“Oh, yes,” he whispered. “The blue children, you mean!”
“Yes, that was it!” Now she lifted her eyes, eagerly.
“Come down to my room, Myra.”
“I couldn’t!”
“You couldn’t?”
“No, of course not! If anyone caught me…”
“They wouldn’t!”
“I’d be expelled!”
There was a slight pause.
“Wait a minute!”
He ran down three steps and turned.
“Wait for me just one minute, Myra!”
She felt her head nodding. She heard his running down the rest of the steps and into the basement room where he lived. Through the door she saw his shadow moving about the floor and the walls. He was dressing. Once he stepped into the portion of the bedroom that she could see through the half-open door and he stood in her sight naked from the waist up, and she was startled and strangely moved by that brief glimpse of his full, powerful chest and arms, strikingly etched with shadows thrown by the lamp. In that moment he acquired in her mind a physical reality which he had never had before. A very great physical reality, greater than she had felt in Kirk Abbott or in any of the other young men that she had gone with on the campus.
A minute later he stepped out of the door and closed it and came quietly up the short flight of steps to where she was standing.
“I’m sorry I took so long.”
“It wasn’t long.”
He took her arm and they went out of the door and around to the front of the house. The oak tree in the front lawn appeared gigantic. Everything was peculiarly sharpened or magnified; even the crunch of gravel under their two pairs of white shoes. She expected to see startled, balloon-like heads thrust out of all the upstairs windows, to hear voices calling a shrill alarm, her name shouted from roof-tops, the rushing of crowds in pursuit…
“Where are we going?” she asked as he led her south along the brick walk.
“I want to show you the field I describe in the poem.”
It wasn’t far. The walk soon ended and under their feet was the plushy coolness of earth. The moon flowed aqueously through the multitude of pointed oak leaves: the dirt road was also like moving water with its variations of light and shade. They came to a low wooden fence. The boy jumped over it. Then held out his arms. She stepped to the top rail and he lifted her down from it. On the other side his arms did not release her but held her closer.
“This is it,” he told her, “the field of blue children.”
She looked beyond his dark shoulder. And it was true. The whole field was covered with dancing blue flowers. There was a wind scudding through them and they broke before it in pale blue waves, sending up a soft whispering sound like the infinitely diminished crying of small children at play.
She thought of the view from her window at night, those nights when she cried bitterly without knowing why, the dome of the administration building like a white peak and the restless waves of moonlit branches and the stillness and the singing voices, mournfully remote, blocks away, coming closer, the tender, foolish ballads, and the smell of the white spirea at night, and the stars clear as lamps in the cloudfretted sky, and she remembered the choking emotion that she didn’t understand and the dread of all this coming to its sudden, final conclusion in a few months or weeks more. And she tightened her arms about the boy’s shoulders. He was almost a stranger. She knew that she had not even caught a first glimpse of him until this night, and yet he was inexpressibly close to her now, closer than she had ever felt any person before.
He led her out over the field where the flowers rose in pale blue waves to her knees and she felt their soft petals against her bare flesh and she lay down among them and stretched her arms through them and pressed her lips against them and felt them all about her, accepting her and embracing her, and a kind of drunkenness possessed her. The boy knelt beside her and touched her cheek with his fingers and then her lips and her hair. They were both kneeling in the blue flowers, facing each other. He was smiling. The wind blew her loose hair into his face. He raised both hands and brushed it back over her forehead and as he did so his hands slipped down behind the back of her head and fastened there and drew her head toward him until her mouth was pressed against his, tighter and tighter, until her teeth pressed painfully against her upper lip and she tasted the salt taste of blood. She gasped and let her mouth fall open and then she lay back against the whispering blue flowers.
Afterward she had sense enough to see that it was impossible. She sent the poems back to the boy with a short note. It was a curiously stilted and formal note, perhaps because she was dreadfully afraid of herself when she wrote it. She told him about the boy Kirk Abbott whom she was going to marry that summer and she explained to Homer how impossible it would have been for them to try and go on with the beautiful but unfortunate thing that had happened to them last night in the field.
She saw him only once after that. She saw him walking across the campus with his friend Hertha, the tall, weedy girl who wore thicklensed glasses. Hertha was clinging to Homer’s arm and shaking with outlandishly shrill laughter; laughter that could be heard for blocks and yet did not sound like real laughter.
Myra and Kirk were married in August of that year. Kirk got a job with a telephone company in Poplar Falls and they lived in an efficiency apartment and were reasonably happy together. Myra seldom felt restless any more. She did not write verse. Her life seemed to be perfectly full without it. She wondered sometimes if Homer had kept on with his writing but she never saw any of it in the literary magazines so she supposed it couldn’t have amounted to very much after all.
One late spring evening a few years after their marriage Kirk Abbott came home tired from the office hungry for dinner and found a scribbled note under the sugar bowl on the drop-leaf table.
“Driven over to Carsville for just a few hours. Myra.”
It was after dark: a soft, moony night.
