Carson McCullers

by Carson McCullers

‘I guess your mother must have gone to the movie or gone shopping or something.’

  ‘No,’ Hugh said. ‘She would have left a note. She always does when she’s gone when I come home from school.’

  ‘We haven’t looked for a note,’ John said. ‘Maybe she left it under the door mat or somewhere in the living room.’

  Hugh was inconsolable. ‘No. She would have left it right under this pie. She knows I always run first to the kitchen.’

  ‘Maybe she had a phone call or thought of something she suddenly wanted to do.’

  ‘She might have,’ he said. ‘I remember she said to Daddy that one of these days she was going to buy herself some new clothes.’ This flash of hope did not survive its expression. He pushed his hair back and started from the room. ‘I guess I’d better go upstairs. I ought to go upstairs while you are here.’

  He stood with his arm around the newel post; the smell of varnished stairs, the sight of the closed white bathroom door at the top revived again ‘the other time.’ He clung to the newel post, and his feet would not move to climb the stairs. The red turned again to whirling, sick dark. Hugh sat down. Stick your head between your legs, he ordered, remembering Scout first aid.

  ‘Hugh,’ John called. ‘Hugh!’

  The dizziness clearing, Hugh accepted a fresh chagrin—Laney was calling him by his ordinary first name; he thought he was a sissy about his mother, unworthy of being called by his last name in the grand, sporty way they used before. The dizziness cleared when he returned to the kitchen.

  ‘Brown,’ said John, and the chagrin disappeared. ‘Does this establishment have anything pertaining to a cow? A white, fluid liquid. In French they call it lait. Here we call it plain old milk.’

  The stupidity of shock lightened. ‘Oh, Laney, I am a dope! Please excuse me. I clean forgot.’ Hugh fetched the milk from the refrigerator and found two glasses. ‘I didn’t think. My mind was on something else.’

  ‘I know,’ John said. After a moment he asked in a calm voice, looking steadily at Hugh’s eyes: ‘Why are you so worried about your mother? Is she sick, Hugh?’

  Hugh knew now that the first name was not a slight; it was because John was talking too serious to be sporty. He liked John better than any friend he had ever had. He felt more natural sitting across the kitchen table from John, somehow safer. As he looked into John’s gray, peaceful eyes, the balm of affection soothed the dread.

  John asked again, still steadily: ‘Hugh, is your mother sick?’

  Hugh could have answered no other boy. He had talked with no one about his mother, except his father, and even those intimacies had been rare, oblique. They could approach the subject only when they were occupied with something else, doing carpentry work or the two times they hunted in the woods together—or when they were cooking supper or washing dishes.

  ‘She’s not exactly sick,’ he said, ‘but Daddy and I have been worried about her. At least, we used to be worried for a while.’

  John asked: ‘Is it a kind of heart trouble?’

  Hugh’s voice was strained. ‘Did you hear about that fight I had with that slob Clem Roberts? I scraped his slob face on the gravel walk and nearly killed him sure enough. He’s still got scars or at least he did have a bandage on for two days. I had to stay in school every afternoon for a week. But I nearly killed him. I would have if Mr. Paxton hadn’t come along and dragged me off.’

  ‘I heard about it.’

  ‘You know why I wanted to kill him?’

  For a moment John’s eyes flickered away.

  Hugh tensed himself; his raw boy hands clutched the table edge; he took a deep, hoarse breath. ‘That slob was telling everybody that my mother was in Milledgeville. He was spreading it around that my mother was crazy.’

  ‘The dirty bastard.’

  Hugh said in a clear, defeated voice, ‘My mother was in Milledgeville. But that doesn’t mean that she was crazy,’ he added quickly. ‘In that big State hospital, there are buildings for people who are crazy, and there are other buildings, for people who are just sick. Mamma was sick for a while. Daddy and me discussed it and decided that the hospital in Mil­ledgeville was the place where there were the best doctors and she would get the best care. But she was the furtherest from crazy than anybody in the world. You know Mamma, John.’ He said again ‘I ought to go upstairs.’

  John said: ‘I have always thought that your mother is one of the nicest ladies in this town.’

