The Complete Stories of Morley Callaghan - Volume Two Read online

  “Go ahead, Marjorie,” he said, calling her by her first name.

  “It’s about Tony. I wanted to ask you about him.”

  “I’ll tell you all I know,” he said cheerfully. “What is it?”

  “He wants me to go out with him, and he offered to help me. He seems a nice fellow in some ways. But I don’t know. I thought I’d ask you.”

  As Ben looked at Miss Wilson, he smiled: he smiled in the way he and Tony had smiled that night they had talked lazily about her. Besides, Tony had loaned him money and had been friendly. Without even closing his eyes he could see a picture of Tony with his shining black head, good white teeth and uneasy glance. So Ben smiled at Miss Wilson and said, “Tony and I always get along all right together. As far as I’m concerned he’s a great guy.”

  “He’s a friend of yours, is he?”

  “Sure he is. He’s all right.”

  “Thanks,” she said quietly, and she got up with a slow awkward movement as if she didn’t know what to say. “I know he has many friends,” she said. “I’ve heard the parties he has in his place. Twice he asked me in but I didn’t go.”

  She seemed to be held there in the room, finding some excuse to stay, felt there was something she was feeling but could not say, even while she knew she had to leave in a moment. It was as though she was waiting, without actually having any hope and without daring to look at him after her first shy glance. Then she astonished him by saying abruptly, “Have you got a girl?”

  “Three or four of them,” he said, laughing.

  “Haven’t you got one you like awfully well, or don’t you bother with girls?”

  She was staring at him so frankly that he felt inexperienced and a little foolish. Ben always seemed so sure of himself in a kind of undisturbed manner, and now he was embarrassed and felt something within him trying to draw away from her. The words she was using were unimportant, but her tone was so insistent that he felt resentful. She was standing with her head on one side looking at him curiously, and then for some reason he made a rather silly, low bow to her, smiling blandly and chuckling with a very artificial good humor as he straightened up.

  While she waited for him to speak her expression became defiant and almost sullen. Turning sharply, she left the room, calling back, “Good-bye. I almost forgot to get dressed for Tony.”

  Ben was upset but he shrugged his shoulders, thinking, “What’s the matter with her? She knows Tony much better than I do. She’s known him a long time.” But her face had looked beautiful, and something had been bothering her, something she despaired of expressing. “It’s hard to say what she’d have said if she got started,” he thought. Ben should have gone on packing, but instead, he went along the hall to Tony’s apartment, smiling broadly as if he had a good joke to tell.

  Tony had just finished dressing. His face, hair, hands were shining with cleanliness. “Hello, Ben,” he said easily. “What’s on your mind?”

  “Marjorie Wilson just told me she was going out with you.”

  “That’s right, and I mustn’t make any mistakes tonight. What did you say to her?”

  “She wanted to know all about you.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said you were a great guy.”

  “Good. Here, shake. Sit down and have a beer. I’ve got two bottles.” Tony began to laugh with extraordinary heartiness. “It will be like taking candy from a baby, Ben. I’ve been nursing her along for months and she knows it.” He spoke with such smug good humor that Ben had an inexplicable resentment. But after they had had a glass of beer the two young men felt a companionable warmth developing between them, so they smiled and talked about Marjorie Wilson. Tony, when his earthy face was creased with smiles, seemed to represent such a vast tolerance that everything but good fellowship became unimportant. As they sat talking, Ben played up to Tony. He wanted Tony to see that he, too, was a man without prejudices who accepted everything as it happened. Besides, Marjorie Wilson had stared at him with such a curious, half-contemptuous smile that he had been irritated, and now it was pleasant to find that his irritation had disappeared and he was enjoying the warmth of Tony’s good nature.

  “I’ve got to finish my packing,” said Ben at last, and he shook hands with Tony, saying, “Just in case I don’t see you again. Have a good time.”

