J. Edgar Hoover was one of the most famous and influential men of the twentieth century. He built the Federal Bureau of Investigation into the best investigative entity in the world and facilitated the capture of John Dillinger, Alvin Karpis and other high-profile hoods during a time of lawlessness in America. He was instrumental in bringing to justice the alleged perpetrator, one Bruno Hauptmann, in the “crime of the century,” the kidnapping and murder of the infant son of Charles Lindbergh. He was a patriot, a man of principle and conviction who wasn’t above exaggerating his own accomplishments in his memoirs.
In the new movie, J. Edgar (directed by Clint Eastwood) Leonardo DeCaprio plays the man who was known to his intimates simply as “Edgar.” In spite of his professional accomplishments, Edgar’s personal life was conflicted. He never married and, being of a decidedly homosexual bent, was never comfortable in that role. In one scene, where he is trying, as a young man, to explain to his devoted mother (Judi Dench) that he “doesn’t like dancing with women,” she tells him she would rather have a dead son than a daffodil (gay) son. (We’re speaking in metaphors here.) This is not exactly a ringing endorsement of his sexual proclivities.
The subject of Edgar’s homosexuality is never sensationalized here. We never see him cruising gay bars or propositioning male prostitutes. It’s plain, though, where his sympathies lay. The most important figure in his life (besides his mother) is Clyde Tolson (played by Armie Hammer, who played both Winklevoss twins in The Social Network). Clyde was Edgar’s friend, confidante, and business associate and at one time the number-two man at the FBI. Edgar and Clyde go on vacations together, share hotel rooms and intimate meals. Clyde advises Edgar on matters of fashion. They seem to spend every moment together. However, as we are told in the movie, they never shared a physical relationship. Clyde doesn’t balk at telling Edgar that he loves him; Edgar is not able to respond in kind. He is not able to show the most important person in his life how he feels about him.
In Titanic and The Aviator and other movies, Leonardo has just been Leonardo (however good that might be), but in this movie Leonardo seems submerged (with the help of what must be several pounds of makeup) in the persona of J. Edgar Hoover. For my money, this seems to be the part Leonardo was born to play. I believed him every step of the way. If he isn’t in serious contention for an Oscar, there’s something wrong with those movie people. He would get my vote if I had one.
Another standout in the cast is Naomi Watts (who I can’t see without thinking of King Kong). She plays Edgar’s sympathetic secretary, Helen Gandy. She is one of the few people in the world Edgar trusts. In what seems a thankless job, she is loyal to the end and will do whatever she must do to protect Edgar and his legacy.
While the movie seems slow to start (it takes about fifteen minutes for it to take off) and is darkly lighted (all the interiors seem dark), these are minor quibbles in an otherwise excellent movie. J. Edgar is not a bad way to spend 138 minutes sitting in a darkened movie theatre. On a personal note, however, I, for one, am getting tired of seeing Richard Nixon portrayed as a foul-mouthed lunatic. He must have had some relatively sane moments in his life where he was actually sincere about something. Can’t we ever see any of those?
On a rainy evening in mid-October 1940, a large crowd had gathered at the Biederhoff funeral parlor on Mission Street near the bridge. By six o’clock—the time when most people were having dinner or settling down for the evening—the chapel was already filled to capacity and the street outside clotted with cars. Every few seconds the door opened to admit new arrivals into the foyer, their voices hushed as they closed their umbrellas and shook the rain off their coats and hats. As they entered the Greek chapel to view the remains of the deceased, their smiles of greeting faded and they assumed expressions of solemnity appropriate to the occasion.
When an old person dies, it’s just a matter of course. A young person dying, though, gets everybody’s attention, especially when the death is sudden and violent and has raised questions for which no answers have been given. Galen Fahrenwald’s death was just such a death. In truth, many of the people who showed up at the funeral parlor to pay their respects didn’t know or care about him—or anybody in his family—but were there because they had heard the news reports of the death and wanted to see for themselves a young man (he was only thirty-seven) laid out in his coffin, a young man with a beautiful young wife and a lot of money who may or may not have died under mysterious circumstances.
Galen Fahrenwald, banked by elaborate floral offerings of every color and variety, was resplendent in his white tie and tails, nestled cozily in his golden chariot casket with its elaborate scrollwork, handles that looked to be made of pure gold, and apricot-colored lining. With his pursed lips that made him appear to be about to break into laughter, perfectly coiffed hair and red cheeks, he looked the picture of health. Nobody would ever know by looking at him that a bullet had struck him in the back, lodged in his heart, and killed him in the space of three seconds.
The police who investigated the murder and examined the evidence were about evenly split, with one-half believing that Galen Fahrenwald was murdered and the other half that the bullet that found his heart was a stray bullet fired from the weapon of a hunter. After all, it was the middle of hunting season and Galen Fahrenwald was not far from a spot known to be frequented by hunters, where game was said to be plentiful. He had taken his lunch with him and was leaning on the fender of his car, eating a chicken sandwich and admiring the view when he was killed. What he was doing there was no mystery; he was known to visit the spot on occasion when he wanted to think and be alone.
A hush came over the crowd when Galen Fahrenwald’s mother and father came in. The old lady was small and frail-looking, dressed entirely in black, her face behind a veil. She held onto her husband’s arm as if she would not have been able to stand on her own. He was tall and dignified, his face expressionless. Those who were hoping for a display of emotion were disappointed as the two quietly viewed the body of their son and moved on, as dispassionate as if they had been looking at a side of beef.
Just as the frisson over the arrival of the parents was waning, Doreen Fahrenwald came in, the wife of the deceased. She was the star attraction of the evening, the one person in everybody’s thoughts. How broken up was she over the death of her husband? Was she as baffled as everybody else over what happened? Just what was she planning to do with all the money that would come to her (at least half a million in life insurance, in addition to the house and everything else)? Would she stay put or go away to a place where nobody knew her? Was she sorry now she never had any children?
Dressed in her exquisitely sleek, Parisian dress the color of wine, with a simple strand of pearls at her neck, Doreen Fahrenwald was the picture of poise and grace. She would put to shame any fabled Hollywood beauty. Her auburn hair was drawn away from her face and arranged simply at the back of her neck. She wore little or no makeup because her beauty was the kind that doesn’t need adornment or fakery. Neither did she wear a hat or a veil or any other mourning frippery. As she approached her husband’s casket, all eyes were turned toward her. People wanted to hear what she was going to say and how she was going to bear up under her tremendous loss. There was a collective intake of breath.
She stood for several minutes and looked at her dead husband, her face a mask. What she was thinking or feeling no one was able to discern. She was a cool customer, people would say. She didn’t believe in public displays of grief, but, oh, to be a fly on the wall when she was alone: that’s when she would let it all out. She moved on as though coming out of a trance and accepted the condolences of those standing nearby.
When Galen married Doreen, he had only known her for only a few weeks and knew almost nothing about her. She was a new teacher at the school and he a member of the school board. She told him she had no family to speak of and had lived with a great-aunt while growing up. The aunt died and left Doreen a little money, so she decided to move on and start a new life for herself in a different part of the world. He was satisfied with the account she gave of her life and saw no reason to look further.
Galen’s mother and father looked unfavorably upon Doreen from the beginning. They believed they saw right through her to her rotten core, in spite of her polished exterior. She was interested in Galen only for his money and the comfort and security it would provide. Galen, they believed, had too much sense to be taken in by such a person. It wasn’t in his nature to want to marry someone he just met and knew nothing about.
They hired the best and most expensive private detective agency to uncover the truth that they knew was lurking there, somewhere just beneath the surface. They hoped to disillusion Galen with the information that was sure to be uncovered.
The investigation revealed that Doreen had, in fact, lived for years with her only known relative, an elderly woman who was a sister of her grandmother. The aunt was nearly bedridden with a host of maladies; Doreen helped care for her. The aunt died unexpectedly of a drug overdose a month after Doreen turned twenty-one. The police investigated, but the death was in the end ruled an accident. The old lady wasn’t in her right mind and just didn’t know how much of her medicine she was taking.
Doreen inherited about a hundred thousand dollars. She rented a luxurious apartment and lived the high life for a couple of years with her fashionable friends until she discovered, to her surprise, that she had spent her entire inheritance. She was forced to leave her apartment and move into a boarding house. All her friends dropped her as if she had died.
