Two days before Christmas when she entered the bar she carried a parcel. It contained Christmas gifts for her children, the two girls. They had no work bench now and no skylight. She unwrapped and rewrapped them on the bed, the immemorial—the work bench of the child’s unwitting begetting become the altar for the Child’s service, she sitting on the edge of it surrounded by holly-stippled paper and the fatuous fragile red-and-green cord and gummed labels, the two gifts she had chosen reasonably costly but unremarkable, she looking at them with a sort of grim bemusement above the hands otherwise and at nearly every other human action unhesitating and swift. “They haven’t even taught me how to wrap up packages,” she said. “Children,” she said. “It’s not a child’s function, really. It’s for adults: a week’s dispensation to return to childishness, to give something you dont want yourself to someone who doesn’t want it either, and demand thanks for it. And the children swap with you. They vacate puerility and accept the role you abandoned not because they ever had any particular desire to be grown but just out of that ruthless piracy of children that will use anything—deception or secrecy or acting—to get anything. Anything, any bauble will do. Presents dont mean anything to them until they get big enough to calculate what it probably cost. That’s why little girls are more interested in presents than little boys. So they take what you give them not because they will accept even that in preference to nothing but because that’s about all they expected anyway from the stupid oxen among whom for some reason they have to live.—They have offered to keep me on at the store.”
“What?” he said. He had not been listening to her. He had been hearing but not listening, looking down at the blunt hands among the tinsel litter, thinking Now is the time for me to say, Go home. Be with them tomorrow night. “What?”
“They are going to keep me on until summer at the store.”
He heard this time; he went through the same experience as when he had recognised the number on the calendar he had made, now he knew what the trouble had been all the time, why he would lie rigidly and carefully beside her in the dawn, believing the reason he could not sleep was that he was waiting for the smell of his moron pandering to fade, why he would sit before an unfinished page in the typewriter, believing he was thinking of nothing, believing he was thinking only of the money, how each time they always had the wrong amount of it and that they were about money like some unlucky people were about alcohol: either none or too much. It was the city I was thinking of he thought. The city and winter together, a combination too strong for us yet, for a time yet—the winter that herds people inside walls wherever they are, but winter and city together, a dungeon; the routine even of sinning, an absolution even for adultery. “No,” he said. “Because we are going to leave Chicago.”
“Leave Chicago?”
“Yes. For good. You’re not going to work any more just for money. Wait,” he said quickly. “I know we have come to live like we had been married five years, but I am not coming the heavy husband on you. I know I catch myself thinking, ‘I want my wife to have the best’ but I’m not yet saying ‘I dont approve of my women working’. It’s not that. It’s what we have come to work for, got into the habit of working for before we knew it, almost waited too late before we found it out. Do you remember how you said up at the lake when I suggested that you clear out while the clearing was good and you said ‘That’s what we bought, what we are paying for: to be together and eat together and sleep together’? And now look at us. When we are together, it’s in a saloon or a street car or walking along a crowded street and when we eat together it’s in a crowded restaurant inside a vacant hour they allow you from the store so you can eat and stay strong so they can get the value of the money they pay you every Saturday and we dont sleep together at all anymore, we take turns watching each other sleep; when I touch you I know you are too tired to wake up and you are probably too tired to touch me at all.”
Three weeks later, with a scribbled address on a torn newspaper margin folded in his vest pocket, he entered a downtown office building and ascended twenty floors to an opaque glass door lettered Callaghan Mines and entered and passed with some difficulty a chromium-finished office girl and faced at last across a desk flat and perfectly bare save for a telephone and a deck of cards laid out for Canfield, a red-faced cold-eyed man of about fifty, with a highwayman’s head and the body of a two hundred and twenty pound college fullback gone to fat, in a suit of expensive tweed which nevertheless looked on him as if he had taken it from a fire sale at the point of a pistol, to whom Wilbourne essayed to give a summary of his medical qualifications and experience.
“Never mind that,” the other interrupted. “Can you take care of the ordinary injuries that men working in a mine shaft might meet?”
“I was just trying to tell you—”
“I heard you. I asked you something else. I said, Take care of them.” Wilbourne looked at him.
“I dont think I—” he began.
“Take care of the mine. Of the people who own it. Have put money into it. Who will be paying your salary as long as you earn it. I dont care two damns in hell how much or how little surgery and pharmacology you know or dont know or how many degrees you might have from where to show it. Nobody else out there will; there’ll be no state inspectors out there to ask to see your license. I want to know if you can be depended on to protect the mine, the company. Against backfires. Suits from wop pick-and-shovel men and bohunk powder-monkeys and chink ore-trammers to whom the notion might occur to swap the company a hand or a foot for a pension or a trip back to Canton or Hong Kong.”
“Oh,” Wilbourne said. “I see. Yes. I can do that.”
“All right. You will be given transportation out to the mine at once. Your pay will be—” he named a sum.
