“She looked like Agnes, standing and whirling and curtsying before me,” he said to the man behind the blue curtain. “And then she must have seen my face, for she ran up to me and kissed me and said, ‘Daddy, I’ll never really leave you, never.’ But she did, she did. She left the next day, and we’ll never see her again. I don’t care what the priest tried to tell us. Pat is gone. Twelve years. She’s all dust now, our little girl, all empty bones and worm-eaten lace and satin. Sometimes, thinking of it, I can’t stand it.”
He put his thin hands over his thin face and pressed them, and when he removed them his dry flesh was red and seemed as sore as if scoured by new tears. But he had long forgotten how to cry. He hadn’t cried since he was a child. He couldn’t cry now, though the very last was on him and his life had come to an end.
“I said to Agnes,” he continued, in his curiously toneless voice which was the very echo of despair, “that we’d reached the end now. I didn’t want to live. I wanted to go to some quiet place and lie down and die. Then the comforters came again. The priest—at least he’s Agnes’ priest. With his, ‘I am the Resurrection and the Life—’ I don’t want Pat ‘resurrected,’ damn it! I want my sweet real Pat, in her own body, with her teasing and her running and her shouting on the stairs, and sunburned in her white shorts, and her hair tousled, and the way she would whirl around on her bicycle and play with the dog—rolling over and over on the grass with him. That’s the girl I want back, not some transcendental angel with wings, not real, not warm and human. As if I ever believed in that crap, anyway.
“Yes, the comforters came again, the ones with their sound money in the banks and in investments and not in a shattered business, the ones with sons and daughters at home. People whose houses weren’t threatened, and a whole lifetime of work. People who were safe. I could see their self-righteousness. All this tragedy hadn’t happened to them—because they were better people than Agnes and me! I could see it on their faces, their smugness, and even under their soothing words. Why, I heard one man, another best friend, actually say to some other people when he didn’t know I was near him, ‘Poor old Frank. Well, I guess my wife and I live right, that’s all.’ And that meant that in some way Agnes and I had offended their supercilious God and were being punished by Him! If that’s the kind of God He is, their God, who the hell wants Him? If He afflicts senselessly, the way we were afflicted, then He either doesn’t exist or Agnes and I are better people than He is. We wouldn’t treat our worst enemy as He has treated us.”
He leaned forward in the white marble chair, broken like a dried branch, for he was very thin now and his brown hair had turned very gray over the past three months, and his eyes moved in their sockets like dead and lifeless mud, dully, sightlessly.
“The comforters! ‘Perhaps it is all for the best. God knows. His ways are mysterious. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the Name of the Lord!’ What kind of nonsense is that? ‘Blessed be the Name of the Lord,’ because He let Pat and that boy be killed by a drunken criminal! The comforters! Why did they come? There wasn’t any real pity in them. They were complacent. Agnes says they weren’t, but I’ve dealt long enough with people to know what they were. For death had passed by their houses and hadn’t come in; death had ridden on the highways with their sons and their daughters, and he hadn’t put his hand on them. Death didn’t stand on their doorsteps; he didn’t afflict them with—disease. Oh, my God!” cried Francis Stoddard. “Oh, my God! Why did it all happen to us? Our only child, our only child. Oh, my God! There isn’t any way out now for me. I’ve known that for three months.”
Again he put his hands over his face. The horrors of his life seemed to be crowding about him, like unclean black monsters, slimy and violent; he had overcome them, but now it was nothing. They had returned to exult over him.
He said, “The comforters. Financial disaster hadn’t struck at them, depriving them of a whole life’s work, threatening them with disgrace and penury and total loss. As if that wasn’t enough to kill a man. Then—Pat.
“It’s easy enough to comfort people like me when you can go home and sleep peacefully, and talk to your children. And under all that comfort—well, old Frank was being punished for something or other by an obscene God, or at the very least he wasn’t much good or he wouldn’t have gotten himself in that spot, losing his business which had been his father’s business, too. Old Frank wasn’t very bright, at that. Poor Agnes, to be married to a failure. Yes, it was too bad about Pat—but those things happen every day.
