The Complete Stories of Morley Callaghan: Volume One

by Morley Callaghan

  At first the little kid, holding his hands behind his back, shuffled out of sight, but Joe knew he would go no farther than the end of the stand; he knew the kid would be there looking up and down the street furtively, stretching his hand out a little, then withdrawing it in fear before he touched an apple, and always staring, wanting the apple more and more.

  Joe got up and yawned lazily, wetting his lips and rubbing his hand across them, and then he deliberately turned his back to the window. But at the moment when he was sure the kid would make up his mind and shoot out his hand, he swung around, and he was delighted to see how the child’s hand, empty and faltering, was pulled back. “Ah, it goes just like a clock, I know just what he’ll do,” Joe thought. “He wants it, but he doesn’t know how to take it because he’s scared. Soon he wants it so much he’ll have to take it. Then I catch him. That’s the way it goes,” and he grinned.

  In a little while, doing a thing he hardly ever did, Joe went out onto the sidewalk and, paying no attention to the kid, who had jumped away nervously, he mopped his shining forehead and wiped his mouth and picked up one of the apples from the top of the pile. He munched it slowly with great relish, spitting out bits of red skin, and gnawing it down to the core. The kid’s mouth dropped open, his blue eyes guileless.

  After tossing the core in a wide arc far out on the street, where it lay in the sunlight and was attacked by two big flies, Joe started back into the store thinking, “Now for sure he’ll grab one. He won’t wait. He can’t.” Yet to tantalize him, he didn’t go right into the store; he turned at the door, looked up at the sky, as though expecting it to rain suddenly.

  While Joe was grinning and feeling pleased with his cunning, his wife came from the room at the back of the store. She was a black-haired woman, wide-hipped and slow moving, with tired brown eyes. When she stood beside her husband with her hands on her hips, she looked determined and sensible. “The baby’s sleeping, I think, Joe. It’s been pretty bad the way she’s been going on.”

  “That’s good,” Joe said.

  “She feels a lot better today.”

  “She’s all right.”

  “I feel pretty tired. I think I’ll lie down,” she said, but she walked over to the window and looked out at the street.

  Then she said sharply, “There’s a kid out there near the apples. One’s gone from the top.”

  “I sold it,” Joe lied.

  “Watch the kid,” she said.

  “O.K.,” Joe said, and she went back to the bedroom.

  He looked again for the kid, who stood rooted there in spite of the hostile glance of the woman. “I guess he doesn’t know how to do it,” Joe thought. Yet the look of helpless longing was becoming so strong in the kid’s face, so bold and unashamed, that it bothered Joe and made him irritable.

  “Look at the face on you. Look out, kid, you’ll start to cry in a minute,” he said to himself. “So you think you can have everything you want, do you?” The agony of wanting was so plain in the boy’s face that Joe was indignant.

  In the room behind the store there was a faint whimpering and the sound of a baby stirring. “Look,” Joe said to himself, as though lecturing the kid. “It’s a nice baby, but it’s not a boy. See what I mean? You go around with that look on your face when you want things and can’t get them, people’ll only laugh at you.” Joe grew restless and unhappy, and he looked helplessly around the untidy store, as if looking upon his own fate.

  The kid on the sidewalk, who had shuffled away till he was out of sight came edging back slowly. And Joe, getting excited, whispered, “Why doesn’t he take it when he wants it so much? I couldn’t catch him if he took it and ran,” and he got up to be near the corner of the window, where he could see the boy’s hand if it came reaching out. “Now. Right now,” he whispered, really hoping it would happen.

  Then he thought, “What’s up with him?” for the kid was brushing by the fruit stand, one of his hands swinging loose at his side. Joe was sure the swinging hand was to knock an apple off the pile and send it rolling along the sidewalk, and he got up eagerly and leaned forward with his head close to the window.

  The kid, looking up warily, saw Joe’s face and grew frightened. Ducking, he ran.

  “Hey!” Joe yelled, out on the sidewalk.

  The kid looked around but kept on running, his legs in blue overalls pumping up and down.