  ‘You see, Mamma had a peculiar thing happen, and afterward she was blue.’

  Confession, the first deep-rooted words, opened the festered secrecy of the boy’s heart, and he continued more rapidly, urgent and finding unforeseen relief.

  ‘Last year my mother thought she was going to have a little baby. She talked it over with Daddy and me,’ he said proudly. ‘We wanted a girl. I was going to choose the name. We were so tickled. I hunted up all my old toys—my electric train and the tracks . . . I was going to name her Crystal—how does the name strike you for a girl? It reminds me of something bright and dainty.’

  ‘Was the little baby born dead?’

  Even with John, Hugh’s ears turned hot; his cold hands touched them. ‘No, it was what they call a tumor. That’s what happened to my mother. They had to operate at the hospital here.’ He was embarrassed and his voice was very low. ‘Then she had something called change of life.’ The words were terrible to Hugh. ‘And afterward she was blue. Daddy said it was a shock to her nervous system. It’s something that happens to ladies; she was just blue and run-down.’

  Although there was no red, no red in the kitchen anywhere, Hugh was approaching ‘the other time.’

  ‘One day, she just sort of gave up—one day last fall.’ Hugh’s eyes were wide open and glaring: again he climbed the stairs and opened the bathroom door—he put his hand to his eyes to shut out the memory. ‘She tried to—hurt herself. I found her when I came in from school.’

  John reached out and carefully stroked Hugh’s sweatered arm.

  ‘Don’t worry. A lot of people have to go to hospitals because they are run-down and blue. Could happen to anybody.’

  ‘We had to put her in the hospital—the best hospital.’ The recollection of those long, long months was stained with a dull loneliness, as cruel in its lasting unappeasement as ‘the other time’—how long had it lasted? In the hospital Mamma could walk around and she always had on shoes.

  John said carefully: ‘This pie is certainly super.’

  ‘My mother is a super cook. She cooks things like meat pie and salmon loaf—as well as steaks and hot dogs.’

  ‘I hate to eat and run,’ John said.

  Hugh was so frightened of being left alone that he felt the alarm in his own loud heart.

  ‘Don’t go,’ he urged. ‘Let’s talk for a little while.’

  ‘Talk about what?’

  Hugh could not tell him. Not even John Laney. He could tell no one of the empty house and the horror of the time before. ‘Do you ever cry?’ he asked John. ‘I don’t.’

  ‘I do sometimes,’ John admitted.

  ‘I wish I had known you better when Mother was away. Daddy and me used to go hunting nearly every Saturday. We lived on quail and dove. I bet you would have liked that.’ He added in a lower tone, ‘On Sunday we went to the hospital.’

  John said: ‘It’s a kind of a delicate proposition selling those tickets. A lot of people don’t enjoy the High School Glee Club operettas. Unless they know someone in it personally, they’d rather stay home with a good TV show. A lot of people buy tickets on the basis of being public-spirited.’

  ‘We’re going to get a television set real soon.’

  ‘I couldn’t exist without television,’ John said.

  Hugh’s voice was apologetic. ‘Daddy wants to clean up the hospital bills first because as everybody knows sickness is a very expensive proposition. Then we’ll get TV.’

  John lifted his milk glass. ‘Skoal,’ he said. ‘That’s a Swedish word you say befor
e you drink. A good-luck word.’

  ‘You know so many foreign words and languages.’

  ‘Not so many,’ John said truthfully. ‘Just “kaput” and “adios” and “skoal” and stuff we learn in French class. That’s not much.’

  ‘That’s beaucoup,’ said Hugh, and he felt witty and pleased with himself.

  Suddenly the stored tension burst into physical activity. Hugh grabbed the basketball out on the porch and rushed into the back yard. He dribbled the ball several times and aimed at the goal his father had put up on his last birthday. When he missed he bounced the ball to John, who had come after him. It was good to be outdoors and the relief of natural play brought Hugh the first line of a poem. ‘My heart is like a basketball.’ Usually when a poem came to him he would lie sprawled on the living room floor, studying to hunt rhymes, his tongue working on the side of his mouth. His mother would call him Shelley-Poe when she stepped over him, and sometimes she would put her foot lightly on his behind. His mother always liked his poems; today the second line came quickly, like magic. He said it out loud to John: ‘ “My heart is like a basketball, bouncing with glee down the hall.” How do you like that for the start of a poem?’