“They didn’t happen to my dear old friends. They still don’t happen. They go on with their placid, rich, comfortable lives, serene and self-congratulatory, making plans for their children, playing with their grandchildren. My God!” cried Francis Stoddard, moving furiously in his chair, “I’d like to see them suffer a little what Agnes and I have suffered, not only the financial failure—and my Pat—but almost from the very minute I was born!”
His gaunt face became shrunken with terrible resentment and anger. “I wasn’t born in this country,” he said. “I was born in one of the old wretched countries. And my real name isn’t Stoddard, either. It was one of those names Americans call ‘unpronounceable.’ My father changed it, not because he was ashamed of it, but because it stigmatized him as a ‘Polack.’ It made things tougher for him, if possible. He came with a pack on his back, all he owned. My mother carried some old blankets. Pa had wanted her to leave them behind, but she said—and she was a wise woman, my mother—‘Who knows? We might need them.’ And we did, for five starving, wretched years when my father worked for twelve dollars a week in a ditch or laboring in a factory. That was before the First World War. I was only a baby. My parents left the old country because they felt, in their peasants’ blood, that something terrible was going to happen to them if they didn’t leave at once. It did—to their families.”
He paused, then he smiled with infinite disgust and anguish. “Agnes tells me that the Holy Family ran away like that, for approximately the same reasons. I suppose I remember that from parochial school, in a miserable part of the city—another city than this. I didn’t pay much attention. I soon didn’t believe in a merciful God when I saw the mercilessness of the life my parents led. They had four more children besides me. They all died of tuberculosis and semi-starvation. And, I’d see my mother—I always see my mother like that—on her knees, meek as milk, praying her Rosary and telling about the will of God. The will of God, for Christ’s sake! Four little children dead because their parents couldn’t afford enough food for them or a decent place to live! No matter how hard my father worked, and he worked twelve hours a day six full days a week, and he was stooped like an old man at thirty and broken down, he couldn’t make enough money to keep his family clothed and adequately sheltered and fed. The parish—and it was as poor as we were—helped to bury my brothers and sisters.”
He paused. His face changed a little, then it became hard as steel again, and engraved with agony. He pushed the thought of the parishioners from him.
“I was the only one left. My father wanted to be a ‘real’ American. His boy was going to have an education, if it killed him, my father. My father was a proud man, even if he was only a ‘Polack.’ A good, God-fearing, devout man, trusting in the God who killed his children. Yes, I was going to have an education. My father looked for a way, but he didn’t find it for many years. His factory, the last one, manufactured windshield wipers, among other things. He invented a better one, simpler, more efficient. We became moderately rich, and I went to college. But I’d put in four years of hard work in a factory before that. I was a full-grown man by then. Besides the five years of grinding factory work I had worked after the hours in high school. My hands—look at them—are callused and bent and twisted, from all the work I did. And the dirt is in my soul, if I have one, and the cold and the misery and the contempt and hunger. They say you forget. You never forget. I’ll never forget the months of pain my mother suffered before she died
, the result of privation and the lack of money to have a doctor when she first became sick with cancer.”
His mouth parted in a gasp of torment. “My mother died before she could enjoy my father’s success. My father couldn’t get over it. ‘Maria never had it,’ he’d say. But—it was God’s will! My father died two years after I was graduated from college and took over his little factory. He wasn’t really alive after my mother died—”
Francis Stoddard stared bleakly at the blue curtain. He had come here only because Agnes had begged him to come. He had come because he refused to see a priest or talk with him. The only time he had ever come into contact with priests, after his rejection of God as a young boy, was when he had married Agnes and Pat had been baptized and confirmed. The priests! What did they know of a man’s bitterness and striving and hopelessness and terror, face to face with a dangerous and merciless world? Except, perhaps, for Father Nowaczysk, another “Polack” with tragic eyes, who had also been born in the “old country.” He, Francis Stoddard, refused to remember that old priest who had buried both his parents, and to whom he had refused to listen, turning away in despair and disgust.
