“Accept my felicitations on your public spirit. And now you want—?”
They looked at one another. Neither of them said it, the words. It was Martin who looked away. “She’s a good girl,” he said, in that flat, slow voice. “Good as any of them. She wouldn’t shame you. Or anybody there. I’d see to that.”
“You are an expert and a prophet with daughters as well as with paving contracts, are you?”
“I’d see to it. I’d give you my promise. My word.”
Blount rose, quickly. He stood erect behind the desk: a slight man, not as tall as the other. “I dont doubt that you can put your daughter into a much higher place than my poor influence could,” he said. “A place to which she is obviously entitled, for being her father’s daughter if for nothing else. That was all you wanted with me?”
Martin had not risen. “Maybe you think I meant a check,” he said. “That would have to go through the bank. I mean cash.”
“You have it with you?”
“Yes.”
“Good-day, sir,” Blount said.
Martin did not move. “You name the figure, and I’ll double it.”
“Good-day, sir,” Blount said.
Outside, in the corridor, the caller put on his hat slowly. He stood there for a time, motionless. He mumbled his mouth slowly, as though he were chewing something. “Hit was the money,” he said at last. “What use has a durn fellow like that got for money? But it’s something. You cant tell me that ere a man breathing breath.…”
II
Where Madison Avenue joins Main Street, where the trolleys swing crashing and groaning down the hill at the clanging of bells which warn and consummate the change of light from red to green, Memphis is almost a city. Farther up or down Main Street it is the country town magnified; the street might have been lifted bodily from the Arkansas or Mississippi hinterland: the same parking-zones carefully striped in fading and tire-scarred paint and disregarded, the same dingy windows full of brogans and glazed vermilion oxfords and underwear with fly-specked bargain-tags, the same optimistic and flamboyant fire-and-clearance sale signs painted on weathered and flapping domestic banners.
At Main and Madison though, where four tall buildings quarter their flanks and form an upended tunnel up which the diapason of traffic echoes as at the bottom of a well, there is the restless life and movement of cities; the hurrying and purposeful going to-and-fro, as though the atomic components were being snowed down within a given boundary, to rush in whatever escaping direction and vanish like snow, already replaced and unmissed. There are always people standing there. Some are beggars, with tin cups and pencils, some hawkers with toys that dance on the pavement or with nostrums; some are stenographers and clerks and youths from the schools in balloon pants and bright sweaters, waiting for trolleys; some are touts for the secret crap-and-poker games and sporting-houses; some are visitors from Arkansas and Mississippi in town for the day, or bankers and lawyers and the wives and daughters of bankers and lawyers who live in the fine houses on Peabody and Belvedere and Sandeman Park Place, waiting for husbands or for private cars. Whoever you are, if you walk past the corner three times, you will see someone whom you know and will be looked at by fifty others who will be interested in the fact of your passing; so that each afternoon when Dr Blount left his office, which was in that block, he would pause at the street door and, if it was winter time, he would draw about his throat and lower face his silk scarf and button his coat and say, “Now for the ordeal,” and step out into the street as though it were a cold tub. There was a back way out of the building, but he would not take it. He would pause at the front door and then enter the ceaseless throng and walk up the street to Madison and turn toward the river, to the open parking-ground where he left his car, walking a little faster until he had reached the car and unlocked the door and got in and closed the door after him. Then he would realise that he had been sweating into his clothes. “It’s because they dont know me,” he would say. “They just know me as what I look like, what I hate to be; not what I am.”