“That’s not much,” Wilbourne said. The other looked at him with the cold flesh-bedded eyes. Wilbourne stared back at him. “I have a degree from a good university, a recognised medical school. I lacked only a few weeks of finishing my internship at a hospital which has a—”
“Then you dont want this job. This job is nowhere near up to your qualifications and, I daresay, your deserts. Good day.” The cold eyes stared at him; he did not move. “I said, Good morning.”
“I will have to have transportation for my wife,” Wilbourne said.
Their train left at three oclock two mornings later. They waited for McCord at the apartment where they had lived for two months and left no mark other than the cigarette scars on the table. “Not even of loving,” he said. “Not the wild sweet attunement, bare feet hurrying bedward in the half light, covers that wont turn back fast enough. Just the seminal groaning of box springs, the preprandial prostate relieving of the ten years’ married. We were too busy; we had to rent and support a room for two robots to live in.” McCord came and they carried down the luggage, the two bags with which they had left New Orleans, and the typewriter. The manager shook hands with all three of them and expressed regret at the dissolution of mutually pleasant domestic bonds. “Just two of us,” Wilbourne said. “None of us are androgynous.” The manager blinked, though just once.
“Ah,” he said. “A pleasant journey. You have a cab?” They had McCord’s car; they went out to it in a mild glitter of minor silver, the final neon and clash and clang of changing lights; the redcap turned the two bags and the typewriter over to the porter at the pullman vestibule.
“We’ve got time for a drink,” McCord said.
“You and Harry have one,” Charlotte said. “I’m going to bed.” She came and put her arms around McCord, her face raised. “Goodnight, Mac.” Then McCord moved and kissed her. She stepped back, turning; they watched her enter the vestibule and vanish. Then Wilbourne also knew that McCord knew he would never see her again.
“How about that drink?” McCord said. They went to the station bar and found a table and then they were sitting again as they had on so many of the afternoons while they waited for Charlotte—the same drinking faces, the s
ame white jackets of waiters and barmen, the same racked gleaming glasses, only the steaming bowls and the holly (Christmas, McCord had said, the apotheosis of the bourgeoisie, the season when with shining fable Heaven and Nature, in accord for once, edict and postulate us all husbands and fathers under our skins, when before an altar in the shape of a gold-plated cattle-trough man may with impunity prostrate himself in an orgy of unbridled sentimental obeisance to the fairy tale which conquered the Western world, when for seven days the rich get richer and the poor get poorer in amnesty: the whitewashing of a stipulated week leaving the page blank and pristine again for the chronicling of the fresh—and for the moment, horselike (“there’s the horse,” McCord said), breathed—revenge and hatred.) missing now, the waiter coming up as he had used to come—the same white sleeve, the anonymous featureless waiter-face you never actually see. “Beer,” McCord said. “What’s yours?”
“Ginger ale,” Wilbourne said.
“What?”
“I’m on the wagon.”
“Since when?”
“Since last night. I cant afford to drink anymore.” McCord looked at him.
“Hell,” McCord said. “Bring me a double rye then.” The waiter departed. McCord still stared at Wilbourne. “It seems to agree with you,” he said savagely. “Listen,” he said. “I know this is none of my business. But I wish I knew what it’s all about. Here you were making fair money, and Charlotte with a good job, you had a nice place to live in. And then all of a sudden you quit it, make Charlotte throw up her job to start out in February to live in a mine shaft in Utah, without a railroad or a telephone or even a decent can, on a salary of—”
“That was just it. That was why. I had become—” He ceased. The waiter set the drinks on the table and went away. Wilbourne raised his ginger ale. “To freedom.”
“I would,” McCord snarled. “You’ll probably be able to drink to a lot of it before you see any of it again. And in water too, not even in soda pop. And maybe in a tighter place than this too. Because that guy is poison. I know about him. He’s wildcat. If the truth was written about him on a tombstone it wouldn’t be an epitaph, it would be a police record.”
“All right,” Wilbourne said. “To love, then.” There was a clock above the entrance—the ubiquitous and synchronised face, oracular admonitory and unsentient; he had twenty-two minutes yet. While it will only take two minutes to tell Mac what it took me two months to discover he thought. “I had turned into a husband,” he said. “That was all. I didn’t even know it until she told me the store had offered to keep her on. At first I used to have to watch myself, rehearse myself each time so I would be sure to say ‘my wife’ or ‘Mrs Wilbourne’, then I discovered I had been watching myself for months to keep from saying it; I have even caught myself twice since we came back from the lake thinking ‘I want my wife to have the best’ exactly like any husband with his Saturday pay envelope and his suburban bungalow full of electric wife-saving gadgets and his table cloth of lawn to sprinkle on Sunday morning that will become his actual own provided he is not fired or run down by a car in the next ten years—the doomed worm blind to all passion and dead to all hope and not even knowing it, oblivious and unaware in the face of all darkness, all unknown, the underlying All-Derisive biding to blast him. I had even stopped being ashamed of the way I earned the money, apologising even to myself for the stories I wrote; I was no more ashamed of them than the city employee buying his own bungalow on the installment plan in which his wife can have the best is ashamed of his badge of office, the rubber plunger for unstopping toilets, which he carries about with him. In fact, I had come to really like to write them, even apart from the money, like the boy who never saw ice before goes bugs about skating right after he learns how. Besides, after I started writing them I learned that I had no idea of the depths of depravity of which the human invention is capable, which is always interesting—”
“You mean, enjoys,” McCord said.