Agnes had talked of the “comforter” here. Another one of Job’s pals! A priest. Another one who would talk of “God’s will.” Another one, perhaps, who would hint, as Job’s friends had hinted, that his afflictions were, in some way, a punishment on him for his “sins.”
“Why did you go to him, my darling?” he had asked Agnes, terrified that she knew the dreadful truth.
She had smiled at him tenderly. “Well, you wouldn’t listen to the priest of our parish—”
“About what?” He had pounced on her, the fear gripping him, the awful, sweating fear.
“Well.” She had looked at him, denying the truth he feared she knew, but which the doctors had told him she did not. “You won’t talk to Father—I thought you might—Why did I go to him? I thought I’d ask him—about you, Frank.”
“And what did he say?”
Her pale lips had trembled. “Everything,” she said.
“You saw him?”
She had sighed. “Yes, I saw him. Oh, yes.”
“And what did he say—about me?”
“He—well, he seemed to want to talk to you—about so many things. Frank, you’ve been so wretched so long. Frank, go to him for my sake, to please me.”
He wouldn’t be able to talk to her much longer. For her sake, to please her, he had come to this stupid place, and was now talking to the man coyly hidden behind that blue curtain—for Christ’s sake!—and he was talking as he had never talked to anyone before except Agnes. He couldn’t understand it. He was a reticent man, taciturn like all Poles, reserved and proud. No, he couldn’t understand it. He had just gotten started—Besides, it was so quiet here, so white and blue, so soundless. But the moment the priest there behind the curtain began his sanctimonious homilies he, Frank Stoddard, nee Stypscynzki, would laugh in his face and walk out. He would go home to Agnes—Oh, God, Oh, my God!
Because he had so much self-control he could bring his mind back to the moment. “Why should a man have to change his name to be accepted by people no better than himself, and perhaps not as good? Why should he be despised because of his race, or the accent in his voice—by ignoramuses who can hardly speak their own native language in decent syntax and in adequate communication? Why should he cringe because he had not been born where his peers—God help us!—had been born?
“I suppose you are an American priest, American born. Were you ever despised because of your parentage, your people, who were probably much more intelligent and more honorable people than your neighbors? Do you know what it is like to be jeered at on the street and called ‘Polack,’ or Tolski?’ Did you ever think twice before speaking so that your accent wouldn’t offend people who didn’t have a tenth of the native vocabulary that you had? Did you ever see the sneers on the faces of fools because of your pronunciation, or the ‘old country’ lilt when you spoke? Do you know what it is like to labor among brutes who mimic you or shut you out or treat you as if you were a swine or a yellow dog? Do you know what the laughter of animals is like? It makes you feel like an animal, yourself.
“That is only part of the misery I went through when I was a child in America. Once hoodlums broke the two windows in the little shack we lived in and the landlord held my father responsible—he was Polish, himself. And, by the way, do you know what it is like to have a richer member of your own people, your own race, imitate the contempt of others when speaking to your parents, or to you? ‘Dumb Polack.’ That was the very least of the epithets, from people who had been born here—and damn it, aren’t we all Europeans? Even if we’ve lived here for twenty generations? At least my people weren’t deported here from the British gutters and from the prisons!
“Oh, God. It doesn’t matter now. I don’t know why I’ve even mentioned it to you, who wouldn’t understand anyway. Even when I was graduated from college, even when I went into my father’s little factory, even when I married an ‘American’ girl—I never gained any assurance. I was always an outsider. I always will be. The bitterness is too deep. You don’t forget things you suffered when you were young. Your parents tell you of the great men of your race—but who cares among people who don’t even know the great men of the past in their own country?
