Collected Stories, page 6
“Good morning,” she said in her husky voice. “Sit down.”
“Thank you,” Mr. Palmer said. He let himself down into the steeply slanting wooden chair and adjusted the knees of his slacks. “It is a good morning,” he said slyly. “So quiet.”
Mrs. Corson’s thin neck jerked upward and backward in a curious gesture. Her throaty laughter was loud and unrestrained, and the eyes she turned on Mr. Palmer were red with mirth.
“That damned dog,” she said. “Wasn’t that something?”
“I thought I’d go crazy,” Mr. Palmer said. “Whose dog was it, anyway?”
Mrs. Corson’s rather withered, red-nailed hand, with a big diamond and a wedding ring on the fourth finger, reached down and picked up the cigarettes. The hand trembled as it held the pack out.
“No, thank you,” he said.
Mrs. Corson took one. “It was Mrs. Kendall’s dog,” she said. “She took it back.”
“Thank God!” said Mr. Palmer.
Her hands nervous with the matchbox in her lap, Mrs. Corson sat and smoked. Mr. Palmer saw that her lips, under the lipstick, were chapped, and that there was a dried, almost leathery look to her tanned and freckled skin.
He slid deeper into the chair and looked out over the water, calm as a lake, the long light swells breaking below him with a quiet, lulling swish. Up the coast heavier surf was breaking farther out. Its nose came like a pulsating tremble on the air, hardly a sound at all. Everything tuned down, Mr. Palmer was thinking. Even the lowest frequency of waves on the beach. Even the ocean waited.
“I should think you’d bless your stars, having a place like this to wait in,” he said.
One of Mrs. Corson’s eyebrows bent. She shot him a sideward look.
“Think of the women who are waiting in boardinghouse rooms,” Mr. Palmer said, a little irritated at her manner. “Think of the ones who are working and leaving their children in nurseries.”
“Oh, sure,” Mrs. Corson said. “It’s fine for Anne, with the beach and yard.”
Mr. Palmer leaned on the arm of the chair and looked at her quizzically. He wished any of these women would ever put away their reticence and talk about their waiting, because that was where their life lay, that was where they had authority. “How long has your husband been gone?” he asked.
“Little over two years.”
“That’s a long time,” Mr. Palmer said, thinking of Penelope and her wait. Ten years while the war went on at Troy, ten more years while Ulysses wandered through every peril in the Mediterranean, past Scylla and Charybdis and Circe and the Cyclops and the iron terrors of Hades and the soft temptations of Nausicaa. But that was poetry. Twenty years was too much. Two, in all conscience, was enough.
“I shouldn’t kick,” the woman said. “Mrs. Kendall’s husband has been gone for over three.”
“I’ve noticed her,” Mr. Palmer said. “She seems rather sad and repressed.”
For a moment Mrs. Corson’s eyes, slightly bloodshot, the pupils dilated darkly, were fixed questioningly on Mr. Palmer’s. Then the woman shook herself almost as a dog does. “I guess,” she said. She rose with a nervous snap and glanced at her watch. From the sandpile the little girl called, “Is it time, Mommy?”
“I guess so,” Mrs. Corson said. She laid the back of her hand across her eyes and made a face.
“I’ll be getting along,” Mr. Palmer said.
“I was just taking Anne down for her pony ride. Why don’t you ride down with us?”
“Well …”
“Come on,” Mrs. Corson said. “We’ll be back in less than an hour.”
The child ran ahead of them and opened the car doors, down in the widened part of the lane. As Mr. Palmer helped Mrs. Corson in she turned her face a little, and he smelled the stale alcohol on her breath. Obviously Mrs. Corson had been drinking the night before, and obviously she was a little hung over.
But my Lord, why not? he said to himself. Two years of waiting, nothing to do but sit and watch and do nothing and be patient. He didn’t like Mrs. Corson any less for occasional drinking. She was higher-strung than either Mrs. Vaughn or Mrs. Kendall. You could almost lift up the cover board and pluck her nerves like the strings of a piano. Even so, she played the game well. He liked her.
