The Complete Stories of Morley Callaghan

by Callaghan, Morley; Atwood, Margaret;

  In the evenings, Uncle Adolphe often took Albert to the houses of friends in the neighborhood. On the way, Albert asked questions about anything that came into his head and got an answer that seemed natural and clear, and made the question seem important. His uncle, full of lively information about everything going on around him, also used to sing while he worked at the bench near the window. Standing in his old khaki-colored smock he pounded away with his hammer, singing at the top of his voice. If people passing on the street turned and gaped, Uncle Adolphe swung his hammer in the air and grinned cheerfully at them.

  Then one day Albert noticed that his uncle was working very fast and watching the clock. “Albert, come here,” he said earnestly. “Are you listening carefully, Albert? I want you to go down to the corner and cross the road and go along to Molsen’s grocery store. Then go in and tell Mr. Molsen you are from your Uncle Adolphe and you have come for Mr. Zimmerman. He’ll be sitting there in the back room. He’s blind, understand, Albert? You take his arm, see? And bring him along here. And be careful. He’s my good friend. You bring him here.”

  “I didn’t know you had a blind friend, Uncle Adolphe,” Albert said, getting his hat.

  “I met him at Molsen’s. He promised to come here and talk to me in the afternoon. He’s a very important man. Be careful, whatever you do, Albert.”

  Albert was very shy going into the grocery store. “My uncle sent me for Mr. Zimmerman,” he said. Pointing to a back room the grocer said, “He’s been waiting. Go on in.” And he called out, “Henry, here’s the boy that Adolphe sent for you.”

  In the back room, a thin old man in a neat black suit sat alone in a rocking chair. His hair was long and white. It stuck out from under the wide-brimmed black hat he had just put on. But it was his calm, thin face which Albert noticed. While Albert was gaping at him Mr. Zimmerman said quietly, “Take my arm, boy.” Mr. Zimmerman seemed to know Albert was standing beside him. It was startling. But then Albert told himself he didn’t need to feel shy, for after all, Mr. Zimmerman couldn’t really see him.

  Albert walked him out to the street. Mr. Zimmerman touched Albert’s arm very lightly. As they went down the street Albert grew fascinated by the ease and assurance with which Mr. Zimmerman strode along. Once he even said, “Faster, please.” Albert wondered if he would notice if he withdrew his arm and let him walk on alone, and he did this, and Mr. Zimmerman kept on going, but then he suddenly stopped, waving his cane fiercely. “Where are you? Are you playing a trick on me?” he snapped. Outraged, he looked as if he were going to strike at Albert.

  “I’m here,” Albert said.

  “Then you mind what you’re doing, and no tricks,” Mr. Zimmerman warned him.

  They said nothing the rest of the way, and Albert was glad when they got to the shoemaker’s shop and he saw his uncle through the window. He was so glad that he ducked away from Mr. Zimmerman as soon as he opened the door.

  “Careful, careful, use your head, Albert,” his uncle called sharply, for Mr. Zimmerman was groping around with his stick.

  “No fuss, no fuss, please,” Mr. Zimmerman protested, irritably. “I’m all right.”

  “It’s just that Albert —”

  “Albert’s all right,” Mr. Zimmerman said impatiently, as he sat down, “only tell him next time he’s not to play games with me and let me go along by myself.”

  “Why, I’m ashamed. Is that so, Albert?” Uncle Adolphe said. He was so apologetic as he fussed around Mr. Zimmerman that Albert couldn’t believe he was looking at his own uncle. He began to feel truly ashamed of himself, as if he had insulted a very great man. He got out of the way, working at little jobs around the shop, and listened furtively while his uncle and Mr. Zimmerman talked.

  He couldn’t make much out of the conversation. With both hands resting on the head of his stick, Mr. Zimmerman was talking like a man making a speech. He talked about China and Russia, and the march of history and the future of the people of America. The big-sounding, lofty phrases meant nothing to Albert, except that sometimes they sounded mocking, and sometimes eager or triumphant and seemed to fill Uncle Adolphe with restless excitement. He asked questions, and when he got the answer he scratched his head and looked puzzled. Albert noticed that Mr. Zimmerman never asked his uncle a question about anything, and it offended Albert. In a couple of hours, Uncle Adolphe took Mr. Zimmerman home and left Albert minding the shop.

