CHAPTER X

Now that was the year when the squirrels were such a pest and everybody worried about cancer and homosexuality. The squirrels upset garbage pails, bit delivery men and entered houses. Cancer was a commonplace but men and women, at its mercy, were told that their pain was some trifling complication while behind their backs their brothers and their sisters, their husbands and wives, would whisper: “All we can hope is that they will go quickly.” This cruel and absolute hypocrisy was bound to backfire and in the end no one could tell or count upon being told if that pain in the middle was the knock of death or some trifling case of gas. Most maladies have their mythologies, their populations, their scenery and their grim jokes. The Black Plague had masques, street songs and dances. Tuberculosis in its heyday was like a civilization where a caste of comely, brilliant and doomed men and women fell in love, waltzed and invented privileges for their disease; but here was the grappling hand of death disinfected by a social conspiracy of all its reality. “Why, you’ll be up and around in no time at all,” says the nurse to the dying man. “You want to dance at your daughter’s wedding, don’t you? Don’t you want to see your daughter married? Well, then, we can’t expect to get better if we’re not more cheerful, can we?” She cleans his arm with alcohol and prepares the syringe. “Your wife tells me you’re a great mountain-climber but if you want to get better and climb the mountains again you’ll have to be more cheerful. You do want to climb the mountains again, don’t you?” The contents of the syringe flow into his veins. “I’ve never climbed a mountain myself,” the nurse says, “but I expect it must be very exciting when you get to the top. I don’t think I’d like the climbing part of it very much but the view from the summit must be lovely. They tell me that in the Alps roses grow in the snow banks and if you want to see all these things again you’ll have to be more cheerful.” Now he is drowsy and she raises her voice. “Oh, you’ll be up and around in no time at all,” she exclaims and softly, softly she closes the door to his room and says to his family, gathered in the corridor: “I’ve put him to sleep again and all we can do is hope and pray that he will never wake up.” Melissa was one of those unfortunate people who was to suffer from this attitude.

Moses returned from his wild-goose chase as soon as he learned of Melissa’s illness, having borrowed enough money to at least give an impression of solvency. The fact that Melissa was convalescent when he returned might have seemed to account for the fact that he did not describe to her his financial embarrassments but this was not so. He would not have been able to describe them to her under any circumstances; no more could Coverly state that he had seen the ghost of his father. Had Moses lived in Parthenia he would have felt free to put a FOR SALE sign in his living room window and another in the windshield of his convertible but to do this in Proxmire Manor would have been subversive. He expressed his worries not in irritability but in a manner that was very broad and jocular. Melissa then had this forced jocularity to cope with as well as the absurd conviction that she had cancer. She could not convince herself that she was cured nor could she trust what the doctor told her. She telephoned the hospital and asked to speak with her nurse. She asked the nurse if they could meet for a drink. “Why not?” the nurse asked. “Sure. Why not?” She went off duty at four and Melissa planned to meet her at the traffic light by the hospital at four-fifteen.

They went to a bar near there, a roadside place. The nurse ordered a double martini. “I’m tired,” she said. “I’m worn out. My sister, she’s married, she called me last night and said would I take care of the baby while she and her husband go to a cocktail party. So I’d said sure, I’d take care of the baby if it was just for cocktails, an hour or two. So I went there at six and you know when they came home? Midnight! The baby didn’t shut her eyes once. She bawled all the time. Kind sister, that’s me.”

“I wanted to ask you about my x-rays,” Melissa said. “You saw them.”

“What are you afraid of,” the nurse asked, “cancer?”

“Yes.”

“That’s what they’re all afraid of.”

“I don’t have cancer?”

“Not to my knowledge.” She raised her face and watched the wind carry some leaves past the window. “Leaves,” she said, “leaves, leaves, look at them. I’ve got a little apartment with a back yard and it’s me that rakes the leaves. I spend all my spare time raking leaves. Just as soon as I get one bunch cleaned up down comes another. As soon as you get rid of the leaves it begins to snow.”

“Would you like another drink?” Melissa asked.

“No, thanks. You know, I wondered what you wanted to see me about but I didn’t think it was cancer. You know what I thought you wanted?”

“What?”

