Carson McCullers

by Carson McCullers

  She would throw herself into first one thing and then another. For a while there were movies. She went to the show every Saturday with him and Chandler West and the rest of the kids, but when it was over and they had seen everything through she wouldn’t come out with them but would stay on in the movie until almost dark. She always started looking at the picture as soon as she passed the ticket man and would stumble down the aisle without ever looking at the seats until she had almost reached the screen—then she would sit on about the third row with her neck bent back and her mouth not quite closed. Even after she had seen everything through twice she would keep turning back to look as she walked out of the show so that she would bump into people and was almost like somebody drunk. On week days she would save all but a dime of her lunch money and buy movie magazines. She had the pictures of Clive Brook and four or five other stars tacked up on the wall of her room and when she would go to the drug store to buy the magazines she would get a chocolate milk and look through all they had, then buy the ones with the most in them about the stars she liked. Movies were all she cared about for about three months. Then all of a sudden that was over and she didn’t even go to the show anymore on Saturdays.

  Then there was the Girl Scout Camp she and the girls she knew were going on, out at a lake about twenty miles from town. That was all she talked about the month beforehand. She would priss around in front of the mirror in the khaki shorts and boy’s shirts they were supposed to have, her hair slicked back close to her head, thinking it was grand to try to act like a boy. But after she had been on the camp just four days he came in one afternoon and found her playing the Victrola. She had made one of the counsellors bring her home and she looked all done in. She said all they did was swim and run races and shoot bows and arrows. And there weren’t any mattresses on the cots and at night there were mosquitoes and she had growing pains in her legs and couldn’t sleep. “I just ran and ran and then lay awake in the dark all night,” she kept saying. “That’s all there was to it.” He laughed at her, but when she started crying—not in the way kids like Mick bawled but slowly and unsobbing—it was almost like he was part of her and crying, too. For a long time they sat on the floor together, playing their records. They were always a lot closer than most brothers and sisters.

  Music to them was something like the glider should have been. But it wasn’t sudden like that and it didn’t let them down. Maybe it was like whiskey was to their Dad. They knew it was something that would stay with them always.

  Sara played the piano more and more after she got to high school. She didn’t like it there any more than he did and sometimes she would even worry him into writing excuses for her and signing their Dad’s name. The first term she got seven bad cards. Their Dad never knew what to do about Sara and whenever she did something wrong he would just clear his throat and look at her in an embarrassed way like he didn’t know how to say what was in his mind. Sara looked like pictures of their mother and he loved her a lot—but it was in a funny sort of timid way. He didn’t fuss at all about the bad cards. She was just twelve and that was young to be in high school anyway.

  There is a time when everybody wants to run away—no matter how well they get along with their family. They feel they have to leave because of something they have done, or something they want to do, or maybe they don’t know why it is they run away. Maybe it is a kind of slow hunger that makes them feel like they have to get out and go in search of something. He ran away from home once when he was eleven. A girl on the next block took her money out of the school savings bank and got a bus to Hollywood because the actress she had a crush on answered one of her letters and said that if she was ever in California to drop in and see her and swim in her swimming pool. Her folks couldn’t get in touch with her for ten days and then her mother went out to Hollywood to bring her back. She had swum in the actress’s pool and was trying to get a job in the movies. She was not sorry to come back home. Even Chandler West who was always slow and dumb tried to run away. Although Chandler had lived across the street from them all their lives there was something about him no one could ever understand. Even as little kids he and Sara felt that. It happened after Chandler had failed all his subjects at school, most of them for the second time. He said afterward that he wanted to build a hut up in the Canadian woods and live there by himself as a trapper. He was too dumb to hitch hike and he just kept walking toward the north until finally he was arrested for sleeping in a ditch and sent home. His mother had almost gone crazy and while he was gone her eyes were wild and like an animal’s. You would think that Chandler was the only person that she had ever loved. And maybe it was from her that he was running away, too.

  So there was nothing very peculiar about what Sara did—that is unless you were a grown person like their Dad who just didn’t understand things like that. There wasn’t any real reason for her wanting to leave. It was just the way she had begun to feel in the last year. Maybe music had something to do with it. Or it might have been because she had grown so much and just didn’t know what to do with herself.

  It happened on her thirteenth birthday and it was Monday morning. Vitalis had the breakfast table fixed nice with flowers and a new table cloth. Sara didn’t seem any different that morning from any other time. But suddenly as she was eating her grits she saw a kinky hair on her plate and she burst out crying. Vitalis’s feelings were hurt because she had tried to have breakfast so nice that morning. Sara grabbed her school books and went out the door. She said she wasn’t mad with anybody about anything but that she was leaving home for good. He knew she was just talking and would just stay away until school was out. If it hadn’t been for Vitalis their Dad would never have known about it. Sara went up the street running and when she came to the vacant lot at the corner she threw all her school books in the high grass there. When he went to pick them up there were papers scattered everywhere in the wind—homework and funny things she had drawn in her tablet.

