The Complete Stories of Morley Callaghan - Volume Three

by Morley Callaghan

  With a dreamy grin Phil kept looking beyond the man’s head, beyond all the tables as if he were sniffing the rich odors from the food counter. But his heart gave a couple of jerks. And he had such a marvelously bright picture of himself going into the laundry in the morning and getting the shirts and putting on the light-blue one with the fine white stripe that he had paid seven dollars for a year ago in Philadelphia.

  But the drunk, having noticed him, was shaking his head at him. He was staring at Phil’s battered felt hat and his old coat and his mussy shirt. He didn’t like what he saw. It didn’t help to make him feel secure and in full possession of himself. The dreamy look on Phil’s face disgusted him.

  “Hey, dreamy,” he said, “what’s eating you?”

  “Me?”

  “Yeah, you, dreamy.”

  “I wasn’t looking at you. I’m making up my mind what I want.”

  “Excuse me, dreamy. Maybe you’re right. I’ve been making mistakes all evening and I don’t want to make any more,” he said.

  While he smiled at Phil a girl in a beige-colored coat spotted with raindrops and snow, a girl with untidy hair and with good legs and a pale face, came over and sat down at his table. An unpunched food check was in her hand. She put her elbows on the table and looked around as if she was waiting for someone. The dollar bill on the floor was about two feet away from her foot.

  The drunk rose from the table with considerable dignity and began to glide across the floor toward the cashier, his check held out with dreadful earnestness, his roll of bills tight in the other hand now. When he had gone about twenty feet Phil glanced at the girl, their eyes met in a wary appraisal of each other. They looked steadily at each other, neither one moving. Her eyes were blue and unwavering, and then, in spite of herself, her glance shifted to the floor before she had time to move.

  Phil lurched at the bill, one knee on the floor as he grabbed it, but she knew just where the bill was and her toe held it down with all her weight, unyielding as he tugged at it. While holding the bill he stared helplessly at her worn shoe that was wet, and then he looked at her ankle and the run in her stocking that went halfway up the calf of her leg. He knew she was bending down. Her face was close to his.

  “I guess it’s a saw-off,” he said, looking up.

  “Looks like it,” she said. She smiled a little in a hard, unyielding way.

  If she had taken her toe off the bill while they talked he mightn’t have done the thing he did, but she made him feel she was only waiting for him to straighten up and be friendly to draw the bill closer to her; and the expectation of having the dollar and getting the shirt had given him quite a lift too, so he said, shrugging good-humoredly, “What do you think we should do?”

  “What do you think yourself?”

  “Tell you what I’ll do,” he said. “Figuring maybe we both saw it at the same time and that we both need it, how about if I toss you for it?”

  She hesitated and said, “Seems fair enough, go ahead.”

  They both smiled as he took a nickel out from his vest pocket, and when she smiled like that he saw that she was quite young. There was a faint little bruise under her eye as though someone had hit her, but her face seemed to open out to him in spite of the pallor, the bruise and her untidy hair, and it was full of a sudden, wild breathless eagerness. “Heads I win, tails you win,” he said, getting ready to toss the coin.

  “Let it land on the table and don’t touch it and let it roll,” she said, nodding her head and leaning forward.

  “Watch me, lady,” he said, and he spun the coin beautifully and it rolled in a wide arc on the table around the little stand that held the sugar, mustard, vinegar, and horseradish. When it stopped spinning they leaned forward so quickly their heads almost bumped.

  “Heads, eh? Heads,” she said, but kept looking down at it as if she couldn’t see it. She was contemplating something, something in her head that was dreadful, a question maybe that found an answer in the coin on the table. Her face was close to his, and there were tears in her eyes, but she turned away and said faintly, “Okay, pal. It’s all yours.”

  She raised her foot and smiled a little while he bent down and picked up the bill.

  “Thanks,” he said. “Maybe you’re lucky in love.”

  “Very likely. More power to you,” she said, and she walked away and over to the cashier, where she handed in her unpunched food check.

  He watched her raising the collar of her beige coat that was spotted from the rain and snow. A little bit of hair was caught and held outside the collar. While she was speaking to the cashier he was looking at the coin flat in the palm of his hand, looking at it and feeling dreadfully ashamed. He turned it over slowly and it was heads on both sides, the lucky phony coin he had found a few years ago. And then he could hardly see the coin in his hand: he could see nothing but the expression on her face as she watched it spinning on the table; he heard her sigh, as if all the hope she had ever had in her life was put on the coin; he remembered how she had stiffened and then smiled: he felt that somehow her whole fate had depended on her having the bill. She had been close to it, just close enough to be tantalized, and then he had cheated her.

  She was going out, and he rushed after her, and saw her standing twenty feet away in the doorway of a cigar store. It was snowing again. She had walked through the snow; her bare shoes were carrying the snow as she stood there in the wet muddy entrance looking up and down the street. Before he could get near her she put her hands deep in her pockets and started to walk away rapidly with her head down.

  “Just a minute, lady. Hey, what’s the hurry?” he called.

  Unsmiling and wondering she turned and waited. “What’s the matter with you?” she said.

