“Aw, I could have told you it was something like that,” Phil scoffed, but his tone showed how serious and disappointed he was.
“Children, children,” Mrs. Loney cried, but the simplicity of their belief had upset her. She began to wail, “Oh, you’re so young. You don’t know what I’ve had to endure. It’s terrible to have had to put up with the things I’ve put up with in my life.”
She knew by their silence and staring eyes that they would be unyielding in their resentment if she should try and make them feel her bitterness, yet she did not know why she wanted their sympathy, why she wanted them to feel close to her; and, with nothing to do but sit there and feel separated while they stared at her, she began to feel helpless.
Joseph Loney’s sister, whom Mary had phoned, came in and sat down and sighed and tried to smile pleasantly. Joseph’s sister, who looked like him and was as thin, was usually comforting but today her patient, understanding smile irritated Mary, who remembered suddenly that this woman had sobered Joseph up on the nights years ago when he came courting her.
“I know you’re not worried at all,” Mary blurted out. “But that’s because from the beginning you never expected anything better of him. It’s different with me. Year after year I’ve never stopped hoping.”
“Did you hear from him?”
“Not a word since he went out with Jimmie Leonard.”
“That Jimmie Leonard is a no-account man if ever there was one. I wouldn’t worry if something put a blight on his life.”
“But Joseph staying out all night when I was sure he was straightening up. Why, I let myself feel so hopeful for the first time in years. I was feeling contented. I was a fool.”
Trying to smile soothingly, the sister said, “Joseph was picked up last night and taken to the station. He phoned me and asked me to break it to you. He’s on his way home.”
“Oh, my Lord!” Mary Loney wailed. “What will I do? Wait till I set eyes on him. A night in jail at this time in life! And me wasting my life trying to make him decent.”
“Don’t be too sure you’ve made his life any too easy for him,” the sister-in-law shouted angrily. “If you weren’t dogging him for one thing it was another till he had to turn to something to feel he was alive.”
“Have you no shame, woman, to be talking before these children?”
“Why don’t you send them home?”
The children were standing stiffly against the wall, and when Mrs. Loney looked at their white, frightened faces she saw they were staring at her resentfully. “Go home, children,” she cried angrily. “You should have gone home long ago.”
“I’ll be the first to go,” the sister-in-law said, and held her head high and walked out.
One by one with lowered heads, the children backed toward the door, keeping their eyes on Mrs. Loney as though sure she would jump at them. But they did not go far. Mrs. Loney, sitting at the window, saw them standing outside and she could hear their chatter. Their excitement made her frantic, but then she heard them shout. They came leaping down the steps, pushing open the door and shouting, “Here he comes, Mrs. Loney. Hurray, hurray, hurray! Here he comes,” and then they rushed out again to welcome him.
Through the window she could see him coming down the street, his head lowered and body bent so he wouldn’t have to look in the neighbors’ windows, stooped and shuffling in his familiar, beaten way, and it was like watching years of her married life flow by, and the happiness and security of the last few months became like something held out to tease her.
The children were still shouting, “Hurray, hurray!” Then they came through the door. “Here he comes, Mrs. Loney.” She saw them grabbing his arms and hanging on to his coat, and then when they were at the door they pushed him into the room.
Her body rigid with anger, she tried to make him look directly into her eyes, but he succeeded in sitting down without appearing to see her. While the children gathered around him, he let his head droop, clenched his hands between his knees and waited.
His shame and silence were almost too terrible for the children to bear, and in bewilderment they looked at Mrs. Loney, unable to understand why she showed no gladness when she had worried and waited so long.
Then Joseph looked up and sighed, and spoke in a way he had not spoken for years. “I’m sorry, Mary,” he said. “I didn’t want it to happen again like this. I’m very sorry.”
When Mary only shook her head bitterly, he shrugged and in shy apology smiled into the faces of the children. As Mary saw their faces light up with gladness and sympathy, the injustice of their childish disregard of her filled her with resentment.
