her beauty.

  “Oh, by the way,” she said, going to the dresser and opening one of the drawers. “Have you a lighter?”

  “Why, yes.”

  “Here’s a couple of tins of lighter fluid from the factory. The foreman told me to take it any time I needed it.”

  “Thanks. Thanks, Peggy,” he said.

  It was an odd little gesture; she was offering him a gift as he had offered her the snow boots.

  “You can walk me down to the corner anyway,” she said. “I was thinking you might like to meet Henry later in the evening. If you’re around the Chalet about eleven or later we’ll probably drop in there.”

  “I’ll be there,” he said.

  SIXTEEN

  At midnight he was with Foley in the Chalet sitting at the corner table in the alcove where the draft from the open window hit him, as usual, on the back of the neck. He kept his scarf on to protect his throat. “I want to look like one of those French intellectuals,” he said. Wolgast was behind the bar, his sleeves rolled up, his bald head shining brightly, and at the other end of the bar Malone and Gagnon, the cartoonist, were having a subdued conversation.

  “Well, I go to work for The Sun, Chuck,” McAlpine said quietly.

  “You do?” Foley looked surprised. “It’s definite?”

  “It’s definite.”

  “Starting when?”

  “I’ll be working on a couple of columns this week. I’ll let Mr. Carver see them, of course. I get a cheque at the end of the week.”

  “How much?”

  “A hundred. More later.”

  “On staff?”

  “On staff. Come on, man, relax. You can believe it. And I don’t have to go down to The Sun. I can work at my own place. Turn in three columns a week.”

  “H’m. Not a newspaperman, a journalist! You should get a pair of striped trousers and a cane. Well, you know what it means?”

  “Go on.”

  “You’re a teacher’s pet. Teacher down there always has a pet.”

  “Don’t be such a wise guy, Chuck.”

  “Or maybe it’s just Catherine’s hand I see in there. Well, okay, I’m wrong. Maybe you know people better than I do. Where are you going to live?”

  “That’s it. I need a typewriter and an apartment.”

  “I may be able to help you. I know a fellow in my building who’s moving to Miami in ten days. You could sublet.”

  “Well, that’s that,” McAlpine said. Now he wanted to find out all Foley knew about Henry Jackson.

  Foley found it amusing to talk about Jackson. “Little Henry,” he called him. Not too much of a success as a commercial artist, he said, but an entertaining kid. How could a boy with a beard be taken seriously? Of course Henry was never quite sure whether he wanted to be a successful commercial artist or a dramatist like Bernard Shaw. He wrote radio plays, and they weren’t so bad either. In fact he was a bright little guy with a chip on his shoulder, and the boys around the Chalet liked him until he got drunk and annoyingly Shavian. The trouble with Henry was that he had been a sickly child; when he was in a good mood he would tell how he had been kept away from school because he had bronchitis twice a year, but those times in his boyhood when he had lain in bed had been important, for his mother, a clever woman apparently, had read Flaubert to him in the French; Henry could recite whole paragraphs from Madame Bovary. Those sick periods had shaped his whole life; he had cultivated a taste for the witty writers of other periods, and naturally had come to believe he was a great wit himself… What was his particular attraction for Peggy? It couldn’t have been his splendid appearance… You should see him. He hadn’t cleaned his shoes in seven years. Everybody in the joint was surprised if he ever came in looking dressed up. McAlpine would know him as soon as he saw him. Was he Peggy’s lover? Well, everybody had taken it for granted he was, and Henry seemed to think so, too. In the last year Peggy and Henry had been together a lot, but whether he was sleeping with her or not, how could you say? One took it for granted they slept together because they both took so much pride in doing exactly what they wanted to do. On the other hand, maybe they regarded it as a novelty not to go to bed. With a couple of inverted exhibitionists a simple love relationship was sometimes difficult, and it was possible they got such excitement out of their spiritual emancipation that a warm embrace would be too vulgar for them. But certainly Henry had been eating with her, reading his plays to her, and staying up all night with her and sharing her interest in primitive African art and Negro musicians. It would be astonishing to everybody if she had only been leading him around by the nose. For the record, then, Henry was her lover, and as to what she got from the bearded boy McAlpine would have to make up his own mind. “And don’t look too eager to do it,” Foley said, with a slow grin. “Here’s the boyfriend now.”

  A young fellow of twenty-four with a wispy reddish beard, wearing a sloppy loose brown tweed jacket and grey trousers, the jacket and trousers hanging on his thin body like a tent, had come in and was staring at Foley and McAlpine. But is he alone? McAlpine thought. Where’s Peggy? Henry Jackson had fierce, bright blue eyes and the weakness of his chin was concealed by his untidy little beard. He went limping to the end of the bar to join Malone and Gagnon. On his left foot he wore a special shoe with a built-up heel.

  “Look, that foot,” McAlpine whispered.

  “Yeah, he’s lame.”

  “You didn’t tell me he was lame, Chuck.”

  “Didn’t I?”

  “No.”

  “Is it so important?”

  “Well, yes, if you had only told me he was lame…” McAlpine said, protesting Foley’s concealment of a fact that would have helped explain Peggy’s sympathy for Jackson.

  Jackson and Malone began to whisper; their heads bobbed together, then bobbed away, and Jackson, turning slowly, glowered at McAlpine. He put his elbows on the bar, meditated, and finally swung full around and regarded McAlpine morosely. Challenging questions were in his eyes: Where did you come from? What makes you think it’s important to you that I’m here alone? You’re an utter stranger. You don’t belong in this at all. She’s nothing to you. What makes you think you can have any right to try and understand what’s happened between me and Peggy, or believe that a guy like you could
take my place with her?

  Then he slid off the stool and approached the corner table, taking four limping, solemn-faced strides, courting a humiliation.

  “Hello, Chuck. Mind if I sit down?”

  “A pleasure, Henry,” said Foley, now full of vast good humour. “I think you and Mr. McAlpine should know each other.

  “Yeah, I think so,” Jackson said. All his movements were jerky and irritable. When Wolgast came from behind the bar with one drink, which he put in front of McAlpine saying, “This is special – for you, Mr. McAlpine, because you held me up the other night,” Jackson scowled unhappily.

  “In fact, Henry,” Foley said slyly, “it looks to me as if you and Jim already know each other.”

  “I think Mr. McAlpine has heard of me,” Henry said.

  “Sure I have,” McAlpine said.

  “Sure you have,” Jackson repeated sourly, and then looked puzzled. “I feel like hell,” he said, trying to laugh. But McAlpine’s intense interest fascinated him. Long explanations could be dispensed with; they understood they had been in the closest communication. “If you and I were contemporaries, McAlpine,” he said arrogantly, “I would try and explain to you; but we’re not contemporaries. The gap is too great. You’re not in my world.” Foley chuckled with vast secret amusement and Jackson scowled. “I think Mr. McAlpine understands,” he said.

  “What are you trying to tell me?” McAlpine asked.

  “I said my generation can’t expect much from your generation.”

  “But why are you so belligerent?”

  “I’m making a point. You get it, I think.”