Never Love a Stranger (30 page)
“She had felt the intensity of Frank’s emotions by proxy, and she was lost and didn’t know it. She didn’t have enough experience at the time to evaluate her emotions properly or attempt to analyse them. She only knew simply that the thing she had felt about him had been felt by others and that nothing would make her whole again until she knew what there was in him that she wanted.
“She tried to laugh herself out of it, saying he was just a kid. But her mind kept telling her that Julie knew that too and felt the same way she did about him.
“Ruth went back to her room, crying. She didn’t know why. If I had known it then I would have called it ‘emotional shock’. She didn’t sleep that night, and the next morning when she got out of bed, tired and upset, she had unconsciously decided on a plan to belittle him in her mind.
“After that she continually ripped into him—made wisecracks at his expense, laughed at his faux pas, gibed at his achievements. I wonder if Frankie knew why she did that. Until one day in school, in the hall, he kissed her. And all the things she had set up in her mind about him scattered to the winds.
“She knew then that he was the only man she would ever settle for, knew then that it wasn’t child’s play, but serious, honest, adult emotion, desirous of finding adult expression.
“It was years after that she came to me and told me what had happened. She had just started working with the hospital unit of the welfare department. You remember, don’t you, Jerry? Your father had helped her get the job. I was interning at Manhattan General, was on the late trick and got home about three in the morning.
“The first thing I noticed was a light on in the living-room. Wondering why it was on, I went in there and found Ruth, asleep in the big chair. I shook her gently to wake her up; I didn’t want to frighten her.
“She opened her eyes. The first words out of her mouth were: ‘I just saw Frank.’ “I could only gape stupidly. ‘Frank‚’ I said, ‘Frank who?’
“I don’t think she even heard me, the words came tumbling out of her so fast. ‘You wouldn’t know him, Marty; you wouldn’t know him at all. He’s so changed. His hair is almost white, and he looks tired and lonely and beaten, and he was hungry. That’s what
they brought him into the hospital for; he had passed out on the street. The doctor said he hadn’t eaten for days.’
“‘Wait a minute, girl‚’ I said. ‘Take it slow. Who are you talking about?’
“She looked up at me as if she were surprised that I didn’t know what she was talking about. Then she said slowly: ‘Francis Kane.’
“Suddenly I was as excited as she was. ‘Frankie!’ I yelled, forgetting the time of night. ‘Where did you see him?’
“‘That’s what I’m trying to tell you‚’ she replied. ‘I saw him at the hospital tonight.’ “I was still excited. ‘What did he say? Did he remember you?’
“At that she burst into tears. ‘No‚’ she sobbed. ‘He denied he ever knew us. He denied he was the Frank Kane I knew he was—even after I told him I loved him.’
“This was a little too much for me. I sank on to the couch. ‘You what?’ I asked. I still thought I was hearing things.
“Her tears had stopped and she looked at me steadily. ‘I told him I loved him and that he had once kissed me in the corridors up at high school and all he did was wisecrack and say he wasn’t the guy I thought he was. Then I told him that I would bring you down in the morning and you would know him, that maybe he had amnesia and couldn’t remember, but I knew inside me that he did remember, that he was lying, that he had put that old high wall around himself and hung a sign on it that said “No trespassing” and he would let no one in at him, let no one crack that wall. Then I was really sure it was Frankie because I remembered when we were kids and I would say something that cut into him, a veil would drop down like a curtain over his eves and face and an invisible wall would come up suddenly from the ground between you and you would know there wasn’t any use in going on, because nothing you could say or do could get past that invisible wall and all you succeeded in doing was hurt yourself.’
“I watched her silently for a while. Many little things about her began to fall in place— why she never went steady, why she never married. She was almost twenty-five then and I had known her all my life, seen her almost every day of it, and now I first began to know her. That’s funny in a way. Yet there is so little we know about ourselves, it’s not surprising that we first began to know each other after we had lived so closely together for twenty-five years.
“Finally, I spoke. ‘We’ll go down there in the morning and see if we can talk some sense into him.’