  ‘Sounds kind of crazy to me,’ John said. Then he corrected himself hastily. ‘I mean it sounds—odd. Odd, I meant.’

  Hugh realized why John changed the word, and the elation of play and poems left him instantly. He caught the ball and stood with it cradled in his arms. The afternoon was golden and the wisteria vine on the porch was in full, unshattered bloom. The wisteria was like lavender waterfalls. The fresh breeze smelled of sun-warmed flowers. The sunlit sky was blue and cloudless. It was the first warm day of spring.

  ‘I have to shove off,’ John said.

  ‘No!’ Hugh’s voice was desperate. ‘Don’t you want another piece of pie? I never heard of anybody eating just one piece of pie.’

  He steered John into the house and this time he called only out of habit because he always called on coming in. ‘Mother!’ He was cold after the bright, sunny outdoors. He was cold not only because of the weather but because he was so scared.

  ‘My mother has been home a month and every afternoon she’s always here when I come home from school. Always, always.’

  They stood in the kitchen looking at the lemon pie. And to Hugh the cut pie looked somehow—odd. As they stood motionless in the kitchen the silence was creepy and odd too.

  ‘Doesn’t this house seem quiet to you?’

  ‘It’s because you don’t have television. We put on our TV at seven o’clock and it stays on all day and night until we go to bed. Whether anybody’s in the living room or not. There’re plays and skits and gags going on continually.’

  ‘We have a radio, of course, and a vic.’

  ‘But that’s not the company of a good TV. You won’t know when your mother is in the house or not when you get TV.’

  Hugh didn’t answer. Their footsteps sounded hollow in the hall. He felt sick as he stood on the first step with his arm around the newel post. ‘If you could just come upstairs for a minute——’

  John’s voice was suddenly impatient and loud. ‘How many times have I told you I’m obligated to sell those tickets. You have to be public-spirited about things like Glee Clubs.’

  ‘Just for a second—I have something important to show you upstairs.’

  John did not ask what it was and Hugh sought desperately to name something important enough to get John upstairs. He said finally: ‘I’m assembling a hi-fi machine. You have to know a lot about electronics—my father is helping me.’

  But even when he spoke he knew John did not for a second believe the lie. Who would buy a hi-fi when they didn’t have television? He hated John, as you hate people you have to need so badly. He had to say something more and he straightened his shoulders.

  ‘I just want you to know how much I value your friendship. During these past months I had somehow cut myself off from people.’

  ‘That’s O.K., Brown. You oughtn’t to be so sensitive because your mother was—where she was.’

  John had his hand on the door and Hugh was trembling. ‘I thought if you could come up for just a minute——’

  John looked at him with anxious, puzzled eyes. Then he asked slowly: ‘Is there something you are scared of upstairs?’

  Hugh wanted to tell him everything. But he could not tell what his mother had done that September afternoon. It was too terrible and—odd. It was like something a patient would do, and not like his mother at all. Although his eyes were wild with terror and his body trembled he said: ‘I’m not scared.’

  ‘Well, so long. I’m sorry I have to go—but to be obligated is to be obligated.’

  John closed the front door, and he was alone in the empty house. Nothing could save him now. Even if a whole crowd of boys were listening to TV in the living room, laughing at funny gags and jokes, it would still not help him. He had to go upstairs and find her. He sought courage from the last thing John had said, and repeated the words aloud: ‘To be obligated is to be obligated.’ But the words did not give him any of John’s thoughtlessness and courage; they were creepy and strange in the silence.

