A Tender Victory

by Taylor Caldwell

  He was dumfounded. The work was all complete, the tables and the chairs in place. The faintly golden shelves had not an empty space. He shouted, “Where did you get that fine mahogany for the shelves? Must have cost a fortune! Best I ever saw.”

  “Mahogany?” asked Johnny. “Isn’t mahogany red? This is a kind of blond color.” He was incredulous.

  “Blond mahogany!” shrieked the doctor, rubbing his arm along one length. “Guston’s best! Don’t tell me he donated it? I wouldn’t believe it! Where did you get it, anyway? It’s priceless.”

  Johnny sat down suddenly and turned pale. “Why, three of the men who work at Guston’s brought it, over a period of several weeks, piece by piece,” he said. “They told me it cost practically nothing. It was waste, they said. Lumber thrown away.”

  The doctor was gleeful. “Well, I’ll be damned. If that lumber was thrown away it was first stacked nicely, out of sight, before it was thrown away. Son, you’re a receiver of stolen goods!” He slapped a massive thigh in its crumpled suiting. He cackled. “The parson’s a fence!”

  Johnny said, aghast, “Could they be arrested for it?”

  “Of course they could! Look at that finish. Finished mahogany. Furniture mahogany. I happen to know that Guston prepares this for the best New York furniture makers.” The doctor cavorted delightedly.

  Johnny stood up, grim and white. “I’m going to write Mr. Guston and tell him, and ask him what the wood is worth, and then I’ll try, someway, to pay him.”

  The doctor suddenly became very sober. “No you won’t,” he said. “In the first place, Guston’s just looking for a chance to get back at you, because of his wife. First thing he’d do is to notify Mac, and there’d be the funniest spread in the papers about it. Mac’s got a real comedian on his staff. Could make you laugh at your dying mother. And then Guston would have your pals arrested. By the way, how did they get it past the foreman, and how come the foreman didn’t notice the disappearance?”

  “One of the men is the foreman,” said Johnny weakly. He shook his head. “I’ve got to pay Guston, someway.”

  “And put your pals in prison? That’d be a nice return, wouldn’t it, for all their work, and sinning up their souls for you?”

  Johnny was silent. Then he said angrily, “Well, what’ll I do?”

  “Nothing, of course. Just keep your mouth shut. And don’t mention it to the men. They thought you deserved mahogany, and that’s a compliment I wouldn’t pay you myself. Don’t disillusion them.”

  “You’re a criminal anyway, doctor.”

  “Well, sure. Who ain’t, by God? Besides, didn’t God Himself forgive the thief on the cross who repented?”

  “I don’t think my boys are doing any repenting,” said Johnny. He had to smile. “I think they feel they’re terribly clever, getting out that mahogany. They brought it at night. In a truck.”

  “Look,” said the doctor. “Guston don’t have much heart for his men. He gets the last drop of sweat out of them, and they hate his guts.”

  “You’re making me feel better,” said Johnny. “But still it isn’t my wood.”

  “Coming down to it, nothing is anybody’s anyway, if you want to get real metaphysical. Didn’t you once say everything was only lent to us? Okay. This is being lent to you. And stop talking so much.”

  “I don’t think I like the shelves very much,” said Johnny—“now.”

  “Of course you do. Don’t be a hypocrite. Those men worked for weeks on those infernal shelves for you.”

  “I know!” said Johnny, becoming inspired. “I’ll just invite them over here, the three of them, for a beer with me, and then I’ll look them in the eye and suggest that they each give a pint of blood regularly to the Red Cross, for a year.”

  He did. First he admired the shelves extravagantly, walking about the hall, and rubbing his hands over the wood. He thanked the three happy men. Then he stopped before them, fixed them with his dark-blue eyes, and said slowly, “Boys, the Red Cross needs blood. Now you’re all husky specimens. Don’t you think you should offer a pint as often as you can? Say for a year? Yes, I think a year will do it.”

  They understood at once. They regarded him with admiration, studiously avoiding looking at the shelves. They brought him their Red Cross cards later, and nothing more was said.

  “Talk about Shylock,” said the doctor, with even more admiration.

  “We won’t,” said Johnny. “Besides, the boys are staining the mahogany red.”

