There Was a Time

by Caldwell, Taylor;

  Feeling everything so imminent upon him now, so acute and sentient and meaningful, Frank said: “How is your family, Giovanni?” Giovanni! It was no longer a name; it was a person, a living creature, a man, flesh of his flesh, a brother with members like his own, with his own heart and his own sensations!

  Had Giovanni a “family?” Frank could not remember, but he had a faint impression that during their conversations a family must have been mentioned. He watched Giovanni closely to see if the old man would show signs of bewilderment. But Giovanni smiled radiantly. He stood, with the tray of empty dishes on his arm, and his wizened face softened, and became tender. “Maria Pia is happy now,” he said.

  Maria Pia. Who was Maria Pia? The name had a familiar sound, but it brought no recognition to Frank, and he was ashamed. Giovanni must have talked often of Maria Pia and he had not listened! Shameful, shallow, degrading thought, that one could, at any time, be so insensible to a fellowman! He made his face interested, and again felt his shame.

  “What is Maria Pia doing now?” he asked.

  “She is dancing again.” Giovanni’s eyes shone with liquid and simple joy. Their corners had moistened; those were tears, there, in the tired old eyes, but they were tears of happiness.

  “Good.” Frank’s voice was cautious, tentative. In a moment, now, he would know all about Maria Pia, whoever she was. He waited.

  The waiter laid soiled silverware on his tray. His hand, veined and dark, trembled uncontrollably. But the light was still on his face. He murmured: “After all this time, she is dancing with the angels. Her mama and me: we’re very happy now.”

  He went away, walking gingerly but quickly, on his aching waiter’s feet. Frank stared after him, feeling a sense of complete loss and frustration. A tale had been told him. He knew the end, but not the beginning. He would never know. There had been a drama, stark, tremendous with pain and suffering, but because he had been blind and deaf, and there had been a shell over his heart, he would never know. He put his usual fifty-cent tip on the table, then impulsively added more silver.

  Maria Pia, Giovanni’s daughter? A young sister? Had she danced once, then been stricken down? Giovanni had told him; Frank knew that. He went out into the somber gray of the early twilight, restless and unfulfilled. The last pages, stained with tears, were in his hand. The first were lost. Good-bye, Maria Pia, he said humbly.

  How much every man lost by not knowing, or loving, or caring for, his neighbor! How empty, how impoverished his life must become, if his eyes were always turned inward upon his own greed, his own selfishness, his own insignificance! When one did not see other men, one did not see God. One saw only emptiness, a dry fountain in a wilderness of bleached boulders and stone, a dead garden full of blowing straw and the skeletons of blasted trees. One became stone himself, a pillar of salt, a being without beginning and without end.

  Frank felt a thickness in his throat, and a hate for himself. Forgive me, he said. Forgive me for my obtuseness and my selfish pain, for my self-dramatization and sterility. If there is a hell, he thought, it will be filled with the bitter waters of self-seeking and egotism, and the foot will be bruised by stony earth.

  He would go to his grandmother’s. He would look at his mother with eyes of new understanding. He would talk to Mr. Farley. Then he would go home and write, write as he had not written in years. The sonorous cadences of the tale of Luke were sounding louder and louder in his ears with exultation.

  CHAPTER 41

  The storm had definitely abated. Main Street, however, was still deserted, except for an occasional scurrying man or woman looking for shelter, for the air that struck Frank’s cheeks was like the blades of icy knives. A streetcar rocked by, its windows almost obliterated by snow, its roof steaming. Frank crossed Main Street, and as he did so, pale street lamps bloomed mistily in the twilight. He would take the West Utica car to Niagara Street, and arrive at his grandmother’s in plenty of time for tea.

  He was the only one waiting for the West Utica car. There was no shelter in which he could huddle away from the flaying cold. He kicked a place in the deep snow in which to stand, and its essence seeped in through his arctics and numbed his feet. Though the worst of the gale had passed, the snow hissed uneasily as currents of wind lashed it, and clouds of thin and scalding whiteness blew into the gray air.

