The Complete Stories of Morley Callaghan - Volume Three Read online

  “To work.” Harriet’s pleasure was mixed with nervous concern; all that mattered now was that the woman should get home safely with her money. Still holding her arm firmly, she walked her out the gate to where taxis were waiting at the curb.

  When they stopped by a lamppost she said, “I’ll tell you what we’ll do. You’ll have to take a taxi. Wait. Lean against that post and give me the money.” When the little old woman had dutifully handed the money to her she knelt down and pretended to be fixing the lace on the woman’s shoe. But she drew the shoe off. Separating one ten-dollar bill from the roll, she made an insole out of the rest, laid it in the shoe and laced it up.

  “Remember now,” she insisted urgently, “don’t change your shoes when you get to work. Don’t touch that shoe till you get home. Understand?” And she didn’t stand up till the woman nodded like an excited conspirator.

  “Now take this ten dollars and pay for the taxi,” she said, handing the bill to her, and then she beckoned to a driver.

  “Thank you, Miss. God bless you,” the little old woman said when she was in the taxi. They smiled at each other mysteriously. The woman’s tired eyes were bright as a young girl’s. As the taxi pulled away, Harriet stood there glowing with satisfaction, for the woman’s luck seemed to be flowing around her and in her. She felt light-hearted, carefree and young, and could hardly turn away.

  Suddenly, she remembered Black Pirate in the fifth and she ran, frightened, through the gate. The race was on, and she knew Charlie would be down there at the rail, all keyed up, thinking the money was on Black Pirate. She couldn’t get her breath. She didn’t know what had happened to her. Charlie would never understand what had happened.

  “It’s Golden Arrow, Moonglow and Funny Face,” she heard over the loudspeaker, and she closed her eyes, unable to listen. Then the race was over and it was still Golden Arrow, Moonglow and Funny Face, and she sighed and felt weak.

  “Why, I’ve saved the fifty dollars,” she thought, making her way to the rail. “Maybe it’s my share of that little old woman’s luck.” It was a windfall, Charlie would see that it was an incredible windfall. He would laugh, and then wonder, and then he would see that it was intended so she could get the dress. He was waiting by the rail in his expensive light summer suit with the pale blue check, and he was watching her glumly.

  “What’s the matter? How can you smile?” he asked sourly, while she was still six feet away. “It’s your funeral, too.”

  “Wait a minute, Charlie. Wait a minute. It could be a lot worse.”

  “Sure. I could have broken my neck. My dough’s all gone.”

  “It isn’t gone, Charlie. Look,” and she opened her purse.

  “What is this?”

  “I didn’t bet on Black Pirate.”

  “You didn’t?”

  “No,” she said and she laughed and felt breathless. “I was too late. Oh you’ll like this, Charlie. Just as if — well, as if we were being looked after. I got talking to a little old woman and I didn’t get to the wicket. So you see, you were right. Luck was with me. If you’d done the betting yourself we’d have blown the fifty, wouldn’t we, and now here it is,” and again she laughed and wanted to tell him about the little old woman, and she did.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said, grinning. “So here we are right back in the ball game. Let’s have the dough.”

  But she hesitated, waiting for him to remember and say, “No, you really saved this money. I would have thrown it down the drain. I guess it’s the money for your dress all right. What a way to get it,” and she tried to prompt him a little. “You know I’m broke, Charlie, and I thought . . .”

  “Ah, now, sweetheart,” he said, making a big joke of it.

  “Charlie, I do need it.”

  “But you wouldn’t be a lovely little burglar, would you?” he asked, laughing. “Let’s have it and we’ll use it to get some real loot. Why, what’s the matter?”

  “It was yours all right. Oh, it isn’t just the money, Charlie.”

  “No? What else?”

  “Oh, I don’t know . . .” But she couldn’t go on. “Here, take it,” she said, and she thrust it at him.

