The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  Naps and I pestered him with more questions, but he held up his hands and said, “Just let me think a bit. I aint had a chance yet to do enough thinkin.”

  Patiently I waited for him to give his brains a thorough workout, but when after fifteen minutes or so he still had not spoken again, I said, “Dall, I’m going to get her.” I began to step out of the car. “I’m going to just go on in there and grab her and bring her out, if I have to carry her.” To Naps I said, “You start the motor—”

  “Git back in dis car!” Naps hissed. “Here they come! Git in here and hunker down!” I obeyed, and Dall and I remained down below dashboard level, bumping our heads together until I heard Naps switch on the ignition. Then he took his heavy hand off the top of my head and I rose up and peered over the dashboard.

  They were getting into a taxi. “Follow that cab!” I implored.

  “Easy, Nub,” he said, letting the Lincoln drift out after them. “Let’s us just keep cool.”

  We followed them east into Ouachita Street and then north up Central Avenue, past the bathhouses and the hotels and on to the end of the avenue, where they turned to the right, into a road leading up Hot Springs Mountain, and drove on toward the top, slowly, while we followed them, and I sat back to ride and endure. We were steadily mounting the mountain, and there was nothing else for me to do but admire the scenery: the woods full of thick red cedars forming a complimentary background of viridian for the blossoming shrubs and the wild flowers—columbines, sweet Williams and lady-slippers—reminding me it was spring and that I was surrounded by a performance of nature that I could never see in Boston, especially not at this time of year. It was a beautiful sunny day with the sky full of white mountain-like cumuli; I suddenly realized it was Saturday.

  At the top of the mountain their cab stopped at the base of the high, lanky observation tower, and they got out and went into the building beneath it. We pulled up short and sat for a moment deliberating. Were they going to go up in that thing? If Margaret was really depressed and unhappy, was Mrs. Austin stupid enough to risk being able to control her on a platform a hundred feet or more above the ground, or was Mrs. Austin totally unaware of her daughter’s frame of mind? Were we going to just sit here and be witnesses to a spectacular plunge and pulverization?

  Fortunately there were several other sightseers on the premises, and I was able to mingle among them, less conspicuous than Dall would be with his height, so he remained in the car with Naps, ready to help if an emergency developed. Once inside the base building, a gift and card shop, I turned my back on Margaret and her mother and pretended to be absorbed with a stack of boxes of pecan pralines. Margaret was looking at some rag dolls. Mrs. Austin was looking at some picture postcards. Eventually I heard Margaret speak to her mother, but I could not catch her soft words. Mrs. Austin’s reply, considerably more distinguishable, was: “You know I’m frightened of high places. But you go on up, if you want to. I’ll just stay here.”…Fool! Idiot! Thoughtless carelessness! What a boneheaded blunder!

  Margaret bought her ticket at the counter and then entered the elevator, and I lurched toward the counter to buy myself a ticket, but Mrs. Austin intervened. “I just don’t know,” she said to the clerk. “All of these are so pretty, I just don’t know which to get.” She held a sheaf of picture postcards in her hand. The elevator door closed and Margaret ascended. I wanted to shove Mrs. Austin out of the way. Or try to buy my ticket with my back to her. Or just go ahead and tell her what a senseless error she had made. But there wasn’t time for that. Perhaps there wasn’t even time for me to wait for the elevator to come back down and get me.

  The stairs! So I took to them. Nine zigzagging flights of metallic, open-aired stairs, and my natural pathological acrophobia killed me nine times, with vertigo and heart attack and dyspnea and angina pectoris, before I could reach the top. Don’t look down, I kept remembering. And after the seventh or eighth flight I began to have the curious notion that when I finally got up there all I would find would be an attic room with mock-feculent murals smeared on the walls. I climbed on, forever.

