Peace, p.17
Peace, page 17
“After a while the little boy threw up, and I showed her how to hold him to make sure none of it went into his lungs. A man came in and sat down with us, and because it was kind of shadowy in the tent except for the bright spot where the sunlight came in at the door, I didn’t notice until I’d spoken with him that one side of his face was all white and didn’t move like a face naturally will; so I asked him what he did in the carnival.
“Charlie’s mother said, ‘This is Litho, Mr. Smart. The man of living stone.’ And Litho took a big kitchen match out of his pocket, and scratched it on his cheek and lit a cigar with it.”
“Mr. Smart, you’re making this up,” my aunt Olivia exclaimed. “I’ve thought so for ages, and now I’m sure of it.”
Mr. Macafee said timidly, “I saw a man strike a match on the palm of his hand once. He was a gandy dancer on the railroad, and pounded in spikes with a sledgehammer all day.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Jimmy. No one pounds spikes with his face.”
Mr. Smart said, “ ‘Once a living man like you, now a living statue.’ That’s what he said, and then he blew cigar smoke in my face. You may not believe it, Miss Weer—”
“Call me Vi, Julius. Can’t you see everyone else does?”
“You may not believe it, Miss Weer, but that’s exactly what he did. Then he said, ‘You think I got something on my face, don’t you? That’s what marks always think. I’ve heard them say I put on a thin glue mixed with powdered pumice. That’s the way you can fix a wood floor so it still looks good but nobody’ll slip, except you use varnish. Then I let them touch me, and they see my whole skin is hard—clear inside my mouth.’
“I told him I would like to touch him myself, and he leaned up closer to me and let me feel of his cheek. It felt just like Mr. T.’s side.
“The woman with no arms said, ‘He works for Mr. Tilly; he knows all about it, Harry.’
“I said, ‘I just started. You take the regular medicine for this, I guess.’
“He said he did, and that Mr. T. had told him that he had to be careful; so he watched how his spots grew (that was what he called them, his spots), and when they started getting too big he stopped taking it until they went down again.”
“Don’t you think, Den, that it’s time you went to bed?”
My aunt Olivia was not serious. She belonged to that school which recognizes the just demands of duty by ritual observance, and had ordered me to bed in exactly the spirit in which she would later—when she was Mrs. Smart—repent three or four times a year of her casual connection with Professor Peacock and her occasional nights with Mr. Macafee. Much later, of course, I did go to bed, a bed haunted by armless women and galloping Chinese officers. I remember waking in the morning with a confused impression of terror, but I was not bothered again by Julius Smart’s story until I recited it (by then I feel sure both faded and embroidered by time, as it is now) to Margaret Lorn.
We had gone among the sands and black willows of the lower Kanakessee on what was supposed to be a picnic, though I don’t think either of us harbored any real desire for the sandwiches and thermos of iced tea Margaret had packed. For myself, what I felt was not hunger, but the tumbling feelings which have served, I think, at least in part, to give to virginity that magical connotation which it had not yet, at that remote date, entirely lost: the ability to entrap unicorns, descry the future, see the fair folk. In the same way that primitive people attributed supernatural powers to alcohol, calling it the water of life, or sought admittance to the world of spirits in suffocating sulphur fumes and decoctions of herbs, so the confusion of emotions characteristic of virginity seemed to them a state more than human. The experienced feel love or desire, or both. The inexperienced are sick with a thousand feelings, most of them unformed: fearful that they may be unable to love or to inspire love; fearful of what they may do if once they allow their emotions to carry them away; fearful that they may be unable to cut the cord that binds them still to the superficial affections of childhood; longing for adventure and yet unable to see that their adventure is in the present, that there will soon be nothing left but love and desire.
I cannot tell you all we did that day. Found a coin in the sand; saw a kingfisher; and on a shadowy beach not much larger than a small room, I told Margaret (inspired originally by some incident I have now forgotten, perhaps only the feel of a wet stone beneath my hand or the oranges she had packed for us, oranges whose peels we launched like cockleboats into the Kanakessee, soon to founder) the story of Mr. T. and his haunted house, the circus in the South, the drugstore and the dinners at the Bluebird Cafe, a story that had somehow retained for me its odor of oleanders and magnolias, its hum of mosquitoes.
And that night (when Margaret and I had long since gone to our beds) I dreamed again about them all: the long grass blowing in a field in Florida, blowing in the Gulf wind, tap, tap, tapping at the tires of the parked cars with its little sword points, square black cars, Fords with mohair upholstery, Duesen-berg cabriolets with jump seats and steamer trunks and cut-glass flower vases, men of stone stalking through the long grass like statues walking, like telamones on their way to assist Atlas, dead men become their own grave markers, their birth and death, their names and the names of their wives and children all written across their faces and all washed away, washed away by the rain, the Gulf storms out of Yucatan and Jamaica, washing away the Mayans, smelling of parrots like the living rooms of old women.
Then I woke and heard my parents (returned from Europe at last and strangers evermore) half snoring in another room, Hannah muttering prayers over and over against the night, praying to the ceiling of her room, painting there with the tip of her short tongue fat angels with harps and bows, and a God who loved old women.
