The Complete Stories of Morley Callaghan

by Callaghan, Morley; Atwood, Margaret;

  While the light suddenly changed in the courtroom as if it were clouding up outside, and the judge cleared his throat angrily and raised his gavel, his face stern, Harry lowered his arm, looking stricken. Swiftly and intelligently he saw his real mistake. His mistake was in the beginning when the police were questioning Scotty, and him too; why didn’t I protect myself by denouncing Scotty? I should have been Scotty’s accuser. I, as well as the bank, was the victim of his deceit; the police should have had my story. Long before the trial they would have had him face Scotty; as an accuser. Even Ouimet, who was an honorable man, mightn’t have tried to pillory him, and Henderson would have been speaking for him as well as for the bank and for justice.

  “Order, order,” the judge shouted. “I won’t have this in my court. You’ll be ejected.” But Harry, his mouth trembling, hurried toward the door, and the policeman opening it for him watched him go along the corridor where the wet blotches and muddy footprints had all dried, and he saw him stop and wipe his forehead, his hand trembling.

  ✧ II ✧

  When the courtroom door opened two hours later, three St. Catherine Street businessmen, coming out slowly and putting on their coats, blocked the door. Then Mollie came around them hurrying to get ahead of the others. Her beaver coat swung back like a sail and her open goloshes flop-flopped with each long angry stride. She was a very proud woman and she was pale and sick with humiliation because everybody knew she was Harry Lane’s girl. She had known him since she was seventeen, although only in the last year had they felt sure they belonged to each other. In the old days he hadn’t liked her. Those were the days when her father had spent ten thousand on her coming out at the St. Andrew’s Ball. Harry had teased her about her father being the greatest authority on indecent literature in the city, because the judge used to make speeches on the need of strong censorship, and he also used to tease her about her mother being a born convener of committees, jockeying for social position. In those days they had been very rude to each other.

  But when he came back from the war he found her working at the Sun, where she had started on the women’s page doing society notes, until they found she had a gift for gay malice and gave her a column, and she had left home for her own apartment on Bishop, and she seemed like another girl. She could sit with him in the Ritz Bar or in a little joint like Jimmie Aldo’s and have her lovely easy laughing tolerance of stockbrokers or old fighters while newspapermen said, “I get a kick out of her. She gives the job a little class, always dressed for high tea.”

  The flopping of her open goloshes irritated her and she had to stop and bend down to zip them up, but the sound of footsteps behind her coming closer flustered her and she got up and hurried on. She couldn’t bear to hear them talking about Harry, running from her own secret conviction that Harry had the kind of nature that could easily have influenced Scotty, and she tried to hide from this conviction by scolding away at him bitterly in her mind for his jokes about her own sense of prudence. She had a sneaking respect for the way he saw through her, but not now. The secret solid steady side of her nature was scandalized and angry; yet, with all her heart she wanted to hurry to him.

  When she looked around at the end of the corridor and he wasn’t there, she was glad. But then, it wasn’t like him to have waited. Outside, the street lights were coming on, the sidewalks were still wet and the air was damp and heavy. It looked like rain. She got a taxi and told the driver to go to the Ritz and she lay back and closed her eyes, thinking, “This could ruin everything for me.”

  At the Ritz she hurried downstairs to the bar and there he was sitting alone with his Manhattan. It was too early for the cocktail crowd. Both his elbows were on the bar and his chin was cupped in his hands, and she had never seen him look so dejected. Then he turned. “Mollie, what did they do?”

  “Gave him four months,” she said grimly.

  “I’ve been framed, Mollie,” he whispered fiercely and he kept clenching and unclenching his fist. His lips were white and the crazy anger in his eyes frightened her. “I’ve been ruthlessly framed.”

  “Why did you let them do it?” she blurted out.

  “I was on the hook. You saw I was on the hook.”

  “You could have got right off the hook by telling about those shares Scotty wanted for himself.”

  “Could I? I stood up there when Ouimet was talking. Even then — well, it was too late. It would look as if I had made a deal with Scotty. All he had to do was keep quiet and who’d believe it wasn’t a cooked-up deal, a conspiracy, worse than ever for me. Come on,” he said, as two strangers came in and sat at the bar. “I’ll take you home. People are watching us.”

  “A fine time to care about anybody watching us,” she said, as he took her arm and led her out up to the street. From the hotel to the first corner they were silent and he seemed to think she was sharing his anger; then at the curb he stepped out into six inches of water and slush and as it came up over his ankle he cursed. “I left my goloshes back there in the courtroom.”

  “Harry, you left more than your goloshes back there.”

  “Cut it out,” he said savagely, but when he had gone on only twenty paces he muttered to himself, “I still can’t believe it. For the guy to sit there looking so ashamed. He was hoping for a suspended sentence or what he got, instead of five or seven years he knew he deserved, and he let me be crucified.” Then he blurted out, “The cowardly bastard.”

  “Harry, from the beginning you were careless.”

  “How was I careless?”

  “I wondered at the time why you didn’t do a little more investigating.”

  “Whoever heard of a man investigating a bank manager who wanted to make him a loan?” he asked angrily. “Am I stupid?”