  Then one afternoon Uncle Adolphe said, “Now listen, Albert. I want you to go and get Mr. Zimmerman. This time put your mind on it, see? If you embarrass him again I won’t like it and I’ll certainly give you a smack, see?”

  Hesitating, Albert asked, “Uncle Adolphe, why do you like the blind man?”

  “Ah, he’s a great scholar. You should have heard him last night.”

  “I’ll bet he doesn’t know half as much as you do.”

  “Me?” he said. “Why, I don’t know anything. I’m just a poor, ignorant shoemaker. But if I listen to him then maybe I’ll get to learn how to see things. Now go along, Albert.”

  Albert went down the street slowly, dreading the walk with Mr. Zimmerman. At Molsen’s, he hung back. Four men from the neighborhood were there, listening reverently to the blind man. When Albert stuck his head into the room he expected Mr. Zimmerman to know he was there and stare at him suspiciously.

  Letting Mr. Zimmerman take his arm, they started out. When they had gone only a little piece he found himself staring up at the blind man’s impassive face and wondering, “How does he know so much? Why do they ask him questions? He can’t see the streets, or people’s faces, or anything in the world. You’d think he’d be the one who’d be asking Uncle Adolphe to come and tell him what’s going on all over.”

  “Are you walking along staring at me, boy?” Mr. Zimmerman asked suddenly.

  “I wasn’t,” Albert began, shocked. Then he grew scared. The other day Mr. Zimmerman had known when he was playing a little game. He seemed to have ways of knowing things that were frightening, and it was as if they were walking arm in arm, yet in different worlds.

  “I was wondering how you knew so much?” he said.

  “Does it surprise you?”

  “I was only thinking —”

  “You should be a polite boy and not keep on reminding me that I can’t see,” Mr. Zimmerman said. “So please don’t stare at me.” He made a sucking sound with his lower lip. He seemed to think Albert was trying to humiliate him. They went to the shop in silence, with Albert frightened by the hostility growing between them.

  “It was a nice little trip this time, eh?” Uncle Adolphe asked, hopefully, as they came in.

  “Oh, yes, indeed,” Mr. Zimmerman said. But then he smiled reproachfully. “Just the same, I don’t think the boy likes me. Do you, Albert?”

  Albert shook his head helplessly at his uncle, who was scowling at him.

  “What’s he been doing now?” Uncle Adolphe asked, humiliated again.

  “He keeps staring at me and not saying anything, eh, Albert?” Mr. Zimmerman said, his hand groping for Albert’s arm, a knowing smile on his face.

  “I just don’t know what to say and I couldn’t help it,” Albert protested. His uncle’s face was reddening, exasperated that Albert should always be doing some little thing to embarrass a man like Mr. Zimmerman. He knocked Albert spinning against the counter and scowled at him, daring him to make more fuss. “I guess he’s a stupid boy,” he apologized. “I haven’t been paying much attention to him. I haven’t noticed him much.” Then he swung his arm at Albert. “Go ’way,” he said. “Go on, go on, go on.”

  Albert stayed out of the store till his uncle took Mr. Zimmerman home.

  For the next few days Uncle Adolphe paid no attention to him at all. Albert hung around the bench near the window, waiting for his uncle to be friendly. A couple of times he asked a few timid questions. “Don’t bother me, Albert,” his uncle said. Albert knew his uncle was seeing Mr. Zimmerman in the evenings. He could tell by the way his u
ncle stood with a shoe in his hand, his face all puckered up, worrying and muttering. He never sang any more.

  Then a week later, in the afternoon, Uncle Adolphe said, “Go and get Mr. Zimmerman, Albert. He’s waiting. Now mind, no woolgathering. It’s disgusting that a boy your age can’t walk a block with Mr. Zimmerman without making trouble. Do you hear me?”

  “I hear, Uncle Adolphe.”

  “Then don’t gape at me so stupidly. Go on,” he said.

  When Albert went down to the grocery store he took the blind man’s arm tighter than ever before. Looking straight ahead, thinking only of his uncle’s shop, he guided Mr. Zimmerman along the crowded sidewalk.