  Then, somehow, miraculously, I was there, and so, somehow, miraculously, still was she. And about six other people. Past the last step, I kept stepping. Every effort I made to walk, across the smooth metal floor of the observation platform, was a spasmic parody of stair-climbing. One of the sightseers eyed me suspiciously. Margaret was leaning against the rail—one might say over the rail. I clung to it desperately and began to work my way along it, my feet still rising and falling upon a phantom set of stairs. Finally I was within inches of her, and I let go of the rail and lunged. And got her. Then there was nothing for me to hang on to but her.

  She twisted around in my grasp, gasped “Clifford!” and a shadow passed across her face foretokening some inner evasion, and she withdrew from me, easily slipping out of my hands and leaning with her back against the rail. “Why have you come after me?” she asked, her voice hesitant, timid. “I,” I managed to say, but that was all. I was really panting, and could not speak. I sucked at the thin high air, desperately gulping at it, but my lungs were only so much paralyzed gangrene, and my heart had gone berserk. I grabbed the rail again for support and hung there wobbling and shivering. I think I may have been frightening her with this display of helplessness, this embarrassing incapacitation, and I tried to smile, but it is virtually impossible to smile with a gasping mouth. “Clifford—” she said solicitously now but still timidly. I tried sign language: with a palsied gesticulation I pointed at her and then down at the ground far below, and then made a diving motion with my hands and shook my head vigorously. When I repeated this pantomime, she caught it. “Jump?” she said and laughed a feeble giggle. “You thought I was going to jump?” I nodded enthusiastically and managed to close my mouth for an instant of smiling. “Oh, Clifford!” she sighed and embraced me tightly for a long moment, then she said, “Here, let’s sit down,” and we both sat down on the floor of the platform, with our backs up against the rail. This more secure position succored me considerably, but still it was a long time before I could get my voice back. People continued to stare at us for a while, but eventually left us alone, having decided apparently that we were just a couple of fun-loving frolickers. “Your face,” she said, running her fingers along my cheek. “You’re all whiskery. I’ve never seen you with whiskers before.” I eked out my weak smile. A breeze came up and tousled her long black hair. Beyond her shoulder I could see all of western Arkansas spread out in green waves of shallow valleys and billowing hills. “How did you find me?” she asked. I shrugged, spread my hands, and accomplished two whole words: “Just looked.” “I mean, how did you know I was up here?” she asked. Three words from me; I had become a loquacious orator: “Just followed you.” “Oh, did you come with Doyle?” she asked. I nodded. “How did you and Doyle know I was in Hot Springs?” she asked. “Your stepfather—” I coughed. Her face clouded over again; she bit her lip and withdrew inside herself, throwing brief nervous glances at me. I put my hand on her hand, but could not decide whether the electric vibrations were generated from her or from me. “You saw my room?” she asked. I nodded, “Yes, and I thought it was rather f—” She sprang to her feet. “Forget me!” she wailed, and I thought she might have said, Forgive me, I wasn’t sure. Then she headed for the stairs. “Marge! no! stop! listen! I!” I stammered out, my rotten voice more helpless than it had ever been, but she went on down the stairs. I struggled to my feet, a painful process. I made it to the stairs and groped down them, but more damn sightseers coming up the narrow passage blocked and slowed my descent, so that when I reached the lower level the elevator had already descended, with her in it.

  To the stairs again, and down. Easier, at least, than going up. But still fatiguing. And frightening, having to look down, down at that abyss of crisscrossing steel beams and the ground far below. Twice I closed my eyes, reeled, and almost lost my balance. Twice I closed my eyes and continued downward sightless, by feel.

&nbs
p; When I attained the earth again at last I discovered that there was nobody in sight, neither Margaret nor her mother nor Naps nor Dall. On foot I began trotting down the mountain. I heard swift footsteps behind me, and turned to see Dall trotting down after me. Catching up with me, he explained that when Margaret and her mother emerged from the base of the tower, Naps had ordered him to get out of the car and hide around the corner of the building. While he was not given to taking orders from a nigger, he had acceded to the request because it was no time to quibble, and then he had watched as Naps drove the Lincoln up beside the two women and said to them, “Mornin, ladies. Hot Springs Limousine Service at yo service,” and the mother said, “Goodness, we couldn’t afford that!” but when Naps told her it was only thirty-five cents, she had taken him up on it.