Myra drove south from the town till she came to an open field. There she parked the car and climbed over the low wooden fence. The field was exactly as she had remembered it. She walked quickly out among the flowers; then suddenly fell to her knees among them, sobbing. She cried for a long time, for nearly an hour, and then’ she rose to her feet and carefully brushed off her skirt and stockings. Now she felt perfectly calm and in possession of herself once more. She went back to the car. She knew that she would never do such a ridiculous thing as this again, for now she had left the last of her troublesome youth behind her.
1937 (Published 1939)
In Memory of an Aristocrat
I went there the first time with a young Jew named Carl who called himself a musician with about as much justice as I have sometimes referred to myself as a writer, though it is true that he used to play light classics on the fiddle at the Court of the Two Sisters where I was employed as a waiter during the holiday season and he played rather well when drunk. At this time, however, both of us were out of regular work. We were both hungry and Carl said that Irene always had something cooking. It might be stew, he said, or vegetable soup or even scalloped oysters, but if it is oysters, he warned me, be sure to smell ‘em first. The last time she had oysters they give me the runs, said Carl. I covered more distance that night, he said, in much less time than when those bloodhounds followed me out of Friarspoint, Mississippi!
While on the subject of oysters he also advised me against eating raw ones with whiskey. There’s something about the chemical reaction, said Carl, that turns the oysters to rocks in your stomach and I have seen big men, he told me, drop dead in their shoes right here in New Orleans bars just because they was from out of town and nobody took the trouble to warn ‘em, like I’m warning you—and here he jabbed me viciously with one finger—that whiskey turns oysters to rocks when the two get mixed in your belly!
Carl was a fountain of wisdom on a vast number of subjects. The way that he lived when he was out of work, which was usually becaus
e his fiddle music was fairly corn, is worthy of a narrative all by itself. This much I’ll tell you now. His chief occupation was what he called “conking the queers.” “Rolling” and “knocking over” are variations of the same expression which refers to the action of terminating an assignation with one of these gentlemen by the application of a loaded stick or blunt end of an ice cleaver to exactly the right portion of his skull at the unsuspecting moment of inclination, and then proceeding, before the victim wroke up, to relieve him of whatever wealth was detachable from his person. So when Carl said that business was good and you hadn’t seen alleycats picketing the Two Sisters lately, you understood right away what he referred to. Mardi Gras time was what he chiefly lived in expectation of. But Mardi Gras was still a month away. It was now the sad, sweet season of Lent with one day a slow, slow rain and the next a bright, misty sunlight with everything still wet and exuding a delicately, freshly rotten smell which is something you always remember about the old French Quarter and want to go back to sometime.
Irene was the name of the girl we were going to see. She had one of those little crib-like rooms on the further end of Bourbon, very deep in the Quarter, a room that opened directly onto the street with the usual green-shuttered window and door. Outside hung a shingle that stated simply IRENE’S—PUBLIC INVITED. She was a well-known member of the Quarter Rats which is not an official society of any kind but is roughly inclusive, I suppose, of all those persons, creative or otherwise, who have wandered into the Quarter and remained there more or less permanently because of the fact that it is the cheapest and most comfortable place in America for fugitives from economic struggle.
Irene was chez elle. The shutters were closed and the room was very dusky so the only thing that struck me forcibly when I first entered was the smell of something cooking on the stove. The only chair was occupied by a Negro woman whom Irene had called in off the street because she had an interesting-looking face. She did have that. She was black as tar with very large spatulate features. She was telling Irene’s fortune when we came in and Irene motioned us to sit down and be still. We did this. We sat down on the bed with Irene and Carl immediately started groping Irene’s legs under the wrapper and the Negress grinned and went on with her prophecies in a rich, fluent voice that was infinitely soothing to listen to.
Honey, she said, you’re going to have an awful lot of success with these here pictures.
Am I? said Irene. Her voice was trembling with unaffected wistfulness.
You sure are, honey. Why, your art work is going to make you famous. You’re going to have pictures for sale, honey, in the biggest stores on Royal Street. You know what I can see? I can see you drivin’ along Canal in a great big high-powered car with a man in a full-dress suit!
Yes? interrupted Irene. What does he look like, honey?
Han’some as Jesus! grinned the Negro woman.
Honestly?
Yes, an’ honey, he’s got ten-dollar bills bulgin’ out of his vest pockets an’ his pants is stuffed with stocks an’ bonds enough to choke a fullgrown mule!
We all laughed at this and the Negress got up and started asking for things. She wanted Irene to give her the cherry-colored smock that hung by the washstand. Irene gave her that. Then she wanted the new bar of toilet soap and the box of sweet pea powder. She got both of those, and then Irene told her she’d better be going before she craved the bed we were sitting on.
I could use a bed like that, said the Negress.
Yes, and I’d let you have it, laughed Irene, except it’s indispensable to me in my line of work!
So the Negro woman bundled her presents up neatly and took her good-humored departure.
I wonder if she was telling the truth, said Irene.
About what?
Me making good as an artist!