  But as he walked back to his own room he began to wonder again what was bothering Miss Wilson. “What did she want from me, anyway?” he thought. Remembering that she had hurried out of his apartment as if she were going to cry, he stopped not far away from her door. Standing outside the door, he could not hear a sound and he imagined she was lying down and maybe crying. He felt sure then that she knew all about Tony, and all about his life and what he would want from her. “Why did she bother me about it then?” he thought angrily.

  While he went on packing in his own room Ben knew he was listening so he would hear them go out, listening, going often to the window because it was a sultry night. The street outside looked hot and still. There had been no breeze for a long time. It was not quite dark.

  Then he saw them going along the street together, Miss Wilson with her brown felt hat taking short little steps and looking straight ahead as she walked beside Tony who was holding her arm. She was leaning close to Tony. Ben watched, his face pressed against the window, till they were out of sight, and then he leaned back and said, “All right, what about it? She’s nothing to me. She knows far more about this town than I do. What did she expect me to do?” he kept thinking. At last he felt so irritated he took his hat and went over to the corner restaurant to have a cup of coffee. And he sat at the counter with his hat pulled down over his eyes, trying to read over again the same stories in the morning paper while he kept on seeing her, sometimes with her hat off and her hair all glossy, and sometimes as she had looked going along the street beside Tony.

  The night was sultry and the smell of food cooking in the restaurant kitchen began to madden him, so he left and went out to the street. He took off his coat, and opened his shirt at the throat and walked very slowly; but there was one question that kept falling heavily into his thoughts, falling as steadily as his footsteps on the pavement, “Why did I have to be loyal to Tony?” Until that moment when she had asked about Tony there had never been any feeling of loyalty for him, it had come suddenly in the way that two fellows help each other about a girl. And he wondered why he had tried to play up to Tony and had wanted him to think he was a man like himself as they shared a bottle of beer.

  There was no light in Tony’s room when Ben got home. They had not returned. He felt so tired he threw himself on the bed, leaving the rest of the packing till morning. But he could not sleep. He lay there feeling very young. Every time he thought of her going along the street with Tony he was dreadfully uneasy, as if he ought to have run after them and called out. He lay there, listening to the sounds from the street.

  Much later, he did not know what time it actually was, he heard them coming in: he heard Tony’s footsteps going one way along the hall and hers going the other and then the sound of the key being thrust into the lock on her door. By this time she would be taking off her hat, sitting down, and he felt so restless he sat up, saying, “There’s no use seeing her.” As soon as he had this notion he knew that he had been lying there waiting for these sounds, that something far too strong to be resisted was urging him into her room.

  His tie was pulled far away from the open collar of his shirt, his trousers were all wrinkled. Without putting on a coat, he hurried out to the hall and rapped lightly on her door. When she opened the door she had on an old blue dressing gown and her dark hair was in a loose bunch on her neck. Her face was still powered and her lips very red. She had been smoking a cigarette. As soon as he saw her he felt helpless, she looked so beautiful. Up to this time he had always been able to laugh when she looked at him, now he was suddenly shy and timid. Stepping into the room before she was able to say anything to him, he closed the door and said, as if
he had been holding his breath, “You’re back, Marjorie?”

  “Yes, I’m back. What do you want?” she said.

  “I don’t know. I guess I must have been waiting.”

  Cool and resentful, she stared at him, then she said, “What on earth do you want now? I’m tired. I’m going to bed.”

  “Marjorie,” he said, “Where did . . .” But he hesitated, trying to avoid asking this question. Then he suddenly blurted out, “Where did you go with Tony?”

  “None of your business,” she said, fierce and blunt.

  “Promise me just one thing, will you?”

  “I won’t promise you anything.”

  “Don’t see Tony again?”

  “You’re a little late with your advice, aren’t you?” she asked, twisting her mouth. Then her face became solemn, almost wooden, though her eyes still retained the expression of sullen resentment. “Tony’s not so bad,” she said lazily. “There are worse in the world.”

