“And you were fifteen,” said Johnny.
“The house was full of girls from the country, who’d run away like me to be actresses; and we talked about how we used to work from sunup to sundown, and how there wasn’t no hope for any of us. And so I stayed.”
She looked at her hands again, as if seeking an answer. “It wasn’t no fancy house. Just sailors and soldiers comin’ in, and workin’ men and stevedores and fellers who drove beer wagons, and maybe sometimes a bookkeeper with a cough. They wanted to talk, too. They didn’t know why they was born. Neither did us girls. One feller kept talkin’ about it all the time, and one night he killed hisself, right in the house. You wouldn’t think people like us would wonder why we was born, would you?”
“We have more reason to ask that than anyone else,” said Johnny.
Mrs. Woodley lifted herself higher on her pillows and gazed at him with such penetration that he was taken aback.
“Well, yes,” she said slowly. “I guess you do too, and you a minister.”
She lay back on her pillows. “I was there for ten years. Hardly never went out. Afraid of all them people. And sick, real sick. Couldn’t make any money for a long time. And when I was twenty-five the sickness did something to my leg, this one here, and I never could walk straight again. I met my man in the house, a stevedore, like I said. He was a good man, forty years old, and we got so we loved each other, and he took me out. I wasn’t so pretty no more, either.”
She twisted her hands together in a pathetic gesture. “Well, sir, I still believed in God, and I had my man, and we was married by a minister, and we moved right into Larry’s room near the docks. I can just hear them steamboats whistlin’ even now, and see the fog comin’ in, and there was the smell of the water and the fish. But I was awful glad I was with Larry. We’d work together and we’d get somewheres, and be real folks. I was real sorry about the house, and I asked God to forgive me.”
“He did,” said Johnny.
Her mouth opened in an agony of flesh and spirit, and she could not speak for a while. Then she shook her head slowly. “No sir. He didn’t. But that don’t matter, because I don’t believe in Him no more. I stopped believin’ when Larry got hurt. He was unloadin’ a ship, and a big crate fell on him. And after that he didn’t work no more; his legs got useless. He couldn’t walk, and him a great big feller like you, and eyes like you got too, and nice, kind hands. We had just that one room, with a stove for cookin’ and heatin’, and Larry lay on the bed and kept cryin’ because of his legs, and because of me.”
Again she wrung her hands. “I was goin’ to have a baby. So I went back to the house. I told Larry I was workin’ in some sweatshop at nights. I’d tried the sweatshop. They gave me three dollars a week, just enough for the rent; nothing for food, or for medicine for Larry when the pain got too bad, or the doctor. So, it was the house. Madame Le Fleur looked at me; I told you she was good, and she said I couldn’t do what I did before. She let me do the scrubbin’ and such, and makin’ beds, and washin’, and she paid me twelve dollars a week. So Larry and I could eat, and Madame would give me a basket of pies and bread and some meat when there was leftovers, and just for a while, when Larry wasn’t too bad, it was real good again, and we loved each other.”
The old, dying face took on an aura of joyful remembrance. Johnny said nothing, and he waited until the aura faded. Mrs. Woodley spoke listlessly. “Funny, I can think of what happened and not feel it much. Like it was a palsied place in me. I came home one morning—it was just the day before Christmas, and I had a present for Larry—and the house where we lived was burned. Yes, sir, right down to the ground. Nobody’d thought about Larry, helpless in the bed. There wasn’t even a bone of him left.”
Her head rolled weakly on the pillows. “Not even a bone. I fainted on the sidewalk, and somebody got an ambulance. They took me to the poor hospital, and Millie was born that night. A long time ago, a long time ago. It was a terrible hospital; beds pushed up against each other, and dirty. Mister, it was sure dirty, and it smelled, and you didn’t ask for nothing, they’d just shove you and tell you to shut up. I got up from my bed in three days and I left, with Millie. It was snowin’, real hard.”
“And where did you go?” asked Johnny.