She worked for a while as a nightclub hostess. Some of the men she encountered during that time were well-heeled older gentlemen who gave her presents of jewelry and cash. She sold the jewelry and saved the cash. She hated the way she was living and longed for a different kind of life. Through taking some night courses, she was able to earn her teaching certificate. She applied for a teaching job in another state and was hired without too much effort. That’s when she met Galen.
When Galen’s mother and father presented the report from the detective agency to him, he read it silently and threw it into the fire. He said none of the information in the report made any difference and he was going through with the marriage in spite of their objections. He told them calmly that he never wanted to see them again. He would never forgive them for meddling in his private affairs. He was a grown man and past caring what they thought of him. It was the first time in his life he had ever rebelled against parental authority.
From the beginning the marriage was not a conventional one. Galen and Doreen lived as separately as they could for two people who occupied the same house. Doreen was rumored to have her discreet love affairs, but she always made sure she didn’t give Galen a reason to hand her a divorce. For his part, he wanted a wife in name only. All he required was that Doreen run the household, accompany him to certain social functions, and to act in the role of wife or business confidante when needed. Nobody knew for sure, of course, but the general belief among friends and acquaintances was that the marriage had never been consummated.
The marriage was amicable enough for a while until Doreen became bored with her fat, comfortable life. She began to drink heavily and spend enormous sums of money at the roulette table and the race track. She wasn’t nearly as lucky at gambling as she thought she should be. Her debts accumulated to the point where she was unable to repay them. Her creditors threatened to try to get the money from her husband.
Galen had, from his strict upbringing, a moralistic view of the world. He believed in the principles of right and wrong; he believed that to waste one’s precious resources on such trivial pursuits as gambling was stupid and irresponsible. When he learned of his wife’s enormous debt, he refused to bankroll her activities. For the first time in their marriage, they engaged in vicious fighting over money. He slapped her across the face, knocking her down and loosening two of her teeth; she threw a bookend at him and cut a gash in his forehead. A few days before Galen was killed, Doreen told friends she was going to file for divorce on the grounds of incompatibility and physical cruelty.
While Doreen Pitkin Fahrenwald was viewing the mortal remains of her husband, a different kind of scene was playing out across town at the police station. After hours of questioning, an auto mechanic by the name of Curtis Faulkner, who held medals for marksmanship from the army, had just confessed to the murder of Galen Fahrenwald. Frightened out of his wits when told he could go to the electric chair, Curtis Faulkner told the police everything.
He had known Doreen Fahrenwald for a year or so, and, no, he wasn’t her lover—she was too much of a lady for that. He met her when she brought her Ford into the shop where he worked. They started talking and discovered they were both just wild about horse racing.
Talk of horses led to more serious conversation. Doreen told Curtis Faulkner about her unhappy marriage and how cold and strange her husband was; how he was controlled by a domineering mother who hated her and wished her dead. To escape her unhappy marriage, she had been drawn into the unsavory world of gambling and café society. She had taken on more debt than she could ever repay. She was being threatened to repay the money she owed and she didn’t know what she was going to do. She was contemplating suicide.
When Doreen learned that Curtis Faulkner was an expert marksman, she was tremendously interested and asked to see his medals. Playing on his ego, she coaxed him into telling her about his exploits in the army. Soon after, she came up with the idea of paying Curtis to kill her husband. Since Curtis didn’t know her husband and had never met him, nobody would suspect him. With her husband dead, she would have control of all his money, could pay off her gambling debts, and live comfortably for the rest of her days. Curtis would have more money than he ever dreamed possible and could escape the job he despised. Everybody would be happy.
The police chief wanted to pick Doreen up quickly before somebody tipped her off and she had a chance to flee. If he could get a confession from her before the voters went to the polls in about three weeks’ time, he would be assured of being re-elected. He dispatched four armed men to pick her up at Biederhoff’s funeral parlor, telling them not to handcuff her unless she resisted.
The four police officers walked single-file into Biederhoff’s, trying to be unobtrusive but getting the attention of everybody there by the mere fact of their presence. The lead man, with the others behind him, went over to Doreen Fahrenwald—at that moment engaged in quiet conversation with a friend near her husband’s casket—and told her she was under arrest for suspicion of murdering her husband, Galen Fahrenwald. When she smiled at him as though he had paid her a compliment, he put the handcuffs on her to show that he meant business. Murder was nothing to smile about.
Doreen Pitkin Fahrenwald showed no emotion, no surprise, as she was led from Beiderhoff’s funeral chapel by a retinue of police officers on that rainy October evening. She stopped in front of Galen’s mother and the four officers stopped, too, willing to give her a chance to say what needed to be said. She seemed about to speak to the veil—seeing nothing of the face underneath—but no words came. She just smiled and shook her head and moved on. There would be much speculation later over what the headshake meant, but, or course, nobody would ever know for sure. She was, to the end, a mystery to all who knew her.
In the new movie, 50/50, seemingly healthy, 27-year-old Adam Lerner (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) discovers he has a malignant tumor in his spine. Suddenly he is faced with the realization that his odds of dying are about the same as his odds of living. He has a fifty-fifty chance. If this seems like a grim premise for a movie, it is, after all, a comedy.
Most of the humor in 50/50 derives from Adam’s best friend Kyle (Seth Rogen). While Kyle is crude and tends to make tactless (but funny) remarks, he has more substance than we at first thought. He knows what friendship is all about—he’ll stick with Adam through all the unpleasantness of his illness.
Adam has a shallow, live-in girlfriend named Rachael (Bryce Dallas Howard) who says at the outset that she will stick with him, but we see right away that she probably isn’t going to last. She seems to care for Adam, but not enough to always be around when he needs her. Adam has never learned to drive a car so he has to depend on Rachael—or somebody—to drive him to his chemotherapy sessions.
Adam’s difficult but loving mother (Anjelica Huston, in what must be her best role in years) doesn’t take the news of her son’s illness very well. There always seems to be an argument about to erupt between mother and son. He won’t return her calls; she doesn’t seem to like it that she doesn’t have much control over him anymore. Adam’s Alzheimer’s-afflicted father doesn’t know much of what’s going on.
Adam’s newly minted therapist, Katherine (Anna Kendrick), sees that Adam is emotionally distant and longs to help him, but she doesn’t seem to know how. He is, after all, only her third patient. She knows all the textbook terms for everything, but she is as lost as he is. She lectures him on what’s “normal” for people in his situation.
Despite its grim subject matter, 50/50 will not leave viewers feeling sad or depressed. While there are some heartrending moments, the message here is humor, courage and acceptance of the inevitable—rather than tears.
Boardwalk Empire, Season Two ~ A Capsule Review by Allen Kopp
Season two of HBO’s excellent series, Boardwalk Empire, is in full swing. If you are familiar with Boardwalk Empire at all, you know it is set in Atlantic City during the 1920s, the glorious time in our nation’s history known as Prohibition. You probably know that Prohibition wasn’t a very good idea. It didn’t stop the making, selling and distribution of liquor, but only drove it underground and led to the rise of the criminal class. Enterprising businessmen who didn’t mind going against a little old law realized there was lots of money to be made.
Enoch “Nucky” Thompson (played by Steve Buscemi), the head rogue in Boardwalk Empire’s gallery of rogues, is no fool. He manages to stay at the top of his game by outsmarting his rivals and cashing in on a political favor whenever he needs one. He is a sometime politician and a “businessman” with a keen instinct for survival. He has underlings who fall all over themselves to do his bidding, including a brother of questionable loyalty who is the sheriff.
Besides being a ruthless gangster who won’t stop at snuffing out whoever gets in his way (or having somebody else snuff them out), Nucky Thompson has more than a small touch of humanity and also a domestic side. He has a living arrangement with a widow with two small children named Margaret Schroeder (Kelly MacDonald). We saw in season one how Margaret came to be a widow and how she came to be Nucky’s almost-wife. She’s domestic and soft-spoken, with an Irish accent, but she knows how to get what she wants and is a lot smarter than her kind is usually given credit for. She’s always ready to lend a helping hand when Nucky is in trouble. She gives the impression that she will be left standing when everybody else is brought down.
Nucky Thompson’s chief rival is “the Colonel,” one Lewis Kaestner, a septuagenarian gangster played by Dabney Coleman. The Colonel used to be top dog and longs to be so again. In season two, he decides to openly challenge Nucky Thompson. He has a powerful ally in his son, Jimmy Darmody (Michael Pitt), an up-and-coming hoodlum who is a veteran of the Great War. Jimmy has a restless wife, Angela (Alexa Palladino), a young son, and a beautiful, glamorous mother, Gillian (Gretchen Mol) who looks barely old enough to be his sister (the Colonel had his way with her when she was only thirteen). The thing about Jimmy is he is torn between loyalty to his father, the Colonel, and loyalty to Nucky Thompson, who acted as a surrogate father to him when he was growing up. Nucky believes he’s more of a father to Jimmy than anybody else ever could be.
