Carson McCullers

by Carson McCullers

  The little girl sat demurely on Bailey’s knees. She wore a pale pink crepe de Chine frock, smocked around the yoke with rose, and a matching silk hair ribbon tying back her pale soft curls. Her skin was summer tanned and her brown eyes flecked with gold and laughing. When she reached up and fingered her father’s horn-rimmed glasses, he took them off and let her look through them a moment. ‘How’s my old Candy?’

  Elizabeth was very beautiful, more beautiful perhaps than he had ever realized. Her straight clean hair was shining. Her face was softer, glowing and serene. It was a madonna loveliness, dependent on the family ambiance.

  ‘You’ve hardly changed at all,’ Elizabeth said, ‘but it has been a long time.’

  ‘Eight years.’ His hand touched his thinning hair self-consciously while further amenities were exchanged.

  Ferris felt himself suddenly a spectator—an interloper among these Baileys. Why had he come? He suffered. His own life seemed so solitary, a fragile column supporting nothing amidst the wreckage of the years. He felt he could not bear much longer to stay in the family room.

  He glanced at his watch. ‘You’re going to the theater?’

  ‘It’s a shame,’ Elizabeth said, ‘but we’ve had this engagement for more than a month. But surely, John, you’ll be staying home one of these days before long. You’re not going to be an expatriate, are you?’

  ‘Expatriate,’ Ferris repeated. ‘I don’t much like the word.’

  ‘What’s a better word?’ she asked.

  He thought for a moment. ‘Sojourner might do.’

  Ferris glanced again at his watch, and again Elizabeth apologized. ‘If only we had known ahead of time——’

  ‘I just had this day in town. I came home unexpectedly. You see, Papa died last week.’

  ‘Papa Ferris is dead?’

  ‘Yes, at Johns Hopkins. He had been sick there nearly a year. The funeral was down home in Georgia.’

  ‘Oh, I’m so sorry, John. Papa Ferris was always one of my favorite people.’

  The little boy moved from behind the chair so that he could look into his mother’s face. He asked, ‘Who is dead?”

  Ferris was oblivious to apprehension; he was thinking of his father’s death. He saw again the outstretched body on the quilted silk within the coffin. The corpse flesh was bizarrely rouged and the familiar hands lay massive and joined above a spread of funeral roses. The memory closed and Ferris awakened to Elizabeth’s calm voice.

  ‘Mr. Ferris’ father, Billy. A really grand person. Somebody you didn’t know.’

  ‘But why did you call him Papa Ferris?’

  Bailey and Elizabeth exchanged a trapped look. It was Bailey who answered the questioning child. ‘A long time ago,’ he said, ‘your mother and Mr. Ferris were once married. Before you were born—a long time ago.’

  ‘Mr. Ferris?’

  The little boy stared at Ferris, amazed and unbelieving. And Ferris’ eyes, as he returned the gaze, were somehow unbelieving too. Was it indeed true that at one time he had called this stranger, Elizabeth, Little Butterduck during nights of love, that they had lived together, shared perhaps a thousand days and nights and—finally—endured in the misery of sudden solitude the fiber by fiber (jealousy, alcohol and money quarrels) destruction of the fabric of married love.

  Bailey said to the children, ‘It’s somebody’s suppertime. Come on now.’

  ‘But Daddy! Mama and Mr. Ferris—I——’

  Billy’s everlasting eyes—perplexed and with a glimmer of hostility—reminded Ferris of the gaze of another child. It was the young son of Jeannine—a boy of seven with a shadowed little face and nobby knees whom Ferris avoided and usually forgot.

  ‘Quick march!’ Bailey gently turned Billy toward the door. ‘Say good night now, son.’

  ‘Good night, Mr. Ferris.’ He added resentfully, ‘I thought I was staying up for the cake.’

  ‘You can come in afterward for the cake,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Run along now with Daddy for your supper.’

  Ferris and Elizabeth were alone. The weight of the situation descended on those first moments of silence. Ferris asked permission to pour himself another drink and Elizabeth set the cocktail shaker on the table at his side. He looked at the grand piano and noticed the music on the rack.

  ‘Do you still play as beautifully as you used to?’

