Departure (20 page)

“I try to,” my brother said. “Don't think I don't want you to be a great cross-country runner, because that wouldn't be true.”

“You don't even understand that my only interest in this damned cross-country running is because I want to lay something at her feet.”

“I just feel you ought to introduce yourself. Then if she were to come out while you're standing here, she'd know you. You got to admit that would be an advantage.”

It was true; I had to. I turned it over in my mind until Wednesday of the following week, and then because it looked like rain practice in Van Cortlandt Park was cancelled. I took my heart in my hands and I stopped Thelma Naille when the dismissal bell rang. As I looked up at her, she was more than ever the Greek Goddess. I asked her how she went home.

“By bus.”

“Do you go alone?”

“Sometimes,” she said.

“Do you like to sit on the top—where it's open?”

“Sometimes,” she said.

“Could I go home with you today?” I managed.

“If you want to,” she said.

I walked on air. My heart beat like a trip hammer. Once, her hand even touched mine for just a moment. Outside, a northeaster blew, and I found a bus with an open top.

“It's cold up here,” she said, when we sat down on the top of the bus. We had it to ourselves, the two of us alone with the whole world beneath us.

“You get used to it.”

“And I think it's going to rain,” she said.

“Maybe it won't, and anyway that's lucky for me because there's no cross-country practice.”

“Oh,” she said.

“That's like sprinting, only it goes on for two and a half miles.”

“Oh,” she said.

“I made the team,” I said.

“Yes? Don't you think we ought to go downstairs?”

“You'll get used to it in no time. There are seventy men on the team, but that's the kind of a sport it is.”

“Oh,” she said. She turned up the collar of her coat and wrapped it more tightly around her. She stared straight ahead of her.

I made small talk to the best of my ability, but she didn't unbend, except to shiver occasionally. I even made one or two excursions into the matter of my feelings, and that was just as nonproductive of reaction. Then the sleet started, not much at first, actually not enough for you to really notice.

“I think we should go downstairs,” she said.

“Oh, no. No. It's nice up here. Up here, you can see everything.”

“Well, you did pay the fare,” she said.

“That doesn't matter. I always pay the fare when I take someone on a bus.”

“Aren't you cold?” she wanted to know.

“No. No—”

The sleet increased and then it turned to rain. For a minute or two more, she sat huddled against the rail. Then she stood up and walked to the back of the bus and down to the lower deck. I followed her, but I couldn't think of anything else to say until we came to her house.

“I'm soaked,” she said. “I'm soaked through and through. And it's your fault.”

“Just a little wet.”

“No, I'm soaked,” she said. “I'm good and soaked. Thank you for taking me home.”

I told my brother about it later and he observed, “There you are. You can't tell.”

“I love her more than ever,” I said.

“Well—”

“What do you mean, well?”

“Nothing. Only tall girls don't like short men. That's something to think about too.”

“I think it was mostly the rain. I guess she's delicate.”

“She's awful big to be delicate.”

“But she's sensitive,” I said. “You wouldn't understand that.”

She wasn't in school the next day, and I went through the tortures of the damned. “Call her up,” my brother said.

“Call her?”

“Sure. Phone her. You know her address. Look up her number in the phone book and call her. She'll think it thoughtful of you.”

I did as he said. A lady's voice answered. “Thelma is sick,” the voice said coldly.

“Can I speak to her?”

“You can't,” the voice said, and hung up.

I wouldn't want anyone to suffer the way I suffered those next few days. Penance was all I could think of. I had read in books about how people spent whole lifetimes atoning for some awful wrong they had done. I saw myself walking in her funeral. No one knew me, but no grief was like mine, because when all was said and done, I had slain her. I and no other. A lifetime would be hardly long enough to atone for that. I decided that I would do good things. My love would never change, never slacken; people would think of me as a saint, not knowing that in all truth I was a murderer. Even my cross-country running suffered. Instead of leading the pace, I lagged. The coach called me up for it, but what did cross-country mean now?

