The Complete Stories of Morley Callaghan - Volume Two

by Morley Callaghan

  “So I did too,” she hesitated, thinking the young man ought to see how well it was written. “I have an extra copy.” She looked at him thoughtfully. He smiled. She got up and went upstairs.

  The young man talked very rapidly to the old lady and took many notes.

  Miss Rower returned. “Would you like to see it?” She handed him a small gray booklet. Looking quickly through it, he saw it contained valuable information about the district.

  “The writing is simply splendid. You must have done a lot of work on it.”

  “I worked hard on it,” she said, pleased and more willing to talk.

  “Is this an extra copy?”

  “Yes, it’s an extra copy.”

  “I suppose I might keep it,” he said diffidently.

  She looked at him steadily. “Well . . . I’ll have to charge you twenty-five cents.”

  “Sure, sure, of course, that’s fine.” He blushed.

  “Just what it costs to get them out,” the old lady explained apologetically.

  “Can you change a dollar?” He fumbled in his pocket, pulling the dollar out slowly.

  They could not change it but Miss Rower would be pleased to go down to the corner grocery store. Mr. Flaherty protested. No trouble he would go. She insisted on asking the next-door neighbor to change it. She went across the room, the dollar in hand.

  Mr. Flaherty chatted with the nice old lady and carefully examined the family tree, and wrote quickly in a small book till the screen door banged, the curtains parted, and Miss Hilda Rower came into the room. He wanted to smirk, watching her walking heavily, so conscious of her ancient lineage, a virginal mincing sway to her large hips, seventy-five cents’ change held loosely in drooping fingers.

  “Thank you,” he said, pocketing the change, pretending his work was over. Sitting back in the chair he praised the way Miss Rower had written the history of the neighborhood and suggested she might write a splendid story of the family tree, if she had the material, of course.

  “I’ve got the material, all right,” she said, trying to get comfortable again. How would Mr. Flaherty arrange it and where should she try to sell it? The old lady was dozing in the rocking chair. Miss Rower began to talk rather nervously about her material. She talked of the last title in the family and the Sir Richard who had been at the court of Queen Elizabeth.

  Mr. Flaherty chimed in gaily, “I suppose you know the O’Flahertys were kings in Ireland?

  She said vaguely, “I daresay, I daresay,” conscious only of an interruption to the flow of her thoughts. She went on talking with hurried eagerness, all the fine talk about her ancestors bringing her peculiar satisfaction. A soft light came into her eyes and her lips were moist.

  Mr. Flaherty started to rub his cheek, and looked at her big legs, and felt restive, and then embarrassed, watching her closely, her lower lip hanging loosely. She was talking slowing, lazily, relaxing in her chair, a warm fluid oozing through her veins, exhausting but satisfying her.

  He was uncomfortable. She was liking it too much. He did not know what to do. There was something immodest about it. She was close to forty, her big body relaxed in the chair. He looked at his watch and suggested he would be going. She stretched her legs graciously, pouting, inviting him to stay a while longer, but he was standing up, tucking his magazine under his arm. The old lady was still dozing. “I’m so comfortable,” Miss Rower said, “I hate to move.”

  The mother woke up and shook hands with Mr. Flaherty. Miss Rower got up to say good-bye charmingly.

  Halfway down the path Mr. Flaherty turned. She was standing in the doorway, partly shadowed by the tall trees, bright moonlight filtering through leaves touching soft lines on her face and dark hair.

  He went down the hill to the hotel unconsciously walking with a careless easy stride, wondering at the change that had come over the heavy, strong woman. He thought of taking a walk along the river in the moonlight, the river on which old Captain Rower had drilled troops on the ice in the winter of 1837 to fight the rebels. Then he thought of having a western sandwich in the café across the road from the hotel. That big woman in her own way had been hot stuff.