  He thought of Kentucky. Tim Cunningham had recently written of the spring warmth in the valleys, the fruit blossoms which were making of the hills great mounds of pink and white, of the dogwood soon to be scenting the woods, of the greening fields. He had written with the simple poetry of the countryman, and he compared the Southern climate with the nefarious cold and deadly winters of the North. Frank had a vision of great white houses set on lush knolls, of “Kentucky colonels” sipping their juleps, of stately dignity and golden sun and the songs of Negro workers in the fields. All at once he yearned for warmth and pleasantness, for the theatrical South he had imagined from the reading of sentimental novels and from the words of Southerners themselves. How agreeable it would be to work during the day in oil fields, and at night on his poetic novel of Luke! He and Tim, perhaps, would have a vine-wreathed cottage in the woods, where only the moon lightened the darkness, and the whippoorwills sang to the night. He saw himself at a plain table, under a lamp, writing hour by hour while Tim slept or read, and the moonlight mingled with the lamplight, and the fragrance of earth and flowers and trees drifted to him through bowered French windows.

  Frank knew that in spite of the universal hope that the war would be renewed and the factories roar again, the Curtiss plant was shutting down, day by day. Any day now he would be out of a job. Why wait? He would write to Tim Cunningham tonight and tell him that in April, or in May at the latest, he would join him in Benton, Kentucky.

  Coming like a white, prehistoric monster out of the gloom of the encompassing winter, the West Utica streetcar groaned towards Main Street and Frank. He entered the car; he was the only passenger. The windows were thick and white with frost. He was encased in an airless chamber of freezing cold, in which his breath rose in clouds. He clung to his seat as the car rocked down the ice-filled tracks. The uncertain lights overhead blinked, went out momentarily, as the pole struck crystallized switches. The car rolled on, through empty and gusty streets. But Frank’s mind was busy with exciting dreams, and though his flesh chilled and numbed, he did not feel it.

  When the car reached Niagara Street, he was still the sole passenger. Stiff and almost unfeeling, he left the car. He would have to walk to his grandmother’s, for it was hopeless to expect another streetcar in this wilderness of snow. Shivering, he started to walk down Niagara Street. He passed Albany Street, where once he had lived and where his father had died.

  All at once, he wanted to see his catalpa tree, standing stiff and black and expectant, in the yard. He wanted to see it, then he would write to Paul Hodge of it; he would examine a branch, to see if the buds had as yet become tender, and if they were swelling. He would touch the trunk, and tell it what was now in his heart, and it would listen, dull and sleeping though it was, and understand and be glad.

  Doubtless a new family lived in that house now. Well, it was dark, and the blizzard had engulfed all life. No one would see him go into the yard to visit his friend. He would stay only long enough to tell the tree, and would go away, enriched and comforted. The tree he had planted so many years ago, and which, like himself, would soon flower and fill the air with richness and leaves! The sap was rising in it, irresistibly, hopefully, steadfast in the empirical knowledge that spring was coming, and that though it was still locked in ice and snow, ever-powerful life was tingling in every branch.

  He stood a moment on the corner of Niagara and Albany Streets. He hesitated. He did not understand this sudden reluctance which came to him like a warning voice. He argued to himself: It will take only a few extra minutes. But the reluctance sharpened in him insistently. Now it was like hands on his shoulders, urging him to continue on down Niagara
Street. But why? Only a few moments, and then he would go on. He felt the tree waiting for him wistfully, stirring in its sleep. He went resolutely down Albany Street, still arguing vaguely with himself.

  The little old white house was still there, as he remembered it. Lights were in its windows. He paused to look. Surely his parents were in that room, toasting themselves before the heater, and there would be a smell of roasting chicken in the kitchen. He had only to put his hand on the knob of the door, to open it, to hear Francis’ irritable voice: “Shut that damned door! You’re letting in the cold.”

  But there was a look of strangeness over the house, as if it had withdrawn from him. Strangers were there now. That was not the window through which he had looked at snow, at trees, at greening lawn. He had never stood on that doorstep. Something ineluctable had happened to the house; it had withdrawn to another plane unfamiliar to him. It resembled only slightly the house he had known, as one human being might wear, for a brief instant, the smile of someone well known, use a familiar gesture. Something had shifted; the very clapboards, the very cellar door, the very shape of the windows, denied that he had known them. Something in time and space had gone on, part of him, but not part of what he now saw.

