The Complete Stories (64 page)

“No,” she murmured, “I want to give the little boy a nickel.”

“No!” Julian hissed. “No!”

She smiled down at the child and opened her bag. The bus door opened and the woman picked him up by the arm and descended with him, hanging at her hip. Once in the street she set him down and shook him.

Julian's mother had to close her purse while she got down the bus step but as soon as her feet were on the ground, she opened it again and began to rummage inside. “I can't find but a penny,” she whispered, “but it looks like a new one.”

“Don't do it!” Julian said fiercely between his teeth. There was a streetlight on the corner and she hurried to get under it so that she could better see into her pocketbook. The woman was heading off rapidly down the street with the child still hanging backward on her hand.

“Oh little boy!” Julian's mother called and took a few quick steps and caught up with them just beyond the lamppost. “Here's a bright new penny for you,” and she held out the coin, which shone bronze in the dim light.

The huge woman turned and for a moment stood, her shoulders lifted and her face frozen with frustrated rage, and stared at Julian's mother. Then all at once she seemed to explode like a piece of machinery that had been given one ounce of pressure too much. Julian saw the black fist swing out with the red pocketbook. He shut his eyes and cringed as he heard the woman shout, “He don't take nobody's pennies!” When he opened his eyes, the woman was disappearing down the street with the little boy staring wide-eyed over her shoulder. Julian's mother was sitting on the sidewalk.

“I told you not to do that,” Julian said angrily. “I told you not to do that!”

He stood over her for a minute, gritting his teeth. Her legs were stretched out in front of her and her hat was on her lap. He squatted down and looked her in the face. It was totally expressionless. “You got exactly what you deserved,” he said. “Now get up.”

He picked up her pocketbook and put what had fallen out back in it. He picked the hat up off her lap. The penny caught his eye on the sidewalk and he picked that up and let it drop before her eyes into the purse. Then he stood up and leaned over and held his hands out to pull her up. She remained immobile. He sighed. Rising above them on either side were black apartment buildings, marked with irregular rectangles of light. At the end of the block a man came out of a door and walked off in the opposite direction. “All right,” he said, “suppose somebody happens by and wants to know why you're sitting on the sidewalk?”

She took the hand and, breathing hard, pulled heavily up on it and then stood for a moment, swaying slightly as if the spots of light in the darkness were circling around her. Her eyes, shadowed and confused, finally settled on his face. He did not try to conceal his irritation. “I hope this teaches you a lesson,” he said. She leaned forward and her eyes raked his face. She seemed trying to determine his identity. Then, as if she found nothing familiar about him, she started off with a headlong movement in the wrong direction.

“Aren't you going on to the Y?” he asked.

“Home,” she muttered.

“Well, are we walking?”

For answer she kept going. Julian followed along, his hands behind him. He saw no reason to let the lesson she had had go without backing it up with an explanation of its meaning. She might as well be made to understand what had happened to her. “Don't think that was just an uppity Negro woman,” he said. “That was the whole colored race which will no longer take your condescending pennies. That was your black double. She can wear the same hat as you, and to be sure,” he added gratuitously (because he thought it was funny), “it looked better on her than it did on you. What all this means,” he said, “is that the old world is gone. The old manners are obsolete and your graciousness is not worth a damn.” He thought bitterly of the house that had been lost for him. “You aren't who you think you are,” he said.

She continued to plow ahead, paying no attention to him. Her hair had come undone on one side. She dropped her pocketbook and took no notice. He stooped and picked it up and handed it to her but she did not take it.

“You needn't act as if the world had come to an end,” he said, “because it hasn't. From now on you've got to live in a new world and face a few realities for a change. Buck up,” he said, “it won't kill you.”

She was breathing fast.

“Let's wait on the bus,” he said.

“Home,” she said thickly.

“I hate to see you behave like this,” he said. “Just like a child. I should be able to expect more of you.” He decided to stop where he was and make her stop and wait for a bus. “I'm not going any farther,” he said, stopping. “We're going on the bus.”

