The Complete Stories of Morley Callaghan - Volume Three

by Morley Callaghan

  A Separation

  When his mother went away Philip was ten years old and a little short for his age, though his legs were beginning to lengthen out and look skinny. As soon as his mother left the house he began to notice that even the small things from day to day were not the same. Night after night his father came home and sat alone with his own worried thoughts, usually in the big leather chair with his head thrown back and his eyes wide open.

  Philip’s father was a broad-shouldered man with thick black hair and a smile full of warmth when he was in good humour, but on these nights, just to look at him moving list-lessly with such a solemn face made Philip feel lonely in the house. And he said to him one time, “What’s the matter, Dad, don’t you feel good?”

  “I’m all right, Phil,” his father answered, looking up with surprise and a sudden amused gentleness.

  Philip tried to accept this answer, standing with his hands linked behind his back and a puckered smile on his face. He started to speak, hesitated gravely, then blurted out, “Maybe if Mother comes back everything will go on like it did before. Won’t it?”

  “Listen to me carefully,” his father said. “I don’t want you to mention your mother again. I don’t want you to even think about her, do you hear?” he added sharply.

  “I hear.”

  “And you’ll remember, mind.”

  “All right, Dad,” he answered timidly, turning his eyes away into a corner of the room. But he felt hurt. His face looked sullen and confused as he shuffled away uneasily. He began to feel vaguely resentful and then angry at his father. Sitting down in a chair, slouching, with his legs crossed at the ankles, and making absurd little noises with his lips, he let himself think of his mother, all kinds of wild hopeful thoughts, till he felt farther and farther away from his father and almost out of the room and in a fine exciting world.

  Only a little while ago his father used to come home in the evenings and say, “What have you been doing today, young fellow, riding a white horse, or were you a pirate on the Spanish Main? Come here and tell me about it.” With his blue eyes full of eagerness, Philip would tell of everything he had thought of doing on the way home from school. But on these days, with no one bothering much about him, his hair was always tousled, his shoes weren’t cleaned as they used to be, his stockings were often twisted carelessly around his legs, and he wore the same green pullover sweater nearly every day. Also he had got into the habit of playing hooky from school with his friend Buddy Hawkins and going uptown to the big stores and hanging around all afternoon and then walking home and having fine talks about all kinds of things; or sometimes in the evenings, when his father had gone out, he would sneak out and meet Buddy on the street. Philip began to like being on the street in the evening almost better than anything. He and Buddy would go down to the corner by the drugstore where some of the big fellows in long pants were standing talking about the ball game, or girls, or fighters, and Philip would listen with his round face tilted up enthusiastically, ready to laugh loudly at any kind of a poor joke. He and Buddy would stay there till someone said, “For the love of Mike, chase those little kids out of here. Go home and tell your mother she wants you.” Then Philip and Buddy would saunter away, sit down by themselves on the curb, and talk about getting long pants in a year or two and make bets about things they never expected really to happen.

  Ever since the time when Philip had been warned not to mention his mother, or think about her, he had been shy with his father, but he was keeping out of his way mainly because he did not want to have to answer difficult questions about himself and school. One night, after dinner, his father, who was looking good-humoured and almost contented, said in a mild, coaxing voice, “Well, son, how’s everything been going with you these days? How are you getting on?”

  “All right, I guess.” Philip said with a restless twist of his head.

  “You don’t talk like you used to. What’s the matter, Phil?”

  “Who, me? Nothing at all’s the matter,” Philip said. His face began to get hot. His father began to stare at him as if he had concern so deep that he was unable to express it, a fear that in a few months his boy had been drawn away from him, or even turned against him. “I don’t want you to keep out of my sight, Phil,” he said earnestly. “There’s no reason for that, is there?”

  “I’m always around the house,” Philip said.

  “Don’t you like being just with me, son?”

  “Sure I like it, Dad.”

  “We used to be great pals, you know, Phil.”

