Ann Petry

by Ann Petry

  “What was you doin’?” he said. Awe still on his face.

  “I was saying grace.” He moves like a mouse, she thought. I didn’t hear him come in here. “I was saying a blessing.” No response. “Before people eat,” she said slowly, “they bless the food.” She thought he would ask why, but he didn’t.

  “Where to sit?” he demanded. He had moved closer to her, if he came any closer his nose would be in her soup.

  Oh, she thought, as she got up from the table, this one time won’t do any harm. “Sit there.” She pointed to the place where Link always sat. “But wait a minute.” She washed his hands and his face. He made no comment. “Now,” she said, “you can sit down at the table.”

  She set a place for him and filled a glass with milk and handed it to him because this was as good a time as any to get him to drink milk from a glass rather than from a nursing bottle. He ate steadily, not talking, but making a rather musical murmuring as he ate, umh, umh, umh, umh. He gulped the milk down, polished off a big bowl of applesauce, grabbed three cookies, said, “Me gotta go now,” and went out the back door, fast.

  “Well!” she said aloud.

  3

  * * *

  SATURDAY AFTERNOON and Jubine, the photographer, leaned way over the desk, bar, barrier, table, whatever it was that separated the girl behind the switchboard in the office of the Monmouth Chronicle from bringers-in of items about weddings and funerals, births and christenings, and complainers about misspelled names.

  Jubine leaned way over and whispered in the girl’s ear, “‘How beautiful are thy feet with shoes, O prince’s daughter—’”

  The girl turned and smiled at him, thus she brought her face quite close to his and did not immediately move it away.

  “Jubie!” she said. “I knew that was you before I looked.”

  “You mean the Chronicle’s bright young men no longer speak English? Is it that they speak in unknown tongues? I forgot. They all talk Bullockese—a fiery wrathful blasphemous language. Thus if Jubine even so much as whispers he is immediately recognized.” He worked a cigar around in his mouth.

  “Where’ve you been?” the girl asked.

  “Oh, around and around and around. In circles. Back and forth and around.”

  “How come we haven’t seen you?”

  “We? We? You mean you, don’t you? Miss me?”

  “Of course.”

  “Whyn’t you call me up?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Too busy? No telephones? No nickels to put in telephones? Or does the telephone company annoy you so you boycott telephones? How about dinner? Tonight?”

  “Jubie, I think you’re sweet. But I don’t want to eat a sandwich at a wake. With or without you. Or on the dock. Or on the back of your motorcycle.”

  “Breakfast. How about breakfast? Sunday morning. Any place you say.”

  “Not me. I tried it once. Never again.”

  He sighed. “Can I help it if I keep believing that one of these days I will come across a small and lovely one with curly black hair, like yours, and dimples in the cheeks, like yours, and a mouth that suggests honey, like yours. But she will not want Simmons mattresses and Toastmaster toasters and Cannon sheets and Gunther coats and De Beers Limited will not rate with her. She will want me. That’s all. She will share my pumpernickel and my pail of beer and because she can hold my hand she will not want anything else. And she will look just like you.”

  “What’s De Beers?”

  “Little one, you mean you haven’t got that far yet? I forgot. You’re only twenty-one. But you’ll find out. They all do.”

  “Jubie, you don’t want a wife. You don’t want a girl. All you need for the rest of your life is a camera. And you know it. You can’t kid me.”

  “I thought perhaps you’d changed your mind.”

  “Nope.” She worked the switchboard, fast, said, Yes, No, Hold on please, ah, shut up you dope, no, fathead, Yes, sir, No, sir. “Did you want something, Jubie? Other than to look at me and practise using words?”

  “Is the owner in?” he asked humbly.

  “I’ll see.”

  “You don’t have to use the technique on me, sweetie. A man that size wearing a camel-hair coat that color could not possibly go out without you seeing him. Besides the Bullock stamps his hoofs as he walks and he exhales smoke and fire through his nostrils. Or does he have a private staircase for emergency use, just in case his past should catch up with him? Besides that five-thousand-dollar-fob Detroit job is right out there at the curb. Dead center in front of the door.”