  “Keep away from Tony.”

  “I guess I’ll do as I please about that,” she said.

  “You’ve got to promise. I’ll make you,” he said.

  She began to back away from him. He grabbed hold of her arm and held her while she started to struggle, pounding him with her fists as if she hated him. “Don’t dare come near me,” she kept saying. He was twisting her arm and saying all the time, “You’ve got to promise to keep away from Tony.” Her face was white, her eyes were closed and she was trembling all over and crying softly.

  “Please let me sit down, Ben,” she said.

  “I didn’t mean to hurt you,” he said.

  She sat down on a small couch, pulling her old blue dressing gown tight around her. Ben sat awkwardly beside her with his hand on her shoulder. Then he wanted to start kissing her. It gave him the first contentment he had had all evening to know he wanted to make love to her. It seemed just a further part of the feeling he had been having earlier, watching her at the window.

  The Bride

  That last night at the hotel, Eleanor, standing in front of the bureau mirror, was smiling at herself with her warm soft eyes as she put on her black hat with the rose veil. She had been married only six days. She was such a gentle, quiet girl, with her slender ankles, her dainty hands, and the fine high bridge on her nose, that everybody who knew her thought she ought to have married a doctor or a lawyer with a good practice who could have given her some security.

  Eleanor was waiting for her husband to come in and take her out to the theater. Since she had never worn a veil with a hat before, she kept hurrying seriously from the bureau to the bathroom mirror, peering at herself and fretting and feeling quite sure that Walter’s eyes would light up with helpless admiration as soon as he saw her. “Then we’ll rush out to the show and rush back and get some sleep and get up early,” she thought. In the morning they were going third-class on the boat to Europe. Everything was taking place so rapidly. They were alone and together, they were actually married, and there was a kind of sweet, uneasy pleasure in letting each small new experience astonish and sweep her from one day into another without letting her stop to grow timid. “I just love this little veil. It’s perfect, it’s stunning,” she thought.

  Walter, coming into the room, called out, “Are you ready, Eleanor?” As she glanced at her pretty face in the mirror, she said, “I’m all ready. I won’t keep you a minute,” and watched with placid assurance for him to take one long, admiring look at her before they hurried out together. He came slowly into the bathroom, hardly seeing her. There was a dreamy, pleased expression in his eyes. Walter was a lazy-moving young man of middle height whose face kept folding in warm smiles. He was carrying a newspaper opened at a particular page. In a most casual manner, to conceal his own deep satisfaction, he held out the paper and said, “Look at this, Eleanor. There’s a little piece here about my winning the scholarship.”

  “Isn’t that lovely,” she said. “Is it a big piece? Let me see.” She pushed her veil back from her eyes.

  As he handed her the paper, he seemed rather bored, so she just glanced once at the article to see his name and the space devoted to him and then she smiled and said, “That’s splendid, isn’t it, dear?” Eleanor still thought they were in a hurry to go out and that he wouldn’t want her to delay and read the paper. “I’m ready, darling,” she said, hoping he would notice her little black veil.

  But he frowned and there was a sullen expression on his face. His blue eyes got bright with bewildered indignation and he blurted out, “Do you mean to say you won’t take time to read that little bit there?”

  “I thought we were in a hurry, that’s all,” she said, but she faltered and felt disturbed beyond all reason. “I mean I thought we could read it when we came home. You told me to be sure and he ready.”

  “But imagine your being able to go out without reading it when you know it all means so much to me. Just imagine.”

  “I’ll read it,” she said. “Give it to me.”

  “Don’t bother,” he said, “I know you look at my work differently than I do. What’s everything to me is so often nothing to you. Come on, we’ll be late.”

  “But I said I’d read it,” she cried, snatching the paper.