  In the hotel he asked to be called early so he could get the first train to the city. For a long time he lay awake in the fresh, cool bed, the figure of the woman whose ancient lineage had taken the place of a lover in her life, drifting into his thoughts and becoming important while he watched on the wall the pale moonlight that had softened the lines of her face, and wondered if it was still shining on her bed, and on her throat, and on her contented, lazily relaxed body.

  Rendezvous

  Have you ever known a man you couldn’t insult, humiliate, or drive away? When I was working in an advertising agency in charge of layouts, Lawson Wilks, a freelance commercial artist, came in to see me with all the assurance of a man who expects a warm, fraternal handshake. As soon as I saw him bowing and showing his teeth in a tittering smile, as if he were waiting to burst out laughing, I disliked him. Without saying a word I looked at his work spread out on my desk and, though it was obvious he had some talent, I wasn’t really interested in his work. I was wondering what was so soft and unresisting, yet so audacious about him that made me want to throw him out of the office.

  “I’ll get in touch with you if I ever need you,” I said coldly, handing him his folder.

  “All right. Thanks a lot,” he said, and stood there grinning at me.

  “Is there anything else I can do for you?” I asked.

  “Oh, no, nothing. But I’ve wanted to meet you, that’s all.”

  “You honor me.”

  “I’ve heard about you.”

  “What have you heard about me?”

  “I know people who know you, and besides, I’ve admired your work a lot. I can open a newspaper and spot a layout that you’ve had a hand in at once.”

  “Thanks. Now you flatter me.”

  “Are you going out to lunch?”

  “I’ve a very important date. I’m meeting my wife.”

  “I’ve often talked to my own wife about you. She’d like to meet you sometime,” he said.

  “Please thank her for me,” I said. “And now if you’ll excuse me . . .”

  “Listen . . . let’s have a drink together sometime. That’s one of the two things we have in common,” he said, shaking with soft laughter.

  I was so enraged I couldn’t answer for a moment. All my friends knew I had been drinking hard and couldn’t stop and in the late afternoons my nerves used to go to pieces in the office. Sometimes it was terrible waiting for five o’clock so I could run out and get a whiskey and soda. Every day it got harder for me to go to work and, besides, I was doing crazy things with friends at night I couldn’t remember the next morning that used to humiliate me when they were mentioned to me. I thought he was mocking me, but I waited a moment and said, “Drinking, yes! And you might be good enough to tell me what the other thing is we are lucky enough to have in common.”

  “Why, I thought you’d notice it,” he said. He was so truly, yet good-naturedly embarrassed, that I was astonished. I stared at him. There he was about my size, plump, dark, overweight, wider across the middle than across the shoulders, and with a little black mustache.

  “What is it?” I insisted.

  “People have always said I looked like you,” he said with a deprecating, yet easy swing of his arm.

  “I see, I see what you mean,” I said, and got up and was walking him toward the door.

  “I’ll phone you sometime,” he said, and he wrung my hand very warmly.

  As soon as he had gone, I looked in the mirror on the wall and rubbed my hand softly over my face. It was not a flabby face. I was fat, but my shoulders were strong and heavy. I began to make loud, clucking, contemptuous noises with my tongue.

  One night a week later my legs went on me and I thought I was losing my mind. My wife begged me to take some kind of a treatment. It was about half past eleven at night and I was lying on the
bed in my pajamas trembling, and with strange vivid pictures floating through my thoughts and terrifying me because I kept thinking I would see them next day at the office and I would not be able to do my work. My legs were twitching. I couldn’t keep them still. My wife, who is very gentle and has never failed me at any time since we’ve been married, was kneeling down, rubbing my bare legs and making the blood flow warm and alive in them, till they began to seem as if they belonged to me.

  Then the phone rang and my wife answered it and came back and said, “A man says he is a friend of yours, a business associate.”

  I didn’t want any business associate to know I couldn’t go to the phone so I put on my slippers and groped my way to it and said with great dignity, “Hello. Who is it?”

  “It’s Lawson Wilks,” the voice said, and I heard his easy intimate self-possessed laughter.

  “What do you want?” I yelled.