  There was an eeriness about the dark street with its flickering lamplights. He looked at the surrounding houses. He glanced down the street. He saw the shop on the corner, Vincent’s, where he had sipped, in ecstasy, a rare soda, or had stared in at the windows at the advertisement for lollypops, with their offered multiple flavors. The faint light which shone out on the street was not the light he had remembered. Only six months had passed, but the world he had known had gone on with him. This was another world. Across the street lived the Campbells; that house with the yellow porch was the home of the Flahertys. Old widowed Mrs. Berger lived in that brown cottage. They had not gone. But had they? If he should knock on their doors, would familiar faces stare out at him? Or would the faces of strangers wait, questioningly, for his first words?

  Again, as he stood in the drift of snow, he felt the urgency not to see his tree, to turn back. The tree you knew is not there now. You have the tree in your heart. It will flourish there forever, forever blossoming, forever alive. You have the tree with you; it is yours, never to be uprooted. Turn away; go on. You cannot come back, for you come back to what you have never known. What you have known is always with you.

  Frank stamped his feet impatiently, shrugging off the ancient wisdom to which he had been listening. He plowed through the drifts towards the rear of the little house. His feet crunched hard and crackling snow. As the lamplight struck his back his shadow fell before him, distorted and twisted. He thought, as if in an enchantment: That shadow belongs here. It lives on this street, this gangling and mysterious thing. It lives in this house. It owns the tree. I have no right here.

  Cautiously, so as not to disturb the mysterious creatures behind the lighted windows, he reached the rear of the house.

  The moon broke through a wrack of clouds, pure spectral light on a waste of alabaster. Frank saw the picket fence, almost obliterated by snow. He saw the roof of the chicken coop on the other side. He saw chimneys of neighboring houses steaming in the moonlight, and the steam turned to frail silver. He saw gleams of light from back windows. He felt the silence and the solitary, frozen immobility of the night.

  But he did not see his tree. His tree was gone. There was not even a black and wounded stump on the smooth deep marble of the yard. There was nothing at all.

  He stood there, and everything became very still in him, as if his heart and his blood had stopped. Always, powerful emotion had been late in coming to him; always, he had at first been stunned as if, so to speak, lightning had struck him, and thunder delayed its reverberation. So he felt nothing as he looked at the sparkling drift where his tree had stood. He said to himself: They have cut it down. And the thought had a kind of smooth impersonality and indifference in his mind.

  They have cut it down, he said to himself, as he stood there, a tall, dark thin shadow under the moon, his hands thrust deep in his pockets, the snow rising high above his ankles. Someone in the little house where he had lived lit the kitchen light, and a narrow golden flood gushed out onto the snow. Automatically, Frank stepped a few paces to one side, where the light would not strike him. But, in his stepping, he did not move his eyes from the place where his tree had stood.

  And then he turned to go. Desolate, forsaken, he looked back. There was the ghostly drift where his tree had stood. Now he was aware of the emptiness, of cruel sorrow and fury. Surely, surely, his tree had stood there only a moment ago, and then the ax had been laid to its trunk, and it had fallen into nothingness and had disappeared. He ran to the drift He stood in it, feeling desperately with his feet. There was no stump. But all at once he sensed the roots in the ground, deep within the ground, as one senses the dead under a grave. The roots were still there, rotting as the dead rot.

  The roots tried to reach him, like the hands of the blind, imploring his pity and his help, conscious of his love as they died. He felt their reaching, their bewilderment. Spring was coming. There would be sap in the roots, still, but it would be a sap stifled and blocked. There was nothing in the airy world above to which it could rise. Hour by hour, the roots were dying, baffled, trying to understand how they had been betrayed, and why the hand which had planted them had allowed this thing to be done.

  Frank could feel his own blood seeping down to the roots, mingling with them. He felt their blind call. Without knowing what he was doing, he knelt in the snow and frantically threw it aside. His gloved hands plowed deeper and deeper; he heard a loud rustling in his ears, and did not know it was his breath.

