The Complete Stories of Morley Callaghan - Volume Three

by Morley Callaghan

  By this time his mother had got up and was trying to remember where she had put the purse when she’d come in from the store. In the way of a big woman, she moved around slowly, with a faraway expression in her eyes. The purse was large, black and flat leather, but there was never a time when his mother had been able to get up and know exactly where her purse was, though she always pretended she was going directly to where she had placed it.

  Now she was at the point where her eyes were anxious as she tried to remember. Her husband, making loud clucking noises with his tongue, took off his glasses and said solemnly, “I warn you, Mrs. McArthur, you’ll lose that purse some day, and then there’ll be trouble and you’ll be satisfied.”

  She looked at him impatiently. “See if you can find my purse, will you, son?” she begged Hal, and he got up to help, as he had done since he was a little boy.

  Because he remembered that his mother sometimes put her purse under the pillow on her bed, he went to look in the bedroom. When he got to the door, which was half-closed, and looked in, he saw Mary standing in front of the dresser with her mother’s purse in her hands. He saw at once that she had just taken out a bill and was slipping it into her own purse — he saw that it was several bills. He ducked back into the hall before she could catch sight of him. He felt helpless; he couldn’t bear that she should see him.

  Mary, coming out of the bedroom, called, “I found it. Here it is. Mother!”

  “Where did you find it, darling?”

  “Under your pillow.”

  “Ah, that’s right. Now I remember,” she said, and looked at her husband triumphantly, for she never failed to enjoy finding the purse just when it seemed to be lost forever.

  As Mary handed the purse to her mother, she was smiling, cool, and unperturbed, yet Hal knew she had put several dollars into her own purse. It seemed terrible that she was able to smile and hide her thoughts like that when they had all been so close together for so many years.

  “I never have the slightest fear that it’s really lost,” the mother said, beaming. Then they watched her, as they had watched her for years after she had found her purse; she was counting the little roll of bills. Her hand went up to her mouth. She looked thoughtful, she looked down into the depths of the purse again, and they waited, as if expecting her to cry out suddenly that the money was not all there. Then, sighing, she took out a bill, handed it to Mary, and it was over, and they never knew what she thought.

  “Good night, Mother. Good night, Dad,” Mary said.

  “Good night, and don’t be late. I worry when you’re late!”

  “So long, Hal.”

  “Just a minute,” Hal called, and he followed Mary out to the hall. The groping, wondering expression on his moth-er’s face as she counted her money had made him feel savage.

  He grabbed Mary by the arm just as she was opening the door. “Wait a minute,” he whispered.

  “What’s the matter, Hal? You’re hurting my arm.”

  “Give that money back to them. I saw you take it.”

  “Hal, I needed it.” She grew terribly ashamed and could not look at him. “I wouldn’t take it if I didn’t need it pretty bad,” she whispered.

  They could hear their father making some provoking remark, and they could hear the easy, triumphant answer of their mother. Without looking up, Mary began to cry, then she raised her head and begged in a frightened whisper, “Don’t tell them, Hal. Please don’t tell them.”

  “If you need the money, why didn’t you ask them for it?”

  “I’ve been asking for a little nearly every day.”

  “You only look after yourself, and you get plenty for that.”

  “Hal, let me keep it. Don’t tell them.”

  Her hand tightened on his arm as she pleaded with him. Her face was now close against his, but he was so disgusted with her he tried to push her away. When she saw that he was treating her as though she were a cheap thief, she looked helpless and whispered, “I’ve got to do something. I’ve been sending money to Paul Farrell.”

  “Where is he?”

  “He’s gone to a sanitarium, and he had no money,” she said.

  In the moment while they stared at each other, he was thinking of the few times she had brought Paul Farrell to their place, and of the one night when her parents had found out that his lung was bad. They had made her promise not to see him any more, thinking it was a good thing to do before she went any further with him.

  “You promised them you’d forget about him,” he said.

