The Grass Harp (21 page)

Since Monday, it has been raining buoyant summer rain shot through with sun, but dark at night and full of sound, full of dripping leaves, watery chimneys, sleepless scuttlings. Billy Bob is wide-awake, dry-eyed, though everything he does is a little frozen and his tongue is as stiff as a bell tongue. It has not been easy for him, Miss Bobbit’s going. Because she’d meant more than that. Than what? Than being thirteen years old and crazy in love. She was the queer things in him, like the pecan tree and liking books and caring enough about people to let them hurt him. She was the things he was afraid to show anyone else. And in the dark the music trickled through the rain: won’t there be nights when we will hear it just as though it were really there? And afternoons when the shadows will be all at once confused,
and she will pass before us, unfurling across the lawn like a pretty piece of ribbon? She laughed to Billy Bob; she held his hand, she even kissed him. “I’m not going to die,” she said. “You’ll come out there, and we’ll climb a mountain, and we’ll all live there together, you and me and Sister Rosalba.” But Billy Bob knew it would never happen that way, and so when the music came through the dark he would stuff the pillow over his head.

Only there was a strange smile about yesterday, and that was the day she was leaving. Around noon the sun came out, bringing with it into the air all the sweetness of wisteria. Aunt El’s yellow Lady Anne’s were blooming again, and she did something wonderful, she told Billy Bob he could pick them and give them to Miss Bobbit for good-bye. All afternoon Miss Bobbit sat on the porch surrounded by people who stopped by to wish her well. She looked as though she were going to Communion, dressed in white and with a white parasol. Sister Rosalba had given her a handkerchief, but she had to borrow it back because she couldn’t stop blubbering. Another little girl brought a baked chicken, presumably to be eaten on the bus; the only trouble was she’d forgotten to take out the insides before cooking it. Miss Bobbit’s mother said that was all right by her, chicken was chicken, which is memorable because it is the single opinion she ever voiced. There was only one sour note. For hours Preacher Star had been hanging around down at the corner, sometimes standing at the curb tossing a coin, and sometimes hiding behind a tree, as if he didn’t want anyone to see him. It made everybody nervous. About twenty minutes before bus time he sauntered up and leaned against our gate. Billy Bob was still in the garden picking roses; by now he had enough for a bonfire, and their smell was as heavy as wind. Preacher stared at him until he lifted his head. As they looked at each other the rain began again, falling fine as sea spray and colored by a rainbow. Without a word, Preacher went over and started helping Billy
Bob separate the roses into two giant bouquets: together they carried them to the curb. Across the street there were bumblebees of talk, but when Miss Bobbit saw them, two boys whose flower-masked faces were like yellow moons, she rushed down the steps, her arms outstretched. You could see what was going to happen; and we called out, our voices like lightning in the rain, but Miss Bobbit, running toward those moons of roses, did not seem to hear. That is when the six o’clock bus ran over her.

“
WALTER, LISTEN TO ME:
if everyone dislikes you, works against you, don’t believe they do so arbitrarily; you create these situations for yourself.”

Anna had said that, and, though his healthier side told him she intended nothing malicious (if Anna was not a friend, then who was?), he’d despised her for it, had gone around telling everybody how much he despised Anna, what a bitch she was. That woman! he said, don’t trust that Anna. This plain-spoken act of hers—nothing but a cover-up for all her repressed hostility; terrible liar, too, can’t believe a word she says: dangerous, my God! And naturally all he said went back to Anna, so that when he called about a play-opening they’d planned attending together she told him. “Sorry, Walter, I can’t afford you any longer. I understand you very well, and I have a certain amount of sympathy. It’s very compulsive, your malice, and you aren’t too much to blame, but I don’t want ever to see you again because I’m not so well myself that I can afford it.” But why? And what had he done? Well, sure, he’d gossiped about her, but it wasn’t as though he’d meant it, and after all, as he said to Jimmy Bergman
(now there was a two-face if ever there was one), what was the use of having friends if you couldn’t discuss them objectively?

