And a harder time than that leaning back and catching forty winks when there’s geese going by in a steady stream telling you, “Winter is here and you better get the lead out and
do
something about that particular arm . . . !”
Willard Eggleston plans to do something, all right, but he isn’t saying what. He finally closes the ticket window and switches off the marquee, tells the projectionist to cap it up and climbs the balcony stairs to let the solitary young couple know the picture has ended. In the lobby he pulls on his overcoat and rubbers and opens his umbrella and walks out into the rain. The geese remind him again of the secret that he isn’t telling, and he stops for a minute to look wistfully through the window next to the theater into his laundry and wish his old confidante was still there (even though he
wouldn’t
have been able to tell her this) like she used to be. Oh, those were the days of secrets, those good years before the coin-operated Laundromats had come to change his life and before his wife and brother-in-law had pushed him into buying that movie-show house for what they called “real prudent real-estate reasons, Willard; it’s right next door and you wouldn’t want a Laundromat concern picking it up, now, would you?”
He laughed to remember that. Now that you mention it, he thought, tracing his fingers along the familiar glass door of his old laundry, I don’t think I would have cared. Even if it had been likely. He knew that wasn’t their real reason for pushing him into the sale. He had known better at the time: his wife’s brother had simply been interested in moving a worthless property, and his wife had just wanted to move Willard. After ten years she had finally grown suspicious of the extra time he spent at night in the laundry with Jill Shelly—“that little bar of dark soap you call your ‘assistant.’ What is it she
assists
with, I’d like to know, that takes until all hours of the night?”
“Jelly and me just sort clothes and talk—”
“Jelly? Jelly? Blackstrap Molasses would be more appropriate. Or Tar . . . why don’t you call her Tarbelly?”
Funny, Willard thought, because it had been his wife who had first called the young girl “Jelly”—more a sarcastic comment on the child’s fleshless frame, he was certain, than a mispronunciation of her name. He had never called her anything but Miss Shelly before, just as it had never occurred to him to chat with the girl during their late working hours until his wife accused him of it. Now he wished he’d been accused much earlier, and of much more; look at all those years wasted when she was nothing more than a skinny black girl, all knees and elbows and teeth . . . why hadn’t he noticed her value until his wife called his attention to it?
“I’m tired of it, do you understand me? You think I don’t know what goes on back there in all those dirty clothes?”
Perhaps it was because his wife insisted so much on acting the part of the overbearing spouse that he had found it easiest to play the dominated husband and wait for her to call the shots. He didn’t know. But before his wife had been so kind as to suggest it, he and the girl had had nothing at all going in the dirty clothes except dirty clothes and silly little secrets.
Although that had been quite a bit, he realized, now that it was gone for good; that was the part he liked best to remember, the dirty clothes and the silly secrets. It had started that way, showing each other little treasures of information they discovered in the town’s dirty laundry, then working together to interpret their findings. Gradually they got to be able to read a soiled slip as though it were a syndicated gossip column. “Look here what
I
found, Will. . . .” She would come to him, proudly bearing a coupon for a prescription for an oral contraceptive found in the pocket of Pucker Pringle’s coat. “Now
who
in the blue-eyed world would of
thought?
And such a good Catholic besides.”
He might counter with a spot of lipstick found on Howie Evans’ undershirt, and she would come back with the cuff of Floyd Evenwrite’s new trousers, caked with the dawn-blue mud like a fellow might step in out in them old mudflats around Indian Jenny’s shack . . .
Oh, those may not have been the best nights, he conceded, but they were the nights he liked best to recall. Strange as it now seemed to him, looking through the window of a business he owned but no longer ran, at piles of laundry that had been coldly sorted by some unappreciative and heartless hand, the memory of those long-ago nights giggling over the town’s telltale stains still held more warmth than the memory of nights much more recent and far warmer. Those early nights had been his. No one had suggested they study those stains. For nearly five years he and the girl folded sheets and sewed buttons, matched pennies to see who would go across to the Sea Breeze for Cokes, and satisfied themselves with such intimacies as those which could be read aloud to one another from other people’s letters found in other people’s pockets.
