On the porch she stopped to catch her breath, resting the suitcase beside her. How dark the night was! Pitch black. Nothing stirred. They had all left, even the workmen. Cleared out as fast as they could. Everything was deserted, without sign of life.
It did not seem possible. The Company had always been alive with activity, all night long. The furnaces, the glowing slag, men working, trucks moving around. Gouges and scoops—But not now. There was only silence. Darkness and silence. Far up above her a few stars shone, faint and remote through the fog. A wind blew, moving among the trees by the side of the building.
She picked up her suitcase and carried it inside, into the gloomy hall, up the stairs to her own room. There, she lit another cigarette and sat down on the bed. Presently she unsnapped the suitcase. She took her clothing out, a robe, slippers, pajamas. Then her cold cream, deodorant, cologne, bottles and tubes. Nail polish. Soap. Her tooth brush. She laid them in a row on the table by the bed.
At the bottom of the suitcase she found her Silex coffee maker and a little brown paper package of coffee, tied with a rubber band. And some sugar and paper cups.
It was a damn good thing she had thought to pack the coffee and things in the suitcase, instead of letting the workmen crate them up. She plugged in the Silex and went down the hall to the bathroom to get water. She put the water and coffee into the Silex.
Then she changed, removing her clothing. She put on the bathrobe and slippers. She found a towel. A good warm bath and then to bed; that would help. Tomorrow things would seem brighter. At night, with all her things crated up, the world silent and deserted around her—No wonder she felt depressed.
Had she ever felt worse? The stained, bare walls reflected the stark light of the lamp bulb. No pictures. No rug. Just the iron bed, the dirty table, the long row of bottles and jars and tubes. And her underwear, lying at the end of the bed. God!
The coffee rushed up into the top. It would soon be ready. She unplugged it. What a way to live. Would it be like this for a whole week? Two weeks?
She poured a cup of coffee, adding a little sugar. Two weeks, perhaps. And with Verne. Of all the people in the world—It was a plot. Fate, as people used to call it.
Fate. She sipped the hot coffee, sitting on the bed in her bathrobe. What a hell of a situation! How was she going to stand it? Why did it have to be him, of all the people they might have picked!
It didn’t seem possible. She looked around at the room. Could things be worse? The room was cold, barren. The cold was seeping around her, past the wool of the robe, chilling her. But the coffee made her feel a little better. Presently she began to feel sleepy. Her head ached dully. Her eyes were dry, tired.
She put the cup down on the floor and lay back, her head resting against the plaster wall. The springs groaned protestingly under her. She loosened her robe.
She was tired, tired and miserable. A week or two, living like this. And with him around. She closed her eyes. Her thoughts began to wander. She relaxed, her head sinking down. The pressure of the wall against her neck faded. The scratchy feel of the robe next to her skin began to recede.
She thought back, to other times. Other places.
Presently her cigarette ceased to glow. She had stubbed it out. Her cup of coffee grew cold.
Lying on the little iron bed she thought back, her mind wandering. The barren room around her dissolved and grew dim. The heap of underwear, the bottles and jars, the bleak walls, everything wavered.
She relaxed into her memories.
It was Castle she remembered. They had gone into the bars barefoot, in dirty pants and shirts. The bars had wood chairs and there were wood mugs on the tables. With no shoes they could feel sand on the floor under their feet. Most of the bars served fish dinners. Those bars had a fish smell about them.
Nobody seemed to mind if they were all sloppy and dirty, laughing and holding onto each other. She, Penny, and Felix. When it was warm enough in the evening they swam in the ocean without any clothes on. Sometimes they swam almost all night, and lay in bed the next day, too lazy to get up.
Felix and Penny were engaged. It had been decided that after their vacation, before school started in the fall, the two of them would get married. They would live in Boston, of course. Felix would go on with his post-graduate work in engineering, and Penny would continue to work at the library, at least until he got his degree.