  Vitalis phoned their Dad who had already gone to work and he came home in the automobile. He was very worried and serious. He kept pulling his lower lip tight against his teeth and clearing his throat. All three of them got in the automobile to go find her. The rest would have been funny if you hadn’t been mixed up in it. They found her after about half an hour—walking down the road between high school and downtown. But when their Dad blew the horn she wouldn’t get in the car, or even look around at them. She just kept going with her head in the air and her pleated skirt switching above her skinny knees. Their Dad had never been so nervous and mad. He couldn’t get out and chase a girl down the street and so he had to just creep the car along behind her and blow the horn. They passed kids going to school who stared and giggled and it was awful. He was madder with Sara than their Dad. If they had had a closed car he would have leaned back and hid his face. But it was a Model T Ford and there wasn’t anything to do but shuffle his feet and try to look like he didn’t care.

  After a while she gave up and got in the car. Their Dad didn’t know what to say and all of them were stiff and quiet. Sara was shamed and sad. She tried to cover it up by humming to herself in a don’t-care way. They got out quietly at the high school. But that wasn’t the end.

  The next month Uncle Jim, who was kin to them on their mother’s side, came down from Detroit on the way to spend his vacation in Florida. Aunt Esther, his wife, was with him. She was a Jew and played the violin. Both of them had always liked Sara a lot—and in their Christmas boxes her present was always better than his or Mick’s. They didn’t have any children and there was something about them that was different from most married people. The first night they sat up very late with their Dad and maybe he told them all about Sara. Anyway, before they left, their Dad asked Sara how she would like to go to school a year in Detroit and live with them. Right away she said that she would like it—she had never been farther away from home than Atlanta and she wanted to sleep on a train and live in a strange place and see snow in the winter time.

/>   It happened so quickly that he could not get it into his head. He had not thought about the time when any of them would ever be away for long. He knew their Dad felt Sara was growing to the age where maybe she needed somebody who was at home more than he was. And the climate might do her good in Detroit and they didn’t have many kinfolks. Before they were even born Uncle Jim had lived at their house a year—when he was still young and before he left for the north. But still he could not understand their Dad’s letting her go. She left in a week—because the school term had only been going a month and they didn’t want to waste more time. It was so sudden that it didn’t give him time to think. She was to be gone ten months and that seemed almost as long as forever. He did not know that it would be almost twice that time before he would again see her. He felt dazed and it was like a dream when they said goodbye.

  That winter the house was a lonesome place. Mick was too little to think about anything but eating and sleeping and drawing on colored paper at kindergarten. When he would come in from school all the rooms seemed quiet and more than empty. Only in the kitchen was it any different and there Vitalis was always cooking and singing to herself and it was warm and full of good smells and life. If he did not go out he would usually hang around there and watch her and they would talk while she fixed him something to eat. She knew about the lonesome feeling and was good to him.

  Most afternoons he was out with Chandler West and the rest of the gang of boys who were sophomores at high school. They had a club and a scrub football team. The vacant lot on the corner of the block was sold and the buyer began to build a house. When the carpenters and bricklayers left in the late afternoon the gang would climb up on the roof or run through the naked incompleted rooms. It was strange the way he felt about this house. Every afternoon he would take off his shoes and socks so he wouldn’t slip and climb to the sharp pointed top of the roof. Then he would stand there, holding his hands out for balance and look around at all that lay below him or at the pale twilight sky. From underneath the boys would be scuffling together and calling out to each other—their voices were changing and the empty rooms made long drawn echoes, so that the sounds seemed not human and unrelated to words.

  Standing there alone on the roof he always felt he had to shout out—but he did not know what it was he wanted to say. It seemed like if he could put this thing into words he would no longer be a boy with big rough bare feet and hands that hung down clumsy from the outgrown sleeves of his lumberjack. He would be a great man, a kind of God, and what he called out would make things that bothered him and all other people plain and simple. His voice would be great and like music and men and women would come out of their houses and listen to him and because they knew that what he said was true they would all be like one person and would understand everything in the world. But no matter how big this feeling was he could never put any of it into words. He would balance there choked and ready to burst and if his voice had not been squeaky and changing he would have tried to yell out the music of one of their Wagner records. He could do nothing. And when the rest of the gang would come out from the house and look up at him he felt a sudden panic, as though his corduroy pants had dropped from him. To cover up his nakedness he would yell something silly like Friends Romans Countrymen or Shake-Spear Kick Him In The Rear and then he would climb down feeling empty and shamed and more lonesome than anybody else in the world.

  On Saturday mornings he worked down at his Dad’s store. This was a long narrow jeweller’s shop in the middle of one of the main business blocks downtown. Down the length of the place was a bright glass showcase with the sections displaying stones and silver. His Dad’s watchmaking bench was in the very front of the shop, looking out on the front window and the street. Day after day he would sit there over his work—a large man, more than six feet tall, and with hands that at first looked too big for their delicate work. But after you watched his Dad awhile that first feeling changed. People who noticed his hands always wanted to stare at them—they were fat and seemed without bones or muscles and the skin, darkened with acids, was smooth as old silk. His hands did not seem to belong to the rest of him, to his bent broad back and his strained muscular neck. When he worked at a hard job his whole face would show it. The eye that wore his jeweller’s glass would stare down round and intent and distorted while the other was squinted almost shut. His whole big face looked crooked and his mouth gaped open with strain. Although when he was not busy he liked to stare out at the heads and shoulders of the people passing on the street, he never glanced at them while he was at work.