  “Nobody thinks you’re stupid.”

  “Everything I said was absolutely true.”

  “The truth. Don’t you know you can’t tell only part of the truth? The thing ends up as a lie. Right at the beginning why didn’t you add it up for the judge?”

  “At the beginning I was sorry for Scotty. Don’t you understand? I was sure he’d go on the stand. An old beat-up friend. Didn’t I practically give him a character certificate? I was sure of him. I don’t know, his wife was sitting there.”

  “I was there, too, Harry. Am I not supposed to have any shame?” she asked fiercely. “Why didn’t you say to hell with Scotty when he was first arrested?”

  “But if Scotty had gone on the stand . . . Look, please stop trying to explain it to me.” They kept quiet while they turned down Bishop to her place, an old stone house a half block below Sherbrooke. “It’s your optimistic nature, Harry,” she said. “It’s good and generous, but sometimes I think it blinds you and everybody else, and then it does bad things for everybody.”

  Following two steps behind her up the stairs he watched the little sway of her hips as he had always done, in spite of his anger, waiting for her to turn and put out her hand as she used to do, and then when her face came into the light on the landing by her door and she fumbled with her key in the lock he saw how thoughtful she was and he felt a sense of dread. Tossing her coat on a chair she went into the kitchen to get him a drink, and as he folded his coat slowly over the same chair a trace of her perfume seemed to be all around him; he could still smell her hair.

  The room, done in white with yellow curtains and a black mantel, was spotlessly clean. Everything in the room seemed to join with her to ask him why he hadn’t been shrewd and prudent enough to foresee that his compassion for Scotty could only lead to a humiliation. His wet shoes squeaked; his right foot felt icy cold.

  “For heaven’s sake, Harry,” she said, coming from the kitchen with the bottle and glasses. “Why don’t you take off those shoes? I suppose it’ll help a lot if you get pneumonia.”

  “I’ll keep moving around,” he said, and then he turned, stricken. “A man shouldn’t go against his own nature, Mollie. That’s when he gets hit on the head. It’s my nature to be absolutely can
did. I’ve never had to conceal stuff. The trouble was, it wasn’t my nature to kick Scotty any deeper in the gutter than he was. I couldn’t. Do you see?” But her back was to him as she poured a rye on ice. “Well, to faithful old Scotty,” he said, taking the glass from her.

  “No, to Scotty’s faithful friend.”

  “Oh, cut it out.”

  “That’s right,” she said wearily. “Just have a drink.” As she sat down on the chesterfield and lay back with her eyes closed, sighing, her dress tightened across her breasts. He watched her face and it was beautiful. She had very clear soft skin with a little mole high on her left cheek. He had always liked that little mole. It was a clean well-cut face with a good jaw and chin, but with her eyes closed, and without the laughter that came in them, there was a grimness to her face, and he wondered why he had never noticed it before. Then her full red mouth quivered.

  “These easy associations,” she said wearily. “This fast money. This sticking together. Harry, why should you ever have got involved with Scotty Bowman?”

  “Well, he was around. We’re people around. We bump against each other. We get to like each other. People.”

  “People, people. Too many people. It’s your business, Harry. All this comes from the rootless kind of life we lead. I do my bright little column and sit around being gay with the boys, and I feel grand, feel I’m not a nobody if some alderman waves at me. I’m twenty-seven, Harry, do you think I want to go on being one of those women no one ever really expects a man to live with, and if she has a husband he irons his own shirts so she can do her work?”

  “Well?”

  “This can ruin you. How long do you think it’s going to take you to live this down?”

  “You don’t have to live down the truth. What’s all this about?”

  “It’s about you and me,” she said fiercely.

  “It’s Scotty who’s going to jail. Not me. They tried to throw some mud on me. Well, I can stand it. Why talk like this to me now?”

  “I feel like it now.” But she was going to cry and she hated her tears. “A crooked deal, and it looks as if you’d taken advantage of a bank manager and left him in jail. I know what people are like about money. I know what this looks like to respectable people.”

  “How things look, the appearance of things,” he said impatiently. “That’s you. Never look under the covers. It’s indecent. For heaven’s sake, I thought you had left home.” He walked over to the window. It had started to rain. The bare branches of the tree in front of the house were shining in the reflected light from the street lamp. A girl went running down the street holding a newspaper over her head and somewhere a monastery bell was chiming. But he wasn’t watching or listening. His head had jerked back, his lips curled a little, then he suddenly rubbed vigorously at the clouded pane.

  “What’s out there?” she asked impatiently.

  “Nothing. It’s raining. That’s all.”

  “Then what’s on your mind?”

  “I don’t know. Two weeks ago they were praying for snow in the Laurentians for the skiing. It looked as if the lodges and everybody connected with them were going to be ruined. Then it snowed heavily, didn’t it? And they rang the church bells and gave thanks. Now it may rain for a week.”

  “Harry, what were you thinking?”

  “Well,” he said, turning to her. “Maybe I was thinking of your people and what they will say.”

