Bad Characters Read online

  No one in town, except, of course, her lodgers, had the slightest sympathy for Gran. The townsfolk allowed that Mr. Murphy was a drunk and was fighting Irish, but he had a heart and this was something that could never be said of Mrs. Placer. The neighbor who had called the police when he was chanting the Dies Irae before breakfast in that deafening monotone had said, “The poor guy is having some kind of a spell, so don’t be rough on him, hear?” Mr. Murphy became, in fact, a kind of hero; some people, stretching a point, said he was a saint for the way that every day and twice on Sunday he sang a memorial Mass over Shannon’s grave, now marked with a chipped, cheap plaster figure of Saint Francis. He withdrew from the world more and more, seldom venturing into the streets at all, except when he went to the bootlegger to get a new bottle to snuggle into. All summer, all fall, we saw him as we passed by his yard, sitting at his dilapidated table, enfeebled with gin, graying, withering, turning his head ever and ever more slowly as he maneuvered the protocol of the kings and the queens and the knaves. Daisy and I could never stop to visit him again.

  * * *

  It went on like this, year after year. Daisy and I lived in a mesh of lies and evasions, baffled and mean, like rats in a maze. When we were old enough for beaux, we connived like sluts to see them, but we would never admit to their existence until Gran caught us out by some trick. Like this one, for example: Once, at the end of a long interrogation, she said to me, “I’m more relieved than I can tell you that you don’t have anything to do with Jimmy Gilmore, because I happen to know that he is after only one thing in a girl,” and then, off guard in the loving memory of sitting in the movies the night before with Jimmy, not even holding hands, I defended him and defeated myself, and Gran, smiling with success, said, “I thought you knew him. It’s a pretty safe rule of thumb that where there’s smoke there’s fire.” That finished Jimmy and me, for afterward I was nervous with him and I confounded and alarmed and finally bored him by trying to convince him, although the subject had not come up, that I did not doubt his good intentions.

  Daisy and I would come home from school, or, later, from our jobs, with a small triumph or an interesting piece of news, and if we forgot ourselves and, in our exuberance, told Gran, we were hustled into court at once for cross-examination. Once, I remember, while I was still in high school, I told her about getting a part in a play. How very nice for me, she said, if that kind of make-believe seemed to me worth while. But what was my role? An old woman! A widow woman believed to be a witch? She did not care a red cent, but she did have to laugh in view of the fact that Miss Eccles, in charge of dramatics, had almost run her down in her car. And I would forgive her, would I not, if she did not come to see the play, and would not think her eccentric for not wanting to see herself ridiculed in public?

  My pleasure strangled, I crawled, joy-killed, to our third-floor room. The room was small and its monstrous furniture was too big and the rag rugs were repulsive, but it was bright. We would not hang a blind at the window, and on this day I stood there staring into the mountains that burned with the sun. I feared the mountains, but at times like this their massiveness consoled me; they, at least, could not be gossiped about.

  * * *

  Why did we stay until we were grown? Daisy and I ask ourselves this question as we sit here on the bench in the municipal zoo, reminded of Mr. Murphy by the polar bear, reminded by the monkeys not of Shannon but of Mrs. Placer’s insatiable gossips at their postprandial feast.

  “But how could we have left?” says Daisy, wringing her buttery hands. “It was the depression. We had no money. We had nowhere to go.”

  “All the same, we could have gone,” I say, resentful still of the waste of all those years. “We could have come here and got jobs as waitresses. Or prostitutes, for that matter.”

  “I wouldn’t have wanted to be a prostitute,” says Daisy.

  We agree that under the circumstances it would have been impossible for us to run away. The physical act would have been simple, for the city was not far and we could have stolen the bus fare or hitched a ride. Later, when we began to work as salesgirls in Kress’s, it would have been no trick at all to vanish one Saturday afternoon with our week’s pay, without so much as going home to say goodbye. But it had been infinitely harder than that, for Gran, as we now see, held us trapped by our sense of guilt. We were vitiated, and we had no choice but to wait, flaccidly, for her to die.

  You may be sure we did not unlearn those years as soon as we put her out of sight in the cemetery and sold her house for a song to the first boob who would buy it. Nor did we forget when we left the town for another one, where we had jobs at a dude camp—the town where Daisy now lives with a happy husband and two happy sons. The succubus did not relent for years, and I can still remember, in the beginning of our days at the Lazy S 3, overhearing an edgy millionaire say to his wife, naming my name, “That girl gives me the cold shivers. One would think she had just seen a murder.” Well, I had. For years, whenever I woke in the night in fear or pain or loneliness, I would increase my suffering by the memory of Shannon, and my tears were as bitter as poor Mr. Murphy’s.

  We have never been back to Adams. But we see that house plainly, with the hopvines straggling over the porch. The windows are hung with the cheapest grade of marquisette, dipped into coffee to impart to it an unwilling color, neither white nor tan but individual and spitefully unattractive. We see the wicker rockers and the swing, and through the screen door we dimly make out the slightly veering corridor, along one wall of which stands a glass-doored bookcase; when we were children, it had contained not books but stale old cardboard boxes filled with such things as W.C.T.U. tracts and anti-cigarette literature and newspaper clippings relating to sexual sin in the Christianized islands of the Pacific.