“Why, back to Madame Le Fleur’s. The girls were crazy about Millie, though she wasn’t no beauty. I had one of their beds, and they called a doctor, and paid for him, too. The girls always paid for everything. They weren’t no cheap girls, not there. They bought clothes for Millie, too. Didn’t have nothin’ but an old blanket for her when I brought her there; she was mother-naked. And when I was able, I worked again in the house. Millie and me was there for five years.”
“Yes?” said Johnny, after she had rested again.
“Well, sir, the girls and me didn’t think it was good for Millie to be there. So I put her in the orphan asylum, and I paid five dollars a week for her, and I worked in the house. But times got different. There was bad times; that was around 1907, I think. The men stopped comin’ and the policemen got mad because there wasn’t no money, and they shut us up. And I got a job scrubbin’ and cleanin’ in one of them big brownstone houses, and Millie got bigger, and then when she was fourteen she got herself a job like mine. I saw her ’bout once a month. She never knew anythin’ about the house.”
“And?” asked Johnny gently.
She looked at him in surprise. “Why, there isn’t no more. Millie got acquainted with the milkman at the house where she was workin’. A small-town boy, right here from Barryfield. Jack. Millie never did really like me. But Jack did. Kind of like Larry; laughed a lot, and we had jokes. Millie didn’t like jokes; doesn’t now, either. Nothin’ wrong with Millie, except she kind of hates everythin’ and I never did, and she fights with Jack because he’s still a milkman. He gets good money too, though you wouldn’t think it. Likes his beer, and the only time he ever fights with Millie is because she don’t keep things clean. He’s like me; he wants things clean. And Millie drinks too much beer. That makes him mad.”
Mrs. Woodley looked at him expectantly. “You see, don’t you! I was wonderin’ if you could tell me why I was ever born, that’s all. Just why was I born?”
Johnny said, speaking gently and thoughtfully, “That is the question every man and woman asks sometime in life. It’s a question I’ve often asked myself, too. And it was because I knew there was some answer that I became a minister,”
He paused. The grayish-mauve shadows rippled over the old woman’s face as she listened. He said, “You’ve said you don’t believe in God. Now people who really don’t believe in Him think they’re just accidents, being born in this world, and so there isn’t any answer, because there wasn’t any reason to begin with. But when you asked me for an answer I knew at once that in your heart you believed in God, and that there is an answer—for you—and that you felt God has it.
“Let me say this. There aren’t any accidents anywhere in this world and in the universe. Scientists have proved there is cause and effect in everything. Nobody like you was ever born before, and nobody like you will ever be born again. Nobody will ever live exactly the life you’ve lived. So, because you’re so—different—from anyone else, you had a place to fill in life that nobody else but you could fill.”
He looked at Mrs. Woodley. Her face was so quiet that she might have been in a trance. Her dim eyes stared straight before her, and her hands lay quiescent on her breast.
“When I worked in a mine,” said Johnny, and he moved closer to the dying woman, “there was an explosion. I got out, and they got out Bill, my best friend. He’d had a terrible life. His father had died in a mine blast, and he’d starved and slept on the streets and eaten garbage until he was old enough to work in the mines, because his mother had died when he was little, and there wasn’t anyone to take him in, and nobody cared, anyway. I was only seventeen when the blast happened.
“Bill was nearly fifty. He’d married a waitress when he was along in years a
nd they loved each other very much. And now they had a boy in school, about my age. They’d been saving all they could to send him to college. I remember him a little.” Johnny smiled reminiscently. “I was a lively, active kind of boy, but Joe wasn’t. Bill wanted him to be an engineer; somewhere Bill had gotten the idea that being an engineer of something or other was the very finest thing to be. Maybe Joe didn’t want to tell his parents that being an engineer wasn’t his idea at all; he was afraid to disappoint them.
“Well, anyway, when they got Bill out of the mine he was dying. He lay right there on the ground and he began to cry. He knew I wanted to be a minister, and he asked me to tell him why he was ever born. He swore and cursed and cried, and said everything he and his wife had done had come to nothing. Joe had left home two days before and said he wasn’t coming back, and couldn’t stand the school anyway. So Bill wanted to know what all his hunger and misery had amounted to, and he hated God, if there was a God, because there wasn’t any answer. Even his boy was gone.”
