She turned with a violent gesture and flung herself into the chair and turned her head and leaned her cheek against the back and clutched the top and wept as she had never wept before, broken, shaking, crushing sobs, as if her body were falling into ruins moment by moment and her heart was exposed and turning in anguish. She was an old woman, older than her years. She was also a desperate and lonely child, a terrified child, a skulking child, a child who lived with terror and pain.
“I came here,” she said, with her lips pressed against the chair’s back as a child presses its lips against its mother’s breast, “because I’m so tired, and I get these headaches, and sick at my stomach—maybe it’s the old menopause—and I think and think, and I look at the women in the nice little houses with the nice kids, and the good husbands, and a car—I never had even a bicycle—and I wonder why they have things so good, and I—I never had anything—not anything, in my whole damned life!”
Her lips went deeper into the velvet hungrily, and it was like flesh to her, loving flesh. “If just I’d had one single thing, just one! Just one to remember.”
She swung about in the chair, fiercely, defiantly, still clutching the arms. She glared at the curtain. “I’ve never had a single person to talk to, to tell anything to, nobody to care whether I lived or died, nobody just to care or be worried about what would happen to me! Do you know something, you man behind there who never says a word, I’ve told you a pack of lies! And you know why? Because I made myself believe them when the going got tough, as it always does for me. A person has to have something to believe in, even if they make up lies. You know why? Because we couldn’t stand living if we didn’t. We can’t stand the truth of what we’ve been living—I mean, people like me.
“The only way I could get people to look at me at all, and see me, a person, who was just a little bit of a nice person, and not an orphan slob, was to tell them all these fancy stories. Maybe they didn’t believe any of it, or maybe they believed a little, or anyway, maybe they thought some of it might be true, or something like it.
“It’s all I’ve got, what I made myself dream about, reading some books I found, and pretending it was me. And then a long time ago I used to buy magazines, like the ones I told you about, and dream I was born a Rothschild, or maybe a Rockefeller, or maybe an Eenglish princess, or some kid, rich, who had parents who loved her, had all those wonderful things and childhood. It wasn’t just being rich, at first, but just having a father and mother like I see all around me all the time. A person got to have some self-respect, you know? Like having nice folks sometime.
“Look at me!” she screamed, starting to her feet, and leaning forward from her thick waist in an attitude of absolute despair and lonely rage. “I never knew who my parents was! First thing I knew was the orphan asylum, sixty years ago, a dump! Cold, hungry, never having any decent clothes. Most of the kids had someone, somewhere, who sent them some things, even if they was second-hand. I had nobody. But I wore cast-offs that was cast-offs in the beginning. I never was warm a day in my life! You, in there! Was you ever homeless, and ever cold, and never had a house of your own? I bet, I just bet, you rich psychiatrist! Did you ever have people turn away from you because you weren’t pretty or something, and because you was frightened, the way I was always frightened? All I had was my teeth. A good thing! If they’d been bad I wouldn’t have one in my head now, that’s the kind of care we got in that old poor orphan asylum where I was, where Jerry was, though I didn’t know he’d been there until I was seventeen.
“Did you ever have anyone laugh at you, and make fun of you, the way they did with me? I betcha they didn’t, not you with all your education and money! When I was eight years old my mother’s cousin, Aunt Sim, and her husband, came around and said they owned me, and they took me out. Aunt Sim wanted someone to work for her in the kitchen, the lazy old bum! The orphan asylum was glad to get rid of me; they was overcrowded; you don’t know what they was like in those days. Anyway, Uncle Ned I called him, was a bartender in a dirty saloon, and I used to scrub it out at night after what little school I went to—and the spittoons and all. And all I got was kicks and scratches and bangs from them. See this arm? Uncle Ned was crazy; he got mad at Aunt Sim one night and he took it out on me, and he had a knife and he ripped my arm with it. I can’t hardly raise it even now, and you think that’s easy in a shop like where I work? You’re nuts if you think it is!