She continued to go on as if she had not heard him. He took a few steps and caught her arm and stopped her. He looked into her face and caught his breath. He was looking into a face he had never seen before. “Tell Grandpa to come get me,” she said.

He stared, stricken.

“Tell Caroline to come get me,” she said.

Stunned, he let her go and she lurched forward again, walking as if one leg were shorter than the other. A tide of darkness seemed to be sweeping her from him. “Mother!” he cried. “Darling, sweetheart, wait!” Crumpling, she fell to the pavement. He dashed forward and fell at her side, crying, “Mamma, Mamma!” He turned her over. Her face was fiercely distorted. One eye, large and staring, moved slightly to the left as if it had become unmoored. The other remained fixed on him, raked his face again, found nothing and closed.

“Wait here, wait here!” he cried and jumped up and began to run for help toward a cluster of lights he saw in the distance ahead of him. “Help, help!” he shouted, but his voice was thin, scarcely a thread of sound. The lights drifted farther away the faster he ran and his feet moved numbly as if they carried him nowhere. The tide of darkness seemed to sweep him back to her, postponing from moment to moment his entry into the world of guilt and sorrow.

The Partridge Festival

C
ALHOUN
parked his small pod-shaped car in the driveway to his great-aunts' house and got out cautiously, looking to the right and left as if he expected the profusion of azalea blossoms to have a lethal effect upon him. Instead of a decent lawn, the old ladies had three terraces crammed with red and white azaleas, beginning at the sidewalk and running backwards to the very edge of their imposing unpainted house. The two of them were on the front porch, one sitting, the other standing.

“Here's our baby!” his Aunt Bessie intoned in a voice meant to reach the other one, two feet away but deaf. It turned the head of a girl in the next yard, who sat cross-legged under a tree, reading. She raised her spectacled face, stared at Calhoun, and then returned her attention—with what he saw plainly was a smirk—to the book. Scowling, he passed stolidly on to the porch to get over the preliminaries with his aunts. They would take his voluntary presence in Partridge at Azalea Festival time to be a sign that his character was improving.

They were box-jawed old ladies who looked like George Washington with his wooden teeth in. They wore black suits with large ruffled jabots and had dead-white hair pulled back. After each had embraced him, he dropped limply into a rocker and gave them a sheepish smile. He was here only because Singleton had captured his imagination, but he had told his Aunt Bessie over the telephone that he was coming to enjoy the festival.

The deaf one, Aunt Mattie, shouted, “Your great-grandfather would have been delighted to see you taking an interest in the festival, Calhoun. He initiated it himself, you know.”

“Well,” the boy yelled back, “what about the little extra excitement you've had this time?”

Ten days before the festival began, a man named Singleton had been tried by a mock court on the courthouse lawn for not buying an Azalea Festival Badge. During the trial he had been imprisoned in a pair of stocks and when convicted, he had been locked in the “jail” together with a goat that had been tried and convicted previously for the same offense. The “jail” was an outdoor privy borrowed for the occasion by the Jaycees. Ten days later, Singleton had appeared in a side door on the courthouse porch and with a silent automatic pistol, had shot five of the dignitaries seated there and by mistake one person in the crowd. The innocent man received the bullet intended for the mayor who at that moment had reached down to pull up the tongue of his shoe.

“An unfortunate incident,” his Aunt Mattie said. “It mars the festive spirit.”

He heard the girl on the other lawn slam her book. The top of her rose into view above the hedge—a sloping-forward neck and a small face with a fierce expression, which she trained briefly on them before she disappeared. “It doesn't seem to have marred anything,” he said. “As I passed through town I saw more people than ever before and all the flags were up. Partridge,” he shouted, “will bury its dead but will not lose a nickel.” The girl's front door slammed in the middle of the sentence.

His Aunt Bessie had gone into the house and come out again with a small leather box. “You look very like Father,” she said and pulled up her chair beside him.

Without enthusiasm Calhoun opened the box, which shed a rust-colored dust over his knees, and removed the miniature of his great-grandfather. He was shown this every time he came. The old man—round-faced, bald, altogether unremarkable-looking—sat with his hands knotted on the head of a black stick. His expression was all innocence and determination. The master merchant, the boy thought, and flinched. “And what would this stalwart worthy think of Partridge today,” he asked wryly, “with its festival in full swing after six citizens have been shot?”

