Poorhouse Fair (5 page)

Once out in the open he wondered how he could help, then realized it was not in his position to help. The emotion that had led him down had been proprietorial and aristocratic; one of the ancient men he included had spoken a word and he had followed and been abandoned on the steps, in the sunshine. He was in command only figuratively. In the long era of Mendelssohn's indifference the old people had worked out the business of the fair so they needed little interference. On the third Wednesday of August, such and such was done, regardless of who reigned in the cupola.

Conner stood by two men screwing, with painful slowness, colored bulbs into sockets strung on long cords. They were maneuvering this chore in the dead center of the main walk. Surely they needed at least advice or one of the nun-bier men--Gregg, for instance, who had been, come to think of it, an electrician in Newark--to mount the shaky ladder lying on the lawn, stained by dew, when the time came to string the lights on the posts. He asked aloud how they proposed to get them up. The two went on fumbling without replying.

Conner proceeded down the walk, to where the tables began across the grass. He observed that the tables were poorly aligned, and suggested that a few be shifted slightly. Neither fastidious nor silly, he himself helped, physically, move the tables. He wondered what land of impression this made and did not see how it could be other than good. His intentions were wholly good. Refreshed, he stood a moment by the stand of Tommy Franklin, who filed peachstones into small baskets and simple animals. Tommy himself was away; his handiwork littered the table casually, strewn on the silver boards like brown pebbles taken from a creek-bottom by the handful.

He was conscious of Hook and Gregg at the end of the alley, conferring by the wall. Under their gaze he turned to Mrs. Mortis; she was sitting in a chair and looked unsteady with her absurd towering bonnet. He asked her how she was feeling.

"No better than an old woman should."

"An old woman should feel fine," he offered, smiling: she seemed more accessible than many of the others. "Especially one who can display these lovely quilts."

"They aren't the best I've done; it's hard to get figured rags; so much of this new cloth is plain. It's all made for the young, you know; they want the simple dresses to show off their figures."

Some of the patches she had used seemed so fragile and dry he feared the sun beating from above might shred them. She herself seemed that way; the wire hoop giving her bonnet shape was wearing through; the exterior had faded while on the inner side the pattern was preserved clearly. "Wouldn't you prefer a table underneath the trees? You're in a rather exposed position here."

"Well, if I weren't exposed who'd see me?"

"I meant simply up by the walk, in the shade."

"I'm usually situated here."

"If you prefer it ... though of course there's no difference. 1 only thought you looked a little pale."

"What do you expect at my age? You expect too much from us old people, Mr. Conner."

His cheek smarted, but he had never found the reply to blunt injustice. "I do?"

"You expect us to give up the old ways, and make this place a little copy of the world outside, the way it's going. I don't say you don't mean well, but it won't do. We're too old and too mean; we're too tired. Now if you say to me, you must move your belongings over beneath the tree, I'll do it, because I have no delusions as to whose mercy we're dependent on." The goiter, from which he had kept his eyes averted, swayed disturbingly: inanimate but still living flesh.

"That's just the way I want no one to feel. I'm an agent of the National Internal Welfare Department and own nothing here. If it is anyone's property it is yours. Yours and the American people's."

"The American people, who are they? You talk like Bryan; Hookie's always talking him up to me."

"There is no reason," Conner said, with a sensation of repetition that made him stammer, "unless you want to, why you should stand under the sun for ten hours."

"This isn't-an all-day sun."

"Whether it is or not, let me and one of the men move your table and chair underneath the trees." A shadow with the cooling quality of treeshade fell over them. He looked up while she studied him; the cloud obscuring the sun had a leaden center. In great vague arcs a haze was forming in the sky. Near the eclipsed sun a cirrus cloud like a twisted handkerchief was dyed chartreuse; the phenomenon seemed little less eerie for being explicable, as iridescence.

"The chair's not mine; I borrowed it for a second, until the giddiness passed."

He pressed, "It will take just a minute."

She smiled absently, then said, girlishly direct and flirting her head, "If you think up there in the shade I'll take off my bonnet because I make this place look like a fool, I won't because when they come from in town they expect to find fools out here. Anyway I'm half bald."