  “You don’t need to pull me like that,” Mr. Zimmerman complained. “Just walk, just walk, if you please,” he said. “I don’t want everybody gaping at me.”

  Though he felt helpless and lost, Albert held on to Mr. Zimmerman’s arm.

  By the time they got to the shop Albert was trembling. He opened the door for Mr. Zimmerman, and was so eager to get away that he jerked his arm loose. Lurching to the side, the blind man groped for the door. He missed it and swung around, losing his balance and banged his head against the door jamb. A little blue bruise appeared on his pale high forehead.

  “Oh, you stupid, careless, clumsy boy.” Uncle Adolphe shouted. “Sit here, Mr. Zimmerman. Oh, what can I say? He’s a stupid boy if ever there was one. Please wait. I’ll get a little hot water in the back room.”

  He grabbed Albert by the scruff of the neck, dragging him along. Passing the counter, he snatched a long piece of thick, raw leather. He clamped his big hand over Albert’s mouth when they got to the back room. He raised his arm, his face full of cold disgust and rage, and he pounded Albert. Then he pushed him on the floor and rushed to get a wet towel and hurried back to Mr. Zimmerman.

  Albert lay there trying not to sob, hearing the drone of their voices, remembering how his uncle used to sing and how bright the world had looked to him until he had started listening to the blind man.

  THE SENTIMENTALISTS

  It was at the scarf counter at noontime that Jack Malone, a young law student, saw the yellow scarf on the rack and thought he might give it to his girl for her birthday. His plump friend, Fred Webster, bored with wandering around from counter to counter in the department store, had just said, “Sure she’ll like it. Take it,” when a gray-haired woman in a blue sailor hat came gliding around the corner and bumped into Malone.

  “Excuse me, lady,” he said, but she was in his way, idly toying with the yellow scarf. “Excuse me, madam,” he said firmly. Moving a step away, she said impatiently, “Excuse me,” and went on fussing with the scarves without actually looking at them, and when the salesgirl approached she did not look up. Reddening, the salesgirl retreated quickly, leaving her there peering through the screen of scarves at the silk-stocking counter in the next aisle.

  “Why get sore? She’s the store detective. You got in her way,” Webster said.

  “Why shouldn’t I? I don’t work for her.”

  “She’s checking out someone at the silk-stocking counter,” Webster said, brightening. “Let’s watch.”

  Because they were having a sale, silk stockings were out loose on the counter and sometimes there was a line of women and sometimes the line thinned out.

  “If you were a betting man, who would you say it was?” Webster asked. He knew Malone was proud of his judgment of people and of the experience he got from talking to people of all kinds in the law office and in the police court. “I’ll bet you five bucks,” Webster said. “Go ahead, look over the field.”

  “It’s too easy,” Malone said. All he had to do was watch the detective behind the scarves and follow the direction of her eyes, watching three women at the end of the silk-stocking counter who had been standing there longer than the others. It was hard to get more than a glimpse of their faces, but one was a stout woman with a silver-fox fur and a dark, heavy, aggressive, and arrogant face. She looked very shrewd and competent. Her lips were heavy and greedy. If she were going to steal anything it would probably be something very valuable, and she wouldn’t give it up easily. On the left of her was a lanky schoolgirl with no shape at all, a brainless-looking kid. And there was a young girl in a red felt hat and a fawn-colored loose spring coat.

  All the women at the counter seemed to be sliding stockings over the backs of their hands and holding them up to the light. Getting a little closer, his excitement quickening, Malone tried to see into their faces and into their lives, and the first one he counted out was the girl in the fawn coat: she seemed like someone he had met on a train, or someone he had known all his life without ever knowing her name. In a hundred places they might have seen each other, at summer dances or on the streets where he had played when he was a kid. But while he was watching her and feeling sure of her, the schoolgirl sighed and dropped the stocking she was looking at and walked away.

  “That leaves only the two,” Webster whispered, coming alongside. His plump good-natured face was disturbed, as if he, too, had decided the stout woman was far too sensible-looking to be a store thief, and his estimate of the girl in the fawn coat with the dark hair and the brown eyes was the same as Malone’s. “I was thinking it would be the school kid doing something crazy,” he whispered.

