The Man Who Lost the Sea (5 page)

He didn’t say anything more to her that evening—he couldn’t. But the next night she was there ahead of him and when he came along with his tray, she called out to him and patted the table across from her. After that they always had dinner together. She was quiet and nice, and she let him be silent for as long as he wanted to be.

Six or seven weeks later something happened at the hospital that made a deep impression on Lulu. A furious young female face appeared at his wicket and demanded: “Where is George Hickenwaller? Where is he? I got to see him right away.”

Lulu stared dumbly until she banged the palm of her hand on the shelf by the wicket, and repeated the question. Her face started darkening ominously and the blood-vessels on the sides of her neck began to stand out in the most alarming fashion.

He remembered then. George Hickenwaller was the married orderly who had annoyed him more than most of the others—although he wasn’t quite sure why. “I’ll find him. Just wait a minute,” he promised. He got up, and went over to the doorway of the locker room, and saw at once that George Hickenwaller was in there with his back to the wall. He was making wild signals of distress and prayer, and moving his mouth strangely, giving vent to some exaggerated, silent, pleading syllables which Lulu could not understand.

He went back to his wicket. “He’s in there,” he said, thumbing at the door.

“In there, is he?” said the young woman. She turned angrily to the man behind her. Lulu saw that the man was a policeman. “He’s in there,” she relayed.

“In there, is he?” the policeman countered. He ran around to the front, to the general office door, and went sprinting across behind Lulu and into the locker room.

There came sounds of the chase and a cry for mercy, and then poor Hickenwaller was walked abjectly out by the policeman. The big, red-faced cop had a meaty hand on his collar and another in the back of his belt.

Quite a crowd had gathered by this time and Lulu found himself standing next to Hickenwaller’s friend, the other orderly. This man shook his head sadly. “I tol’ him he wasn’t goin’ to get away with it. ‘I know what I’m doin’,’ he says. ‘I got it made.’ ” The orderly shook his head again. “He got it made
now
all right, but good.”

“What did he do?” Lulu asked.

“Got married.”

“To that one?” Lulu pointed at the angry woman, who was ducking under the policeman’s guard to punch Hickenwaller solidly on the ear.

“Yeah, an’ another one too. I tol’ him she’d find out.”

“Two wives?”

“Bigamy,” said the orderly knowledgeably.

“Is that very bad?” Lulu asked, really wanting to know.

The orderly cocked his head and squinted at him. “Lew old man, let me tell you.
One
is very bad.”

“Yes, but this—uh—bigamy. It’s
really
bad, huh.”

“No way to get to heaven.”

“Well,” said Lulu, and got back to work.

Dinnertime, comfortable with Miss Fisher in the booth. He wondered why she seemed so glad to have dinner with him all the time. What did she get out of it. He didn’t ask her. But he continued to wonder.

“Oh,
there
you are!” someone said at his elbow. It was the manager.
He half-filled the booth and loomed over them. “I thought I had all the trouble with you I was goin’ to,” he growled at Lulu.

Lulu went speechless. He made himself smaller in his seat, while Miss Fisher looked frightened at the manager and anxious at Lulu.

The manager banged a check with a bank slip stapled to it, banged it down directly in front of Lulu. “After all that trouble, now they’re bouncing.”

Lulu didn’t know what to say. Miss Fisher stared at him, while the manager continued to glare. People began to crane and peer at them. Lulu slipped down another notch in his seat.

Suddenly Miss Shelly Fisher snatched up the check, “Just a minute, Mr. Grossman,” she said firmly, “I’m sure this can be straightened out. Mr. Llewellyn, didn’t you make a large deposit at the First National just a few weeks ago?”

Lulu nodded.

“Have you put any more money in the checking account since then?”

He shook his head sheepishly. “I didn’t know I had to,” he mumbled.

“Well, have you taken anything out of the savings account?”

He shook his head. Miss Fisher said, “I’ll vouch for him, Mr. Grossman. He just isn’t used to a checking account yet. He has a good balance in savings. You can take my word for it.”

“You work at the bank?”

“You’ve seen me there.”

He nodded slowly. “Well, all right then,” he growled. He picked up the check and waved it in front of Lulu’s nose. “You take care of it by this time tomorrow, you hear?”