He said you said they said we said round and round. Round and round, like the paddle-bladed ceiling-fan wheeling above; turning and turning, stirring stale air ineffectively, it made a watch-tick sound, counted seconds in the silence. Walter inched into a cooler part of the bed and closed his eyes against the dark little room. At seven that evening he’d arrived in New Orleans, at seven-thirty he’d registered in this hotel, an anonymous, sidestreet place. It was August, and it was as though bonfires burned in the red night sky, and the unnatural Southern landscape, observed so assiduously from the train, and which, trying to sublimate all else, he retraced in memory, intensified a feeling of having traveled to the end, the falling off.

But why he was here in this stifling hotel in this faraway town he could not say. There was a window in the room, but he could not seem to get it open, and he was afraid to call the bellboy (what queer eyes that kid had!), and he was afraid to leave the hotel, for what if he got lost? and if he got lost, even a little, then he would be lost altogether. He was hungry; he hadn’t eaten since breakfast, so he found some peanut-butter crackers left over from a package he’d bought in Saratoga, and washed them down with a finger of Four Roses, the last. It made him sick. He vomited in the wastebasket, collapsed back on the bed, and cried until the pillow was wet. After a while he just lay there in the hot room, shivering, just lay there and watched the slow-turning fan; there was no beginning to its action, and no end; it was a circle.

An eye, the earth, the rings of a tree, everything is a circle and all circles, Walter said, have a center. It was crazy for Anna to say what had happened was his own doing. If there was anything wrong with him really, then it had been made so by
circumstances beyond his control, by, say, his churchly mother, or his father, an insurance official in Hartford, or his older sister, Cecile, who’d married a man forty years her senior. “I just wanted to get out of the house.” That was her excuse, and, to tell the truth, Walter had thought it reasonable enough.

But he did not know where to begin thinking about himself, did not know where to find the center. The first telephone call? No, that had been only three days ago and, properly speaking, was the end, not the beginning. Well, he could start with Irving, for Irving was the first person he’d known in New York.

Now Irving was a sweet little Jewish boy with a remarkable talent for chess and not much else: he had silky hair, and pink baby cheeks, and looked about sixteen. Actually he was twenty-three, Walter’s age, and they’d met at a bar in the Village. Walter was alone and very lonesome in New York, and so when this sweet little Irving was friendly he decided maybe it would be a good idea to be friendly, too—because you never can tell. Irving knew a great many people, and everyone was very fond of him, and he introduced Walter to all his friends.

And there was Margaret. Margaret was more or less Irving’s girl friend. She was only so-so looking (her eyes bulged, there was always a little lipstick on her teeth, she dressed like a child of ten), but she had a hectic brightness which Walter found attractive. He could not understand why she bothered with Irving at all. “Why do you?” he said, on one of the long walks they’d begun taking together in Central Park.

“Irving is sweet,” she said, “and he loves me very purely, and who knows: I might just as well marry him.”

“A damn fool thing to do,” he said. “Irving could never be your husband because he’s really your little brother. Irving is everyone’s little brother.”

Margaret was too bright not to see the truth in this. So one
day when Walter asked if he might not make love to her she said, all right, she didn’t mind if he did. They made love often after that.

Eventually Irving heard about it, and one Monday there was a nasty scene in, curiously enough, the same bar where they’d met. There had been that evening a party in honor of Kurt Kuhnhardt (Kuhnhardt Advertising), Margaret’s boss, and she and Walter had gone together, afterwards stopping by this bar for a nightcap. Except for Irving and a couple of girls in slacks the place was empty. Irving was sitting at the bar, his cheeks quite pink, his eyes rather glazed. He looked like a little boy playing grownup, for his legs were too short to reach the stool’s footrest; they dangled doll-like. The instant Margaret recognized him she tried to turn around and walk out, but Walter wouldn’t let her. And anyway, Irving had seen them: never taking his eyes from them, he put down his whiskey, slowly climbed off the stool, and, with a kind of sad, ersatz toughness, strutted forward.

“Irving, dear,” said Margaret, and stopped, for he’d given her a terrible look.

His chin was trembling. “You go away,” he said, and it was as though he were denouncing some childhood tormentor, “I hate you.” Then, almost in slow motion, he swung out and, as if he clutched a knife, struck Walter’s chest. It was not much of a blow, and when Walter did nothing but smile, Irving slumped against a jukebox, screaming: “Fight me, you damned coward; come on, and I’ll kill you, I swear before God I will.” So that was how they left him.

Walking home, Margaret began to cry in a soft tired way. “He’ll never be sweet again,” she said.