Johnny reached out and took one of Mrs. Woodley’s hands. It was as cold and dead as wax. But she turned her head to him, and there was a strange listening look in her eyes.
“I told Bill,” said Johnny, “that God had sent us here to know Him and love Him and serve Him on earth, so that we could join Him in heaven. It comforted him, I think. It was all I could do.”
Mrs. Woodley spoke. “Yes sir, it was all you could do. But it wasn’t no real answer. Why was your friend Bill born? The real reason besides what ministers tell folks?”
Johnny smiled. He looked before him, and his blue eyes were filled with light. “You know, I was thinking myself, and asking questions too, before Bill died, and I’d almost decided not to be a minister. But I did. I knew there was an answer, someplace, and God had it, and you just had to wait and then you’d know the answer.”
“But nobody ever heard of Joe any more,” said Mrs. Woodley with frail bitterness.
“Oh yes,” said Johnny. “The whole world knows about him, now. He just received the Nobel Prize. That was two months ago. For his medical research. Millions of people may not die of cancer, now, because of Joe. He always wanted to be a doctor. When he went away he worked and put himself through medical school. He’s only thirty-eight now. He’s just beginning. If there hadn’t been his father, Bill, there wouldn’t have been Joe. And, do you know something? When he got the prize he said, ‘My father always taught me that the greatest thing in the world for a man to do is to try to help his brother, his fellow man.’ There’s quite a monument to Bill in the cemetery.”
Johnny held the old hand tightly. “Now, Mrs. Woodley, can you tell me why Bill was born? Or was it just an accident, and isn’t there any answer?”
She gazed at him with enormous intensity, and did not speak.
“Let us take Larry, your husband. I gather he didn’t have anyone to love him but you. Is that so?”
She nodded dumbly.
“You gave him love. Maybe you don’t think that’s important, but it’s the most important thing in the world. Tell me. Before he lost the use of his legs, did you and he love each other as much as you did later?”
Mrs. Woodley regarded him quietly. “No. We didn’t. Things were even sort of beautiful for us, after that, in spite of everythin’. Yes sir. I didn’t tell you. Larry was all alone while I was workin’. He wasn’t much of a scholar, but he could read. I used to buy old books for him, and he’d tell me stories I’d never heard of from the books. And he liked the Bible best of all. Why, he was kind of peaceful all the time! I’d wash or sew and cook, and he’d read the Bible to me, and the other books, and I thought I was in heaven.”
She looked at Johnny, and something came alive in her sunken face. “Larry said he’d never been converted. He didn’t know anythin’ about God, until his legs went. Why, people’d come in from the rooming house just to hear him talk about the Bible, and Jesus, and tell them Bible stories! Poor, miserable people just like us, not havin’ enough to eat, and no hope, and they’d go out like they was in a dream. And somehow, because of Larry, they’d think up things to do to help themselves. Why, there was a fellow who was a thief. Everybody knew about him. And then he wasn’t a thief any more. He got in the Salvation Army.”
Johnny held her hand more tightly. She half rose from the pillows in excitement, and her face became beautiful again.
“And,” said Johnny, “if you hadn’t been there to work and take care of him he wouldn’t have had the books you bought, and the Bible, and so many people would have been lost.”
She sank back against the pillows, and her shallow breath quickened.
“Nobody but you could have helped Larry. You are responsible for Larry, and everyone he saved.”
“Me!” she whispered. She closed her eyes, and suddenly slept.
Johnny walked out of the bedroom and sought Mrs. Baxter. She was sitting slackly in the still dirty parlor. He sat beside her and began to talk. After a while she was weeping. He took her hand and led her back into her mother’s bedroom. Mrs. Woodley was groaning softly. She opened her filmed eyes and looked at them.
Mrs. Baxter, dirty and disheveled, sat down on the edge of the bed, crying. “Ma,” she said, “I didn’t have no words to tell you. Honest. But the minister told me to tell them to you.” She faltered, and the tears ran down her soiled coarse face. “You was always so smart, Ma. And so pretty, and nobody even thought about your leg. And you told me always to be a good girl, and I knew I couldn’t let you down.” She gulped. “Ma, I never told you, but when I was eighteen, and working in a kitchen in somebody’s house, I got to hating my life. There was other ways of making a better living, people told me. In a house.” She paused, fearfully, and shrank. “Ma, you don’t know what a ‘house’ is?”