Brutish Prohibition agent Nelson Van Alden (Michael Shannon) see himself as a kind of avenging angel. He takes his job as an agent for the U.S. government very seriously. He believes anybody who profits from the illegal liquor trade should be called up before the law. He frequently invokes his religion but lives by his own rules. He is not above killing a man (or more than one) if it suits his purposes. He has a mousey, lonely wife back home that he doesn’t seem to like very much; also a lady friend, Lucy Danziger (Paz De La Huerta), in Atlantic City who is expecting his child. He doesn’t seem to care much for her, either; he keeps her a virtual prisoner in his apartment until after his baby his born. Lucy is a rough-hewn, tough-talking sexpot who happens to be Nucky Thompson’s cast-off girlfriend. Since Nucky threw her over in favor of Margaret Schroeder, she’ll stop at nothing to get revenge.
Of the secondary characters in Boardwalk Empire, my favorite is Richard Harrow (played by Jack Huston, grandson of John Huston), a tragically disfigured, gravelly voiced war veteran who becomes a friend and associate of Jimmy Darmody. He is in the service of the bootleggers and thugs he associates with, while longing for a “normal” family life that he will never have.
Boardwalk Empire is loaded with period detail; in its sets and costumes it has a feel of authenticity. The vintage cars and period music stand out in every episode. The characters are well drawn and believable and the dialogue crisp and intelligent. This show has everything the viewer could want in a period crime drama and then some. How many TV series have had Warren G. Harding, Jack Dempsey and Eddie Cantor as characters?
In the air is the smell of rubbing alcohol, or, as it is more commonly known, “shot medicine.” It’s shot day and Miss Goldsmith, the school nurse—along with her huge female assistant with bulging arms, affectionately referred to as “the Angel of Death”—is alone in the narrow nurse’s room on the third floor with the door, usually opened, now closed. The ghoulish pair requires solitude while they lay out on the table the cotton balls, syringes, frightening-looking bottles of serum, and hundreds of needles required to vaccinate the students of Harmony Hill elementary school against the dreaded scourge of disease. When they are ready to begin, the door will re-open and the Angel of Death will issue forth with a bunch of the blue “shot cards” in her dimpled hands to collect the first lucky recipients of the largess of the state health department. We wait in our stifling classroom, pretending to be paying attention to our social studies lesson, but instead consumed with worry about when the Angel of Death will appear at our door and begin calling out the names of those of us who must submit to the needle.
Miss Joyce, our teacher, pauses in midsentence when there is a knock at the door. We all sit bolt upright, knowing our moment has come. The door opens and there is the Angel of Death proffering her stack of blue cards as she steps into the room. She has a satisfied grin on her lipsticked mouth as Miss Joyce gives her the go-ahead and she begins calling out the names, in seemingly random—rather than alphabetical—order: Eddie Fuller, Ramona Peabody, Roy Babb, Emory Dalton, Felicity Fleming, Curtis Welch, Norman Hardy, Betty Ray, Travis Fletcher, George Abney…
By the time my name is called, I have a lump of dread in my stomach, but I stand up and walk jauntily to the front of the room and take my blue shot card from the Angel of Death with a smile on my face as if getting stuck in the arm with a needle is the one thing in the world I’m longing to do today.
When all the names have been called (about half in the room) and we are all lined up ready to go, the Angel of Death leads us out of the room, down the long hallway and up the stairs. We don’t make a sound except for the clomping of our shoes on the old wooden floors.
While we are standing in the nurse’s room in a line that goes all the way out into the hallway, Wanda Gilroy, who I don’t know very well because she’s in another grade, wets her pants and begins wailing. One of the older girls leads her away by the arm—as if wetting her pants has somehow affected her ability to see—while the Angel of Death puts some paper towels on the floor to soak up the urine so the rest of us won’t have to walk through it. Wanda might have thought that wetting her pants would get her out of getting the shot, but she’ll have to get back in line as soon as she dries herself off.
I’m about twenty people back, and the line seems to be moving very slow (is this going to take all day?), when there’s a commotion at the front of the line. Leroy Meinhardt is putting up a fuss just as Miss Goldsmith is wiping his stringy little arm with the alcohol-soaked cotton ball. It seems that Leroy has decided at the very last moment that he can’t and won’t tolerate getting a shot today. He keeps saying, “No! No! No!” As he tries to pull away, Miss Goldsmith holds him and says, “There, now, this isn’t going to hurt at all.” She finishes swabbing his arm and when Leroy sees the syringe she’s holding in her hand, he breaks away. He dives under the little hospital bed against the wall, but he’s no match for the Angel of Death. She grabs him by the ankles and pulls him out easily on the slick tile floor. She jerks his little ass to a standing position and sets him down in easy reach of Miss Goldsmith with her needle.
“You’re making this much harder than it needs to be,” Miss Goldsmith says grimly. “I’m just as determined to give it as you are not to get it!”
Leroy appears to be about to acquiesce; he is holding still but making little sobbing sounds. Miss Goldsmith holds his arm in her vise-like grip and swabs it again. When she has the needle not more than three inches from his arm, he breaks away again but the Angel of Death grabs him before he has a chance to get very far. She sits down and pulls him toward her and holds him between her massive thighs. She puts her arms around his upper body as if she is a bear and, in this way, with her arms and legs, holds him immobile. He is making “yah-yah,” sounds, but he can’t move so he is essentially helpless, eyes shut tight, holding his breath and gritting his teeth.
Miss Goldsmith grabs the flesh of his upper arm in her left hand and with the other hand sticks the needle in. She pushes the plunger on the syringe, emptying the life-saving serum into his arm, and withdraws the needle.
Leroy grows limp; his head lolls forward on his shoulders. The Angel of Death continues to hold him because it seems he will slump to the floor if she doesn’t, but in a few seconds he opens his eyes and looks around as if he is just coming out of a trance. The room is absolutely still, with everybody watching him. When he realizes he is half-sitting on the Angel of Death’s lap, he pushes away and stands up and smiles broadly. Everybody in the room claps and cheers, jubilant that the ordeal is over and has ended in success.
When my turn comes, I look out the window at the sky and let my body go as limp as I can to still remain standing. I don’t look at the needle going into my arm and I won’t show that I feel it. I believe, even at my young age, in the principle of simple human dignity. I would never want anybody to see me making a scene, crying and screaming, the way Leroy Meinhardt does. He will always be remembered, even decades later, as a whiny crybaby and a person to be avoided.
I get my lemon sucker, the kind with the soft loop—so if you fall flat on your face while you’re eating it you won’t push it out the backside of your head—and go back downstairs to Miss Joyce’s room. I’m not supposed to eat the sucker until recess, so I put it in my shirt pocket for safe keeping. I’m happy to have the shot over with. I don’t see what all the fuss was about; it didn’t hurt at all. I’ll try to remember that for the next time, but I probably won’t.
A Visit of Charity ~ A Classic American Short Story by Eudora Welty (1909-2001)
It was mid-morning—a very cold, bright day. Holding a potted plant before her, a girl of fourteen jumped off the bus in front of the Old Ladies’ Home, on the outskirts of town. She wore a red coat, and her straight yellow hair was hanging down loose from the pointed white cap all the little girls were wearing that year. She stopped for a moment beside one of the prickly dark shrubs with which the city had beautified the Home, and then proceeded slowly toward the building, which was of whitewashed brick and reflected the winter sunlight like a block of ice. As she walked vaguely up the steps she shifted the small pot from hand to hand; then she had to set it down and remove her mittens before she could open the heavy door.
“I’m a Campfire Girl…I have to pay a visit to some old lady,” she told the nurse at the desk. This was a woman in a white uniform who looked as if she were cold; she had close-cut hair which stood up on the very top of her head exactly like a sea wave. Marian, the little girl, did not tell her that this visit would give her a minimum of only three points in her score.
“Acquainted with any of our residents?” asked the nurse. She lifted one eyebrow and spoke like a man.
“With any old ladies? No—but—that is, any of them will do,” Marian stammered. With her free hand she pushed her hair behind her ears, as she did when it was time to study Science.