“Heroin.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I thought maybe you wanted me to smuggle some heroin out to you. You’d be surprised at the number of people who think I can get them drugs. Top-ranking people, some of them. Oh, I could name names. Shall we go?”

She stood, late one afternoon, at her window watching the ring of golden light that crowned the eastern hills at that season and time of day. It rested on the Babcocks’ lawn, the Filmores’ ranch house, the stone walls of the church, the Thompsons’ chimney—lambent, and as yellow and clear as strained honey and a ring, because, as she watched, she saw at the base of the hills a clear demarcation between the yellow light and the rising dark, and watched the band of light lift past the Babcocks’ lawn, the Filmores’ ranch house, the stone walls of the church and the Thompsons’ chimney, up into thin air. The street was empty, or nearly so. Everyone in Proxmire Manor had two cars and no one walked with the exception of old Mr. Cosden, who belonged to the generation that took constitutionals. Up the street he came, his blue eyes fixed on the last piece of yellow light that touched the church steeple, as if exclaiming to himself, “How wonderful, how wonderful it is!” He passed, and then a much stranger figure took her attention—a tall man with unusually long arms. He was a stray, she decided; he must live in the slums of Parthenia. In his right hand he carried an umbrella and a pair of rubbers. He was terribly stooped and to see where he was going had to crane his neck forward and upward like an adder. He had not bent his back over a whetstone or a workbench or under the weight of a brick hod or at any other honest task. It was the stoop of weak-mindedness, abnegation and bewilderment. He had never had any occasion to straighten his back in self-esteem. Stooped with shyness as a child, stooped with loneliness as a youth, stooped now under an invisible burden of social disregard, he walked now with his long arms reaching nearly to his knees. His wide, thin mouth was set in a silly half-grin, meaningless and sad, but the best face he had been able to hit on. As he approached the house, the beating of her heart seemed to correspond to his footsteps, the cutting pain returned to her breast, and she felt the return of her fear of darkness, evil and death. Carrying his umbrella and rubbers, although there was not a cloud in the sky, he duck-footed out of sight.

A few nights later, Melissa was driving back from the village of Parthenia. The street was lighted erratically by the few stores that hung on at the edge of town—general stores smelling of stale bread and bitter oranges, where those in the neighborhood who were too lazy, too tired and too infirm to go to the palatial shopping centers bought their coffee rings, beer and hamburgers. The darkness of the street was sparsely, irregularly, checkered with light, and she saw the tall man crossing one of these apertures, throwing a long, crooked shadow ahead of him on the paving. He held a heavy bag of groceries in each arm. He was no more stooped than before—the curvature of his spine seemed set—but the bags must be heavy, and she pitied him. She drove on, evoking defensively the worlds of difference that lay between them and the chance that he would have misunderstood her kindness had she offered to give him a ride. But when she had completed her defense it seemed so shallow, idle and selfish that she turned the car around in her own driveway and drove back toward Parthenia. Her best instinct was to help him—to make some peace between his figure and her irrational fear of death—and why should she deny herself this? He would have passed the lighted stores by this time, she decided, and she drove slowly up the dark street, looking for his stooped figure. When she saw him she turned the car around and stopped. “Can I help you?” she asked. “Can I give you a ride? You seem to have so much to carry.” He turned and looked at the beautiful stranger without quite relaxing his half-grin, and she wondered if he wasn’t a deaf-mute as well as weak-minded. Then a look of distrust touched the grin. There was no question about what he was feeling. She was from that world that had gulled him, pelted him with snowballs and rifled his lunchbox. His mother had told him to beware of strangers and here was a beautiful stranger, perhaps the most dangerous of all. “No!” he said. “No, no!” She drove on, wondering what was at the bottom of her impulse; wondering, in the end, why she should scrutinize a simple attempt at kindness.