And then Monday came, and she appeared in school, and my heart sang again. She was paler—that was true—but it only increased her beauty. I went up to her and said:

“You were ill, and I'm sorry. If it was my fault—” I had thought the speech out very carefully, but she didn't permit me to complete it. Instead she broke in:

“You are a horrible, nasty little boy. Please don't speak to me again.”

I skipped cross-country that day. I turned up for work at three and my brother shook his head somberly when he saw my face.

“What happened?” he demanded.

“The world ends, and you want to know what happened!”

“You'll still take the top floors, won't you?”

“Yes,” I said sadly. “It doesn't matter. I still love her. I will always love her, I guess.” I saw the future then, a grim and bitter man who turned his face from all women. They wouldn't know and neither would she.

Wake Up Glad

T
ULLY'S WIFE
, A hard-working woman who looked older than she was, what with four children and the cooking and washing that go with them, could not speak of her husband for any length of time without referring to the fact that he woke up glad. If she put a heavy store in small pleasures and blew them up all out of proportion—well, that could not be held against her. Sometimes it tired the neighbors and the people in the stores where she shopped; but mostly they were used to reiterated observations, and, aside from the youngsters who were coming back from overseas, their horizons were limited.

She was fond of saying, “I like a man who wakes up glad. I like a cheery smile in the morning. I like a joke. I like the morning it should be what God made it for, the brightest part of the day.”

That was the way Fred Tully woke up, and in the course of some years, she had repeated that information to everyone who would listen. She might have fastened on other things, but this took her fancy. She might have said of Fred Tully that he didn't drink as much as other men did in the part of Greenpoint where they lived. He went on a bender once in a while, but in the course of things he was a good, solid family man, a good provider, and rid of most of his wild ways as he passed the middle part of his thirties. He was good-looking, big-shouldered and tall, but a little stooped after seven years of sitting in a hack. He had once claimed a terrible temper backed up by hamlike fists, but he never used his hands against his wife and he would die before he would put a finger on one of the children.

Now a tire of fat around his belly took the edge off him, and when he rolled on the floor with the kids in the morning, making them late for school, he looked so much like a large, good-natured dog that his wife would say, “Now is that right for a man to be down on his stomach, wriggling like a beast?”

He woke up glad; he woke up singing. For him, the morning, the very early morning, was the best part of the day. The three boys and the girl would all pile into the bed, and he would roughhouse them over his wife's sleepy anger. He would whack them out of bed and into the bathroom. Once the priest had warned his wife that this sort of thing, a man and three boys and a girl, all half-naked, could lead to bad things, but Fred had said to her, “The hell with that—it only leads his fat head into his pants.”

Fred put up the coffee himself. When he opened the can, he sniffed and sang. He sang as he measured the coffee. He sang crazy songs that he picked up from the characters in the garage, and no one had ever heard such songs in the neighborhood before, songs like, “Gimmick, gimmick, gimmick, gimmick—” and then with the kids joining in—“down to the bottom!”

Nobody in the whole house slept after the Tullys got up. There was no peace either, until he left with the kids, sometimes walking with them all the way to school. On the way, they sang; like characters, people in the neighborhood said. So when Tully's wife always came around to explaining that he woke up glad, it was in the way of an apology, too. Sometimes, she felt it would be more comfortable if Tully were like other people; sometimes, it even occurred to her that other people said stronger things about Tully. But she had been married to him a long time; she was used to him; and now that no more children came, God be praised, she sometimes found herself being in love with him like a schoolgirl.

Fred Tully knew that he woke up glad. He stayed glad, cheerful, easy, for about two or three hours after he got into his hack. Then it got him; every day it got him. It had been that way since the first day he went out, and he had been sitting in a hack for seven years now. By noon, usually, the morning was like a dream. Before he became a hack, he had worked in a dozen different places, mills, factories, warehouses. Twice he had driven a truck. But nothing like hacking; hacking he hated; he despised hacking. In the beginning, he would have given it up for any decent job; now, with the war over, he turned in about sixty a week, and you don't give up sixty a week no matter how you hate it.