“Father was progressive,” his Aunt Bessie said, “—the most forward-looking merchant Partridge ever had. He would either have been one of the prominent men shot or he would have been the one to subdue the maniac.”

The boy did not know how much of this he could stand. In the paper there had been pictures of the six “victims” and one of Singleton. Singleton's was the only distinctive face in the lot. It was broad but bony and bleak. One eye was more nearly round than the other and in the more nearly round one Calhoun had recognized the composure of the man who knows he will and who is willing to suffer for the right to be himself. A calculating contempt lurked in the regular eye but in the general expression there was the tortured look of the man who becomes maddened finally by the madness around him. The other six faces were of the same general stamp as his great-grandfather's.

“As you get older, you'll look more and more like Father,” his Aunt Mattie prophesied. “You have his ruddy complexion and much the same expression.”

“I'm a different type entirely,” he said stiffly.

“Peaches and cream,” his Aunt Bessie guffawed. “You're getting a little pot-tummy too,” she said and took a lunge at his middle with her fist. “How old is our baby now?”

“Twenty-three,” he muttered, thinking that it could not go on like this for the whole visit, that once they had roughed him up a bit, they would leave off.

“And do you have a girl?” his Aunt Mattie asked.

“No,” he said wearily. “I take it,” he went on, “that around here Singleton is considered nothing but a mental case?”

“Yes,” his Aunt Bessie said, “—peculiar. He never conformed. He was not like the rest of us here.”

“A terrible drawback,” the boy said. Though his eyes were not mismatched, the shape of his face was broad like Singleton's; but the real likeness between them was interior.

“Since he is insane, he is not responsible,” his Aunt Bessie said.

The boy's eyes brightened. He sat forward and fixed the old lady with a narrow gaze. “And where then,” he asked, “does the real guilt lie?”

“Father's head was as smooth as an infant's by the time he was thirty,” she said. “You had better hurry and get you a girl. Ha ha. What are you going to do with yourself now?”

He reached into his pocket and withdrew his pipe and a sack of tobacco. You could not ask them questions in depth. They were both good low-church Episcopalians but they had amoral imaginations. “I think I shall write,” he said and began to load the bowl.

“Well,” his Aunt Bessie said, “that's fine. Maybe you'll be another Margaret Mitchell.”

“I hope you'll do us justice,” his Aunt Mattie shouted. “Few do.”

“I'll do you justice all right,” he said grimly. “I'm writing an expos.…” He stopped and put the pipe in his mouth and sat back. It would be ridiculous to tell
them.
He removed the pipe and said, “Well, that's too much to go into. It wouldn't interest you ladies.”

His Aunt Bessie inclined her head significantly. “Calhoun,” she said, “we wouldn't want to be disappointed in you.” They eyed him as if it had just occurred to them that the pet snake they had been fondling might after all be poisonous.

“Know the truth,” the boy said with his fiercest look, “and the truth shall make you free.”

They appeared reassured at his quoting Scripture. “Isn't he sweet,” his Aunt Mattie asked, “with his little pipe?”

“Better get you a girl, boy,” his Aunt Bessie said.

*   *   *

He escaped them in a few minutes and took his bag upstairs and then came down again, ready to go out and immerse himself in his material. His intention was to spend the afternoon interviewing people about Singleton. He expected to write something that would vindicate the madman and he expected the writing of it to mitigate his own guilt, for his doubleness, his shadow, was cast before him more darkly than usual in the light of Singleton's purity.

For the three summer months of the year, he lived with his parents and sold air-conditioners, boats, and refrigerators so that for the other nine months he could afford to meet life naturally and bring his real self—the rebel-artist-mystic—to birth. During these other months he lived on the opposite side of the city in an unheated walk-up with two other boys who also did nothing. But guilt for the summer pursued him into the winter; the fact was, he could have fared without the orgy of selling he cast himself into in the summer.