Joseph got up slowly and went into the kitchen and came back with the fiddle, still moving in the same slow way, and sat down and twanged the strings with his thumb. Too bewildered and indignant to know what to say, she could only watch him.
He started to play one of the old songs. He broke off, took the fiddle from under his chin and seemed to look at it in disappointment. Then he started to play another song and tried two or three more old songs of his youth, and as each failed, he seemed puzzled. Mary, clenching her fists, shouted, “So that’s all there is to it, eh? It’s just going to be like that, eh, and you’re going to sit there and have nothing to say? I’ll show you.” She rushed at her husband, grabbed the fiddle out of his hands and tossed it across the room. As the fiddle fell they heard one of the strings snap. The fiddle lay upside down near the little table with the flowerpot on it.
The children, with horror and fear of Mrs. Loney in their faces, began to edge to the door. Phil was the first to dart out to the street, and Margot, pulling her little brother after her, followed, and Sally bumped into Margot going up the steps. Frightened, Mrs. Loney whispered to her husband, “Joseph — the children.”
But when he did nothing but smile at her in the puzzled, wondering way, she cried out helplessly, “Children, children,” and rushed out after them, urgent and eager as she stood on the street crying out, “Come back, children, come back.”
The children, who had retreated along the sidewalk, only backed away a little farther when they heard her calling. Realizing they would not return even if she ran along the street after them, she rushed through the door and pleaded desperately, “Joseph, oh, Joseph, do something! Don’t let them go like that.”
Joseph, picking up his fiddle, looked at his wife’s frightened, pleading face and said, “What’ll I do?”
“Call them, call them. They won’t come back for me,” she said.
Joseph hurried out and she heard him calling, “Hey, kids, hey, kids.” She saw him take a few steps after them, holding his fiddle over his head, and she waited, looking out into the street, feeling old and frightened.
Then Joseph came in and sat down at the end of the long table and began to play a fiery tune on his fiddle with the broken string. He smiled and nodded to his wife, who still watched out the open door.
“They’ll come,” Joseph said confidently, as he went on scraping with his bow. She nodded humbly, and as the solemn faces of the children came closer a fearful eagerness kept growing in her.
MOTHER’S DAY AT THE BALLPARK
Willie McCaffery, the burly International League umpire, had a splendid contempt for the crowd. No one had ever heard him say a good word about fans in a ballpark. Not only were they abusive and heartless, he had decided long ago, but they had no sense of natural justice. They were incapable of appreciating that beautiful coordination of mind and eye that went into one of his decisions. They were always resentful of his integrity. On and off the ball field he avoided people, but he didn’t feel lonely. He was proud of his work.
Around the circuit regular fans who hated his imperturbable aloofness would try and ride him, and he would show his contempt in the way he stood on the baseline, his massive blue-clad body motionless, his big arms folded, his shoulders hunched up, his cap pulled down over his eyes. Some fans believed that he was deaf, for when they tried kidding him before a ga
me, with a laughing sweet friendliness, he wouldn’t turn and smile. He despised their loud friendship as much as he did their insults, and the crowd knew it, and when he went swooping after a runner, crouched, shot out his fist, and yelled, “Y’rrre out!” the fist remained held out like a quivering spine, quivering with the crowd’s angry roar, and they hated it. But they couldn’t reach him with their insults. He had trained himself so thoroughly that words hurled at him had no meaning. They were just sounds.
One Saturday afternoon he was working the second game of a doubleheader between Buffalo and Toronto in the Toronto ballpark. Willie was having a difficult day. He was not himself. Last night he got a wire from his only brother, out on the coast, asking for money for an operation on his sick wife. Willie had wired some money, and then had felt conscience-stricken: he hadn’t wired enough. On the train he had not slept. During the first game of the doubleheader he felt restless and impatient, then the sun got hotter; the second game dragged on, the fielding ragged and the home team unable to do anything right, and Willie was disgusted.
