There was a moment of understanding, then, which obliterated Arthur’s rising panic. As if in the far distance, through transfiguring haze and mist, he really saw his father for the first time. The vision lasted and was remembered only for a second; but during that brief flash, he understood many things. Here was one who, in another way, felt and remembered as he, himself, felt and remembered. Here was found, unexpectedly, in a father he did not know, one who, broadly speaking, was obsessed with his own feelings, his own images, his own remembrances. The discovery shocked him out of his silence and he spoke haltingly, almost gently.
‘I know. Yes; I know.’
Then for the first time since he had begun his reflective monologue, Hollis Maxley looked at his son.
‘God,’ he said softly. ‘What a tangled mess we make out of our living.’ He paused. ‘I haven’t been a very good father, have I, Art? If I had known . . . You see, I was young; not in years, but in the important ways. There were so many things I didn’t stop to think about, to figure out. But those are excuses. It is, and was, my fault, I guess. It started out wrong and I let it go wrong for so long that—Well, we weren’t able to straighten it out. If in the beginning I had been a little wiser or a little kinder, or—If I had just known as much about things then as I know now! Lord, I wonder how many people have said that. But—if I had, things might have been different, mightn’t they?’
Arthur did not know how to handle the unaccustomed warmth that flowed inside him, it was so tentative and new. When he spoke, his voice was hardly above a whisper.
‘I guess we can’t really be sure of anything,’ he said. ‘Everybody tries to do what they think is right, best, and— and if it doesn’t work out, why—it’s hard to put the blame on anyone. Things just happen.’
Now the restlessness in his father’s eyes was gone. They glowed with a new, intense light. He looked with fierce, repressed affection at his son, and his gaze burned through him.
‘I’m tired of running,’ he said. ‘I’ve been running on this log for—Oh, it seems like a thousand years. I’m tired; I won’t run any more!’ He thumped the table with his tightly clenched fist. His voice was pleading. ‘I could stop— it wouldn’t be impossible—if I had someone to help me. But—by myself, it’s no good. I know. Look. Why can’t we forget these years? Why can’t we? Look—you’ve been running yourself. I know, I can tell. The marks are on your face, and, God knows, I should recognize them. Can’t we help each other out? It would be hard at first, I know that. No. It wouldn’t be easy. But—we’re both so tired, and we’ve got to stop running sometime!’
From somewhere in a troubled displacement, Arthur looked across a space of light and darkness and saw his father who seemed younger now, more like the man he remembered. And as the faint reverberation of an echo, he heard his own voice, strange and unsure of itself, saying: ‘I don’t know . . . I don’t know.’
His mind recoiled from the very prospect of thinking about this. It was so new, so unexpected. He waited for a shock, he waited for the dark monsters of his remembering to spring upon him, ravenous and insatiable. But no shock came, and the monsters did not spring.
He had no way of knowing what to say or do. He looked toward his father with unfocussed eyes and listened to his heart beat in his chest. Then, as the room began to blur in his sight and he became dizzy, he blinked rapidly and shook his head and allowed his gaze to wander away from his father out over the dining room.
And suddenly the shock was upon him, stiffening his body; he heard the growling of the dark monsters. The skin about his eyesockets distended and he half-rose from his chair, his mouth gaping with incredulity.
For there, gliding across the crowded floor, clad all in white, her hand outstretched, was his mother.
A silver-shot mist hung about her—the halo of fine insubstantial hair caressed her head, just as he remembered it, and her skin was the same tinged ivory that it had been in life. She floated nearer to him, she came nearer and nearer.
Then he fell back into his chair and passed a shaky hand over his eyes. It was not his mother at all. It was a stranger, a woman whom he had never seen before. A trick of the light, he told himself; it was only a trick of the light and a small resemblance and this circumstance which had caused the mistake.
But he could not prevent his eyes from lifting again to seek out curiously that deceptive figure. And then he had a second start, for the woman he had seen was looking directly at them and was walking toward their table with unmistakable intent. He turned to his father with a puzzled frown.
