The Unpossessed (3 page)

Suppose she said What happened! why darling, things happened to me all day long. In the first place the beggar on the subway stairs noticed my straw hat was gone; and then I signed thirty-seven curt letters Adolph Worthington and I crossed the t at thirty-seven different angles; furthermore, Mister Flinders, it is emphatically
not
our policy to wrap soap in cellophane; at four-seven P. M. the carbons blew off my desk and feeling the breeze anyway on my wrists and under my skirt I knew it was fall again. And celery isn't good any more, being brown and coarse-fibred, but tomorrow or maybe the day after I think I can promise you the chestnut vendors will be out, and the grocery man's little girl has a nasty runny cold again and darling I hope you understand I talk this way because I love you. Suppose when she said all that on one breath it didn't work, it didn't reduce him to smiling his fine reluctant smile reserved for nonsense, suppose it didn't bring back to him and so to her the softness of her, the woman-ness of her, that part which passed all day unknown and undesired, by Adolph Worthington
Business Manager
, by the beggar in the subway, by Mr. Papenmeyer whose little girl had a nasty cold again?

The street lay cramped between its rows of houses, leading inexorably to its end. Down its center ran a groove; and try as she would to escape, her feet ran down as helpless as a trolley. At one end Mr. Worthington, to whose bell she responded all day, in whose aura she lived all day; on the way home Mr. Papenmeyer (who dared commiserate, because Miles was a New Englander!), a brief stop at Mr. Papenmeyer's station; and then Miles Flinders, who made his wishes felt not by a bell in her ears but by a constant frightened consciousness in the very lining of her being.

The janitor's wife leaning out the first floor window with a shawl about her shoulders called:

“Chill in the air, ain't it, Mrs. Flinders.”

“Winter is certainly coming, Mrs. Salvemini.”

There was the bell marked Banner-Flinders. There stood the door which could open and close a thousand times in a day without her knowledge, although it was the door to her home. Perhaps the door had opened and quietly, secretively, released Miles, who might also have sensed the new year waiting round the corner! perhaps he had slid through like a cat never to come home again! (But he would be there, come home ahead and waiting.) The mail-box hung like a sealed packet on Christmas day, that might contain anything; that must contain the world; her nervous fingers crawled and clutched: a milliner's card came out. (But what did she want, this woman who—
surely she loved her husband
?) “Madame Bertha invites you . . .” Well what was she after then—a letter from Jeffrey, from Bruno? a letter from Miles, “goodbye, my dear, I've gone away”? No, no, it was some thread, some meaning she was looking for; some way of finding the world without reading papers from Germany . . .

She raced up the stairs in terror, in doubt.

She burst the door open—and in the pit of her being peace vanquished regret, for there was no change and no sign of a change; for he sat there with his feet on a chair and with all that she loved and all that she hated him for written plainly on his face; he had come home, like a child, for his supper. He took off his glasses and his eyes opened and closed several times patiently like a baby's growing used to her light. And she herself was taking off her hat to stay (enormously bored, enormously relieved) at the same moment that she advanced to kiss him.

His hand shot up as though to ward off something. “Old Son-of-a-Bitch cut me again today,” he said; “and before I forget—Jeffrey called, to speak to you I think.” His hand wavered with an air, she thought, of laying a smoke-screen between them. “A ten percent cut,” he said with a certain grim complacence.

She paused, startled by the irrelevance; “Old Son-ofa-Bitch?” she faltered, trying to focus her wits: her impulse being to cry impatiently “What of it? that has nothing to do with
us
”
;
then fluttered, lost to the notion of their being children playing at being adults, pretending to
care
about such irrelevancies; and rushed to him dropping the bundles, perceiving how his pride lay bleeding out of all proportion, tortured by how, in coming home to him, she had in her mind deserted him, had turned and fled from him twenty times.

She would pierce his wavering smoke-screen and purge him with her comfort.