  But he knew that something was wrong and while he hesitated uneasily she had a moment of wild hope as, half-ashamed, he struggled against being who he was. He took her arm and gave her a little pull to him, and he told her with the pressure of his fingers on her arm that all that was generous and just and affectionate in his nature made him feel unhappy and ashamed; then all his habit of indulging himself with her seemed to weaken his remorse. “Don’t you see, darling, this fifty is meant to give us another chance?” This familiar expression of his hopefulness put an ache in her heart because, for so long, she had shared his hopefulness.

  As he reached for the money, she knew he couldn’t help himself. He was just being himself with her, as he always would, taking a little more every day, taking and taking and putting nothing back in her heart, and worse still, taking away that kind of young light-hearted happiness she had felt standing at the curb, and he always would do this; he would keep on doing it until she was empty and old.

  “Yes, sir. This is going to be the fifty that does the trick for us,” he said, trying to feel at ease with himself. “Let’s see what I’ve got for the next race. I think our luck has really changed.”

  “I think it has,” she said softly, and as she stood beside him she thought of the little old woman in the taxi, and, staring across the green infield in the sun, she knew that she would be halfway to work. She remembered how she had hoped the woman’s life would change, and now, following the taxi in her mind, she suddenly felt herself, too, whirling away from the track, with the incredible good luck that had come just in time to take her out of Charlie’s life.

  A Couple of Million Dollars

  The well-dressed big man with the puffy-eyed face turned suddenly on the street and grinned at a shabby man who was buying a newspaper. The big fellow said, “Why it’s my old friend Max Seagram.”

  “And you’re Myers.”

  “Sure I’m Myers,” he said. It was a cold day in the early winter and Max was wearing a threadbare, light spring coat. “Don’t tell me you’re not doing well,” he said, still grinning.

  “The truth is I’m flat on my back.”

  “What were you doing?”

  “I was in advertising in Chicago and I thought I might catch on here, but no luck so far,” Max said. He was staring at Myers’ grinning face. Ten years ago in Chicago, they had worked together till Myers had been left a couple of million dollars by an uncle who had owned a shirt factory. “What are you doing yourself?” Max asked uneasily.

  “Nothing, absolutely nothing. Come on over to the Waldorf and have a drink with me.” As he slipped his arm under Max’s and they walked along the street, he whispered, “How would you like me to put a little money your way?”

  “Doing what?” Max asked.

  “Keeping an eye on my wife.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  While Myers hung on to his arm and talked about his wife, Max felt sick with humiliation. “It sounds easy enough,” he said, “but I thought you meant a decent job.”

  Something about Myers frightened Max: something that made him let his arm hang heavy at his side till Myers dropped it and pulled his own arm away.

  Going into the bar at the Waldorf, Myers said, “All I want you to do is find out who the guy is she’s hanging around with, and that’ll be easy because she makes no bones about going out by herself in the evening.”

  “What’ll you do if you catch her?”

  “It’ll make a nice beginning, just to catch her,” Myers said.

  As they had one old fashioned, and then another, Max, ashamed of his shabby clothes, could do nothing but listen and stare stupidly at Myers. “I’ll show her to you when she’s coming out in the evening sometime,” Myers said, pulling at his nose with his thumb and forefinger and grinning shyly. Then he took out his wallet, h
is eyes on Max’s frayed threadbare coat cuffs that Max had tried to darken that afternoon with ink, and a bill slipped from Myers’ hand and dropped to the floor, underneath the table. Without looking down, Myers beckoned a waiter and pointed to the floor; he kept on grinning and whispering. The waiter picked the bill up and bowed. Myers waved his hand irritably and said, “Don’t bother me. Keep it!”

  It was a stupid gesture, an insult to everybody in the place.

  “Here’s fifty,” Myers said. “That’ll keep you going, won’t it?”

  “Listen Myers, how long have you been married?”

  “Five years. But only two years to this one.”

  “So I wouldn’t know her at all?”

  “You might. She was in a show when I met her.”

  “When do I start?” Max said, holding the money.

  “Why not take a shot at it tonight?” Myers said. “I can tip you off when she’s going out.”

