Clock Without Hands (30 page)

"For chrissakes!" somebody shouted, "cut it!"

The old Judge stood at the microphone with the echo of his own words ringing in his ears and the memory of the sound of his own gavel rapping in his courtroom. The shock of recognition made him crumble, yet immediately he shouted: "It's just the other way around! I mean it just the other way around! Don't cut me off!" pleaded the Judge in an urgent voice. "Please don't cut me off."

But another speaker began and Martha switched off the radio. "I don't know what he was talking about," she said. "What happened?"

"Nothing, darling," Malone said. "Nothing that was not a long time in the making."

But his livingness was leaving him, and in dying, living assumed order and a simplicity that Malone had never known before. The pulse, the vigor was not there and not wanted. The design alone emerged. What did it matter to him if the Supreme Court was integrating schools? Nothing mattered to him. If Martha had spread out all the Coca-Cola stocks on the foot of the bed and counted them, he wouldn't have lifted his head. But he did want something, for he said: "I want some ice-cold water, without any ice."

But before Martha could return with the water, slowly, gently, without struggle or fear, life was removed from J. T. Malone. His livingness was gone. And to Mrs. Malone who stood with the full glass in her hand, it sounded like a sigh.

Carson McCullers was born in Columbus, Georgia, in 1917. She published her first short story, "Wunderkind," in 1936; four years later, at the age of twenty-three, she won instant fame with her novel
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.
While still in her twenties, she published three further novels—
Reflections in a Golden Eye
(1941),
The Ballad of the Sad Café
(1943), and
The Member of the Wedding
(1946)—and most of her mature short stories, essays, and poetry. In 1950, her stage adaptation of
The Member of the Wedding
opened on Broadway to great acclaim; she followed it in 1954 with a comedy,
The Square Root of Wonderful.
In 1952 she was inducted into the National Institute of Arts and Letters, whose citation praised her "deeply penetrating yet compassionate observation of human nature," "unique talent for lyrical narrative," and "rare talent as a dramatist."
Clock Without Hands,
her final novel, was published in 1961. She died in Nyack, New York, in 1967, at the age of fifty.