She lit a cigarette which she had rolled on a special little machine which she had for that purpose. A wide rubber band it was that worked on a couple of spools. A very handy little contraption for nervous people like Irene and myself whose hands shake when they’re rolling so that most of the tobacco gets spilled out. Irene showed us how it worked and we rolled out several cigarettes. Carl would have kept on rolling till he’d filled his pockets if Irene hadn’t stopped him. He was delighted with the machine and I remember that quite a little discussion went on about it.
It came out in the course of the corwersation that Irene used to pose for night classes at the WPA in New York. She took off her wrapper and showed us her body which Carl said was unusually good. I didn’t think so. She was one of those big, dark girls, everything about her on a monumental scale. Okay for Carl who was pretty good sized himself but sort of putting me in a protective shadow. Yes, I was reminded somehow of the goddamnedest poem I have ever read that was written by a boy from Cape Girardeau who said who said the shadows nestled under the big elm tree like puppies under the mother dog’s belly. Whenever I notice a disparity in size I think about that image and I remember the boy who conceived it, a very small, timid-looking freshman at the University of Missouri who was—
Excuse me, that’s something else that belongs in another story.
Irene was big all right, and the lower part of her body was disproportionately heavy. It was almost as though the camera had been placed at her feet. I mean everything seemed to be on a larger scale toward the bottom. But she was not in any way unpleasant to look at. You could look at her and imagine feelings of pleasure. She was capacious all right—built, as Carl said, for comfort. And her face was rather splendid. Also large but with something noble about it. She had been through a lot, you could tell, and had gone through it pretty bravely. The lines of humor were permanent lines in her face. There was nearly always an air of quiet laughter about her, together with something that was deeply, incurably hurt. You wanted to know what it was but it didn’t come out very quickly. Her face seemed to have risen slowly out of some stifling black cloud and now to have come into sunlight that showed the scars but gave her clean air to breathe. What she made me think of as I looked at her standing there naked and smiling at me and Carl was the title of a book, or perhaps a phrase from a poem which I have seen somewhere. The tower beyond tragedy—that’s what it was.
So Irene was beautiful if you took long enough to see it, and she was also a very lovable person if you were not too squeamish about certain inessential matters. She was the good kind of Bohemian, not the phony kind whose freedom is a ready-made accessory to a studio but the kind who has made her own freedom, forged it like a suit of armor with a desperate labor out of a very desperate need.
This is lyricism almost in a class with the boy’s from Cape Girardeau, but thinking about Irene is compulsion to poetry even when you ordinarily stick to prose. Somebody should have loved her who was a good poet. Maybe somebody did and the poem will yet be written.
Carl enjoyed looking at her and she was pleased by his frank admiration. After a while she lay down there on the bed between us. You can play all you want to, she laughed, but don’t try anything else.
We lay there on the bed and played with Irene and discussed our three vocations. Irene told us that she always saw abstract designs when she was love-making. One time she said she had to get up right in the middle of things and draw a sketch on the wallpaper.
I’ve never been able to decide, she said, which is more important, the thing itself or the quality of it that you reproduce in your work.
Emotion, I suggested, or emotion remembered in tranquillity?
Yeah, she said. Her face grew very thoughtful.
I knew another writer, she said, who warned me that I was abusing my emotions. Bitches, he told me, got so they couldn’t feel anything at all. Do you suppose that’s true?
Naw, said Carl.
I don’t think so either, she said more cheerfully. From personal experience I would say it’s just the other way round.
How do you mean? Carl asked.
Well, the more I feel, she said, the more I seem to be capable of f
eeling. It scares me a little because if I keep on, some day I’ll feel so much that it will probably kill me!
I was reminded of an epigrammatic statement, whose I don’t remember, but it seemed appropriate.
There is only one true aristocracy, I told her a little pontifically, and that is the aristocracy of passionate souls!
Irene turned and looked at me strangely. A slow, delighted smile appeared on her face.
Thanks, she said. Excuse me just a minute!
She got up from the bed and took a piece of charcoal and scribbled the statement which I had quoted on the wall space between two paintings.
Thanks, she repeated. I’m glad you gave me that, it’s something I want to remember!
It was raining outside, one of those slow New Orleans rains, and the yellow spot on the ceiling got darker and it began to exude little cold drops of water which struck Irene each time in the close proximity of her navel. She seemed to take a masochistic pleasure in this mild torture. We’d watch the drop forming up there and speculate on the number of minutes that it would take to fall. Carl always made the closest guess. When the drop descended Irene would shriek and squirm on the bed and this seemed to get Carl excited. He kept throwing one of his legs over hers in spite of the warning she gave him, so finally she jumped up and slapped him sharply. The trouble with you is, she told him, you’re always wanting something for nothing. Then Carl accused her of being anti-Semitic and she started bawling him out for his lack of social convictions.
During the heat of this quarrel I got up from the bed and helped myself to some stew. It was terribly thick and gummy, all of the constituents had gone to pieces so that nothing in it was distinguishable from anything else. It was one of those stews that remind you of nothing so much as that famous brook of Longfellow’s that continues everlastingly with a magnificent disregard for the vital statistics of men. I wondered if this would be as bad as those scalloped oysters Carl had spoken about but nevertheless took a chance.