The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty (66 page)

He sighed gently. By now—for she did take things in slowly—the rosy mole might be riding the pulse in her throat as it did long after the telephone rang late in the night and was the wrong number—"Why, it might have been a
thousand
things." Pretty soon, with her middle finger she would start touching her hairpins, one by one, going over her head as though in finishing her meditations she was sewing some precautionary cap on.

Eugene was walking down the habitual hills to Bertsingers', Jewelers, and with sharp sniffs that as always rather pained him after breakfast he was taking note of the day, its temperature, fog condition, and prospects of clearing and warming up, all of which would be asked him by Mr. Bertsinger Senior, who would then tell him if he was right. Why, in the name of all reason, had he struck Emma? His act—with that, proving it had been a part of him—slipped loose from him, turned around and looked at him in the form of a question. At Sacramento Street it skirted through traffic beside him in sudden dependency, almost like a comedian pretending to be an old man.

If Eugene had not known he could do such a thing as strike Emma, he was even less prepared for having done it. Down hill the eucalyptus trees seemed bigger in the fog than when the sun shone through them, they had the fluffiness of birds in the cold; he had the utterly strange and unamiable notion that he could hear their beating hearts. Walking down a very steep hill was an act of holding back; he had never seen it like that or particularly noticed himself reflected in these people's windows. His head and neck jerked in motions like a pigeon's; he looked down, and when he saw the fallen and purple eucalyptus leaves underfoot, his shoes suddenly stamped them hard as hooves.

A quarrel couldn't even grow between him and Emma. And she would be unfair, beg the question, if a quarrel did spring up; she would cry. That was a thing a stranger might feel on being introduced to Emma, even though Emma never proved it to anybody: she had a waterfall of tears back there. He walked on. The sun, smaller than the moon, rolled like a little wheel through the fog but gave no light yet.

Why strike her even softly? They weren't very lovingly inclined these days, with the heart taken out of them by sorrow; violence was out of place to begin with.
Why not strike her? And if she thought he would stay around only to hear her start tuning up, she had another think coming. Let her take care and go about her business, he might do it once more and not so kindly.

If he had had time to think about it, he might simply have refused to eat his breakfast. He knew that she minded. Ever since Emma was a landlady calling "Come on quick, Mr. MacLain!" and he was an anxious roomer, he had known where she was
sensitive.
Actually, of course, he wouldn't have dared not eat—under any circumstances. If he had wanted to kill her, he would have had to eat everything on her table first, and praise it. She had had a first husband, the mighty Mr. Gaines, and she would love forever a compliment on her food. "Sit down and tell me what you see" was what Emma would say.

The present fact was that she'd said something innocent—innocent but personal, personal but not dear—to him, which she might have said a thousand times in twelve years of marriage, and simply taking the prerogative of a wife was leaning over to remove some offense of his with her own motherly finger, and he had slapped her face today. Why slap her today? The question prodded him locally now, in the back of one knee as nearly as he could tell. It accommodated itself like the bang of a small bell to the stiff pull of his shanks.

He struck her because she was a fat thing. Absurd, she had always been fat, at least plump ("Your little landlady's forever busy with something nice!"), plump when he married her.
Always was is no reason for its being absurd even yet to
—But couldn't it be his reason for hitting her, and not hers?
He struck her because he wanted another love. The forties. Psychology.

Nevertheless a face from nowhere floated straight into that helpless irony and contemplated the world of his inward gaze, a dark full-face, obscure and obedient-looking as a newsprint face, looking outward from its cap of dark hair and a dark background—all shadow and softness, like a blurred spot on Jones Street.
Miss Dimdummie Dumwiddie,
he could the same as read underneath, in the italics of poetry. A regardful look. Should he suspect? She had died, was that the story?
Then too late to love you now. Too late to verify this story of yours
... in the paper, though he was carrying the paper for any such possible reference, pinned there by his right arm. This morning it had become too late to love the young and dead Miss Dumwiddie, and he had struck his wife with the flat of his hand.