  ‘I still enjoy it.’

  ‘Please play, Elizabeth.’

  Elizabeth arose immediately. Her readiness to perform when asked had always been one of her amiabilities; she never hung back, apologized. Now as she approached the piano there was the added readiness of relief.

  She began with a Bach prelude and fugue. The prelude was as gaily iridescent as a prism in a morning room. The first voice of the fugue, an announcement pure and solitary, was repeated intermingling with a second voice, and again repeated within an elaborated frame, the multiple music, horizontal and serene, flowed with unhurried majesty. The principal melody was woven with two other voices, embellished with countless ingenuities—now dominant, again submerged, it had the sublimity of a single thing that does not fear surrender to the whole. Toward the end, the density of the material gathered for the last enriched insistence on the dominant first motif and with a chorded final statement the fugue ended. Ferris rested his head on the chair back and closed his eyes. In the following silence a clear, high voice came from the room down the hall.

  ‘Daddy, how could Mama and Mr. Ferris——’ A door was closed.

  The piano began again—what was this music? Unplaced, familiar, the limpid melody had lain a long while dormant in his heart. Now it spoke to him of another time, another place—it was the music Elizabeth used to play. The delicate air summoned a wilderness of memory. Ferris was lost in the riot of past longings, conflicts, ambivalent desires. Strange that the music, catalyst for this tumultuous anarchy, was so serene and clear. The singing melody was broken off by the appearance of the maid.

  ‘Miz Bailey, dinner is out on the table now.’

  Even after Ferris was seated at the table between his host and hostess, the unfinished music still overcast his mood. He was a little drunk.

  ‘L’improvisation de la vie humaine,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing that makes you so aware of the improvisation of human existence as a song unfinished. Or an old address book.’

  ‘Address book?’ repeated Bailey. Then he stopped, noncommittal and polite.

  ‘You’re still the same old boy, Johnny,’ Elizabeth said with a trace of the old tenderness.

  It was a Southern dinner that evening, and the dishes were his old favorites. They had fried chicken and corn pudding and rich, glozed candied sweet potatoes. During the meal Elizabeth kept alive a conversation when the silences were overlong. And it came about that Ferris was led to speak of Jeannine.

  ‘I first knew Jeannine last autumn—about this time of the year—in Italy. She’s a singer and she had an engagement in Rome. I expect we will be married soon.’

  The words seemed so true, inevitable, that Ferris did not at first acknowledge to himself the lie. He and Jeannine had never in that year spoken of marriage. And indeed, she was still married—to a White Russian money-changer in Paris from whom she had been separated for five years. But it was too late to correct the lie. Already Elizabeth was saying: ‘This really makes me glad to know. Congratulations, Johnny.’

  He tried to make amends with truth. ‘The Roman autumn is so beautiful. Balmy and blossoming.’ He added, ‘Jeannine has a little boy of six. A curious trilingual little fellow. We go to the Tuileries sometimes.’

  A lie again. He had taken the boy once to the gardens. The sallow foreign child in shorts that bared his spindly legs had sailed his boat in the concrete pond and ridden the pony. The child had wanted to go in to the puppet show. But there was not time, for Ferris had an engagement at the Scribe Hotel. He had promised they would go to the guignol another afternoon. Only once had he taken Valentin to the Tuileries.

  There was a st
ir. The maid brought in a white-frosted cake with pink candles. The children entered in their night clothes. Ferris still did not understand.

  ‘Happy birthday, John,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Blow out the candles.’

  Ferris recognized his birthday date. The candles blew out lingeringly and there was the smell of burning wax. Ferris was thirty-eight years old. The veins in his temples darkened and pulsed visibly.

  ‘It’s time you started for the theater.’

  Ferris thanked Elizabeth for the birthday dinner and said the appropriate good-byes. The whole family saw him to the door.

  A high, thin moon shone above the jagged, dark skyscrapers. The streets were windy, cold. Ferris hurried to Third Avenue and hailed a cab. He gazed at the nocturnal city with the deliberate attentiveness of departure and perhaps farewell. He was alone. He longed for flighttime and the coming journey.

