Then one day, without warning, as though she, too, had accepted the armistice and the capitulation, the grandmother departed to visit her son in Mills City. Her going seemed to leave the house bigger and emptier than it had ever been, as if the grandmother had been the only other actually living person in it. There were sewing women in the house daily now, making the trousseau, yet Elly seemed to herself to move quietly and aimlessly, in a hiatus without thought or sense, from empty room to empty room giving upon an identical prospect too familiar and too peaceful to be even saddening any longer. For long hours now she would stand at her mother’s bedroom window, watching the slow and infinitesimal clematis tendrils as they crept and overflowed up the screen and onto the veranda roof with the augmenting summer. Two months passed so; she would be married in three weeks. Then one day her mother said, “Your grandmother wants to come home Sunday. Why don’t you and Philip drive down to Mills City and spend Saturday night with your uncle, and bring her back Sunday?” Five minutes later, at the mirror, Elly looked at her reflection as you look at someone who has just escaped a fearful danger. ‘God,’ she thought, ‘what was I about to do? What was I about to do?’
Within the hour she had got Paul on the telephone, leaving home to do it, taking what precautions for secrecy her haste would afford her.
“Saturday morning?” he said.
“Yes. I’ll tell mother Phi … he wants to leave early, at daylight. They won’t recognize you or the car. I’ll be ready and we can get away quick.”
“Yes.” She could hear the wire, distance; she had a feeling of exultation, escape. “But you know what it means. If I come back. What I told you.”
“I’m not afraid. I still don’t believe you, but I am not afraid to try it now.”
Again she could hear the wire. “I’m not going to marry you, Elly.”
“All right, darling. I tell you I’m not afraid to try it any more. Exactly at daylight. I’ll be waiting.”
She went to the bank. After a time Philip was free and came to her where she waited, her face tense and wan beneath the paint, her eyes bright and hard. “There is something you must do for me. It’s hard to ask, and I guess it will be hard to do.”
“Of course I’ll do it. What is it?”
“Grandmother is coming home Sunday. Mother wants you and me to drive down Saturday and bring her back.”
“All right. I can get away Saturday.”
“Yes. You see, I told you it would be hard. I don’t want you to go.”
“Don’t want me to …” He looked at her bright, almost haggard face. “You want to go alone?” She didn’t answer, watching him. Suddenly she came and leaned against him with a movement practiced, automatic. She took one of his arms and drew it around her. “Oh,” he said. “I see. You want to go with someone else.”
“Yes. I can’t explain now. But I will later. But mother will never understand. She won’t let me go unless she thinks it is you.”
“I see.” His arm was without life; she held it about her. “It’s another man you want to go with.”
She laughed, not loud, not long. “Don’t be foolish. Yes. There’s another man in the party. People you don’t know and that I don’t expect to see again before I am married. But mother won’t understand. That’s why I must ask you. Will you do it?”
“Yes. It’s all right. If we can’t trust one another, we haven’t got any business marrying.”
“Yes. We must trust one another.” She released his arm. She looked at him intently, speculatively, with a cold and curious contempt. “And you’ll let mother believe …”
“You can trust me. You know that.”
“Yes. I’m sure I can.” Suddenly she held out her hand. “Good-bye.”
“Good-bye?”
She leaned against him again. She kissed him. “Careful,” he said. “Somebody might …”
“Yes. Until later, then. Until I explain.” She moved back, looked at him absently, speculatively. “This is the last trouble I’ll ever give you, I expect. Maybe this will be worth that to you. Good-bye.”
That was Thursday afternoon. On Saturday morning, at dawn, when Paul stopped his car before the dark house, she seemed to materialize at once, already running across the lawn. She sprang into the car before he could descend and open the door, swirling down into the seat, leaning forward and taut with urgency and flight like an animal. “Hurry!” she said. “Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!”
But he held the car a moment longer. “Remember. I told you what it meant if I came back. O.K.?”
“I heard you. I tell you I’m not afraid to risk it now. Hurry! Hurry!”