Felix was tall and blond, with a small mustache. His eyes were always bright and button-shiny, and he looked down at people, his hands in his pockets or wrapped around a load of books. His skin was sunny and healthy; he was very good natured. Barbara liked him, but he got on her nerves. He tripped on things; he swung his arms when he talked. She found it hard to take him seriously.
Penny, plump and wearing a heavy canvas shirt, smoking a cigarette, was warm and attractive. She laughed, with a hearty, man-style deep bellow. She never wore lipstick, and when they came to Castle she brought only two pairs of shoes, both low heeled. And men’s pants.
As for Barbara Mahler, at twenty, she found herself facing a world that was quite different from anything she had known in Boston. She faced it with a mixture of shyness and sullen reserve. When they were with people she sat off in a corner, holding a drink, impressing people as aloof and untouchable. If a man approached her she cut him down with a few well-chosen words. Actually, she was frightened. She was especially frightened of the very men she sent off, yet at the same time she wanted very much to talk to them.
At twenty, her hair was cut in a tight bob, even all the way around. It was brown and thick, with heavy wide strands. Like the Botticelli cherubs that one sees. Her nose was large and Roman, giving her face a strong hardness, but with a kind of young boy youthfulness. A combination of female austerity and masculine immaturity. To many she seemed more like an immature boy than a woman.
She was slender, then, with nice arms and legs. She wore a brass bracelet on her wrist; her only jewelry.
Sitting in the corner watching the group of people talking and laughing made her feel alone. She did not like to mix with them, and if she were forced to she spoke roughly and slowly, a few words at a time. Many years later she realized they all thought she was tough and hard. The men who tried to pick her up never repeated it.
She wrote to her family every week, especially to her younger brother, her favorite. Bobby was seventeen. He had dropped out of school to marry a silly, selfish girl who had been working as a secretary, and who had quit her job the same week that they were married. He had never returned to school, to the family’s bitter dismay. Of all of them, Barbara was perhaps the only one who still wrote kindly and personally to the boy. And he appreciated the warm letters from his older sister.
Castle was a resort town up the coast from Boston. It was very small, and only a few people went there. But it had a lovely bay. In the winter time fishermen and shopkeepers lived in Castle, and perhaps one or two professional men who looked after them. But when spring came and the snow melted the tourists began to appear. Soon the real inhabitants were lost in a crowd of young people up from Boston. They rented cabins on the beach. They pitched tents, stayed in cars and in trailers, or in sleeping bags. As the summer came on, new faces appeared among them, old faces vanished. Finally it was fall, and they were gone.
Now, in July, Penny and Felix and Barbara lay in the warm sand, smoking and talking, enjoying the fish smells, the archaic streets and houses, the old wood that had been washed up from the sea around them. Ocean and wind, the smell of fish and salt and ancient timbers. But the last days of their vacation were on them. They would soon be going back to Boston.
Penny and Felix would be married, A new life was starting for them. But what of Barbara?
They had two cabins, next to each other. In the first one were Penny and Barbara; Felix had the other. After the first few nights Barbara woke up to find Penny gone. She was alone in the bed; the covers were tossed back on Penny’s side. She was not in the bathroom. She had gone out
.
Barbara lay in the bed, fully awake, thinking and looking out through the part of the window visible past the shade. There were stars out, bigger than the stars she saw from her Boston window, upstairs in the family home.
It was a warm night. Silence lay all around her. She felt strange, lying alone in the big bed, in the unfamiliar cabin. As if she were in a train, lost someplace in the world, moving through the night without any idea of direction. Past vacant fields, houses bolted up, stores closed for the night, signs turned off. Deserted streets and silence everywhere, without life or movement.
She thought about Penny. When would she be back? Of course she was with Felix. Penny was twenty-three, and they had been engaged for a long time. A vague unhappiness settled over Barbara. She pushed the covers from her and lay naked, thinking about Penny and Felix. The darkness was warm against her bare skin.
