Complete Stories (45 page)
Authors: Dorothy Parker,Colleen Bresse,Regina Barreca
The Colonel came back. “Look, Horace,” he said, “would you—”
“Well, now, say, if you want to talk about friends,” Horace said, “I just don’t mind telling you that out at Mrs. Hofstadter on Josephine Street’s daughter’s wedding here yesterday, there wasn’t a guest there wasn’t a friend of Horace’s. There they all was, oh, a hundred, a hundred fifty people, all of them talking right up, ‘Hello, Horace,’ ‘Glad to see you, Horace.’ Yes, sir, and not a colored face there, either. I just said, ‘Thank you.’ I always try to say the right thing, and that’s what I said. Mrs. Hofstadter, she said to me, ‘Horace,’ she said—”
“Horace,” I said, nor knew, perhaps, that it would stand my only complete speech with him, “may I have a glass of water, please?”
“Can you have a glass of water!” Horace said. “Can you have a glass of water! Well, I’ll tell you just what Horace is going to do. He’s going out there in that kitchen, and he’s going to bring you just the biggest, coldest glass of water
you
ever had in
your
life. There’s going to be nothing too good for
you,
now Horace is here. Why, he’s going to do for you just like you was Mrs. Hofstadter, out in her lovely home on Josephine Street; yes, he is.”
you
ever had in
your
life. There’s going to be nothing too good for
you,
now Horace is here. Why, he’s going to do for you just like you was Mrs. Hofstadter, out in her lovely home on Josephine Street; yes, he is.”
He left, turning his head archly back over his shoulder to bestow his parting smile.
The Colonel said, “I wonder which Mrs. Hofstadter that is.”
“I keep getting her mixed up with the one that lives somewhere near Josephine Street,” I said.
Horace returned with the water, and spoke to us. Through his preparations for dinner, he spoke to us. Through dinner, which was held at six o’clock, according to the custom obtaining in Mrs. Hofstadter on Josephine Street’s lovely home, he spoke to us. We sat there. Once the Colonel asked Horace for something, and so learned his lesson forever. Better go without a service than bring on rich and recommended assurances of the tender perfection of its fulfillment.
I cannot remember the menu. I can bring back, while faintness spirals upward through me, an impression of waxen gray gravy, loose pink gelatine, and butter at blood-heat, specialties finer than which Mrs. Hofstadter on Josephine Street had never et. Over more definite items, memory draws her merciful gray curtain. She does, for that matter, over all the events of Horace’s stay with us. I do not know how long that was. There were no days, there were no nights, there was no time. There was only space; space filled with Horace.
The Colonel, for it is a man’s world, was away from the bungalow during the day. Horace was there. Horace was always there. I have known no being so present in a house as was Horace. I never knew him to open a door, I never heard his approaching footfall; Horace was out of the room and then, a thousand times more frequently, Horace was in it. I sat at my typewriter, and Horace stood across from it and spoke to me.
And in the evenings, when the Colonel returned, Horace spoke to us. All his conversation was for us, for none of his friends, boy friends or lady friends, ever called him to hold talk; it may be that Mrs. Hofstadter on Josephine Street could not bring herself to share his telephone number. The Colonel and I did not look at each other; after a little while we avoided each other’s eyes. Perhaps it was that we did not wish to see each other in our shame. I do not know; I know nothing about those days. I am sure, after confirmation, that we did not think, either of us, “In heaven’s name, what manner of worm is this I have married?” We had no thoughts, no spirits, no actions. We ceased to move from room to room, even from chair to chair. We stayed where we were, two vile, dead things, slowly drowned in warmish, sweetish oil. There we were, for eternity, world without end, with Horace.
But an end came. I have never known what brought it on, nor have I wanted to learn. Once your pardon arrives, what’s it to you what induced the governor’s signature? The Colonel said, afterward, that Horace said it once too often; but that is all I ever knew. All I know is that I came into the living-room one morning, one heavenly morning of sunshine, and heard the Colonel’s voice upraised in the kitchen. People who happened to be passing through the town on trains at that time could also have heard the Colonel’s voice upraised in the kitchen.
