Lucinderella, p.4
Lucinderella, page 4
She said “Typewriter?” and I said “Yes, Lucy,” and she said, “What do I want with a typewriter?”
I said I thought people wrote out books on typewriters and she said if she ever wrote out another book on anything she hoped somebody would black her eye.
“But Lucy!” I said, trying to act as if I didn’t feel the way you do when the medic lets the air out of the blood-pressure pump. “What do you mean?”
She said, “I mean that,” and I sank down on the other end of the stone as soft in the knees as you must be when a gunman lays down the gun. I was speechless. I couldn’t tell her I didn’t believe her, couldn’t quite say You’re tired, you’ll feel better tomorrow. “Well, it’s fine to see you again, Lucy,” I said, “even without a typewriter,” taking one of the thin hands that had grown sinewy with the punching of ten million keys. “Fine to have you home.” Her statement called for more elaborate comment but I was afraid if I said very much my voice would give the truth away; Big Ma says never tell a lie if the truth will do just as well, but so often it won’t.
“I’m going to get a job here, Cliff, a job with tools.” She gripped my hand for a second (or Cliff’s hand or whoever’s hand she figured she had) then dropped it to shape the sort of job she had in mind. “Something solid, with engines, heavy stuff, maybe something in a garage like Clamp, with oil that pours like honey and yellow packing grease and steel squares and Phillips-head screwdrivers and Allen wrenches. I am sick of words, sick of intangibles, sick of halls of people sitting there like blotters, listening, looking. I want things you can pick up in your hand. Look what I bought in a little country town in Virginia. I just happened to see it in a store window across from the bus stop.” She felt in one of the vertical pockets of the windbreaker and took out a five-eighths cold chisel and laid it out tenderly on her palm. “Do you know what that is?”
“Do I know what it is!”
“It’s a cold chisel. Cold black, cold gray, made all the colder by that beautiful warm orange band at the top. I hadn’t seen one since I left home. And you know, it’s exactly like it was then. No new model every year. It hasn’t been improved for the very good reason you can’t improve it. It’s perfect. It’s exactly what it ought to be. It weighs. Feel it.”
“Lucy, I’ve felt a thousand cold chisels.”
“It’s octagonal so it won’t slip round in your fingers or roll off your workbench. It’s tempered and the tempered part is silver gray. I can tell you don’t like it.”
“Sure I like it, Lucy. What am I supposed to do?” I didn’t know what to say; a cold chisel is a cold chisel in my book.
“I don’t think you have enough respect for this sort of thing, Clint, something that’s been perfect for so long. Phidias had one in his apron pocket twenty-five hundred years ago and the Assyrians before that and the Egyptians God knows when.”
“Don’t you think you’re blowing this up a little large, Lucinda? After all——”
“And please don’t make any flip big-city Freudian remarks about it because that’s what I’m so sick the hell of.”
This stopped my breath in the middle of my windpipe. “Good night, Lucy, I wasn’t——” the heat coming up in my ears and throat and gagging me because we aren’t used to this sort of talk. “Everything in creation,” she said, “that isn’t level is either convex or concave and it’s ridiculous to try to read male and female into everything. I’m sick of pornography, Clamp. Not sex but all the words about it. They say you have to use them to blow out the libido, as if you were one of these sports cars you’ve got to drive ninety every so often; but maybe I don’t want my libido blown out—I’m not talking about sex, I’m talking about talking about sex.”
I had no words to handle this; we don’t go round every which way discussing male and female and the rest of it. She reclaimed the cold chisel, which I was glad to get rid of, and sat there for a minute admiring it on her palm. “Let’s go back a second,” I said. “You don’t mean you’re coming down here to live?” It brought up no end of complications.
She said, “Oh!” in a totally different voice, then, “Not to live, I believe.”
“Long visit?”
There was another silence, then she returned the chisel to her pocket and announced in a casual tone that she supposed I knew she was dying. “I don’t particularly care, but it’s more seemly to die at home, don’t you think so? I want a horizontal funeral. The idea of being brought down out of my apartment propped in a corner of the elevator—well, I came home.”
“For God’s sake, Lucy!” I said.
