Take Me Home

by Fletcher Flora

  “Don’t you make any money at all from writing?”

  “I’ve made a little in the past, but not for quite a while.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’ve been writing a novel and haven’t had anything to sell.”

  “If you ask me, you’d better quit writing the novel and write something to sell instead. Then you might be able to live in a little better place.”

  Abruptly, as if she were acting suddenly upon a decision slowly reached, she unbuttoned her coat, removed it, and tossed it into a chair. Walking across to a ratty, brown, frieze sofa, she sat down and stretched her legs in front of her. She was wearing a gray wool dress that did not look shabby or cheap, although not new or expensive, and the thinness of her body, which had been a suggestion under the coat, was now clearly apparent.

  After stretching and yawning, she kicked off her shoes. She did look very young, as the Greek had said, and he wondered for the first time what her age was.

  “How old are you?” he said.

  She yawned again, stretching, and looked up at him from the corners of her eyes with a sly expression. Her hair had a soft luster, gathering the light. It was a soft golden color, thick and full, brushed back over the ears at the sides. At the moment it was badly tousled by the wind, but it was palpably clean, and he had a notion it would have the smell, if he were to bury his nose in it, of scented soap.

  “I’m twenty-four,” she said.

  “You don’t look it.”

  “Don’t I? I feel at least three times that.”

  “Are you in trouble of some kind?”

  “If I am, it’s my own.”

  “That’s right. I only hope you keep it to yourself. Why don’t you want to go back to the place you came from?”

  “I’d rather not talk about it, if you don’t mind.”

  “You’ve run away from home, haven’t you?”

  “Run away? I told you I’m twenty-four, and that’s the truth. I’m old enough to go where I please.”

  “You do have a home, don’t you?”

  “I used to have one, but not any more.”

  “What happened to it?”

  “Nothing happened to it, except that it’s not mine any more. My family doesn’t want me. They consider me a disgrace.”

  “Are you?”

  “I suppose I am. At least they think so.”

  “Do you have a husband?”

  “No, God, no! Why do you keep asking questions? You tell me to keep my trouble to myself, but at the same time you keep trying to get it out of me. It’s not sensible.”

  “Oh, hell. There’s no use whatever in trying to come to terms with you. That’s plain enough.”

  Before she could respond, he turned and walked out of the littered living room and through the bedroom into the tiny bathroom that had been built, as an afterthought, in one corner. After turning on the light above the lavatory, he splashed his face with cold water and tried, with a brush and paste, to wash some of the feverish night out of his mouth. He was drawn tight, his nerves on edge, and although he was tired, it was still impossible to sleep. It occurred to him that he didn’t even know the name of his guest, and that it had not, in spite of their unusual arrangement, seemed important enough to compel him to learn it. There was no assurance, of course, even if he asked, that she would tell him, or tell him, at any rate, the truth. When he went back into the living room, she had stretched out on the sofa with her arms folded up and her fingers laced beneath her hand.

  “It has just come into my mind that I don’t know your name,” he said.

  “Has it? I don’t know yours either, for that matter.”

  “It’s Henry Harper.”

  “Mine’s Ivy, if it makes any difference to you. Ivy Galvin.”

  “Do you know something? I believe it really is.”

  “Of course it is. Did you think I’d give you a false name?”

  “I thought you’d probably either give me a false one or none at all.”

  “You’re suspicious of everything, aren’t you? Well, I’m warm now, and I’m getting sleepy. I believe I could sleep for a while. Would you mind letting me alone?”

  “Not at all. It would be a pleasure.”

  “Thanks very much.”

  She shut her eyes, as if by this small act she could achieve seclusion, and her breathing assumed with completion of the act an added depth and rhythm. In the posture and semblance of sleeping, she looked exposed and terribly vulnerable.

  “I’ll get you a cover,” he said.

  “I don’t need a cover. It’s warm enough in here without one.”

  “At least you’ll need a pillow.”