“Yes. All right.—Respectability. That was what did it. I found out some time back that it’s idleness breeds all our virtues, our most bearable qualities—contemplation, equableness, laziness, letting other people alone; good digestion mental and physical: the wisdom to concentrate on fleshly pleasures—eating and evacuating and fornication and sitting in the sun—than which there is nothing better, nothing to match, nothing else in all this world but to live for the short time you are loaned breath, to be alive and know it—oh yes, she taught me that; she has marked me too forever—nothing, nothing. But it was only recently I have clearly seen, followed out the logical conclusion, that it is one of what we call the prime virtues—thrift, industry, independence—that breeds all the vices—fanaticism, smugness, meddling, fear, and worst of all, respectability. Us, for instance. Because of the fact that for the first time we were solvent, knew for certain where tomorrow’s food was coming from (the damned money, too much of it; at night we would lie awake and plan how to get it spent; by spring we would have been carrying steamer folders in our pockets) I had become as completely thrall and slave to respectability as any—”
“But not her,” McCord said.
“No. But she’s a better man than I am. You said that yourself.—as any man by drink or opium. I had become the Complete Householder. All I lacked was official sanction in the form of a registered Social Security number as head of a family. We lived in an apartment that wasn’t bohemian, it wasn’t even a tabloid love-nest, it wasn’t even in that part of town but in a neighborhood dedicated by both city ordinance and architecture to the second year of wedlock among the five thousand a year bracket. I would be waked in the mornings by the noise of children passing in the street; by the time spring came and the windows would have to stay open I would have been hearing the fretful cries of Swede nursemaids from the park all day long and, when the wind was right, smell the smell of infant urine and animal crackers. I referred to it as home, there was a corner in it we both called my study; I had even bought the damn typewriter at last—something I had got along without for twenty-eight years and so well I didn’t even know it, which is too heavy and unwieldy to carry yet which I would no more have dared desert than—”
“You’ve still got it, I noticed,” McCord said.
“—than—Yes. A good portion of any courage is a sincere disbelief in good luck. It’s not courage otherwise.—than I would my eyelashes. I had tied myself hand and foot in a little strip of inked ribbon, daily I watched myself getting more and more tangled in it like a roach in a spider web; each morning, so that my wife could leave on time for her job, I would wash the coffee pot and the sink and twice a week (for the same reason) I would buy from the same butcher the groceries we needed and the chops we would cook ourselves on Sunday; give us a little more time and we would have been dressing and undressing inside our kimonos in one another’s presence and turning off the light before we made love. That’s it. It’s not avocation that elects our vocations, it’s respectability that makes chiropractors and clerks and bill posters and motormen and pulp writers of us.” There was a loudspeaker in the bar too, synchronised too; at this moment a voice cavernous and sourceless roared deliberately, a sentence in which could be distinguished a word now and then—‘train’, then others which the mind two or three seconds afterward recognised to be the names of cities far flung about the continent, cities seen rather than names heard, as if the listener (so enormous was the voice) were suspended in space watching the globy earth spin slowly out of its cradling cloud-wisps in fragmentary glimpses the evocative strange divisions of the sphere, spinning them on into fog and cloud again before vision and comprehension could quite grasp them. He looked at the clock again; he still had fourteen minutes. Fourteen minutes to try to tell what I have already said in five words he thought.
“And mind, I liked it. I never denied that. I liked it. I liked the money I made. I even liked the way I made it, the thing I did, as I told you. It wasn’t because of that that one day I caught myself back from thinking ‘My wi
fe must have the best’. It was because I found out one day that I was afraid. And I found out at the same time that I will still be afraid, no matter what I do, that I will still be afraid as long as she lives or I live.”
“You are still afraid now?”
“Yes. And not about money. Damn money. I can make all the money we will need; certainly there seems to be no limit to what I can invent on the theme of female sex troubles. I dont mean that, nor Utah either. I mean us. Love, if you will. Because it cant last. There is no place for it in the world today, not even in Utah. We have eliminated it. It took us a long time, but man is resourceful and limitless in inventing too, and so we have got rid of love at last just as we have got rid of Christ. We have radio in the place of God’s voice and instead of having to save emotional currency for months and years to deserve one chance to spend it all for love we can now spread it thin into coppers and titillate ourselves at any newsstand, two to the block like sticks of chewing gum or chocolate from the automatic machines. If Jesus returned today we would have to crucify him quick in our own defense, to justify and preserve the civilization we have worked and suffered and died shrieking and cursing in rage and impotence and terror for two thousand years to create and perfect in man’s own image; if Venus returned she would be a soiled man in a subway lavatory with a palm full of French post-cards—” McCord turned in his chair and beckoned, a single repressed violent gesture. The waiter appeared, McCord pointed to his glass. Presently the waiter’s hand set the refilled glass on the table and withdrew.
The Wild Palms: [If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem] Page 11