  “Appropriate, and discreet,” said the doctor approvingly. “And I hope every time you look at the shelves you’ll have a qualm, or something.”

  Lorry wired the doctor, briefly: “Expect me day after Christmas, darling.”

  The party for the children, held in the parish hall two days before Christmas, was a great success. All of Johnny’s children attended. They could not get over the giant tree, wonderful decorations, and lights and all. Kathy efficiently introduced Jean, Pietro, and Max to her Sunday-school friends, and Emilie, considerably recovered, sat in a chair and gazed radiantly at the star on the top of the tree. At times she clasped her small hands tightly together in a convulsion of joy. She sat and sucked a peppermint cane. Mrs. Burnsdale had made her a blue velvet dress with a lace collar and Johnny thought the baby looked like an angel. As he moved among all the small guests he frequently stopped to kiss the child, and roll one of her long curls over his fingers.

  The parish hall was noisy with excited children, who sang Christmas songs while Mrs. McGee played the ancient piano. The adults admired the shelves and the books. The gleaming tables, covered, were now being used for punch and cake and ice cream. Kathy had a few complaints about the amount of food being consumed by Pietro, and she had dire predictions about the state of his stomach tomorrow. She patrolled not only her family, but the other children who were celebrating, until Johnny told her severely, “Look here, dear, you’re not a warden. You’re not even a schoolmistress. Let them enjoy themselves. And if Max wants to wear his skull-cap, to show off or something, even though the rabbi says he doesn’t need to wear it all the time, let him alone. It gives him an air, and he likes to explain what it is. Why don’t you relax and just have a good time?”

  Kathy said, “Is it a good time when people do things wrong?”

  “Sometimes,” Johnny assured her cynically. She frowned at him. “I mean,” he added hastily, “people can often enjoy things which are bad for them, such as the wrong food, or too much candy, or coffee. It’s just one night; let them be sick if they want to. Part of the price of liberty is paying for it, one way or another, disagreeably. By the way, what is that you’ve got in your hand behind your back? Fudge? You know chocolate gives you hives.”

  “It’s just one night,” Kathy said, her eyes twinkling. “All right, Papa. I will relax.”

  Johnny moved about among the milling and excited children and adults. Mrs. McGee pounded away determinedly at the Christmas hymns, and was joined by loudly singing groups. She murmured to Johnny when he approached, “I don’t know about your Christmas services, Mr. Fletcher, the midnight one. The board is behind you, but some of the people have said it’s Roman Catholic, and they don’t look so pleased. I tell them some Protestant churches here have the midnight services, and some are sensible enough to nod their heads, and some of them look huffy and talk about John Knox. Who is he?”

  “A man with his own ideas, like me,” said Johnny.

  Max, he found, was staring with delight at the star on the top of the tree, and demanded an explanation. “It is the guiding light,” Johnny told him. He was finding it a little difficult, these days, to keep his eyes on that light himself. He wondered if parishioners ever knew that clergymen sometimes had their own confusions.

  On the day before Christmas, in the morning, Johnny received a call from a parishioner to say that her old mother was dying and wished to see him. The name, Baxter, was not familiar to him. The woman, speaking in a dull and sullen voice, answered his question.
“Oh, we kind of come in to hear you sometimes. You ain’t like a lot of ministers. But I don’t believe anything you say.”

  “No?” said Johnny, picturing her as a short and stubby middle-aged woman with a coarse pale face, untidy light hair, two chins, and a general air of dishevelment and slovenliness. “Why do you come then?”

  Her voice rose roughly. “How do I know? My man and I just think we should go to church sometimes, but we didn’t until you came, and then we didn’t go anyways for a while. Until there was a lot of talk in town about you and people against you, or maybe for you, and we went, and my man says, ‘I like him. He says something sometimes that makes me feel funny inside!”

  Johnny contemplated this dubious compliment a moment. “Well, do I make you—er—feel funny inside, sometimes?”

  There was a silence. Then she said resentfully, “How do I know? For a while I feel different, sort of as if the world wasn’t the damn place it really is. Well, are you coming or not?”

  Johnny got into his elderly car and drove off in the wan and smoky light of the December morning. The streets were crowded with shopping women and their excited children. He looked at the tired, cross, hopeless, pleased, or worried faces, and he thought to himself that no matter how often he looked at his fellow man he was always new, always deserving of love and tenderness, always to be regarded with compassion. A light snow was falling, very fine, but mingled with it were huge white flakes like random butterflies, fluttering lightly in the air. Here and there tinkling bells sounded.