And Walter said, “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Oh, yes, you do,” she told him, her voice a whisper. “Yes,
you do; the two of us, we’ve taught him how to hate. Somehow I don’t think he ever knew before.”

Walter had been in New York now four months. His original capital of five hundred dollars had fallen to fifteen, and Margaret lent him money to pay his January rent at the Brevoort. Why, she wanted to know, didn’t he move to some place cheaper? Well, he told her, it was better to have a good address. And what about a job? When was he going to start working? Or was he? Sure, he said, sure, as a matter of fact he thought about it a good deal. But he didn’t intend fooling around with just any little jerkwater thing that came along. He wanted something good, something with a future, something in, say, advertising. All right, said Margaret, maybe she could help him; at any rate, she’d speak with her boss, Mr. Kuhnhardt.

THE K.K.A., SO CALLED, WAS
a middle-sized agency, but, as such things go, very good, the best. Kurt Kuhnhardt, who’d founded it in 1925, was a curious man with a curious reputation: a lean, fastidious German, a bachelor, he lived in an elegant black house on Sutton Place, a house interestingly furnished with, among other things, three Picassos, a superb musicbox, South Sea Island masks, and a burly Danish youngster, the houseboy. He invited occasionally some one of his staff in to dinner, whoever was favorite at the moment, for he was continually selecting protégés. It was a dangerous position, these alliances being, as they were, whimsical and uncertain: the protégé found himself checking the want ads when, just the evening previous, he’d dined most enjoyably with his benefactor. During his second
week at the K.K.A., Walter, who had been hired as Margaret’s assistant, received a memorandum from Mr. Kuhnhardt asking him to lunch, and this, of course, excited him unspeakably.

“Kill-joy?” said Margaret, straightening his tie, plucking lint off his lapel. “Nothing of the sort. It’s just that—well, Kuhnhardt’s wonderful to work for so long as you don’t get too involved—or you’re likely not to be working—period.”

Walter knew what she was up to; she didn’t fool him a minute; he felt like telling her so, too, but restrained himself; it wasn’t time yet. One of these days, though, he was going to have to get rid of her, and soon. It was degrading, his working for Margaret. And besides, the tendency from now on would be to keep him down. But nobody could do that, he thought, looking into Mr. Kuhnhardt’s sea-blue eyes, nobody could keep Walter down.

“You’re an idiot,” Margaret told him. “My God, I’ve seen these little friendships of K. K.’s a dozen times, and they don’t mean a damn. He used to palsy-walsy around with the switchboard operator. All K. K. wants is someone to play the fool. Take my word, Walter, there aren’t any short cuts: what matters is how you do your job.”

He said: “And have you complaints on that score? I’m doing as well as could be expected.”

“It depends on what you mean by expected,” she said.

One Saturday not long afterwards he made a date to meet her in Grand Central. They were going up to Hartford to spend the afternoon with his family, and for this she’d bought a new dress, new hat, and shoes. But he did not show up. Instead, he drove out on Long Island with Mr. Kuhnhardt, and was the most awed of three hundred guests at Rosa Cooper’s debut ball. Rosa Cooper (nee Kuppermann) was heiress to the Cooper Dairy Products: a dark, plump, pleasant child with an unnatural British accent, the result of four years at Miss Jewett’s. She wrote a letter to a friend named Anna Stimson, who subsequently
showed it to Walter: “Met the divinest man. Danced with him six times, a divine dancer. He is an Advertising Executive, and is terribly divinely good-looking. We have a date—dinner and the theater!”

Margaret did not mention the episode, nor did Walter. It was as though nothing had happened, except that now, unless there was office business to discuss, they never spoke, never saw each other. One afternoon, knowing she would not be at home, he went to her apartment and used a passkey given him long ago; there were things he’d left here, clothes, some books, his pipe; rummaging around collecting all this he discovered a photograph of himself scrawled red with lipstick: it gave him for an instant the sensation of falling in a dream. He also came across the only gift he’d ever made her, a bottle of L’Heure Bleue, still unopened. He sat down on the bed, and, smoking a cigarette, stroked his hand over the cool pillow, remembering the way her head had laid there, remembering, too, how they used to lie here Sunday mornings reading the funnies aloud, Barney Google and Dick Tracy and Joe Palooka