  At the store his Dad usually gave him odd jobs such as that of polishing silverware or running errands. Sometimes he cleaned watch springs with a brush soaked in gasoline. Occasionally if there were several customers in the place and the salesgirl was busy he would awkwardly stand behind the counter and try to make a sale. But most of the time there was nothing much for him to do except hang around. He hated staying at the store on Saturdays because he could always think of so many other things he wanted to do. There were long stretches when the store would be very quiet—with only the droning ticks of the watches or the echoing sounds of a clock striking.

  On the days when Harry Minowitz was there this was different. Harry took in the extra work of two or three jewellers in the town and his Dad let him use the bench at the back of the store in exchange for certain jobs. There was nothing that Harry didn’t know about even the finest of watch mechanics and because of this (and for other reasons too) he had the nickname of “The Wizard.” His Dad didn’t like Jews because there were a couple in town who were slick as grease and bad on other jewellers’ business. So it was funny the way he depended on Harry.

  Harry was small and pale and he always seemed tired. His nose was large for his peaked face and next to his eyes it was the first thing you noticed. Perhaps that was because he had the habit of slowly rubbing it with his thumb and second finger when he was thinking, gently feeling the hump on it and pressing down the tip. When he was in doubt about a question put to him he would not shrug or shake his head—but slowly turn his slender hands palm upward and suck in his hollow cheeks. Usually a cigarette drooped from his mouth and his thin lips seemed too relaxed to hold it. His dark eyes had a way of staring sharply at a person, then the lids would suddenly droop down as though he understood everything and was still bored. At the same time there was a certain jauntiness about him. His clothes were dapper and he wore a stiff derby hat at an angle on the back of his head. Nothing could ever surprise Harry, but in his own quiet way he could always laugh at everything, even himself. He had come to the town ten years before and he lived alone in a small room on one of the overcrowded streets down by the river. Though he seemed to know half the people in the town by their names and faces he had few friends and was a solitary man.

  During the winter after Sara left when Andrew worked at the store every Saturday he liked to watch Harry and think about him. There was a time when he would rather have been noticed and admired by him than any other person. He had never tried to ape his Dad like some boys did. But there was something sure and nonchalant about Harry that seemed wonderful to him. He had lived in cities like Los Angeles and New York and he knew languages and people that were strange to men like his Dad. He wanted to be good friends with Harry but he didn’t know how to go about it. When they were together something made him talk loud and hold his face stiff and call grown men by their last names without the Mister. Then he would be embarrassed, stumble over his big feet and get in everybody’s way. He felt that Harry saw through all of this and was laughing. This made him mad. There were times when if Minowitz hadn’t been so old he would have picked a fight with him and tried to bash his ears in. But although Harry looked like he might be any age he knew that he must be around thirty—and a nearly six foot tall boy of fourteen couldn’t fight with a smaller man who was that much older.

  Then one morning Harry brought “the dolls” to the store. That was the name somebody gave to the
set of chessmen he had worked on for ten years. At first it was a surprise to realize that even Harry could be a crank about something—he had known that he liked chess and owned a fine set of pieces, but that was all. He learned that Harry would go anywhere to find a partner who could give him a good game. And next to playing he liked to just fondle and work with these little doll-like men. They had been carved years ago by a friend of his father—out of ebony and some light hard wood. Some of the pieces had shrunken little Chinese faces and all of the parts were curious and beautiful. For years Harry had worked in his spare time to inlay this set with chased gold.

  It was these chessmen that made them friends. When Harry saw how interested he was he began to tell him about the work and also to explain the moves in a chess game. Within a few weeks he learned how to play a fair game for a beginner. And after that he and Harry would play together often on Saturdays in the back of the store. He got so that even at night when he couldn’t sleep he would think about chess. He hadn’t thought that he could ever like a game so much.

  Sometimes Harry would have him up to his place for an evening. The room he lived in was very neat and bare. They would sit silently over a little card table, going through the game without a word. As Harry played his face was as pale and frozen looking as one of his little carved pieces—only his sharp black eyebrows moved and his fingers as he slowly rubbed his nose. The first few times he left as soon as the games were over because he was afraid Harry might get tired of him if he stayed longer and think he was just a boring kid. But before he knew it all that was changed and they would talk sometimes until late at night. There were times when he would feel almost like a drunk man and try to put into words all the things he had kept stored up for a long time. He would talk and talk until he was breathless and his cheeks burned—about the things he wanted to do and see and make up his mind about. Harry listened with his head cocked to one side and his unsurprised silence made what he wanted to say come faster and even more clearly than he had thought it.