Carson McCullers

by Carson McCullers

  Now at the cocktail party, years later, the noise, the assurance and the sense of his own separateness recalled the cafeteria breakfast and this hour was still more desolate because of the sliding passage of time.

  “There’s Marian,” Mabel said. “She looks tired, thinner.”

  “If the damned Guggenheim had renewed my fellowship I was going to take Marian to Europe for a year,” he said. “The damned Guggenheim—they don’t give grants to creative writers any more. Just physicists—people like that who are preparing for another war.”

  The war had come as a relief to Ken. He was glad to abandon the book that was going badly, relieved to turn from his “phantom rock” to the general experience of those days—for surely the war was the great experience of his generation. He was graduated from Officers’ Training School and when Marian saw him in his uniform she cried and loved him and there was no further talk of divorce. On his last leave they made love often as they used to do in the first months of marriage. It rained every day in England and once he was invited by a lord to his castle. He crossed on D-Day and his battalion went all the way to Schmitz. In a cellar in a ruined town he saw a cat sniffing the face of a corpse. He was afraid, but it was not the blank terror of the cafeteria or the anxiety of a white page on the typewriter. Something was always happening—he found three Westphalian hams in the chimney of a peasant’s house and he broke his arm in an automobile accident. The war was the great experience of his generation, and to a writer every day was automatically of value because it was the war. But when it was over what was there to write about—the calm cat and the corpse, the lord in England, the broken arm?

  In the Village apartment he returned to the book he had left so long. For a time, that year after the war, there was the sense of a writer’s gladness when he has written. A time when the voice from childhood, a song on the corner, all fitted. In the strange euphoria of his lonely work the world was synthesized. He was writing of another time, another place. He was writing of his youth in the windy, gritty Texas city that was his home town. He wrote of the rebellion of youth and the longing for the brilliant cities, the homesickness for a place he’d never seen. While he was writing One Summer Evening he was living in an apartment in New York but his inner life was in Texas and the distance was more than space: it was the sad distance between middle age and youth. So when he was writing his book he was split between two realities—his New York daily life and the remembered cadence of his Texas youth. When the book was published and the reviews were careless or unkind, he took it well, he thought, until the days of desolation stretched one into the other and the terror started. He did odd things at this time. Once he locked himself in the bathroom and stood holding a bottle of Lysol in his hand, just standing there holding the Lysol, trembling and terrified. He stood there for half an hour until with a great effort he slowly poured the Lysol in the lavatory. Then he lay on the bed and wept until, toward the end of the afternoon, he went to sleep. Another time he sat in the open window and let a dozen blank pages of paper float down the six stories to the street below. The wind blew the papers as he dropped them one by one, and he felt a strange elation as he watched them float away. It was less the meaninglessness of these actions than the extreme tension accompanying them that made Ken realize he was sick.

  Marian suggested he go to a psychiatrist and he said psychiatry had become an avant-garde method of playing with yourself. Then he laughed, but Marian did not laugh and his solitary laughter finished in a chill of fear. In the end Marian went to the psychiatrist and Ken was jealous of them both—of the doctor because he was the arbiter of the unhappy marriage and of her because she was calmer and he was more unhinged. That year he wrote some television scripts, made a couple of thousand dollars and bought Marian a leopard coat.

  “Are you doing any more television programs?” Mabel Goodley asked.

  “Naw,” he said, “I’m trying very hard to get into my next book. You’re the only honest person I know. I can talk with you . . .”