“She shook her head slightly. ‘It wouldn’t be of any use. He won’t be there in the morning. I could see it in his face.’
“‘Then we’ll go now,’ I said, standing up.
“She put her hand on my arm and looked up at me. ‘No, Marty, we’ll not go now‚’ she said softly. ‘If we do, he’ll never forgive us. The only thing he ever really had was his pride, and we couldn’t take that from him. If we did, we might just as well not call him back, for he wouldn’t be the Frankie we knew. We have to let him work this out himself, just as he always did.’
“But what about you?’ I asked.
“‘I can wait,’ she said simply. ‘He has to have this chance.’ She drew me down to the
chair beside her and rested my head on her shoulder where I could hear her fine, soft breathing. ‘You see,’ she said reflectively, ‘he never had a chance to really be young; he had too much to fight, too hard a world to face. He was never an adolescent in the literal sense of the word. He sprang from childhood directly into manhood. That’s why he seemed odd to us kids. That’s why some of us liked him and others didn’t. There weren’t any half-way measures in the way you felt about him. It was one way or the other. But beneath it all he was just a little boy hungry for someone to like him, to love him.’
“I turned my head and looked up at her. ‘But if he goes away this time he may never come back.’
“Her eyes looked across the room over my head. ‘That’s a chance I’ll have to take, but‚’ she smiled sligntly, she seemed to know much more than she was saying, ‘I believe he’ll come back. And when he does, I’m going to marry him and I’m going to take the lonely lines from his face and the bitter corners from his mouth. I’ll knock down that wall around him and build one of my own—with bricks made of love, not suspicion.’
“‘But it may be years,’ I said.
“She looked down at me, her eyes were warm and clear with an inner confidence. ‘We can wait,’ she answered. ‘We’re young and we can wait. Meanwhile, there are others I can help. There are many children like Frank in this world—too many kids that have to by-pass their youth in order to provide themselves with necessities. Every child deserves a break. I’d like to take part in seeing that they get one.’
“‘So we won’t go to the hospital tonight?’ I asked.
“‘No, Marty,’ she said, ‘we won’t go tonight. Let him get all the rest he can. He needs it badly.’
“We went down there in the morning and, as Ruth had expected, he was gone.
“Time went by. I finished school and hung out my shingle. You two were married, and Jerry went to work in the district attorney’s office. Ruth became head of her section of the child welfare department. We were growing up, all of us. But we knew and could see each other grow. I knew where you were, and you knew what I was doing during that time.
“But none of us knew about Francis—not even after he came back into our lives. Not even after he had married Ruth, did we know. Maybe he told her, maybe he didn’t, but she never told us. Francis was passing through what I like to call ‘the lost years’. ‘The lost years’—I wonder what they were like for him, the years in which we grew up. Does anyone know? I wonder if they do.”
Marty finished his drink and got up and walked over to the window and looked out. There were clouds in his mind, and he felt curiously depressed. The evening had lost its magic for him.
“Marty,” he heard Jerry’s voice calling him.
He turned around. There was a new look on Jerry’s face, a certain strain had gone from it. His face looked brighter now and he seemed more sure of himself.
“Maybe I can fill them in for you,” Jerry said.
S
AM
quit school and went to work on the truck. He got about twelve dollars a week and lived with some relatives of his in upper Harlem. By midsummer I had become well integrated into the work at the store. Though Harry didn’t say anything to me, I could tell by his manner and the way the customers spoke that I was doing all right. Work took up most of my time, and on Sundays, my one day off, I used to lounge around generally and go to a show.