  “Go ahead, then. Read it out of duty.” He sighed, shrugged his shoulders, and said, “I can’t understand you. If you’re not really interested, why are you going off to Europe on a wild-goose chase? We’ll have hardly any money for two, barely enough to live on. If we go broke, you’ll probably want me to quit and come back and get a job.”

  They were in the bedroom now and she sat down by the window to try to read the piece in the paper, but the printed letters kept dancing up and down and her veil kept dropping in front of her eyes. She was hurt, yet she knew she had hurt him, too. “Why didn’t I read it when he first handed it to me?” she thought. “I don’t know why I didn’t.”

  Walter was saying moodily, “Come on, let’s go, Eleanor.”

  “If you feel the way you say, I don’t want to go out with you,” she said. “If you talk like that about me, I won’t go to the show.” But as she spoke, she pleaded with her eyes, wanting him to apologize and comfort her and say he had been wrong.

  “Come on,” he said irritably. “It’s just a little thing. Forget it.”

  “You don’t think it such a little thing or you wouldn’t still be so nasty, so I won’t go with you while you feel that way,” she said resentfully.

  “All right, don’t,” he said, blunt and angry. “I can’t help it if I feel that way.” He flung himself on the bed and tried to show by his inert indifference that he was a reasonable, good-tempered fellow who was interested mainly in humoring his wife. They were both silent. Then Walter began to feel miserable and more and more bewildered. In the months before the marriage, their relationship had seemed so simple, but already he had begun to feel a pulling and straining between them over very little things that was bewildering because it hurt so much. As he looked at Eleanor sitting forlornly by the window, he could not stand this separation and he felt his whole being drifting toward her. “What really matters deeply to her?” he asked himself. He thought of the hours she had listened to him talking and had seemed so animated by anything that stirred him at all. “I don’t know why this has to happen,” he said mildly. “I’m not going to sit here saying nothing. The whole thing is of no importance. I’m going downstairs to the lobby.”

  “Suit yourself,” she said stubbornly.

  When he had gone, she tried to behave like a sensible woman who was prepared to enjoy a quiet evening by herself. She took off her coat and hat, put on a negligée, got herself an apple, and lay down on the bed to read. The window in the room looked across at another wing of the hotel, and laughter drifting across from those lighted open windows began to make her feel restless and lonesome. Very slowly she nibbled at her apple, staring at one spot on the printed page and trying to understand how Walter could speak with so much bitterness about a simple matter o
f having his name mentioned in the paper, and as she frowned there grew in her a dull, heavy fear of all the trifling matters for disagreement that might arise and grow big and sharp enough to separate them. She felt even worse because her fear was so mixed up with her ache of love for him. Her mother had said, “Eleanor, you’ve only known the man a year. It’s very silly to get married now. You’ll never have anything ahead. Just because the boy has a chance to go to Europe for a year, he wants to take you with him.” Within her grew an increasing dread of all the days ahead, days sure to be full of such abrupt, surprising disagreements . . . in the morning they were going far away to a strange country where she would have no friends if she should find herself alone. Even in the hotel room, where she could hear the noise of laughter from open windows, she became so afraid of being alone that she felt helpless; she began to cry.

  She was still crying when Walter came in. He had made up his mind to come sauntering into the room smiling with tolerant good nature to conceal his awkwardness, so he got confused when he saw her and rushed across the room with a white, worried face, saying, “What’s the matter?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, and she kept crying.

  “Can’t I do anything?” he said, caressing her head.

  “No, I guess I’m just lonesome, that’s all. Can’t I cry if I want to?”

  “Why are you so lonesome?”

  “I wish I were home,” she said. “I don’t want to go so far away.”

  “You’re afraid of how things will turn out,” he said angrily.

  “Maybe I’m afraid. I don’t know.”

  She lay with her black curled hair against the clean white pillow and heard him walking up and down, up and down, and at last she stopped crying.

  “We’re very silly,” he said finally. “I’m ashamed. To make it worse, there was nothing to it at all. But it’s my fault. Please forgive me, Eleanor.”