  His hands struck black hard earth. He felt over it. There was nothing. But he pressed the wet gloved palms of his hands strongly on its roughness. Something pulsed under them. Like a failing heart. He felt the life of the roots, their young strongness. And then, as if they acknowledged him with a last expiring sigh, their pulsing dwindled, was gone.

  He got slowly to his feet, and looked down at the grave of his tree. His sorrow was an unbearable sickness in him. And then rage came, wild and terrible. Why had this tree been done to death? Who had dared do this to a being so beautiful and so living? Man was an evil, dirty creature, an animal, an obscenity. Without compunction, without thought, he could destroy a harmless and lovely thing, and not care. Frank saw his tree carted away, thrown upon some rubbish heap. Perhaps its leaves had been bright with autumn when this was done. He saw those leaves, fading slowly, drooping, falling. Why hadn’t he known?

  Somewhere there was a rough noise as a door opened. A man’s hoarse voice shouted out, “What the hell you think you’re doin’ out there?”

  Frank, trembling and weak, turned to see the huge bulk of a man plowing towards him in the snow. The moon came out again, and he saw under a bald dome a great and bristling face, the face of an uncouth laborer. The man approached him, half crouching, an ape which had ravished a nymph. The moonlight was so vivid that Frank could see the beetling eyes, glittering savagely and with suspicion.

  He said, in a faint choked voice: “Where is my tree? The tree I planted?”

  The man stopped abruptly and stared. He looked at the narrow black hole in the snow; he looked back to Frank. “You crazy?” he rumbled. “You mean that tree that stood there? I cut it down so the kids could have a baseball diamond, that’s why. What you mean, comin’ here?”

  Frank did not know that he had clenched his wet fists; he did not know that he had taken a step towards this dread horror, this personification of a world he now hated. He saw that the ape was retreating, slowly, warily. He followed it. He said very softly: “I planted that tree. I watched it grow. It was mine. You’ve killed it.”

  “You crazy,” said the ape, finally stopping in its backward retreat. “You lived here, ’fore we came? Well, what of it? The kids wanted to play baseball, so I cut the damn thing down. Who the hell cares, you crazy son of a bit
ch? Get out o’ here, or I’ll call the cops.”

  He raised his voice to a shout, not daring to look away from Frank, whose face he saw clearly in the moonlight: “Grace, call the cops! Got a crazy bastard out here! Tryin’ to break in the house!”

  A coarse female shriek sounded from the house. Frank was not aware of moving, but automatically his arm shot out from his shoulder, the clenched fist like a wet stone at the end of it. He felt it strike flesh and bone, and he heard a meaty and crunching sound. He saw the ape fall backward into the snow, arms and legs flailing. Still without full consciousness, he kicked the creature in the side several times. Then he ran, stumbling in the deep drifts.

  CHAPTER 42

  He sat again in the West Utica streetcar, huddled in his seat. Again he was the sole passenger in that heaving and rocking vehicle whose windows were thick with frost-ferns. He sat, almost crouched, like a man in pain, hands thrust deep in his pockets, collar up about his ears, hat pulled down. He listened to, and felt, the crunching and grinding of the wheels; he swayed back and forth, and from side to side. The clattering noise, flat and raucous, echoed in his flesh. One of his fists ached; he knew the hand to be bruised. He moved his hand in the glove, and was pleased by the smarting of the scraped skin.

  He looked about him dully. Everything was without perspective, like a photograph. He sensed the walls of the car, the coated windows, the flickering light on the ceiling. He saw them, but they were flattened and meaningless. Somewhere, far off in space, there was a pain, a pain like nausea. He did not think of the tree. The tree was gone; it was no longer part of him. He knew only his hatred.

  The car swayed, and his body swayed with it; he was thrown back against the seat. The pain quickened and throbbed. He saw the motorman at the controls; the man was whistling through his teeth, jangling his bell ferociously. He hated the motorman. He hated the broad squat shoulders, the red ears, the silly uniform cap, the way his hand tugged at the bell-rope. He was an animal, like all the rest of them, a forked animal in old blue serge, a monstrosity, a meaninglessness.