The Collected Stories of William Humphrey (19 page)

Men like Moore and Beck would, of course, know nothing of the art world. But they would simply assume that he had done well. Especially when they saw him in this suit. He looked at it again to be sure, and he decided once and for all that it was not so much what the suit did for him, as what he did for the suit.

Besides Beck and Moore there were men like Joseph Caspar and William Malcolm Cooper in the class of '26. That was his class. Or rather, the class he would have been in if he had stayed another year.

“Rachel,” he said, “these men I'm going to be with the next couple of days are my kind of people. They come from the best families. They were brought up to respect ceremony and tradition. They know what culture is. And don't think they won't remember me. They know what the name Ruggles means.”

The taxi that was to take him to the train pulled up outside the door and honked.

Rachel carried out his grip and the bundle of paintings. He had decided first to take five, then eight; now there were eleven of them and it was arranged that Rachel was to send ten more tomorrow by express.

He looked at them and smiled shrewdly.

“I can ask any price from men like those,” he said. “What's money to them?”

In Sickness and Health

M
R
. G
ROGAN
'
S
bald head broke through the covers. He experimented with his nose; it rattled like steampipes warming up. He was so stiff he felt that all the veins in his body must have froze and busted. He opened his eyes and wriggled painfully upwards, feeling, after only one day in bed, stiff and strange as an old snake crawling out of hibernation. Now, if only he had stayed on his feet, as he had insisted, he would have been feeling hearty again this morning.

He could hear his wife down below walloping up his breakfast, doubtless assuring herself that he was so near dead he would never hear her, murmuring soft little Viennese curses whenever her big hulk smacked into the cabinet corner. Mr. Grogan licked a fingertip and scrubbed the corners of his eyes. When she came up he would look long awake, though he had not been able to get up.

Mr. Grogan was an early riser. You couldn't tell her otherwise, and his wife had the notion he did it to make her look lazy. He just wanted to get out of a morning without the sight of her. Maybe she was brighter than he took her for, and just as spiteful as he knew she was, and wanted to rob him of that pleasure. One reason or another, she was to be heard scrambling and puffing in the mornings, trying to get down before he did, and now he could just imagine how pleased with herself she was today.

He knew just how her mind was working. Had she stopped to consider that he just might be better this morning? Not for an instant. She was too cheerful down there now for such a shadow to have passed even momentarily across her mind. An hour at least she must have lolled abed this morning, thinking to herself how, even after time for the alarm, she might go right on lying there as long as she pleased, and still be the first down in the kitchen. No racing down this morning, no colliding in the hall, no frowzy hair nor unlaced shoes, all to see which one—and he it was just about always—could be sitting there already polishing off his coffee with a distant, foregone glance for the stay-a-bed. Yes, she had that kind of a nasty mind.

The breakfast she came up with would have winded a slender woman.

“Ah,
liebchen
, no better, hah?” she grinned, and when he opened his mouth to remonstrate, she drew a concealed thermometer and poked it in him.

Mr. Grogan lay there with it poked out defiantly at her, making it seem there was so much of her that he had to look first around one side of it, then around the other, to take her all in. She stood over him regally; she did every chance she got. Mrs. Grogan carried her head with great pride of ownership, as though she had shot it in Ceylon and had it mounted on a plaque.

She must have thought that the longer she left the thermometer in, the higher it would go. He started to take it out, but she beat him to it.

“Ah!” she sighed, regarding it with deep satisfaction. “Ah-hah!”

Nothing could have made Mr. Grogan ask her what it said. Not even if he had believed she knew how to read the thing.

“That's what you need,” she said. “Plenty sleep and decent food,” and the way she said it you would think she had found him in a doorway in the Bowery and given him the only home he had ever known.

“Well, you don't,” he replied, but she was gone. Amazing, truly, how fast she could move that great body of hers when it meant getting out in time to have the last word herself.