  “I’ll take a pillow if you have an extra one, but what I’d like more than anything else is a drink of whiskey. Do you happen to have any?”

  “I have some bourbon in the bedroom.”

  “I think, if I had a drink of whiskey, that I could go right off to sleep.”

  “I’ll get it for you.”

  He went into the bedroom to a chest of drawers, where the piece of a bottle stood in the midst of several tumblers. He poured about three fingers into two of the tumblers, got a pillow from the bed, and carried the tumblers and the pillow back into the living room. Ivy Galvin, or whoever she was if she was not Ivy Galvin, opened her eyes and sat up immediately on the edge of the sofa, her knees and ankles together in a position of unconscious propriety. She took the tumbler he offered and drank the whiskey in two swallows with only the briefest interval between.

  “Thank you,” she said. “Are you going to work some more?”

  “No.”

  “It’s all right if you want to. Don’t let me interfere.”

  “I won’t. It’s just that you reach a point when it goes bad, or seems to go bad, even if it doesn’t really, and there’s no use trying any longer.”

  “That’s true in everything.”

  She set her empty glass on the floor beside the sofa and lay down again with her head on the pillow. Her eyes closed, she began to breathe, as she had before, with depth and rhythm. He drank his own whiskey and sat down in the chair at the table and began to gather the scattered yellow sheets of his manuscript, putting them in order. This done, he began reading, but reading at this time was a mistake, because he was tired and satiated with words, and everything seemed worse than it was. The whiskey began to work on him a little, making him slightly drowsy, and he pushed his typewriter back and lay his head for a moment on the edge of the table where the typewriter had been, and the moment stretched on and on and became nearly an hour, and he wakened abruptly with his head splitting and a dull pain between his shoulders. Standing, he turned off the lamp on the table and walked in darkness into the bedroom and sat down on the edge of the bed and removed his shoes. He thought that another swallow of whiskey would do him good, and so he got up and took the swallow from the bottle and then lay down across the bed for a minute, for just a minute before undressing and getting into bed properly, and this minute across the bed, like the moment at the table, stretched on and on into the day, the particular Sunday that this day was.

  CHAPTER 2

  She was really Ivy Galvin. That was her name.

  She lay quietly on the worn sofa, one hand holding the other beneath her small breasts and her ankles touching in a position that was the prone equivalent of the one in which she had sat erect, a few minutes ago, to accept her whiskey. Except for her deep and rhythmic breathing, a technique she had developed in the methodical seduction of quietude, she had the appearance of having been laid out neatly for burial. She was feeling relaxed and at ease now, not so much from warmth and whiskey as from the assurance, at last clearly established, that Henry Harper, the odd young man she was using in her exigency, was not in the least inte
rested in what she could not possibly give.

  It was not true that she wanted to sleep, for she had found that sleep was treacherous. What she really wanted was to achieve and sustain for as long as possible the marginal twilight area between waking and sleeping in which she felt absolutely detached and inviolate, removed alike from the hard, bright threats above and the symbolisms of the same threats in the stirring darkness below. She wished that she could live in this twilight always, and she had become quite expert, as a matter of fact, in sustaining it precariously for long periods of time, but it was impossible, of course, to sustain it, as she wished, forever. Sooner or later she would descend in spite of herself into the waiting darkness of hostile symbols, which were very bad, and sooner or later after that she would rise inevitably to the shapes and names and terms of reality, which were never any better and usually worse.

  Her eyes were not completely closed, although they appeared to be. Through her lowered lashes she watched Henry Harper with a kind of dreamy intentness upon the smallest details of what he did. She did not watch him because she was interested or concerned, but only because he was useful as a neuter distraction that helped her remain a little longer in her interim twilight. She saw him drink his whiskey and sit down and gather his papers. His head in the light of the lamp had a massive and shaggy look, and she thought with the detachment that was now possible to her that he looked completely spent and almost pitiable, committed to his own aberrations, whatever they were, and his own consequent loneliness. After a while he lay his head on the table and did not move for a long while.