In the sixth inning, the home team, three runs down, filled the bases with one out; then Watkins hit sharply to the left of second. It could have been a single, but the Buffalo shortstop made a fantastic stop, half spinning, and threw to second, where the second baseman, pivoting beautifully, got the ball over to first. Willie jerked up his fist and cried, “Y’rrre out!”
Henley, the Toronto manager, jumped out of the dugout, but Willie met his eyes and Henley backed away. Willie had the respect of every manager in the league and knew it.
Sauntering over to the grass behind the first base line, Willie took out his handkerchief and mopped his forehead. “Hey, McCaffery, you swine . . .” He not only heard the voice, he heard the words and found himself repeating them, and was so astonished that he tried to figure out why. It was a foghorn voice, coming from the rail behind first. Any other day he would have heard that voice but he wouldn’t have dwelt on the words; it would have been just another insulting snarl having no meaning for him. But today he wasn’t himself, his mind wandering from the game. Hunching up his big shoulders, he kicked at the grass and tried to conceal from himself that the voice had reached him.
Loafing near the foul line at the end of the seventh inning, he heard the voice again. “Hey McCaffery, you’re blind as a bat. Where’s your white cane?” He stooped and picked up a blade of grass, planted himself solidly on his feet and reflected, worried, for this one foghorn voice was breaking through his years of impenetrable aloofness; and when Smiley, the first batter up, hit into left and tried to stretch it into a double, Willie, calling him out, half turned to listen. “You bow-legged blind man!” the big voice jeered. As Willie moved into position behind first, it came again. “McCaffery! You got big bucks on this game. I know your bookie. He told me.”
Willie was disgusted with himself, but the more he tried to concentrate on not listening, the more he became aware of the voice, and it shook him. He had a furtive curiosity about the owner of that voice. When he was stationed with folded arms near first and he heard, “You think your ass is a star,” he turned in spite of himself, looked at the first row of seats behind the rail and picked out a balding, thin, middle-aged man with a bow tie. As soon as he had turned he realized how he was cheapening himself. He jerked his head away. The regular fans, who had never seen him take the slightest interest in them, howled with delight. The man with the bow tie roared out more insults.
Willie tried to tell himself he had looked up over the stands to see if a bank of clouds would soon hide the sun and throw a shadow over the hot infield, but he hated himself. It was all the fault of the ragged, endless game and the heat and his lack of sleep. He tried to show his contempt for the crowd with an even greater arrogance of style. He kept moving around. He stomped his foot and punched the air, calling, “You, out!” He felt sure he had become himself again. The insulting voice seemed to recede.
In the last of the ninth, the home team rallied and scored two runs; and with Spencer, the heavyset catcher on first with the tieing run, Ingoldsby came in to pinch-hit. He rapped one between first and second. The second baseman got his glove on it, tossed it to the shortstop, who had no trouble tagging the slow-moving Spencer, and Willie called him out, and the game was over. Removing his cap he sighed and came walking off the diamond.
At the rail the fat, pink-cheeked heckler stood up scowling. He felt big and important — he had provoked Willie. Passing only a few feet away from him Willie didn’t look up. As if he felt slighted, the fat man, leaning over the rail, said so quietly and intimately that none of the other fans heard him, “McCaffery, me and your mother know you’re a lousy son of a bitch . . .”
Willie felt himself go blind and his muscles quiver. Running at the rail he didn’t know what he was doing. He swung himself over the rail. He lurched among the fans who blocked the aisle, gaping at him. He charged toward his tormentor who was wiping his pink forehead . . .
Dropping his handkerchief, the fat man put up his pudgy fists and with his short, heavy arms, he tried to flail at Willie, who punched him on the nose. Someone jumped at Willie and tried to drag him off. Soon two policemen had Willie by the arms. Fans who had come leaping over the seats tried to jostle Willie. A small boy gave him a poke at the back of his neck.
The fat man, also restrained by a cop, held his nose and cursed loudly and begged everybody to let him at Willie.