And then, ten hours later, with the Mills City signs increasing with irrevocable diminishment, she said, “So you won’t marry me? You won’t?”
“I told you that all the time.”
“Yes. But I didn’t believe you. I didn’t believe you. I thought that when I—after—And now there is nothing else I can do, is there?”
“No,” he said.
“No,” she repeated. Then she began to laugh, her voice beginning to rise.
“Elly!” he said. “Stop it, now!”
“All right,” she said. “I just happened to think about my grandmother. I had forgotten her.”
Pausing at the turn of the stair, Elly could hear Paul and her uncle and aunt talking in the living-room below. She stood quite still, in an attitude almost pensive, nun-like, virginal, as though posing, as though she had escaped for the moment into a place where she had forgotten where she came from and where she intended to go. Then a clock in the hall struck eleven, and she moved. She went on up the stairs quietly and went to the door of her cousin’s room, which she was to occupy for the night, and entered. The grandmother sat in a low chair beside the dressing table littered with the frivolous impedimenta of a young girl … bottles, powder puffs, photographs, a row of dance programs stuck into the mirror frame. Elly paused. They looked at one another for a full moment before the old woman spoke: “Not contented with deceiving your parents and your friends, you must bring a Negro into my son’s house as a guest.”
“Grandmother!” Elly said.
“Having me sit down to table with a negro man.”
“Grandmother!” Elly cried in that thin whisper, her face haggard and grimaced. She listened. Feet, voices were coming up the stairs, her aunt’s voice and Paul’s. “Hush!” Elly cried. “Hush!”
“What? What did you say?”
Elly ran to the chair and stooped and laid her fingers on the old woman’s thin and bloodless lips and, one furiously importunate and the other furiously implacable, they glared eye to eye across the hand while the feet and the voices passed the door and ceased. Elly removed her hand. From the row of them in the mirror frame she jerked one of the cards with its silken cord and tiny futile pencil. She wrote on the back of the card. He is not a negro he went to Va. and Harvard and everywhere.
The grandmother read the card. She looked up. “I can understand Harvard, but not Virginia. Look at his hair, his fingernails, if you need proof. I don’t. I know the name which his people have borne for four generations.” She returned the card. “That man must not sleep under this roof.”
Elly took another card and scrawled swiftly. He shall. He is my guest. I asked him here. You are my grandmother you would not have me treat any guest that way not even a dog.
The grandmother read it. She sat with the card in her hand. “He shall not drive me to Jefferson. I will not put a foot in that car, and you shall not. We will go home on the train. No blood of mine shall ride with him again.”
Elly snatched another card, scrawled furiously. I will. You cannot stop me. Try and stop me.
The grandmother read it. She looked at Elly. They glared at one another. “Then I will have to tell your father.”
Already Elly was writing again. She thrust the card at her grandmother almost before the pencil had ceased; then in the same motion she tried to snatch it back. But the grandmother had already grasped th
e corner of it and now they glared at one another, the card joining them like a queer umbilical cord. “Let go!” Elly cried. “Let it go!”
“Turn loose,” the grandmother said.
“Wait,” Elly cried thinly, whispering, tugging at the card, twisting it. “I made a mistake. I—” With an astonishing movement, the grandmother bent the card up as Elly tried to snatch it free.
“Ah,” she said, then she read aloud: Tell him. What do you know. “So. You didn’t finish it, I see. What do I know?”
“Yes,” Elly said. Then she began to speak in a fierce whisper: “Tell him! Tell him we went into a clump of trees this morning and stayed there two hours. Tell him!” The grandmother folded the card carefully and quietly. She rose. “Grandmother!” Elly cried.
“My stick,” the grandmother said. “There; against the wall.”
When she was gone Elly went to the door and turned the latch and recrossed the room. She moved quietly, getting a robe of her cousin’s from the closet, and undressed, slowly, pausing to yawn terrifically. “God, I’m tired,” she said aloud, yawning. She sat down at the dressing table and began to manicure her nails with the cousin’s equipment. There was a small ivory clock on the dressing table. She glanced at it now and then.