At the pony track Anne raced down the fenced runway at a pink fluttering gallop, and Mr. Palmer and Mrs. Corson, following more slowly, found her debating between a black and a pinto pony.
“Okay,” the man in charge said. “Which’ll it be today, young lady?”
“I don’t know,” the girl said. Her forehead wrinkled. “Mommy, which do you think?”
“I don’t care, hon,” her mother said. “Either one is nice.”
Pretty, her blonde braids hanging in front and framing her odd pre-Raphaelite face, Anne stood indecisive. She turned her eyes up to Mr. Palmer speculatively. “The black one’s nice,” she said, “but so’s the …”
“Oh, Anne,” her mother said. “For heaven’s sake make up your mind.”
“Well … the black one, then,” Anne said. She reached out a hand and touched the pony’s nose, pulling her fingers back sharply and looking up at her mother with a smile that Mr. Palmer found himself almost yearning over.
“You’re a nitwit,” her mother said. “Hop on, so we can get back for the mailman.”
The attendant swung her up, but with one leg over the saddle Anne kicked and screamed to get down. “I’ve changed my mind,” she said. “Not this one, the pinto one.”
The attendant put her up on the pinto and Mrs. Corson, her chapped lips trembling, said, “Another outburst like that and you won’t get on any, you little … !”
The pony started, led by the attendant who rocked on one thick-soled shoe. For a moment Mrs. Corson and Mr. Palmer stood in the sun under the sign that said “Pony Rides, 10 Cents, 12 for $1.00.” They were, Mr. Palmer noticed, in the Mexican part of town. Small houses, some of them almost shacks, with geraniums climbing all over them, strung out along the street. Down on the corner beyond the car was a tavern with a dusty tin sign. Mrs. Corson unsnapped her purse and fished out a wadded bill and held it vaguely in her hand, looking off up the street past the track and the pinto pony and the pink little huddle on its back and the attendant rocking along ahead on his one thick shoe.
“I wonder,” she said. “Would you do me a favor?”
“Anything.”
“Would you stay here five minutes while I go to the store? Just keep an eye on her?”
“Of course,” he said. “I’d be glad to go to the store for you, if you’d like.”
“No,” she said. “No, I’d better get it.” She put the crumpled bill into his hand. “Let her have all the rides she wants. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
Mr. Palmer settled himself on a chair against the stable wall and waited. When Anne and the attendant got back he waved the bill at them. “Want another ride?”
“Yes!” Anne said. Her hands were clenched tightly in the pony’s mane, and her eyes danced and her mouth was a little open. The attendant turned and started down the track again. “Run!” Anne cried to him. “Make him run!”
The crippled hostler broke into a clumsy hop-skip-and-jump for a few yards, pulling the pony into a trot. The girl screamed with delight. Mr. Palmer yawned, tapped his mouth, smiled a little as he smelled the powder-and-perfume smell on the dollar bill, yawned again. Say what you would, it was decent of the woman to come out with a hangover and take her child to the pony track. She must feel pretty rocky, if her eyes were any criterion.
He waited for some time. Anne finished a second ride, took a third, finished that, and had a fourth. The attendant was sweating a little. From the fence along the sidewalk two Negro children and a handful of little Mexicans watched. “How about it?” Mr. Palmer said. “Want another?”
She nodded, shaken with giggles and sudden shyness when she looked around and found her mother gone.
“Sure you’re not getting sore?” Mr. Palmer patted his haunch suggestively.
She shook her head.
“Okay,” the hostler said. “Here we go again, then.”
At the end of the fifth ride Anne let herself be lifted off. The hostler went inside and sat down, the pony joined its companion at the rail, cocked its hip and tipped its right hoof and closed its eyes. Anne climbed up into Mr. Palmer’s lap.
“Where’s Mommy?”
“She went to buy something.”
“Darn her,” Anne said. “She does that all the time. She better hurry up, it’s getting mailtime.”
“Don’t you like to miss the mail?”
“Sometimes there’s packages and things from Daddy,” Anne said. “I got a grass skirt once.”
Mr. Palmer rounded his mouth and eyes. “You must like your daddy.”
“I do. Mommy doesn’t, though.”
“What?”
