Collected Stories, page 4
Tamsen too was staring, tipping her head sideways. “I can’t get over how much you’ve changed,” she said. “You used to be such a string bean.”
“Cheer up,” Mark said. “I’m still a string bean at heart.”
“No fooling,” Mel said. He plucked the cloth of Mark’s sleeve, sniffed his fingers. “Where’d you get that jacket?”
“Montreal,” Mark said, and immediately felt an obscure guilty shame, as if he had been betrayed into boasting, rubbing in the fact that he had gone up and out in the world and Mel had been marooned behind. “I was up there a couple weeks ago at a genetics conference,” he said lamely, in extenuation.
For an instant he was furious at Mel, so furious he shook. In college it had been Mel who had everything—money enough, and clothes, and a car, and a home where starveling students could come like grateful sidling dogs off the street. And he had been brought up well, he had good parents, his home was full of music and books and a certain sense of social grace and personal responsibility. Mel had taught the whole unlicked lot of them something, how to win and how to lose, how to live with people and like them and forgive them. He had never owned a dime’s worth of anything that he wasn’t glad to share. Now the shoe was on the other foot. Now Mark had gone higher and farther than any of them had ever aimed, and it embarrassed and enraged him to know that he could give lessons to Mel. And it was unjust that having shared everything for four years in college, they couldn’t share this trouble that Mel was in now.
Tamsen’s level blue eyes were inspecting him, and it struck him that here at least was something they had never shared. He had always known more about Tamsen than Mel had. When he stood up as Mel’s best man he could have told the bridegroom the names of four people who had slept with the bride. He wished now that he had; he had wished it a hundred times. And catching Tamsen’s eyes, twinkling with a little spark of malice, he knew she understood precisely what he was thinking. She had always been shrewd, and she had been all her life one of the world’s most accomplished and convincing liars. When she went after Mel she had fooled even the people who knew her best, made them believe she was infatuated. …
“I tell you for sure,” she said, “if you’d been as good looking then as you are now I’d never have let old Melly take me in to church.”
“Maybe there’s still time,” Mark said.
Mel’s tugging hand hauled him around. “You’ve changed, you know that, you damn Yale professor?”
“So have you,” Mark said, but his attempt to hold Mel’s eye was unsuccessful, and he added, “I stay in nights, now. Once I got free of your influence I steadied right down.”
“That’s fact,” Mel said. “Terrible influence. Half stiff ten-thirty Sunday morning. Blame that boy of mine. Got his old man out playing baseball with a hangover before breakfast. You ever meet that boy?”
“Never did.”
“Where is he, Tam?”
“He’s around,” Tamsen said. “How about me getting you two a drink?”
Mark let her go. It was a way of getting Mel alone. It seemed to him that some of the drunken pose fell away from Mel as soon as his wife left the room. He looked into the streaked eyes and shook his head and grinned. “How are things going, anyway?”
The eyes were round and innocent. “Things going wonderful. I run the business now, since my dad died. My dad was a good business man, you know that, Canby?”
“I know that,” Mark said. “It wasn’t business I was thinking about.” With a quick estimate that he might have only two minutes more before Tamsen returned, he opened his mouth to say what he had come to say, and found that his tongue wouldn’t go around it. In that instant it was clear that you did not come in on an old friend and say, “I hear your wife’s been playing around with a golf pro. I could have warned you about her that way. Probably I should have. But I hear you found out all right, and were all set to get a divorce. Bailey told me that much, a year ago. Then I heard that instead of getting a divorce you went down to St. Louis, you and Tamsen and the boy, and stayed six months, and came back home and no more said about any divorce. Get rid of her. She’ll cheat on you all her life, and break you in the process. If she’s pulled some lie out of the bag and convinced you that you were mistaken, don’t believe it, she could lie her way out of hell. For the love of God, get that divorce, for the sake of the boy and for your own sake. She’ll suck you dry like an old orange skin. You’re already so far gone I could cry—soggy with alcohol and with that comedy-routine front on all the time. Come and stay with me, I’ll line you up with Alcoholics Anonymous if you want. Give me a chance to pay some of what I owe you.”