He would look neither to the right nor the left. The people standing at the corner—the Arkansas and Mississippi farmers in wool or gingham shirts without ties; the clerks, the mechanics, the stenographers with shining rayon legs and rouge bought at Woolworth’s, would see a slight, smallish man, dapperly dressed, mistaking an eager face sick with nerves and self-doubt for that of a successful road-house owner or cotton factor or merchant; anyway, one who had money in the bank and who slept well at night in a good bed cool or warm at wish or will, in a room into which the sound of the city scarcely came. They could not know that through the fitted coat he had so long since taught himself to feel the impact of eyes that more than likely did not even remark his passing with curiosity or speculation or derision, that he now carried the impact of them on with him like specks of pepper on a piece of raw flesh, until the door of his coupe had shut behind him. In the car he felt better. He would drive back past the corner, waiting perhaps for the abrupt, savage bell and the change of lights, aware of people standing there, but not as individuals, thoughts, speculations, eyes. Then they were a part of the scene: the globular lamps curving downward and away along the diminishing asphalt like twin loops of a pearl necklace on a dark narrow bosom; the buildings, the signs, the noise: Memphis, where he had been born in the same house where his grandfather had been born before him.
He was forty. He had never married. He lived with his grandmother, an invalid of ninety, and the maiden sister of his father. He was an only child. His mother died when he was born. His father, alive, was a bluff, loud man, a practical man, an inferior and successful doctor who liked to get up at three and four oclock in the morning and make calls among Greek and Italian immigrants on the edge of town. When Blount was a child, his father would sometimes tease him and lead him on and then trick him into some exposition of self, into one of those harmless revelations, betrayals of dignity, which are so tragic to children. He would run from the room, followed by his father’s booming shout, and run up the stairs and into a dark closet where linen was kept, where he would crouch. He would tremble, feel faint; he would perspire and writhe with impotent agony, though he would not cry. He would crouch in the dark, his eyes wide, his ears preternaturally attuned, though he knew not what for, feeling his sweat against his clothes, feeling his body cold under the sweat, yet still sweating. He would think about supper, of having to go down to the table, and his stomach would coil and knot like a fist, though he had perhaps been hungry the moment before his father caused him to betray himself. As the moment for the ringing of the supper bell drew near, he would live years, suffer miseries of indecision, since the sweating would cause his glands to overfunction; he would taste saliva and be very hungry. He would steal into the diningroom before the meal was on the table. He would be at his place when the others came in, motionless, his head bowed as though he waited, not a blow, but rather to be doused without warning with a pail of water. In the meantime his aunt had spoken to his father, and he was let be. Sitting at his place he would watch himself with a kind of horror eat and eat and eat. Then he knew that when he went to bed he would fall asleep quickly and wake thirty minutes later as though a clock had rung inside him, and be violently ill. Knowing this, sitting in the library after supper while his father read the paper and his aunt sewed, he would take a crying fit, inexplicable to all of them, himself included, with the exception of his aunt, who would believe that she knew. “He hasn’t been well for a day or so,” she would say, and she would give him medicine which he did not need and put him to bed herself, where he would go off almost immediately to sleep, to wake up thirty minutes later and be violently sick until nature relieved him of both supper and medicine. When he was grown, a medical student and then a doctor himself, he still found himself now and then, with that same horror and despair, tricked by circumstances into corresponding self-betrayals of his sense of fitness, though he did without the linen closet, as he had learned to curb the
ensuing desire to overeat. Nevertheless, on these occasions he still waked up thirty minutes later, nauseated, sweating, though empty and inwardly cold. Then he would believe that he was going to die and, sitting up in bed, his thin hair dishevelled, his face pale and intent, his senses taut as though the skin on his face were attuned with listening, he would time his own pulse and take his own temperature with a thermometer carried in a tube with a clip for the pocket like a fountain pen.
He had inherited his father’s practice, which after fifteen years had become a matter of routine calls upon four or five old women suffering from gout and indolence, since he was comfortably well-to-do in his own right, save that his grandmother and his aunt had incomes and reversions out of the estate. He kept an office downtown however, which, though he did not know it, was the equivalent of the linen closet of his childhood; and, pausing just within the door to take that mental deep breath before stepping into the street, his “Now for the ordeal” was the counterpart of the old agony and misery of indecision that must be overcome, while he crouched in the dark closet waiting for the supper bell of his childhood.