Finally she turned over and went to sleep.
In the later nights, when Penny was gone so often, Barbara had plenty of time to think about herself and what direction she was moving in.
She was young, younger than any of the other people she had gone around with in Boston. Here, in Castle, they knew no one very well. Without Penny and Felix she was all alone. She was dependent on them. Her crowd was not here.
They were jazz enthusiasts, all of them. Not the jazz of the ballroom radio shows, the popular dance bands for high school proms. Their jazz was the real jazz, the jazz of the South, of New Orleans, the riverboats, the jazz that had moved up the river to Chicago. In Chicago it had become real music; in the hands of great musicians it had become an art.
Listening to the cornet of Beiderbecke, dead now, the rasp of Louis Armstrong, they found a raw, brutal and sophisticated music that seemed to move as they were moving. If the music were blind and lost, so were they also. They clung to this music, in the small places where it was played and heard, the cafés, the dim little Negro bars. There were records, the names, the sacred names. Bix. Tram. The hard, rough voice of Ma Rainey. Places and names. Sounds.
This was Barbara’s crowd, but they were not here in Castle. They were back in Boston. Here she was with a new group which she did not understand; She felt no desire, when she watched them talking, to join in with them. A kind of heavy stupor settled over her; she moved away, to the back of the room, sitting quietly alone. By herself she watched. A spectator, perched on the arm of a chair, or leaning against a door. She seemed to be ready to leave at any moment, disdainfully, haughtily; in reality she struggled with the rising tide of terror, and the desire to fell in disorderly panic.
Lying in the darkness alone, night after night, looking past the shade at the great stars, she thought about herself. She thought: what will I be in a year? Will I be alive? Will I be in Boston? Will I be living this way?
The prospect of living as she was now, filled her with a cold despair. If she had to spend her life alone, sitting at the edge of rooms, watching the others, then it did not matter what happened to her. She might as well give herself to anything that came along, any cross-tide that might tear her loose and carry her off.
She thought again of Penny and Felix lying in bed together. She imagined the sweating, panting exhaustion of love. The periods of quiet. The blood. Restlessly, she kicked the covers back. She got out of bed and sat looking into the darkness. At twenty, her mind and body were a battleground for some internal fever that was working itself slowly to the surface. The symptoms were long in coming. The waves of intense longing and desire were still indistinct and wave-like, rolling around inside her like a heavy fluid.
She got up from the chair and paced back and forth. After a while Penny came inside quietly. She saw Barbara and stopped at the door.
“Hello, honey. I was out walking along the beach.”
“I know,” Barbara said. “How was it?”
“Fine.”
Barbara got back into bed. “Coming?”
Penny came over and slid in beside her. Barbara felt her body, heavy and solid, almost like a man’s body. She gasped suddenly, tense. But Penny was already asleep. Barbara lay back, staring up at the darkness, her mouth open a little, her hands clenched at her sides.
The next day was the beginning of their last day at Castle. Because they did not have as much money as when they had come, it was decided they would try to hitchhike back.
“Lots of people are driving down the coast, right now,” Felix said. “An endless stream of shiny cars.”
Barbara pointed out that it might mean they would have to separate; no car would want to pick up three people. Even two was a lot. The best would be to go singly, but of course, that would be no fun. They let the matter ride for a while. More urgently, there was a final party for them which some friends who were remaining were giving.
Penny and Felix went to the party together. Barbara was to come along after them, since she wanted to write home once more before leaving. She wrote to her mother and to her father. Then she wrote a short note to Bobby.
“Bobby, sometimes I envy you, being married. I hope you and Judy are happy. Maybe I’ll get a chance to come and visit you later in the fall.”
She looked at what she had written and then taking a new sheet of paper wrote:
“Maybe I’ll have a chance to come visit you two and see how married life is. It must have some advantages.”