  Grabbing an apple and yelling, “Hey, hey, kid, you can have it!” Joe followed a few steps, but the kid wouldn’t look back.

  Joe stood on the sidewalk, an awful eagerness growing in him as he stared at the shining red apple, and wondered what would happen to the kid he was sure he would never see again.

  The Voyage Out

  Jeff found himself sitting next to her one night in a movie house, and when he saw that she was neat and pretty he began to watch her furtively. Though she didn’t turn her head, he felt sure she was aware of him beside her. When she got up to go, he followed her out, and as she hesitated at the theatre entrance, drawing on her gloves, he began a polite, timid conversation. Then they walked along the street together.

  Her name was Jessie and she worked in a millinery store and lived with her father and mother. Until one night a month later, when they were in the hall of her apartment house saying good night in the way they had so often done in the last weeks, he hadn’t thought he had much chance of making love to her. They were standing close together, laughing and whispering. Then she stopped laughing and was quiet, as though the shyness hidden under her warm affectionate ways was troubling her. She put her arms tight around him, lifted up her face, held him as if she would never let him go, and let him know she was offering all her love.

  “I don’t want to go home. Let me go in with you and stay awhile.”

  “All right — if they’re asleep,” she whispered.

  As they opened the door and tiptoed into her place, the boldness he felt in her made his heart pound. Then they heard her father cough. They stood still, frightened, her hand tightening on his arm.

  “We’d better not tonight,” she whispered. “They’re awake. You’d better go quick.”

  “Tomorrow night then?”

  “Maybe — we’ll see,” she said.

  Brushing her face against his, she almost shoved him out into the hall.

  As he loafed over to Eighth Avenue, he was full of elation, and he thought, “She’ll do anything I want now. It came so easy, just like I wanted it to,” and a longing for her began to grow in him. He could feel her warmth and hear her urgent whispering. He grinned as he loafed along, for he had thought it would take a long time and he’d have to go slow and easy. Lights in the stores, the underground subway rumble, and the noise of the crosstown buses on Twenty-third Street seemed to be made important by the marvelous tenderness within him. He wanted suddenly to lean against a bar or sit at a counter, hear men’s laughter, and feel his own triumphant importance among them, and he hurried into the restaurant where he had a cup of coffee every night after leaving her.

  At this hour men from a local bakery, with the strong, sweet smell of freshly baked bread on them and their pants white with flour, came in and sat in a row at the counter. While ordering hot food they looked around to see who else was in the restaurant. There were two girls sitting at a table talking quietly. When Jeff smiled at the girls without any shyness, because a warm feeling for everyone and everything was in him, they shrugged in surprise and laughed at each other.

  Sitting next to Jeff was a big, powerful, sandy-haired fellow wearing a little flour-marked cap. The others called him Mike, and Jeff had often seen him in the restaurant. Having finished his plate and wiped his mouth, he winked at Jeff and said, “Hello, kid. You around here again tonight? What’s new?”

  “Nothing,” Jeff said. “I’ve just been feeling pretty good.” He looked so happy as he grinned that Mike puckered his eyes and appraised him thoughtfully, and the two girls at the table were watching him, too. To seem nonchalant, Jeff whispered to
Mike, as he indicated the girls with a nod of his head, “How do you like the look of the blonde doll in the green hat?”

  “That one?” Mike said as he turned on his stool and looked at the girls, who were whispering with their heads close together. “That one? She’s a cinch. Didn’t you see the glad eye she was giving you? A soft touch. She’d give you no trouble at all.”

  “She don’t look like that to me,” Jeff said.

  “If you couldn’t go to town with her in two weeks, you ought to quit,” Mike said. Then, as if ashamed to be arguing about women with a man who was so much younger, he added, “Anyway, she’s too old for you. Lay off her.”