BUT COMFORT was salt to his wounds. He had been reared to expect just punishment from an angry God; then God was mercilessly withdrawn and since then nothing adequate supplied. In punishment one found the final solace; in repentance the blessing of convalescence, return to grace. All of his life women (his aunts, his frightened mother, now Margaret) had come to him stupidly offering comfort, offering love; handing him sticks of candy when his soul demanded God; and all of his life he had staved them off, put them off, despising their credulity, their single-mindedness, their unreasoning belief that on their bosoms lay peace. For if he were once to give in, to let their softness stop his ears, still the voices that plagued him this way and that, they would be giving him not peace, but death; the living death of the man who has consented to live the woman's life and turned for oblivion to love as he might have turned to drink.

For Son-of-a-Bitch he had felt sharp admiration, when the man, by virtue of his superior position, bent to deliver perfunctorily to him the cut. He had bared his chest, had taken the
cut
without flinching, as his just due from Mr. Pidgeon pinch-hitting admirably for God; and then because he felt complacently like a dog he had wheeled his bleeding chest about and exposed for Mr. Pidgeon's further flagellation the humble seat of his pants. “Has my work fallen off, Mr. Pidgeon?” And Son-of-a Bitch, stirred by no womanly compunction, led further perhaps by temptation than his original desire would have taken him, added to the cut a well-placed kick in the pants: “We might have cut you anyway, Flinders; but we don't feel you've been getting much punch in your work.”

Gratefully stung, Miles
thanked
him; that is, he said in so many words, “Perhaps you're right.” And felt as he had felt when Uncle Daniel, flogging him with a wand of birch, said “Maybe that will teach you,” and he had answered “I'll ask God to help me.” There had been a God then. Now God like Uncle Daniel had been a long time dead.

And sitting at supper (to which the aunts timidly bade him come) on the raw stripes of Uncle Daniel's licking, he would be filled with a righteous exaltation. It was more blessed to sit on stripes than on a bottom unlawfully padded with deceit. Uncle Dan flogged harder than the immediate sin deserved; this was because Uncle Daniel, wise, like God, knew vaguely of many other sins which had not come to light, which might have been stored up on a small boy's conscience almost since his birth. In this Uncle Daniel was a loyal representative of God. So before his eyes, as before God's, he lowered his own; in fear—for something in him loathed those floggings; in guilt—if ever all the sins were guessed then flogging was not enough; and also, obscurely, in hope, for once they were all read that one lacked the strength to own to, then would come absolution complete: an end to evil thoughts preventing sleep at night, end to the sudden threats of God sounding in guilty ears—one would be like “other children” that the aunts, not knowing, dimly fancied.

Here came Margaret,
at
him, it seemed (a wistful aunt, a helpless mother, ill-disguised) with that peculiar look of hope planned to seduce him; he described it to her fondly, at times when he could bear it, as her “balmy” look. Dropping the bags at his feet as though she brought a sick child toys from the Five and Ten and fully expecting his fever to go down at sight of them, not knowing them for trash! Poor little Maggie; it took stooping to enter the doll's house in which she lived; which she furnished so tenderly with chairs that were too little and too soft, always struggling to draw the curtains so a man could not see out; and rushing to the miniature door with her hands outstretched, her face gone “balmy” with her filmy hopefulness, begging a man to come in and be stifled. He could have borne it better if her face had sprung to life for Jeffrey.

He waved her back: “Ten percent. So now
you
will be bringing home most of the bacon”; and watched her, with compunction yet with pleasure, withdraw and stoop as though for refuge to the bags. Her face looked hurt as though his need for hurt hurt her. But since she would not stab him, he longed to reach and scratch out forever the “balmy” look from her mild, uncomprehending face.

“Leave them, leave them,” he said, slumped in his chair. “We have time before we eat.” The paper corner on the bulkiest lifted suddenly with a crackle, like the ear of an animal, rather hurt. He prodded it with one toe and shoved it an inch or two farther from his chair.

So lately had she held it! He could feel his toe gently prodding her shoulder where the helpless bag had lain. Well, now was her chance: why didn't she scream out in anger and strike him back? When would she learn that a man could not live with such unrelenting kindness?

“But darling!” she protested. “I—” She stopped. She seemed to eye him humbly; perhaps ashamed of her bucolic unawareness, her gift to him of vegetables! She sighed, her protest skillfully withdrawn. She has her own way, he thought, of knifing me! her cowardly pulling
out
the sword—that wounds!