She wrote some more, and then sealed the note in an envelope and put postage stamps on the three letters. After a time she went to the closet and began to bring out clothes she wanted to wear to the party. She put out a dark green skirt on the bed, and a light neutral blouse. She dressed carefully, heels and nylons. She combed her hair down into place and fastened it back with a silver clasp.
Over the skirt and blouse she slipped on a suede leather jacket. Putting the letters in the jacket pocket she went out into the warm night, locking the door.
At the party, sitting on the arm of a big couch, watching the people talking and laughing, she realized she would really be sorry to leave Castle. To her, Boston, with stale air, familiar streets and hills, the same old faces, the high school, the movie theaters, would be the same old life again, exactly as before.
She would have to go back and take things up just as before. Without change. Except that now she would be more alone than ever; Penny and Felix would be married and off by themselves.
She shut her eyes. The murmur of the room rolled around her. How could she face it?
While she was thinking about it a man came over to her. He was a small man, older than most of them, with a pipe and a grey rumpled suit.
“You’re not drinking. Can I bring you anything? Scotch and water?” He had a glass in his hand.
Barbara shook her head. “No thanks.”
“Nothing?”
“No.”
“You wouldn’t mind holding my drink for a second, would you?” He held his glass out to her, and she took it slowly. The man went off, and in a moment he came back with another glass. He grinned, his eyes dancing behind horn-rimmed glasses. She thought: what an odd little face, so thin and wrinkled. Like a little prune.
“I’ll keep this one,” he said. “It’s fuller.”
She started to get angry. But then she laughed, because he was grinning at her, watching her.
“All right,” she said. “Give me the drink.”
They exchanged drinks. Barbara sipped a little. The liquor was cold and biting. She wrinkled her nose. The man had not gone away. He was still standing beside her, at the end of the couch.
“My name’s Verne Tildon,” the man said.
3
AT LAST CARL left the porch and went slowly back inside the office. He put his suitcase and package down, deep in thought, oblivious to his surroundings. The office was barren, in the glare of the overhead light. The curtains and small furnishings were all gone; only a table and two chairs and a metal file cabinet were left. The bare plaster wall was marred by two screw holes where the pencil sharpener had been. A notice was st
ill tacked on the wall.
NO SMOKING WITHOUT AUTHORIZED PERMIT
Suddenly he noticed there was another person in the room. Verne was sitting at the table, watching him through his horn-rimmed glasses.
“Hello,” Carl said. “You still here?”
“You look upset.”
“They didn’t consider it important enough to let me know about it. About staying. That’s what gets me the most. If I had known I could have let my family know in time. This way, they’ll—”
“Oh, your family.” Verne got up and clapped the young man on the shoulder. The solid flesh hardly budged. “Don’t worry. They won’t care whether you come back.”
Carl gave up. “What the heck. Anyhow, it’s only for a week.” His usual good spirits were returning.
“A week! You should live so long.”
“What do you mean?”
“A week. More like two.”
“They said we could go—”
“When the yuks come. But the yuks may take their time getting here. The Oriental mind is inscrutable. It requires centuries to reach a decision.”
“Well, it doesn’t matter. Lord, it’s dreary in here with everything gone!” Carl took off his coat and took it to the closet. He stopped, the door half open.
“What’s the matter?” Verne came over. Inside the closet, piled high to the ceiling, were cardboard boxes full of dusty ledgers and file cards, account books and papers. All tied with string, crushed together in a heap, ready to fall any moment.
Carl slammed the door. “I give up. I thought they were going to take that.”
“Why should they? It’s not worth anything. The files of a unit that’s gone bust. That’s all they are. Records of a short, brief flame of economic passion.”
“Not so short. A good many years.”
“A good many years indeed,” Verne agreed. “And in view of that fact, a week or so shouldn’t make any difference.”
Carl picked up the traffic notification paper from the table and scanned it again. “Who is this? This woman, Barbara Mahler. Do you know her?”