  Jeff kept shifting around on the stool, trying to catch a sudden glimpse of the girl in the green hat so he could see her as Mike had seen her, yet knowing that to him she still looked quiet and respectable. When she smiled suddenly, she seemed like any other friendly girl — a little like Jessie, even. “Maybe Mike could have looked at Jessie and known from the start it would only take a month with her,” he thought. Feeling miserable, he kept staring at the girl, yearning to possess Mike’s wisdom, with a fierce longing growing in him to know about every intimate moment Jessie had had with the men who had tried to make love to her. “If I had been sure of myself, I guess I could have knocked Jessie over the first night I took her out,” he went on thinking. The elation he had felt after leaving Jessie seemed childish, and he ached with disappointment.

  The girls, who had become embarrassed by Jeff’s sullen stare, got up and left the restaurant, and when they had gone Jeff said to Mike, “I get what you mean about the doll in the green hat.”

  “What did she do?” Mike asked.

  “Nothing, nothing. Just the way she swung her hips going out of the door,” Jeff lied, and he lit a cigarette and paid his check and went out.

  Jeff and his brother, who was a salesman out of work, had a small apartment on West Twenty-Second Street. As soon as Jeff got home, he realized that the sight of the food in the restaurant had made him hungry, and he went to the fridge and got a tomato, intending to cut some bread and make himself a sandwich. He was holding the tomato in his hand when there was the sound of someone rapping on the door. It was his brother’s girl, Eva, tall and slim with fine brown eyes, who was only about two years older than Jeff. She often came to the apartment to see Jeff’s brother. She was at ease with Jeff, and laughed a lot with him, and never minded him having a cup of coffee with them. But tonight she looked dreadfully frightened. Her eyes were red-rimmed and moist, as though she had been crying.

  “Jeff, is Bill home?” she asked.

  “He ought to be home any minute, Eva. I thought he was with you.”

  “He was, but he left me, and I thought he’d be here.”

  “Sit down and wait for him,” Jeff said.

  When she had been sitting down a little while and they>were talking, Jeff found himself trying to look at her as Mike had looked at the girl in the green hat in the restaurant, looking at the way she held her head, at her legs, at her eyes — with such a strange, shrewd glance that she became uneasy and began to smooth her skirt down over her legs.

  “She knew what I was thinking,” Jeff thought, smiling and cynical, and he tried to say with his eyes, I know a lot more about you than I used to know. I’ll bet if I put my arms around you, you’d snuggle up against me.

  “What’s the matter with you tonight?” Eva said uneasily.

  Startled, Jeff said, “Nothing. Nothing is the matter with me.”

  “I guess I’m restless. I can’t sit still. I think I’ll be going,” she said, and with her face flushed, she got up and went out before he could think of anything to say that might keep her there.

  When she had gone, Jeff, remembering the distress in her eyes when she’d first come in, grew ashamed of the stupid, leering way he had looked at her. “I’ve driven her away. Thinking of Mike made me act like a fool.” He hurried to the open window and he could see her pacing up and down, waiting.

  He stayed at the window, watching till he saw his brother coming. Eva ran up to him, and they stopped under the light and began to talk earnestly. Then Bill took her by the arm very firmly and they started to walk toward the corner, but then they turned and came back and stood talking beneath the window.

  In the murmur of their voices Jeff knew from the tone that his brother was apologetic. Then the voices rose a little and seemed to be lifted up to him, and there was a desperate pleading in the snatch of words, an eloquent sound Jeff had never heard in a girl’s voice before. “It’s all right. I wish you’d understand. I’m not worrying and I’ll never, never hold it against you.” She stopped suddenly and grabbed at Bill’s arm. Then she let him go and hurried along the street, while Bill stood still, looking after her.

  When Bill came in, Jeff said, “Eva was in here waiting for you.”

  Throwing his hat on a chair, Bill walked aimlessly toward the bedroom. “I know she was here. I ran into her outside.”

  “What did she want?”

  “Nothing important.”

  “She was worked up about something, all right.”

  In Bill’s eyes there was the same distress Jeff had seen on the face of Eva. He was accustomed to having his older brother dominate him, even bully him a little. Bill seemed years older than Jeff because his hair had got so thin. Now the worry, the wonder, and fright showing in Bill’s eyes made Jeff feel helpless. “Eva thinks she’s going away, but I’m not going to let her,” Bill said. “I’m going to marry her even if we have to all live here together.”

