Of Time and the River (38 page)

“What did she want?”

“She wanted to know if the doc-taw was theah,” Creasman said in a coarse and throaty parody of refinement. “And is he coming in tonight? Really, I should like to know. . . . Ooh, yaas,” Creasman went on throatily, adding a broad stroke or two on her own account. “I simply must find out! I cawn’t get my sleep in until I do. . . . Well,” she demanded harshly, “what am I going to tell her if she calls again?”

“What did she say to tell me?”

“She said”—the nurse’s tone again was lewdly tinged with parody— “to tell you that she is having guests for dinner tomorrow night— this evening—and that you simply GOT to be thöh, you, and your wife, too—ooh, Gawd, yes!—the Reids are comin’, don’t-cherknow— and if you are not thöh Gawd only knows what will happen!”

He glowered at her drunkenly for a moment, and then, waving thick fingers at her in disgust, he mumbled:

“You got a dirty mouth . . . don’t become you. . . . Unlady- like. . . . Don’t like a dirty-talkin’ woman. . . . Never did. . . . Unbecomin’. . . . Unlady-like. . . . Nurses all alike . . . all dirty talkers . . . don’t like ‘em.”

“Oh, dirty talkers, your granny!” she said coarsely. “Now you leave the nurses alone. . . . They’re decent enough girls, most of ‘em, until they come here and listen to you for a month or two. . . . You listen to me, Hugh McGuire; don’t blame the nurses. When it comes to dirty talking, you can walk off with the medals any day in the week. . . . Even if I am your cousin, I had a good Christian raising out in the country before I came here. So don’t talk to me about nurses’ dirty talk: after a few sessions with you in the operating room even the Virgin Mary could use language fit to make a monkey blush. So don’t blame it on the nurses. Most of them are white as snow compared to you.”

“You’re dirty talkers—all of you,” he muttered, waving his thick fingers in her direction. “Don’t like it. . . . Unbecomin’ in a lady.”

For a moment she did not answer, but stood looking at him, arms akimbo on her starched white hips, a glance that was bold, hard, sardonic, but somehow tinged with a deep and broad affection.

Then, taking her hands off her hips, she bent swiftly over him, reached down between his legs, and got the jug and lifting it up to the light in order to make her cynical inspection of its depleted contents more accurate, she remarked with ironic approbation:

“My, my! You’re doing pretty well, aren’t you? . . . Well, it won’t be long NOW, will it?” she said cheerfully, and then turning to him abruptly and accusingly, demanded:

“Do you realize that you were supposed to call Helen Gant at twelve o’clock?” She glanced swiftly at the clock. “Just three and a half hours ago. Or did you forget it?”

He passed his thick hand across the reddish unshaved stubble of his beard.

“Who?” he said stupidly. “Where? What is it?”

“Oh, nothing to worry about,” she said with a light hard humour. “Just a little case of carcinoma of the prostate. He’s going to die anyway, so you’ve got nothing to worry about at all.”

“Who?” he said stupidly again. “Who is it?”

“Oh, just a man,” she said gaily. “An old, old man name Mr. Gant.— You’ve been his physician for twenty years, but maybe you’ve forgotten him. You know—they come and go; some live and others die—it’s all right,—this one’s going to die. They’ll bury him— it’ll all come out right one way or the other—so you’ve nothing to worry about at all. . . . Even if you kill him,” she said cheerfully. “He’s just an old, old man with cancer, and bound to die anyway, so promise me you won’t worry about it too much, will you?”

She looked at him a moment longer; then, putting her hand under his fat chin, she jerked his head up sharply. He stared at her stupidly with his yellowed drunken eyes, and in them she saw the mute anguish of a tortured animal, and suddenly her heart was twisted with pity for him.

“Look here,” she said, in a hard and quiet voice, “what’s wrong with you?”

In a moment he mumbled thickly:

“Nothing’s wrong with me.”

“Is it the woman business again? For God’s sake, are you never going to grow up, McGuire? Are you going to remain an overgrown schoolboy all your life? Are you going to keep on eating your heart out over a bitch who thinks that spring is here every time her hind end itches? Are you going to throw your life away, and let your work go to smash because some damned woman in the change of life has done you dirt? What kind of man are you, anyway?” she jeered. “Jesus God! If it’s a woman that you want the woods are full of ‘em. Besides,” she added, “what’s wrong with your own wife! She’s worth a million of those flossy sluts.”

