The Mortgaged Heart (26 page)

"The first warm day I just suddenly decided to buy myself some new clothes."

But he was not talking about clothes; he was thinking about "the other time" and the grudge that had started when he saw the blood and horror and felt
why did she do this to me.
He thought of the grudge against the mother he loved the most in the world. All those last, sad months the anger had bounced against the love with guilt between.

"I bought two dresses and two petticoats. How do you like them?"

"I hate them!" Hugh said angrily. "Your slip is showing."

She turned around twice and the petticoat showed terribly. "It's supposed to show, goofy. It's the style."

"I still don't like it."

"I ate a sandwich at the tearoom with two cups of cocoa and then went to Mendel's. There were so many pretty things I couldn't seem to get away. I bought these two dresses and look, Hugh! The shoes!"

His mother went to the bed and switched on the light so he could see. The shoes were flat-heeled and
blue
—with diamond sparkles on the toes. He did not know how to criticize. "They look more like evening shoes than things you wear on the street."

"I have never owned any colored shoes before. I couldn't resist them."

His mother sort of danced over toward the window, making the petticoat twirl under the new dress. Hugh had stopped crying now, but he was still angry.

"I don't like it because it makes you look like you're trying to seem young, and I bet you are forty years old."

His mother stopped dancing and stood still at the window. Her face was suddenly quiet and sad. "I'll be forty-three years old in June."

He had hurt her and suddenly the anger vanished and there was only love. "Mamma, I shouldn't have said that."

"I realized when I was shopping that I hadn't been in a store for more than a year. Imagine!"

Hugh could not stand the sad quietness and the mother he loved so much. He could not stand his love or his mother's prettiness. He wiped the tears on the sleeve of his sweater and got up from the bed. "I have never seen you so pretty, or a dress and slip so pretty." He crouched down before his mother and touched the bright shoes. "The shoes are really super."

"I thought the minute I laid eyes on them that you would like them." She pulled Hugh up and kissed him on the cheek. "Now I've got lipstick on you."

Hugh quoted a witty remark he had heard before as he scrubbed off the lipstick. "It only shows I'm popular."

"Hugh, why were you crying when I came in? Did something at school upset you?"

"It was only that when I came in and found you gone and no note or anything—"

"I forgot all about a note."

"And all afternoon I felt—John Laney came in but he had to go sell Glee Club tickets. All afternoon I felt—"

"What? What was the matter?"

But he could not tell the mother he loved about the terror and the cause. He said at last: "All afternoon I felt—odd."

Afterward when his father came home he called Hugh to come out into the back yard with him. His father had a worried look—as though he spied a valuable tool Hugh had left outside. But there was no tool and the basketball was put back in its place on the back porch.

"Son," his father said, "there's something I want to tell you."

"Yes, sir?"

"Your mother said that you had been crying this afternoon." His father did not wait for him to explain. "I just want us to have a close understanding with each other. Is there anything about school—or girls—or something that puzzles you? Why were you crying?"

Hugh looked back at the afternoon and already it was far away, distant as a peculiar view seen at the wrong end of a telescope.

"I don't know," he said. "I guess maybe I was somehow nervous."

His father put his arm around his shoulder. "Nobody can be nervous before they are sixteen years old. You have a long way to go."

"I know."

"I have never seen your mother look so well. She looks so gay and pretty, better than she's looked in years. Don't you realize that?"

"The slip—the petticoat is supposed to show. It's a new style."

"Soon it will be summer," his father said. "And we'll go on picnics—the three of us." The words brought an instant vision of glare on the yellow creek and the summer-leaved, adventurous woods. His father added: "I came out here to tell you something else."

"Yes, sir?"

"I just want you to know that I realize how fine you were all that bad time. How fine, how damn fine."

His father was using a swear word as if he were talking to a grown man. His father was not a person to hand out compliments—always he was strict with report cards and tools left around. His father never praised him or used grown words or anything. Hugh felt his face grow hot and he touched it with his cold hands.