  “Doesn’t she want to marry you?”

  “She keeps saying it’s her fault, and I didn’t intend to marry her, and now she’s put me in a hole at a time when we can’t do anything about it. She wants to go away for a while till everything’s all right.” Then Bill, looking straight ahead, said quietly, “I don’t know what I’d do if anything happened to Eva.”

  Jeff could still see Eva clutching at his brother’s arm on the street — but not in the way Jessie had clutched at his own arm — and he said hesitantly, “I’ve got a girl too. I wouldn’t want to get in the jam you’re in.”

  “Nobody does. There’s no use talking about it,” Bill said, and he went into the bedroom and Jeff knew that Bill was quietly fearing for Eva, longing to protect her. Jeff began to feel all his brother’s wretchedness and grew timid. If he went back to Jessie, it might get for them like it was for Bill and Eva now.

  He sat and worried about his brother for a long time. Then he knew suddenly that he was no longer even thinking of his brother; without noticing it, he had begun to dream of the way Jessie had held him and the way she was going to whisper to him tomorrow night at her place when it was very late. He could see her lifting her ardent face up to him.

  Realizing that neither Mike’s wisdom nor his brother’s anguish could teach him anything and standing at the open window, he looked out over the lighted streets where he had walked a little while ago, looking toward Jessie’s place, stirred with a longing for more and more of whatever she would be able to give him. It had started now for them and it would keep going on. And then he was filled with awe, for it seemed like the beginning of a voyage out, with not much he had learned on this night to guide him.

  Soldier Harmon

  There were twelve pool tables in the club. Four fellows in peak caps and one in a derby hat were watching a game. It was ten minutes to seven, Saturday evening. They were watching Joe Harmon, a big man with a slow grin and a dark bruise under his left eye, and his manager, Doc Barnes, a small, neat man with shiny black hair. Doc Barnes, concentrating, looked carefully at three balls on the table, then looked at them from another angle, and finally, with his hip on the end of the table, leaned over the green baize.

  “All right, one foot on the floor,” Joe said.

  “It’s there; keep your shirt on,” the Doc said, feinting with his cue.

  “On the floor, Doc.”

  “I got it on the floor, I tell
ya.”

  “Yeah, if your leg was three inches longer, Doc.”

  Someone yelled near the door, and Joe turned. The club bouncer had grabbed a man in a tight overcoat. “Throw him out!” someone yelled, a fat man in shirt-sleeves holding the door open. The other man pulled off his overcoat and draped it over the bouncer’s head and jabbed at the head under the coat while everybody laughed.

  Joe Harmon watched, one hand loose on his hip. In his other hand he held the cue, the handle-butt down on the floor. Clearing his throat he let the cue drop against the side of the table, then took two slow steps toward the crowd. Doc Barnes, jumping down from the table, grabbed Joe’s arm.

  “Lay off, Joe.”

  “Sit down, Doc.”

  “Don’t get in it, Joe. Come on; get out of here,” and he jerked Joe around. “You big sap,” he said. “What do you want mixing up in that stuff? Come on, thickhead.” He grabbed Joe’s vest from a peg on the wall, then held his coat for him, trying to keep him from the fight near the door.

  They went down the back stairs and out of the lane to the street. Snow had gone from the streets by the middle of March, though ice was closely hugging to the curb. They went into Chink’s at the corner. The Doc ordered two hot roast beef sandwiches, pumpkin pie, and coffee, and, leaning back in the chair, watched Joe, who had his elbows pressed firm on the hard white table, a stubborn expression on his face.

  “It simply won’t do, Joe,” he said.

  “No.”

  “Absolutely no. Who the hell’s going to pay to see you fight if they just have to hang around a poolroom and get it for nothing? It’s not business. Don’t give your stuff away.”

  Joe grinned. “A guy’s got to have a little fun now and again. That stuff up in the club there’s real. The other ain’t. The other’s just motions.”

  “Not when you’re right, Joe. Not on your life, when you’re ready to let them have it,” and he reached over and slapped Joe on the back. Chink brought the hot roast beef sandwiches with lots of gravy.