“Of course he will. Of course,” said Miss Fisher soothingly. She put her hand over Lulu’s as he slipped yet another inch down in his chair, which put the table about breast-high to him. Grossman went away.

“It’s all right now,” she said. “It’s all right. Sit up, Mr. Llewellyn.”

He did, shamefaced. “I didn’t know,” he said feebly.

“You’d better let someone look over your checkbook. Do you want me to?”

“It’s home,” he said, regretfully, feeling that the simple statement had disposed of the matter.

“I don’t mind,” she said, surprisingly. “I have nothing else to do.”

“You mean, you’d come to …”

She nodded while he fought his unwilling tongue. After a moment she got up. “Come on,” she said.

Unbelievingly he followed her out of the restaurant, and then led the way to his rooming house.

The room was so small he had to sit on the bed if she was going to sit at the table. He kept it neat enough, but places that crummy are unconquerable. He found the checkbook and gave it to her. She riffled through the stubs, finding not a single entry.

“Well,” she said, “No
wonder!
” Very carefully she explained to him how he must keep his record in the stubs and make an effort not to let checks bounce. He nodded humbly every three seconds while she talked. She did it kindly and did not laugh at him, or sneer.

“Yes, Mr. Skerry told me. I guess it didn’t stick.”

“
Lots
of people don’t understand it at first.”

This is a very fine lady, he told himself, and wished he could say it out loud.

“What are those?” She pointed to the top of the chest, where eleven cash envelopes lay in a neat row.

“Oh, that’s my paydays,” he said.

She picked one of the envelopes up, pressed it, shook it, and finally read the data typed on it. “Cash, my goodness. They pay you in cash. You shouldn’t leave cash around.”

He could only manage to get out a faltering, “I’m sorry.”

“My, you do need someone to look after you.” She counted the envelopes. “Don’t you see, if you put these in your checking account every week you’d always have money to write checks against?”

He didn’t see. He just waved at the envelopes and said unhappily, “I just never knew
what
to do with ’em.”

He intercepted her look of astonishment and said abjectly, “I never could understand all this. You want to help me with it?”

So Miss Fisher began taking care of Lulu Llewellyn.

He began to be happier. Yet his relationship with Miss Fisher was
so innocent, and she herself so different from any woman he’d ever met that some of his old torment began to return, and he found himself cringing again under the assault of other people’s sins. Now, however, as his philosophy of sin began a slow evolution, there was a slightly different reaction. Instead of considering himself totally unfit and excluded, he began to match what he knew of himself against each of the sins he heard recounted. Could I do
that?
Could he ever gamble? Seduce? Steal, swear, assault, outwit? Always no and no and no, and the words in Ivy’s letter trailing across his clear conscience:
a very good man who couldn’t do a bad thing if he tried
.

And then one day he saw the face of Hickenwaller’s friend go past his wicket—just that, a reminder. And belatedly, as all things did, the solution came to Lulu Llewellyn.

He went to Miss Fisher and asked her, and she cried. Then she said yes, she would marry him. Then she cried again and said pathetically that she had made up her mind when she was eight years old that nobody would ever want her and she might as well face it.

So they went down to City Hall and got a license, and three days later they were married. He chittered and jittered like the most eager of grooms. He was eager about something else than that which plagues most grooms, however, and it was more important—to him, at least.

That very evening he marched to Ivy’s apartment and up the one flight of stairs. It made him feel a little strange to be knocking on the door instead of using his key, but somehow he felt that he should knock, that he owed her that courtesy. He waited happily, feeling the crackling comfort of the marriage license in his breast pocket.

The door opened.

“Lulu! Oh—Lulu, I’m so glad.” She looked worn, sallow-cheeked, but her eyes were shining. She pulled him inside and shut the dear. “I just knew you’d come back. I just knew you would, you had to.”

He cleared his throat. “I …”

“Don’t talk. Don’t say anything. I’ve had a chance to think things out clearly. And oh, Lulu, it’s all so senseless and I’m so sorry.”

“But I didn’t …”

“Don’t say another word. You’re going to listen to me now. I’ve
waited too long. You just stay right there where you belong.”

Half playfully but very firmly she nudged him over to his old chair and crowded him until he had to sit down.