“And I met Jerry in the saloon one night when I was working there. They made me quit school when I was twelve; that’s what it was like then, and I worked washing dishes in the kitchen behind the bar, making up the free lunch and cleaning up afterward. Jerry was thirty years old, a grown man, a drummer, that’s what they called salesmen then. He went around the towns selling things, like liniment and stockings and thread and pans. I thought he was great, just great. Sometimes he’d make fifteen–eighteen dollars a week, and that was big money then, and he was a nice-looking jerk in a way, with shiny shoes. Oh, hell! They talk about teen-agers being kids, these days, but I was a real kid, not with this sex-stuff and lipstick and high-heels like they got now; I was just a kid. Seventeen.
“And I was an ugly kid, too, and I can just see myself in the old rags I wore, and the button-shoes that was all patched, and my hair hanging down my back. No, it wasn’t gold-blonde hair, though I kid myself it was, sometimes. It was just plain mousy, and I curled it in a frizz on Sundays in the front. I was an ugly kid, all right! But Jerry, he liked me, he said. One day he got in a fight with Uncle Ned, who was twisting my arm, and I loved Jerry right off, though he wasn’t no Errol Flynn, or one of them new movie stars with the funny names you see in the movies now. He tripped up Uncle Ned, and then he says to me, ‘Girlie, I been seeing you around and I kind of like you, you’re so pitiful. How about you and me getting hitched?’ I tell you, I could have died!”
She sobbed with a retching sound which she could not control and now did not even attempt to control. “Seventeen, and a real kid, with no idea of anything. Jerry had a room in a boardinghouse, and he took me there, and a couple of days later we were married. I suppose,” she stammered, “I ought to be grateful he did that, for things happened to kids in those days, awful things, when they were in a spot like me. And I ate three meals a day, real meals, for the first time in my life. It got to be heaven after awhile. Jerry—well, he drank a little—No! He was drunk most of the time! I had to get a job, in a little factory, and I made five dollars a week, and I worked twelve hours a day, six days a week. It was still heaven for a little while, after Aunt Sim and Uncle Ned.
“And then,” she gulped over and over, her face scarlet with pain and tears, “Jerry began to beat me up when he was drunk, and then even when he wasn’t. I guess he got sick of the sight of me, I was still so ugly. But he was all I had, and I mean, well I clung to him, and I promised him if he’d stay with me I’d take care of him, and so he quit his job and I worked. I worked Sundays, too, cleaning offices, to make it up to him for marrying me and taking me away. Oh, he worked sometimes, here and there, because I couldn’t make enough money, all by myself, for his drink; but not very often. Then I heard of a bigger factory in this town, and we came here and I got so I was making fourteen dollars a week by the time I was twenty-two. Not too bad, but not very good, neither. I didn’t eat too regular, if you know what I mean.
“Sometimes I got to dreaming that Jerry was a good sober man, with a good job, and making money, and that we had a nice little house, on a quiet street, with maybe a secondhand car and a couple of kids. Sometimes it was so real that when I’d wake up in the morning, in the couple of dirty rooms we had in this city, I couldn’t believe where I was! I could just hear my little boy—I called him Tommie in my dreams—calling me. ‘Mama, Mama!’ Just like that.” Her lips trembled in a tender smile and again the dreaming look glazed her eyes. Then she shuddered.
“It got so that the only way I could get along, working all the time, and coming to those awful rooms with Jerry drunk on the b
ed, was to pretend I was somebody else and had a wonderful life. I’d talk about it at the plant. The girls all were jealous; they began to call me ‘tightwad’ because of my clothes. ‘She puts it all in the bank,’ they’d say right where I could hear them, and I’d be so proud of Jerry’s and my big bank account and I’d really begin to believe we had it. I’d buy up old magazines, like the Bazaar and Vogue, and look at all the pictures, and by and by—Oh, yes, and the Ladies’ Home Journal and other women’s magazines—I’d begin to dream of having clothes like that, and jewelry like that, and furs. But mostly, the house, and the kids, and the smooth sheets and the pretty dishes and nice rugs. And sometimes on Saturday afternoons I’d sneak around to the real swell shops in this city, and walk through, looking at all the terrific things in them, and the clothes, and by and by I’d think I was really shopping, me with only three cheap dresses to my name, and a coat so old I’d forgotten what I’d paid for it, and it wasn’t any good to begin with.”