  Freed by alcohol and secure in friendship (for after all Mabel was one of his favorite people), he began to talk of the book he had tried so long to do: “The dominant theme is the theme of self-betrayal and the central character is a small-town lawyer named Winkle. The setting is laid in Texas—my home town—and most of the scenes take place in the grimy office in the town’s courthouse. In the opening of the book Winkle is faced with this situation . . .” Ken unfurled his story passionately, telling of the various characters and the motivations involved. When Marian came up he was still talking and he gestured to her not to interrupt him as he talked on, looking straight into Mabel’s spectacled blue eyes. Then suddenly he had the uncanny sensation of a déjà vu. He felt he had told Mabel his book before—in the same place and in the same circumstance. Even the way the curtain moved was the same. Only Mabel’s blue eyes brightened with tears behind the glasses, and he was joyful that she was so much moved. “So Winkle then was impelled to divorce—” his voice faltered. “I have the strange feeling I have told you this before . . .”

  Mabel waited for a moment and he was silent. “You have, Ken,” she said finally. “About six or seven years ago, and at a party very much like this one.”

  He could not stand the pity in her eyes or the shame that pulsed in his own body. He staggered up and stumbled over his drink.

  After the roar in the cocktail room the little terrace was absolutely silent. Except for the wind, which increased the sense of desertion and solitude. To dull his shame Ken said aloud something inconsequential: “Why, what on earth—” and he smiled with weak anguish. But his shame still smoldered and he put his cold hand to his hot, throbbing forehead. It was no longer snowing, but the wind lifted flurries of snow on the white terrace. The length of the terrace was about six footsteps and Ken walked very slowly, watching with growing attention his blunted footsteps in his narrow shoes. Why did he watch those footsteps with such tension? And why was he standing there, alone on the winter terrace where the light from the party room laid a sickly yellow rectangle on the snow? And the footsteps? At the end of the terrace there was a little fence about waist-high. When he leaned against the fence he knew it was very loose and he felt he had known that it would be loose and remained leaning against it. The penthouse was on the fifteenth floor and the lights from the city glowed before him. He was thinking that if he gave the rickety fence one push he would fall, but he remained calm against the sagging fence, his mind somehow sheltered, content.

  He felt inexcusably disturbed when a voice called from the terrace. It was Marian and she cried softly: “Aah! Aah!” Then after a moment she added: “Ken, come here. What are you doing out here?” Ken stood up. Then with his balance righted he gave the fence a slight push. It did not break. “This fence is rotten—snow probably. I wonder how many people have ever committed suicide here.”

  “How many?”

  “Sure. It’s such an easy thing.”

  “Come back.”

  Very carefully he walked on the backward footprints he had made before. “It must be an inch of snow.” He stooped down and felt the snow with his middle finger. “No, two inches.”

  “I’m cold.” Marian put her hand on his coat, opened the door and steered him into the party. The room was quieter now and people were going home. In the bright light, after the dark outside, Ken saw that Marian looked tired. Her black eyes were reproachful, harried, and Ken could not bear to look into them.

  “Hon, do your sinuses bother you?”

  Lightly her forefinger stroked her forehead and the bridge of her nose. “It worries me so when you get in this condition.”

  “Condition! Me?”

  “Let’s put on our things and go.”

  But he could not stand the look in Marian’s eyes and he hated her for inferring he was drunk. “I’m going to Jim Johnson’s party later.”

  After the search for overcoats and the ragged good-bys a little group went down in the elevator and stood on the sid
ewalk, whistling for cabs. They discussed addresses, and Marian, the editor and Ken shared the first taxi going downtown. Ken’s shame was lulled a little, and in the taxi he began to talk about Mabel.

  “It’s so sad about Mabel,” he said.

  “What do you mean?” Marian asked.

  “Everything. She’s obviously going apart at the seams. Disintegrating, poor thing.”

  Marian, who did not like the conversation, said to Howards: “Shall we go through the park? It’s nice when it snows, and quicker.”

  “I’ll go on to Fifth and Fourteenth Street,” Howards said. He said to the driver: “Go through the park, please.”

  “The trouble with Mabel is she is a has-been. Ten years ago she used to be an honest painter and set-designer. Maybe it’s a failure of imagination or drinking too much. She’s lost her honesty and does the same thing over and over—repeats over and over.”

  “Nonsense,” Marian said. “She gets better every year and she’s made a lot of money.”