The nurse shrugged and rose. “You have a nice multiflora cineraria there,” she remarked as she walked ahead down the hall of closed doors to pick out an old lady.
There was loose, bulging linoleum on the floor. Marian felt as if she were walking on the waves, but the nurse paid no attention to it. There was a smell in the hall like the interior of a clock. Everything was silent until, behind one of the doors, an old lady of some kind cleared her throat like a sheep bleating. This decided the nurse. Stopping in her tracks, she first extended her arm, bent her elbow, and leaned forward from the hips, all to examine the watched strapped to her wrist; then she gave a loud double-rap on the door.
“There are two in each room,” the nurse remarked over her shoulder.
“Two what?” asked Marian without thinking. The sound like a sheep’s bleating almost made her turn around and run back.
One old woman was pulling the door open in short, gradual jerks, and when she saw the nurse a strange smile forced her old face dangerously awry. Marian, suddenly propelled by the strong, impatient arm of the nurse, saw next the side-face of another woman, even older, who was lying flat in bed with a cap on and a counterpane drawn up to her chin.
“Visitor,” said the nurse, and after one more shove she was off up the hall.
Marian stood tongue-tied; both hands held the potted plant. The old woman, still with that terrible, square smile (which was a smile of welcome) stamped on her bony face, was waiting…Perhaps she said something. The old woman in bed said nothing at all, and she did not look around.
Suddenly Marian saw a hand, quick as a bird claw, reach up in the air and pluck the white cap off her head. At the same time, another claw to match drew her all the way into the room, and the next moment the door closed behind her.
“My, my, my,” said the old lady at her side.
Marian stood enclosed by a bed, a washstand and a chair; the tiny room had altogether too much furniture. Everything smelled wet—even the bare floor. She held on to the back of the chair, which was wicker and felt soft and damp. Her heart beat more and more slowly, her hands got colder and colder, and she could not hear whether the old women were saying anything or not. She could not see them very clearly. How dark it was! The window shade was down, and the only door was shut. Marian looked at the ceiling…It was like being caught in a robbers’ cave, just before one was murdered.
“Did you come to be our little girl for a while?” the first robber asked.
Then something was snatched from Marian’s hand—the little potted plant.
“Flowers!” screamed the old woman. She stood holding the pot in an undecided way. “Pretty flowers,” she added.
Then the old woman in bed cleared her throat and spoke. “They are not pretty,” she said, still without looking around, but very distinctly.
Marian suddenly pitched against the chair and sat down in it.
“Pretty flowers,” the first woman insisted. “pretty—pretty…”
Marian wished she had the little pot back for just a moment—she had forgotten to look at the plant herself before giving it away. What did it look like?
“Stinkweeds,” said the other old woman sharply. She had a bunchy white forehead and red eyes like a sheep. Now she turned them toward Marian. The fogginess seemed to rise in her throat again, and she bleated, “Who—are—you?”
To her surprise, Marian could not remember her name. “I’m a Campfire Girl,” she said finally.
“Watch out for the germs,” said the old woman like a sheep, not addressing anyone.
“One came out last month to see us,” said the first old woman.
A sheep or a germ? wondered Marian dreamily, holding on to the chair.
“Did not!” cried the other old woman.
“Did so! Read to us out of the Bible and we enjoyed it!” screamed the first.
“Who enjoyed it?” said the woman in bed. Her mouth was unexpectedly small and sorrowful, like a pet’s.
“We all enjoyed it,” said Marian, without realizing that she had said a word.
The first old woman had just finished putting the potted plant high, high up on top of the wardrobe, where it could hardly be seen from below. Marian wondered how she had ever succeeded in placing it there, how she could ever have reached so high.
“You mustn’t pay any attention to old Addie,” she now said to the little girl. “She’s ailing today.”
“Will you shut your mouth?” said the woman in bed. “I am not.”
“You’re a story.”
“I can’t stay but a minute—really I can’t,” said Marian suddenly. She looked down at the wet floor and thought that if she were sick in here they would have to let her go.
With much to-do the first old woman sat down in a rocking chair—still another piece of furniture!—and began to rock. With the fingers of one hand she touched a very dirty cameo pin on her chest. “What do you do at school?” she asked.
“I don’t know…” said Marian. She tried to think but she could not.
“Oh, but the flowers are beautiful,” the old woman whispered. She seemed to rock faster and faster; Marian did not see how anyone could rock so fast.
“Ugly,” said the woman in bed.
“If we bring flowers—“ Marian began, then fell silent. She had almost said that if Campfire Girls brought flowers to the Old Ladies’ Home, the visit would count one extra point, and if they took a Bible with them on the bus and read it to the old ladies, it counted double. But the old woman had not listened, anyway; she was rocking and watching the other one, who watched back from the bed.
“Poor Addie is ailing. She has to take medicine—see?” she said, pointing a horny finger at a row of bottles on the table, and rocking so high that her black comfort shoes lifted off the floor like a little child’s.
“I am no more sick than you are,” said the woman in bed.
“Oh, yes you are!”
“I just got more sense than you have, that’s all,” said the other old woman, nodding her head.
“That’s only the contrary way she talks when you all come,” said the first old lady with sudden intimacy. She stopped the rocker with a neat pat of her feet and leaned toward Marian. Her hand reached over—it felt like a petunia leaf, clinging and just a little sticky.
“Will you hush! Will you hush!” cried the other one.
Marian leaned back rigidly in her chair.
“When I was a little girl like you, I went to school and all,” said the old woman in the same intimate, menacing voice. “Not here—another town…”
“Hush!” said the sick woman. “You never went to school. You never came and you never went. You never were anything—only here. You never were born! You don’t know anything. Your head is empty, your heart and hands and your old black purse are all empty—you showed it to me. And yet you talk, talk, talk, talk, talk all the time until I think I’m losing my mind! Who are you? You’re a stranger—a perfect stranger! Don’t you know you’re a stranger? Is it possible that they have actually done a thing like this to anyone—sent them in a stranger to talk, and rock, and tell away her whole long rigmarole? Do they seriously suppose that I’ll be able to keep it up, day in, day out, night in, night out, living in the same room with a terrible old woman forever?”
Marian saw the old woman’s eyes grow bright and turn toward her. This old woman was looking at her with despair and calculation in her face. Her small lips suddenly dropped apart, and exposed a half circle of false teeth with tan gums.
“Come here, I want to tell you something,” she whispered. “Come here!”
Marian was trembling, and her heart nearly stopped beating altogether for a moment.
“Now, now, Addie,” said the first old woman. “That’s not polite. Do you know what’s really the matter with old Addie today?” She, too, looked at Marian; one of her eyelids dropped low.
“The matter?” the child repeated stupidly. “What’s the matter with her?”
“Why, she’s mad because it’s her birthday!” said the first old woman, beginning to rock again and giving a little crow as though she had answered her own riddle.
“It is not, it is not!” screamed the old woman in bed. “It is not my birthday, no one knows when that is but myself, and will you please be quiet and say nothing more, or I’ll go straight out of my mind!” She turned her eyes toward Marian again, and presently she said in the soft, foggy voice, “When the worst comes to the worst, I ring this bell, and the nurse comes.” One of her hands was drawn out from under the patched counterpane—a thin little hand with enormous black freckles. With a finger which would not hold still she pointed to a little bell on the table among the bottles.
“How old are you?” Marian breathed. Now she could see the old woman in bed very closely and plainly, and very abruptly, from all sides, as in dreams. She wondered about her—she wondered for a moment as though there was nothing else in the world to wonder about. It was the first time such a thing had happened to Marian.
“I won’t tell!”
The old face on the pillow, where Marian was bending over it, slowly gathered and collapsed. Soft whimpers came out of the small open mouth. It was a sheep that she sounded like—a little lamb. Marian’s face drew very close, the yellow hair hung forward.
“She’s crying!” She turned a bright, burning face up to the first old woman.
“That’s Addie for you,” the old woman said spitefully.
Marian jumped up and moved toward the door. For the second time, the claw almost touched her hair, but it was not quick enough. The little girl put her cap on.
“Well, it was real visit,” said the old woman, following Marian through the doorway and all the way out into the hall. Then from behind she suddenly clutched the child with her sharp little fingers. “Oh, little girl, have you a penny to spare for an old woman that’s not got anything of her own? We don’t have thing in the world—not a penny for candy—not a thing! Little girl, just a nickel—a penny—”
Marian pulled violently against the old hands for a moment before she was free. Then she ran down the hall, without looking behind her and without looking at the nurse, who was reading Field & Stream at her desk. The nurse, after another triple motion to consult her wrist watch, asked automatically the question put to visitors in all institutions: “Won’t you stay and have dinner with us?”