  “Do me a good turn, will you?”

  “Why should I?”

  “Why not if it don’t hurt?”

  “That depends on what it is,” she said.

  “Take the buck, will you, that’s all,” he said.

  She tried to figure him out a moment, then she said, “What is this, mister? You won it fair and square enough. Okay. Let it go at that.” Her face looked much harder, suddenly much older than it had in the restaurant.

  “No, I didn’t win it on the level,” he said. “Here, Miss, take it, please,” and he reached out and held her arm, but she pulled away from him frowning. He grew flustered. “That was a phony coin I tossed, don’t you see? I’ll show it to you if you want to. You didn’t have a chance.”

  “Then why with the big heart now?” she said.

  “I don’t know. I was watching you go out and I got a hunch it was worse for you than it was for me. You had a bigger stake in it . . . ” He went on pleading with her earnestly.

  Mystified, she said, “Look here, if you cheated me you cheated me and I might have known it would be phony anyway, but —”

  “I thought I needed the buck badly, but I felt lousy watching you go out. I needed to get my laundry tomorrow. I need a clean shirt. That’s what I was thinking watching the guy fingering the roll. And it was tough to see you come in on it. I didn’t stop to think. I just went after it.”

  She was listening earnestly as if his remorse truly puzzled her, and then she put out her hand and gave him a pat on the arm that made him feel like they knew each other well and had been together all evening, and that she was very old and he a green kid.

  “Listen, you figure a clean shirt will help you?” she said.

  “I figured it would give me a head start that’s all.”

  “Maybe it will. Go ahead. Get the shirt.”

  “No, please, you take it.”

  “A clean shirt won’t help me, not the price of one,” she said harshly. “So long,” she said, with that bright, unyielding smile.

  She walked away resolutely this time, as if she had made some final destructive decision, a decision she had dreaded and that she mightn’t have made if he hadn’t cheated her and she had got the dollar.

  Worried, he went t
o run after her, but he stopped, startled and shaken, perceiving the truth as she had seen it, that the dollar in the long run was no good to her, that it would need some vast upheaval that shook the earth to really change the structure of her life. Yet she had been willing to stop and help him.

  But the clean shirt became an absurd and trivial thing and the dollar felt unclean in his hand. He looked down the street at the tavern light. He had to get rid of the dollar or feel that he’d always see her walking away resolutely with her hands deep in her pockets.

  It Must Be Different

  Sylvia Weeks and Max Porter had known each other five months, but she’d never taken him home to her place till that autumn evening when they had walked in the streets after the show, and the rain had begun to fall.

  It had started when Max began suddenly to tell her that there was a real chance for him to get along in the radio business, and then her heart had begun to beat unevenly, for she became aware that he was getting ready to talk about wanting to marry her. He was so simple and honest about it that she became humble and shy, and they walked along silently, both anxious about what was to be said; and then the rain began to fall in large heavy drops. Ducking their heads, they ran along the street hand in hand and stood breathless on the stoop outside her place, watching the wet pavement shining under the street light.

  Sylvia could not bear to let him go as he had gone on other nights; it was as though they had looked for each other for months, and had now met suddenly face to face. That magical feeling was still flowing between them, and she couldn’t bear to let him go until all the necessary words had been said, or the things done that would hold them together forever.

  “Come on in for a little while, Max,” she said.

  “Are you sure it’ll be all right?”

  “I think they’ll be in bed,” she said.

  They laughed a little while she fumbled in her purse for her latchkey; then they tried to go in quietly. When they were in the hall, they heard someone coughing in the living room. Sylvia whispered uneasily: “I thought they’d be in bed.”

  “Maybe I’d better not come in,” he said.

  “Come on anyway,” she said.

  In the living room Sylvia’s mother, a large woman with a face that had been quite pretty once, but which was now soft and heavy, was standing with an alarm clock in her hand. She was on her way to bed and she had been urging her husband, who still sat in the armchair in his shirtsleeves and suspenders reading the paper, to go along with her, so he would not disturb her later on. When Sylvia came in with Max following shyly, the mother was flustered and began to tidy her gray hair with her hand. “We were on our way to bed. We were just waiting for you, Sylvia,” she said reproachfully.

  “We wanted to walk after the show, Mother; but it rained. This is Max, Mother,” Sylvia said.

  “Oh, hello, Max. We’ve heard about you.”

  “If it’s too late, I won’t stay, Mrs. Weeks.”

  “So you’re Max, eh?” the father said, getting up. He was a furniture maker who worked hard all day and who usually hurried out of the room when a visitor came in the evening; but now he stood staring at Max as if he had been wondering about him a long time.

  Mrs. Weeks, looking at Sylvia, said: “You must have been having a good time, dear. You look happy and kind of excited.”

  “I’m not excited. I was just hurrying in the rain,” Sylvia said.