  “I thought you might want to have a drink with me. I’m not far away. I’m in a tavern just two blocks from your place.”

  I suddenly had a craving for a drink and felt like going out to meet him, and then loathed myself and shouted, “No, no, no. I don’t want a drink. I’m not going out. I’m terribly busy. Do you understand?”

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll call you again. I was just thinking about you.”

  I saw him in October, about a week after I had taken three months’ leave of absence from the office, trying to get myself in hand so I wouldn’t have to go away to a nursing home. I really wasn’t making much of a fight and sometimes I was ashamed. I looked shabby, twitching a lot. I sat for hours smiling to myself. I couldn’t bear to have anyone see me.

  On a dark windy day I was sitting in the Golden Bowl Tavern with a whiskey and soda, promising myself I would not have another drink, not until I had read the Sunday paper at least. Then I looked up and saw that Wilks had come in and was grinning at me with warm delight, as much as I’ve ever seen on a man’s face. While I turned away sullenly, he sat down, ordered a whiskey, and nodding at my glass, said, “The same thing, you see. Didn’t I tell you?”

  “Didn’t you tell me what?” I said. He looked pretty terrible to me. His dull eyes were pouchy, and he seemed heavier and softer. As he raised his glass his hand trembled. When he noticed me staring at him, his face lit up with fraternal goodwill. I wanted to insult him. “You better watch out,” I whispered. “The heeby-jeebies’ll get you. They’ll have to take you outa here soon.”

  In a tone that maddened me, because he meant no offence, he said, “We’re taking the same trip, my friend.”

  “How so?”

  “You don’t mind me sitting here, do you?”

  “Sit here if you want,” I said. “I’m reading the paper.”

  It was a pleasure to see him looking such a wreck. I was delighted sitting there turning the pages of the paper slowly, never looking up at him while his voice droned on, patient, friendly, dead. Surely anyone else in the world would have found it too humiliating, sitting there like that, yet he said, “Do you mind letting me have the comics?”

  “Take them,” I said, letting him pull the paper from me.

  “I thought I might as well be doing something while I waited for you,” he said.

  I folded my paper. “Sorry,” I said, “I have got to go.”

  “Let’s walk together to the corner,” he said.

  He was so contented on that dark and windy October afternoon that I decided to mock him. I began by asking questions and he told me he really hadn’t been happy for some years. He didn’t make much more than enough to live on and, besides, his wife wasn’t very sympathetic to his work. On the nights when he wanted to drink and be surrounded by jovial companions and talk about his work and about art, literature and drama, his wife, a matter-of-fact woman, wanted to go out with the ladies and play bridge, and it was a game he couldn’t stand.

  “How about you? Does your wife play bridge?” he asked.

  “She can’t stand the game,” I jeered at him.

  “Maybe my wife and I got married too young. Sometimes I feel that she doesn’t really love me at all. How about your wife?”

  Full of gratitude to my wife for giving me another chance to widen the gulf between this man and me, I said crisply, “It’s entirely different with us, thank you.” Then I started to laugh openly, knowing I had been mocking him with my pretended interest in his wretched affairs. Chuckling, I left him standing on the corner, with that puzzled yet overwhelming smile of goodwill still on his weak and puffy face.

  I didn’t see him for a month. There were nights when I had some terrible experiences and I grew afraid for my wife and myself. I let them put me in the nursing home.

  The first weeks were hard, terrifying, yet fascinating. I had a little room to myself and when I was normal and quiet I had the freedom of the house and the grounds, and I had some good conversations with the male nurses. Sometimes they locked me in. The door leading to the corridor had bars on it.

  In the morning I often felt that I had floated out of my body at night and had remarkably interesting encounters in space with friends who were dear to me, interesting because they seemed to enlarge the borders of reality for me.

  Then one morning one of the nurses said, “We have a patient just across the corridor who knows you.”

  “Who?”

  “A Mr. Lawson Wilks.”

  “How is he?”