But Hollis Maxley did not meet his gaze, for he too saw the woman; and his face was a twisted mask of worried expectancy.
Then, before either of them could speak, she was at their table. Her voice was gay and brassy as she said, ‘Hollie, dear! I missed you this afternoon. Why didn’t you phone?’
Hollis Maxley flushed darkly. He got up from his chair awkwardly and stammered, ‘Oh, I—I—’
She laughed and her laughter was a thin tinkle of razor-sharp blades clashing against each other. ‘It’s quite all right, darling, only you said you would call. And don’t get up. I just dropped in with some friends, and when I saw you over here engaged in such earnest conversation, I thought I would relieve the intensity.’
She smiled again, displaying even rows of small white teeth. She looked curiously at Arthur who sat regarding her with utter coldness.
Hollis Maxley would not look at either of them. He hovered above the table, supported by clenched fists that wrinkled the tablecloth.
The woman laughed again, but the sound was forced and strained and uncertain. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I shan’t disturb you any longer. I just—’
Then from his painful confusion, Hollis Maxley salvaged a quiet modicum of instinctive dignity. He said, ‘I’m sorry, Ellen. This is my son, Arthur Maxley. Arthur, this is Miss Ellen Phillips.’
The woman introduced as Miss Phillips shot a startled glance at Hollis Maxley. ‘Your son? Why, Hollie, I didn’t know you—’ She broke off and turned to Arthur, who had not moved, and offered him a new smile and a small, well- manicured hand. ‘I’m so happy to know you.’
He disregarded the proffered hand. He did not answer her. He was aware that his father flashed him an agonized glance, but he did not move.
The woman looked at Hollis Maxley. She said in a changed voice, ‘I’m sorry if I interrupted anything, Hollis. I’ll see you later.’ Then she moved off quickly and vanished into the crowd.
Hollis Maxley reseated himself slowly and looked at his son, looked at his face which was set and pale, at the eyes which flashed like unbanked coals behind refracting glass.
There was a moment of uncompromising silence. Then Hollis Maxley said, ‘Look, that wasn’t important. Forget about that.’
But the moment of warmth was gone, and both of them knew it would not come again. It was a loss; and a part of Arthur grieved that loss, the loss he had somehow known from the beginning was inevitable. And such a small thing. His logic named it small; it must be small.
It was, as his father said, unimportant. And yet—and yet. It was as if some fortuitous intelligence, some obscure power which controlled both their destinies, had willed this thing to happen and had imbued it with a strange, unsayable significance of which he was instantly aware. And now this significance entered into his spirit, creating a blind moment of hate that destroyed all past warmth and understanding, leaving in their place a tortuous pattern of inarticulate pain and revulsion, the compounded fury of which was directed at the defenseless figure in front of him.
‘Forget it,’ his father said again.
Forget, he thought bitterly. ‘Forget,’ he said aloud.
And there was a sudden vision in a corner of his memory of a slimmer creature all in white who glided across a happier room in a happier time and a vision of his father (the brown ghost in front of him now) younger also and himself and the three of them walking and they were alone in the summer twilight in the w
arm and scented season and there was no thought of another time nor of another place for they were entire and there was no need for any other and then there was nothing bad and then there was neither faithlessness nor an obscure disquiet nor anything.
‘I can’t forget.’
He heard his own words and hated their cheap sound, hated the brain that whelped, the lips which gave them birth.
‘Don’t take it so seriously,’ his father said. Little jewels of sweat were glistening on his forehead. ‘She was—nothing. You understand that.’
Furious, unreasoning words rushed up and spewed from his lips. ‘No!’ he said. ‘I don’t understand. You—how you could—that cheap creature—that—’ He shook his head, trembling with momentary nausea. When he spoke again, there was more calm in his voice, more questioning. ‘No, I can’t understand. Why have things changed so? Have things always been like this? I thought I remembered a time when—But everything is bad now, it’s evil. You, me, the whole world, everything. Can’t we go back? Can’t we be like we were then? What’s wrong?’