On Thursday the maid was off, and Melissa took care of the baby. He slept after lunch, and she woke him at four, lifting him out of his crib and letting the blankets fall. They were alone. The house was quiet. She carried him into the kitchen, put him in his highchair and opened a can of figs. Sleepy and docile and pale, he followed her with his eyes, and smiled sweetly when their eyes met. His shirt was stained and wet, and she wore a wrapper. She sat by him at the table, with her face only a few inches from his, and they spooned the figs out of the can. He shuddered now and then with what seemed to be pleasure. The quiet house, the still kitchen, the pale and docile boy in his stained shirt, her round white arms on the table, the comfortable slovenliness of eating from a can were all part of an intimacy so intense and yet so tranquil that it seemed to her as if she and the baby were the same flesh and blood, subjects of the same heart, all mingled and at ease. What a comfort, she thought, is one’s skin. . . . But it was time then to change the boy, time to dress herself, time to take up cheerfully the other side of her life. Carrying the child through the living room she saw, out of the window, the stooped figure with his rubbers and umbrella.

A wind was blowing and he moved indifferently through a diagonal fall of yellow leaves, craning his neck like an adder, his back bent under its impossible burden. She held the baby’s head against her breast, foolishly, instinctively, as if to protect his eyes from some communicable evil. She turned away from the window, and shortly afterward there was a loud pounding on the back door. How had he found where she lived, and what did he want? He might have recognized her car in the driveway; he might have asked who she was, the village was that small. He had not come to thank her for her attempted kindness. She felt sure of that. He had come—in his foolishness—to accuse her of something. Was he dangerous? Was there any danger left in Proxmire Manor? She put the boy down and went toward the back door, summoning her self-respect. When she opened it, there was Mr. Narobi’s good-looking grocery boy. He made it all seem laughable—came in beaming and with a kind of radiance that seemed to liberate her from this absurd chain of anxieties.

“You’re new?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“I don’t know your name.”

“Emile. It’s a funny name. My father was French.”

“Did he come from France?”

“Oh, no, Quebec. French Canadian.”

“What does he do?”

“When people used to ask me that, I used to say, ‘He plays the harp!’ He’s dead. He died when I was little. My mother works at the florist’s—Barnum’s—on Green Street. Maybe you know her?”

“I don’t think I do. Would you like a beer?”

“Sure. Why not? It’s my last stop.”

She asked if he wanted something to eat, and got him some crackers and cheese. “I’m always hungry,” he said.

She brought the baby into the kitchen and they all three sat at the table while he ate and drank. Stuffing his mouth with cheese, he seemed to be a child. His gaze was clear and disarming. She couldn’t meet it without a stir in her blood. And was this sluttishness? Was she worse than Mrs. Lockhart? Would she be dragged figuratively out of Proxmire Manor at the tail of a cart? She didn’t care.

“Nobody ever gave me a beer before,” he said. “They give me Cokes, sometimes. I guess they don’t think I’m old enough. But I drink. Martinis, whisky, everything.”

“How old are you?”

“Nineteen. Now I have to go.”

“Please don’t go,” she said.

He stood at the table, covering her with his wide gaze, and she wondered what would happen if she reached out to him. Would he run out of the kitchen? Would he shout, “Unhand me!”? He seemed ripe; he seemed ready for the picking; and yet there was something else in the corner of his eyes—reserve, wariness. He perhaps had a vision of something better, and if he had, she would encourage him with all her heart. Go and love the drum majorette, the girl next door.

“Oh, I’d like to stay,” he said. “It’s nice here. But it’s Thursday, and I have to take my mother shopping. Thank you very much.”

He went to the house three or four times a week. Melissa was usually alone in the late afternoons and he timed his visits. Sometimes she seemed to be waiting for him. No one had ever been so attentive. She seemed interested in all the facts of his life—that his father had been a surveyor, that he drove a secondhand Buick, that he had done well at school. She usually gave him a beer and sat with him in the kitchen. Her company excited him. It made him feel that he might do well. Some of her worldliness, some of her finesse, would rub off on him and get him out of the grocery business. Suddenly, one afternoon, she said quite shyly, “You know, you’re divine.”

He wondered if she hadn’t lost her marbles. He had heard that women sometimes did. Had he been wasting his time? He didn’t want to fool around with a woman who had lost her marbles. He knew he wasn’t divine. If he was, someone would have said so before and if he had been divine and had been convinced of this, he would have concealed it—not through modesty but through an instinct of self-preservation. “Sometimes I think I’m good-looking,” he said earnestly to try and modify her praise. He finished his beer. “Now I have to get back to the store.”