  Even if we were able to close our minds’ eyes to the past, Mr. Murphy would still be before us in the apotheosis of the polar bear. My pain becomes intolerable, and I am relieved when Daisy rescues us. “We’ve got to go,” she says in a sudden panic. “I’ve got asthma coming on.” We rush to the nearest exit of the city park and hail a cab, and, once inside it, Daisy gives herself an injection of adrenalin and then leans back. We are heartbroken and infuriated, and we cannot speak.

  Two hours later, beside my train, we clutch each other as if we were drowning. We ought to go out to the nearest policeman and say, “We are not responsible women. You will have to take care of us because we cannot take care of ourselves.” But gradually the storm begins to lull.

  “You’re sure you’ve got your ticket?” says Daisy. “You’ll surely be able to get a roomette once you’re on.”

  “I don’t know about that,” I say. “If there are any V.I.P.s on board, I won’t have a chance. ‘Spinsters and Orphans Last’ is the motto of this line.”

  Daisy smiles. “I didn’t care,” she says, “but I had to laugh when I saw that woman nab the redcap you had signalled to. I had a good notion to give her a piece of my mind.”

  “It will be a miracle if I ever see my bags again,” I say, mounting the steps of the train. “Do you suppose that blackguardly porter knows about the twenty-dollar gold piece in my little suitcase?”

  “Anything’s possible!” cries Daisy, and begins to laugh. She is so pretty, standing there in her bright-red linen suit and her black velvet hat. A solitary ray of sunshine comes through a broken pane in the domed vault of the train shed and lies on her shoulder like a silver arrow.

  “So long, Daisy!” I call as the train begins to move.

  She walks quickly along beside the train. “Watch out for pickpockets!” she calls.

  “You, too!” My voice is thin and lost in the increasing noise of the speeding train wheels. “Goodbye, old dear!”

  I go at once to the club car and I appropriate the writing table, to the vexation of a harried priest, who snatches up the telegraph pad and gives me a sharp look. I write Daisy approximately the same letter I always write her under this particular set of circumstances, the burden of
which is that nothing for either of us can ever be as bad as the past before Gran mercifully died. In a postscript I add: “There is a Roman Catholic priest (that is to say, he is dressed like one) sitting behind me although all the chairs on the opposite side of the car are empty. I can only conclude that he is looking over my shoulder, and while I do not want to cause you any alarm, I think you would be advised to be on the lookout for any appearance of miraculous medals, scapulars, papist booklets, etc., in the shops of your town. It really makes me laugh to see the way he is pretending that all he wants is for me to finish this letter so that he can have the table.”

  I sign my name and address the envelope, and I give up my place to the priest, who smiles nicely at me, and then I move across the car to watch the fields as they slip by. They are alfalfa fields, but you can bet your bottom dollar that they are chockablock with marijuana.

  I begin to laugh. The fit is silent but it is devastating; it surges and rattles in my rib cage, and I turn my face to the window to avoid the narrow gaze of the Filipino bar boy. I must think of something sad to stop this unholy giggle, and I think of the polar bear. But even his bleak tragedy does not sober me. Wildly I fling open the newspaper I have brought and I pretend to be reading something screamingly funny. The words I see are in a Hollywood gossip column: “How a well-known starlet can get get a divorce in Nevada without her crooner husband’s consent, nobody knows. It won’t be worth a plugged nickel here.”

  Cops and Robbers

  The child, Hannah, sitting hidden on the attic steps, listened as her mother talked on the telephone to Aunt Louise.

  “Oh, there’s no whitewashing the incident. The child’s hair is a sight, and it will be many moons, I can tell you, before I’ll forgive Hugh Talmadge. But listen to me. The worst of it is that this baby of five has gone into a decline like a grown woman—like you or me, dear, at our most hysterical. Sudden fits of tears for no apparent reason and then simply hours of brooding. She won’t eat, she probably doesn’t sleep. I can’t stand it if she’s turning mental.”

  The door to the bedroom, across the hall, was half open, and through the crack of the door at the foot of the attic steps Hannah saw that in the course of the night her parents had disarrayed the pale-green blanket cover and now, half off the bed, drooping and askew, it looked like a great crumpled new leaf, pulled back here and there to show the rosy blankets underneath. In the bedroom it is spring, thought Hannah, and outdoors it is snowing on the Christmas trees; that is a riddle.

  Her mother lay in the center of the big bed, which was as soft and fat as the gelded white Persian cat who dozed at her side, his scornful head erect, as if he were arrested not so much by sleep as by a coma of boredom and disgust. A little earlier, before he struck this pose, he had sniffed and disdained the bowl of cream on his mistress’s breakfast tray, and when she had tried to cajole him into drinking it, he had coolly thrashed his tail at her. In the darkness of her enclosure, Hannah yearned, imagining herself in the privileged cat’s place beside her mother, watching the mellowing, pillowing, billowing snow as it whorled down to meet the high tips of the pine trees that bordered the frozen formal garden. If she were Nephew, the cat, she would burrow into the silky depths of the bed up to her eyes and rejoice that she was not outside like a winter bird coming to peck at suet and snowy crumbs at the feeding station.

