The Complete Stories (67 page)

The girl was much too big for the small car. She kept shifting about and twisting inside her raincoat. “The rain has beat the azaleas down,” she observed in a neutral tone.

Calhoun rudely kept silent. He was trying to obliterate her from his consciousness so that he could reestablish Singleton there. He had lost Singleton completely. The rain was coming down in gray swaths. When they reached the highway, they could barely see across the fields to a faint line of woods. The girl kept leaning forward, squinting into the opaque windshield. “If a truck were to come out of that,” she said with a gawkish laugh, “that would be the end of us.”

Calhoun stopped the car. “I'll be glad to take you back and go on by myself,” he said.

“I have to go,” she said hoarsely, staring at him. “I have to see him.” Behind her spectacles, her eyes appeared larger than they should have been and suspiciously liquid. “I have to face this,” she said.

Roughly, he started the car again.

“You have to prove to yourself that you can stand there and watch a man be crucified,” she said. “You have to go through it with him. I thought about it all night.”

“It may give you,” Calhoun muttered, “a more balanced view of life.”

“This is personal,” she said. “You wouldn't understand,” and she turned her head to the window.

Calhoun tried to concentrate on Singleton. Feature by feature, he brought the face together in his mind and each time he had it almost constructed, it fell apart and he was left with nothing. He drove in silence, at a reckless speed as if he would like to hit a hole in the road and see the girl go through the windshield. Every now and then she blew her nose weakly. After fifteen miles or so the rain slackened and stopped. The treeline on either side of them became black and clear and the fields intensely green. They would have an unmistakable view of the hospital grounds as soon as these should come in sight.

“Christ only had to take it three hours,” the girl said all at once in a high voice, “but he'll be in this place the rest of his life!”

Calhoun cut his eyes toward her. There was a fresh wet line down the side of her face. He turned his eyes away, awed and furious. “If you can't stand this,” he said, “I can still take you home and come back by myself.”

“You wouldn't come back by yourself,” she said, “and we're almost there.” She blew her nose. “I want him to know that somebody takes his side. I want to say that to him no matter what it does to me.”

Through his rage, the terrible thought occurred to the boy that he would have to
say
something to Singleton. What could he say to him in the presence of this woman? She had shattered the communion between them. “We've come to listen I hope you understand,” he burst out, “I haven't driven all this way to hear you startle Singleton with your wisdom. I've come to listen to
him.
”

“We should have brought a tape recorder!” she cried, “then we'd have what he says all our lives!”

“You don't have elementary understanding,” Calhoun said, “if you think you approach a man like this with a tape recorder.”

“Stop!” she shrieked, leaning toward the windshield, “that's it!”

Calhoun slammed on his brakes and looked forward wildly.

A cluster of low buildings, hardly noticeable, rose like a rich growth of warts on the hill to their right.

The boy sat helpless while the car, as if of its own volition, turned and headed toward the entrance. The letters
QUINCY STATE HOSPITAL
were cut in a concrete arch which it rolled effortlessly through.

“Abandon hope all ye who enter here,” the girl murmured.

They had to stop within a hundred yards of the gate while a fat white-capped nurse led a line of patients, straggling like elderly schoolchildren, across the road in front of them. A snaggle-toothed woman in a candy-striped dress and black wool hat shook her fist at them, and a baldheaded man waved energetically. A few threw malevolent looks as the line shuffled off across the green to another building.

After a moment the car rolled forward again. “Park in front of that center building,” Mary Elizabeth directed.

“They won't let us see him,” he mumbled.

“Not if you have anything to do with it,” she said. “Park and let me out. I'll handle this.” Her cheek had dried and her voice was businesslike. He parked and she got out. He watched her disappear into the building, thinking with grim satisfaction that she would soon turn into a full-grown ogre—false intellect, false emotions, maximum efficiency, all operating to produce the dominant hair-splitting Ph.D. Another line of patients passed in the road and several of them pointed at the small car. Calhoun did not look but he sensed he was being watched. “Hup up there,” he heard the nurse say.