“And the freight elevator at that. I’m a hell of a way from freight.”
“I should think so.” I didn’t know what to say.
I stammered out something about what seemed to be the trouble? what did the doctors say? “You don’t look sick. Tired maybe but not sick.” I thought her face looked more dirty than either tired or sick but you can’t tell a girl that. As a matter of fact I thought she looked rather well, thin but not frail, something warm in her face that hadn’t been there before, success-burn I suppose.
She said the doctors didn’t seem to know. “Or they know and won’t tell me. I don’t mind if they think it’s best to fool me. As long as they really do fool me. There’s no percent in being half-fooled.”
“Maybe it’s not as bad as you think,” I said, wanting to comfort her. “You were always one for being ahead of time, you know,” something in the back of my head pointing and pointing until I realized she was answering once more the question I had asked in Uncle Brownell’s room; however much she might be exaggerating, either from a basis of some actual illness or from a superfluity of inventiveness, she hadn’t come home to put us all through the wringer again. It was almost as if she had been putting herself through the wringer along with us and I felt sorry for her. “Writing is hard work,” I said (I can’t imagine less-hard work but nobody likes to think he has an easy job); “a little rest and you’ll be okay.”
“And I don’t want to be burnt,” she said. “Just put me in the ground. Did Papa Charles give us a cemetery lot?” I said I believed so, it wasn’t like Papa Charles to leave us out on a limb like that, and she said, “Well, just put me in the ground.” There was no use arguing with her and I said all right, Mr. Grimes was very good at that.
I realized then that what I had been half-consciously taking to be the burning-mattress smell of our city dump might actually be one of Bivins’ little Between the Acts cigars (“Between what acts?” he would say if you gave him a chance) and sure enough, turning my eyes, I saw the square toes of his high tan shoes aimed at us from the sidewalk like two lashed-together East River garbage scows. I didn’t know how long he had been there; his face gave no indication he had heard our talk but you can’t go by Bivins’ face. Yet I was glad he had come by; he was sometimes hard to deal with, but anything to get Lucinda off her funeral. I remembered she wouldn’t know who he was (none of us had known him when he first came, except possibly Uncle Brownell and the Judge) and I got up with some style and said, “Lucinda, this is Cousin Bivins Brogdon. He’s in Uncle Laban’s old room.”
She glanced up in silence at Bivins’ wide dark jaws that he shaved now and then on some incalculable schedule of his own and Bivins grinned at her with the little brown stub between his short front teeth. “Cousin Lucinda Fannin,” I said, and as the silence stretched out, “You’ve read her books.”
“Never heard of her.” It was just a matter of being the first disagreeable thing he could think of.
I said maybe one day she would put him in a book all by himself and he could have gooseflesh of his very own, but he wasn’t interested in me. “What’s the matter with you?” he said, pointing at the stick with one of the shoes. “Are you a cripple?”
She rubbed her palm over the knob and said, “Slipped a disc.”
“Slipped on a what?” (a sample of his ghastly humor).
It wasn’t much of a welcome and I thought she was annoyed but after staring at him for a moment she broke into what I believe was her first home smile. She twisted herself obligingly round on the stone (her back hadn’t seemed stiff until now though I may have overlooked it) and put her hand on her spine. Bivins started over to feel for himself but Uncle Brownell called down from his second-story porch and Bivins froze at the voice. I said, “Yes sir,” and Uncle Brownell said, “Mrs. Bargeron just phoned, Clamp. She says Lucinda’s already in town.”
I said yes sir, she was, she had just got in, she was right there, and he said, “Right there? Well, dear me. That looks like the trash boy. Are you sure?”
“‘Are you sure!’” Bivins mocked him with a snort, resuscitating the half-dead cigar with three or four quick puffs and stalking off up the street. “I’ll be at the Lot if you need me.” (He’s a specialist in used cars, particularly used-car buyers.)
Uncle Brownell called, “Lucinda, is that you?”
She said, “Tell him I don’t know. Tell him that’s what I came home to find out,” but of course I wasn’t going to tell him any such thing. “Yes sir, it’s Lucinda all right,” I said, laying a hand on the slick shoulder of the windbreaker, half expecting her to jump up and run away.