I didn’t make friends with the facility I used to, so my outside interests were rather curtailed. I didn’t care very much; I was content just to go along in a routine sort of way. The few moments of discontent I had, I relegated to the back of my mind with other indefinable longings. I made several attempts to locate my uncle through his former place of business, but the whole family just seemed to drop out of sight. Business was slow during the summer, and Harry told me that he would get me a raise in the fall. My salary was ten dollars a week, to which I added the extra two dollars Harry used to give me and about three dollars in tips that I used to average, which made a comfortable total of fifteen a week and was enough for me to get along on. I could use more money, but then, who couldn’t? Jobs were pretty hard to get and I thought I was doing pretty well. It wasn’t as much money as I had made years ago when I worked for Keough, but somehow I wasn’t too interested in trying to get back into that work. I had the idea that I would eventually work my way up into a better paying job. The Horatio Alger idea was still a good one as far as I knew.
In July, Otto, the owner of the ice-cream parlour on our block, asked me if I wanted to work for him on Sunday afternoon, when he was pretty busy. He told me he’d give me two dollars for the afternoon, which was from one o’clock to eight o’clock in the evening. Since I didn’t have anything else to do, I took him up on it. In a few weeks I had become a fair soda clerk—about good enough to get along—and I enjoyed talking to the young people that hung around there. Quite a few of them came down from the club that was upstairs over the grocery store.
I always wondered about that club. The sign on the window said “Workers’ Alliance”, but the name to my mind never seemed to fit the place because all its members were on home relief and didn’t work. I know every Saturday night when we were working late in the store, we’d hear a lot of noise coming from upstairs.
One Saturday night about midnight, after we had closed up, I decided to go up and see what their rackets were like. I had been asked to come up several times by some of the members, but had never felt like going up there before. I guess I was a little restless and maybe lonesome for some human laughter.
Their meeting place was a large, unpapered apartment that had had the walls knocked out to make one big meeting room. They had a four-piece band in one corner of the room and a table stacked with cold cuts and bread on the other side of the room. They had a barrel of beer, a punch bowl, and some big gallon bottles of red guinea wine
I stepped over the threshold and into the room looking for some familiar face. I spotted one that I knew. A fellow named Joey who bought in the store—I didn’t know his last name—came over.
“I didn’t expect you here,” he said in a surprised sort of voice.
I shook his outstretched hand and laughed. “I thought I’d come up and see what kind of a racket you guys were running.”
He took me by the arm. “Come on,’’ he said, “I’ll show you around.” He introduced me to several young men and girls and I nodded to several people I knew from the store. Then he led me over to the table, stuck a sandwich in my hand, said: “Enjoy yourself,” and rushed over to the door to greet someone who was just coming in. I gathered he was kind of an officer of the club or something because he seemed to know everybody there.
After a while I saw a girl I knew talking to a fellow. I knew her from the store because we had a standing joke between us. She always used to come into the store and ask for a bottle of ketchup and she used to say it fast. It sounded funny the way she said it. I walked over to her, took a bite out of my sandwich so that my mouth was full, and mumbled: “Did you get your katship today?”
She turned around and saw me. She too seemed a little surprised. “What the hell are you doing here?” she asked.
I swallowed my mouthful. “I’m a member of the party,” I retorted. “Like hell you are!” she said with conviction.
“All right, then I came up for the free eats.”
“Ain’t that the truth?” she said with some scorn. “Didn’t we all?”
The fellow walked away and began to talk to some other jane. “Want to dance?” I asked her.
“O.K., I’ll risk it,” she said.
I put the sandwich on a chair and we began to dance. “It’s a nice racket they’re running,” I said.
“It’s free,” she answered.
People kept coming in while we were dancing even though it was late. I kept stepping all over her feet. It had been a long time since I had danced.
“You might be able to cut cheese,” she finally said in disgust after I had stepped on her feet for the sixth time, “but I’ll be damned if you know how to dance!” I held her tight, close to me. “That’s just an excuse,” I said.
She pushed me away. “Oh!”
The music stopped. “Now come the speeches,” she told me.
“Do you want to duck out?” I asked her. I had some other ideas.
She didn’t want to. We walked back to the chair where I had parked my sandwich. I picked it up and we sat down. “Stick around,” she said, “you might learn something.”
I looked out across the floor. Joe was climbing up on a big table he had dragged out in the middle of the floor. He held up his hand. “All right, everybody,” he shouted, “I want