“Mommy gets mad,” Anne said. “She thinks Daddy could have had shore duty a long time ago, he’s had so much combat, but she says he likes the Navy better than home. He’s a commander.”
“Yes, I know,” Mr. Palmer said. He looked up the street, beginning to be fretful. The fact that the woman spent her whole life waiting shouldn’t make her quite so callous to how long she kept other people waiting. “We are going to miss the mailman if your mommy doesn’t hurry,” he said.
Anne jumped off his lap and puckered her lips like her mother. “And today’s a package!”
Mr. Palmer raised his eyebrows. “How do you know?”
“The fortune teller told Mommy.”
“I see,” the old man said. “Does your mother go to fortune tellers often?”
“Every Saturday,” Anne said. “I went with her once. You know what she said? And it came true, too.”
Mr. Palmer saw the girl’s mother coming down the sidewalk, and stood up. “Here comes Mommy,” he said. “We’d better meet her at the car.”
“She said we’d get good news, and right away Daddy was promoted,” Anne said. “And she said we’d get a package, and that week we got three!”
Mrs. Corson was out of breath. In the bright sun her eyes burned with a curious sightless brilliance. The smell of alcohol on her was fresher and stronger.
“I’m sorry,” she said as she got in. “I met a friend, and it was so hot we stopped for a beer.”
On the open highway, going back home, she stepped down hard on the throttle, and her fingers kept clasping and unclasping the wheel. Her body seemed possessed of electric energy. She radiated something, she gave off sparks. Her eyes, with the immense dark pupils and suffused whites, were almost scary.
When they pulled up and parked in front of Mr. Palmer’s gate, opposite the mailboxes, the little red flags on some of the boxes were still up. On the stone wall sat Mrs. Kendall, her son, Tommy, and the pregnant girl, Mrs. Vaughn. “Late again,” Mrs. Corson said. “Damn that man.”
“Can I play, Mommy?” Anne said.
“Okay.” As the child climbed out, the mother said, “Don’t get into any fixes with Tommy. Remember what I told you.”
“I will,” Anne said. Her setter came up and she stooped to pull its ears.
Her mother’s face went pinched and mean. “And stop abusing that dog!” she said.
Mr. Palmer hesitated. He was beginning to feel uncomfortable, and he thought of the pages he might have filled that morning, and the hour that still remained before noon. But Mrs. Corson was leaning back with the back of her hand across her eyes. Through the windshield Mr. Palmer could see the two women and the child on the wall, like a multiple Patience on a monument. When he looked back at Mrs. Corson he saw that she too was watching them between her fingers. Quite suddenly she began to laugh.
She laughed for a good minute, not loudly but with curious violence, her whole body shaking. She dabbed her eyes and caught her breath and shook her head and tried to speak. Mr. Palmer attended uneasily, wanting to be gone.
“Lord,” Mrs. Corson said finally. “Look at ’em. Vultures on a limb. Me too. Three mama vultures and one baby vulture.”
“You’re a little hard on yourself,” Mr. Palmer said, smiling. “And Anne, I’d hardly call her a vulture.”
“I didn’t include her,” Mrs. Corson said. She turned her hot red eyes on him. “She’s got sense enough to run and play, and I hope I’ve got sense enough to let her.”
“Well, but little Tommy …”
“Hasn’t had his hand out of mamma’s since they came here,” Mrs. Corson said. “Did you ever see him play with anybody?”
Mr. Palmer confessed that he hadn’t, now that he thought of it.
“Because if you ever do,” Mrs. Corson said, “call out all the preachers. It’ll be Christ come the second time. Honest to God, sometimes that woman …”
Bending forward, Mr. Palmer could see Mrs. Kendall smoothing the blue sweater around her son’s waist. “I’ve wondered about her,” he said, and stopped. Mrs. Corson had started to laugh again.
When she had finished her spasm of tight, violent mirth, she said, “It isn’t her child, you know.”
“No?” he said, surprised. “She takes such care of it.”
“You’re not kidding,” Mrs. Corson said. “She won’t let him play with Anne. Anne’s too dirty. She digs in the ground and stuff. Seven months we’ve lived in the same house, and those kids haven’t played together once. Can you imagine that?”