  “Very bad for the most part.”

  “Look here,” I begged. “I don’t want to see him at all, you understand?”

  It seemed terrible that he should be there making me hate him when I was better and looking forward to getting out of the place. I refused to go to the door to look across the corridor. I knew he was standing there looking across at my room and I had a truly savage pleasure in never letting him see me.

  During one very bad night, the last bad night I had, I felt that part of myself that was truly me hovering around overhead, right overhead from where I was, except, of course, that I wasn’t confined at all. I was smiling at Lawson Wilks, who had joined me, and we were having a very friendly and easy conversation about many simple things. We laughed a lot and liked each other and I was happier than I had been in years.

  In the morning when I woke up, I lay in the bed a long time remembering the night and growing, bit by bit, more puzzled. Then I couldn’t help getting up and sneaking over to the door and peering at Lawson Wilks’ room.

  DRAWING BY GEORGE GROSZ

  When I got to the door I saw Lawson Wilks standing there looking over at me, and when he saw that I’d come at last to the door, he nodded his head in encouragement. His warm smile seemed even kindlier now. “You and me, we had a good time, didn’t we?”

  “We did?” I said, with a little cracked smile.

  Pointing high over his head, he grinned and said, “It was wonderful last night, wasn’t it?”

  The Snob

  It was at the book counter in the department store that John Harcourt, the student, caught a glimpse of his father. At first he could not be sure in the crowd that pushed along the aisle, but there was something about the color of the back of the elderly man’s neck, something about the faded felt hat, that he knew very well. Harcourt was standing with the girl he loved, buying a book for her. All afternoon he had been talking to her with an anxious diligence, as if there still remained in him an innocent wonder that she should be delighted to be with him. From underneath her wide-brimmed straw hat, her face, so fair and beautifully strong with its expression of cool independence, kept turning up to him and sometimes smiled at what he said. That was the way they always talked, never daring to show much full, strong feeling. Harcourt had just bought the book, and had reached into his pocket for the money with a free, ready gesture to make it appear that he was accustomed to buying books for young ladies, when the white-haired man in the faded felt hat, at the other end of the counter, turned half toward him, and Harcourt knew he was standing only a few feet away from his f
ather.

  The young man’s easy words trailed away and his voice became little more than a whisper, as if he were afraid that everyone in the store might recognize it. There was rising in him a dreadful uneasiness; something very precious that he wanted to hold seemed close to destruction. His father, standing at the end of the bargain counter, was planted squarely on his two feet, turning a book over thoughtfully in his hands. Then he took out his glasses from an old, worn leather case and adjusted them on the end of his nose, looking down over them at the book. His coat was thrown open, two buttons on his vest were undone, his gray hair was too long, and in his rather shabby clothes he looked very much like a working man, a carpenter perhaps. Such a resentment rose in young Harcourt that he wanted to cry out bitterly, “Why does he dress as if he never owned a decent suit in his life? He doesn’t care what the whole world thinks of him. He never did. I’ve told him a hundred times he ought to wear his good clothes when he goes out. Mother’s told him the same thing. He just laughs. And now Grace may see him. Grace will meet him.”

  So young Harcourt stood still, with his head down, feeling that something very painful was impending. Once he looked anxiously at Grace, who had turned to the bargain counter. Among those people drifting aimlessly by, getting in each other’s way, using their elbows, she looked tall and splendidly alone. She was so sure of herself, her relation to the people in the aisles, the clerks behind the counter, the books on the shelves, and everything around her. Still keeping his head down and moving close, he whispered uneasily, “Let’s go and have a drink somewhere, Grace.”

  “In a minute, dear,” she said.

  “Let’s go now.”

  “In just a minute, dear,” she repeated absently.

  “There’s not a breath of air in here. Let’s go now.”

  “What makes you so impatient?”

  “There’s nothing but old books on that counter.”

  “There may be something here I’ve wanted all my life,” she said, smiling at him brightly and not noticing the uneasiness in his face.