He could hear her vast sigh as she stood at the head of the basement steps. He could hear her settle slowly down the steps, then scrape her way over to the coalbin. There was no subtlety in her, and that was what he resented most. There she went now, rattling the furnace. She might be Mrs. Beelzebub opening shop. Soon she would come up to demonstrate her pains, complaining of the heat, the dirt, the waste of coal. Were he to dare remind her that
he
, certainly, required no fire, why, she would burst. What would she have done for heat if he hadn't come down like this? Last winter she had practically turned blue before she would ask him to build a fire. But that had not taught her, and this time she would have moved out sooner than admit she was cold—though how she could get cold through all her insulation was more than he could guess. But cold she was, stiff as untried lard, while here was himself with his hundred and twenty pounds, and that old and ailing, and all along he might have been a teapot in a cozy, he told himself—while the yellowed old teeth danced in his mouth like popcorn in a pan.

She stood at the door, grateful for having made the stairs once again. She had been sure to get good and smeared with soot and coal dust, and not stop to wash any of it. Mr. Grogan had thrown back two of his blankets and was smoking the pipe she had forbidden him, though he did not dare inhale for fear of a coughing spell. So smug she looked, turning up his radiator, her sleeves rolled back, just stifling for the sake of his health. He could not resist asking, “Would you mind just raising up that window there while you're close by?” She turned on him such a smile as she might have given a child she was holding for ransom.

After that she left him alone. Maybe she was thinking that alone he would come to enjoy a nice warm room, a day in bed with meals brought up, realize how much he did owe her to be sure. But even if it were pleasant would she let a man enjoy it? And on that sour thought his pipe drained in his mouth and started a coughing fit that very nearly choked him in trying to keep her from hearing. Ah, Grogan, he chided himself, wouldn't it have been better now to have built a fire back in November and worn the muffler like she said? A stubborn, wheezing “no!” shot through him. But wouldn't it now? Didn't he regret the false front of good health and didn't he wish he had confessed to sniffles three days ago and staved off what was sure to develop into pneumonia?

Come now. Were things that black, truly? Well, he was not exactly what you would call hale, but nobody but himself would ever know it, and better by far than she gave him the credit for. He still cut a pretty sturdy figure and nobody ever heard him complain. In fact, he had been maybe a little too uncomplaining. Well, if so he could point out where to lay the blame. What else could a man do only swallow down his aches and pains, never mention them nor so much as let them be guessed, when he knew that if they were her face would light up at every hole like a new candle had been put in it. Many the time he had felt so bad that younger men than he by years would have spent the week in bed and he had got right up—first, too, more like than not—made his own breakfast, it went without saying, and gone to work with a smile and a tipped hat for everybody on the street.

Meanwhile she had been giving him a standing with the neighbors that she never dreamed was noble. “Oh,
I'm
very well, Mrs. Harriman, very well indeed. It's
Mr
. Grogan, you know.” This she would sadly volunteer over the back fence. She had to volunteer it, for no one ever thought to
ask
after such a chipper man. In those days Mr. Grogan got no end of delight in knowing that to Mrs. Harriman and to the rest of the neighbors, his wife was making of herself either a liar or a lunatic. For whenever he caught sight of her on the back fence speaking with Mrs. Harriman and looking sadly up at his window, then he would rush out and start weeding his garden in a flaming fury. Or he would trot down the street and catch flies as the kids played baseball, wind up and burn the ball home. He just wished she could have seen the neighbors' faces then!

But people are always anxious to believe the worst about someone else's health. The neighbors then respected him, stood aside on the walks, offered little services and some of them went so far as to consult him about their own illnesses, he being such a fine example of how to bear so many. Then he may have peacocked it a bit; he supposed he did. Not that he wanted their attention. If he played up to all this ever so little it was because it was pleasant to see her program turning out so different from the way she had planned it.

Soon, though, it got to looking like they were saying among themselves, “Well, here comes that poor half-dead fool Grogan, with no idea of all that's going on inside hisself.” There did seem to be such a conspiracy against him, he had thought more than once of taking a loss on his equity in the house and finding a new neighborhood. Hereabouts just to walk down the block of an afternoon made him feel the morgue had given him a day off his slab.