  Dall and I sat down beside the road to wait. Within ten minutes Naps returned. “Cheapskate didn’t gimme no tip,” he said. He said he had taken them to one of the bathhouses. We got into the car with him and he took us there, one of a number of those prosaic awning-draped edifices constructed on Bathhouse Row in what might be called county-health-center-federal architecture, half hidden behind two magnolia trees. NIRVANA it said over the door of this one. “Let’s go see what we can see,” Naps said. “I think I got a friend or two works in this place.” We got out of the car and I started down the front walk, but Naps came and took my arm. “The back way,” he said. “We got to use the back way.” So we did.

  Inside, Naps abandoned us in a hospital-like corridor beside the valve-control room while he went off in search of his contacts. He was not gone long, and returned bringing in tow a white-uniformed Negro girl. He asked us, “Have one of you gentlemen maybe got ten dollars you would like to spare? Here is Miss Virgie Mae Humboldt, who, in consideration of the aforementioned sum, will escort one of you to Miss Austin’s private sudatorium, providing you proceed with caution and play it cool.”

  “Why can’t you talk like that more often?” I asked him, admiring the sudden absence of his darkie patois.

  Dall took a half-dollar out of his pocket and flipped it. “Call it,” he said to me. “Tails,” I said. It came down heads. “You pay,” Dall said, so I gave Miss Humboldt ten dollars.

  Then Dall flipped the coin again. “Who’s gonna go and try to talk to Margaret?” he asked. “Call it,” he said. “Heads,” I said this time. It came down tails. “You go,” Dall said. “I’m a good listener, but I aint much when it comes to talkin.”

  The Negro girl led me up a chambered stairway, down a narrow hall, and to a door. We met no one en route. The place seemed deserted. She pointed at the door and whispered, “She in there.” She pointed at another door across the hall and added, “Her momma in there.” Then she smiled and said, “Best not stay too long,” and departed.

  I opened the door. A not very large room, choked with steam. Through the hot vapors I perceived her sitting on a tiled bench, wrapped in a white Turkish towel, reading a limp copy of Vogue. She looked up, and her mouth did something I had never seen it do before: it fell open.

  “Muggy day, isn’t it?” I said, fanning my face.

  She did not scream or anything. She narrowed her eyes, closed her mouth, and said, “I’m losing my mind.”

  I closed the door and went and sat down beside her on the bench. “Maybe,” I said.

  “You must be a…a sorcerer, or something. How did you find me this time?”

  “Actually I’m just an incubus, as you said before. Now if you will kindly remove that towel, I’ll proceed to incubate you.”

  “At least you have your old voice back this time.” She touched me, hesitantly, on the sleeve, as if to make sure I was real. “Please,” she said. Tell me how you found me.”

  “Just followed you,” I said.

  “You couldn’t have. I was watching.”

  “Apparently you didn’t see me sneak up and latch on to the rear bumper of that limousine that you rode into town.”

  “Did you, now? I’m amazed.”

  “Just fooling,” I said, and then I gripped her hand tightly and began to talk very rapidly. “Margaret, I know what you did to your room wasn’t really real and I know you did it because you hated that room and I don’t blame you a bit and I think your mother is horrible and anyway did you know that she is so mean to your poor stepfather too that she forced him to have to be the one to clean the room? but anyway Dall and your stepfather and Naps and I went up there last night and cleaned it all up, so—”

  “Who’s Naps?” she asked.

  “A colored friend of mine. The fellow who brought you and your mother down here from the mountain in his car. Anyway—”

  Margaret smiled. “You’re clever,” she said admiringly. “It’s like a special Secret Service or something.”