She laughed at herself, half-groaning, half-sobbing. “I guess that’s about all, I think. But about thirty-five years ago, looking at Jerry, I’d wonder how I’d bury him if he died. I still was grateful to him, in spite of everything. He was all I had. So I sobered him up one day, and pressed his only suit—he had one of his jobs then—and sent him to the insurance company, no, I went with him, I’ve got to be straight on things now. I told him I was the one being insured. Anyway, in those days they didn’t mind so much, it was prosperous and everybody was buying insurance, you know, the twenties? They didn’t ask too many questions, but they liked the idea that I was paying for the insurance and working every day. They checked up on me, and saw I was paying the rent every Monday night. So, anyway, I got Jerry insured for three thousand dollars, and then I could sleep nights, not wondering if they’d bury him behind a fence or something. He was all I had.
“You see, Doctor, he sort of got to be a kind of kid to me, me taking care of him and washing his clothes at night and feeding him when he couldn’t even sit up, after being sick from drinking all that moonshine they had those days, or was it bathtub gin? I don’t remember; never touched it, myself. And I’d tell myself how handsome he was, and how he was sick, not drunk, and that I was all he had.
“And then, after ten–fifteen years, after we came here, he died, and I was all alone again; he had the D.T.s And it was the Depression. I still had my job, but they cut my pay; I didn’t mind too much; things were getting cheaper. And now I had three thousand dollars! I spent eight hundred on Jerry’s funeral; it was real smart, even if only me and the landlady and a couple of girls from the plant came to it. And he had a vault, too, and a grave where the trees are real pretty. Now he was settled down, but I was all alone.
“The rest of the money looked awful good to me! It was real good! Especially when I lost my job, and didn’t have another for two years. I lived on it, real close, and it lasted, and there was quite a bit left when I got a job in another plant when Hitler began to come up in the news, and everybody was thinking of war, and the government wanted us to rearm and arm the other countries. And so I got a fine job, thirty dollars a week, and then it was forty, then fifty, then sixty, then seventy, when we got in the war!”
She smiled all over her ravished old face and nodded proudly. “Trust little Maudie! Did she blow it the way the rest of the women and girls did? She did not, no sir! She saved most of it! And that’s why I’ve got me seven thousand dollars in the bank, right now, and a good thing, because with the pay I’m getting now, and the high price of everything, I can’t save a cent. You see I’ve got a teeny apartment in an old building in the suburb, just two rooms, and share a bath with Nancy next door, but I got to pay sixty dollars a month for it, and food!
“And all through those years I’d read all the magazines. I told you about, and dream and dream and dream. That’s the only way I could stand things. Then Nancy, she says to me, ‘The war’s over, and why do you have to work in a plant in pants, get yourself a decent job, with all you know about style and clothes and perfumes.’ So I looked around and after awhile I got a job in the main store, for thirty-eight dollars a week, not much, but with commissions, and I did so good, with my sense of style and what I know about clothes and what to wear when, that I got raised to fifty, and commissions, and all the ladies, some of them real rich, would ask for me, personally, because I always told them the truth and they liked to hear my stories about my wonderful childhood and all the wonderful life I’d had.”
She stopped, and her ruined face paled and she put her hand to her heavy breast and held it there. She sighed deeply, long sighing breaths like tearless sobs. “I even saw some of the houses where the ladies lived, the rich ones I mean. I’d walk around at night, looking at them and I’d pretend I lived there. It got so that I could see into the houses, and all the expensive antiques and the pictures and drapes and silver and the Orientals, and sometimes at night I’d go right up to the windows and look, and sure enough, the rooms was like the ones I saw in the magazines! And I’d be living there, with a rich kind husband and have half a dozen kids, teen-agers then, or maybe older and married and with kids of their own. It was terrific.”