  Philip couldn’t think of anything to say, so his father added, “You’re feeling stubborn about something.” He began to look disappointed, as though sure of hostility in his son. “This won’t do at all,” he said coldly. “And you’ll have to get used to things.”

  Philip got up from the table and followed his father from one room to another, looking up eagerly and trying to get his eye so he would see how much he liked him, feeling too awkward to say anything. His father paid no attention to him.

  The next time Philip stayed away from school, his father was told about it and he spoke to Philip; it was the night Mr. Moyer, an old friend, came to the house, but about half an hour before he came, “Come here, Philip,” his father said, looking hard-eyed and brusque. “Where were you this afternoon?”

  “At school,” Philip said.

  “You’re a liar,” his father said, grabbing hold of him roughly.

  “I’m not lying, not really. Let go my arm. Oh, you’re hurting.”

  “I want the truth, always the truth,” his father said, slapping Philip and watching him cower away with his elbows up over his thin face. “If you think you’re going to have your own way entirely around here, and do just as you please, you’re mistaken. You’ve not been going to school. The Lord knows what you’ve been doing. And all the time around here, you’re pouting and looking sullen as if you had no use for me.” He slapped Philip again. “From now on you’ll do what you’re told and stop lying and being deceitful, do you hear?”

  “I won’t ever lie to you again, Dad.”

  “See that you don’t. Stop crying now and go on out to the street for awhile. Mr. Moyer’s coming here and he shouldn’t see you like that.”

  Dragging his feet, Philip got his peak cap and went out to the street with his head down. From his coat pocket he pulled out a withered old horse chestnut with a cord through it and stared at it attentively while he swung it around his finger. Mr. Moyer would be coming along soon, he thought. He did not want anybody to see him while his eyes were still red from crying, so he walked along the street the length of the block to the corner. The street lights had just been lit. On the other side of the street, he saw Buddy Hawkins carrying a big paper bag, and he started to run, calling, “Wait a minute, Buddy.” When he crossed the street he said to the other kid, “My dad found out about me staying away from school.”

  “Gee, maybe my father knows too,” Buddy said. “My mother hasn’t said anything yet. What did your father say, Phil?”

  “He gave me a licking.”

  “I guess I won’t go near your house for awhile.”

  “Come on and hang around awhile,” Philip said, wanting company very much, but Buddy said, “I can’t. My mother’s waiting for these things. So long.”

  Whistling thinly, Philip leaned against the lamppost. At first his thoughts were jumbled, and he looked up and down the street, wondering where to go, then his thoughts became more vivid and he remembered that last time his mother had come to see him. It had been on a mild evening, clear and fine and not very late, and the kids he had been playing with had left him and he had sat down for awhile on the pavement before going into the house. His father, who had been out that evening, had made him promise to be in bed by ten o’clock. Sitting on the curb, in front of the house, he had looked up and seen her coming along the street, a tall woman dressed with elegance, with a fresh lovely face. He had jumped up and run toward her to take hold of her arm and
had chattered away while leading her into the house. She had seemed to know his father would not be in at that hour, and sitting beside him, patting his head and laughing gaily, she had felt so happy she had begun to cry. He had said, “Why are you crying, Mother?” and she had said, “I’m just feeling happy, that’s all.” She had asked all about himself and had brought him two books of adventure stories. Then she had said, “Always make a little prayer for me at night, Philip, and I’ll make one for you.” Her lovely face had been smudged with tears as she hurried away.

  Philip went on thinking about this very gravely. He began to wonder why it was, if his mother loved him and his father used to love him so much, that they did not always want to be together. He figured out that his mother had been glad to be in the house, and his father wasn’t really happy when she was away. Why couldn’t something be done, he wondered. Perhaps if they only understood how much he loved them both, they would want to be together. He had a sudden buoy-ant hope that his father might understand this clearly, if only he could go home now and do something to make his father very proud of him.