Then the clock below stairs struck midnight. She sat for a moment longer with her head above her glittering nails, listening to the final stroke. Then she looked at the ivory one beside her. ‘I’d hate to catch a train by you,’ she thought. As she looked at it her face began again to fill with the weary despair of the afternoon. She went to the door and passed into the dark hall. She stood in the darkness, on her naked feet, her head bent, whimpering quietly to herself with bemused and childish self-pity. ‘Everything’s against me,’ she thought. ‘Everything.’ When she moved, her feet made no sound. She walked with her arms extended into the darkness. She seemed to feel her eyeballs turning completely and blankly back into her skull with the effort to see. She entered the bathroom and locked the door. Then haste and urgency took her again. She ran to the angle of the wall beyond which the guest room was and stooped, cupping her voice into the angle with her hands. “Paul!” she whispered, “Paul!” holding her breath while the dying and urgent whisper failed against the cold plaster. She stooped, awkward in the borrowed robe, her blind eyes unceasing in the darkness with darting despair. She ran to the lavatory, found the tap in the darkness and tempered the drip of water to a minor but penetrating monotony. Then she opened the door and stood just within it. She heard the clock below stairs strike the half hour. She had not stirred, shaking slowly as with cold, when it struck one.
She heard Paul as soon as he left the guest room. She heard him come down the hall; she heard his hand seek the switch. When it clicked on, she found that her eyes were closed.
“What’s this?” Paul said. He wore a suit of her uncle’s pajamas. “What the devil—”
“Lock the door,” she whispered.
“Like hell. You fool. You damned fool.”
“Paul!” She held him as though she expected him to flee. She shut the door behind him and fumbled for the latch when he caught her wrist.
“Let me out of here!” he whispered.
She leaned against him, shaking slowly, holding him. Her eyes showed no iris at all. “She’s going to tell daddy. She’s going to tell daddy to-morrow, Paul!” Between the whispers the water dripped its unhurried minor note.
“Tell what? What does she know?”
“Put your arms around me, Paul.”
“Hell, no. Let go. Let’s get out of here.”
“Yes. You can help it. You can keep her from telling daddy.”
“How help it? Damn it, let me go!”
“She will tell, but it won’t matter then. Promise. Paul. Say you will.”
“Marry you? Is that what you are talking about? I told you yesterday I wouldn’t. Let me go, I tell you.”
“All right. All right.” She spoke in an eager whisper. “I believe you now. I didn’t at first, but I do now. You needn’t marry me, then. You can help it without marrying me.” She clung to him, her hair, her body, rich with voluptuous and fainting promise. “You won’t have to marry me. Will you do it?”
“Do what?”
“Listen. You remember that curve with the little white fence, where it is so far down to the bottom? Where if a car went through that little fence.…”
“Yes. What about it?”
“Listen. You and she will be in the car. She won’t know, won’t have time to suspect. And that little old fence wouldn’t stop anything and they will all say it was an accident. She is old; it wouldn’t take much; maybe even the shock and you are young and maybe it won’t even … Paul! Paul!” With each word her voice seemed to faint and die, speaking with a dying cadence out of urgency and despair while he looked down at her blanched face, at her eyes filled with desperate and voluptuous promise. “Paul!”
“And where will you be all this time?” She didn’t stir, her face like a sleepwalker’s. “Oh. I see. You’ll go home on the train. Is that it?”
“Paul!” she said in that prolonged and dying whisper. “Paul!”
In the instant of striking her his hand, as though refusing of its own volition the office, opened and touched her face in a long, shuddering motion almost a caress. Again, gripping her by the back of the neck, he assayed to strike her; again his hand, something, refused. When he flung her away she stumbled backward into the wall. Then his feet ceased and then the water began to fill the silence with its steady and unhurried sound. After a while the clock below struck two, and she moved wearily and heavily and closed the tap.