But she was looking up the sidewalk after Bivins, the cigar smoke floating behind him like a concentrated twilight. “Why did he go?” she said, and I told her the situation between him and Uncle Brownell was, as the war dispatches used to say, confused; I would tell her about it sometime. “He seemed so attractive,” she said.
I didn’t bother to say we didn’t usually think of him that way; I could hear Uncle Brownell inside alerting the unit (he had been with General Edwards on the Chemin des Dames), and I thought if we didn’t move quickly the reception would take place there on the curb. “They’re waiting for us,” I said, keeping a hand on her in case she made a break for it.
But she didn’t. She took a last draw on the cigarette, pushed herself up with the stick and threw out, cold turkey, in a billow of smoke, “Orpheus descended into the netherworld to beg the release of his dear love. Let’s go say hello to Uncle Pluto.”
I had never heard such words on a city street, not even Chapel Hill, and I don’t imagine many other people have.…
But she had others—at what must be the most short-lived reception on record. Uncle Brownell greeted her with a kiss on the temple and a general summary of our pleasure at having her back. “And surprise, Lucinda. What is behind this good fortune of ours?” Lucy said, “Sex, mostly, Uncle Brownell,” and Uncle Brownell nodded as if, well, yes, one must be prepared for everything up there “at the North.” Then Lucy said, “I’m sick of all this sex talk, Uncle Brownell. I’m sick and tired of hearing about orgasms and erections and and penises fifteen inches long, and making that wonderful old word ‘screw’ into something you can’t say without a gulp and a blink if you happen to want just a plain screw with threads on it, I mean I just think there’s more to life than all this sticking it in business——”
We picked him up, the Judge and I and Stanley and Lester—Uncle Brownell was a rather heavyset man—and carried him by heels and shoulders to his bed under the chandelier. I stayed with him, Papa Charles’ blue eyes gazing down over the Bible at us from the mantelpiece. I think he was finally able to mix it in with the hallucinations of his unconscious minutes and dispose of both as if they hadn’t happened (and anyway, the chances are he was out before she got past screws in the obsolete carpentry sense).
III
Uncle Brownell hadn’t heard the words that upset me, and maybe they wouldn’t have upset him. Not the outhouse words, which I had seen far more definitive collections of on their native walls and often with illustrations; it was the others. We are not a word-pinching people, Southerners, as I have said. We don’t expect a person to back up every word he uses with some meaning; sometimes you don’t want words to mean anything, just sprinkle a few over a pause for decoration or because you get excited or embarrassed at something, and everybody understands because it is the tone of your voice that matters and the look in your eye and what your hand is doing and where your foot is. But we don’t go round scattering out such words as Orpheus and Pluto and netherworld, to say nothing of dear love. They were book words.
I was on the dining room that week, the hotel dining room, where I filled in if one of the girls was off or we had a wedding or a birthday, grabbing my white coat and my soda-jerker’s envelope cap like an intern when the phone starts ringing on a Saturday night (I was learning the business and Uncle Otis, Presbyterian, believed in the hard way) and I thought about Lucinda’s book words until I could hardly write out a straight order. Every time a guest read off “Fresh garden turnip greens with boiled egg-slice” or “Hand-picked young Georgia beets in drawn-butter sauce”—Clarissa typed up the menus and put in the highlights—I had to watch myself I didn’t write down some of Lucinda’s strange words that were getting stranger all the time.
When you don’t grasp what somebody is saying the best way is to put him down as loony-bin and forget it but though I tried this for most of Thursday I knew it wouldn’t quite do for Lucinda. I didn’t know anybody else capable of saying such things but they were not too different from some of the things I had read in her books or, for that matter, some of the things she had said before she left us. I remember she said once, it was not long before she went away and she may have had that in mind it occurs to me now, gazing off down the upstairs porch with her muscadine eyes while I stood there pulling on the hammock rope with my comments drying up to dust inside me, “What I want, Clamp, is to have a woman’s life and to suffer a woman’s portion and to wait for a woman’s strength to come to me out of the dark.” I said, “My God, Lucy!” “Tragedy can develop you, but you can’t just go out and cultivate a tragedy. Or can you?” Not the same thing exactly but off the same piece of no-comment goods, sighted off the same reference point as the other, very different from ours. I don’t know where she picked it up, maybe way back before I knew her, but anybody would have to admit she had gone a lot further on it than we had on ours so I figured there couldn’t be much wrong with it.