Vividly, comically conscious of his own thick hair, from the black roots of which the heat of a blush poured down over his face, Conner said, "You're nothing like a fool." In these words he committed his worst error with her. He felt in the air between them her patience with him snap. Previously she had been trying him, tentatively, testing him against her memory of Mendelssohn. The game lost, he spoke more in his own voice. Haughtiness showed. "You have free will. I'm not trying to steal your bonnet from you, or your usual place; I had only your welfare in mind. But we'll let things as they are."

He continued down the alley of tables, obscurely obliged to speak to Hook. It was Hook, after all, who had compelled him to venture down into this unsafe area hours before he was needed. Self-denying by doctrine, he walked against the slope of his desire, which was for retreat into the buildings and up the narrow solacing stairs to his office.

Yet the spot where Hook and Gregg had been standing was vacant, or seemed so until with a shock he saw the cat. A caramel torn, it held one useless foreleg crooked before its chest, and its face was mashed and infected. An eye was either gone or swollen shut. Three brown snaggle-teeth hung slantwise beneath a rigidly lifted lip.

It looked like the work of an automobile. Another cat could not have produced that crushed effect. The modern cars, run by almost pure automation, became accustomed to the superhighways and sped even on decayed lanes like the one curving past the poorhouse. Conner wondered that the animal had lived. To judge from the advance of the infection the accident had occurred days ago. A disease seemed mingled with the wounds.

It was uncanny, considering the smallness and inhumanity of the face, that there should be distinctly conveyed to Conner, through the hair and wounds, an impression of a request, polite, for mercy.

Though he didn't move, the cat abruptly danced past him, bobbing like a cheap toy, keeping to the long grass near the wall. Conner wondered how he had gotten within the wall.

HOOK'S BLOOD felt thick and dark with this hurrying and confusion. His eyesight seemed further impaired; he saw nothing, in the sense of focus, but received an impression of green as his eyes by habit searched the ground before his feet for obstacles. Gregg beside him was a malevolent busy force in whose power he had unaccountably been placed. Hook felt incapable of leaving the smaller man's orbit. It was better to remain with Gregg than to stay behind and risk association with the cat. Gregg had seen it wandering in the field beyond the wall and like a boy of twelve had scrambled over the wall and captured it. Hook wouldn't have thought he could have captured it, but the creature offered no resistance, merely limped a few yards and then waited. Gregg cradled it in his arms and dropped it over the wall, near Hook's feet; Hook saw that the animal was hopelessly out of order. What did Gregg want it for? To torment, no doubt. He recalled how some of his students, in the days of the smaller school, had beaten a flying squirrel with hockey sticks during recess. Breaking up the screaming ring he had found as its center a grey pelt wildly pulsing with the parasitic life that refused to loosen its grip, and had had to dispatch it himself, weeping and trembling, with a hatchet brought up from the basement, while the pupils were within with their books. As he imagined it there had been a storm brooding that day; children invariably became unruly under the approach of wet weather.

They were hurrying because Gregg, on fire with his idea, was going to the kitchen to beg scraps for his new pet. Hook, bewildered by the sudden introduction of the animal into his morning study, had gone with him a distance, but at the corner of the big house, he realized it would not do to accompany him further. "You proceed," he said, "I want noth-ing to do with such monkey business."

"Okay, Hookie," the little man said, rudely using a nickname Hook had overheard before but always chose to forget, "You stay here and keep an eye on the tiger. Don't let the cops see it before I give the word."

Fanciful talk. Gregg imagining that a lame cat on these acres would be observed. Superimposing his memory of difficult students on Gregg, he perceived the true motive for his act: it was a disturbance of accustomed order. In abruptly vaulting the wall and dropping at Hook's feet this live responsibility he was making a sardonic comment on the elder man's brittle ways, which could not comfortably deviate a hair from worn paths. Hook smiled to himself. It was different now; teaching school, he had been bound to the students, but here there was no law forcing him and Gregg into association. It did not occur to him that, though Gregg in part may have been teasing his stately old friend, it was Conner's authority the cat's presence flaunted.