He looked again and gave a little cry. A gentle face, wrapped around with a green hand towel, was in his window, smiling toothlessly but with an agonizing tenderness.

“Get a move on, sweetie,” the nurse said and the face retreated.

The boy rolled his window up rapidly but his heart was wrenched. He saw again the agonized face in the stocks—the slightly mismatched eyes, the wide mouth parted in a stifled useless cry. The vision lasted only a moment but when it passed, he was certain that the sight of Singleton was going to effect a change in him, that after this visit, some strange tranquility he had not before conceived of would be his. He sat for ten minutes with his eyes closed, knowing that a revelation was near and trying to prepare himself for it.

All at once the car door opened and the girl folded herself, panting, in beside him. Her face was pale. She held up two green permission slips and pointed to the names written on them: Calhoun Singleton on one, Mary Elizabeth Singleton on the other. For a moment they stared at the slips, then at each other. Both appeared to recognize that in their common kinship with him, a kinship with each other was unavoidable. Generously, Calhoun held out his hand. She shook it. “He's in the fifth building to the left,” she said.

They drove to the fifth building and parked. It was a low red brick structure with barred windows, like all the others except that the outside of it was streaked with black stains. In one window two hands hung out, palms downward. Mary Elizabeth opened the paper sack she had brought and began to take out presents for Singleton. She had brought a box of candy, a carton of cigarettes and three books—a Modern Library
Thus Spake Zarathustra,
a paperback
Revolt of the Masses,
and a thin decorated volume of Housman. She handed the cigarettes and the candy to Calhoun and got out of the car with the books herself. She started forward, but halfway to the door she stopped and put her hand to her mouth. “I can't take it,” she murmured.

“Now now,” Calhoun said kindly. He put his hand on her back and gave her a slight push and she began to move forward again.

They entered a stained linoleum-covered hall where a peculiar odor met them at once like an invisible official. There was a desk facing the door, behind which sat a frail harrassed-looking nurse whose eyes darted to right and left as if she expected ultimately to be hit from behind. Mary Elizabeth handed her the two green permits. The woman looked at them and groaned. “Go in yonder and wait,” she said in a weary insult-bearing voice. “He'll have to be got ready. They shouldn't have give you these slips over there. What do they know about what goes on over here over there and what do them doctors care anyhow? If it was up to me the ones that don't cooperate wouldn't see nobody.”

“We're his kin,” Calhoun said. “We have every right to see him.”

The nurse threw her head back in a soundless laugh and went off muttering.

Calhoun put his hand on the girl's back again and guided her into the waiting room where they sat down close together on a mammoth black leather sofa which faced an identical piece of furniture five feet away. There was nothing else in the room but a rickety table in one corner with an empty white vase on it. A barred window cast squares of damp light on the floor at their feet. There seemed an intense stillness about them although the place was anything but quiet. From one end of the building came a continuous mourning sound as delicate as the fluttering wail of owls; at the other end they heard rocketing peals of laughter. Closer at hand, a steady montonous cursing broke the silence around it with a machine-like regularity. Each noise seemed to exist isolated from every other.

The two sat together as if they were waiting for some momentous event in their lives—a marriage or instantaneous deaths. They seemed already joined in a predestined convergence. At the same instant each made an involuntary motion as if to run but it was too late. Heavy footsteps were almost at the door and the machine-like curses were bearing down.

Two burly attendants entered with Singleton spider-like between them. He was holding his feet high up off the floor so that the atendants had to carry him. It was from him the curses were coming. He had on a hospital gown of the type that opens and ties up the back and his feet were stuck in black shoes from which the laces had been removed. On his head was a black hat, not the kind countrymen wear, but a black derby hat such as might be worn by a gunman in the movies. The two attendants came up to the empty sofa from behind and swung him over the back of it, then still holding him, each passed around the sofa arms and sat down beside him, grinning. They might have been twins for though one was blond and the other bald, they had identical looks of good-natured stupidity.