  The girl giggled. “If he’s in shall I say that you have some pictures for him?”

  “I am not here to sell him any pictures unless I feel a sudden wave of pity for him. Which I doubt. You tell the Keeper of the Gate that Jubine is here because Bullock sent for Jubine. Jubine always comes on horseback whenever his friend the editor, owner, and publisher of the Monmouth Chronicle gets into trouble and sends for him.”

  “Trouble? Trouble? What kind of trouble is he in, Jubie?”

  “Maybe he’s pregnant. That’s why I came so fast. I want to know, too.”

  The girl said, “Mr. Jubine to see Mr. Bullock,” into the mouthpiece and waited about five minutes, then she said, “All right.”

  “You can go right in. But don’t bait him, Jubie. He’s not feeling so good today.”

  “Tch! Tch! He should live so. A big strong young man in a camel-hair coat, not feeling so good today. Now remember I had a head, two arms, two legs, and a torso, all intact when last you saw me go through yonder door. Grrrrrrrrr!” he growled, and blew her a kiss.

  Peter Bullock looked at Jubine and thought, I don’t know why I was weak enough to send for him, except that I’ve had to buy too goddamn many of his pictures lately, sometimes even had to call him up and ask him if he had what I wanted. Just that morning he’d been raving at the halfwits in the photo department, “What’s the matter with you? That damn Jubine gets pictures. Why can’t you?”

  Even while he said it he was thinking, You can’t pay a man to do what Jubine does, sleep in snatches, half awake even when asleep, eat where and when he can, ear always cocked to police calls, camera always close by, camera to be woman, children, home, life, sleep, everything. Had thought that and then decided, I’ll offer him a job. And so sent for him. And here he was. So he offered him the job—head of the photo department.

  Jubine laughed. He took the cigar out of his mouth to laugh, and then put it back in his mouth, lit it. Bullock had never seen him light it before, had figured that the one cigar lasted him a year or so, all he ever did was hold it in his mouth, not even chewing on it, just working it around.

  He blew out a great cloud of bluegray smoke. “You know what I make a year, Bullock?”

  Bullock shook his head.

  “You guess. Sometimes for just one shot, I get more than you could afford to pay me for four months’ work.”

  “I don’t believe you. Whyn’t you buy some decent clothes and a car? And live in a decent house.” Jubine lived in a loft, wore GI pants and shoes, rode on a motorcycle.

  “For what? My clothes keep me warm. My loft keeps the rain and the wind away from my person. And I am free. But you, my dear Bullock, you are a slave, to custom, to a house, to a car. You have given yourself little raw places in your stomach, little sore burning places, so that you cannot eat what you want and you cannot sleep at night, because you have turned so many handsprings to pay for that long shiny car, and you’ve got to keep on turning them so that you can buy expensive tires for it, so that you can buy the expensive gas that goes in its belly. It’s a slave ship. Think of it—a slave ship right here in this beautiful little New England city called Monmouth—”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” he said impatiently. “Go on home and eat roots and herbs from the meadows, go on home and live naked in a cave, I wish to God I’
d never—”

  “I know, Bullock, I know,” voice tender, voice all compassion. “I like you, that’s why I enjoy talking to you. You see your newspaper could be so good but you can’t afford to fool around with it because it would frighten the readers and they would cancel their subscriptions and the advertisers would get angry and withdraw their advertising and—”

  “The advertisers don’t run the paper.”

  “I didn’t say they did. But they’d be fools if they didn’t let you know when they were displeased, because of a story or an editorial.”

  “Bosh.”

  “No advertiser ever tried to keep a story out of the Chronicle?”

  “You’ve been reading Pravda.”

  Jubine shook his head. “You mean to tell me that there is not left in your newspaper or in you even so much as a spark, just the faintest suggestion of a spark of life, that would disturb an advertiser? Not even an editorial that makes an advertiser register a complaint over the telephone?” He paused, eyed Bullock, said, “Do you know what history will record about you and your newspaper?”