And never shared a single secret of their own until his wife practically insisted on it.
Then, for a few marvelous, frantic months, they had shared two secrets: the first on top of the pile of unfolded sheets that came nightly from the drier, fragrant and fluffy and white, like a great bed of warm snow . . . and the second beneath the dark blanket of the girl’s skin, warmer even that the pile of sheets, and growing.
“And when you get this movie house, Willard, I think it would be a very wise plan to get you a new
ass
istant, too; employing the only darky in town hasn’t been the
best
way to get new customers, by any means; also, I would imagine she might like to be with her own, for a while. Why don’t you see if she wouldn’t be interested in going back to wherever it is—she must have a family—that she came from?”
Again, it seemed, his wife had come up with just the right suggestion at just the right time. Jelly laughingly agreed that it was considerate of her, all in all, and that it might be wise indeed to spend a few months up in Portland visiting with the folks, “long enough leastways that when I come back I can tell everybody about this
wild
marriage I had with this sailor who drowned at sea, me just bringing the poor lad’s child into the world. Sure; everything’ll work out hunky-dory. I think your wife
always
has some wise ideas.”
Everything did work out hunky-dory. Not a suspicion in town was aroused, not an eyebrow lifted: “About Willard Eggleston? An’ that chocolate drop worked for him?
Never
, in a hundred years . . .”
And, while she didn’t even know where Jelly had gone, once more it was his wife’s idea that he take trips to Portland every month or two to screen the pictures he wanted for the theater.
Hunky-dory as you could ever wish for. Never even a slip to make the bank-messenger curious, as though the whole conspiracy had been planned for him, and worked out to the last detail.
Jelly was even considerate enough to schedule the birth of the drowned sailor boy’s child to coincide with one of his screening trips to Portland: Willard arrived at the Burnside Infirmary and asked about the Shelly girl just in time to have a colored intern tell him she was fine and point to a glass case being wheeled from the delivery room. He leaned to look through the glass at a child so wild-looking and fierce, so absolutely individual with his conglomeration of characteristics, that it was all Willard could do to keep from spoiling everything by announcing, “That’s my boy!”
Now, hardly a year after the birth, he was able to find only the feeblest residue of that moment of terrible pride. He found it hard to bring his mind around to admitting that the thing had ever happened, that these two most important people in his life even existed. Especially since the strike; at first he had seen them almost weekly, when he was still doing well enough to send three hundred a month without its being missed. Then another Laundromat opened, and the best he could do was two-fifty, then two hundred. And since this strike he had been forced to borrow on theater and laundry both to be able to send them a hundred and fifty. He couldn’t face a son so fierce, so wild-looking, when a hundred and fifty dollars a month was the best he could do as a father.
And today he had received a letter from Jelly telling him that she knew how hard it must be, with the conditions and all, for him to keep slipping her money . . . so she was thinking of marrying. “A Merchant Marine, Will, most the time at sea and he don’t have to know one single thing about anything me and you do while he is gone. Then we won’t keep on being a burden and a drain on you, you see?”
He saw. Things were still working out hunky-dory for his protection. His world had been kept under his hat so long that pretty soon no one would even need to worry about somebody’s finding out; there wouldn’t be anything under there to find out.
If he didn’t take steps it would all never have been, like the sound a tree doesn’t make when it falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it.