His relations with his patients could hardly be called contacts with the contemporary scene, with any living scene. What suffering they did was from that which no doctor could alleviate or cure: it was from time and flesh. They lived in smug, solid, airless bedrooms, where they spent the hour of his visit talking of the patient’s girlhood, of her parents and first children in the years immediately following the Civil War; while Blount, his face quiet though still eager, a little diffuse, talked out of the tales he had heard from his grandmother of that time, as though he had himself been there. When he was younger he was at one time, for a brief interval, conscious that he had not yet given over linen closets. “I am an old woman, myself,” he told himself. “They just got the bodies mixed up and put me into the wrong one, too late.” That was why, while in France, on a base hospital staff, he deliberately picked a fight with a man larger than he was and went into the affair shaking with dread but not fear and without skill or hope, and was severely beaten. But the triumph, the glow, did not even last into slumber. “It wouldn’t have, if I had whipped him, even,” he said to himself; the next day he was ashamed of his black eye, his missing teeth. He asked to be, and was, transferred to another hospital, where he told of having been attacked by a patient suffering from shell-shock.
He returned home and for the next ten years he watched his practice drop away to four or five old women dying slowly and querulously in huge, ugly, wealthy houses set on streets with evocative names, of Confederate generals and battlefields: Forrest Avenue, and Chickamauga and Shiloh Place, sitting for long afternoons shut away by the close, stale walls from the uproar and the fury. “It’s because I like the smell,” he told himself. “I like the smell of old female flesh.”
His single contact with the scene which he inhabited was his chairmanship of the Nonconnah Guards. He had held it twelve years; each December he led the ball at which the season’s debutantes were presented, and though there was no smell of old female flesh here, and though he still did not know it, this office—the minor and spurious importance of choosing music and decorators and caterers and checking and approving lists of names—was another linen closet.
The Guards was organised in 1859, by fifty-one young men of the city, all bachelors. The battalion elected officers and received a National Guard charter, the major being Dr Blount’s grandfather. They gave a ball that year, and in the two succeeding Decembers. In 1861 the battalion resigned its charter and joined the Confederate Army. In 1865 sixteen of them returned home. The organization was interdict by the Federal government, the sixteen members scattered about the South at the head of night-riding bands, terrorising and intimidating negroes, sometimes with reason, sometimes not. When the last of the carpetbaggers were expelled and the negro marshals and representatives who had run the state governments since the war were sent back to the cotton fields, the Guards reorganised and received its charter back and gave another ball, which it had continued to do each December. Its status was now restored; it had a skeleton staff of Regular Army officers, with an inner hierarchy of elective social officers, the ranking one being the Flag-Corporal, the office which Dr Blount held, having been elected to it in a Paris café in 1918.
III
Once his coupe had dropped down the hill from Main Street and turned through the traffic into Union Avenue, where the congestion ravelled out into swift parallel lines with no more lights and bells, he would become cool. The sweat would evaporate; he would feel a cool vacuum between his body and his clothing. His body would feel firm, as though motion isolated him, molded him anew, the man a man now, rushing in a close, closed, lonely glass cabinet along the smooth and hissing asphalt. Then he would begin to look about, to look ahead, calling the streets before he reached them: the names evocative of old lost battles, of men in—he liked to believe, to think of them—some valhalla of the undefeated, galloping with long tossing hair and brandished sabres forever on tireless horses: Beauregard, Maltby, Van Dorn; Forrest Park with a stone man gallant on a gallant stone horse; Forrest: a man without education, a soldier as Goethe was a poet, whose tactics for winning battles was to git thar fustest with the morest men, and in whose command Blount’s grandfather had been killed. He passed a street, slowing, one whole side of which was already torn up and dotted with pieces of red cloth nailed limply to sticks, and in the middle distance of which Italians and negroes labored with picks and shovels. “A monument,” he said. “But not more enduring than brass, thank God.”