Marian never replied. She pushed the heavy door open into the cold air and ran down the steps.
Under the prickly shrub she stooped and quickly, without being seen, retrieved a red apple she had hidden there.
Her yellow hair under the white cap, her scarlet coat, her bare knees flashed in the sunlight as she ran to meet the big bus rocketing through the street.
“Wait for me!” she shouted. As though at an imperial command, the bus ground to a stop.
She jumped on and took a big bite out of the apple.
Hermann Rorschach (1884-1922) ~ The Man Who Made Inkblots his Life’s Work
Most people have heard of the Rorschach inkblot test. We’ve seen it in dozens of movies: a psychiatrist is examining a patient; he shows the patient a series of inkblots and asks him to describe what he “sees” in the inkblots. While one person will see two elephants stuck together trying to pull themselves apart, another person will see something entirely different. The trained psychiatrist knows how to analyze patients’ responses to the inkblots.
The Rorschach inkblot test was developed by one Hermann Rorschach, a Swiss Freudian psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who lived from 1884 to 1922. As a child, like many other young people in his native country, he enjoyed “Klecksography,” the making of fanciful inkblot pictures. After graduating from high school, he enrolled in medical school at the University of Zurich, where the excitement in academic circles for psychiatry reminded him of his childhood inkblots. He wondered why different people saw different things in the same inkblots and began showing them to children and analyzing their responses.
In 1914, at the age of 30, he became assistant director at the regional psychiatric hospital at Herisau. In 1921 he wrote the book, Psychodiagnostic, which formed the basis for the inkblot test. In 1922, only one year after his book was published, he died of peritonitis brought on by a ruptured appendix. He was only 37 years old.
Good Country People ~ A Classic American short story by Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964)
Besides the neutral expression that she wore when she was alone, Mrs. Freeman had two others, forward and reverse, that she used for all her human dealings. Her forward expression was steady and driving like the advance of a heavy truck. Her eyes never swerved to left or right but turned as the story turned as if they followed a yellow line down the center of it. She seldom used the other expression because it was not often necessary for her to retract a statement, but when she did, her face came to a complete stop, there was an almost imperceptible movement of her black eyes, during which they seemed to be receding, and then the observer would see that Mrs. Freeman, though she might stand there as real as several grain sacks thrown on top of each other, was no longer there in spirit. As for getting anything across to her when this was the case, Mrs. Hopewell had given it up. She might talk her head off. Mrs. Freeman could never be brought to admit herself wrong to any point. She would stand there and if she could be brought to say anything, it was something like, “Well, I wouldn’t of said it was and I wouldn’t of said it wasn’t” or letting her gaze range over the top kitchen shelf where there was an assortment of dusty bottles, she might remark, “I see you ain’t ate many of them figs you put up last summer.”
They carried on their most important business in the kitchen at breakfast. Every morning Mrs. Hopewell got up at seven o’clock and lit her gas heater and Joy’s. Joy was her daughter, a large blonde girl who had an artificial leg. Mrs. Hopewell thought of her as a child though she was thirty-two years old and highly educated. Joy would get up while her mother was eating and lumber into the bathroom and slam the door, and before long, Mrs. Freeman would arrive at the back door. Joy would hear her mother call, “Come on in,” and then they would talk for a while in low voices that were indistinguishable in the bathroom. By the time Joy came in, they had usually finished the weather report and were on one or the other of Mrs. Freeman’s daughters, Glynese or Carramae. Joy called them Glycerin and Caramel. Glynese, a redhead, was eighteen and had many admirers; Carramae, a blonde, was only fifteen but already married and pregnant. She could not keep anything on her stomach. Every morning Mrs. Freeman told Mrs. Hopewell how many times she had vomited since the last report.
Mrs. Hopewell liked to tell people that Glynese and Carramae were two of the finest girls she knew and that Mrs. Freeman was a lady and that she was never ashamed to take her anywhere or introduce her to anybody they might meet. Then she would tell how she had happened to hire the Freemans in the first place and how they were a godsend to her and how she had had them four years. The reason for her keeping them so long was that they were not trash. They were good country people. She had telephoned the man whose name they had given as reference and he had told her that Mr. Freeman was a good farmer but that his wife was the nosiest woman ever to walk the earth. “She’s got to be into everything,” the man said. “If she don’t get there before the dust settles, you can bet she’s dead, that’s all. She’ll want to know all your business. I can stand him real good,” he had said, “but me nor my wife neither could have stood that woman one more minute on this place.” That had put Mrs. Hopewell off for a few days. She had hired them in the end because there were no other applicants but she had made up her mind beforehand exactly how she would handle the woman. Since she was the type who had to be into everything, then, Mrs. Hopewell had decided, she would not only let her be into everything, she would see to it that she was into everything – she would give her the responsibility of everything, she would put her in charge. Mrs. Hopewell had no bad qualities of her own but she was able to use other people’s in such a constructive way that she had kept them four years.
Nothing is perfect. This was one of Mrs. Hopewell’s favorite sayings. Another was: that is life! And still another, the most important, was: well, other people have their opinions too. She would make these statements, usually at the table, in a tone of gentle insistence as if no one held them but her, and the large hulking Joy, whose constant outrage had obliterated every expression from her face, would stare just a little to the side of her, her eyes icy blue, with the look of someone who had achieved blindness by an act of will and means to keep it.
When Mrs. Hopewell said to Mrs. Freeman that life was like that, Mrs. Freeman would say, “I always said so myself.” Nothing had been arrived at by anyone that had not first been arrived at by her. She was quicker than Mr. Freeman. When Mrs. Hopewell said to her after they had been on the place for a while, “You know, you’re the wheel behind the wheel,” and winked, Mrs. Freeman had said, “I know it. I’ve always been quick. It’s some that are quicker than others.”
“Everybody is different,” Mrs. Hopewell said.
“Yes, most people is,” Mrs. Freeman said.
“It takes all kinds to make the world.”
“I always said it myself.”
The girl was used to this kind of dialogue for breakfast and more of it for dinner; sometimes they had it for supper too. When they had no guest they ate in the kitchen because that was easier. Mrs. Freeman always
managed to arrive at some point during the meal and to watch them finish it. She would stand in the doorway if it were summer but in the winter she would stand with one elbow on top of the refrigerator and look down at them, or she would stand by the gas heater, lifting the back of her skirt slightly. Occasionally she would stand against the wall and roll her head from side to side. At no time was she in any hurry to leave. All this was very trying on Mrs. Hopewell but she was a woman of great patience. She realized that nothing is perfect and that in the Freemans she had good country people and that if, in this day and age, you get good country people, you had better hang onto them.
She had had plenty of experience with trash. Before the Freemans she had averaged one tenant family a year. The wives of these farmers were not the kind you would want to be around you for very long. Mrs. Hopewell, who had divorced her husband long ago, needed someone to walk over the fields with her; and when Joy had to be impressed for these services, her remarks were usually so ugly and her face so glum that Mrs. Hopewell would say, “If you can’t come pleasantly, I don’t want you at all,” to which the girl, standing square and rigid-shouldered with her neck thrust slightly forward, would reply, “If you want me, here I am – LIKE I AM.” Mrs. Hopewell excused this attitude because of the leg (which had been shot off in a hunting accident when Joy was ten). It was hard for Mrs. Hopewell to realize that her child was thirty-two now and that for more than twenty years she had had only one leg. She thought of her still as a child because it tore her heart to think instead of the poor stout girl in her thirties who had never danced a step or had any normal good times. Her name was really Joy but as soon as she was twenty-one and away from home, she had had it legally changed. Mrs. Hopewell was certain that she had thought and thought until she had hit upon the ugliest name in any language. Then she had gone and had the beautiful name, Joy, changed without telling her mother until after she had done it. Her legal name was Hulga. When Mrs. Hopewell thought the name, Hulga, she thought of the broad blank hull of a battleship. She would not use it. She continued to call her Joy to which the girl responded but in a purely mechanical way. Hulga had learned to tolerate Mrs. Freeman who saved her from taking walks with her mother. Even Glynese and Carramae were useful when they occupied attention that might otherwise have been directed at her.
