Collected Stories of Carson McCullers

by Carson McCullers

  Heime always seemed to smell of corduroy pants and the food he had eaten and rosin. Half the time, too, his hands were dirty around the knuckles and the cuffs of his shirts peeped out dingily from the sleeves of his sweater. She always watched his hands when he played—thin only at the joints with the hard little blobs of flesh bulging over the short-cut nails and the babyish-looking crease that showed so plainly in his bowing wrist.

  In the dreams, as when she was awake, she could remember the concert only in a blur. She had not known it was unsuccessful for her until months after. True, the papers had praised Heime more than her. But he was much shorter than she. When they stood together on the stage he came only to her shoulders. And that made a difference with people, she knew. Also, there was the matter of the sonata they played together. The Bloch.

  "No, no—I don't think that would be appropriate," Mister Bilderbach had said when the Bloch was suggested to end the programme. "Now that John Powell thing—the Sonate Virginianesque."

  She hadn't understood then; she wanted it to be the Bloch as much as Mister Lafkowitz and Heime.

  Mister Bilderbach had given in. Later, after the reviews had said she lacked the temperament for that type of music, after they called her playing thin and lacking in feeling, she felt cheated.

  "That oie oie stuff," said Mister Bilderbach, crackling the newspapers at her. "Not for you, Bienchen. Leave all that to the Heimes and vitses and skys."

  A Wunderkind. No matter what the papers said, that was what he had called her.

  Why was it Heime had done so much better at the concert than she? At school sometimes, when she was supposed to be watching someone do a geometry problem on the blackboard, the question would twist knife-like inside her. She would worry about it in bed, and even sometimes when she was supposed to be concentrating at the piano. It wasn't just the Bloch and her not being Jewish—not entirely. It wasn't that Heime didn't have to go to school and had begun his training so early, either. It was—?

  Once she thought she knew.

  "Play the Fantasia and Fugue," Mister Bilderbach had demanded one evening a year ago—after he and Mister Lafkowitz had finished reading some music together.

  The Bach, as she played, seemed to her well done. From the tail of her eye she could see the calm, pleased expression on Mister Bilderbach's face, see his hands rise climactically from the chair arms and then sink down loose and satisfied when the high points of the phrases had been passed successfully. She stood up from the piano when it was over, swallowing to loosen the bands that the music seemed to have drawn around her throat and chest. But—

  "Frances—" Mister Lafkowitz had said then, suddenly, looking at her with his thin mouth curved and his eyes almost covered by their delicate lids. "Do you know how many children Bach had?"

  She turned to him, puzzled. "A good many. Twenty some odd."

  "Well then—" The corners of his smile etched themselves gently in his pale face. "He could not have been so cold—then."

  Mister Bilderbach was not pleased; his guttural effulgence of German words had Kind in it somewhere. Mister Lafkowitz raised his eyebrows. She had caught the point easily enough, but she felt no deception in keeping her face blank and immature because that was the way Mister Bilderbach wanted her to look.

  Yet such things had nothing to do with it. Nothing very much, at least, for she would grow older. Mister Bilderbach understood that, and even Mister Lafkowitz had not meant just what he said.

  In the dreams Mister Bilderbach's face loomed out and contracted in the center of the whirling circle. The lip surging softly, the veins in his temples insisting.

  But sometimes, before she slept, there were such clear memories; as when she pulled a hole in the heel of her stocking down, so that her shoe would hide it. "Bienchen, Bienchen!" And bringing Mrs. Bilderbach's work basket in and showing her how it should be darned and not gathered together in a lumpy heap.

  And the time she graduated from Junior High.

  "What you wear?" asked Mrs. Bilderbach the Sunday morning at breakfast when she told them about how they had practiced to march into the auditorium.

  "An evening dress my cousin had last year."

  "Ah—Bienchen!" he said, circling his warm coffee cup with his heavy hands, looking up at her with wrinkles around his laughing eyes. "I bet I know what Bienchen wants—"

  He insisted. He would not believe her when she explained that she honestly didn't care at all.