  So with slow, conspicuous movements he entered the kitchen where his father and Mr. Moyer, the neighbour, were drinking a few bottles of beer. The two men were talking slowly, pausing from time to time to get the matter clear. As Philip, curling his cap in his hands, sat down, he didn’t exactly want to be noticed, yet at the same time he would have liked them to speak to him. Mr. Moyer, a fat kindly man with thin reddish hair curling over a shiny pink scalp, had already taken off his coat for an evening’s drinking. Philip twisted faintly the corner of his lip in a grin and Mr. Moyer gave him a sociable smile. Philip gave his father a broad, half-ashamed, good-natured smile, but his father, with a gloomy frown of despair on his face, didn’t notice him and went on talking. “I suppose I ought to get used to the situation,” he was saying.

  “You’re letting it go on worrying you too much, man.”

  “I can’t help it.”

  “You make a mistake, John,” Philip heard Mr. Moyer say. “It was a case of both of you working at cross purposes. Not just her. So you’ve got no right to hate her, you know.”

  “I don’t hate her. You don’t understand what I mean,” Philip’s father said, looking bewildered and indignant. “I don’t hate anybody.”

  “I always liked Elsie myself. Of course I knew her well.”

  “You knew her, sure you did, and did you ever imagine she wasn’t satisfied? I don’t know what to believe now.”

  “Maybe she knows now she made a mistake, and if you got hold of her and talked straight . . .”

  “No, that’s out of the question. I couldn’t rely on her again.”

  “Come on, John. Don’t have such a tough spirit. It isn’t like you at all.”

  “Supposing I did forgive her? Would it alter my own feeling?”

  “I think candidly, since we know each other so well, that you might be generous enough to welcome her, if she hinted she wanted to try again.”

  “Am I not entitled to have any feeling at all about it?”

  “Sure you are, and she’s entitled to have some pride too. I say it would be a mighty generous gesture if you went to her yourself,” Mr. Moyer said.

  “Thank God I’ve got some pride myself. Oh, I know, you think I’m stubborn. Maybe I am, but . . .”

  Philip noticed Mr. Moyer nodding toward him and saying, “Better drop the subject for a time, John.” Philip had kept on lifting his head every time his father spoke. He knew they were talking about his mother, and every time his father spoke the disappointment within him grew heavier. But he liked Mr. Moyer for being so polite and agreeable about his mother. Mr. Moyer was saying, “He’s a nice boy,” and Philip ducked his head.

  “He’s growing up and getting wise like they all do. I had occasion to whip him tonight for not telling the truth.”

  “He’s all right,” Mr. Moyer said. “My wife often wishes we had a boy like him instead of all those girls of ours.”

  “You’ll have less trouble with the girls. I don’t know as I can rely on anything Philip says, and he gets stubborn and sullen, too. Look at him. Isn’t he the dead image of his mother, sitting there? He’s beginning to remind me of her every time I look at him. He’s got all her little ways and does just what he wants, too.”

  Philip feeling ashamed, and wanting to run out of the room, tried to smile first at one, then at the other. And Mr. Moyer, forcing a laugh because he, too, was embarrassed, said, “You can’t blame the kid for looking so like his mother, can you?”

  “I suppose not,” Philip heard his father say. “Only I don’t expect much. I haven’t much faith in him, that’s all.”

  “Sh, sh, have some sense, John. You’re making the kid feel bad.”

  Philip looked up once at his father who said, in a milder voice, “Better run along to bed, son.”

  In a single breath and with his head down, Philip said, “Good night, Dad, good night, Mr. Moyer,” and he left the kitchen.

  But he did not go to bed. Pulling his cap well down over his eyes, he went out, closing the door quietly. The way things were going he did not know what he could do. As he stood on the doorstep, with the night air cooling his flushed face, he had a sharp aching feeling of separation from everything he had ever liked. He clenched his fists stubbornly. He kept looking eagerly along the street. Then slowly he shuffled down to the sidewalk and began walking toward the corner. “I’ll go away. When I’m big I’ll come back and then things’ll be different,” he thought.