“Yes, it’s part of the misery I’ve had to carry. Perhaps I’m more sensitive than most. I know my race is almost accepted in Detroit and Chicago; we’ve given a few mayors here and there, and Congressmen, and a Senator or two. But everyone always looks so surprised, and considers them an exception, for God’s sake. Oh, it doesn’t matter.”
But his face showed that it mattered, and that he would never forget. The sore was only one sore, however, in the enormous wound that was his heart now. And the wound was killing him, he who had been so brave and proud and defiant and strong for too many of his years. There came a time when a man thought he deserved some peace—but it was taken away.
I shouldn’t have told him of Pat, he thought. He is probably only thinking that, after all, it was twelve years ago, and “time heals all wounds.” The cant. Time doesn’t heal. You do go on, but you go on crippled. And this time I won’t even go on—
“I’ve told you I failed in my business. You don’t need the details. I was just trying to expand too fast; it was all in the air, expansion. Then I got down to bedrock. I hired some good mechanical engineers. We improved the windshield wipers, and diversified. I came back. But I won’t, and can’t, forget my ‘comforters’ who had found my failure a sort of vindication of their own virtue, their own smartness. Never mind.”
The cool sweetness of the room flowed all about him. “I think,” he said, “that’s all. I promised my wife to see you, to tell you some of my damned troubles. That’s all.”
But he had not spoken of the worst at all. He had spoken of it to only three doctors and to no one else, for fear of Agnes knowing. Now it seemed to him that he could actually see the wound that was spreading and bleeding in him. But to speak of it would be to reveal it to this silent and indifferent man behind the curtain. Not to speak of it made it easier to bear. Not to speak of it guarded Agnes from the knowing. Not to speak of it would prevent that stranger from trying to prevent what he, Frank Stypscynzki, intended to do tonight, tomorrow, or at least in the next month. Even thinking of it now was like a desperate relief in him, such as a prisoner, condemned to death on the scaffold next week, kills himself tonight to escape his executioners, his ceremonial, sadistic executioners. To die privately, to die alone—that retained a man’s dignity. His affairs were in order—
Are they?
He almost jumped from the chair, and his agonized heart struck against his chest. Then he fell back. He hadn’t heard the man speak. It was only his imagination. He heard himself saying, hurriedly, stammering, “There comes a time in many men’s lives, as it has in mine, when you just can’t go on living. You can’t endure it. It’s a—it’s a
kind of horror. Your mind—it won’t accept the fact that you may actually be alive. It refuses to think of it. It won’t have it. You’ve had enough. You’ve lost nearly everything—and now you’re faced with losing the last, and the best of it. How can you live?”
Agnes, forgive me, but how can I live? How can I live, watching you, waiting? Agnes, my darling, my gentle darling, you who have such faith in a God that doesn’t exist. Would you have such faith if I let you wait? But I can’t wait.
He heard himself, out of his agony, saying the words he had sworn he would never say here or anywhere else: “I am a potential murderer and suicide. No, not potential. I am going to kill my wife, then kill myself, very soon.”
He heard his voice, numbly, his calm, indifferent voice, his traitor’s voice. He jumped to his feet. That horrified listener there, the man who never spoke, would call the police! He would have him followed. He would tell Agnes. He would have him, the treacherous stupid fool, arrested, thrown into an insane asylum—and Agnes would die alone in all the torture of her disease, protected from him, the husband who had intended not to let her know that torture, nor his own. Then they would both lie, side by side, near Pat, and all the monstrous abomination of living would be behind them forever and it would be almost as good as if they had never been born. “In the grave there is no remembrance.” Not to remember all the terrible years of youth, the struggles of maturity, the stunning agony of loss, the final end of torment—yes, it would be almost as good as if it had never happened.
Now he would leave before the man could rush from behind that curtain or out of that door, and call those who would insist that Frank Stypscynzki endure to the end a life that should never have been lived. But the curtain did not stir, there was no movement behind it. He was probably waiting, the smart operator, for him to reveal his name.