  He turned slowly to go upstairs. His heart was not like a basketball but like a fast, jazz drum, beating faster and faster as he climbed the stairs. His feet dragged as though he waded through knee-deep water and he held on to the banisters. The house looked odd, crazy. As he looked down at the ground-floor table with the vase of fresh spring flowers that too looked somehow peculiar. There was a mirror on the second floor and his own face startled him, so crazy did it seem to him. The initial of his high school sweater was backward and wrong in the reflection and his mouth was open like an asylum idiot. He shut his mouth and he looked better. Still the objects he saw—the table downstairs, the sofa upstairs—looked somehow cracked or jarred because of the dread in him, although they were the familiar things of everyday. He fastened his eyes on the closed door at the right of the stairs and the fast, jazz drum beat faster.

  He opened the bathroom door and for a moment the dread that had haunted him all that afternoon made him see again the room as he had seen it ‘the other time.’ His mother lay on the floor and there was blood everywhere. His mother lay there dead and there was blood everywhere, on her slashed wrist, and a pool of blood had trickled to the bathtub and lay dammed there. Hugh touched the doorframe and steadied himself. Then the room settled and he realized this was not ‘the other time.’ The April sunlight brightened the clean white tiles. There was only bathroom brightness and the sunny window. He went to the bedroom and saw the empty bed with the rose-colored spread. The lady things were on the dresser. The room was as it always looked and nothing had happened . . . nothing had happened and he flung himself on the quilted rose bed and cried from relief and a strained, bleak tiredness that had lasted so long. The sobs jerked his whole body and quieted his jazz, fast heart.

  Hugh had not cried all those months. He had not cried at ‘the other time,’ when he found his mother alone in that empty house with blood everywhere. He had not cried but he made a Scout mistake. He had first lifted his mother’s heavy, bloody body before he tried to bandage her. He had not cried when he called his father. He had not cried those few days when they were deciding what to do. He hadn’t even cried when the doctor suggested Milledgeville, or when he and his father took her to the hospital in the car—although his father cried on the way home. He had not cried at the meals they made—steak every night for a whole month so that they felt steak was running out of their eyes, their ears; then they had switched to hot dogs, and ate them until hot dogs ran out of their ears, their eyes. They got in ruts of food and were messy about the kitchen, so that it was never nice except the Saturday the cleaning woman came. He did not cry those lonesome afternoons after he had the fight with Clem Roberts and felt the other boys were thinking queer things of his mother. He stayed at home in the messy kitchen, eating fig newtons or chocolate bars. Or he went to se
e a neighbor’s television—Miss Richards, an old maid who saw old-maid shows. He had not cried when his father drank too much so that it took his appetite and Hugh had to eat alone. He had not even cried on those long, waiting Sundays when they went to Milledgeville and he twice saw a lady on a porch without any shoes on and talking to herself. A lady who was a patient and who struck at him with a horror he could not name. He did not cry when at first his mother would say: Don’t punish me by making me stay here. Let me go home. He had not cried at the terrible words that haunted him—‘change of life’—‘crazy’—‘Milledgeville’—he could not cry all during those long months strained with dullness and want and dread.

  He still sobbed on the rose bedspread which was soft and cool against his wet cheeks. He was sobbing so loud that he did not hear the front door open, did not even hear his mother call or the footsteps on the stairs. He still sobbed when his mother touched him and burrowed his face hard in the spread. He even stiffened his legs and kicked his feet.

  ‘Why, Loveyboy,’ his mother said, calling him a long-ago child name. ‘What’s happened?’

  He sobbed even louder, although his mother tried to turn his face to her. He wanted her to worry. He did not turn around until she had finally left the bed, and then he looked at her. She had on a different dress—blue silk it looked like in the pale spring light.

  ‘Darling, what’s happened?’

  The terror of the afternoon was over, but he could not tell it to his mother. He could not tell her what he had feared, or explain the horror of things that were never there at all—but had once been there.

  ‘Why did you do it?’

  ‘The first warm day I just suddenly decided to buy myself some new clothes.’

  But he was not talking about clothes; he was thinking about ‘the other time’ and the grudge that had started when he saw the blood and horror and felt why did she do this to me. He thought of the grudge against the mother he loved the most in the world. All those last, sad months the anger had bounced against the love with guilt between.

  ‘I bought two dresses and two petticoats. How do you like them?’