Willard stepped back from the laundry window to leave and was stopped by his dim reflection in the glass: hardly there at all, a ridiculous little character with a receding chin and eyes swimming nearsightedly behind glasses out of style years ago, a cartoonist’s wash-drawing of the capital-H henpecked husband, a satirist’s two-dimensional straw man designed to convey at first glance a two-dimensional personality that everyone knows everything about before it even opens its straw man’s mouth. Willard wasn’t shocked by the image; he had been aware of it for years. When he was younger he had scoffed to himself at all those people who treated him as though he really were this image he projected—“What do I care for what they see? They think they know the book by its cover, but the
book
knows what it is.” Now he knew better; if the book never opens up and comes out, it can be warped to fit the image others see. He remembered Jelly telling of her father . . . a shy and gentle man until a car’s windshield branded him from chin to ear with a scar that raised the hackles of any strange Negro in a bar and provoked policemen to frisk him every chance they got: once a gentle man, he was now serving twenty to life for killing an old friend with a razor. No, a book wasn’t invulnerable to the appearance of its cover, not by any means.
He took a parting look at the reflection—not a figure adapted to having a burden or a drain put on it, that was certain—then moved on off toward the streetlight on the corner. This funny-paper image is so complete and so consistent, he thought, it’s a wonder the rain doesn’t just wash me away down the gutter like a old paper doll. It is, for a fact, a real wonder . . . that I haven’t been washed down a long time ago.
Yet, when he turned the corner and walked away from the light, his shadow stretched before him, black and solid. So he wasn’t
quite
disengaged from his world. There was still something. His two-dimensional perfection was still marred, he knew, by the memory of a skinny colored girl and an ugly and outraged baby: they were the blood and heart and bones that kept him from collapsing flat. But that blood had grown thin and the bones transparent, and the heart small and riddled with holes the way a plant grows, kept untended too long from the light.
And now she had written that she was planning to marry her sailor boy, just as she said in their whispered fantasy, so she and the child would need less of his tending than ever. He had written back begging her to wait: There was something he could do; he’d be thinking about it for some time, couldn’t tell her, but take his word, please, just for a few days, wait!
As his shadow stretched on to nowhere down the wet sidewalk, he became aware of the geese again. He lowered the umbrella to hear them better, lifting his face to the rain: You birds . . . you aren’t the only ones with secrets to tell.
Though it did seem a terrible shame that he couldn’t find some soul to share this final secret with. Just
one
person who would never tell. A real shame, he thought, lifting his umbrella again and continuing on with his face wet with rain, envying the geese their invisible confidants in the winnowing dark overhead.
Whereas Lee, being long on confidants and short on courage, envies them their outspoken, and terse, honesty.
“Fly now! Delay later!” they tell me, Peters, which leaves me feeling that if I hang around here too much longer I will begin to take root right through the hobbed soles of my boots. “Fly! Fly!” they cry, and I raise my feet up from the muddy floor of this vehicle just to play it safe. . . . What is there about our generation, man, that makes us sweat this root scene so much? Look at us: we wander across America in dedicated droves, equipped with sideburns and sandals and a steel-stringed guitar, relentlessly tracking our lost rootbeds . . . yet all the while guarding against that most ignoble of ends: becoming rootbound. What, pray, is it we hope to do with the object of our search if we succeed? If we have no intention of attaching ourselves to these roots, what use do you suppose we have in mind? Boil us up a tea and use them, like sassafras, as a purgative? Stash them away in the cedar chest with our high-school diploma and prom programs? It’s always been a mystery to me . . .
Another straggling flock came over, sounding quite close. I looked up from my ledger and out the peephole I had rubbed in the fogged windshield; the sky was filled with the same twilight of rain and smoke that had been hanging over the carrier like impatient six o’clock kept waiting ever since noon. The geese must have passed within yards of me, but not so much as a gray ripple broke that twilight’s surface. There was a feeling of curious doubt building in my mind about these phantom birds, like that sensation one gets hearing a canned audience on TV: in days and days of hearing thousands and thousands of them pass overhead, I had actually seen only one.
The honking faded off where Hank and Joe and Andy were working. I saw Hank stop work, listen, start off toward the donkey after his shotgun, change his mind, stop, and stand ready for their appearance, barehanded and cruel-looking in his hood and smoke-blacked face: Watch; he’s going to spring into the air and snag one on the fly the way that ape in the New York zoo used to catch pigeons . . . rip them to feathery shreds before he hits the ground!