But that did not seem to stop the sound of the water. It seemed to drip on into the silence where she lay rigid on her back in bed, not sleeping, not even thinking. It dripped on while behind the frozen grimace of her aching face she got through the ritual of breakfast and of departure, the grandmother between Paul and herself in the single seat. Even the sound of the car could not drown it out, until suddenly she realized what it was. ‘It’s the signboards,’ she thought, watching them as they diminished in retrograde. ‘I even remember that one; now it’s only about two miles. I’ll wait until the next one; then I will … now. Now.’ “Paul,” she said. He didn’t look at her. “Will you marry me?”
“No.” Neither was she looking at his face. She was watching his hands as they jockeyed the wheel slightly and constantly. Between them the grandmother sat, erect, rigid beneath the archaic black bonnet, staring straight ahead like a profile cut from parchment.
“I’m going to ask you just once more. Then it will be too late. I tell you it will be too late then, Paul … Paul?”
“No, I tell you. You don’t love me. I don’t love you. We’ve never said we did.”
“All right. Not love, then. Will you marry me without it? Remember, it will be too late.”
“No. I will not.”
“But why? Why, Paul?” He didn’t answer. The car fled on. Now it was the first sign which she had noticed; she thought quietly, ‘We must be almost there now. It is the next curve.’ She said aloud, speaking across the deafness of the old woman between them: “Why not, Paul? If it’s that story about nigger blood, I don’t believe it. I don’t care.” ‘Yes,’ she thought, ‘this is the curve.’ The road entered the curve, descending. She sat back, and then she found her grandmother looking full at her. But she did not try now to veil her face, her eyes, any more than she would have tried to conceal her voice: “Suppose I have a child?”
“Suppose you do? I can’t help it now. You should have thought of that. Remember, you sent for me; I didn’t ask to come back.”
“No. You didn’t ask. I sent for you. I made you. And this is the last time. Will you? Quick!”
“No.”
“All right,” she said. She sat back; at that instant the road seemed to poise and pause before plunging steeply downward beside the precipice; the white fence began to flicker past. As Elly flung the robe aside she s
aw her grandmother still watching her; as she lunged forward across the old woman’s knees they glared eye to eye—the haggard and desperate girl and the old woman whose hearing had long since escaped everything and whose sight nothing escaped—for a profound instant of despairing ultimatum and implacable refusal. “Then die!” she cried into the old woman’s face; “die!” grasping at the wheel as Paul tried to fling her back. But she managed to get her elbow into the wheel spokes with all her weight on it, sprawling across her grandmother’s body, holding the wheel hard over as Paul struck her on the mouth with his fist. “Oh,” she screamed, “you hit me. You hit me!” When the car struck the railing it flung her free, so that for an instant she lay lightly as an alighting bird upon Paul’s chest, her mouth open, her eyes round with shocked surprise. “You hit me!” she wailed. Then she was falling free, alone in a complete and peaceful silence like a vacuum. Paul’s face, her grandmother, the car, had disappeared, vanished as though by magic; parallel with her eyes the shattered ends of white railing, the crumbling edge of the precipice where dust whispered and a faint gout of it hung like a toy balloon, rushed mutely skyward.
Overhead somewhere a sound passed, dying away—the snore of an engine, the long hissing of tires in gravel, then the wind sighed in the trees again, shivering the crests against the sky. Against the bole of one of them the car lay in an inextricable and indistinguishable mass, and Elly sat in a litter of broken glass, staring dully at it. “Something happened,” she whimpered. “He hit me. And now they are dead; it’s me that’s hurt, and nobody will come.” She moaned a little, whimpering. Then with an air of dazed astonishment she raised her hand. The palm was red and wet. She sat whimpering quietly, digging stupidly at her palm. “There’s glass all in it and I can’t even see it,” she said, whimpered, gazing at her palm while the warm blood stained slowly down upon her skirt. Again the sound rushed steadily past high overhead, and died away. She looked up, following it. “There goes another one,” she whimpered. “They won’t even stop to see if I am hurt.”
Collected Stories Page 20