A spectral smile hovered over Mrs. Woodley’s mouth. “I’ve heard about ’em,” she said.
Mrs. Baxter was blushing. She hung her bedraggled head like a child. “Well, Ma, I thought about it. But there was you, so smart and so good, and not afraid of anything. You know, Ma, you never knew I loved you. But I did, I did! And I knew I couldn’t let you down and be bad. So I was a good girl.”
Mrs. Woodley looked at Johnny, and her ravaged face lighted with joy. She put her hand on her daughter’s head and drew it to her breast. “You loved me, Millie? You loved me?”
Mrs. Baxter sobbed. “Oh, Ma, you wouldn’t believe how much I love you! But I didn’t know you loved me too. You so smart and pretty and moving fast and doing everything, and taking care of me.”
“My baby,” said Mrs. Woodley, and her voice was rich with happiness. “Why, I lived for you, baby. You was all I had.”
Mrs. Baxter wept. “I’m just no good. Letting things go and breaking Jack’s heart with the dirty house. Ma, I’m going to be better. I’m going to be the kind of wife Jack wants. I’ve been mean, because I never thought I could be like you, so smart, so wonderful.”
“Yes you can,” said Johnny, and he lifted Mrs. Baxter’s head and smiled at her tear-soaked face. “You can be the woman your mother wants you to be, and knows you can be. For your sake, and your husband’s.”
“I will, I will!” cried Mrs. Baxter fervently. Then she pulled his hand to her lips and kissed it. “You’re so wonderful, Mr. Fletcher. You don’t know what you did for Ma and me. We’re going to be in the church all the time, Mr. Fletcher. We sure are. Jack and me.”
Johnny looked at Mrs. Woodley, who smiled with the fullness of knowledge.
23
When Johnny reached the street again he saw that the murky December light had changed suddenly to a thick yellowish fog, so sickening, so choking that he began to cough violently. His eyes stung; his throat closed; his lungs rebelled. He groped to his car, feeling the heavy warmish moisture of mingled fog and smoke pressing against his face. The snow was vanishing in this new and sudden change. He tried to see the sky through his dripping eyes; it was the color of sulfur. Was this the inversion Dr. McManus had told him of
, this impenetrable and deadly effluvium which was smothering the city?
He had to drive carefully. Cloudy and hurrying forms, shapeless and without sex, were looming up before him. His fear rose for Emilie, and he tried to comfort himself with the memory of the air conditioner. Cars moved with a ghostly sound, shrilling their horns in warning. Children called, and their voices were hollow.
It took him a long time to get home. He abandoned the car thankfully and ran into the house. Dr. McManus was there, his stained hat stuck on the back of his head, his overcoat hanging on his wide body, helping the excited children to decorate their own small tree. The children milled about him, exclaiming, handing up glittering balls of gold and blue and silver and scarlet; yards of tinsel draped a chair, and thin strips of tin foil. Emilie was not present; she had been rushed back into the safety of her room.
“Hello!” cried Johnny happily. The children were too bemused with happiness and absorption to give him more than an absent answer. Dr. McManus said, “Just dropped in from the hospital. You know something? They’re bringing in loads of sick kids and old people; we’ve got a first-class inversion. If we don’t have an epidemic of deaths over this, then I miss my guess.”
“I’m going to do something about it immediately after Christmas,” said Johnny.
“Oh no you’re not!” said the doctor. “Remember what I told you before about rendering to Caesar.” He glared at Johnny, who was silent. Then he softened. “Never mind. Want to tell you something.” He drew Johnny to a little distance and whispered, “I’ve got all those things the children wanted, down in the parish hall under the big tree. And some small things for them for this tree here. You can take ’em to the hall after they’ve examined what’s here.” He raised his voice. “I almost forgot. I’ve something for the kids right now!”