IV
The room was a bedroom, a big, square room cluttered with heavy furniture. An old woman reclined in a deep chair before the fire, wrapped in rugs. Blount sat on a straight chair beside her, leaning forward, talking. “That was the first time I ever saw him, when he was sitting there in my office, offering me money to let his daughter come to the Ball. He had the money with him. In cash. But I had never seen him before. I had heard of him, of course; especially on election years when you alls’ women clubs get out reform tickets to drive the high priest of corruption out of town. But I didn’t know about him. I didn’t even know that he was an outlander. Maybe if I had, my civic pride— You know; if robbed we must be, let it be by our own thieves.”
“Is he an outlander?” the woman said.
“He came from down in Mississippi. He owned a grocery store, maybe a filling station too, out on the edge of town at first. He lived over the store, with his wife and child; that wasn’t as long ago as you’d think, considering where he lives now. His house is fine. It’s bigger than the Morro Castle at the Saint Louis Fair was. It must have eight or ten acres of red tiles on the roof alone.”
“How do you know all this?”
“Anybody can see his house. You cant help but see it. You can see it almost as far as you can see Sears and Roebuck’s.”
“I mean, about him.” She was watching Blount.
“I found out. I asked. Do you think I’d let a man try to bribe me, without finding out all I could about him?”
“So you will know whether the bribe will be good or not?”
Blount stopped in midspeech. He looked at the woman. “Do you — Good Lord. I.… You’re kidding me, as the children say nowadays. I suppose I could be bribed to betray myself; I expect that all men, modern men, can. Have their price. But not to betray people who have put trust in me.”
“By electing you head of a dancing-club,” the woman said.
His mouth was already shaped for talk, for rebuttal. Then he closed it. “Fiddlesticks,” he said. “Why do I argue with you? You cant understand. You’re just a woman. You cant understand how a man feels about valueless things, things that dont have a dollar mark on them. If this had a current price, a value in coins, I would believe you at once. Of course they wouldn’t mind, the other girls, the guests. The girls wouldn’t know her and the men wouldn’t dance with her. She’d just have a rotten time. We know that. We aren’t co
ncerned with her.”
“Who are you concerned with?”
“I dont know. That’s it. I just dont know what I have to do.”
“You didn’t have to go and see the man again.”
“How did you know—” He looked at her, his jaw slacked. His face was thin, sick, intense. He closed his jaw. “Yes. I sent for him. Wrote him a note. He came back, in the same suit. He offered to build a new armory for the Guards. We talked. He told me about himself—”
“And you accepted the armory?”
“No. You know I didn’t. I would not sell the Guards to him because, once he had bought them, they would have no value; they would not be the Guards. If I could sell Forrest Park to him for instance, or sell him what Van Dorn Avenue stands for. So we talked. He was born and raised on a Mississippi plantation. Tenant-farmers; you know: barefoot, the whole family, nine months in the year. There were six children, in a one-room-and-leanto cabin, he the youngest. Sometimes nearby, but usually from a distance, he would see the owner of the land on a saddle-horse, riding over the fields among the tenants, calling them by their first names and they saying Sir to him; and from the road that passed before the big house, he (he would slip away from home, when the rest of his family were in the field) would see the owner lying in a hammock under the trees, at two and three and four oclock in the afternoon, when his own father and mother and sisters and brothers were among the shimmering cotton-rows in sweaty gingham and straw hats like things salvaged out of trash bins.
“One day his father sent him up to the big house with a message. He went to the front door. A nigger opened it, one of the few niggers in that country, neighborhood; one of a race whom his kind hated from birth, through suspicion and economic jealousy and, in this case, envy; performing, as his people did, work which niggers would not do, eating food which the niggers at the big house would have scorned. The negro barred the door with his body; while they stood so, the boss himself came up the hall and looked out at the boy in worn overalls. ‘Dont you ever come to my front door again,’ the boss said. ‘When you come here, go to the back door. Dont you ever come to my front door again.’ And there was the nigger behind the boss, in the house, grinning behind the boss’ back. He—Martin—told me he could feel the nigger’s white eyeballs on his back as he returned down the drive, without delivering the message, and the nigger’s white teeth cracked with laughing.