At first she had thought she could not stand Mrs. Freeman for she had found it was not possible to be rude to her. Mrs. Freeman would take on strange resentments and for days together she would be sullen but the source of her displeasure was always obscure; a direct attack, a positive leer, blatant ugliness to her face – these never touched her. And without warning one day, she began calling her Hulga.
She did not call her that in front of Mrs. Hopewell who would have been incensed but when she and the girl happened to be out of the house together, she would say something and add the name Hulga to the end of it, and the big spectacled Joy-Hulga would scowl and redden as if her privacy had been intruded upon. She considered the name her personal affair. She had arrived at it first purely on the basis of its ugly sound and then the full genius of its fitness had struck her. She had a vision of the name working like the ugly sweating Vulcan who stayed in the furnace and to whom, presumably, the goddess had to come when called. She saw it as the name of her highest creative act. One of her major triumphs was that her mother had not been able to turn her dust into Joy, but the greater one was that she had been able to turn it herself into Hulga. However, Mrs. Freeman’s relish for using the name only irritated her. It was as if Mrs. Freeman’s beady steel-pointed eyes had penetrated far enough behind her face to reach some secret fact. Something about her seemed to fascinate Mrs. Freeman and then one day Hulga realized that it was the artificial leg. Mrs. Freeman had a special fondness for the details of secret infections, hidden deformities, assaults upon children. Of diseases, she preferred the lingering or incurable. Hulga had heard Mrs. Hopewell give her the details of the hunting accident, how the leg had been literally blasted off, how she had never lost consciousness. Mrs. Freeman could listen to it any time as if it had happened an hour ago.
When Hulga stumped into the kitchen in the morning (she could walk without making the awful noise but she made it – Mrs. Hopewell was certain – because it was ugly-sounding), she glanced at them and did not speak. Mrs. Hopewell would be in her red kimono with her hair tied around her head in rags. She would be sitting at the table, finishing her breakfast and Mrs. Freeman would be hanging by her elbow outward from the refrigerator, looking down at the table. Hulga always put her eggs on the stove to boil and then stood over them with her arms folded, and Mrs. Hopewell would look at her – a kind of indirect gaze divided between her and Mrs. Freeman – and would think that if she would only keep herself up a little, she wouldn’t be so bad looking. There was nothing wrong with her face that a pleasant expression wouldn’t help. Mrs. Hopewell said that people who looked on the bright side of things would be beautiful even if they were not.
Whenever she looked at Joy this way, she could not help but feel that it would have been better if the child had not taken the Ph.D. It had certainly not brought her out any and now that she had it, there was no more excuse for her to go to school again. Mrs. Hopewell thought it was nice for girls to go to school to have a good time but Joy had “gone through.” Anyhow, she would not have been strong enough to go again. The doctors had told Mrs. Hopewell that with the best of care, Joy might see forty-five. She had a weak heart. Joy had made it plain that if it had not been for this condition, she would be far from these red hills and good country people. She would be in a university lecturing to people who knew what she was talking about. And Mrs. Hopewell could very well picture here there, looking like a scarecrow and lecturing to more of the same. Here she went about all day in a six-year-old skirt and a yellow sweat shirt with a faded cowboy on a horse embossed on it. She thought this was funny; Mrs. Hopewell thought it was idiotic and showed simply that she was still a child. She was brilliant but she didn’t have a grain of sense. It seemed to Mrs. Hopewell that every year she grew less like other people and more like herself – bloated, rude, and squint-eyed. And she said such strange things! To her own mother she had said – without warning, without excuse, standing up in the middle of a meal with her face purple and her mouth half full – “Woman! Do you ever look inside? Do you ever look inside and see what you are not? God!” she had cried sinking down again and staring at her plate, “Malebranche was right: we are not our own light. We are not our own light!” Mrs. Hopewell had no idea to this day what brought that on. She had only made the remark, hoping Joy would take it in, that a smile never hurt anyone. The girl had taken the Ph.D. in philosophy and this left Mrs. Hopewell at a complete loss. You could say, “My daughter is a nurse,” or “My daughter is a school teacher,” or even, “My daughter is a chemical engineer.” You could not say, “My daughter is a philosopher.” That was something that had ended with the Greeks and Romans. All day Joy sat on her neck in a deep chair, reading. Sometimes she went for walks but she didn’t like dogs or cats or birds or flowers or nature or nice young men. She looked at nice young men as if she could smell their stupidity.
One day Mrs. Hopewell had picked up one of the books the girl had just put down and opening it at random, she read, “Science, on the other hand, has to assert its soberness and seriousness afresh and declare that it is concerned solely with what-is. Nothing – how can it be for science anything but a horror and a phantasm? If science is right, then one thing stands firm: science wishes to know nothing of nothing. Such is after all the strictly scientific approach to Nothing. We know it by wishing to know nothing of Nothing.” These words had been underlined with a blue pencil and they worked on Mrs. Hopewell like some evil incantation in gibberish. She shut the book quickly and went out of the room as if she were having a chill.
This morning when the girl came in, Mrs. Freeman was on Carramae. “She thrown up four times after supper,” she said, “and was up twict in the night after three o’clock. Yesterday she didn’t do nothing but ramble in the bureau drawer. All she did. Stand up there and see what she could run up on.”
“She’s got to eat,” Mrs. Hopewell muttered, sipping her coffee, while she watched Joy’s back at the stove. She was wondering what the child had said to the Bible salesman. She could not imagine what kind of a conversation she could possibly have had with him.
He was a tall gaunt hatless youth who had called yesterday to sell them a Bible. He had appeared at the door, carrying a large black suitcase that weighted him so heavily on one side that he had to brace himself against the door facing. He seemed on the point of collapse but he said in a cheerful voice, “Good morning, Mrs. Cedars!” and set the suitcase down on the mat. He was not a bad-looking young man though he had on a bright blue suit and yellow socks that were not pulled up far enough. He had prominent face bones and a streak of sticky-looking brown hair falling across his forehead.
“I’m Mrs. Hopewell,” she said.
“Oh!” he said, pretending to look puzzled but with his eyes sparkling, “I saw it said ‘The Cedars’ on the mailbox so I thought you was Mrs. Cedars!” and he burst out in a pleasant laugh. He picked up the satchel and under cover of a pant, he fell forward into her hall. It was rather as if the suitcase had moved first, jerking him after it. “Mrs. Hopewell!” he said and grabbed her hand. “I hope you are well!” and he laughed again and then all at once his face sobered completely. He paused and gave her a straight earnest look and said, “Lady, I’ve come to speak of serious things.”
“Well, come in,” she muttered, none too pleased because her dinner was almost ready. He came into the parlor and sat down on the edge of a straight chair and put the suitcase between his feet and glanced around the room as if he were sizing her up by it. Her silver gleamed on the two sideboards; she decided he had never been in a room as elegant as this. “Mrs. Hopewell,” he began, using her name in a way that sounded almost intimate, “I know you believe in Chrustian service.”
“Well, yes,” she murmured.
“I know,” he said and paused, looking very wise with his head cocked on one side, “that you’re a good woman. Friends have told me.”
Mrs. Hopewell never liked to be taken for a fool. “What are you selling?” she asked.
“Bibles,” the young man said and his eye raced around the room before he added, “I see you have no family Bible in your parlor, I see that is the one lack you got!”
Mrs. Hopewell could not say, “My daughter is an atheist and won’t let me keep the Bible in the parlor.” She said, stiffening slightly, “I keep my Bible by my bedside.” This was not the truth. It was in the attic somewhere.
“Lady,” he said, “the word of God ought to be in the parlor.”
“Well, I think that’s a matter of taste,” she began, “I think…”
“Lady,” he said, “for a Chrustian, the word of God ought to be in every room in the house besides in his heart. I know you’re a Chrustian because I can see it in every line of your face.”
She stood up and said, “Well, young man, I don’t want to buy a Bible and I smell my dinner burning.”
He didn’t get up. He began to twist his hands and looking down at them, he said softly, “Well lady, I’ll tell you the truth – not many people want to buy one nowadays and besides, I know I’m real simple. I don’t know how to say a thing but to say it. I’m just a country boy.” He glanced up into her unfriendly face. “People like you don’t like to fool with country people like me!”
“Why!” she cried, “good country people are the salt of the earth! Besides, we all have different ways of doing, it takes all kinds to make the world go ‘round. That’s life!”
“You said a mouthful,” he said.
“Why, I think there aren’t enough good country people in the world!” she said, stirred. “I think that’s what’s wrong with it!”