"I just wanted to tell you that, Son." He shook Hugh by the shoulder. "You'll be taller than your old man in a year or so." Quickly his father went into the house, leaving Hugh to the sweet and unaccustomed aftermath of praise.

Hugh stood in the darkening yard after the sunset colors faded in the west and the wisteria was dark purple. The kitchen light was on and he saw his mother fixing dinner. He knew that something was finished; the terror was far from him now, also the anger that had bounced with love, the dread and guilt. Although he felt he would never cry again—or at least not until he was sixteen—in the brightness of his tears glistened the safe, lighted kitchen, now that he was no longer a haunted boy, now that he was glad somehow, and not afraid.

[
Mademoiselle,
November 1955]

A
LL AFTERNOON
Ken Harris had been sitting before a blank page of the typewriter. It was winter and snowing. The snow muted traffic and the Village apartment was so quiet that the alarm clock bothered him. He worked in the bedroom as the room with his wife's things calmed him and made him feel less alone. His prelunch drink (or was it an eye opener?) had been dulled by the can of chili con carne he had eaten alone in the kitchen. At four o'clock he put the clock in the clothes hamper, then returned to the typewriter. The paper was still blank and the white page blanched his spirit. Yet there was a time (how long ago?) when a song at the corner, a voice from childhood, and the panorama of memory condensed the past so that the random and actual were transfigured into a novel, a story—there was a time when the empty page summoned and sorted memory and he felt that ghostly mastery of his art. A time, in short, when he was a writer and writing almost every day. Working hard, he carefully broke the backs of sentences,
x'd
out offending phrases and changed repeated words. Now he sat there, hunched and somehow fearful, a blond man in his late thirties, with circles under his oyster blue eyes and a full, pale mouth. It was the scalding wind of his Texas childhood he was thinking about as he gazed out of his window at the New York falling snow. Then suddenly a valve of memory opened and he said the words as he typed them:

Who has seen the wind?
Neither you nor I:
But when the trees bow down their heads
The wind is passing by.

The nursery verse seemed to him so sinister that as he sat thinking about it the sweat of tension dampened his palms. He jerked the page from the typewriter and, tearing it into many pieces, let it fall in the wastepaper basket. He was relieved that he was going to a party at six o'clock, glad to quit the silent apartment, the torn verse, and to walk in the cold but comforting street.

The subway had the dim light of underground and after the smell of snow the air was fetid. Ken noticed a man lying down on a bench, but he did not wonder about the stranger's history as he might have done another time. He watched the swaying front car of the oncoming express and shrank back from the cindery wind. He saw the doors open and close—it was his train—and stared forlornly as the subway ground noisily away. A sadness fretted him as he waited for the next one.

The Rodgers' apartment was in a penthouse far uptown and already the party had begun. There was the wash of mingled voices and the smell of gin and cocktail canapés. As he stood with Esther Rodgers in the entrance of the crowded rooms he said:

"Nowadays when I enter a crowded party I think of that last party of the Due de Guermantes."

"What?" asked Esther.

"You remember when Proust—the I, the narrator—looked at all the familiar faces and brooded about the alterations of time? Magnificent passage—I read it every year."

Esther looked disturbed. "There's so much noise. Is your wife coming?"

Ken's face quivered a little and he took a Martini the maid was passing. "She'll be along when she leaves her office."

"Marian works so hard—all those manuscripts to read."

"When I find myself at a party like this it's always almost exactly the same. Yet there is the awful difference. As though the key lowered, shifted. The awful difference of years that are passing, the trickery and terror of time, Proust..."

But his hostess had gone and he was left standing alone in the crowded party room. He looked at faces he had seen at parties these
last thirteen years—yes, they had aged. Esther was now quite fat and her velvet dress was too tight—dissipated, he thought, and whisky-bloated. There was a change—thirteen years ago when he published
The Night of Darkness
Esther would have fairly eaten him up and never left him alone at the fringe of the room. He had been the fair-haired boy, those days. The fair-haired boy of the Bitch Goddess—was the Bitch Goddess success, money, youth? He saw two young Southern writers at the window—and in ten years their capital of youth would be claimed by the Bitch Goddess. It pleased Ken to think of this and he ate a ham doodad that was passed.