You simply did not say things like that. Even thinking about them made them sound self-righteous and prying. Instead, you looked uneasily at your oldest and closest friend, trying to surprise in his eyes the things you knew were there, pain and shame and bitterness and defeat. But there was too thick an insulating layer between. Seventeen years were too many. Mel was like the elk in Jim Bridger’s Yellowstone story. He grazed on the other side of the glass mountain, clear and undistorted, looking only a hundred yards away. The hunter’s gun went off, and the elk didn’t even raise his head, didn’t even hear the report. He just went on grazing, with blankness like a membrane over his eyeballs and an unpierceable transparent wall between him and the world.
Mel’s lips twitched. He lurched forward, looking puzzled and solicitous. “Whazza name?” he said, besotted and polite, and turned his ear sideward like a deaf man.
Mark pushed him away angrily just as Tamsen came in with glasses. Mel took two and handed one to Mark with a crooked grin. “Here, rinse your mouth,” he said.
Tamsen raised her glass. “Here’s to the local boy who made good.” They clicked glasses elaborately all around. Irritated, baffled, frustrated, gnawed by that odd obscure shame, Mark drank with them to himself.
“I was thinking about you the other day,” Tamsen was saying. “We were down watching the spring canoe race and two kids went over the falls by the power plant just the way you and Mel did once.”
“I hope they didn’t swallow as much water as I did,” Mark said.
“Yeah, but this the other day was an accident,” Mel said. “You, you pot-licker, you put us over there just to duck me.”
“I was along,” Mark said. “I went over too. Remember?”
Tamsen shook her head. “You were a pair,” she said. “I guess I’d forgotten what a pair you were.”
They sat nursing their drinks, the door open upon the street and the locust noise, and groped carefully backward for the things to remember and laugh about, gleaning the safe nostalgic past. But it was not the canoes over waterfalls, the times Jay Straup tried to climb Old Capitol steps in his old Model T, the picnics on Signal Hill when all the farmer kids used to creep up and spy on the college kids necking, that Mark wanted to remember. People who recalled such things and shook their heads over them bored him. He kept looking at Mel in search of that spark of understanding, and he kept wanting to say—
Remember the times we used to go out on dates and come in late in your old Ford, and stop down along one of the river joints for a pork tenderloin and a ginger beer, two or three o’clock in the morning, only a truck driver or two on the stools? How good sandwiches tasted at that hour, and how late the moon would be over the bluffs when we came out yawning and started up to your house? Remember the mornings we woke up in this house, this very house seventeen or eighteen or twenty years ago, and found the sun scrambled in the bedclothes, and had a shower and breakfast and went out onto the sidewalk, not for anything especially, but just to be outdoors, and walked under those trees out there up to the corner and back again, loafing, alive to the fingertips, talking about anything, nothing, girls, games, profundities? Remember? It isn’t what we did, but what we were, that I remember, and I know that what we were is still here, if we’d peel off the defenses and the gag-lines and the doubletalk routines and the Montreal jackets.
The porch thudded with feet and a chubby boy of twelve came in with a bat in his hand. He stood forward gravely when Mel introduced him, shook hands with polite indifference, coasted into the kitchen and came back gnawing on a cookie.
“Canby, my friend,” Mel said to him, “you’ll be as fat as your old man.”
The child was a curious blend of his parents, with Tamsen’s deceptively clear eyes and Mel’s twisting delicate mouth. He looked at his father over the cookie, grinning.
“Stay away from pappy,” Tamsen said. “Pappy started out to cure a hangover and behold he’s swizzled again.”
A grunt that sounded almost like an angry outburst escaped Mel. He lunged for the boy. “Come here!” he said, as the boy eluded him. “Come here and I’ll knock your two heads together.”
Still grinning, the boy banged out onto the porch. “How about another drink for the two old grads?” Tamsen said.