She dropped her head and then her swollen eyes fell on the brilliant ring on her finger. She lifted her hand and let the soft light strike on it. “This ring,” she said, half to herself, and smiling apologetically. “It’s just fake, though the ring is real white gold. I paid forty-five dollars for it, on a sale, and you just can’t tell that it isn’t a diamond, honestly. Only a jeweler could; one of those manmade things, you know? Everybody thinks it’s real. I tell them Jerry gave it to me when we got engaged.”
Sudden exhaustion took her and she leaned back in the chair and coughed weakly. Her massive body took on the lines of dissolution and collapse, and she became smaller. Her voice was hardly above a whisper. “And that’s all. It’s all I ever had, a few dreams. Did they hurt anybody? No. Sure, they were lies, though sometimes I’d think they were true. It didn’t hurt me. I don’t see how I could have lived without them, Doctor.
“But now I’m awful tired, though the company doctors say I’m in good health. I get to thinking. I’ve got seven thousand dollars, and a job, and I won’t have a job much longer. They wanted to retire me this year, but how am I going to live on eighty-five or ninety dollars a month Social Security? So they’re letting me stay on awhile, after I explained to them. The company psychiatrist asks me, ‘How about an aunt, or cousin, or daughter, or sister or brother you could live with, or a close friend, doubling up?’ And I just laugh. I say I want to be independent and I want to keep my nest-egg. My God, suppose I got real sick for a year or something! How would I get along?
“Lots of people say that I should have saved more, but I saved every penny I could, and it isn’t enough, and there were all those years before and after the war when I was making only enough to get by with. And the money’s drawing interest in the bank. I hope they’ll let me go on until it’s about nine thousand dollars, but the way money’s going down these days that isn’t much anyway. Somebody said I could buy an annuity, you know? You put in all your money, and they pay you so much a month, and I think it would be around ninety or maybe a hundred, and it’s ten years or life, and I could get along with the Social Security as well, but what if I live ten years more and they drop me? I don’t care if I die sooner, for there’s no one who’d want any money left, and besides the insurance company would keep what was left.
“It’s gotten to the point, Doctor, where I worry all the time. It takes every cent I make just to live these days, and I could use more. And then, after all these years! it keeps coming back to me about how I never really had anyone in my life, and when I do fall asleep I dream I’m back there in the orphan asylum and a kid again, or I dream about Aunt Sim and Uncle Ned, and the way they’d kick me around and starve me, and I dream of Jerry and how he’d beat me up, and that ratty room we lived in, and all the hours in the factory, and how cold and hungry I always
was, and when I wake up I’m in sweats and trembling, and I’m afraid all over again. Sometimes it takes me a couple hours before I can pretend I had everything, like I told you, just so I can get through another day.
“And then I’m so tired I can hardly wait to quitting time and I go home and can hardly eat, sometimes, and I’m afraid to go to bed because of the awful dreams.
“Oh, God, if I just had someone I could talk to, somebody who gave a damn about me, somebody I didn’t have to lie to and pretend to! Somebody who cared a little bit about me! When I get a cold I get scared to death, thinking about a doctor or who’d take care of me if I couldn’t work for a while, or bring me something to eat, or just care. Just once, just caring once. But I don’t have anybody and I never did.”
Her voice rose to a thin and lashing cry. “Oh, you can just sit there and you don’t care! They say you listen, but what good does it do? I’ve told you the truth and I bet you’re sitting there and laughing to yourself and thinking, It takes all kinds.’ It sure does, Doctor, it even takes kinds like me, God damn it!”
She pushed herself to her feet and she ran to the curtain and glared at it through streaming eyes. She saw the silver button, and remembered what she had heard, that if you wished to see the man who had listened to you you needed only to press that button. Recklessly, and sobbing deep in her chest, she struck the button with the palm of her hand, as a child would strike at something in its desperate misery.
The blue curtains flowed aside and the soft light lay upon the man who listens, and when Maude Finch saw his face and his great and agonized eyes, his loving and merciful eyes, she sprang back with a choked sound and she covered her mouth with her hands. She stared at him with wide, wet intensity and he regarded her gently, and slowly she let her hands fall and her tears became fewer and fewer. Still keeping her eyes on him she put her hand behind her and groped for the chair. She sat down and let her lids drop. She began to speak in a low voice.