Then he saw someone across the room whom he admired. She was Mabel Goodley, the painter and set-designer. Her blond hair was short and shining and her glasses glittered in the light. Mabel had always loved
The Night
and had given a party for him when he got his Guggenheim. More important, she had felt his second book was better than the first one, in spite of the stupidity of the critics. He started toward Mabel but was stopped by John Howards, an editor he used to see sometimes at parties.

"Hi there," Howards said, "what are you writing these days, or is it a fair question?"

This was a remark Ken loathed. There were a number of answers—sometimes he said he was finishing a long novel, other times he said he was deliberately lying fallow. There was no good answer, no matter what he said. His scrotum tightened and he tried desperately to look unconcerned.

"I well remember the stir
The Doorless Room
made in the literary world of those days—a fine book."

Howards was tall and he wore a brown tweed suit. Ken looked up at him aghast, steeling himself against the sudden attack. But the brown eyes were strangely innocent and Ken could not recognize the guile. A woman with tight pearls around her throat said after a painful moment, "But dear, Mr. Harris didn't write
The Doorless Room.
"

"Oh," Howards said helplessly.

Ken looked at the woman's pearls and wanted to choke her. "It couldn't matter less."

The editor persisted, trying to make amends. "But your name is Ken Harris. And you're married to the Marian Campbell who is fiction editor at—"

The woman said quickly: "Ken Harris wrote
The Night of Darkness
—a fine book."

Harris noticed that the woman's throat was lovely with the pearls and the black dress. His face lightened until she said: "It was about ten or fifteen years ago, wasn't it"

"I remember," the editor said. "A fine book. How could I have confused it? How long will it be before we can look forward to a second book?"

"I wrote a second book," Ken said. "It sank without a ripple. It failed." He added defensively, "The critics were more obtuse even than usual. And I'm not the best-seller type."

"Too bad," said the editor. "It's a casualty of the trade sometimes."

"The book was better than
The Night.
Some critics thought it was obscure. They said the same thing of Joyce." He added, with the writer's loyalty to his last creation, "It's a much better book than the first, and I feel I'm still just starting to do my real work."

"That's the spirit," the editor said. "The main thing is to keep plugging away. What are you writing now—if that's a fair question?"

The violence swelled suddenly. "It's none of your business." Ken had not spoken very loudly but the words carried and there was a sudden area of silence in the cocktail room. "None of your Goddam business."

In the quiet room there came the voice of old Mrs. Beckstein, who was deaf and sitting in a corner chair. "Why are you buying so many quilts?"

The spinster daughter, who was with her mother always, guarding her like royalty or some sacred animal, translating between the mother and the world, said firmly, "Mr. Brown was saying..."

The babble of the party resumed and Ken went to the drink table, took another Martini and dipped a piece of cauliflower in some sauce. He ate and drank with his back to the noisy room. Then he took a third Martini and threaded his way to Mabel Goodley. He sat on an ottoman beside her, careful of his drink and somewhat formal. "It's been such a tiring day," he said.

"What have you been doing?"

"Sitting on my can."

"A writer I used to know once got sacroiliac trouble from sitting so long. Could that be coming on you?"

"No," he said. "You are the only honest person in this room."

He had tried so many different ways when the blank pages started. He had tried to write in bed, and for a time he had changed to longhand. He had thought of Proust in his cork-lined room and for a month he had used ear-stoppers—but work went no better and the rubber started some fungus ailment. They had moved to Brooklyn Heights, but that did not help. When he learned that Thomas Wolfe had written standing up with his manuscript on the icebox he had even tried that too. But he only kept opening the icebox and eating.... He had tried writing drunk—when the ideas and images were marvelous at the time but changed so unhappily when read afterward. He had written early in the morning and dead sober and miserable. He had thought of Thoreau and Walden. He had dreamed of manual labor and an apple farm. If he could just go for long walks on the moors then the light of creation would come again—but where are the moors of New York?