He was giving, it seemed, advice to Horace. “You go,” it ran, “and you go now!”
I heard Horace’s tones, those of one quieting a problem child, but they were so low I received few words. “—spoken to this way,” I distinguished, and “—loveliest people in this town. Why, Mrs. Hofstadter on Josephine Street, she wouldn’t never—”
Then the Colonel’s voice had everything its way again. He gave a fresh piece of advice. He suggested, as a beginning, that Horace take Mrs. Hofstadter and take her lovely home and take her whole goddam Josephine Street—
The Colonel was free. He was so free that he stood, straight-shouldered on the sunlit porch, and sated his eyes on the back of Horace, receding down the path. Mrs. Hofstadter on Josephine Street’s words had come true. She had not known who those people were that Horace was going to’s, but she had known they were going to be happy. We were alone; tomatoes might start following us around again, but that was the worst that could happen to us.
So it was ten minutes before the telephone rang. Crazed with joy at the return of my tongue, I answered it. I heard a large voice, slithering along the wire like warm cottonseed oil.
“This,” it said, “is Horace. Horace is speaking. I am a big man and I always try to do the big thing, and I want to tell you that I am sorry Horace left your home so impetuous; yes, I am: I want you to know that Horace is going to come back to your home again and serve you, just like for so many years he served—”
But somehow the receiver clicked into place and I never had to hear her name again.
The New Yorker,
August 4, 1934
August 4, 1934
Clothe the Naked
Big Lannie went out by the day to the houses of secure and leisured ladies, to wash their silks and their linens. She did her work perfectly; some of the ladies even told her so. She was a great, slow mass of a woman, colored a sound brown-black save for her palms and the flat of her fingers that were like gutta-percha from steam and hot suds. She was slow because of her size, and because the big veins in her legs hurt her, and her back ached much of the time. She neither cursed her ills nor sought remedies for them. They had happened to her; there they were.
Many things had happened to her. She had had children, and the children had died. So had her husband, who was a kind man, cheerful with the little luck he found. None of their children had died at birth. They had lived to be four or seven or ten, so that they had had their ways and their traits and their means of causing love; and Big Lannie’s heart was always wide for love. One child had been killed in a street accident and two others had died of illnesses that might have been no more than tedious, had there been fresh food and clear spaces and clean air behind them. Only Arlene, the youngest, lived to grow up.
Arlene was a tall girl, not so dark as her mother but with the same firm flatness of color. She was so thin that her bones seemed to march in advance of her body. Her little pipes of legs and her broad feet with jutting heels were like things a child draws with crayons. She carried her head low, her shoulders scooped around her chest, and her stomach slanted forward. From the time that she was tiny, there were men after her.
Arlene was a bad girl always; that was one of the things that had happened to Big Lannie. There it was, and Big Lannie could only keep bringing her presents, surprises, so that the girl would love her mother and would want to stay at home. She brought little bottles of sharp perfume, and pale stockings of tinny silk, and rings set with bits of green and red glass; she tried to choose what Arlene would like. But each time Arlene came home she had bigger rings and softer stockings and stronger perfume than her mother could buy for her. Sometimes she would stay with her mother over a night, and sometimes more than a week; and then Big Lannie would come back from work one evening, and the girl would be gone, and no word of her. Big Lannie would go on bringing surprises, and setting them out along Arlene’s bed to wait a return.
Big Lannie did not know it, when Arlene was going to have a baby. Arlene had not been home in nearly half a year; Big Lannie told the time in days. There was no news at all of the girl until the people at the hospital sent for Big Lannie to come to her daughter and grandson. She was there to hear Arlene say the baby must be named Raymond, and to see the girl die. For whom Raymond was called, or if for anyone, Big Lannie never knew.
He was a long, light-colored baby, with big, milky eyes that looked right back at his grandmother. It was several days before the people at the hospital told her he was blind.