Willie suddenly became aware of the cops’ uniforms and, his mind cleared, he realized that he had gone into the stands and had assaulted a fan. In a panic, he kept shaking his head in desperate protest. Not only had he lost his self-respect, he would lose his job, for coming toward them in a rush through the crowd was Collins, the home team’s tall, weary-faced business manager, who yelled, “Out of the way! What is this?”
Faces came crowding closer to Willie and he felt very lonely. In his rage and remorse and fear he stared at these faces, and for the first time he felt he had to justify himself to a crowd, and he cried out blindly, “He’s not going to insult my mother, he’s not going to call my mother that . . .”
A big fellow, who looked like a truck driver, turned to the little man beside him. “What did the guy say about McCaffery’s mother?”
“I don’t know.”
The angry business manager was now standing beside Willie and the two cops. “What’s the cause of this?” Collins shouted. “What are you trying to do, McCaffery?” He waited but Willie, breathing hard, only shook his head.
“The guy was riding McCaffery about his mother,” one of the cops said.
“Yeah, the guy insulted his mother and McCaffery took a poke at him,” said the other cop.
“I see,” said Collins, baffled and embarrassed. Suddenly he swung around on the man with the bow tie on, then he turned impatiently to the cops. “I know this guy. He’s in here on a pass anyway. Take him out and I’ll see he doesn’t get back in.”
While the two cops were walking the fat man away Willie waited for the crowd to jeer at him, but nobody said anything; and, as he looked around, he felt bewildered, for he saw a kind of apologetic sympathy in their faces.
“Come on, McCaffery, I’ll walk you to the dressing room,” Collins said and, when they fell in step, he added, “You don’t have to worry about this at all. Not with your record. As far as I’m concerned, nothing will be said about it.”
“Thanks,” Willie said. Still trembling and all mixed up, he tried to recall what he had cried out to the crowd that had made them feel he had so much in common with them. He kept going over it, but he couldn’t remember.
JUST LIKE HER MOTHER
Uncle Alec was a short solid man with a smooth unsmiling face. His clothes always looked too tight on him because, as his wife Marge said, he had a tendency to obesity. Yet in spite of his clumsy body and awkward gait he had an impressive quiet dignity. He and his wife lived in a flat over his small book and gift shop. He was not a good businessman. He was too indep
endent and stubborn, and he had an annoying way of shrugging when a customer disregarded his advice on a book. He sold records but showed real interest only in the customers who liked the classical composers, especially Mozart and Bach.
When Georgie Miller’s father died, it was Uncle Alec who offered to look after her. She was sixteen. Her beautiful young mother came up from Toronto, where she worked in television, and made the arrangements. She promised to send fifty dollars a month for Georgie’s board, and then she returned to Toronto and Georgie moved in with Uncle Alec and Aunt Marge.
At first she found it hard to feel at home at her uncle’s place. She knew she could never grow to love a sedate, methodical woman like Aunt Marge.
At the end of the month, when a letter came from her mother and no mention was made of the board money, Aunt Marge made a caustic comment, but Uncle Alec didn’t complain. Georgie was his brother’s child, he said, and he was going to look after her anyway. She wanted, then, to help him in the store. And she was of real help because the customers who bought pop records liked her to wait on them and she learned to talk their language. Soon the little cubicle where they kept the record player became her department.
Uncle Alec would sit at his big corner desk by the cash register and watch her and he would rub the side of his face slowly and meditate. Once, he said, “You’re a bright intelligent girl, Georgie,” and another time he said, “A girl like you with a little spark of something, well, she should have some distinction. There shouldn’t be anything cheap and common about her. No, that’s right.” He seemed to be debating with himself, mulling over some plan and gradually finding pleasure in it.
He began to spend his spare time talking to her about books and when they weren’t busy in the shop he played classical records and talked about the composers. If she offered an intelligent perception, his face would soften and his eyes shine. He took her to concerts with him. At home, even when they were having dinner, he would recite the poetry of Keats and Shelley and have her repeat it, and then explain that the wisdom of the race was in the language and when good poems were learned by heart a girl could possess that wisdom.
The Complete Stories of Morley Callaghan Page 11