Eugene slowed his step obediently here; at the jobbing butcher's he was habitually caught. Without warning red and white beeves were volleyed across the sidewalk on hooks, out of a van. The butchers, stepped outside for a moment in their bloody aprons, made a pause for ladies sometimes, but never for men. The beeves were moving across, all right, and on the other side a tramp leaned on a cane to watch, leering like a dandy at each one of the carcasses as it went by; it could have been some haughty and spurning woman he kept catching like that.

At the go-ahead from the butcher, made with a knife, Eugene took one step, but stopped suddenly. It was out of the question—that was all of a sudden beautifully clear—that he should go to work that day.

And things were a great deal more serious than he had thought.

Delicately and slowly as if he had been dared, Eugene felt with his hand under his raincoat, touching coat and vest and silver pencil. He clung to one small revelation: that today he was not able to take those watches apart.

He had only reached California Street. He stood without moving at the brink of the great steepness, looking down. He had struck Emma and when he struck, her face had met his blow with blankness, a wide-open eye. It had been like kissing the cheek of the dead.

She could still bite his finger, couldn't she?
and some mischievous, teasing spirit looked at him, mouthing joy before darting ahead. But he looked down at the steepness, shocked and almost numb. A passerby gave him a silent margin. The slap had been like kissing the cheek of the dead.

What would Mr. Bertsinger Senior, down at the shop, have to say about this, Eugene wondered, what lengthy thing? His watch opened in the palm of his hand, and then he was walking on again with protest and speed down the hill, the street like the sag of a rope that disappeared into fog. The world was the old man's subject, but he knew yours.

Below in Market Street the fog ran high overhead and the bustle of life was revealed. Eugene could imitate his hurry. Could it seem at all sad or absurd to the others, he wondered—with his head seeming to float above his long steps—that Market had with the years become a street of trusses, pads, braces, false bosoms, false teeth, and glass eyes? And of course of jewelry stores. He passed the health food store where the shark liver oil pellets were displayed (really attractively, to tell the truth) on a paper lacy as a Valentine. How amazing it all was. Wasn't it? A sailor in the penny arcade was having his girl photographed in the arms of a stuffed gorilla. Eugene would like to show that to somebody.

He read the second story level of signs across the street, Joltz Nature System, Honest John Trusses, No Toothless Days. A lady carrying a streetcar transfer slip and a bunch of daisies wrapped in newspaper was coming down the stairs from the No Toothless Days door; would she dare smile, supposing she heard of a little joke, horseplay, would there be any use in telling her?

In the flyblown window of a bookstore a dark photograph that looked at first glance like Emma (Emma, he could bet, still sat on at the table composing herself, as carefully as if she had been up to the ceiling and back) was, he read below, Madame Blavatsky. Every other store on Market Street was, pursuing some necessity, a jewelry store; so that if you wore a Strictform No Give Brace you could wear at the same time a butterfly breast pin or a Joy watch band, "Nothing but Gold to Touch the Flesh." It could all make a man feel shame. The kind of shame one had to jump up in the air, kick his heels, to express—whirl around!

Just on the other side of Bertsingers' there was a crowded market. Eugene could hear all day as he worked at his meticulous watches the glad mallet of the man who cracked the crabs. He could hear it more plainly now, mixed with the street noises, like the click and caw of a tropical bird, and the doorway there shimmered with the blue of Dutch iris and the mixed pink and white of carnations in tubs, and the bright clash of the pink, red, and orange azaleas lined up in pots. Oh, to have been one step further on, and grown flowers!

There was Bertsingers'.

Compunction gave Eugene a little elderly-like rap, and he recognized that Bertsingers' was more respectable than most of the jewelry stores: Mr. Bertsinger Senior was on hand. Bertsingers' did carry its brand of the rhinestone Pegasus and ruby swordfish, its tray of charms; and the diamond rings filling the window did each bear a neat card saying "With Full Trade-in Privilege." But the cards were in Mr. Bertsinger Senior's handwriting—fine and with shaded loops. And Bertsingers' never had a neon sign over his cage in the repair department. There was some dignity left to everything, if you knew where to find it. And Eugene passed by the door.