  Realizing that he had gone to sleep in his chair, she wondered if his sleep was sound and deep, as hers was not, or if it was disturbed by symbols, as hers was. This was something that did not bear thinking about, however, because it threatened the detachment she wished to sustain, and she began, as another distraction, to count slowly to herself, forming without sound with her lips the shape of the numbers, to see how high she could go before she stirred, but the time it took was too long to survive, and she was asleep a full quarter of an hour before he got up suddenly and turned out the light and left the room.

  For a while she was neither more nor less than she appeared to be, a girl asleep in a posture of primness on a worn sofa, but then, as the windows on the street side of the room began to lighten, which was about seven o’clock in the morning of that day, she wakened in her sleep to another morning of another day in another place, and she was, in the time and place of her waking, another person.

  She was, for one thing, much younger. She was much younger, and the day was soft and bright and beautiful, and she thought for these two reasons, because she was young and the day was beautiful, that she would put on a beautiful dress. She selected one from her closet and examined it, and it was just the kind of dress for that kind of day, pale blue and silken to the touch, although it was really polished cotton. It had a short bodice with a full skirt of yards and yards of material flaring out from a tiny waist, which would make a stiff petticoat necessary underneath, and so she selected the petticoat to wear also, and around the hem of the petticoat there was an inch of real lace that was supposed to show, just slightly, beneath the hem of the skirt of the dress.

  She laid the dress and the petticoat side by side on her bed and went into the bathroom and bathed with scented soap, and then she put on a white bathrobe that had tiny blue roses scattered all over it, which was rather ridiculous when you came to think of it, inasmuch as there was no such thing as a blue rose, so far as she knew. Wearing the white robe and thinking of the pale blue dress and feeling clean and perfumed and almost as beautiful as the morning, she went back into the bedroom to the dressing table that had a mirror as big as the one her mother used. With the silver-backed brush that had been given to her by an aunt, she began to brush her hair. She pulled the brush through her hair and lifted it above her head to begin a second stroke, and then she stopped, the brush suspended in the beginning of the stroke, and stared in amazement at the reflection of her face in the glass. It was really rather funny, almost ludicrous, for there were three large brown stains on her face, and she began to laugh at herself and watch herself laughing back from the glass, wondering how in the world she could have bathed so carefully and still have failed to remove the stains. She couldn’t think where she might have acquired the stains, but it didn’t really matter, since they were there, as she could clearly see, and there was nothing to do but wash her face again.

  She washed it in the lavatory, using very hot water and a stronger soap, but the stains were stubborn and refused to leave, and all of a sudden she understood that they were never going to leave, never in the world, even if she scrubbed herself every hour of every day for the rest of her life. Filled with terror and monstrous grief, she threw herself on the bed beside the blue dress and the petticoat, and at that instant her Cousin Lila came into the room and began to stroke her hands and arms in an attempt to comfort her, and everywhere that Lila’s fingers touched there was instantly another stain that would never leave. Pulling away with a cry of anguish, she sprang to her feet and began to run across the room to the door, and she was wakened by the cry and the action in the middle of a strange room that she could not remember ever having seen before.

  And then she remembered that it was the room of Henry Harper, an odd and antagonistic fellow who had agreed to let her sleep here until tomorrow, or today, which it now was. The last she’d seen of him, he’d been sitting in a chair with his head on the table, the one right over there, but now he was gone. In the gray light that filtered through the dirty glass of the front windows, she could see the empty chair and the table and the typewriter and a stack of yellow sheets beside the typewriter, but she could not see Henry Harper anywhere, and she wondered where he was. There was another room, of course, a bedroom with a bath built into the corner, and it was probably that he was in there, in the bedroom, where he would naturally have gone if he wanted to sleep. She walked over to the door of the bedroom and looked in, and there he was, sure enough, not lying properly in the bed, as he should have been, but lying sprawled across it on his face, fully clothed, as if he had simply fallen there in exhaustion and had failed to get up again.