His face had brightened. “I didn’t intraduce myself,” he said. “I’m Manley Pointer from out in the country around Willohobie, not even from a place, just from near a place.”
“You wait a minute,” she said. “I have to see about my dinner.” She went out to the kitchen and found Joy standing near the door where she had been listening.
“Get rid of the salt of the earth,” she said, “and let’s eat.”
Mrs. Hopewell gave her a pained look and turned the heat down under the vegetables. “I can’t be rude to anybody,” she murmured and went back into the parlor.
He had opened the suitcase and was sitting with a Bible on each knee. “I appreciate your honesty,” he said. “You don’t see any more real honest people unless you go way out in the country.”
“I know,” she said, “real genuine folks!” Through the crack in the door she heard a groan.
“I guess a lot of boys come telling you they’re working their way through college,” he said, “but I’m not going to tell you that. Somehow,” he said, “I don’t want to go to college. I want to devote my life to Chrustian service. See,” he said, lowering his voice, “I got this heart condition. I may not live long. When you know it’s something wrong with you and you may not live long, well then, lady…” He paused, with his mouth open, and stared at her.
He and Joy had the same condition! She knew that her eyes were filling with tears but she collected herself quickly and murmured, “Won’t you stay for dinner? We’d love to have you!” and was sorry the instant she heard herself say it.
“Yes mam,” he said in an abashed voice. “I would sher love to do that!”
Joy had given him one look on being introduced to him and then throughout the meal had not glanced at him again. He had addressed several remarks to her, which she had pretended not to hear. Mrs. Hopewell could not understand deliberate rudeness, although she lived with it, and she felt she had always to overflow with hospitality to make up for Joy’s lack of courtesy. She urged him to talk about himself and he did. He said he was the seventh child of twelve and that his father had been crushed under a tree when he himself was eight years old. He had been crushed very badly, in fact, almost cut in two and was practically not recognizable. His mother had got along the best she could by hard working and she had always seen that her children went to Sunday School and that they read the Bible every evening. He was now nineteen years old and he had been selling Bibles for four months. In that time he had sold seventy-seven Bibles and had the promise of two more sales. He wanted to become a missionary because he thought that was the way you could do most for people. “He who losest his life shall find it,” he said simply and he was so sincere, so genuine and earnest that Mrs. Hopewell would not for the world have smiled. He prevented his peas from sliding onto the table by blocking them with a piece of bread which he later cleaned his plate with. She could see Joy observing sidewise how he handled his knife and fork and she saw too that every few minutes, the boy would dart a keen appraising glance at the girl as if he were trying to attract her attention. After dinner Joy cleared the dishes off the table and disappeared and Mrs. Hopewell was left to talk with him. He told her again about his childhood and his father’s accident and about various things that had happened to him. Every five minutes or so she would stifle a yawn. He sat for two hours until finally she told him she must go because she had an appointment in town. He packed his Bibles and thanked her and prepared to leave, but in the doorway he stopped and wring her hand and said that not on any of his trips had he met a lady as nice as her and he asked if he could come again. She had said she would always be happy to see him. Joy had been standing in the road, apparently looking at something in the distance, when he came down the steps toward her, bent to the side with his heavy valise. He stopped where she was standing and confronted her directly. Mrs. Hopewell could not hear what he said but she trembled to think what Joy would say to him. She could see that after a minute Joy said something and that then the boy began to speak again, making an excited gesture with his free hand. After a minute Joy said something else at which the boy began to speak once more. Then to her amazement, Mrs. Hopewell saw the two of them walk off together, toward the gate. Joy had walked all the way to the gate with him and Mrs. Hopewell could not imagine what they had said to each other, and she had not yet dared to ask. Mrs. Freeman was insisting upon her attention. She had moved from the refrigerator to the heater so that Mrs. Hopewell had to turn and face her in order to seem to be listening. “Glynese gone out with Harvey Hill again last night,” she said. “She had this sty.” “Hill,” Mrs. Hopewell said absently, “is that the one who works in the garage?”
“Nome, he’s the one that goes to chiropractor school,” Mrs. Freeman said. “She had this sty. Been had it two days. So she says when he brought her in the other night he says, ‘Lemme get rid of that sty for you,’ and she says, ‘How?’ and he says, ‘You just lay yourself down acrost the seat of that car and I’ll show you.’ So she done it and he popped her neck. Kept on a-popping it several times until she made him quit. This morning,” Mrs. Freeman said, “she ain’t got no sty. She ain’t got no traces of a sty.”
“I never heard of that before,” Mrs. Hopewell said.
“He ast her to marry him before the Ordinary,” Mrs. Freeman went on, “and she told him she wasn’t going to be married in no office.”
“Well, Glynese is a fine girl,” Mrs. Hopewell said. “Glynese and Carramae are both fine girls.”
“Carramae said when her and Lyman was married Lyman said it sure felt sacred to him. She said he said he wouldn’t take five hundred dollars for being married by a preacher.”
“How much would he take?” the girl asked from the stove.
“He said he wouldn’t take five hundred dollars,” Mrs. Freeman repeated.
“Well we all have work to do,” Mrs. Hopewell said.
“Lyman said it just felt more sacred to him,” Mrs. Freeman said. “The doctor wants Carramae to eat prunes. Says instead of medicine. Says them cramps is coming from pressure. You know where I think it is?”
“She’ll be better in a few weeks,” Mrs. Hopewell said.
“In the tube,” Mrs. Freeman said. “Else she wouldn’t be as sick as she is.”
Hulga had cracked her two eggs into a saucer and was bringing them to the table along with a cup of coffee that she had filled too full. She sat down carefully and began to eat, meaning to keep Mrs. Freeman there by questions if for any reason she showed an inclination to leave. She could perceive her mother’s eye on her. The first round-about question would be about the Bible salesman and she did not wish to bring it on. “How did he pop her neck?” she asked.
Mrs. Freeman went into a description of how he had popped her neck. She said he owned a ’55 Mercury but that Glynese said she would rather marry a man with only a ’36 Plymouth who would be married by a preacher. The girl asked what if he had a ’32 Plymouth and Mrs. Freeman said what Glynese had said was a ’36 Plymouth. Mrs. Hopewell said there were not many girls with Glynese’s common sense. She said what she admired in those girls was their common sense. She said that reminded her that they had had a nice visitor yesterday, a young man selling Bibles. “Lord,” she said, “he bored me to death but he was so sincere and genuine I couldn’t be rude to him. He was just good country people, you know,” she said, “—just the salt of the earth.”
“I seen him walk up,” Mrs. Freeman said, “and then later – I seen him walk off,” and Hulga could feel the slight shift in her voice, the slight insinuation, that he had not walked off alone, had he? Her face remained expressionless but the color rose into her neck and she seemed to swallow it down with the next spoonful of egg. Mrs. Freeman was looking at her as if they had a secret together.
“Well, it takes all kinds of people to make the world go ‘round,” Mrs. Hopewell said. “It’s very good we aren’t all alike.”
“Some people are more alike than others,” Mrs. Freeman said.
Hulga got up and stumped, with about twice the noise that was necessary, into her room and locked the door. She was to meet the Bible salesman at ten o’clock at the gate. She had thought about it half the night. She had started thinking of it as a great joke and then she had begun to see profound implications in it. She had lain in bed imagining dialogues for them that were insane on the surface but that reached below the depths that no Bible salesman would be aware of. Their conversation yesterday had been of this kind.
He had stopped in front of her and had simply stood there. His face was bony and sweaty and bright, with a little pointed nose in the center of it, and his look was different from what it had been at the dinner table. He was gazing at her with open curiosity, with fascination, like a child watching a new fantastic animal at the zoo, and he was breathing as if he had run a great distance to reach her. His gaze seemed somehow familiar but she could not think where she had been regarded with it before. For almost a minute he didn’t say anything. Then on what seemed an insuck of breath, he whispered, “You ever ate a chicken that was two days old?”
The girl looked at him stonily. He might have just put this question up for consideration at the meeting of a philosophical association. “Yes,” she presently replied as if she had considered it from all angles.
“It must have been mighty small!” he said triumphantly and shook all over with little nervous giggles, getting very red in the face, and subsiding finally into his gaze of complete admiration, while the girl’s expression remained exactly the same. “How old are you?” he asked softly.
She waited some time before she answered. Then in a flat voice she said, “Seventeen.”
His smiles came in succession like waves breaking on the surface of a little lake. “I see you got a wooden leg,” he said. “I think you’re real brave. I think you’re real sweet.”