The dog boy running, barking, snarling, piddling on the rug, hiding from a beating beneath the table, mounting my leg when I sat with Margaret on a sofa long since sold and never—never that I knew—in that room at all, yelping when I kicked, snarling and looking at me with human eyes, Margaret with his head in her lap while I explained that it did not matter, that my father would take him hunting the next day, that that would make him happy. He rises and begins to clean a gun.
“That isn’t the end, Mr. Smart. It can’t be the end!”
“You mean when Litho told me how he took the medicine? I’m not going to tell you about the rest of the time I spent out there at the tent show. Everybody was more or less friendly, but the man with the canes had gone off somewhere, and we had to wait for him to come back so he could drive me back to town. I sat up front with him when we went back, and got to see how he worked the car without having any legs. It was almost as good as watching the things, he did on his canes—he could jump up in the air and wave both of them over his head, then catch himself on them; he showed me—and I told him so. I told him he ought to have a ring like a regular circus, and then he could drive around in it in the car, and back up and everything, and then get out and let everybody see how he walked. He said it was a good idea, but the show wasn’t big enough for that yet.
“But all the time we were driving back I was thinking about Mr. T. . . . and the closer we got to town the more I thought about him, and having to sleep in that house of his again.
“He hadn’t come back to the store yet when I got there, and I opened back up, so when he came it looked like I had been there all the time; but when we went down to the cafe for supper—he said we’d eat out that night, and made me lock up and come with him—I told him about it. Then I told him that when he’d said the ghost was putting that stuff in his food I hadn’t believed him; I’d heard of them playing the piano and unlocking doors and all that—even pulling the covers off beds—but never of one putting something in someone’s food before. I told him I’d thought he had a disease, and maybe worrying about it had affected his mind a little. But now that I’d talked to Litho I could see it was real. Then I asked if he couldn’t just get rid of all that stuff. He said he had, but the ghost must have a bottle of it somewhere.”
“Tell me, Mr. Smart, did you save him? Mr. Tilly?”
“No.” Smart sighed and looked at the floor. Until then even I (though at that age I possessed a child’s credulity in full measure) had been half convinced that he had been composing his story as he proceeded; but there was an expression of real grief in his face. He had felt, if not love for, at least loyalty to his Mr. T., had struggled to preserve him, and had failed. “No, he died. I thought maybe Bob had told you.”
My aunt shook her head.
“He died. I came in his bedroom one morning when he didn’t come down to breakfast, and found him dead in his bed. He didn’t have any kin of his own, but he left the store to some relatives of his wife’s—he had her picture on his dresser, not a pretty woman like you ladies here, but I suppose he loved her in his way—and they hired me to run the store for them until they could find a buyer. That’s what I’ve been doing ever since he died. People down there were getting to think I dwried it, but I didn’t want to buy it, though I had enough saved to do it—for collateral, you know, on a loan from the bank, just like I’m doing here—but I wanted to get back closer to the farm.“
It has suddenly struck me, after scribbling for days here, that Julius Smart, who will scarcely appear in it again, is actually the central character of this book. I recall him clearly only at three stages of his life:
When he was an elderly man and I myself was middle-aged, an unimportant employee of the corporation he had founded, he was a shrunken figure whom I saw perhaps once in two years when his inspection of our laboratory was the climax of weeks of preparation. His thin white hair was always tousled on these occasions, though I never saw him run his fingers through it; his clothes were neat, rather old-fashioned (he wore a vest, and a gold chain across the front of it during that period when it seemed that the vest had vanished never to return), and appeared expensive despite the rumor that he bought boys’ shoes for his tiny feet. As I’ve said, we knew of the impending visit for weeks before he came, so that what he saw was not the real work carried out in the laboratory or anything like it, but an elaborate show produced for his benefit. I thought at the time that this was what he wished, that he desired to impress us—not only those of us who worked there, but our superiors, and their superiors, and theirs on up the line—with his importance. Miss Birkhead has told me since that several people at the top of the research department had learned to anticipate an inspection when he began to ask certain types of questions at the department heads’ meetings. This would explain the long delays that sometimes occurred between the announcement of an inspection and its taking place, delays in which everyone was forbidden to carry out any sort of experiment for fear of disturbing the meticulously prepared stage set, and we all sat bored at our desks.
At my aunt Olivia’s funeral he had been much younger; small, stocky (he was already beginning to make money, and my aunt had hired an excellent cook, a Latvian who subscribed to foreign-language newspapers and who had spent five years in Paris learning entrees and three in Vienna learning desserts, but who was unfitted for the hotel kitchen he had earned by a nervousness bordering on frenzy), dressed entirely in black. He might, except for his soft hands, have been a local farmer. He cried continually throughout the service, as did Mr. Macafee. Professor Peacock did not come, and I supposed at the time that he felt no grief; but he died only a few years afterward of a complicated series of disorders said to have been aggravated by hypertension, and it may be that—once she was no longer available—he had found that he had loved her more than he knew.