  “I married him before he went away,” she said. “It takes a lot to look after him. I try to keep enough out of my pay every week to pay for my lunches and my board here, but I never seem to have enough left for Paul, and then I don’t know what to do.”

  “You’re crazy. He’ll die on your hands,” he whispered. “Or you’ll have to go on keeping him.”

  “He’ll get better,” she said. “He’ll be back in maybe a year.”

  There was such fierceness in her words, and her eyes shone with such ardor that he didn’t know what to say to her. With a shy smile, she said, “Don’t tell them, Hal.”

  “Okay,” he said, and watched her open the door and go out. He went back to the living room, where his mother was saying grandly to his father, “Now you’ll have to wait till next year to cry blue ruin.” His father grinned and ducked his head behind his paper.

  “Don’t worry. There’ll soon be a next time,” he said.

  “What did you want to say to Mary?” his mother asked.

  “I just wanted to know if she was going my way, and she wasn’t,” Hal said.

  And when Hal remembered Mary’s frightened, imploring eyes, he knew he would keep his promise and say nothing to them. He was thinking how far apart he had grown from them; they knew very little about Mary, but these days he never told them anything about himself, either. Only his father and mother, they alone, were still close together.

  Magic Hat

  It was not true that Jeannie Warkle had been too easy for Joe Stanin. No truer than saying Joe had been too easy for her. It had worked both ways, and that was how they wanted it. She knew she belonged to him the first time they met, at the end of the summer when she had been modeling sports clothes for Wentmore, who had given a party for visiting professional golfers. Joe was a commercial artist with the agency that handled the Wentmore account and he had wanted to meet some of the big-name golfers, but instead, he had met her modeling a gray flannel ski suit with a ridiculous plunging neckline. The first thing she had said to him was that she, herself, wouldn’t dream of wearing it skiing without a heavy scarf around her neck.

  He, too, had known that in some way they were committed to each other, but he had said frankly, “I don’t want to settle down. Not for years. I know it’s a crazy independence in me, but at least I like a girl to feel the same way. We must never feel we have any strings on each other, Jeannie. And anyway, they’re moving me to New York in the winter. I’m a bad lot, Jeannie, and I can’t do you any good.”

  Knowing there could be nothing in it for her but the happiness they got out of being together made her love for him seem like a gift more precious than if she had demanded some security, and anyway, no promise he could have given her would have been as good as his free and happy gentle lovemaking.

  When January came and it was time for Joe to go away, she knew she was expected to act like a good sport with no regrets and no complaints, but it was very difficult. She felt she belonged completely to him. To have wailed that he was abandoning her would have cheapened her. His last week in Montreal was very hard on her, because she had to hide her dread of the loneliness she would feel when he had gone. What made it worse was that in that week he couldn’t spend much time with her; he was having conferences with his advertising colleagues that lasted until late in the evening, and she had to sit around at home under the eyes of her father and mother and sister Alma, looking pale and distracted.

  Her father, putt
ing down his newspaper, would look at her and say, “Why wait around for that fellow to call you, Jeannie? I’ll be glad when you’ve seen the last of him.” Her mother, looking up quickly, her plump face indignant, would chime in, “I should say so. He took up all your time, and there was never anything in it for you.”

  They didn’t know she felt she belonged to Joe and could not go out with anybody else. It was humiliating. She knew she would have to find an excuse for keeping in her own room until Joe went away. In a fashion magazine she had seen a picture of a Chinese coolie hat, a gay foolish hat with a pink and black silk sectional crown. At the time she had seen it she had no intention of making it, but she had to appear to be busy, and she decided to copy the hat.

  The night she came home with the materials, she had a purposeful air that impressed her family. After dinner she went to her room and began to shape the buckram for the crown. Again and again she put it on her head. Then she cut a paper pattern for the silk sections that were to cover the crown completely. There was to be a corded silk tassel hanging from the point of the crown. As soon as she sat down and started sewing, she felt much happier. She felt she was absorbed in her work, although she was hoping, of course, that the telephone would ring and sometimes imagined she heard it, but now it was a more peaceful kind of waiting.

