“What are you waiting for?” he asked.
“It seems now he’ll come back again,” she said.
“When, Ellen?”
“I don’t know. I just feel that he will.” She smiled patiently, with such a depth of certainty and peace that he dared not speak. For many minutes he sat beside her, stirred, and deep within him was a pain that seemed to be a part of all his years, but he could really feel nothing but her contentment now. Nothing that had ever happened to him seemed as important as this secret gladness Ellen was sharing with him.
He got up and said quietly, “I’ll go now, Ellen. Good night.”
“Good night, Dad,” she said.
THEIR MOTHER’S PURSE
Hal went around to see his mother and father, and while he was talking with them and wondering if he could ask for a loan, his sister Mary, who was dressed to go out for the evening, came into the room and said, “Can you let me have a little something tonight, Mother?”
She was borrowing money all the time now, and there was no excuse for her, because she was a stenographer. It was not the same for her as it was with their older brother, Stephen, who had three children, and could hardly live on his salary.
“If you could possibly spare it . . .” Mary was saying in her low and pleasant voice as she pulled on her gloves. Her easy smile, her assurance that she would not be refused, made Hal feel resentful. He knew that if he asked for money he would appear uneasy and a little ashamed, and his father would put down his paper and stare at him and his mother would sigh and look dreadfully worried, as though he were the worst kind of spendthrift.
Getting up to find her purse, their mother said, “I don’t mind lending it to you, Mary, though I can’t figure out what you do with your money.”
“I don’t seem to be doing anything with it I didn’t use to do,” Mary said.
“And I seem to do nothing these days but hand out money to the lot of you. I can’t think how you’ll get along when I’m dead.”
“I don’t know what you’d all do if it weren’t for your mother’s purse,” their father said, but when he spoke he nodded his head at Hal, because he would rather make it appear that he was angry with Hal than risk offending Mary by speaking directly to her.
“If anybody wants money, they’ll have to find my purse for me,” their mother said. “Try and find it, Mary, and bring it to me.”
Hal had always thought of Mary as his young sister, but the inscrutable expression he saw on her face as she moved round the room picking up newspapers and looking on chairs made him realize how much more self-reliant, how much apart from them she had grown in the last few years. He saw that she had become a handsome woman. In her tailored suit and hat, she looked almost beautiful, and he was suddenly glad she was his sister.
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 mother’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 ardour 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.
THE SHINING RED APPLE
It was the look of longing on the boy’s face that made Joe Cosentino, dealer in fruits and vegetables, notice him. Joe was sitting on his high stool at the end of the counter where he sat every afternoon, looking out of the window at the bunches of bananas and the cauliflowers and the tomatoes and apples piled on the street stand, and he was watching to see that the kids on the way home from school didn’t touch any of the fruit.
A skinny little boy, who was wearing a red sweater and blue overalls, stood near the end of the fruit stand by a pyramid of big red apples. With his hands linked loosely together in front of him, and his head, with the straight, untidy brown hair that hung almost down to his blue eyes, cocked over to one side, he stood looking with longing at the apples. If he moved a little to the right, he would be out of sight of the window, but even so, if he reached his hand out to take an apple, Joe, sitting at the end of the counter and watching, would surely see the hand. The sleeves of Joe’s khaki shirt were rolled up, and as he sat on his stool he folded his hairy forearms across his deep chest. There wasn’t much business, there seemed to be a little less every day, and sitting there week after week, he grew a little fatter and a little slower and much more meditative. The store was untidy, and the fruit and the vegetables no longer had the cool, fresh appearance they had in the stores of merchants who were prosperous.
If the kid, standing outside, had been a big, resolute-looking boy, Joe would have been alert and suspicious, but as it was, it was amusing to sit there and pretend he could feel the kid’s longing for the apple growing stronger. As though making the first move in a game, Joe leaned forward suddenly, and the boy, lowering his head, shuffled a few feet away. Then Joe, whistling thinly, as if he hadn’t noticed anything, got up and went out, took his handkerchief and started to polish a few of the apples on the pile. They were big, juicy-looking apples, a little over-ripe and going soft. He polished them till they gleamed and glistened in the sun. Then he said to the kid, “Fine day, eh, son?”
“Yeah,” the kid said timidly.
“You live around here?”
“No.”
“New around here?” Joe said.
The kid, nodding his head shyly, didn’t offer to tell where he lived, so Joe, chuckling to himself, and feeling powerful because he knew so surely just what would happen, went back to the store and sat down on the stool.
At first the little kid, holding his hands behind his back, shuffled out of sight, but Joe knew he would go no farther than the end of the stand; he knew the kid would be there looking up and down the street furtively, stretching his hand out a little, then withdrawing it in fear before he touched an apple, and always staring, wanting the apple more and more.
Joe got up and yawned lazily, wetting his lips and rubbing his hand across them, and then he deliberately turned his back to the window. But at the moment when he was sure the kid would make up his mind and shoot out his hand, he swung around, and he was delighted to see how the child’s hand, empty and faltering, was pulled back. “Ah, it goes just like a clock, I know just what he’ll do,” Joe thought. “He wants it, but he doesn’t know how to take it because he’s scared. Soon he wants it so much he’ll have to take it. Then I catch him. That’s the way it goes,” and he grinned.