  It was ugly and ungenerous here where she was, on the narrow, splintery stairs, and up in the attic a mouse or a rat scampered on lightly clicking claws between the trunks; some hibernating bees buzzed peevishly in their insomnia. Stingy and lonesome like old people, the shutins worried their grievances stealthily. And Hannah, spying and eavesdropping (a sin and she knew it), felt the ends of her cropped hair and ran a forefinger over her freshly combed boy’s cut—the subject of her mother’s conversation. Something like sleep touched her eyeballs, though this was early morning and she had not been awake longer than an hour. But it was tears, not drowsiness, that came. They fell without any help from her; her cheeks did not rise up as they usually did when she cried, to squeeze themselves into puckers like old apples, her mouth did not open in a rent of woe, no part of her body was affected at all except the eyes themselves, from which streamed down these mothering runnels.

  “Why did he do it?” Her mother’s question into the telephone was an impatient scream. “Why do men do half the things they do? Why does Arthur treat you in public as if you were an enlisted man? I swear I’ll someday kill your rear admiral for you. Why does Eliot brag to Frances that he’s unfaithful? Because they’re sadists, every last one of them. I am very anti-man today.”

  “What is antiman?” whispered Hannah.

  The stools on either side of the fireplace in the den were ottomans, and sometimes Hannah and her mother sat on them in the late afternoon, with a low table between them on which were set a Chinese pot of verbena tisane, two cups, and a plate of candied orange rind. At the thought of her mother’s golden hair in the firelight, and the smell of her perfume in the intimate warmth, and the sound of her voice saying, “Isn’t this gay, Miss Baby?” the tears came faster, for in her heavy heart Hannah felt certain that now her hair was cut off, her mother would never want to sit so close to her again. Unable to see through the narrow opening of the door any longer, she leaned her face against the wall and felt her full tears moistening the beaverboard as she listened to her mother’s recital of Saturday’s catastrophe.

  “On the face of it, the facts are innocent enough. He took her to town on Saturday to buy her a pair of shoes, having decided for his own reasons that I have no respect for my children’s feet—the shoes he got are too odious, but that’s another story. Then when he brought her back, here she was, cropped, looking like a rag doll. He said she’d begged to have it done. Of course she’d done nothing of the kind. To put the most charitable construction on the whole affair, I could say that when he went into the barbershop to have his own hair cut, he’d had a seizure of amnesia and thought he had Andy with him, or Johnny, or Hughie, and decided to kill two birds with one stone. And then afterward he was afraid of what I’d say and so cooked up this canard—and more than likely bribed her to bear him out. The way men will weasel out of their missteps! It isn’t moral. It shocks me.”

  He did not think I was Andy or Johnny or Hughie, Hannah said to herself. In the barbershop at her father’s club there had been no one but grown men and a fat stuffed skunk that stood in front of the mirror between two bottles of bay rum, its leathery nose pointed upward as if it were trying to see the underside of its chin in the looking glass. Through a steaming towel, her father had muttered, “Just do as I say, Homer, cut it off,” and the barber, a lean man with a worried look on his red face, flinched, then shrugged his shoulders and began to snip off Hannah’s heavy curls, frowning with disapproval and remarking once under his breath that women, even though they were five years old, were strictly forbidden on these premises. On the drive home, her peeled head had felt cold and wet, and she had not liked the smell that gauzily hovered around her, growing more cloying as the heater in the car warmed up. At a red light, her father had turned to her and, patting her on the knee, had said, “You look as cute as a button, young fellow.” He had not seemed to hear her when she said, “I do not. I’m not a young fellow,” nor had he noticed when she moved over against the door, as far away from him as she could get, hating him bitterly and hating her nakedness. Presently, he’d turned on the radio to a news broadcast and disputed out loud with the commentator. Hannah, left all alone, had stared out the window at the wolfish winter. In one snow-flattened field she saw tall flames arising from a huge wire trash basket, making the rest of the world look even colder and whiter and more unkind. Her father scowled, giving the radio what for, swearing at the slippery roads—carrying on an absent-minded tantrum all by himself. Once, halted by a woman driver whose engine was stalled, he’d said, “Serves her right. She ought to be home at this time of day tending to business.” As they turned in their own drive, he sai
d a lie: “That was a fine idea of yours to have your hair cut off.” She had never said any such thing; all she had said, when they were having lunch in a brown, cloudy restaurant, was that she would rather go to the barbership with him than wait at Grandma’s. But she had not contradicted him, for he did not countenance contradiction from his children. “I’m an old-fashioned man,” he announced every morning to his three sons and his two daughters. “I am the autocrat of this breakfast table.” And though he said it with a wink and a chuckle, it was clear that he meant business. Johnny, who was intellectual, had told the other children that an autocrat was a person like Hitler, and he had added sarcastically, “That sure is something to brag about, I must say.”