On the occasion of Mr. Macafee’s party, Smart must have been absurdly young—he was at least five years younger than my aunt. To me he was a grownup, and I did not notice. A neat young man with hair the color of straw plastered flat across his head, and wearing clothing so new it must have been purchased especially for the occasion: a white shirt from Macafee’s with pinholes still in the broadcloth; a crisp suit of a material the color of butterscotch, with yellow threads running through the weave. His face was rather long and thin, but smooth. His teeth were large, and so good that they looked false, as actors’ teeth often do. His complexion was clear and high. He told his story so earnestly (at this point) that you might have thought him on trial for his life. . . .
“It’s a mess when you find a dead person like that,” he said. “Especially a dead person that nobody thought was sick. I’ve tried since to remember how many nights I spent in his house before he died. I think it was five. It was the fifth night. I got up like I usually did and went downstairs and started coffee, then came back up to my own room and shaved. The ghost had been walking the night before, and I had laid in bed listening to it. Up and down the hall, mostly; sometimes up and down the front and back steps. I had bought a lock for my room and locked myself in at night, so I wasn’t too worried about it, and besides it had never shown any wish to harm me.
“That morning I got through shaving and made toast and got ready to fry some eggs as soon as Mr. T. should come down. Well, he didn’t come, of course, and I sat down and had myself a piece of toast and some coffee while I waited for him, and then I thought perhaps he was oversleeping. I knew he had been taking something to help him sleep, for he was troubled by the noises the ghost made, walking up and down, so often outside his door, and—he said—whispering at the keyhole sometimes or scratching at the panels like a dog, sometimes climbing around outside, he said, and standing on the windowsills looking in at him.
“I went up to his bedroom door and knocked and called, but no one answered.
“Then I thought that perhaps he had been up early that morning and had already gone out; but the chain was still on the front door, and the back door stuck so bad I didn’t think he could have opened it and closed it again without waking me. So he was still in there, and I went back up and knocked again, getting no answer as before.”
“You should have kicked the door down, Mr. Smart.”
“Well, it was a pretty solid-built door, and it would have taken a lot of kicking. What I did finally was to go outside and climb up on the top of the front porch. Standing on the roof there, I could look in the window. What I saw was him lying dead there on the bed. I knocked in the screen, and went inside and felt him and tried to take his pulse; but I think he’d been dead most of the night. Rigor had set in already. That’s when they get stiff. There was only the one doctor in town, and I unlocked the door and went downstairs and telephoned him.”
“And you continued to live in that house, Mr. Smart?” Eleanor Bold said. “I don’t believe I could have stood it.”
“Yes. Well, for one thing I was getting used to it—a person gets used to anything, you know, except hanging. And for another, I didn’t think the ghost would stay around much with Mr. T. gone. Then, too, his relatives, you see, wanted me to run the store for them until someone was willing to buy it, and I was to have my same salary there, and I thought while we were talking about it—there was three of them, all kin of his wife’s, really, an uncle and two aunts—that they didn’t really need that house, and free rent was something else I could get out of them.”
“Why, Mr. Smart! Gouging them like that.”
“If I hadn’t, Miss Weer, I never would have been able to buy Bledsoe’s here. I didn’t think I owed them anything—if I owed anyone, it was Mr. T., and he had been giving me free rent and paying a very good salary, too.”
“Call me Vi, Mr. Smart; everyone does.”
“They took some kickshaws out, and the good silver and photograph albums and some letters of Mrs. T.’s, but I made them leave the rest of the furniture, and they never even tried to go in that third bedroom, the one between Mr. T.’s and mine. I found out afterward that the house had the reputation of being haunted all around town, and they were just as happy to have it not standing vacant. Besides, I told anyone that asked—when they came in the store, you know—that it wasn’t, so I suppose they were able to sell it when I went away.”
I—Alden—beg your pardon for breaking off this way. But I think I just heard a door close. That cannot be; or can it? I am in my house, and they are all dead—aren’t they? Dale, even Charlie Scudder. Dead. Charlie used to stop at the roadhouse on his way home and have a highball; mostly the shift workers drank in there, fellows in denim shirts—or sport clothes if they’d changed before going home. Some of them changed and took showers. Charlie suggested we stop there one day, and we sat in a booth with all of them looking covertly at us, and drank rye and ginger ale. I kept thinking of Charlie’s Chrysler outside among the Fords and Chevies, and wondering if they would slash the tires. I could hear someone talking, he telling the others at the bar that one of us was the president of the company; and someone else saying no, the president is a little man with white hair. Julius, of course. I have seen that roadhouse tumbled down, the foundation overgrown with weeds.
But I did hear a door close. I know I did. I have been sitting here ever since wondering if I should try to buzz Miss Birkhead on the intercom. What-if she should answer? But it might be only a trick, like the view from the windows. I shuffle the papers on my desk, and my finger touches the button and draws away. What if she should answer? There is a can of film in my upper left-hand drawer, and a projector, my private projector, at one side of the room. My side hurts so much I do not want to leave my chair. The label on the can says, “For Den—Merry Christmas and Happy Memories from Dad,” and I have forgotten in the pain what it contains.