“Why not?” Mel said, but Mark rose.
“I’ve got to catch a train at twelve-thirty.”
“You don’t have to go,” Mel said. “You just came, Canby.”
Mark put out his hand to Tamsen. “Good-bye,” he said. “If you ever come east don’t forget me.”
He was trying to decide whether the look in her clear eyes had been triumphant, or whether there had actually been any look at all, as he and Mel went out the sidewalk and down to the corner. They did not speak on the way down, but on the corner, under the warm shade, their voices almost lost in the incessant shrilling of the locusts, they shook hands again. Mark knew there was no use in trying to say any of what it had been in his mind to say. But even so he gripped Mel’s hand and held his eyes.
“I wish you the best, you bum,” he said, and his throat tightened up as it sometimes tightened at an emotional crisis in a play. “If you’re not so stiff you can’t listen straight, listen to this. I wish you the best, and if there’s ever a time I can …”
He stopped. Mel was looking at him without any of the sodden fuzziness that had marked him for the past hour. His eyes were pained, intent, sad. On his delicate bruised lips there was a flicker of derision.
The Berry Patch
That day the sun came down in a vertical fall of heat, but the wind came under it, flat out of the gap beyond Mansfield, and cooled a sweating forehead as fast as the sun could heat it. In the washed ruts of the trail there were no tracks.
“Lord,” Perley Hill said. “It’s day for seeing things, right enough.”
He jerked off his tie and unbuttoned his shirt, rolled up his sleeves and set his right arm gingerly on the hot door, and as Alma steered the Plymouth up the long slope of Stannard he looked back across the valley to where the asbestos mine on Belvidere blew up its perpetual white plume, and on down south across the hills folding back in layers of blue to Mansfield and Elmore and the shark-fin spine of Camel’s Hump. Just across the valley the lake was like a mirror leaned on edge against the hills, with the white house of the village propped against its lower edge to keep it from sliding down into the river valley.
“It’s pretty on a clear day,” Alma said, without looking.
Perley continued to look down. “Things show up,” he said. “There’s Donald Swain’s place.”
“ ’Twon’t be his much longer,” Alma said.
Perley glanced at her. She was watching the road with rigid concentration. “Having trouble?” he said.
“I thought I told you. He’s in hospital in St. Johnsbury. Stomach trouble or something. With Henry and George in the navy, Allen can’t run it alone. Donald’s had him put it up for sale.”
“I guess you did tell me,” he said. “I forgot.”
“Already sold half his cows,” Alma said.
They passed an abandoned farm, with a long meadow that flowed downhill between tight walls of spruce. “Looks like a feller could’ve made that pay,” Perley said. “How long’s it been since Gardner left here?”
“I remember coming up here to pick apples when I was about fifteen,” Alma said. “Must be ten-twelve years since anybody’s worked this place.”
Perley drummed on the door, grinning a little to himself at the way Alma never took her eyes off the road when she talked. She faced it as if it were a touchy bull-critter. “Kind of proud of yourself since you learned to drive, ain’t you?” he said. “Be putting Sam Boyce out of business, taxiing people around.”
She took her foot off the accelerator. “Why, you can drive,” she said. “I didn’t mean—”
“Go ahead,” Perley said. “Any OPA agents around, you can do the explaining about the pleasure driving.”
“ ’Tisn’t pleasure driving,” Alma said. “Berrying’s all right to do.”
Perley watched the roadside, the chokecherry bushes getting heavy with green clusters already, the daisies and paintbrush just going out, but still lush in the shaded places, the fireweed and green goldenrod flowing back into every little bay in the brush.
Just as Alma shifted and crawled out onto a level before an abandoned schoolhouse, a partridge swarmed out of a beech, and Perley bent to look upward. “See them two little ones hugging the branch?” he said. “They’d sit there and never move till you knocked them off with a stick.”
Alma pulled off the road into the long grass. An old skid road wormed up the hill through heavy timber, and the air was rich with the faint, warm, moist smell of woods after rain. Perley stretched till his muscles cracked, yawned, stepped out to look across the broken stone wall that disappeared into deep brush.