Now another situation held among Mr. Grogan's friends and it was only this that kept him going. Mr. Grogan was a great one for broadening himself with new friends and he was attracted naturally and by principle to young men. The few friends his wife had managed to keep were as old and mostly older than herself. Her claim was that he palled around with his young friends in a vain and unbecoming attempt to imagine himself their age again. But this, he knew, was to cover her own guilt for avoiding all younger women that she might not appear any older by contrast, and comparing her own fine fat state daily to the failing energies of her old crones.

Mr. Grogan prided himself on the job he had done of keeping his friends away from his wife. They, then, had no reason for not taking his word that he enjoyed excellent health. Not one of them but would have had trouble believing otherwise of anybody, and when he was with them Mr. Grogan never felt an ache or a pain. So, it was shocking to slip like a ghost down the three blocks nearest his house, turn the corner and enter McLeary's tavern like the playboy of Western Long Island.

Just the kind of a shock Mr. Grogan would have welcomed when toward eleven o'clock there came up to him the sound of substantial steps on the back stoop and he heard his wife greet her friend Mr. Rauschning, the baker. Into the kitchen they would go, where she would stuff him with the marzipan she bought from him at cutthroat prices, so Mr. Grogan expected, but instead he heard them on the steps up to his room and the two of them rumbled in like a Panzer division.

Mr. Rauschning took one look at him. Then he removed the cigar from his mouth and turned it over and over, squinting at it as though he could read his temperature on it and was satisfied that it could never be as alarming as Grogan's. “
Ja
,” he said, and to this Mrs. Grogan nodded gravely.

Neighborhood kids said that Rauschning soured his dough by scowling at it. But to Mr. Grogan he was no surlier than the rest of his compatriots. To Mr. Grogan it seemed his wife's friends wore a look of petty insolence, to which he contrasted the noble defiance of generations of Irishmen oppressed by the same grievance.

“Since yesterday morning,” his wife commented on his condition, and Rauschning nodded; he could have predicted it to the hour.

“And the
Herr Doktor
, what does he say?”

“Hah! What doctor?”

Mr. Rauschning said ah-hah. Between them his fate was sealed.

“Well, how's the bakery business?” Mr. Grogan inquired amiably, and wished he hadn't as Rauschning nodded faintly to a man who would soon have little concern over the staff of life.

“Well, Grogan, I hope you get better,” he said, and turned back at the door to add, “soon.” He turned then to Mrs. Grogan to indicate that his anxiety was for her, as well as his condolences—for hopes, before such evidence, were vain, ending with a smile of agreement that she would be better off afterwards, of course, for a good strong German woman would always get by.

Now they were gone and Mr. Grogan thought he would just forget they were ever there, doze off wishing the two of them off on one another. But that would suit her too well. Ah, how often had she wished aloud for the likes of him herself, him or her first husband back again, whose speckled portrait sat on her bureau fading a little more each year as though still fleeing the vigor of her tongue.

The two dearest friends Mrs. Grogan owned came around noon to have the invalid exhibited to them. His wife must have phoned everybody she knew the night before when she had him drugged asleep, urged them all over for a laugh. But there stirred in him suddenly a fear that something unmistakably desperate in his appearance that was plain to all but him, something that they figured would this morning come to an inevitable crisis, something that had escaped him while draining away his very life, something horrible had summoned them all this morning with no help from her necessary. Was it possible? Had she been right all along, sincere, and the neighbors, had they honestly seen it coming?

They came up while he was feeling himself frantically for ailments he might have overlooked. They were Miss Hinkle and Mrs. Schlegelin and it was easy to see how even Mrs. Grogan could feel secure in their company. Miss Hinkle came in with a twitter at being in a man's bedroom and Mrs. Grogan was astonished that she could feel that way in the bedroom of a man with so little of his manhood left him. The sight of Mrs. Schlegelin could make Mr. Grogan feel there was hope for even him, for who ever saw such a thing so skinny from head to toe?