By noon, this day, it was as bad as it ever was, always in midtown, heavy traffic, people in a resentful mood. Long ago, he had noticed how moods seem to run different, from day to day. “I wake up glad,” he would tell himself, “I wake up glad, and by twelve o'clock, I'm like this.”

He wanted a drink; when he wanted a drink that way, badly and savagely, in the middle of the day, he knew the storm signals were up; he knew it was hair trigger from here on. When he wanted a drink that way, he pulled in somewhere, had a sandwich and two or three cups of coffee, and kept his mouth shut. He kept his mouth shut in the lunchroom, and he kept his mouth shut for the rest of the afternoon. He went home, and the kids knew the way he was and left him alone. His wife knew the way he was, and thought to herself, “Well, he'll wake up glad. Let him get to bed now.”

Today, he had his coffee and a sandwich and got back into the cab; he never said a word. When some guys came in who knew him, and said, “Hey, Tully,” he just nodded. When they got into an argument about the union and started in on the old refrain, “There's nothing in the world as dumb as a hack—there's nothing so low as a hack. In the whole world, everything's organized, but not the hacks. Go tell a hack something—tell him what's good for him. What about it, Tully?” he just nodded, finished his coffee and got out. He picked up fares and took them where they wanted to go. He had seven fares working downtown, and then a long one up to Eighty-second Street and Park Avenue. He didn't look at faces, continued to want a drink, and didn't answer when a customer tried to be pleasant. It was four o'clock when he turned east on Eighty-second Street and picked up a woman near the corner of Lexington.

When the woman got in, Tully just glanced at her. He had no center rear view in his cab, and it wasn't until later that he turned around to look at her. His first impression was just a dame in a good fur coat, yellow hair, and a polished face. The face was set and expressionless, and didn't tell anyone anything, and she gave him an address on Fortieth Street between Fifth and Sixth, grading the words in a flat, hard voice. He knew that kind of face and that kind of voice; as he started down Lexington, he took his lower lip between his teeth and held it there.

Traffic was heavy on Lexington; he made five blocks on the first light, only three on the second, and then the woman in back said to him, in that same, expressionless voice, “Why don't you stop squeezing nickels and turn up to Park?”

Tully turned west, and then downtown on Park. He felt little needles in his spine, and he hunched forward over the wheel. But it was slow on Park, too; it was one of those days when everything jams up, and it's slow all over the city.

“This is fine,” his fare said. “This is fine. This is just fine.”

Tully didn't answer.

“I adore cab drivers,” she said.

The needles were jabbing at Tully now; they went in and out, cutting his flesh. At Forty-seventh Street, he turned west again. They jammed up in the line of cars waiting to spill out onto Madison and Fifth.

“You couldn't have done it better,” the woman in back said.

Grinding his teeth over the flesh of his lower lip, Tully jerked the car into neutral and raced the motor. It was an old Packard, his cab, and the vibration of the motor promised to fling it apart. He didn't care; he wanted the motor to drop out onto the street. He'd walk away and leave it. Then the lights changed and the cars ahead pulled away. With horns shrieking, Tully moved to the corner and was caught there by another light.

“You planned that nicely,” she said.

Tully put the car in neutral again. He turned slowly, knowing that the future was wild; here went everything. He looked at the woman and then he turned back. He tried to smile. What sense did it make? He brought home sixty dollars a week, and he woke up glad. And with all the kids getting out of the army, you couldn't go out and pick up a job around the corner.

But in his mind's eye was planted a picture of the woman. He had carried a thousand like her, and the mink was the same and the hair was the same, and the face, too; but it always flashed into his head, with insane regretfulness, that he'd never go to bed with a woman like that, like out of the window of Saks Fifth Avenue, he'd never touch one, he'd never get close enough to the face to know if you could get your fingernails under it and peel it off.