“Makes a feller just want to lay down in the cool,” he said. “If I lay down will you braid my hair full of daisies?”
The berry pails in her hands, Alma looked at him seriously. “Well, if you’d rather just lay down,” she said. “We don’t have to—”
“I guess I can stay up a mite longer,” Perley said.
“But if you’d rather,” she said, and looked at him as if she didn’t quite know what he’d like to do, but was willing to agree to anything he said. She’d been that way ever since he came home. If he yawned, she wondered if he didn’t want to go to bed. If he sat down, she brought a pillow or a magazine as if he might be going to stay there all day.
He reached in and got the big granite kettle and set it over her head like a helmet, and then fended her off with one hand while he got the blanket, the lunch box, the Mason jar of water. “Think the army had wrapped me up in cellophane too pretty to touch,” he said.
“Well,” she said, “I just wanted to be sure.” She looked at his face and added, “You big lummox.”
He nested the pails, hooked his arm through the basket, slung the blanket across his shoulder, picked up the water jar. “If I just had me a wife would do for me,” he said, “I’d lay down and get my strength back. With the wife I got, I s’pose I got to work.”
“Here,” Alma said mildly. “Give me some of them things. You’ll get so toggled up I’ll have to cut you out with the pliers.”
All the way up the skid road under the deep shade their feet made trails in the wet grass. Perley jerked his head at them. “Nobody been in since yesterday anyway,” he said.
“Wa’n’t any tracks on the road.”
“Thought somebody might’ve walked,” Perley said. “Haven’t, though.”
“Be nice if we had the patch all to our lonesomes,” she said.
They came out of the woods into a meadow. A house that had once stood at the edge was a ruined foundation overgrown with fireweed, and the hurricane of 1938 had scooped a path two hundred yards long and fifty wide out of the maples behind. Root tables lay up on edge, trunks were crisscrossed, flat, leaning, dead and half-dead. Perley went over and looked into the tangle. “Plenty raspberries,” he said.
“I’ve got my face fixed for blueberries,” Alma said. “We can get some of those too, though. They’re about gone down below.”
Perley was already inspecting the ruined cellar. “Ha!” he said. “Gooseberries, too. A mess of ’em.”
“It’s blueberries I’m interested in,” she said.
“Well, I’ll find you some blueberries then.” He tightroped the foundation and jumped clear of the gooseberry bushes. Fifty feet down the meadow he went into a point with lifted foot, the pails dangling in one hand. “Hey!” he said. “Hey!”
When she got to his side he was standing among knee-high bushes, and all down the falling meadow, which opened on the west into a clear view of the valley, the village, the lake, the hills beyond hills and the final peaks, the dwarf bushes were so laden that the berries gleamed through the covering leaves like clusters of tiny flowers.
“Thunderation,” Perley said. “I never saw a patch like that in fifteen years.”
Before she could say anything he had stripped off the army shirt and the white undershirt and hung them on a bush, and was raking the berries into a pail with his spread fingers.
By the time two buckets were full the wind had shifted so that the trees cut it off, and it was hot in the meadow. They went back into the shade by the old foundation and ate lunch and drank from the spring. Then they lay down on the blanket and looked up at the sky. The wind came in whiffs along the edge of the blowdown, and the sweet smell of the raspberry patch drifted across them. Away down along the view that this house had had once, the lake looked more than ever like a mirror tipped against the hills. Below the village Donald Swain’s white house and round red barn were strung on a white thread of road.
Perley rolled over on his side and looked at his wife. “I guess I never asked you,” he said, “how you were getting along.”
“I get along all right.”
“You don’t want me to sell any cows?”
“You know you wouldn’t want to do that. You were just getting the herd built up.”
“A herd’s no good if you can’t get help.”
“People are good about helping,” she said.
“What’ll you do when there ain’t any more people around? Seems like half the place has gone down country or into the army already.”