  Bullock didn’t answer.

  “Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Neither will history mention the city of Monmouth, as a place of interest. It will be mentioned only as the birthplace of Jubine, the man who spent a lifetime photographing a river, and thus recorded the life of man in the twentieth century. For the first time.”

  “In that case,” Bullock made his voice dry, deliberate, “why do you waste your valuable time talking to me? Why don’t you—”

  “Because, my dear Bullock, I am trying to save you.”

  He walked straight into it. “Save me? Save me from what?”

  “From ulcers and the fate of ulcer victims, from slavery and the fate of slaves, from whoredom and the fate of whores—”

  “Get out,” Bullock roared. “Go on, get out, and don’t ever come back—”

  “Wait. I have brought your Christmas pictures.” He opened his shabby briefcase, extracted a large blownup photograph, blew on it, kissed his hand to it. “Look—”

  Bullock held the picture a long time. He had seen the church all his life, but never quite like this. Snow on the ground, and in the background the river, the melted snow had increased its size, widening it, or else it was the angle of the camera, the wind must have been blowing because there were little rippling waves in the water, motion in the water, and the church was all slender steeple, going up, up, toward the sky. And a cloud, just one cloud far up. Church, river, sky, cloud, all of it timeless, ageless. Hope in it, in the sun sparkling on the river, on the snow, on that fragilelooking steeple that lifted itself up, and up, up.

  “That’s beautiful,” he said, and sighed.

  “Why did you sigh?”

  “Don’t start talking. Just let me buy the picture and then run along and save somebody else’s soul. How much do you want for it?”

  “Wait. I have something else to show you. Here. This goes with the picture of the church. You have just seen religion on the River Wye, man’s aspiration, his hope, his faith, part of his dreams. But the river reveals many things about men. Here is despair written almost on the face of the river.”

  He shook his head as he looked at the next photograph. The river was in the background of this one, too, but it must have been taken on a cold night, and the river was black, ugly. It seemed to resent the dock for the dock was in the foreground, snowcovered, and the river had thrown a border of frozen spray along the edge of the dock, as though it had been spitting at it. There were footprints, a man’s prints, and off to one side was the body of a man, flat on his belly, snow on him, too. His footprints were black in the white snow, water in the heel prints.

  He handed the picture back, said nothing.

  Jubine reached in the briefcase again. “I went back in an hour—and this is what I got.”

  You could see where the man had been lying, the imprint of his body. You could see, in the snow, how he had struggled, clawing at the snow to get on his feet, and then his footprints. He dragged his feet when he walked, the dragging unsteady feet had gone in a zigzag line to the edge of the dock, ended there. There were no footprints coming back.

  “You mean—why didn’t you stop him?”

  “Stop him? I didn’t see him do this.”

  “But when you saw him lying there in the snow, why didn’t you find out what he was doing there? You must have known he was heading for the river.”

  “Me?” Jubine’s popeyes widened. He worked his cigar from the right-hand corner of his mouth to dead center, worked it back to its first position. “Me? Am I the hand of God, Bullock? Should I interfere with the inevitable, the foreordained? Interfere with the doomed and the damned?” He made a gesture with his hand, as though he were rejecting the idea, pushing it away. “Not Jubine. Jubine watches. Jubine waits. Jubine records but Jubine never, never interferes—”

  “I always knew you set these things up,” Bullock said furiously. “Anything for a picture—even a man’s life.” Jubine reached over, took the picture of the church, and put it back in the briefcase. “Hold on. I want that one.”

  “All or none. These three pictures belong together. They must be printed together. You cannot use the church by itself. You see, I am interested in the immortal souls of your readers as well as yours. They are poor peons, too. And so on Christmas morning—”

  “You couldn’t pay me to put those other two pictures in the paper on Christmas Day.”