‘But that’s what I want.’ His father’s words tumbled with a peculiar, hopeless eagerness. ‘Don’t you see, Art? That’s what I want—to live again like we lived before—to go back. And we can, if you will—’
‘No, not now. Not—Oh, what’s the use, talking. You can’t go back. You know that. Just for a minute, I thought that . . . But not any longer. It’s all gone. Everything’s filthy again. And that woman, that—How you could—’
Hollis Maxley raised his hands feebly and waved them before his face like a groggy pugilist.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘All right. I guess it’s no use. I suppose I knew it from the start. I’m sorry. Christ, I’m sorry. What else can I say? What can anyone say? But—can’t you see how it is? There’s nothing worse than being alone when you aren’t strong enough to face your own thoughts. You can stand it just so long, and then—Well, then you just can’t be alone any longer. You’ve got to do something, no matter how silly it is. You’ve got to make yourself believe you aren’t alone, even if you are.’
‘I don’t suppose she’s the only one.’
‘Why do you keep harping on her? No, she’s not the only one. There have been others. This is so stupid. There have been others. There’s nothing so wrong, you see, but— They all look like her. I try to make myself believe that . . . No, there have been others. Why say there haven’t? Don’t you see?’
They sat motionless, staring at each other. They looked for a long while and neither of them spoke.
At last, Hollis Maxley cried out in a great burst of pain, ‘God, you don’t think I want to live like this, do you?’
His son stood up suddenly and pushed the chair back from the table. His face was a twisted mask where incommunicable pity and hate struggled vainly with contempt and unacknowledged love.
‘You fool,’ he whispered softly. ‘You poor fool.’ And he did not know to whom he spoke.
He looked at the huddled figure for a last time. The thought ran swiftly across his brain that he would not see his father again. Unexpectedly, tears blurred his eyes and he turned and rushed out of the room.
When he stumbled out of the hotel lobby, he found that darkness had descended, had crept down stealthily out of the sky to engage the city in ancient battle. The street lights and the electric signs sputtered with pitiful vehemence, but their protestations seemed only to emphasize the vast power of the night.
He breathed deeply, shudderingly of the corrupt air. A summer chill had come with the evening, and the cool breeze whipped through his clothing; and he shivered, hunching his shoulders and ramming his hands deep into his pockets, distinctly uncomfortable in the biting change from the close atmosphere of the dining room.
He stood for a moment indecisively on the sidewalk while the great human stream swirled and eddied about him. Then, as if the monotonous pressure of the current had uprooted him, he moved dully into the rushing torrent, a bit of colorless flotsam tossed and carried along between narrow banks.
The clatter of the metropolitan night assaulted his ears and screamed down the echoing vault of his senses, piling up and reverberating in increasing and diminishing waves until it seemed that all the city was one gigantic pulse of sound. And the ostentatious glare of the store windows along the street, the huge neon signs, the city’s myriad lights, the turgid twist and turn of the crowd, the snail-like convolutions of the shiny traffic upon the reflecting pavement—all these were visual counterpoint to the grating music of uninhibited noise.
Then, as he walked along the overflowing street in this deep summer evening, there came to him that peculiar loneliness which is felt only in the monstrous impersonality of a multitude, that incomparable sensation of pure aloneness never known in another circumstance. The solitary figure upon an unchanging expanse of desert is not so alone as is one lost in the infinity of a crowded city. He who is alone on the desert is always aware of his own significance, however small, and his relation to the space that he can see. But one who is solitary in the midst of a teeming swarm loses awareness of himself as an individual. The hundreds of strange bodies which press against him unknowingly, the hundreds of strange eyes which look upon his face blankly and without recognition, the voices which speak above, around, but never to him—in these lies true aloneness. Of these things he was dimly aware as he tumbled and drifted along.