  They were driving through the park and Ken watched the winter landscape. The snow was heavy on the park trees and occasionally the wind slid the banked snow from the boughs, although the trees did not bow down. In the taxi Ken began to recite the old nursery verse about the wind, and again the words left sinister echoes and his cold palms dampened.

  “I haven’t thought of that jingle in years,” John Howards said.

  “Jingle? It’s as harrowing as Dostoevski.”

  “I remember we used to sing it in kindergarten. And when a child had a birthday there would be a blue or pink ribbon on the tiny chair and we would then sing Happy Birthday.”

  John Howards was hunched on the edge of the seat next to Marian. It was hard to imagine this tall, lumbering editor in his huge galoshes singing in a kindergarten years ago.

  Ken asked: “Where did you come from?”

  “Kalamazoo,” Howards said.

  “I always wondered if there really was such a place or a—figure of speech.”

  “It was and is such a place,” Howards said. “The family moved to Detroit when I was ten years old.” Again Ken felt a sense of strangeness and thought that there are certain people who have preserved so little of childhood that the mention of kindergarten chairs and family moves seem somehow outlandish. He suddenly conceived a story written about such a man—he would call it The Man in the Tweed Suit—and he brooded silently as the story evolved in his mind with a brief flash of the old elation that came so seldom now.

  “The weatherman says it’s going down to zero tonight,” Marian said.

  “You can drop me here,” Howards said to the driver as he opened his wallet and handed some money to Marian. “Thanks for letting me share the cab. And that’s my part,” he added with a smile. “It’s so good to see you again. Let’s have lunch one of these days and bring your husband if he would care to come.” After he stumbled out of the taxi he called to Ken, “I’m looking forward to your next book, Harris.”

  “Idiot,” Ken said after the cab started again. “I’ll drop you home and then stop for a moment at Jim Johnson’s.”

  “Who’s he—why do you have to go?”

  “He’s a painter I know and I was invited.”

  “You take up with so many people these days. You go around with one crowd and then shift to another.”

  Ken knew that the observation was true, but he could not help it. In the past few years he would associate with one group—for a long time he and Marian had different circles of friends—until he would get drunk or make a scene so that the whole periphery was unpleasant to him and he felt angry and unwanted. Then he would change to another circle—and every change was to a group less stable than the one before, with shabbier apartments and cheaper drinks. Now he was glad to go wherever he was invited, to strangers where a voice might guide him and the flimsy sheaves of alcohol solace his jagged nerves.

  “Ken, why don’t you get help? I can’t go on with this.”

  “Why, what’s the matter?”

  “You know,” she said. He could feel her tense and stiff in the taxicab. “Are you really going on to another party? Can’t you see you are destroying yourself? Why were you leaning against that terrace fence? Don’t you realize you are—sick? Come home.”

  The words disturbed him, but he could not bear the thought of going home with Marian tonight. He had a presentiment that if they were alone in the apartment something dreadful might come about, and his nerves warned him of this undefined disaster.

  In the old days after a cocktail party they would be glad to go home alone, talk over the party with a few quiet drinks, raid the icebox and go to bed, secure against the world outside. Then one evening after a party something had happened—he had a blackout and said or did something he could not remember and did not want to remember; afterward there was only the smashed typewriter and shafts of shameful recollection that he could not face and the memory of her fearful eyes. Marian stopped drinking and tried to talk him into joining AA. He went with her to a meeting and even stayed on the wagon with her for five days—until the horror of the unremembered night was a little distant. Afterward, when he had to drink alone, he resented her milk and her eternal coffee and she resented his drinking liquor. In this tense situation he felt the psychiatrist was somehow responsible and wondered if he had hypnotized Marian. Anyway now the evenings were spoiled and unnatural. Now he could feel her sitting upright in the taxi and he wanted to kiss her as in the old days when they were going home after a party. But her body was stiff in his embrace.