  The next day he looked down on the city from the air, burnished in sunlight, toylike, precise. Then America was left behind and there was only the Atlantic and the distant European shore. The ocean was milky pale and placid beneath the clouds. Ferris dozed most of the day. Toward dark he was thinking of Elizabeth and the visit of the previous evening. He thought of Elizabeth among her family with longing, gentle envy and inexplicable regret. He sought the melody, the unfinished air, that had so moved him. The cadence, some unrelated tones, were all that remained; the melody itself evaded him. He had found instead the first voice of the fugue that Elizabeth had played—it came to him, inverted mockingly and in a minor key. Suspended above the ocean the anxieties of transience and solitude no longer troubled him and he thought of his father’s death with equanimity. During the dinner hour the plane reached the shore of France.

  At midnight Ferris was in a taxi crossing Paris. It was a clouded night and mist wreathed the lights of the Place de la Concorde. The midnight bistros gleamed on the wet pavements. As always after a transocean flight the change of continents was too sudden. New York at morning, this midnight Paris. Ferris glimpsed the disorder of his life: the succession of cities, of transitory loves; and time, the sinister glissando of the years, time always.

  ‘Vite! Vite!’ he called in terror. ‘Dépêchez-vous.’

  Valentin opened the door to him. The little boy wore pajamas and an outgrown red robe. His grey eyes were shadowed and, as Ferris passed into the flat, they flickered momentarily.

  ‘J’attends Maman.’

  Jeannine was singing in a night club. She would not be home before another hour. Valentin returned to a drawing, squatting with his crayons over the paper on the floor. Ferris looked down at the drawing—it was a banjo player with notes and wavy lines inside a comic-strip balloon.

  ‘We will go again to the Tuileries.’

  The child looked up and Ferris drew him closer to his knees. The melody, the unfinished music that Elizabeth had played, came to him suddenly. Unsought, the load of memory jettisoned—this time bringing only recognition and sudden joy.

  ‘Monsieur Jean,’ the child said, ‘did you see him?’

  Confused, Ferris thought only of another child—the freckled, family-loved boy. ‘See who, Valentin?’

  ‘Your dead papa in Georgia.’ The child added, ‘Was he okay?’

  Ferris spoke with rapid urgency: ‘We will go often to the Tuileries. Ride the pony and we will go into the guignol. We will see the puppet show and never be in a hurry any more.’

  ‘Monsieur Jean,’ Valentin said. ‘The guignol is now closed.’

  Again, the terror the acknowledgement of wasted years and death. Valentin, responsive and confident, still nestled in his arms. His cheek touched the soft cheek and felt the brush of the delicate eyelashes. With inner desperation he pressed the child close—as though an emotion as protean as his love could dominate the pulse of time.

  A Domestic Dilemma

  ON THURSDAY Martin Meadows left the office early enough to make the first express bus home. It was the hour when the evening lilac glow was fading in the slushy streets, but by the time the bus had left the Mid-town terminal the bright city night had come. On Thursdays the maid had a half-day off and Martin liked to get home as soon as possible, since for the past year his wife had not been—well. This Thursday he was very tired and, hoping that no regular commuter would single him out for conversation, he fastened his attention to the newspaper until the bus had crossed the George Washington Bridge. Once on 9-W Highway Martin always felt that the trip was halfway done, he breathed deeply, even in cold weather when only ribbons of draught cut through the smoky air of the bus, confident that he was breathing country air. It used to be that at this point he would relax and begin to think with pleasure of his home. But in this last year nearness brought only a sense of tension and he did not anticipate the journey’s end. This evening Martin kept his face close to the window and watched the barren fields and lonely lights of passing townships. There was a moon, pale on the dark earth and areas of late, porous snow; to Martin the countryside seemed vast and somehow desolate that evening. He took his hat from the rack and put his folded newspaper in the pocket of his overcoat a few minutes before time to pull the cord.

  The cottage was a block from the bus stop, near the river but not directly on the shore; from the living-room window you could look across the street and opposite yard and see the Hudson. The cottage was modern, almost too white and new on the narrow plot of yard. In summer the grass was soft and bright and Martin carefully tended a flower border and a rose trellis. But during the cold, fallow months the yard was bleak and the cottage seemed naked. Lights were on that evening in all the rooms in the little house and Martin hurried up the front walk. Before the steps he stopped to move a wagon out of the way.