“No,” Mr. Palmer confessed. “I can’t.”
“She adopted it when it was six months old,” Mrs. Corson said. “She tells us all it’s a love-child.” Her laugh began again, a continuous, hiccoughy chuckle. “Never lets go its hand,” she said. “Won’t let him play with anybody. Wipes him off like an heirloom. And brags around he’s a love-child. My God!”
With her thin, freckled arm along the door and her lips puckered, she fell silent. “Love-child!” she said at last. “Did you ever look at her flat face? It’s the last place love would ever settle on.”
“Perhaps that explains,” Mr. Palmer said uncomfortably. “She’s childless, she’s unattractive. She pours all that frustrated affection out on this child.”
Mrs. Corson twisted to look almost incredulously into his face. “Of course,” she said. Her alcoholic breath puffed at him. “Of course. But why toot it up as a love-child?” she said harshly. “What does she think my child is, for God’s sake? How does she think babies are made?”
“Well, but there’s that old superstition,” Mr. Palmer said. He moved his hand sideward. “Children born of passion, you know—they’re supposed to be more beautiful …”
“And doesn’t that tell you anything about her?” Mrs. Corson said. “Doesn’t that show you that she never thought of passion in the same world with her husband? She has to go outside herself for any passion, there’s none in her.”
“Yes,” Mr. Palmer said. “Well, of course one can speculate, but one hardly knows …”
“And that damned dog,” Mrs. Corson said. “Tommy can’t play with other kids. They’re too dirty. So she gets a dog. Dogs are cleaner than Anne, see? So she buys her child this nice germless dog, and then ties him up and won’t let him loose. So the dog howls his head off, and we all go nuts. Finally we told her we couldn’t stand it, why didn’t she let it loose and let it run. But she said it might run away, and Tommy loved it so she didn’t want to take a chance on losing the pup. So I finally called the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and they told her either to give it regular running and exercise or take it back. She took it back last night, and now she hates me.”
As she talked, saliva had gathered in the corner of her mouth. She sucked it in and turned her head away, looking out on the street. “Lord God,” she said. “So it goes, so it goes.”
Through the windshield Mr. Palmer watched the quiet women on the wall, the quiet, well-behaved child. Anne was romping with the setter around the big stump, twenty feet beyond, and the little boy was watching her. It was a peaceful, windless morning steeped in sun. The mingled smell of pines and low tide drifted across the street, and was replaced by the pervading faint fragrance of ceanothus, blooming in shades of blue and white along Mr. Palmer’s walk.
“I’m amazed,” he said. “She seems so quiet and relaxed and plain.”
“That’s another thing,” Mrs. Corson said. “She’s a cover-yourself-up girl, too. Remember Margy Fisher, whose husband was killed a few weeks ago? You know why she never wore anything but a bathing suit? Because this old biddy was always after her about showing herself.”
“Well, it’s certainly a revelation,” Mr. Palmer said. “I see you all from my window, you know, and it seems like a kind of symphony of waiting, all quiet and harmonious. The pregnant girl, too—going on with the slow inevitable business of life while her husband’s gone, the rhythm of the generations unchanged. I’ve enjoyed the whole thing, like a pageant, you know.”
“Your window isn’t a very good peek-hole,” Mrs. Corson said drily.
“Mm?”
“Hope’s husband was killed at Dieppe,” said Mrs. Corson.
For a moment Mr. Palmer did not catch on. At first he felt only a flash of pity as he remembered the girl’s big steady brown eyes, her still, rather sad face, her air of pliant gentleness. Then the words Mrs. Corson had spoken began to take effect. Dieppe—almost three years ago. And the girl six months pregnant.
He wished Mrs. Corson would quit drumming her red nails on the car door. She was really in a state this morning, nervous as a cat. But that poor girl, sitting over there with all that bottled up inside of her, the fear and uncertainty growing as fast as the child in her womb grew …
“Some naval lieutenant,” Mrs. Corson said. “He’s right in the middle of the fighting, gunnery officer on a destroyer. You ought to hear Hope when she gets scared he’ll never come back and make a decent woman of her.”