Bertie Junior was up front and on the lookout for what he might miss, of course—Eugene took a chance. Bertie Junior's thumbs bent softly back, he had little ducktails at the back of his head, he looked privileged as well as young. He'd put a chip diamond in his Army discharge button, for the hell of it—he said. Even in the dark rear of the shop his gleam and his eagerness could be detected from the street, and there was an equal chance he might detect Eugene going by, his target on any occasion. But he came to the door with head lifted high at that moment, watching a fist fight come out of a barber shop. He gleamed even to the sideways glance, wearing two fountain pens, their clips forking tongue-like out of his still-soldierly breast. Eugene got by.

He was not called back, either, or discovered pausing so near, at the market. The fish windows were decorated like a holiday show. There was a double row of salmon steaks placed fan-wise on a tray, and filets of sole fixed this way and that down another tray as in a plait, like cut-off golden hair. When Eugene set his eyes on an arrangement of amber-red caviar in the shape of a large anchor, "They are fish eggs, sir," a young, smocked clerk said, "and personally I think it's a perfect
pity
that they should be allowed to take them." He stood arms akimbo in the market entrance and did not recognize Mr. MacLain who had repaired his watch at all,
that
little drudge. A yearning for levity took hold of the little drudge, he tipped his hat and bowed like a Southerner, to the fish eggs.

There was a soft gleam. Above, blue slides of sky were cutting in on the fog. The sun, as with a spurt of motion, came out. The streetcars, taking on banana colors, drove up and down, the line of movie houses fluttered streamers and flags as if they were going to sea. Eugene moved into the central crowd, which seemed actually to increase its jostling with the sunshine, like the sea with wind.

A little old tramp woke up on the street, and rubbed his eyes. He began scattering crumbs to the descending pigeons and sea gulls. They walked about him fussing like barnyard chickens, and he stood as if flattered by their transformation and their greed, pressing his knees together in the posture of a saint or a lady of the house and looking up to smile at the world. Eugene walked among crumbs and pigeons and crossed over the wide trashy street and when he looked to the right he could see, quite clearly just now, the twin brown-green peaks at the end of the view, the houses bright in their sides, while the lifted mass of blue and gray fog swayed as gently over them as a shade tree.

The lift of fog in the city, that daily act of revelation, brought him a longing now like that of vague times in the past, of long ago in Mississippi, to see the world—there were places he longed for the sight of whose names he had forgotten. And while now it was doubtful that he would ever see the Seven Wonders of the World, he had suggested to Emma that they take a simple little pleasure trip—modestly, on the bus—down the inexpensive side of the Peninsula; but it had been his luck to mention it on the anniversary of Fan's death and she had slammed the door in his face.

It was womanlike; he understood it now. The inviolable grief she had felt for a great thing only widened her capacity to take little things hard. Mourning over the same thing she mourned, he was not to be let in. For letting in was something else. How cold to the living hour grief could make you! Her eye was quite marblelike at the door crack.

There had been a time, too, when she was a soft woman, just as he had been a kind man, soft unto innocence—soft like little Fan, and he saw the child at bedtime letting her hair ripple down and all around, with it almost meeting under her chin like a little golden rain hat, and he wanted to say, "Oh, stay, wait." Just as the other thing was there too: Fan from the age she could walk to it was standing with her back to the fire (they kept an open fireplace then) and with that gesture like a curtsey was lifting up her gown to warm her backside, like any woman in the world.

Now, too late, when the city opened out so softly in beauty and to such distances, it awoke a longing for that careless, patched land of Mississippi winter, trees in their rusty wrappers, slow-grown trees taking their time, the lost shambles of old cane, the winter swamp where his own twin brother, he supposed, still hunted. Eugene looked askance at a flower seller: where had the seasons gone? Too cheap, bewilderingly massed together, the summerlike, winterlike, springlike flowers tied up in bunches made him glance disparately at the old man marking down the price on a jug of tulips, and at three turbaned Hindus who bought nothing but in calm turn smelled the bouquets until they stood there with all their six eyes closed, translated into still another world.