“I won’t be a second,” she said, and ran out of the room. He sat there, his backsides liking the old chair, and thought excitedly. You’re the first. Miss Fisher—she’s the second. He wondered how that would sound if he ever told it at the hospital. He put the speculation aside to think about later.

After a moment she came out of the bedroom carrying the black metal box. “I’m not a stupid woman, Lulu,” she said. “Really I’m not. I read and I think and I can keep my end up when I talk with well-educated people. But sometimes the brightest of us can be more stupid than the slowest witted. Well, anyway, I’ll admit it. I finally had to talk it out with someone. I did, Lulu—and I got the answer.” She inserted the key in the box, turned it, raised the black metal lid. “He’s a dear man, a brilliant man. He’s a psychiatrist. I told him everything, but you mustn’t worry about that, Lulu. They’re like
priests
. Anyway, I didn’t even tell him your name.”

She rummaged in the box and found a paper and began to gesture with it while she talked.

“There it was, right in front of my silly old eyes, and I never even saw it. He explained to me that it was
terribly
important to you to thank we were living together
without
being married. He said it made a man of you. He said you had been very strictly brought up and that you had—well, he called it a ‘black-and-white’ morality. He said you took it so seriously when you were a child that you had nothing at all on the black side—not so much as cheating on a school examination, or hitting a puppy in your whole life. That’s why, he said, when I finally told you that our living together was a ‘white’ thing, and had been from the beginning, it was a terrible blow to your self-confidence. You just couldn’t stand it.”

“Now I’m going to tell you something I never thought I’d ever tell to a living soul. I was on my own when I was fourteen, and I always had to think things out for myself. Sometimes I did well at that, and sometimes I failed. But I always thought things out for myself first—not for laws or anyone else or customs or anything
like that, but just for myself alone. Well, never mind all that now. One of the main things was—I thought I had to have freedom. I made up my mind I’d do what I wanted with whom I wanted, just as long as I was discreet. As long as I put a partition that was like a high wall between the one thing and the other. You don’t understand this, do you? Well, that’s all right, You’ll understand all you need to in just one more minute.”

“Didn’t you ever wonder what I did with my weekends for nineteen years, Lulu? Didn’t you
care?
”

He started to answer, but she gave him no chance. “No; I don’t suppose it ever occurred to you to wonder. It was just the way things were—like water running downhill and the sun coming up. You knew I was going to be away Saturday and Sunday, and you just accepted it. Poor Lulu! Well. I see I’ve get to tell you then. I was taking a course in economics for a while. Let me see that would be about six years ago. Oh, I’ve done all sorts of things on weekends—and anyway, there was this man. You see, and I don’t know what happened to me at all, but I’d never felt like that in my life before. And I guess I never will again,” she added in a whisper, tragically.

Then she blew her nose. “I have the most awful cold, Lulu. I think I’m a bit feverish. So there I was, feeling like that about this man, you see, and for a while I thought he might feel the same way about me. So I saw a lawyer and showed him my papers, and I got this. Here, Lulu, this is yours. This is for you.” She handed him the paper.

The whole episode was so reminiscent of the one which had blasted his quiet life once before that he took the paper without even glancing at it. He simply closed his eyes, and got up and stood trembling, waiting for he knew not what.

She understood and laughed happily. Then she coughed, and laughed again and took the paper away from him. “You’re afraid of it, and I don’t blame you. Here, I’ll read it to you.” Her hand touched his, and he felt the paper slip out of his fingers.

“ ‘There came before me in the County Court in the township of …’ Oh, let’s skip all that lawyers’ talk. Here it is. ‘Therefore by weight of evidence in camera’—that means secret and confidential—‘the marriage of said L. Llewellyn and said Ivy Shoots is hereby
annulled and held to be void and without existence.’ ”

She pushed the paper triumphantly back into his lap. “You understand that, Lulu? It isn’t a divorce. A divorce says a marriage was and is no more. This says that in the eyes of the law and in my eyes, Lulu, and in your eyes, Lulu, the wedding never took place. You see? You see? So if that was what was bothering you, it needn’t any longer. It’s gone. We’re without benefit of clergy if that’s how you’d like it to be. We can call it common-law if you want that instead. Lulu I just don’t know—?”