  “I know you never liked them,” she said, standing up, “but since you brought them into it I know exactly what my father will say. You won’t get sore?”

  “No, go on.”

  “Were you afraid, in the beginning — with the police — of mentioning these shares Scotty asked for, afraid it would look like a deal?” and the pain in her eyes told him she had been trying to hide the doubt in her own mind.

  “And you think I was only trying to protect myself? Look, Mollie,” and he was hesitant, almost shy. “About the whole thing beginning with Scotty . . .”

  “Oh, Harry,” she said bitterly. “What does it matter how it began. Who’s going to listen now?”

  “I see,” and he half smiled, wanting to say, “but you, yourself, you don’t quite believe me.” He didn’t say it. Putting his hands in his pockets he walked around the room feeling like a stranger; then he turned, white-faced. “You forgot something. Scotty once had a lot of integrity, and right now he’s so ashamed he knows he could never come out and face me. Don’t worry. I’ll hear from him.”

  “Harry,” she said, but the real pity in her eyes hurt his pride painfully and then she came over to him and, half ashamed of her need and the sympathy it made her feel, she tried to put her arms around him and it seemed to belittle him more than anything said in the courtroom. “No,” he said fiercely. Jerking away, he slapped her on the face.

  Her hand went up slowly to her cheek, rage in her eyes, for never in her life had she been hit, and then her quivering face shamed him.

  “Mollie, I’m sorry. I don’t know why . . .”

  “Well, I know why,” she said breathing hard.

  “No, you don’t, you don’t at all.”

  “Well, you figure it out, Harry.”

  “I do.”

  But he couldn’t hold on to his anger. Her wrong understanding of him, in their love, filled him with terrible sadness; he felt stricken; he had to hide his desolation, and he quickly picked up his coat and hat and hurried out.

  ✧ III ✧

  He lived in a neatly remodeled old house just two blocks west of the Ritz on Sherbrooke and across the road were the big apartment houses screening the mountain. He had always liked coming up the streets on the lower slope and seeing the shadows of the trees against the night sky and below, the pattern of street lights. In the old days his family home had been on Clarke Street on the west of the mountain, but one winter in his second year at college when his mother had been in Florida he had roomed with a fellow just a few doors west of where he now lived. On summer nights when all the trees were in bloom and the old stone mansions gleamed with light, he used to think that this one fine street in the city was as fine as any street in Paris or London.

  His apartment was on the ground floor, a big high-ceilinged room that had once been a drawing room, and a bedroom and a small kitchen. The big room was done in gray with coral drapes and yellow chairs, and on the mantel was a picture of Mollie and one of his mother who had died of cancer a year ago. In this picture, taken only five years ago, she still had some of her beauty, and it showed in her fine eyes. She was a Quebec Catholic whose marriage to a Protestant hadn’t affected her happiness at all, although at the end she had worried about Harry never going to church as she had worried too about him being killed in battle or dying in a hospital without the last rites of the church, and for her sake he had worn a religious medal around his neck so that he could be identified and prayed for, if he lay dying among strangers.

  When he came in, and before he turned on the light, he saw the chair by the window, just touched faintly by the street light, and he seemed to see Scotty sitting there as he sat that night with the snow on the toes of his old-fashioned rubbers. That I should be such an open book to any man, he thought bitterly. Sitting there in the chair, Scotty had counted on being able to touch his heart, just as he had also counted on getting the shares from him. His face burning with humiliation he suddenly wondered why his heart hadn’t been as open to Mollie as it had been to Scotty, for she had his love.

  Then he felt all mixed up about himself and a little wild and betrayed by both of them. He hurled his hat and coat at the chair. “You ruthless disloyal bastard,” he said. “Well, I know something about you too. Your Calvinistic soul will be tormented. Soon you’ll know you can’t come out and face me.”

  Switching on the light he sat down, breathing heavily, and listened. From the street came the sound of car wheels licking loudly through pools of water, then a young woman’s voice talking baby talk to a little dog on its night walk with her. The
front door opened. The old painter and his wife came in and went upstairs. These familiar sounds made him feel lonely, then his head began to sweat and burn and he jumped up and paced around the room.

  But the fact is, he thought, jerking open his collar, the fact is nobody now can know the truth but me and Scotty, and the walls of the room seemed to come against him. Then he thought he would call Ouimet, then he thought he would call the newspapers, then enraged and helpless he said, “To hell with it, that little Judas can’t cheapen me.”

  His mahogany desk in the far corner of the room caught his eye and something he saw there began to bother him. Frowning, he walked slowly over to the desk. Opened letters and unpaid bills were scattered on the desk top, all mixed up and pushed aside. Some of them had been there for weeks. He always paid his bills and sooner or later he answered all the letters. But the careless disorder of it worried him and almost furtively he began to straighten out the papers, separating the letters from the bills and putting them in neat piles, which he put in different drawers, getting it done before anybody could come in and get the impression that he was careless in these simple business matters. Then he looked down at his wet shoes and slowly wiggled his cold foot. It felt numb and he went into the bedroom and pulled off the shoes and socks and lay on the bed, feeling exhausted, and was soon asleep.