  He turned into a very shabby street of old attached houses, grimy windows, splintered doors, and broken steps. He found the number he was looking for, and the door was opened for him by a woman so exactly like the one he had pictured in his mind that he could only gape for a moment in astonishment. Her shapeless body was swathed in a wrapper of some indeterminate color, mostly dull orange, fastened with a huge safety pin, and a rank odor emanated from her. “The minister?” she asked, scowling at him as if he were an intruder. “All right. Come in.”

  He followed her into a tiny parlor, dark, dirty, strewn with newspapers, beer bottles, and saucers full of cigarettes from the night before. He was angry. Poverty was one thing, and a thing one could respect. Filthiness was quite another. The woman saw his rebuking eyes looking about the room, and she said defiantly, “Well, we had some friends in last night, and I didn’t have time to clean up.”

  Dust was everywhere, gray on the maroon mohair furniture, which was of the poorest quality, on the cheap end tables, and on the green rug and drunken lamps. Johnny said nothing. Again he followed Mrs. Baxter into a black hole of a hall; she opened a door with the gesture of a contemptuous jailer. Again he was astonished, for the room resembled a nun’s cell, full of light from a tall, clean, and undraped window which looked out on a miserably filthy yard. The floor was scrubbed almost white, with no rug upon it, and the old brass bed had a patched white coverlet and snowy pillows. Nothing else stood in that small and narrow cell but a single kitchen chair and a yellow pine chest of drawers on which were neatly arranged a comb, a brush, a Bible, and a drinking glass. The air of austerity was almost stringent; never had Johnny seen a room with such dignity.

  “Well, here’s the minister, Ma,” said Mrs. Baxter. “Mr. Fletcher, this’s my ma, Mrs. Woodley.”

  An old woman was half sitting against the clean pillow, and she looked like an old and dying nun, for her gaunt face had a steadfast and haughty quality, the faded blue eyes sunken above wide cheekbones, the nose jutting out like a finely carved piece of fleshless wood, the mouth cold and remote. Her white hair, sparse but brushed, had been drawn back tightly from her face and fastened in a knob on the back of her head.

  She did not reply to Johnny’s greeting. She regarded him with the far indifference of the dying, yet he felt that she saw him fully and completely. He sat down beside her. Mrs. Baxter closed the door and left him alone with her mother.

  There were things a minister said to the dying, consoling, reassuring, courageous, and pious things. But all at once Johnny had nothing to say. He and the old woman looked at each other in a long silence. He could hear Mrs. Baxter cursing and grumbling in the front of the house, rattling bottles together, pushing furniture into place, snarling at someone who had knocked on the door, then slamming the door until the whole tiny flat shook, then grumbling again. Mrs. Woodley seemed not to hear anything; her waxy hands, worn and with knobby joints, lay folded on the white coverlet, which was no more colorless than they.

  Then she said in a thin, bleak voice, “I’m dying. Maybe I won’t be alive tomorrow.”

  She had spoken with that far indifference. She added, “Takes a sight of time to die—right from when you’re born. Too long.”

  “For a lot of us, yes,” said Johnny.

  She sighed. “From what I’ve heard, you’ve set this town on its ear.” Now she smiled, mournfully yet indifferently. “Thought you’d look different. You look like a stevedore. My husband was one, on the docks.”

  “I was one too, once,” said Johnny. “While I was going through school.”

  “Always did like a man that looked like a man,” said Mrs. Woodley. “Why you could go right on the docks, this minute, or maybe in the mines.”

  “I’ve been in the mines too,” said Johnny.

  Her voice was not panting, nor did she speak with difficulty. She nodded her head. “Thought so.” The pallid light streaming through the polished window showed too clearly the gray shadow of death that hovered over her ascetic face.

  “I’ve got the cancer,” she said, without emphasis.

  Johnny wondered whether she were suffering. His big strong face expressed his compassion. She saw it, waved it away wearily with one of her hands. “What does it matter? I know what you’re thinking. Does it hurt? Mister, it hurts worse than hell.” The word, as she spoke it, was simple and factual, and he accepted it as such. He nodded. “Of course,” he said.