  Around nine, opposite the Myers’ apartment house on Park Avenue, Max walked up and down. The cold wind blew against his legs. He tried to get a look through the doors along the black-and-white tiled hall as people in evening clothes came out. The giant doorman in the blue uniform was intimidating and he ducked his head and mumbled, “Some buddy! He puts me to work but he never thought of asking me around to see him.”

  Mrs. Myers was a slim woman with a little green hat, a mink coat, and she had a tall showgirl’s shape and a soft glowing complexion. She looked so rich that Max had a wild longing to brush against her, and it was easy following her. Sometimes she met a woman friend. Sometimes she went alone to the theater. There were times when he was close enough to touch the soft fur of her coat. Once, he lost her for a while in a crowd and was terrified.

  Every evening, he met Myers at the cocktail hour at the Waldorf and had a drink and reported, “Nothing doing, nothing at all.”

  Myers was disgusted. “You’re not slipping, are you? Look here, Max, you’re sure I can trust you?”

  “Check it yourself.”

  “Never mind. She’s fooling me and I’ll get her. I never miss. Just pin that in your hat, Maxie.” They sat for an hour, drinking.

  Always, after his third or fourth old-fashioned, his voice grew milder, his face softened, and he asked about the troubles Max had been through with a gentle considerate charm; but a drink later, his voice changed, he started tossing money around at the waiters who winked at each other and grinned, and Max got jittery again.

  “You’re lousy with dough and don’t know what to do with it,” Max blurted out.

  “Wrong, wrong, wrong again. You haven’t learnt anything, Max,” he jeered. “I do it because it amuses me.”

  “But the waiters laugh at you and know you’re a sucker.”

  “I’m a sucker?” He chuckled, wrinkling his puffy eyes. “I’ll let you in on something, Maxie. They know I’m a sucker, but what do I know about them? I know how to make everybody here get down and rub his nose in the mud. I make suckers out of them every day.” His voice rose, men standing at the bar looked over at him, and there was a frantic, frustrated bitterness in him. “Sure, I can turn this place into a madhouse damned quick and any time I want to. I know all about them. I know what they want and I’ve got plenty of it, hee, hee, hee, hee.”

  “Go ahead, have a big belly laugh,” Max said. “It’s a mighty nice big feeling, crawling with coin, but listen, I got a brother in Chicago who never made more than you throw away in a week.”

  “What are you getting sore about?” Myers said, suddenly soft and soothing. “You want me to subsidize your whole family? I can do it.”

  “I don’t want anything like that,” Max said, afraid he was going to cry.

  “Then what are you sore about?”

  “Nothing you’d understand.”

  “Here, you’re doing fine, here’s fifty bucks, sooner or later she’s going to make a break and you be on the job,” Myers said, tossing some bills across the table to Max, who stared a long time before he picked them up.

  One night, when he was following her, Mrs. Myers got out of her taxi on Fifth Avenue at Thirty-fourth Street and he hurried after her and almost ran into her as she stepped out from a doorway.

  “Well, and who are you, anyway?” she said. “And just what do you want?”

  “I don’t know you, lady, I don’t know what you mean,” he said.

  “You’ve been following me for a couple of weeks. You’re working for my husband, I presume — well, tell him it’s no good. Next time, I’ll simply have you arrested,” and she turned and started to go down the street.

  “Just a minute,” he called desperately.

  “What for?”

  “Don’t go like that, please, you don’t understand. I used to know him years ago.”

  “You knew him in Chicago?”

  “I grew up with him. Nobody knew him better.”

  “Maybe, if you don’t mind . . .” she hesitated. “Maybe you could tell me a few things . . .”

  “Sure. Look, I’ve been wanting to talk to someone about him,” he said. “I used to work in the same office with him, only he worked twice as hard. I used to loan him money, we used to go to the ball games together and when we were kids my mother liked having him around because he was hard working.” He was so excited to be walking with her, feeling her coat brushing against him, and watching the light touching her fine smooth skin that he broke off and began to apologize for following her. “I was broke, I had to do something. Myers knew I’d take the job.”