In a little while, doing a thing he hardly ever did, Joe went out onto the sidewalk and, paying no attention to the kid, who had jumped away nervously, he mopped his shining forehead and wiped his mouth and picked up one of the apples from the top of the pile. He munched it slowly with great relish, spitting out bits of red skin, and gnawing it down to the core. The kid’s mouth dropped open, his blue eyes guileless.
After tossing the core in a wide arc far out on the street, where it lay in the sunlight and was attacked by two big flies, Joe started back into the store thinking, “Now for sure he’ll grab one. He won’t wait. He can’t.” Yet to tantalize him, he didn’t go right into the store; he turned at the door, looked up at the sky, as though expecting it to rain suddenly.
While Joe was grinning and feeling pleased with his cunning, his wife came from the room at the back of the store. She was a black-haired woman, wide-hipped and slow moving, with tired brown eyes. When she stood beside her husband with her hands on her hips, she looked determined and sensible. “The baby’s sleeping, I think, Joe. It’s been pretty bad the way she’s been going on.”
“That’s good,” Joe said.
“She feels a lot better today.”
“She’s all right.”
“I feel pretty tired. I think I’ll lie down,” she said, but she walked over to the window and looked out at the street.
Then she said sharply, “There’s a kid out there near the apples. One’s gone from the top.”
“I sold it,” Joe lied.
“Watch the kid,” she said.
“O.K.,” Joe said, and she went back to the bedroom.
He looked again for the kid, who stood rooted there in spite of the hostile glance of the woman. “I guess he doesn’t know how to do it,” Joe thought. Yet the look of helpless longing was becoming so strong in the kid’s face, so bold and unashamed, that it bothered Joe and made him irritable. “Look at the face on you. Look out, kid, you’ll start to cry in a minute,” he said to himself. “So you think you can have everything you want, do you?” The agony of wanting was so plain in the boy’s face that Joe was indignant.
In the room behind the store there was a faint whimpering and the sound of a baby stirring. “Look,” Joe said to himself, as though lecturing the kid. “It’s a nice baby, but it’s not a boy. See what I mean? You go around with that look on your face when you want things and can’t get them, people’ll only laugh at you.” Joe grew restless and unhappy, and he looked helplessly around the untidy store, as if looking upon his own fate.
The kid on the sidewalk, who had shuffled away till he was out of sight came edging back slowly. And Joe, getting excited, whispered, “Why doesn’t he take it when he wants it so much? I couldn’t catch him if he took it and ran,” and he got up to be near the corner of the window, where he could see the boy’s hand if it came reaching out. “Now. Right now,” he whispered, really hoping it would happen.
Then he thought, “What’s up with him?” for the kid was brushing by the fruit stand, one of his hands swinging loose at his side. Joe was sure the swinging hand was to knock an apple off the pile and send it rolling along the sidewalk, and he got up eagerly and leaned forward with his head close to the window.
The kid, looking up warily, saw Joe’s face and grew frightened. Ducking, he ran.
“Hey!” Joe yelled, out on the sidewalk.
The kid looked around but kept on running, his legs in blue overalls pumping up and down.
Grabbing an apple and yelling, “Hey, hey, kid, you can have it!” Joe followed a few steps, but the kid wouldn’t look back.
Joe stood on the sidewalk, an awful eagerness growing in him as he stared at the shining red apple, and wondered what would happen to the kid he was sure he would never see again.
ONE SPRING NIGHT
They had been to an eleven-o’clock movie. Afterward, as they sat very late in the restaurant, Sheila was listening to Bob Davis, showing by the quiet gladness that k
ept coming into her face the enjoyment she felt in being with him. She was the young sister of his friend, Jack Staples. Every time Bob had been at their apartment, she had come into the room, they had laughed and joked with her, they had teased her about the way she wore her clothes, and she had always smiled and answered them in a slow, measured way.
Bob took her out a few times when he felt like having a girl to talk to who knew him and liked him. And tonight he was leaning back good-humouredly, telling her one thing and then another with the wise self-assurance he usually had when with her; but gradually, as he watched her, he found himself talking more slowly, his voice grew serious and much softer, and then finally he leaned across the table toward her as though he had just discovered that her neck was full and soft with her spring coat thrown open, and that her face under her little black straw hat tilted back on her head had a new, eager beauty. Her warm, smiling softness was so close to him that he smiled a bit shyly.
“What are you looking at, Bob?” she said.
“What is there about you that seems different tonight?” he said, and they both began to laugh lightly, as if sharing the same secret.
When they were outside, walking along arm in arm and liking the new spring night air, Sheila said quickly, “It’s awfully nice out tonight. Let’s keep walking a while, Bob,” and she held his arm as though very sure of him.
“All right,” he said. “We’ll walk till we get so tired we’ll have to sit on the curb. It’s nearly two o’clock, but it doesn’t seem to matter much, does it?”
Every step he took with Sheila leaning on his arm in this new way, and with him feeling now that she was a woman he hardly knew, made the excitement grow in him, and yet he was uneasy. He was much taller than Sheila and he kept looking down at her, and she always smiled back with frank gladness. Then he couldn’t help squeezing her arm tight, and he started to talk recklessly about anything that came into his head, swinging his free arm and putting passionate eloquence into the simplest words. She was listening as she used to listen when he talked with her brother and father in the evenings, only now she wanted him to see how much she liked having him tonight all for herself. Almost pleading, she said, “Are you having a good time, Bob? Don’t you like the streets at night, when there’s hardly anybody on them?”
The New Yorker Stories Page 5