  “Anyway,” I went on, still talking as fast as I could, “you’ve just got to go back to Little Rock with us because we’re all counting on you to be in that play tonight and if you pass up this chance you might not get another chance so this is your golden opportunity so to speak and you know there’s going to be a New York producer and a bunch of other New York theater people in the audience tonight because they flew all the way down here to see the play and they want to see you too and maybe you might even get a job offer or a screen test or something out of it, so you just can’t pass up this swell chance…”

  She said nothing. She did not look at me.

  “Margaret,” I said, trying to be gay, “I knew you were being deliberately fecetious in what you did to your room.” I waited to let the pun sink in, but she didn’t seem to catch it, so I went on. “Anyway, I thought it was funny and so did Dall and we want to do everything we can to help you because you’ve had such a raw deal from your mother and everybody, and—”

  “And Jimmy too,” she said.

  “Yes, and Jimmy Slater too, and we want—” I stopped. I looked at her.

  She flipped idly through the flaccid Vogue, not really looking at the pages. She addressed the magazine, quietly: “It’s really a very bad play and I don’t think I could do the role the way Jimmy wants me to do it, and besides I’d be just as happy if I never saw him again.”

  “Why?” I asked her. She didn’t answer. “Why?” I said again. “Has he hurt you in some way? Has he taken advantage of you? What did he do? Just tell me and I’ll kill the bastard.”

  She glanced up at me. “Leave him alone,” she said. “It’s all over. Just forget about it.”

  “But the play—”

  “It’s a horrible play and I get murdered in the end of it, and the whole thing is just too absurd for words.”

  “It’s supposed to be the Theater of the Absurd,” I said, rather pedantically. “Maybe you don’t understand it or something. If—”

  “Please, Clifford,” she said, and I hushed. Then she spoke again, quietly: “It’s really flattering that you and Doyle are trying so hard to help me, but I’m just a hopeless failure and I’ve always been one and I’m too old to try to change the situation even if there were anything I could do about it, but there isn’t, so why don’t you just forget about me?”

  “You actually want to stay here in Hot Springs?”

  “It isn’t too bad. And it’s certainly better than that house in Little Rock. You can’t make me go back to that place.”

  “I don’t intend to,” I said. “We were going to stay at the Coachman’s Inn, remember? Or anywhere. And when the play is over I’ll take you to New York, or send you there, or just anything you want to do.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? Because I like you, that’s why. You’re very special to me, and I have great hopes for your future and all.”

  She smiled but said nothing to that. We sat in silence. I was drenched with sweat from all the steam. I searched desperately for something to say, some gambit, some conclusive, decisive word or words which would sway her.

  I tried. “Margaret, if you stay over here, we’ll all be very much worried about you, because obviously you�
�re unhappy, and you might just try to kill yourself or something.” She said nothing. “I mean, really,” I said. Then I asked, “Isn’t it true that you might have drowned yourself back in March if Dall hadn’t come your way? Isn’t it?” She didn’t answer. I said, “Yes, I think it is. So you’re badly mistaken if you think Dall and I could stand to go off and leave you here in Hot Springs where you could do just about anything without anybody to stop you or help you. Come on, Margaret, go with us.” She said nothing. She did not look up at me. There was only one more tack remaining, one last card up my sleeve, and I tried it: “I thought you didn’t like your mother.”

  “I can’t stand her,” she said.

  “Then why—”

  “Because,” Margaret cut me off, her voice rising, “because she has been telling me what to do for twenty-seven years, and for twenty-seven years I have been doing what she has told me to do, and it is rather late to do otherwise now! You see? Because although it is really nice of a couple of friendly, decent boys like you and Doyle to want to help me, it’s just too late! So leave me alone! Leave me alone!” Gesturing at the door for me to leave, she cried these words with such vehement motions of her hands and her whole body that the Turkish towel sprang loose and flopped around her hips on the tile of the bench, and she sat there exposed, her marmoreal chest cleaved by two memorably bold breasts hoisted high by the thrust of her arm as she pointed at the door, and the satin skin of her abdomen stretched around the most lovely dent of a navel I have ever seen, and the crisp thatch of her crotch as raven-black as her hair, and the whole creature a delightful feast for famished eyes.