Obediently--in a life as empty of material purpose as Hook's, there was little substance to resist any command --he fixed his gaze on the spot far down the wall, where they had been standing. Though his sight possibly deceived him, there was no cat there. He was principally pleased. At his age it was not difficult to believe he had imagined the entire incident, and the cat in his misery was phantasmal. To strengthen his case against Gregg's certain reproval, he scanned all the distant terrain this side of the wall, looking especially under the tables and around the feet of the women. Nothing but trod lawn. The sky in the southeastern quarter was unmistakably darkening now; the thunder-heads had moved up into the sky, grounded no longer on the horizon but jutting from the dense atmosphere like blooms trailing their roots in murky water.

In fact at the moment he first looked the cat was within yards of his feet, and while he inspected the distance the cat had passed his ankles and gone and hidden among the sheds in the back of the house. Hook, blind in all directions but the forward one, was vulnerable to approach from below. He was amazed when a voice by his side spoke.

"Good morning, Mr. Hook."

"Eh? Ah, Mr. Conner; pardon my not responding. I would make a better lamp-post than a spy."

"Are you admiring the view?" Conner was a head shorter than he, with a smooth face that had little harm in it, discounting the sureness and appetite of the young. His eyes were a remarkably light brown.

"Why, yes. It seems overcast."

"I'm hoping that the clouds will be blown around to the west."

A corner of Hook's mouth dimpled at the folly of such hope. The rain was upon them now, in his mind. "The rain would be a great dis-service to the preparations," he admitted.

"WNAM predicted fair and cooler at six this morning."

"These forecasters, now,"--Hook waggled a surprisingly shapely finger upwards--"they can't quite pull a science out of the air."

Conner laughed, encouraged to be striking sparks of life from this gray monument, which had held so abnormally still as he had approached it. Then he insisted, a bit prig-gishly, "Everything, potentially, is a science, is it not? But it takes many years."

"More years than I likely can wait."

Conner good-naturedly held his peace. It seemed a draw. Over by an open window of the west whig a nurse laughed. The tops of the walnut trees were beginning to switch. Hook coughed. "In my boyhood, now, the almanacs would predict the entire weather for the year, day by day. Now they think it bold to venture to say what will come within the next hour. The reports in the paper seem concerned more and more with yesterday's weather."

"Perhaps the weather is more variable than it used to be."

"Yes well: the bombs."

Conner nodded quiescently. He was sleepy; he rose at six, after perhaps five hours sleep--he never knew precisely, the near boundary of insomnia was vague. He hated beds; they were damp and possessive, and when he lay down, words, divorced from their objects, floated back and forth, like phosphorescent invertebrates swaying in the wash of the sea. Day came as a reprieve. This had begun recently with Conner, in the last few years. In his sleepless state, then, he was susceptible to the contagion of his companion's pacific mood.

The figures on the front lawn, at some distance, moved in soothing patterns, silently bumping and pausing. Legs made x's when two passed each other. The activity was as ill-planned as that of an ant colony, but for the moment it did not exasperate Conner to watch. In the frame of mind of an old man idling beneath a tree, he was grateful for slow spectacles. Hook relit his cigar, now short. His eyes crossed in a look of savagery behind their magnifying lenses, and the gasps of his sucking lips assumed, in the enveloping hush, high importance. Moisture walked out from his mouth along the skin of the cigar; the nipple burned; smoke writhed across Hook's face and was borne upward.

Standing so close, and, due to Hook's eyesight, unobserved, Conner could examine the old man's face as intimately as a masterpiece in a museum: the handsome straight nose; the long narrow nostrils suggesting dignity more than vigor; the dark, disapproving, somewhat womanish gash of the mouth; and the antique skin mottled tan and white and touched with rose at the crests of the cheeks, stretched loosely over bones worn by age to a feminine delicacy. It was not the same person--compact, jaunty, busy, menacing--Conner had watched from afar, from above.