“But what did he say—Mr. Pidgeon?” she asked, as though rousing herself (concession number one!) to pretend acquaintance with his world of facts; so might his aunts have inquired kindly about a game of baseball played at school. “Old Son-of-a-Bitch?” she added painfully (concession number two!); did she think to win him with this condescending loyalty?

“
He
doesn't matter.” Contemptuously Miles dropped Mr. Pidgeon along with Margaret's concessions out of his picture. “He is just a symbol. He gets
his
from the higher-ups, just as I get mine from him.”

She was choked with silly laughter. “Such a fat symbol, honey! I mean, it's hard to recognize a symbol with a belly like that—and so
many
warts . . .”

He wished to God she wouldn't use nursery humor on him. She'd had a good malicious wit before she was a wife.

“You wouldn't see a social trend,” he said, “unless it was crammed down your own personal throat: and
then
you'd try to think it funny. You know what I mean when I say Pidgeon is a symbol.”

“Then doesn't it seem wrong to call him Son-of-a-Bitch,” she said thoughtfully. “I mean—an epithet—if he doesn't himself determine his status, if it's all—” she waved her arm; deprecated her own ignorance, but falsely, he thought—“if it's all, as you say, ec-o-nom-ic.”

That perverse female logic again! Did they know what they were talking about? or did they bandy words, caught from the male-grown-ups' table? “Miss Banner! you win your M for elementary Marx,” he decided to be gallant and smiled reluctantly.

“You surely aren't worried, Miles!” she rallied warmly. He hated the way she picked up his crumbs! “We can still afford cigarettes and gin and a Charles Street roof over our heads—Mr. Pidgeon or no Mr. Pidgeon.
We
don't give a damn!”

He looked at her slowly, with distaste, the still-born smile sticking in his throat. (But thank God she had not said “each other—we still have each other!” Some tact, some happy accident, prevented that!) “I should hate to think that cigarettes and gin are what our life is made of.”

She seemed to sit plunged in defeat, her foot making sad little designs this way and that on the floor. Then she strengthened suddenly, as though from the bottom she bounded up, reborn. “Cigarettes and gin!” she said scornfully. “When we have each other!” She seemed to flow toward him borne strongly on a tide of joy, suddenly too big and too amoeba-motherly to hold out against. She put her arms around him and drew him against her and he could feel himself like a bundle of dry sticks gathered to her side.

He leaned against her, not unwillingly, but awkwardly, joint by joint, as though he did not know how. He was ashamed before her sudden largeness. He did his best for her. But his dryness would not melt.

“The best things in life are free, my love,” she whispered merrily; and ran her hand wickedly inside his shirt as she pressed him closer.

He grew less brittle. The faint suggestion of wickedness in her tone and the sudden invasion of her hand on his unsuspecting chest warmed him, even thrilled him faintly, as though the thrill were sensed through veils of prohibition.

“Pinocchio!” she whispered.

His heart ached for her. He felt indeed like the puppet-boy—he remembered pitifully how Bruno said (incredulously admiring, nevertheless, for Miles's stiffness was a miracle to him, a mystery to Bruno's rich amorphous Jewishness) that if he presented his friend Miles Flinders on the puppet-stage the audience would boo, demanding a more life-like marionette.

“Will you wait, Blue Fairy, will you help?” he said gently. He wanted to be taken out of his shell; but at this moment he wanted it, guiltily, more for her sake than his own.

“Dear little Pinocchio,” she said; “of course, forever!”

She seemed to hold her breath, hoping for the miracle. It irked him; but he felt he owed it to her to lie still in her arms.

He closed his eyes. Pinocchio! It was an old story between them, a sad little joke. She had read him the whole book one night, after Bruno had called him a puppet; the story of the little wooden boy who wanted to become real, whose dear papa and whose Blue Fairy waited and waited patiently for that happy day to come. She leaned over to show him the pictures; he said she exactly resembled the Blue Fairy. He had felt pleasantly pathetic; pointing out that no one had read him Pinocchio when he was a child; that until Bruno came along he had never had a friend; that now he had a wife he wanted her to slowly give him all the childhood he had missed on that New England farm where he had feared the wrath of God. Strong in his faith in his new wife he repudiated Uncle Daniel; forgot the forgotten God of his childhood.