  “So was I.”

  While they stood together, suddenly disturbed, the stout woman made a purchase and walked away. They both turned, watching the bright-colored bank of scarves, and Malone suddenly longed to see the blue sailor hat go gliding behind the scarves, following the stout woman. But the detective was still there, waiting. You could see the motionless rim of her hat.

  “Well, it’s the girl in the fawn coat she’s watching,” Webster said.

  “And what do you think?”

  “I think the detective’s crazy.”

  “Yet she’s the one the woman’s watching.”

  “Listen, I’ll bet you that five bucks old eagle eye hiding over there is absolutely wrong about her.”

  “Not on your life. That’s no bet. That kid’s no thief,” Malone said.

  It wasn’t just that the girl was pretty. But in the slow way she turned her head, swinging the dark hair over her raised collar, in the light of intelligence that shone in her dark eyes when she looked up quickly, and in the warmth that would surely come easily in her face, Malone was reminded that she might be someone like his own sister. Her clothes were not expensive: the fawn coat looked as if it had been worn at least three seasons. But his sister had looked like that the time they were all scrimping and saving to send her to collage. Suddenly, Malone and Webster were joined, betting against the judgment of the store detective. They wanted to root for the girl, root her away from the counter. With a passionate eagerness to see the woman detective frustrated, Malone muttered in her direction, “Lady, you’re picking on the wrong party. Just stick around a while and watch her walk away.”

  But the store detective’s blue sailor hat was moving slowly, coming around, closing in. Yet the girl stood motionless. A stocking was in her hand, or her hand was on the counter, and her absent-minded stillness, her lowered head — it became apparent — were a furtive awareness of the position of the salesgirl. Malone went to speak to Webster, and then he couldn’t: they were both unbelieving and hurt. Yet there still was a chance. It became a desperate necessity that he should be right about the girl. “Go away, kid,” he was begging her. “Why do you stand there looking like that? You’re no thief. You’re a kid. Get moving, why don’t you?” But she bent her head, she hunched up her shoulders a little, and her hand on the counter was drawing a pair of silk stockings into the wide sleeve of her coat. As the store detective came slowly around the end of the scarf counter, Webster said, disgusted, “Just another little store thief.”

  Malone wanted to slap the girl and abuse her. It wasn’t just that she had let him down, she seemed to have betrayed so many things that belonged to the most intimate and warmest part of his life. “
Let her arrest her, what do we care?” he said as the store detective went slowly down the aisle. But in spite of himself he thought he would cry out if he stood there. He got excited. He walked along the aisle alone, taking out his watch as if he had been waiting a long time for someone. When he was opposite the girl he stopped, staring at her back, at the bunch of black curls under the rim of her hat, and he was sick and hesitant and bewildered. “Why, Helen,” he said, reaching out and touching her, “have you been here all this time?” A wide, forced smile was on his face.

  “Smile, please smile,” he whispered, because he could see the store detective watching them. “Come away,” he begged her. “They’re watching you.”

  Before the scared smile came on her face, the silk stockings rolled in a ball in her palm and half up her sleeve were dropped almost naturally on the counter. She made it look like a careless gesture. “Hello,” she said, “I was . . .” then her voice was lost. If he had not moved she would have stood gaping and incredulous, but he was scared for himself now, for he might be arrested as an accomplice, and he linked his arm under hers and started to walk down the aisle to the door.

  They had to pass the store detective, and maybe it was because Malone instinctively tightened his hold on the girl’s arm that he could feel it trembling. But the store detective, frustrated and puzzled, seemed to smile cynically just as they passed; he hated her for being right about the girl.

  When they got outside, they stopped a moment under the big clock. It had been raining out, but there was bright sunlight on the wet pavement and the noonday crowd surged by. In that bright light, as he stood hesitating and the girl’s head was lowered in humiliation, he noticed that there seemed to be a hundred little spots on her light coat, maybe rain marks or dust and rain. His heart was pounding, but now that he had got her safely out of the store, he wanted to get rid of her, and he didn’t want her to offer any of that servile gratitude he got from petty thieves he helped in the police court.

  “Thanks,” she whispered.