  At the corner, in an aimless way he crossed the street, and then after standing still a few moments, he crossed back again, thinking steadily of strange places he could go till he grew older, thinking of places very far away till his imagination began to unravel many pictures in which he saw and heard himself speaking distinctly. But after awhile he thought fearfully. “If Mr. Moyer goes and Dad finds out I’m not in bed, there’ll be trouble,” so he started to hurry back to the house.

  In the hall he brushed against Mr. Moyer, who was saying, “Good night, John.” Both men looked very solemnly at Philip’s scared face that kept twisting uneasily away from them. “Good night, John,” Mr. Moyer repeated before he left.

  Philip’s father said to him when they were alone, “Where have you been, son? I thought you went to bed.” He spoke in a mild coaxing voice and without waiting for an answer he walked away. He was frowning as if something was hurting him and he could not free himself. Twice he patted Philip on the shoulder when he passed him, with a faint, embarrassed smile on his face that quickly disappeared. At last he sat down beside the boy and began to speak with a mild diffidence, trying all the time without hurrying to find certain words which would explain that he was sorry. All he actually said was, “We’ll be great friends again, boy,” and he played awkwardly with Philip’s arm, squeezing it hard, sometimes looking at him, and sometimes letting his own thoughts wander away.

  Philip was still timid, but he began to like feeling his father’s big hand patting him on the shoulder so steadily as if he were proud of him, and he could sort of feel them being drawn close together while his father was silent with such an eager expression on his face. He glanced up shyly. Then he said with sudden confidence, “I feel all right, Dad.” His father, who had been watching him very humbly, took a deep breath and said, “That’s fine, son. Everything will be all right. I’ll do everything I can do. You understand?” Philip didn’t know exactly what his father meant, and he hardly dared to let himself try and figure it out, so he just sat there feeling big with hope.

  Possession

  On the way along the street Dan looked up at the falling snow and the lights in the windows and it all began to shift away and then swing back before his eyes. He was scared of this sudden dizziness and he said, “It’s nothing. That’s just the way the snow slants across the lights. It makes my eyes tired, that’s all.”

  As he went into his place he closed the door quietly and he went to go noiseless
ly up the stairs, but then he hesitated when he saw the little pile of letters on the table in the hall. He looked back at those letters and hope rose in him again. Three days ago he had written to an uncle he hardly knew in Detroit asking him for money, and now he tiptoed back to the table and flicked his thumb through the pile of letters while the wet snow melting on his hat trickled down and dripped on the floor, and he saw there wasn’t a letter for him. And then, when he heard the click of a latch in the door at the end of the hall, he knew he had delayed too long. Mrs. Macillroy, who owned the building, hurried after him and caught him when he was only halfway up the stairs. She was a plump, quiet woman with grey hair who was smiling very softly tonight. “And how are you tonight, Mr. Lowery?” she called anxiously. By the solicitude and softness of her voice he knew what she really wanted to say, but he said, “I’m fine, thanks.”

  “Was there anything doing today?”

  “No, nothing at all,” he said, keeping the wide, false smile on his face.

  “Is there anything in sight at all?”

  “I thought there might have been a letter there for me,” he said. “I wrote to Detroit for some money,” he said.

  It was a hopeless business trusting the tenants and letting the days go by but Mrs. Macillroy was a good-natured woman and she said in spite of her natural shrewdness, “All right. I hope something turns up soon for you,” and she walked away soberly.

  While he watched her shoulders and the little roll of grey hair at the back of her neck he wondered if he would ever be able to come in and get by the hall again.

  As he sat on his bed waiting for the excitement that had risen in him so sharply to subside, it seemed he could not help remembering every job he had ever had. He began to think of all the money he had once wasted on foolish and lovely little things. He sat there with an intense longing in him to live over again the joyous moments when he had spent money freely, and in a little while he was so enchanted he could hardly move and more beautiful thoughts came just as easily and their loveliness was always heightened by the depth of his longing.