  She found consolation in the work she was putting on the hat; she found that the pattern she was making with the pink and black silk segments took on the pattern of the happy months she spent with Joe. While she cut the silk segments according to the pattern she had made and smoothed them on her knee, she would pause and ponder and believe that Joe needed her without knowing it, and even when he went away sooner or later he would realize he needed her. She could tell this to herself over and over again while she sewed, and as the hat took the colorful shape she had planned, so her desperate hope took a real shape, too, and she couldn’t bear to stop working. She worked at the hat until her eyes ached, and she knew she was making it for Joe.

  But there were only three evenings left, evenings she had counted on having with him, and he had telephoned to tell her that work in the office had to be cleared up. He was in on the planning of the layouts for an account. The conference would go on into the night, he said. And she was left at home again working on the hat in her room, wondering if she would have even one date with him.

  Then Alma came into the room. “I thought you were to go out with Joe,” she said.

  “He’s tied up. It’s those silly conferences.”

  “Tied up? You know, Jeannie, the trouble with you, when Joe whistled you always ran.”

  “I could whistle when I wanted to. I did my share of whistling.”

  “You don’t fool me, Jeannie,” Alma said. Then she looked at the hat. “Why are you in such a hurry to finish that hat? Here — let’s see it.”

  Taking the hat from Jeannie’s knee, she put it on her own head and looked at herself in the mirror. She had a round, plump face like her mother’s. The hat made her look like a peasant. “I don’t like it at all,” she said, adjusting it at another angle.

  “Take it off, then,” Jeannie said quickly, for she couldn’t bear to see the hat on anyone else. By this time it seemed to her to belong to all that had been good for her and Joe. She took the hat from Alma.

  “Let’s see it on you, then,” Alma said.

  It looked like a different hat on Jeannie, for she had a narrow, oval face, and she knew how good it looked on her and she smiled brightly at Alma.

  “Just the same, I don’t think you’ll wear it much. It’s too gaudy. You’ll throw it away. When does Joe go?”

  “In a couple of days, why?”

  “A smooth operator, isn’t he?”

  “How so, Alma?”

  “I know the type,” Alma said, and she looked wise. She was buxom and sure of herself. “They tell you from the beginning you can’t have them, and then they’re in the clear.”

  When Alma had gone, Jeannie had to put down the hat. Her hands were trembling and she couldn’t sew. She got up and walked around the room restlessly, asking herself if it could possibly be true that she had only been a cheap soft touch for Joe, and if he were deliberately keeping away from her now to make it easy for himself at the end. It was an unbearable thought, and her head ached and she felt sick. She began to loathe herself. She picked up the hat again. She sewed at it blindly. It was too late now for Joe to phone, but she knew where he was, and while she sewed she seemed to see him sitting in the LaSalle bar with his colleagues. A few months ago she would have felt as free and independent as he did. Breaking the thread with her teeth, she put down the needle, looked at the hat, and suddenly realized it was finished. It was there on her knees, and as she stared at it, all the hope she had felt while working on it returned. “How do I know he isn’t cornered by his colleagues and can’t get away, no matter how much he’s longing to see me?” she asked herself.

  If she put on the hat and went down to the LaSalle and met Joe, mightn’t she look so new and strange to him that he would be unable to leave her, she asked herself, and the thought enchanted her. She tried to hold back and feel ashamed of herself for running after him possessively and seeking humiliation. “No, he’s there, and he’ll be glad,” she thought. “As soon as he sees me he’ll be glad.” She got dressed quickly and put on the hat.

  It was cold and snowing a little, with a wind from the mountain, and when she got out of the taxi her cheeks were glowing. She sauntered into the bar, tall and elegant, with her well-cut muskrat coat that looked like mink wrapped around her, and though her thumping heart cut off her breath, her manner was what she wanted it to be — easy and untroubled.

