The Complete Stories (60 page)

“Thomas,” his mother said, “I want you to take Star home on your way. I don't want her riding in taxis by herself at night.”

For a moment Thomas remained furiously silent. Then he turned and left the room. Presently he came back with a look of obscure determination on his face. The girl was ready, meekly waiting at the parlor door. She cast up at him a great look of admiration and confidence. Thomas did not offer his arm but she took it anyway and moved out of the house and down the steps, attached to what might have been a miraculously moving monument.

“Be good!” his mother called.

Sarah Ham snickered and poked him in the ribs.

While getting his coat he had decided that this would be his opportunity to tell the girl that unless she ceased to be a parasite on his mother, he would see to it, personally, that she was returned to jail. He would let her know that he understood what she was up to, that he was not an innocent and that there were certain things he would not put up with. At his desk, pen in hand, none was more articulate than Thomas. As soon as he found himself shut into the car with Sarah Ham, terror seized his tongue.

She curled her feet up under her and said, “Alone at last,” and giggled.

Thomas swerved the car away from the house and drove fast toward the gate. Once on the highway, he shot forward as if he were being pursued.

“Jesus!” Sarah Ham said, swinging her feet off the seat, “where's the fire?”

Thomas did not answer. In a few seconds he could feel her edging closer. She stretched, eased nearer, and finally hung her hand limply over his shoulder. “Tomsee doesn't like me,” she said, “but I think he's fabulously cute.”

Thomas covered the three and a half miles into town in a little over four minutes. The light at the first intersection was red but he ignored it. The old woman lived three blocks beyond. When the car screeched to a halt at the place, he jumped out and ran around to the girl's door and opened it. She did not move from the car and Thomas was obliged to wait. After a moment one leg emerged, then her small white crooked face appeared and stared up at him. There was something about the look of it that suggested blindness but it was the blindness of those who don't know that they cannot see. Thomas was curiously sickened. The empty eyes moved over him. “Nobody likes me,” she said in a sullen tone. “What if you were me and I couldn't stand to ride you three miles?”

“My mother likes you,” he muttered.

“Her!” the girl said. “She's just about seventy-five years behind the times!”

Breathlessly Thomas said, “If I find you bothering her again, I'll have you put back in jail.” There was a dull force behind his voice though it came out barely above a whisper.

“You and who else?” she said and drew back in the car as if now she did not intend to get out at all. Thomas reached into it, blindly grasped the front of her coat, pulled her out by it and released her. Then he lunged back to the car and sped off. The other door was still hanging open and her laugh, bodiless but real, bounded up the street as if it were about to jump in the open side of the car and ride away with him. He reached over and slammed the door and then drove toward home, too angry to attend his meeting. He intended to make his mother well-aware of his displeasure. He intended to leave no doubt in her mind. The voice of his father rasped in his head.

Numbskull, the old man said, put your foot down now. Show her who's boss before she shows you.

But when Thomas reached home, his mother, wisely, had gone to bed.

*   *   *

The next morning he appeared at the breakfast table, his brow lowered and the thrust of his jaw indicating that he was in a dangerous humor. When he intended to be determined, Thomas began like a bull that, before charging, backs with his head lowered and paws the ground. “All right now listen,” he began, yanking out his chair and sitting down, “I have something to say to you about that girl and I don't intend to say it but once.” He drew breath. “She's nothing but a little slut. She makes fun of you behind your back. She means to get everything she can out of you and you are nothing to her.”

His mother looked as if she too had spent a restless night. She did not dress in the morning but wore her bathrobe and a gray turban around her head, which gave her face a disconcerting omniscient look. He might have been breakfasting with a sibyl.

“You'll have to use canned cream this morning,” she said, pouring his coffee. “I forgot the other.”

“All right, did you hear me?” Thomas growled.

“I'm not deaf,” his mother said and put the pot back on the trivet. “I know I'm nothing but an old bag of wind to her.”

“Then why do you persist in this foolhardy…”

“Thomas,” she said, and put her hand to the side of her face, “it might be…”

“It is not me!” Thomas said, grasping the table leg at his knee.