  "Like this, Anna," he said, pushing his napkin across the table and mincing to the other side of the room, swishing his hips, rolling up his eyes behind his horn-rimmed glasses.

  The next Saturday afternoon, after her lessons, he took her to the department stores downtown. His thick fingers smoothed over the filmy nets and crackling taffetas that the saleswomen unwound from their bolts. He held colors to her face, cocking his head to one side, and selected pink. Shoes, he remembered too. He liked best some white kid pumps. They seemed a little like old ladies' shoes to her and the Red Cross label in the instep had a charity look. But it really didn't matter at all. When Mrs. Bilderbach began to cut out the dress and fit it to her with pins, he interrupted his lessons to stand by and suggest ruffles around the hips and neck and a fancy rosette on the shoulder. The music was coming along nicely then. Dresses and commencement and such made no difference.

  Nothing mattered much except playing the music as it must be played, bringing out the thing that must be in her, practicing, practicing, playing so that Mister Bilderbach's face lost some of its urging look. Putting the thing into her music that Myra Hess had, and Yehudi Menuhin—even Heime!

  What had begun to happen to her four months ago? The notes began springing out with a glib, dead intonation. Adolescence, she thought. Some kids played with promise—and worked and worked until, like her, the least little thing would start them crying, and worn out with trying to get the thing across—the longing thing they felt—something queer began to happen—But not she! She was like Heime. She had to be. She—

  Once it was there for sure. And you didn't lose things like that. A Wunderkind. ... A Wunderkind.... Of her he said it, rolling the words in the sure, deep German way. And in the dreams even deeper, more certain than ever. With his face looming out at her, and the longing phrases of music mixed in with the zooming, circling round, round, round—A Wunderkind. A Wunderkind....

  This afternoon Mister Bilderbach did not show Mister Lafkowitz to the front door, as he usually did. He stayed at the piano, softly pressing a solitary note. Listening, Frances watched the violinist wind his scarf about his pale throat.

  "A good picture of Heime," she said, picking up her music. "I got a letter from him a couple of months ago—telling about hearing Schnabel and Huberman and about Carnegie Hall and things to eat at the Russian Tea Room."

  To put off going into the studio a moment longer she waited until Mister Lafkowitz was ready to leave and then stood behind him as he opened the door. The frosty cold outside cut into the room. It was growing late and the air was seeped with the pale yellow of winter twilight. When the door swung to on its hinges, the house seemed darker and more silent than ever before she had known it to be.

  As she went into the studio Mister Bilderbach got up from the piano and silently watched her settle herself at the keyboard.

  "Well, Bienchen," he said, "this afternoon we are going to begin all over. Start from scratch. Forget the last few months."

  He looked as though he were trying to act a part in a movie. His solid body swayed from toe to heel, he rubbed his hands together, and even smiled in a satisfied, movie way. Then suddenly he thrust this manner brusquely aside. His heavy shoulders slouched and he began to run through the stack of music she had brought in. "The Bach—no, not yet," he murmured. "The Beethoven? Yes. The Variation Sonata. Opus 26."

  The keys of the piano hemmed her in—stiff and white and deadseeming.

  "Wait a minute," he said. He stood in the curve of the piano, elbows propped, and looked at h
er. "Today I expect something from you. Now this sonata—it's the first Beethoven sonata you ever worked on. Every note is under control—technically—you have nothing to cope with but the music. Only music now. That's all you think about."

  He rustled through the pages of her volume until he found the place. Then he pulled his teaching chair halfway across the room, turned it around and seated himself, straddling the back with his legs.

  For some reason, she knew, this position of his usually had a good effect on her performance. But today she felt that she would notice him from the corner of her eye and be disturbed. His back was stiffly tilted, his legs looked tense. The heavy volume before him seemed to balance dangerously on the chair back. "Now we begin," he said with a peremptory dart of his eyes in her direction.