Big Lannie went to each of the ladies who employed her and explained that she could not work for some while; she must take care of her grandson. The ladies were sharply discommoded, after her steady years, but they dressed their outrage in shrugs and cool tones. Each arrived, separately, at the conclusion that she had been too good to Big Lannie, and had been imposed upon, therefore. “Honestly, those niggers!” each said to her friends. “They’re all alike.”
Big Lannie sold most of the things she lived with, and took one room with a stove in it. There, as soon as the people at the hospital would let her, she brought Raymond and tended him. He was all her children to her.
She had always been a saving woman, with few needs and no cravings, and she had been long alone. Even after Arlene’s burial, there was enough left for Raymond and Big Lannie to go on for a time. Big Lannie was slow to be afraid of what must come; fear did not visit her at all, at first, and then it slid in only when she waked, when the night hung motionless before another day.
Raymond was a good baby, a quiet, patient baby, lying in his wooden box and stretching out his delicate hands to the sounds that were light and color to him. It seemed but a little while, so short to Big Lannie, before he was walking about the room, his hands held out, his feet quick and sure. Those of Big Lannie’s friends who saw him for the first time had to be told that he could not see.
Then, and it seemed again such a little while, he could dress himself, and open the door for his granny, and unlace the shoes from her tired feet, and talk to her in his soft voice. She had occasional employment—now and then a neighbor would hear of a day’s scrubbing she could do, or sometimes she might work in the stead of a friend who was sick—infrequent, and not to be planned on. She went to the ladies for whom she had worked, to ask if they might not want her back again; but there was little hope in her, after she had visited the first one. Well, now, really, said the ladies; well, really, now.
The neighbors across the hall watched over Raymond while Big Lannie looked for work. He was no trouble to them, nor to himself. He sat and crooned at his chosen task. He had been given a wooden spool around the top of which were driven little brads, and over these with a straightened hairpin he looped bright worsted, working faster than sight until a long tube of woven wool fell through the hole in the spool. The neighbors threaded big, blunt needles for him, and he coiled the woolen tubes and sewed them into mats. Big Lannie called them beautiful, and it made Raymond proud to have her tell him how readily she sold them. It was hard for her, when he was asleep at night, to unravel the mats and wash the worsted and stretch it so straight that even Raymond’s shrewd fingers could not tell, when he worked with it next day, that it was not new.
Fear stormed in Big Lannie and took her days and nights. She might not go to any organization dispensing relief, for dread that Raymond would be taken from her and put in—she would not say the word to herself, and she and her neighbors lowered their voices when they said it to one another—an institution. The neighbors wove lingering tales of what happened inside certain neat, square buildings on the cindery skirts of the town, and, if they must go near them, hurried as if passing grave-yards, and came home heroes. When they got you in one of those places, whispered the neighbors, they laid your spine open with whips, and then when you dropped, they kicked your head in. Had anyone come into Big Lannie’s room to take Raymond away to an asylum for the blind, the neighbors would have fought for him with stones and rails and boiling water.
Raymond did not know about anything but good. When he grew big enough to go alone down the stairs and into the street, he was certain of delight each day. He held his head high, as he came out into the little yard in front of the flimsy wooden house, and slowly turned his face from side to side, as if the air were soft liquid in which he bathed it. Trucks and wagons did not visit the street, which ended in a dump for rusted bedsprings and broken boilers and staved-in kettles; children played over its cobbles, and men and women sat talking in open windows and called across to one another in gay, rich voices. There was always laughter for Raymond to hear, and he would laugh back, and hold out his hands to it.
At first, the children stopped their play when he came out, and gathered quietly about him, and watched him, fascinated. They had been told of his affliction, and they had a sort of sickened pity for him. Some of them spoke to him, in soft, careful tones. Raymond would laugh with pleasure, and stretch his hands, the curious smooth, flat hands of the blind, to their voices. They would draw sharply back, afraid that his strange hands might touch them. Then, somehow ashamed because they had shrunk from him and he could not see that they had done so, they said gentle good-bys to him, and backed away into the street again, watching him steadily.
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