  “Hon, let’s be like we used to be. Let’s go home and get a buzz on peacefully and hash over the evening. You used to love to do that. You used to enjoy a few drinks when we were quiet, alone. Drink with me and cozy like in the old days. I’ll skip the other party if you will. Please, Hon. You’re not one bit alcoholic. And it makes me feel like a lush your not drinking—I feel unnatural. And you’re not a bit alcoholic, no more than I am.”

  “I’ll fix a bowl of soup and you can turn in.” But her voice was hopeless and sounded smug to Ken. Then she said: “I’ve tried so hard to keep our marriage and to help you. But it’s like struggling in quicksand. There’s so much behind the drinking and I’m so tired.”

  “I’ll be just a minute at the party—go on with me.”

  “I can’t go on.”

  The cab stopped and Marian paid the fare. She asked as she left the cab, “Do you have enough money to go on?—if you must go on.”

  “Naturally.”

  Jim Johnson’s apartment was way over on the West Side, in a Puerto Rican neighborhood. Open garbage cans stood out on the curb and wind blew papers on the snowy sidewalk. When the taxi stopped Ken was so inattentive that the driver had to call him. He looked at the meter and opened his billfold—he had not one single dollar bill, only fifty cents, which was not enough. “I’ve run out of money, except this fifty cents,” Ken said, handing the driver the money. “What shall I do?”

  The driver looked at him. “Nothing, just get out. There’s nothing to be done.”

  Ken got out. “Fifteen cents over and no tip—sorry—”

  “You should have taken the money from the lady.”

  This party was held on the walk-up top floor of a cold-water flat and layered smells of cooking were at each landing of the stairs. The room was crowded, cold, and the gas jets were burning blue on the stove, the oven open for warmth. Since there was little furniture except a studio couch, most of the guests sat on the floor. There were rows of canvases propped against the wall and on an easel a picture of a purple junk yard and two green suns. Ken sat down on the floor next to a pink-cheeked young man wearing a brown leather jacket.

  “It’s always somehow soothing to sit in a painter’s studio. Painters don’t have the problems writers have. Who ever heard of a painter getting stuck? They have something to work with—the canvas to be prepared, the brush and so on. Where as a blank page—painters aren’t neurotic as many writers are.”
/>   “I don’t know,” the young man said. “Didn’t van Gogh cut off his ear?”

  “Still the smell of paint, the colors and the activity is soothing. Not like a blank page and a silent room. Painters can whistle when they work or even talk to people.”

  “I know a painter once who killed his wife.”

  When Ken was offered rum punch or sherry, he took sherry and it tasted metallic as though coins had been soaked in it.

  “You a painter?”

  “No,” said the young man. “A writer—that is, I write.”

  “What is your name?”

  “It wouldn’t mean anything to you. I haven’t published my book yet.” After a pause he added: “I had a short story in Bolder Accent—it’s one of the little magazines—maybe you’ve heard of it.”

  “How long have you been writing?”

  “Eight—ten years. Of course I have to do part-time jobs on the outside, enough to eat and pay the rent.”

  “What kind of jobs do you do?”

  “All kinds. Once for a year I had a job in a morgue. It was wonderful pay and I could do my own work four or five hours every day. But after about a year I began to feel the job was not good for my work. All those cadavers—so I changed to a job frying hot dogs at Coney Island. Now I’m a night clerk in a real crummy hotel. But I can work at home all afternoon and at night I can think over my book—and there’s lots of human interest on the job. Future stories, you know.”

  “What makes you think you are a writer?”

  The eagerness faded from the young man’s face and when he pressed his fingers to his flushed cheek they left white marks. “Just because I know. I have worked so hard and I have faith in my talent.” He went on after a pause. “Of course one story in a little magazine after ten years is not such a brilliant beginning. But think of the struggles nearly every writer has—even the great geniuses. I have time and determination—and when this last novel finally breaks into print the world will recognize the talent.”