  Her hands rounded over the keys and then sank down. The first notes were too loud, the other phrases followed dryly.

  Arrestingly his hand rose up from the score. "Wait! Think a minute what you're playing. How is this beginning marked?"

  "An-andante."

  "All right. Don't drag it into an adagio then. And play deeply into the keys. Don't snatch it off shallowly that way. A graceful, deeptoned andante—"

  She tried again. Her hands seemed separate from the music that was in her.

  "Listen," he interrupted. "Which of these variations dominates the whole?"

  "The dirge," she answered.

  "Then prepare for that. This is an andante —but it's not salon stuff as you just played it. Start out softly, piano, and make it swell out just before the arpeggio. Make it warm and dramatic. And down here—where it's marked dolce make the counter melody sing out. You know all that. We've gone over all that side of it before. Now play it. Feel it as Beethoven wrote it down. Feel that tragedy and restraint."

  She could not stop looking at his hands. They seemed to rest tentatively on the music, ready to fly up as a stop signal as soon as she would begin, the gleaming flash of his ring calling her to halt. "Mister Bilderbach—maybe if I—if you let me play on through the first variation without stopping I could do better."

  "I won't interrupt," he said.

  Her pale face leaned over too close to the keys. She played through the first part, and, obeying a nod from him, began the second. There were no flaws that jarred on her, but the phrases shaped from her fingers before she had put into them the meaning that she felt.

  When she had finished he looked up from the music and began to speak with dull bluntness: "I hardly heard those harmonic fillings in the right hand. And incidentally, this part was supposed to take on intensity, develop the foreshadowings that were supposed to be inherent in the first part. Go on with the next one, though."

  She wanted to start it with subdued viciousness and progress to a feeling of deep, swollen sorrow. Her mind told her that. But her hands seemed to gum in the keys like limp macaroni and she could not imagine the music as it should be.

  When the last note had stopped vibrating, he closed the book and deliberately got up from the chair. He was moving his lower jaw from side to side—and between his open lips she could glimpse the pink healthy lane to his throat and his strong, smoke-yellowed teeth. He laid the Beethoven gingerly on top of the rest of her music and propped his elbows on the smooth, black piano top once more. "No," he said simply, looking at her.

  Her mouth began to quiver. "I can't help it. I—"

  Suddenly he strained his lips into a smile. "Listen, Bienchen," he began in a new, forced voice. "You still play the Harmonious Blacksmith, don't you? I told you not to drop it from your repertoire."

  "Yes," she said. "I practice it now and then."

  His voice was the one he used for children. "It was among the first things we worked on together—remember. So strongly you used to play it—like a real blacksmith's daughter. You see, Bienchen, I know you so well—as if you were my own girl. I know what you have—I've heard you play so many things beautifully. You used to—"

  He stopped in confusion and inhaled from his pulpy stub of cigarette. The smoke drowsed out from his pink lips and clung in a gray mist around the lank hair and childish forehead.

  "Make it happy and simple," he said, switching on the lamp behind her and stepping back from the piano.

  For a moment he stood just inside the bright circle the light made. Then impulsively he squatted down to the floor. "Vigorous," he said.

  She could not stop looking at him, sitting on one heel with the other foot resting squarely before him for balance, the muscles of his strong thighs straining under the cloth of his trousers, his back straight, his elbows staunchly propped on his knees. "Simply now," he repeated with a gesture of his fleshy hands. "Think of the blacksmith—working out in the sunshine all day. Working easily and undisturbed."

  She could not look down at the piano. The light brightened the hairs on the backs of his outspread hands, made the lenses of his glasses glitter.

  "All of it," he urged. "Now!"

  She felt that the marrows of her bones were hollow and there was no blood left in her. Her heart that had been springing against her chest all afternoon felt suddenly dead. She saw it gray and limp and shriveled at the edges like an oyster.