He made no answer and in a moment she went on in a harsh and jeering tone that was almost deliberately coarse:

“Haven’t you learned yet, with all you’ve seen of it, that a piece of tail is just a piece of tail, and that in the dark it doesn’t matter one good God-damn whether it’s brown, black, white, or yellow?”

Even as she spoke, something cold and surgical in his mind, which no amount of alcohol seemed to dull or blur, was saying accurately: “Why do they all feel such contempt for one another? What is it in them that makes them despise themselves?”

Aloud, however, waving his thick fingers at her in a gesture of fat disgust, he said:

“Creasman, you got a dirty tongue. . . . Don’t like to hear a woman talk like that. . . . Never liked to hear a dirty-talkin’ woman. . . . You’re no lady!”

“Ah-h! No lady!” she said bitterly, and let her hands fall in a gesture of defeat. “All right, you poor fool, if that’s the way you feel about it, go ahead and drink yourself to death over your ‘lady.’ That’s what’s wrong with you.”

And, muttering angrily, she left him. He sat there stupidly, without moving, until her firm heel-taps had receded down the silent hall, and he heard a door close. Then he reached down between his knees and got the jug and drank again. And again there was nothing in the place except the sound of silence, the rapid ticking of a little clock, the thick short breathing of the man.

XXV

Somewhere, far away, across the cool sweet silence of the night, Helen heard the sound of a train. For a moment she could hear the faint and ghostly tolling of its bell, the short explosive blasts of its hard labour, now muted almost into silence, now growing near, immediate as it laboured out across the night from the enclosure of a railway cut down by the river’s edge; and for an instant she heard the lonely wailing and receding cry of the train’s whistle, and then the long heavy rumble of its wheels; and then nothing but silence, darkness, the huge hush and secrecy of night again.

And still plucking at her chin, thinking absently, but scarcely conscious of her thinking, like a child in reverie, she thought:

“There is a freight-train going west along the river. Now, by the sound, it should be passing below Patton Hill, just across from where Riverside Park used to be before the flood came and washed it all away. . . . Now it is getting farther off, across the river from the casket factory. . . . Now it is almost gone, I can hear nothing but the sound of wheels . . . it is going west toward Boiling Springs . . . and after that it will come to Wilson City, Tennessee . . . and then to Dover. . . . Knoxville . . . Memphis— after that? I wonder where the train is going . . . where it will be tomorrow night? . . . Perhaps across the Mississippi River, and then on through Arkansas . . . perhaps to St. Louis . . . and then on to—what comes next?” she thought absently, plucking at her chin—“to Kansas City, I suppose . . . and then to Denver . . . and across the Rocky Mountains . . . and across the desert . . . and then across more mountains and then at last to California.”

And still plucking at her chin, and scarcely conscious of her thought—not THINKING, indeed, so much as reflecting by a series of broken but powerful images all cogent to a central intuition about life—her mind resumed again its sleepless patient speculation:

“How strange and full of mystery life is. . . . Tomorrow we shall all get up, dress, go out on the streets, see and speak to one another—and yet we shall know absolutely nothing about anyone else. . . . I know almost everyone in town—the bankers, the lawyers, the butchers, the bakers, the grocers, the clerks in the stores, the Greek restaurant man, Tony Scarsati the fruit dealer, even the niggers down in Niggertown—I know them all, as well as their wives and children—where they came from, what they are doing, all the lies and scandals and jokes and mean stories, whether true or false, that are told about them—and yet I really know nothing about any of them. I know nothing about anyone, not even about myself—” and, suddenly, this fact seemed terrible and grotesque to her, and she thought desperately:

“What is wrong with people? . . . Why do we never get to know one another? . . . Why is it that we get born and live and die here in this world without ever finding out what anyone else is like? . . . No, what is the strangest thing of all—why is it that all our efforts to know people in this world lead only to greater ignorance and confusion than before? We get together and talk, and say we think and feel and believe in such a way, and yet what we really think and feel and believe we never say at all. Why is this? We talk and talk in an effort to understand another person, and yet almost all we say is false: we hardly ever say what we mean or tell the truth—it all leads to greater misunderstanding and fear than before—it would be better if we said nothing. Tomorrow I shall dress and go out on the street and bow and smile and flatter people, laying it on with a trowel, because I want them to like me, I want to make ‘a good impression,’ to be a ‘success’—and yet I have no notion what it is all about. When I pass Judge Junius Pearson on the street I will smile and bow and try to make a good impression on him, and if he speaks to me I shall almost fawn upon him in order to flatter my way into his good graces. Why? I do not like him, I hate his long pointed nose, and the sneering and disdainful look upon his face: I think he is ‘looking down’ on me— but I know that he goes with the ‘swell’ social set and is invited out to all the parties at Catawba House by Mrs. Goulderbilt and is received by them as a social equal. And I feel that if Junius Pearson should accept me as HIS social equal it would help me—get me forward somehow—make me a success—get ME an invitation to Catawba House. And yet it would get me nothing; even if I were Mrs. Goulderbilt’s closest friend, what good would it do me? But the people I really like and feel at home with are working people of Papa’s kind. The people I really like are Ollie Gant, and old man Alec Ramsay, and big Mike Fogarty, and Mr. Jannadeau, and Myrtis, my little nigger servant girl, and Mr. Luther, the fish man down in the market, and the nigger Jacken, the fruit and vegetable man, and Ernest Pegram, and Mr. Duncan and the Tarkintons—all the old neighbours down on Woodson Street—and Tony Scarsati and Mr. Pappas. Mr. Pappas is just a Greek luncheon-room proprietor, but he seems to me to be one of the finest people I have ever known, and yet if Junius Pearson saw me talking to him I should try to make a joke out of it—to make a joke out of talking to a Greek who runs a restaurant. In the same way, when some of my new friends see me talking to people like Mr. Jannadeau or Mike Fogarty or Ollie or Ernest Pegram or the Tarkintons or the old Woodson Street crowd, I feel ashamed or embarrassed, and turn it off as a big joke. I laugh about Mr. Jannadeau and his dirty fingers and the way he picks his nose, and old Alec Ramsay and Ernest Pegram spitting tobacco while they talk, and then I wind up by appearing to be democratic and saying in a frank and open manner—‘Well, I like them . . . I don’t care what anyone says’ (when no one has said anything!), ‘I like them, and always have. If the truth is told, they’re just as good as anyone else!’—as if there is any doubt about it, and as if I should have to justify myself for being ‘democratic.’ Why ‘democratic’? Why should I apologize or defend myself for liking people when no one has accused me?

“I’m pushing Hugh ahead now all the time; he’s tired and sick and worn out and exhausted—but I keep ‘pushing him ahead’ without knowing what it is we’re pushing ahead toward, where it will all wind up. What is it all about? I’ve pushed him ahead from Woodson Street up here to Weaver Street: and now this neighbourhood has become old-fashioned—the swell society crowd is all moving out to Grovemont—opposite the golf-course; and now I’m pushing him to move out there, build upon the lot we own or buy a house. I’ve ‘pushed’ him and myself until now he belongs to the Rotary Club and I belong to the Thursday Literary Club, the Orpheus Society, the Saturday Musical Guild, the Woman’s Club, the Discussion Group, and God knows what else—all these silly and foolish little clubs in which we have no interest—and yet it would kill us if we did not belong to them, we feel that they are a sign that we are ‘getting ahead.’ Getting ahead to what?

“And it is the same with all of us: pretend, pretend, pretend— show-off, show-off, show-off—try to keep up with the neighbours and to go ahead of them—and never a word of truth; never a word of what we really feel, and understand and know. The one who shouts the loudest goes the farthest:—Mrs. Richard Jeter Ebbs sits up on top of the whole heap, she goes everywhere and makes speeches; people say ‘Mrs. Richard Jeter Ebbs said so-and-so’—and all because she shouts out everywhere that she is a lady and a member of an old family and the widow of Richard Jeter Ebbs. And no one in town ever met Richard Jeter Ebbs, they don’t know who he was, what he did, where he came from; neither do they know who Mrs. Richard Jeter Ebbs was, or where she came from, or who or what her family was.

“Why are we all so false, cowardly, cruel, and disloyal toward one another and toward ourselves? Why do we spend our days in doing useless things, in false pretence and triviality? Why do we waste our lives—exhaust our energy—throw everything good away on falseness and lies and emptiness? Why do we deliberately destroy ourselves this way, when we want joy and love and beauty and it is all around us in the world if we would only take it? Why are we so afraid and ashamed when there is really nothing to be afraid and ashamed of? Why have we wasted everything, thrown our loves away, what is this horrible thing in life that makes us throw ourselves away—to hunt out death when what we want is life? Why is it that we are always strangers in this world, and never come to know one another, and are full of fear and shame and hate and falseness, when what we want is love? Why is it? Why? Why? Why?”