However, with a sudden and violent wrench, he dislocated himself from that stream and stood with his body flattened and pressed against the plate glass bank of a store window, watching the river from which he had escaped go rushing by. He stood so for some moments, collecting his scattered faculties. A few doors above him, he could see an electric sign which flashed regularly on and off. He could not read the letters from where he stood, and he did not dare step out to look more closely for fear that the hungry maw of the crowd would suck him in, devour him again; but from the aperture below the sign there came a soothingly raucous sound of laughter and music. He edged down the sidewalk, still pressed against its high bank, until he could slip into that door. As he entered, he was able to spell out the neon sign as it flashed, ‘Luisant’s.’
He discovered himself in a small, softly lighted foyer. A carelessly groomed hat-check girl regarded him with tired, mascaraed eyes. He handed her his hat in exchange for a cardboard tag. He walked toward the paneled double door which led to the muted wail of the dance orchestra whose music he had heard up the street.
The room was larger than he had expected. From the narrow entrance and the tiny foyer, he had anticipated an equally small and crowded place. The latter was true, but the room itself was surprisingly spacious. To his left there was an alcove whose entire length was devoted to a bar. Most of the chrome and red leather barstools in front of it were in use, their occupants largely silent, intent upon their serious business of drinking and rather sullen observation of themselves in the bar mirror.
Little noise, except an occasional clank of glasses and swish of cocktail shakers, issued from there. The larger place with the tables, dance floor, and orchestra was parent of the real sound. He stood on the outer edge of the room with a hesitant expression on his face.
A waiter approached him warily, eyeing him up and down. One could almost hear the automatic click of that professional mind as he was considered and shoved into a neat classification.
‘Have you a reservation, sir?’ the waiter asked. The formula was recognized. He smiled.
‘No.’
‘No reservation? Oh. Well.’ The waiter pretended to be taken aback. He put a forefinger precisely at the cleft of his chin and stared into space. Then, as if conferring an inestimable favor, he whispered; ‘I think . . . yes, I’m almost sure . . . a very nice table . . . Canceled at the last minute, I believe. Follow me, sir.’
And they moved off together toward the table which had been canceled at the last minute.
The waiter pulled back the chair with a flourish and a bow, and he started to s
it down. Magically, the edge of the chair bumped behind his knees. His legs folded and he plopped gently into a sitting position. He stared at a menu shoved suddenly under his nose.
‘No,’ he said distraitly. ‘Not just yet. I think . . . first . . . a brandy and soda. Yes.’
The waiter moved away and he put his elbows on the white table-top. For the first time since he had left his father back in the Regency dining room he did not move. As he had wandered the streets distractedly, dully, it seemed that all feeling had been held in abeyance until a certain, propitious moment. And now the moment was here, upon him, and his pain flooded like a drowning wave.
With a certain bitter and agonized humor, he wondered why real and deep emotion so often finds expression in the stomach. For suddenly his bowels rebelled; a great fist was there, twisting and tearing. Beads of sweat stood out on his forehead, and he thought for a moment that he was going to be physically ill. But he fought it down, held it inside him.
Then he felt the weak drained relief that follows the cessation of nausea. A delicious lassitude crept over him, and he relaxed, utterly spent, urgently and blessedly tired. Had he not known that any movement would destroy the welcome lethargy, he would have left the night club at that very moment, he would have returned to his apartment, thrown himself upon the waiting bed, and slept forever. But he realized that his condition was one of precarious balance; he did not stir.
There had been a pause in the music. Now, out of the corner of his eye, he saw the orchestra leader mount the little platform where the musicians were. He waved his baton wearily at them. They doused half-smoked cigarettes and picked up their instruments. The leader brought his stick down sharply; music blared.
The room’s weight shifted as a great number of people got up from their tables and oozed onto the dance floor. Sleek ladies allowed themselves to be crushed to the bodies of slick men, and the peculiar, machine-like precision that is ballroom dancing filled his sight.
Nothing but the Night Page 6