  “And that’s why I asked you to come,” she said. “To tell me why.”

  Johnny leaned his elbow on the chest of drawers, and supported his chin on his palm.

  “If you looked like I kind of was afraid you’d look, I wouldn’t ask you. I wouldn’t even have talked to you,” said Mrs. Woodley. “But you’re my kind of folks. I sort of thought so, from what Millie and Jack told me, and from the papers. A man like my man.”

  She paused, closed her eyes briefly, and rested. Johnny sat in silence. He saw a spasm running like water over her fleshless face, the stern twitching of her lips. He could not turn away from the sight of that noble agony.

  When she opened her eyes again they were filmed with the moisture of torment. “Do they give you anything?” he asked gently.

  She smiled for the first time, a dry and papery smile. “Yes, the doctor left something. Dope. Not for me. My ma brought me into the world without it and I’ll go out without it. The pain ain’t nothing to me. Not after what my life was. So, you’ve got to tell me why, so I’ll know.” She regarded him keenly. “I don’t believe in no God. Thought I’d be honest with you, right from the start.”

  Johnny said, “You couldn’t ever be less than honest, Mrs. Woodley. And I’ll be honest with you. Tell me.”

  She sighed; she seemed to sink deeper into her pillows. With an effort, she raised her hands and regarded them as if she could draw her story from them. She said, “I wasn’t born here. Born in a little town in New York State. Out in the country. Ten kids of us. Remember the house well, four rooms. It was a farm, and we all worked it and I said to myself it was too much work, and no farmer’s life for Sally. That’s me. I was the middle girl, and was kind of pretty.” She looked at him. “You wouldn’t think so. I’m seventy-two. But I was.” She smiled, not bleakly now, but suddenly, and all at once she had an old beauty like a faded portrait. “I was going to be an actress.

  “A long time ago. It all comes back to me though. So one day I packed a suitcase, it was made of wicker—funny I can just see it, all
yeller, and the top fitted right on it, like a market basket. The only one we had. Ma’s. Put my best two dresses in it, and wrote a note and said I was going to be one of them actresses, you know, like Lillian Russell, with champagne and diamonds. I had yeller hair, and it sure was a pretty sight when I brushed it out.”

  She stared straight before her. “Well, suppose you’ve heard the story before. A country girl goin’ to the city, on the steam cars. Took all day. I can just see it now, with kerosene lamps, and mattin’ on the floors. That was for poor folks. I had eight dollars. Been savin’ it for a long time; I had some of the egg money. You should have seen New York in them days. Mister, it sure was different from what I see in the magazines about it, and smelled of coal gas and manure, and was full of carriages and wagons and carts.” She smiled at the long-dead picture. “I was scared to death of all them people. I was fifteen years old.”

  “Yes,” said Johnny.

  “Well, sir,” said Mrs. Woodley, “I didn’t know where to go. So I asked a policeman, and he told me about a rooming house, and put me on a horsecar, and I sat and held my suitcase on my lap, and I just couldn’t believe there was all them people in the world! Lordy, I was a greenhorn.”

  Now she was no longer amused. Her sunken face became stern and still. “My pa was always readin’ the Bible. And I sat on the seat and I prayed. God would take care of me. He sure would!”

  Johnny was silent.

  Now Mrs. Woodley’s voice sank. “Just an old story. The policeman’d given me the address of a house. A whorehouse. Know what that is, mister?”

  “Yes,” said Johnny.

  She turned her head and gazed at him keenly. “It don’t make you sick?”

  “Only for you,” said Johnny.

  Again she nodded. “Oh, they didn’t give me any of them drugs they talk about, or anything. The woman, Madame Le Fleur they called her, was kind of nice, and sensible. Asked me if I didn’t want to go home, and she’d give me the money. I couldn’t go home. And I didn’t have nowheres else to go. You know, mister, Madame Le Fleur was a lot better than some of the ‘good’ women you hear about. And I thought of the farm, and none of us eatin’ too much, and Ma and Pa working like the horses, only harder, and the kids, Mary had the consumption, and there was something else wrong with the others, and I thought maybe I could send them some money. Oh, I knew it was wrong. No use sayin’ I didn’t know. Know what despair is, mister? Well, that’s what I had.”