She continued to hold her face, shaking her head slightly. “Think of all you have,” she began. “All the comforts of home. And morals, Thomas. No bad inclinations, nothing bad you were born with.”

Thomas began to breathe like someone who feels the onset of asthma. “You are not logical,” he said in a limp voice. “
He
would have put his foot down.”

The old lady stiffened. “You,” she said, “are not like him.”

Thomas opened his mouth silently.

“However,” his mother said, in a tone of such subtle accusation that she might have been taking back the compliment, “I won't invite her back again since you're so dead set against her.”

“I am not set against her,” Thomas said. “I am set against your making a fool of yourself.”

As soon as he left the table and closed the door of his study on himself, his father took up a squatting position in his mind. The old man had had the countryman's ability to converse squatting, though he was no countryman but had been born and brought up in the city and only moved to a smaller place later to exploit his talents. With steady skill he had made them think him one of them. In the midst of a conversation on the courthouse lawn, he would squat and his two or three companions would squat with him with no break in the surface of the talk. By gesture he had lived his lie; he had never deigned to tell one.

Let her run over you, he said. You ain't like me. Not enough to be a man.

Thomas began vigorously to read and presently the image faded. The girl had caused a disturbance in the depths of his being, somewhere out of the reach of his power of analysis. He felt as if he had seen a tornado pass a hundred yards away and had an intimation that it would turn again and head directly for him. He did not get his mind firmly on his work until mid-morning.

Two nights later, his mother and he were sitting in the den after their supper, each reading a section of the evening paper, when the telephone began to ring with the brassy intensity of a fire alarm. Thomas reached for it. As soon as the receiver was in his hand, a shrill female voice screamed into the room, “Come get this girl! Come get her! Drunk! Drunk in my parlor and I won't have it! Lost her job and come back here drunk! I won't have it!”

His mother leapt up and snatched the receiver.

The ghost of Thomas's father rose before him. Call the sheriff, the old man prompted. “Call the sheriff,” Thomas said in a loud voice. “Call the sheriff to go there and pick her up.”

“We'll be right there,” his mother was saying. “We'll come and get her right away. Tell her to get her things together.”

“She ain't in no condition to get nothing together,” the voice screamed. “You shouldn't have put something like her off on me! My house is respectable!”

“Tell her to call the sheriff,” Thomas shouted.

His mother put the receiver down and looked at him. “I wouldn't turn a dog over to that man,” she said.

Thomas sat in the chair with his arms folded and looked fixedly at the wall.

“Think of the poor girl, Thomas,” his mother said, “with nothing. Nothing. And we have everything.”

When they arrived, Sarah Ham was slumped spraddle-legged against the banister on the boarding house front-steps. Her tam was down on her forehead where the old woman had slammed it and her clothes were bulging out of her suitcase where the old woman had thrown them in. She was carrying on a drunken conversation with herself in a low personal tone. A steak of lipstick ran up one side of her face. She allowed herself to be guided by his mother to the car and put in the back seat without seeming to know who the rescuer was. “Nothing to talk to all day but a pack of goddamned parakeets,” she said in a furious whisper.

Thomas, who had not got out of the car at all, or looked at her after the first revolted glance, said, “I'm telling you, once and for all, the place to take her is the jail.

His mother, sitting on the back seat, holding the girl's hand, did not answer.

“All right, take her to the hotel,” he said.

“I cannot take a drunk girl to a hotel, Thomas,” she said. “You know that.”

“Then take her to a hospital.”

“She doesn't need a jail or a hotel or a hospital,” his mother said, “she needs a home.”

“She does not need mine,” Thomas said.

“Only for tonight, Thomas,” the old lady sighed. “Only for tonight.”

Since then eight days had passed. The little slut was established in the guest room. Every day his mother set out to find her a job and a place to board, and failed, for the old woman had broadcast a warning. Thomas kept to his room or the den. His home was to him home, workshop, church, as personal as the shell of a turtle and as necessary. He could not believe that it could be violated in this way. His flushed face had a constant look of stunned outrage.