  His face seemed to throb out in space before her, come closer with the lurching motion in the veins of his temples. In retreat, she looked down at the piano. Her lips shook like jelly and a surge ot noiseless tears made the white keys blur in a watery line. "I can't," she whispered. "I don't know why, but I just can't—can't any more."

  His tense body slackened and, holding his hand to his side, he pulled himself up. She clutched her music and hurried past him.

  Her coat. The mittens and galoshes. The schoolbooks and the satchel he had given her on her birthday. All from the silent room that was hers. Quickly—before he would have to speak.

  As she passed through the vestibule she could not help but see his hands—held out from his body that leaned against the studio door, relaxed and purposeless. The door shut to firmly. Dragging her books and satchel she stumbled down the stone steps, turned in the wrong direction, and hurried down the street that had become confused with noise and bicycles and the games of other children.

  The Aliens

  In August of the year 1935 a Jew sat alone on one of the rear seats of a bus headed south. It was late afternoon and the Jew had been travelling since five o'clock in the morning. That is to say he had left New York at daybreak and except for a number of necessary brief stops he had been waiting patiently on his rear seat for the time when he would reach his destination. Behind him was the great city—that marvel of immensity and intricate design. And the Jew, who had set out at such an early hour on this journey, carried in him a last memory of a city strangely hollow and unreal. As the sun was rising he had walked alone in the unpeopled streets. As far ahead as he could see there were the skyscrapers, pastel mauve and yellow in color, clear and sharp as stalactites against the sky. He had listened to the sound of his own quiet footsteps and for the first time in that city he had heard on the streets the clear articulation of a single human voice. But even then there was the feeling of the multitude, some subtle warning of the raucous fury of the hours soon to come, the turmoil, the constant struggles around closing subway doors, the vast roaring of the city day. Such then was his last impression of the place he had left behind him. And now before him was the South.

  The Jew, a man of about fifty years of age, was a patient traveller. He was of middle height and only slightly under average weight. As the afternoon was hot he had removed his black coat and hung it carefully on the back of his seat. He wore a blue striped shirt and gray checked trousers. And of these rather threadbare trousers he was careful to the point of anxiousness, lifting the cloth at the knee each time he crossed his legs, flicking with his handkerchief the dust that seeped in the open window. Although there was no passenger beside him he kept himself well within the limits of his portion of the seat. On the rack above him there was a cardboard lunch box and a dictionary. />
  The Jew was an observant person—and already with some care he had scanned each fellow passenger. Especially he had noticed the two Negroes who, although they had boarded the bus at widely separate points, had been talking and laughing together on the back seat all the afternoon. Also he watched with interest the passing landscape. He had a quiet face—this Jew—with a high, white forehead, dark eyes behind horn rimmed spectacles, and a rather strained, pale mouth. And for a patient traveller, a man of such composure, he had one annoying habit. He smoked constantly and as he smoked he quietly worried the end of his cigarette with his thumb and forefinger, rubbing and pulling out shreds of tobacco so that often the cigarette was so ragged that he was obliged to nip off the end before putting it to his lips again. His hands were slightly calloused at the fingertips and developed to a state of delicate muscular perfection; they were a pianist's hands.

  At seven o'clock the long summer twilight had just begun. After a day of glare and heat the sky was now tempered to a restful greenish blue. The bus wound along a dusty unpaved road, flanked by deep fields of cotton. It was here that a halt was made to pick up a new passenger—a young man carrying a brand new cheap tin suitcase. After a moment of awkward hesitation the young man sat down beside the Jew.

  "Good evenin', sir."

  The Jew smiled—for the young man had a sunburned pleasant face—and replied to this greeting in a voice that was soft and slightly accented. For a while these were the only words that were said between them. The Jew looked out of the window and the young man watched him shyly from the corner of his eye. Then the Jew took down his lunch box from the rack above his head and prepared to eat his evening meal. In the box there was a sandwich made with rye bread and two lemon tarts. "Will you have some?" he asked politely.