  The children were in the living room, so intent on play that the opening of the front door was at first unnoticed. Martin stood looking at his safe, lovely children. They had opened the bottom drawer of the secretary and taken out the Christmas decorations. Andy had managed to plug in the Christmas tree lights and the green and red bulbs glowed with out-of-season festivity on the rug of the living room. At the moment he was trying to trail the bright cord over Marianne’s rocking horse. Marianne sat on the floor pulling off an angel’s wings. The children wailed a startling welcome. Martin swung the fat little baby girl up to his shoulder and Andy threw himself against his father’s legs.

  ‘Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!’

  Martin set down the little girl carefully and swung Andy a few times like a pendulum. Then he picked up the Christmas tree cord.

  ‘What’s all this stuff doing out? Help me put it back in the drawer. You’re not to fool with the light socket. Remember I told you that before. I mean it, Andy.’

  The six-year-old child nodded and shut the secretary drawer. Martin stroked his fair soft hair and his hand lingered tenderly on the nape of the child’s frail neck.

  ‘Had supper yet, Bumpkin?’

  ‘It hurt. The toast was hot.’

  The baby girl stumbled on the rug and, after the first surprise of the fall, began to cry; Martin picked her up and carried her in his arms back to the kitchen.

  ‘See, Daddy,’ said Andy. ‘The toast——’

  Emily had laid the children’s supper on the uncovered porcelain table. There were two plates with the remains of cream-of-wheat and eggs and silver mugs that had held milk. There was also a platter of cinnamon toast, untouched except for one tooth-marked bite. Martin sniffed the bitten piece and nibbled gingerly. Then he put the toast into the garbage pail.

  ‘Hoo—phui— What on earth!’

  Emily had mistaken the tin of cayenne for the cinnamon.

  ‘I like to have burnt up,’ Andy said. ‘Drank water and ran outdoors and opened my mouth. Marianne didn’t eat none.’

  ‘Any,’ corrected Martin. He stood helpless, looking around the walls of the kitchen. ‘Well, that’s that, I guess,’ he said finally. ‘Where is your mother now?’

  ‘She’s up in you all’s room.’

  Martin left th
e children in the kitchen and went up to his wife. Outside the door he waited for a moment to still his anger. He did not knock and once inside the room he closed the door behind him.

  Emily sat in the rocking chair by the window of the pleasant room. She had been drinking something from a tumbler and as he entered she put the glass hurriedly on the floor behind the chair. In her attitude there was confusion and guilt which she tried to hide by a show of spurious vivacity.

  ‘Oh, Marty! You home already? The time slipped up on me. I was just going down——’ She lurched to him and her kiss was strong with sherry. When he stood unresponsive she stepped back a pace and giggled nervously.

  ‘What’s the matter with you? Standing there like a barber pole. Is anything wrong with you?’

  ‘Wrong with me?” Martin bent over the rocking chair and picked up the tumbler from the floor. ‘If you could only realize how sick I am—how bad it is for all of us.’

  Emily spoke in a false, airy voice that had become too familiar to him. Often at such times she affected a slight English accent, copying perhaps some actress she admired. ‘I haven’t the vaguest idea what you mean. Unless you are referring to the glass I used for a spot of sherry. I had a finger of sherry—maybe two. But what is the crime in that, pray tell me? I’m quite all right. Quite all right.’

  ‘So anyone can see.’

  As she went into the bathroom Emily walked with careful gravity. She turned on the cold water and dashed some on her face with her cupped hands, then patted herself dry with the corner of a bath towel. Her face was delicately featured and young, unblemished.

  ‘I was just going down to make dinner.’ She tottered and balanced herself by holding to the door frame.

  ‘I’ll take care of dinner. You stay up here. I’ll bring it up.’

  ‘I’ll do nothing of the sort. Why, whoever heard of such a thing?’

  ‘Please,’ Martin said.

  ‘Leave me alone. I’m quite all right. I was just on the way down——’