  “I was afraid you’d feel like that. Some day I shall become discouraged and I will stop offering you immortality. You are a stupid man, Bullock. These pictures will be reprinted, together, not just one of them, as long as there is any paper left in the world. They will become better known than the Mona Lisa, than a Raphael Madonna, and when I think that they might first have appeared in the Monmouth Chronicle, why I weep for you, Bullock. I weep for you.”

  He supposed it was childish, but as Jubine went out the door he followed him, and when he reached the little anteroom where his secretary sat, he said, loud enough for Jubine to hear, “Don’t let him in here again. I don’t want any more of his pictures. I don’t want to talk to him on the telephone. Tell that cutie on the switchboard the same thing.”

  The irritation that Jubine had set up in him, hung around him like a cloak; it seemed to increase in size, until when he finally got home even the sight of his own home infuriated him. Lola sensed his mood, the instant he entered the house, and she practically tiptoed around him, and that made him angrier.

  We live like millionaires, he thought, got to have a maid and a cook and a cleaning woman and God knows what else. The dinner table set up like it was for a banquet, lighted candles and flowers on the table. Good food, he supposed, and he had mashed potatoes and cream.

  “Had a hard day, Pete?”

  “Mmmmmm.”

  That took care of the conversation during dinner. Afterwards they went into the living room, and he thought, Rose-colored curtains drawn across the picture window, glass house, never throw stones when you live in a glass house. Cozy. Almost winter. Stage all set for it. The wife in black velvet, ankle length, fullskirted, gold something or other around the waist, the husband in tweed jacket, pants didn’t match, pipe in hand, leaning against the fireplace, fire flickering in the fireplace, fireplace built practically in the middle of the living room, chimney part of the decorative value of the room, according to the pansy who selected the furnishings. Logs of applewood being burned, sold practically by weight, he ought to know, he paid the bill for the goddamn wood and wondered what the hell kind of world this was where you bought wood for a fireplace, when you burned oil to heat the joint with, but then you had a fireplace and you lived in a city so you had to buy wood by the piece from a farmer who insulted you even as he pocketed your money, and then pay a fortune to have it hauled here, and then you burned the stuff not to keep
warm but to— Decorative effect. Hearth. Home. Siamese cat part of it. No children. Siamese cat took their place. Sat in front of the fire warming its behind and sneered. Lola’s cat.

  Lola was reading a magazine. He thought, I don’t hate her. I think I do sometimes. But I don’t. I couldn’t. It’s just the old war between the male and the female. Never resolved and never will be. I couldn’t hate her. She’s beautiful. A redhead. How the hell did we get here anyway? Why do I get so mad at her, at myself, at the goddamn newspaper, this house, even the wood, burning in the fireplace. It cost a couple of arteries but it burns smoothly, evenly, throws no sparks, stays lighted.

  He sighed. Lola looked up, and he thought, she knows me so well that she knows it is now safe to talk to me, that I am now a human being again and not an animal holed up somewhere with a front paw caught in a trap, paw swelling, pain in it, animal crazy with pain, would bite off the hand of a would-be rescuer. Lola. In this light—red hair—

  “What’re you readin’?”

  “Vogue. New issue. It’s got the most marvelous photograph. Look.”

  She came across the room with it, stood beside him, magazine held open. He might have known. One of Jubine’s shots. Old colored washerwoman. Taken, he was certain, right here in Monmouth. Looked though as if it had been taken in Charleston. Woman sitting on a stoop. Face like—he didn’t believe any such face existed—face like a painting by an old master, master hand, a strong old face, tough, not tough in the modern sense, tough like leather, indestructible, would wear forever, a face that had seen all kinds of things, a face that had survived everything, a face suggesting what—compassion. He had the feeling that if this old woman looked at him, Bullock, she would feel sorry for him. And he thought, That’s the thing about Jubine that infuriates me. It’s not that rot he talks, it’s not that he talks all the time like it was a compulsion, speech eases him, so he has to talk and talk and talk and talk; it’s that he actually feels sorry for me. Why did I know instantly that this was a washerwoman, yes, sign right by the door, said Han Launderey, beautifully misspelled, and the old hands were out of shape at the knuckles and joints.