As soon as the girl was up in the morning, her voice throbbed out in a blues song that would rise and waver, then plunge low with insinuations of passion about to be satisfied and Thomas, at his desk, would lunge up and begin frantically stuffling his ears with Kleenex. Each time he started from one room to another, one floor to another, she would be certain to appear. Each time he was halfway up or down the stairs, she would either meet him and pass, cringing coyly, or go up or down behind him, breathing small tragic spearmint-flavored sighs. She appeared to adore Thomas's repugnance to her and to draw it out of him every chance she got as if it added delectably to her martyrdom.

The old man—small, wasp-like, in his yellowed panama hat, his seersucker suit, his pink carefully-soiled shirt, his small string tie—appeared to have taken up his station in Thomas's mind and from there, usually squatting, he shot out the same rasping suggestion every time the boy paused from his forced studies. Put your foot down. Go to see the sheriff.

The sheriff was another edition of Thomas's father except that he wore a checkered shirt and a Texas type hat and was ten years younger. He was as easily dishonest, and he had genuinely admired the old man. Thomas, like his mother, would have gone far out of his way to avoid his glassy pale blue gaze. He kept hoping for another solution, for a miracle.

With Sarah Ham in the house, meals were unbearable.

“Tomsee doesn't like me,” she said the third or fourth night at the supper table and cast her pouting gaze across at the large rigid figure of Thomas, whose face was set with the look of a man trapped by insufferable odors. “He doesn't want me here. Nobody wants me anywhere.”

“Thomas's name is Thomas,” his mother interrupted. “Not Tomsee.”

“I made Tomsee up,” she said. “I think it's cute. He hates me.”

“Thomas does not hate you,” his mother said. “We are not the kind of people who hate,” she added, as if this were an imperfection that had been bred out of them generations ago.

“Oh, I know when I'm not wanted,” Sarah Ham continued. “They didn't even want me in jail. If I killed myself I wonder would God want me?”

“Try it and see,” Thomas muttered.

The girl screamed with laughter. Then she stopped abruptly, her face puckered and she began to shake. “The best thing to do,” she said, her teeth clattering, “is to kill myself. Then I'll be out of everybody's way. I'll go to hell and be out of God's way. And even the devil won't want me. He'll kick me out of hell, not even in hell…” she wailed.

Thomas rose, picked up his plate and knife and fork and carried them to the den to finish his supper. After that, he had not eaten another meal at the table but had had his mother serve him at his desk. At these meals, the old man was intensely present to him. He appeared to be tipping backwards in his chair, his thumbs beneath his galluses, while he said such things as, She never ran me away from my own table.

A few nights later, Sarah Ham slashed her wrists with a paring knife and had hysterics. From the den where he was closeted after supper, Thomas heard a shriek, then a series of screams, then his mother's scurrying footsteps through the house. He did not move. His first instant of hope that the girl had cut her throat faded as he realized she could not have done it and continue to scream the way she was doing. He returned to his journal and presently the screams subsided. In a moment his mother burst in with his coat and hat. “We have to take her to the hospital,” she said. “She tried to do away with herself. I have a tourniquet on her arm. Oh Lord, Thomas,” she said, “imagine being so low you'd do a thing like that!”

Thomas rose woodenly and put on his hat and coat. “We will take her to the hospital,” he said, “and we will leave her there.”

“And drive her to despair again?” the old lady cried. “Thomas!”

Standing in the center of his room now, realizing that he had reached the point where action was inevitable, that he must pack, that he must leave, that he must go, Thomas remained immovable.

His fury was directed not at the little slut but at his mother. Even though the doctor had found that she had barely damaged herself and had raised the girl's wrath by laughing at the tourniquet and putting only a streak of iodine on the cut, his mother could not get over the incident. Some new weight of sorrow seemed to have been thrown across her shoulders, and not only Thomas, but Sarah Ham was infuriated by this, for it appeared to be a general sorrow that would have found another object no matter what good fortune came to either of them. The experience of Sarah Ham had plunged the old lady into mourning for the world.