  “I guess it’s just the rain and the hurrying that makes your eyes shine,” the mother said; but the free ecstatic eagerness she saw in her daughter’s face worried her, and her glance was troubled as she tried to make her husband notice that Sylvia’s face glowed with some secret delight that had come out of being with this boy, who was a stranger and might not be trustworthy. Sylvia and Max were standing underneath the light, and Sylvia with her flushed cheeks and her dark head seemed more marvelously eager than ever before. It was easy for them to feel the restlessness and the flowing warmth in her, and the love she had been giving; and then the mother and father, looking at Max, who seemed very boyish with his rain-wet hair shining under the light, smiled a little, not wanting to be hostile, yet feeling sure that Sylvia and this boy had touched some new intimacy that night.

  In a coaxing, worried voice Mrs. Weeks said: “Now don’t stay up late, Sylvia darling, will you?” Again her husband’s eyes met hers in that thoughtful, uneasy way; then they said pleasantly: “Good night, Max. We’re glad to meet you. Good night, Sylvia.” And then they went to bed.

  When they had gone, Max said: “They certainly made that pretty clear, didn’t they?”

  “Made what clear?”

  “That they wouldn’t trust me alone with my grandmother.”

  “They didn’t say anything at all, Max.”

  “Didn’t you see how they stared at me? I’ll bet they’re listening now.”

  “Is that why you’re whispering?”

  “Sure. They expect us to whisper, don’t they?”

  They sat down on the couch, but they both felt that if they caressed each other, or became gentle and tender, they were only making a beginning at something that was expected of them by the mother and father going to bed in the next room. So they were awkward and uneasy with each other. They felt like strangers. When he put his arm on her shoulder, it lay there heavy, and they were silent, listening to the rain falling outside.

  Then there was a sound in the hall, the sound of shuffling slippers, and when they looked up quickly, they saw a bit of her mother’s dressing gown sweeping past the door. Then the slippers were still. In a little while there was a worried, hesitant shuffling; then they came back again past the door.

  “Did you want something, Mother?” Sylvia asked.

  “No, nothing,” the mother said, looking in. She tried to smile, but she was a little ashamed, and she would not look directly at Sylvia.

  “I couldn’t get to sleep,” she said.

  “Aren’t you feeling well?”

  “I lie awake, you know. I hear every sound in here. I might just as well be in the room with you, I guess.” Then, with a half-ashamed droop of her head, she shuffled away.

  “Is she policing us?” Max asked irritably.

  “I think she’s just not feeling well.” Sylvia said.

  They both sat stiffly, listening, though she wanted to put her cheek down on Max’s shoulder. In a little while they heard the murmur of voices in the bedroom; and Sylvia knew that her father and mother were lying awake worrying about her. Out of their own memories, out of everything that had happened to them, they felt sure they knew what would be happening to her. The murmuring voices rose a little; the sounds were short and sharp as the mother and father wrangled and worried and felt helpless. Sylvia, trying hard to recover those moments she had thought so beautiful, hurrying along the street with Max, knew that it was no use, and that they were gone, and she felt miserable.

  “I think I’ll get out,” Max whispered.

  “Please don’t go now,” she coaxed. “It’s the first night we’ve felt like this. Please stay.”

  She wanted to soothe the anger and contempt out of him by rubbing her fingers through his hair; yet she only sat beside him stiffly, waiting, while the house grew silent, for warmth and eagerness to come again. It was so silent she thought she could hear the beating of his heart. She was ashamed to whisper. Max kept stirring uneasily, wanting to go.

  Then they were startled by the father’s voice calling roughly: “Sylvia!”

  “What is it?” she said.

  “What’s keeping you there? Why are you so quiet? What are you doing?”

  “Nothing.”

  “It’s getting late,” he called.

  She knew her father must have tried hard to stop himself calling out like that; yet she felt so humiliated she could not look at Max.

  “I’m getting out quick,” Max said.

  “All right. But it’s nothing; he’s just worrying,” she pleaded.

  “They’ve been lyi
ng in bed all the time listening.”

  “They’re very fond of me,” she said. “They’d do it, no matter what it was.”

  But hating the house and her people, he snapped at her, “Why don’t they put a padlock on you?”

  Then she felt that the feeling that had been so good between them, that she had tried to bring into the house and bring into her own life, could not last here, that his voice would never grow shy and hesitant as he fumbled for a few words here, that this was really what she was accustomed to and it was not good. She began to cry softly. “Don’t be sore, Max,” she said.

  “I’m not sore at you.”

  “They felt pretty sure they know how it goes; that’s all,” she pleaded with him. “They think it’ll have to go with me the way it went with them.”

  “That’s pretty plain.”

  “I don’t think either one of them want to see me get married. Nothing ever happened the right way for them. I can remember ever since I was a kid.”

  “Remember what?”

  “They parted once, and even now when they get mad, they’re suspicious of each other and wouldn’t trust each other around the block. But that was years ago, really,” she said, holding him tightly by the arm, and pleading that he understand the life in her home was not unhappy. “They’re both very fond of me,” she said apologetically. “They’ve had a tough time all their lives. We’ve been pretty poor, and — well — they worry about me, that’s all.”

  Her eyes looked so scared that Max was afraid to question her, and they stood together thinking of the mother and father lying awake in the bedroom.

  “I guess they feel that way about people, out of what’s happened to them, eh?” he said.

  “That’s it.”

  “Their life doesn’t have to be your life, does it?”