  Joe was sitting at the corner table with three red-faced advertising men. He looked thinner and younger than the others. “Hi, Joe,” she called brightly. He was surprised, of course, but then he grinned and stood up, and she felt weak with relief. “See, I really must—” he said to the others. Joining her, he whispered, “I’m going to miss you, baby. Where am I going to find a girl who’ll know when to come along and rescue me?”

  “You won’t have much trouble, Joe,” she said lightly. “Not when you can grin like that.”

  “But I’ve got in a rut with you, Jeannie,” he teased her.

  “You’ll do all right, Joe.”

  “Just the same, I had a good girl in Montreal, Jeannie.”

  “You’ll have a good one in New York,” she said gaily. “You always get the girl who’s good for you.” But she was waiting for him to say something about her hat.

  “Let’s go down to Charlie’s bar and see what’s doing,” he said. The hat wasn’t going to do her any good. It didn’t matter what she wore or how she looked — he had made the separation from her in his mind and by this time had accepted it, she thought miserably. She was bewildered, then bitter. All she could think of was: “I don’t even look any different to him in this hat. No! He’s deliberately refusing to notice it.”

  They went along St. Catherine to Charlie’s bar, and Joe talked about his big plans for New York. He wasn’t aware that she was too bright, too gay, and too sympathetic. Afterward, just as if it were any other night, they went to his little apartment on Bishop Street. She took a long time taking off her hat. She put it on the bookcase. But he flopped down in the chair, loosened his collar, and talked and talked. “Please, please stop talking!” she wanted to cry out. But her cry would have been a wail of protest at being left behind and a cheapening of what was left to her of her self-respect. She was simply there, and he was at home with her; he was used to her, and foolishly at ease with her. Her hat, on the bookcase caught her eye. It reminded her of her blind hopefulness. She kept staring at it with a blank concentration even when his arms were around her, so she would not cry out, “How can you be so completely selfcentered?”

  “I should go home. It’s awfully late,” she said finally.

  “No, let’s go somewhere on the way,” he said. “It’s the last chance we’ll
have.” So they stopped somewhere else and found his friend Lou. He got very sentimental with Lou, talking about how happy he had been in Montreal. There were only three cities on the continent with any real color of their own, Lou said, and they agreed enthusiastically that Montreal was one of them. But Joe did not see that he was breaking Jeannie’s heart, telling how happy he had been in Montreal. It was almost dawn when they left Lou, and it was snowing hard.

  “Let’s walk,” he said, taking her arm. “I feel like walking for hours.”

  “It’s pretty wet,” she said, looking at the snow streaming across the streetlight. She was going to say, “What about my hat?” but she no longer cared about it.

  The snow was wet and three inches thick, but she had on her galoshes, and he walked her west on Dorchester and they both had their heads down against the snow. He talked about writing letters to her. Whenever he thought of Montreal he would think of her, he said; in fact, when he thought of home she would be there, and he wanted her to promise to write him.

  Her hat caught the snow but he walked her along, talking eloquently, and they turned up the hill to her street. At the corner under the light he stopped as he turned to speak, and he started to laugh. The heavy, wet snow crown had melted through the silk and the buckram, and the water, in two little rivulets, beginning at her ears, was trickling down her cheeks.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked.

  “Your hat’s leaking,” he said solemnly.

  “What does it matter?” she asked indignantly. “It’s ruined anyway, isn’t it?”

  “Here. Let me shake the snow off it,” he said.

  Lifting the hat from her head, he shook off the snow, and while she watched him with blank resentment, he held the hat by the tassel and spun the brim like a wheel, and the spraying drops of water made a circle in the light. While the hat was still spinning, he held it high and let it settle at a crazy angle on her head. He started to laugh; then he stopped, looking at her with wonder. “You know something, Jeannie?” he said earnestly. “At that angle on you it looks like a circus hat — sort of crazy and black and pink and shining in the snow.”