But I didn’t feel that was any excuse for the netherworld business. If she wanted to blow herself up into Orpheus, all right, but it wasn’t all right for her to think of her return home as a descent into hell. And I didn’t like “Uncle Pluto.” It suggested a detachment from us, an objectivity toward us, which was too much in keeping with some of the acids she had dropped on us in print. In fact “Uncle Pluto” had a sort of already developed literary ring to it and, waiting a minute at Uncle Otis’ desk for him to get off the phone and sign a check, it came to me that Pluto might easily get to be Uncle Brownell’s next reincarnation—saving out some pitchy pitchforkman’s pitchy spot for me. By the time Uncle Otis hung up I was reading the whole remark as the skeleton of her next book, an account of her Orphic descent into hell for the rescue of something she prized, which fitted in so pat with my more homely metaphor of coming back to the woodpile that Uncle Otis had to rap on his desk to bring me up into the everyday air. I told myself it wasn’t possible; she wasn’t going to write any more books of any kind; whether or not she was too sick to do it (or too cured) she was through with all that: she hadn’t brought a typewriter, she had brought a cold chisel——
“Something on your mind, Clamp?”
“No, sir,” I said, holding out the check. “Well, you know Lucinda got back yesterday.”
“You don’t mean it!”
He started to say something else but one of the big vans banged through past his window with the new cars hanging all over it like a hayride and that always tried him, because they went back empty and left us there to get out of it as best we could. “I’ve tried to make those people load up with junks instead of going back empty but will they do it?” “No sir, they won’t do it.” “What this world needs, Clamp, is a—speaking man-to-man now—is a contraceptive for General Motors” (we had covered the situation any number of times). He anchored the check with his Georgia-marble paperweight, uncapped his pen with his teeth and signed the left-handed pushing signature he had had to learn after his right arm went into the saw at the old Tatum Cotton Gin forty years ago down in Ferguson County—Uncle Otis Faglie (he had branched off way back and had practically nothing in common with Uncle Brownell’s people except a carry-down of Presbyterianism and maybe a few little things I am too close to notice, a live-and-let-live man, though I think Uncle Brownell and The Homestead ruffled him, maybe the basis of his liking for Lucinda and her books for he was no part of a literary man). He said he wanted to see Lucy and I said I would give her the message, and we got back to business: “If Clarissa’s out there tell her I’ve got a couple of letters when she gets a chance.”
I found her in the kitchen watching the new potato peeler and I told her.
People sometimes had a shock if they had never been guests at our hotel before—Hotel Jonathan Copp (honoring one of our most stouthearted citizens, first missionary to the settlement, who asked for transfer in 1756 after discharging his duties “in ye wylds of America for five years without any Temporal profit and no Happiness” to himself). It didn’t amount to anything if all they saw was Welborn at the elevator crank with no arm in the far sleeve of his white coat, but if it happened that Isham had brought in their luggage with (and under) his one and Tom Dixon was on the desk offering the pen with his they would begin to take notice. And if Uncle Otis happened to walk out into the lobby too you could see them begin counting to themselves. Usually they had supper with us—Uncle Otis set a good table and they could see the dining room was crowded—and if I was on I could feel them looking back and forth between my hands to be sure.
It was no sentimental quirk on Uncle Otis’ part. He didn’t take on every one-armed man he could find and he would fire one employee as quick as another if something went wrong, arm or no arm. But he was prejudiced in favor of one-armed people, the way you often notice that the girls in an office tend to have an overall resemblance to the boss’ wife and daughters, whether he is happily married or not, because he is used to that general size and shape, used to looking about so high for a face, to talking and listening at about that angle. Uncle Otis tried to put his prejudice on a sound business basis by claiming one-armed people were more honest and industrious and reliable. “I am yet to see a one-armed crook,” he said.