  Turning away, she crossed the living room to one of the front windows and stood looking down into the street. The street was narrow and dirty and utterly dismal in the gray morning light. Across the way, in the recessed doorway of a pawnshop, over which hung the old and identifying sign of the Medici, were several sheets of a newspaper that had been driven there in the night by the wind. Just below her and a little to the right, attached at a right angle to the face of the building in which she stood, was a sign that said “USED BOOKS” in large white letters, and in smaller letters underneath, “BOUGHT AND SOLD.” She could read the words clearly from her position, and they seemed to her in their innocence to be a gross obscenity, a tiny part of the monstrous distortion of all things that was effect of her depression. She had no watch, but she could tell by the quality of the light that it was still early, which left ahead of her the most of an interminable day, and she wondered in despair how she would live it, and if she did, how she would then live the one that would surely follow it.

  She wondered if Henry Harper had any cigarettes. He must have some somewhere, because she remembered that he had given her one on the street outside the diner where they had met. She looked around the room and could not see any, and so she walked softly into the bedroom and found part of a package lying on his dresser with some loose change and a pocket knife and a folder of paper matches. She helped herself to three of the cigarettes and the folder of matches and went back into the living room and sat down on the sofa. The smoke did not taste good, mostly because she had been unable to brush her teeth for quite a while, but she accepted this as being appropriate, natural enough in a life where nothing at all was any good, and it amounted to nothing more than another minute factor in the gran
d sum of her depression and despair. She had lived in her depression now for far too long, and it was nothing she had been able to do anything about, she had tried, and it had made Lila furious. It was, she supposed, one of the reasons Lila had tried to kill her.

  Now she had deliberately thought about it, after trying so hard not to think about it at all, and it seemed like a long time ago that it had happened, far back in the remote and incredible past of yesterday. Something so remote could surely be thought of without particular trauma, could be considered calmly, or at least without excessive emotion, in the hope that something beneficial might come of it, something recovered that had been lost, something learned that had not been learned before, or had been forgotten. She was not actually optimistic that any of these things would result from her thinking, however calmly, or anything good at all, but anyhow it was sometimes easier in the long run to think than it was not to think, and it was a kind of relief for a while, even though it did not last.

  So Lila had tried to kill her. There was no question about that. It was only by the merest chance that she escaped, and if she had not escaped, no one would ever have known that she had been deliberately killed, for Lila was far too clever to be found out, and it would have been considered either an accident or suicide, whichever under the circumstances seemed most likely. Her relationship with Lila had started going bad ages ago, long before remote yesterday, and it had gone steadily from bad to worse, and the most terrible part of it was that it had been, until yesterday, all kept carefully under the surface of a terrifying cordiality. So far as she could understand it, for this deterioration of a relationship that had once seemed the only true and possible one in her shrunken world, there were two reasons, and neither was a reason that she could change.

  In the first place, she had not been a cheerful or pleasant companion. She admitted that. It’s difficult to be cheerful or pleasant when one is burdened constantly, more and more heavily as time goes on, by a complex feeling of guilt and danger and loneliness, and it is impossible not to have such a feeling, or to hide it forever, when one is insecure in one’s position. She was like an apostate who, having no longer any belief in God, still fears God’s judgment. And then, in the second place, Lila had simply grown away from her and wished to be rid of her, but there was danger in this for Lila, or Lila thought there was, for she did not trust her little cousin any longer, and there was no telling what harm the cousin might do, in ignorance or fear or malice or all together, if she were deserted and left to her own devices. Lila was beautiful and talented and ambitious, and if it was compulsory for her to be one thing, it was imperative for her to appear to be something else. Therefore, she had tried to kill, and it was something, after all, that could be thought about afterward in the room of a stranger without grief or anger or exorbitant sense of loss.