As for Singleton, he fixed Calhoun with his green slightly mismatched eyes. “Whadaya want with me?” he shrilled. “Speak up! My time is valuable.” They were almost exactly the eyes that Calhoun had seen in the paper, except that the penetrating gleam in them had a slight reptilian quality.

The boy sat mesmerized.

After a moment, Mary Elizabeth said in a slow, hoarse, barely audible voice, “We came to say we understand.”

The old man's glare shifted to her and for one instant his eyes remained absolutely still like the eyes of a treetoad that has sighted its prey. His throat appeared to swell. “Ahhh,” he said as if he had just swallowed something pleasant, “eeeee.”

“Mind out now, dad,” one of the attendants said.

“Lemme sit with her,” Singleton said and jerked his arm away from the attendant, who caught it again at once. “She knows what she wants.”

“Let him sit with her,” the blond attendant said, “she's his niece.”

“No,” the bald one said, “keep aholt to him. He's liable to pull off his frock. You know
him.
”

But the other one had already let one of his wrists loose and Singleton was leaning outward toward Mary Elizabeth, straining away from the attendant who held him. The girl's eyes were glazed The old man began to make suggestive noises through his teeth.

“Now now, dad,” the idle attendant said.

“It's not every girl gets a chance at me,” Singleton said. “Listen here, sister, I'm well-fixed. There's nobody in Partridge I can't skin. I own the place—as well as this hotel.” His hand grasped toward her knee.

The girl gave a small stifled cry.

“And I got others elsewhere,” he panted. “You and me are two of a kind. We ain't in their class. You're a queen. I'll put you on a float!” and at that moment he got his wrist free and lunged toward her but both attendants sprang after him instantly. As Mary Elizabeth crouched against Calhoun, the old man jumped nimbly over the sofa and began to speed around the room. The attendants, their arms and legs held wide apart to catch him, tried to close in on him from either side. They almost had him when he kicked off his shoes and leaped between them onto the table, sending the empty vase shattering to the floor. “Look girl!” he shrilled and began to pull the hospital gown over his head.

Mary Elizabeth was already dashing out the room and Calhoun ran behind her and thrust open the door just in time to prevent her crashing into it. They scrambled into the car and the boy drove it away as if his heart were the motor and would never go fast enough. The sky was bone-white and the slick highway stretched before them like a piece of the earth's exposed nerve. After five miles Calhoun pulled the car to the side of the road and stopped from exhaustion. They sat silently, looking at nothing until finally they turned and looked at each other. There each saw at once the likeness of their kinsman and flinched. They looked away and then back, as if with concentration they might find a more tolerable image. To Calhoun, the girl's face seemed to mirror the nakedness of the sky. In despair he leaned closer until he was stopped by a miniature visage which rose incorrigibly in her spectacles and fixed him where he was. Round, innocent, undistinguished as an iron link, it was the face whose gift of life had pushed straight forward to the future to raise festival after festival. Like a master salesman, it seemed to have been waiting there from all time to claim him.

The Lame Shall Enter First

S
HEPPARD
sat on a stool at the bar that divided the kitchen in half, eating his cereal out of the individual pasteboard box it came in. He ate mechanically, his eyes on the child, who was wandering from cabinet to cabinet in the panelled kitchen, collecting the ingredients for his breakfast. He was a stocky blond boy of ten. Sheppard kept his intense blue eyes fixed on him. The boy's future was written in his face. He would be a banker. No, worse. He would operate a small loan company. All he wanted for the child was that he be good and unselfish and neither seemed likely. Sheppard was a young man whose hair was already white. It stood up like a narrow brush halo over his pink sensitive face.

The boy approached the bar with the jar of peanut butter under his arm, a plate with a quarter of a small chocolate cake on it in one hand and the ketchup bottle in the other. He did not appear to notice his father. He climbed up on the stool and began to spread peanut butter on the cake. He had very large round ears that leaned away from his head and seemed to pull his eyes slightly too far apart. His shirt was green but so faded that the cowboy charging across the front of it was only a shadow.