  She walked beside him with her head down, troubled by her own thoughts, and when they were as far as Madison Square, she stepped out to the curb, waved her arm suddenly to a passing taxi, wiped away a few flecks of snow from her face with her gloved hand, and said, “Look here! If he’s paying you, you’d better let him go on. You need the money.”

  “But I’ll have to keep following you.”

  “It won’t bother me like it did,” she said, “don’t worry about it.” Her face was lovely in that light in the snow. “You’re very nice, you know,” she said, and the wheel of the cab spun and sprayed the snow over the sidewalk, some of it catching his pants cuff, and she was gone.

  The next time he saw Myers he said, “I’m not going to take any more of your money for this thing. It’s no good, so I’m quitting.”

  “How did it go last night?”

  “The same old thing. Nothing happened.”

  “Then you’re missing out, man. She was excited about something when she came in,” Myers said. “Listen, you’re my old pal, eh, Maxie? Look! Let me loan you some money. Don’t figure I’m paying you for the job. You can pay me back when you want to. What do you say?” He grinned. “Let’s you and me have dinner tonight.”

  “With me in these clothes?”

  “You don’t need to dress if you’re with me. I don’t,” Myers said.

  During the dinner in the hotel Max asked Myers what had happened to him since he’d come into the money ten years ago, and Myers said he had stopped working immediately, gone to Paris and had lived there for two years doing everything rich Americans were supposed to do, until he got so bored he pulled out of Paris and settled down in London. But he had come to hate the English and went to the Far East, to Shanghai, and later to Bombay, and then to the golden temple of the Sikhs at Amritsar, and then he had lived for a month in Moscow and grew to hate the Russians.

  After dinner, they went to a nightclub. The hatcheck girl beamed, the captain fussed, trembling with eagerness, the manager came and asked if he was pleased with his table, and lovely girls in the floorshow kept smiling at him wistfully. Yet, he didn’t give anyone a tip and didn’t pay his check when they went out.

  “Do you own a piece of this place, or what’s the set-up that you don’t have to pay?” Max asked.

  Myers grinned. “It’s more fun this way,” he said. “You know what a sucker’s game the nightclub racket is for anybody with a little dough. I figured that out a long time ago
.”

  “Then do you pay?”

  “Sure, I pay plenty, but I fixed it with them so I pay for everything at the end of the month. Then I owe them a hell of a lot and keep putting it off a long time and they hop around like cats on a hot brick. I get full value for my money.”

  One night, Max followed Mrs. Myers to a little Russian place in a cellar on West Twelfth Street, and she came up to him with her hand out, as if they had become old friends since they had walked in the snow. “I’ve been terribly restless,” she said, “I’ve got to talk to somebody.”

  “What’s the matter, Mrs. Myers?”

  “It’s not safe, I know, to talk like this. It’s crazy.”

  “Sure it’s safe,” he said, anxious to soothe her.

  It was warm in the little café, there was the smell of wine and food and a Russian girl playing a guitar and singing, and when they sat down in a corner at the end of one of the long wooden tables and she started making little patterns with her finger on it, he was sure she was very lonely.

  “I don’t know anybody who knew him years ago when he was different,” she began.

  “But what’s worrying you now?”

  “Nothing, nothing. I just go over and over it.” Looking at him helplessly, she blurted out, “You don’t understand. I’m scared. He does nothing. He works at nothing. He looks and looks and looks for something to amuse him and I don’t know if I amuse him, or bore him, too. I don’t know if he wants me, except I’m something he owns.”

  “Maybe I’m helping make you feel that way,” he said. “I’ll tell him I won’t follow you any more.”

  “No, that’s no solution.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Nothing, nothing. Let’s be friends, that’s all. You’re sweet to listen to me,” she said. Her green felt hat was low over one eye, and he could see the smooth sweep of her golden-red hair to the curve of her neck, and she was so close to him, so eager for warmth and friendliness that he had to catch his breath.

  “Why don’t you leave Myers?” he blurted out.

  “I’m scared to.”