The girl stood blank and solid and silent.
“Walk to the gate with me,” he said. “You’re a brave sweet little thing and I liked you the minute I seen you walk in the door.”
Hulga began to move forward.
“What’s your name?” he asked, smiling down on the top of her head.
“Hulga,” she said.
“Hulga,” he murmured, “Hulga. Hulga. I never heard of anybody name Hulga before. You’re shy, aren’t you, Hulga?” he asked.
She nodded, watching his large red hand on the handle of the giant valise. “I like girls that wear glasses,” he said. “I think a lot. I’m not like these people that a serious thought don’t ever enter their heads. It’s because I may die.”
“I may die too,” she said suddenly and looked up at him. His eyes were very small and brown, glittering feverishly.
“Listen,” he said, “don’t you think some people was meant to meet on account of what all they got in common and all? Like they both think serious thoughts and all?” He shifted the valise to his other hand so that the hand nearest her was free. He caught hold of her elbow and shook it a little. “I don’t work on Saturday,” he said. “I like to walk in the woods and see what Mother Nature is wearing. O’er the hills and far away. Picnics and things. Couldn’t we go on a picnic tomorrow? Say yes, Hulga,” he said and gave her a dying look as if he felt his insides about to drop out of him. He had even seemed to sway slightly toward her.
During the night she had imagined that she seduced him. She imagined that the two of them walked on the place until they came to the storage barn beyond the two back fields and there, she imagined, that things came to such a pass that she very easily seduced him and that then, of course, she had to reckon with his remorse. True genius can get an idea across even to an inferior mind. She imagined that she took his remorse in hand and changed it into a deeper understanding of life. She took all his shame away and turned it into something useful.
She set off for the gate at exactly ten o’clock, escaping without drawing Mrs. Hopewell’s attention. She didn’t take anything to eat, forgetting that food is usually taken on a picnic. She wore a pair of slacks and a dirty white shirt, and as an afterthought, she had put some Vapex on the collar of it since she did not own any perfume. When she reached the gate no one was there. She looked up and down the empty highway and had the furious feeling that she had been tricked, that he only meant to make her walk to the gate after the idea of him. Then suddenly he stood up, very tall, from behind a bush on the opposite embankment. Smiling, he lifted his hat which was new and wide-brimmed. He had not worn it yesterday and she wondered if he had bought it for the occasion. It was toast-colored with a red and white band around it and was slightly too large for him. He stepped from behind the bush still carrying the black valise. He had on the same suit and the same yellow socks sucked down in his shoes from walking. He crossed the highway and said, “I knew you’d come!”
The girl wondered acidly how he had known this. She pointed to the valise and asked, “Why did you bring your Bibles?”
He took her elbow, smiling down on her as if he could not stop. “You can never tell when you’ll need the word of God, Hulga,” he said. She had a moment in which she doubted that this was actually happening and then they began to climb the embankment. They went down into the pasture toward the woods. The boy walked lightly by her side, bouncing on his toes. The valise did not seem to be heavy today; he even swung it. They crossed half the pasture without saying anything and then, putting his hand easily on the small of her back, he asked softly, “Where does your wooden leg join on?”
She turned an ugly red and glared at him and for an instant the boy looked abashed. “I didn’t mean you no harm,” he said. “I only meant you’re so brave and all. I guess God takes care of you.”
“No,” she said, looking forward and walking fast, “I don’t even believe in God.”
At this he stopped and whistled. “No!” he exclaimed as if he were too astonished to say anything else.
She walked on and in a second he was bouncing at her side, fanning with his hat. “That’s very unusual for a girl,” he remarked, watching her out of the corner of his eye. When they reached the edge of the wood, he put his hand on her back again and drew her against him without a word and kissed her heavily.
The kiss, which had more pressure than feeling behind it, produced that extra surge of adrenalin in the girl that enables one to carry a packed trunk out of a burning house, but in her, the power went at once to the brain. Even before he released her, her mind, clear and detached and ironic anyway, was regarding him from a great distance, with amusement but with pity. She had never been kissed before and she was pleased to discover that it was an unexceptional experience and all a matter of the mind’s control. Some people might enjoy drain water if they were told it was vodka. When the boy, looking expectant but uncertain, pushed her gently away, she turned and walked on, saying nothing as if such business, for her, were common enough.
He came along panting at her side, trying to help her when he saw a root that she might trip over. He caught and held back the long swaying blades of thorn vine until she had passed beyond them. She led the way and he came breathing heavily behind her. Then they came out on a sunlit hillside, sloping softly into another one a little smaller. Beyond, they could see the rusted top of the old barn where the extra hay was stored. The hill was sprinkled with small pink weeds. “Then you ain’t saved?” he asked suddenly, stopping.
The girl smiled. It was the first time she had smiled at him at all. “In my economy,” she said, “I’m saved and you are damned but I told you I didn’t believe in God.”
Nothing seemed to destroy the boy’s look of admiration. He gazed at her now as if the fantastic animal at the zoo had put its paw through the bars and given him a loving poke. She thought he looked as if he wanted to kiss her again and she walked on before he had the chance.
“Ain’t there somewheres we can sit down sometime?” he murmured, his voice softening toward the end of the sentence.
“In that barn,” she said.
They made for it rapidly as if it might slide away like a train. It was a large two-story barn, cool and dark inside. The boy pointed up the ladder that led into the loft and said, “It’s too bad we can’t go up there.”
“Why can’t we?” she asked.
“Yer leg,” he said reverently.
The girl gave him a contemptuous look and putting both hands on the ladder, she climbed it while he stood below, apparently awestruck. She pulled herself expertly through the opening and then looked down at him and said, “Well, come on if your coming,” and he began to climb the ladder, awkwardly bringing the suitcase with him.
“We won’t need the Bible,” she observed.
“You never can tell,” he said, panting. After he had got into the loft, he was a few seconds catching his breath. She had sat down in a pile of straw. A wide sheath of sunlight, filled with dust particles, slanted over her. She lay back against a bale, her face turned away, looking out the front opening of the barn where hay was thrown from a wagon into the loft. The two pink-speckled hillsides lay back against a dark ridge of woods. The sky was cloudless and cold blue. The boy dropped down by her side and put one arm under her and the other over her and began methodically kissing her face, making little noises like a fish. He did not remove his hat but it was pushed far enough back not to interfere. When her glasses got in his way, he took them off of her and slipped them into his pocket.
The girl at first did not return any of the kisses but presently she began to and after she had put several on his cheek, she reached his lips and remained there, kissing him again and again as if she were trying to draw all the breath out of him. His breath was clear and sweet like a child’s and the kisses were sticky like a child’s. He mumbled about loving her and about knowing when he first seen her that he loved her, but the mumbling was like the sleepy fretting of a child being put to sleep by his mother. Her mind, throughout this, never stopped or lost itself for a second to her feelings.
“You ain’t said you loved me none,” he whispered finally, pulling back from her. “You got to say that.”
She looked away from him off into the hollow sky and then down at a black ridge and then down farther into what appeared to be two green swelling lakes. She didn’t realize he had taken her glasses but this landscape could not seem exceptional to her for she seldom paid any close attention to her surroundings.
“You got to say it,” he repeated. “You got to say you love me.”
She was always careful how she committed herself. “In a sense,” she began, “if you use the word loosely, you might say that. But it’s not a word I use. I don’t have illusions. I’m one of those people who see through to nothing.”
The boy was frowning. “You got to say it. I said it and you got to say it,” he said.
The girl looked at him almost tenderly. “You poor baby,” she murmured. “It’s just as well you don’t understand,” and she pulled him by the neck, face-down, against her. “We are all damned,” she said, “but some of us have taken off our blindfolds and see that there’s nothing to see. It’s a kind of salvation.”
The boy’s astonished eyes looked blankly through the ends of her hair. “Okay,” he almost whined, “but do you love me or don’tcher?”
“Yes,” she said and added, “in a sense. But I must tell you something. There mustn’t be anything dishonest between us.” She lifted his head and looked him in the eye. “I am thirty years old,” she said. “I have a number of degrees.”
The boy’s look was irritated but dogged. “I don’t care,” he said. “I don’t care a thing about what all you done. I just want to know if you love me or don’tcher?” and he caught her to him and wildly planted her face with kisses until she said, “Yes, yes.”
“Okay then,” he said, letting her go. “Prove it.”
She smiled, looking dreamily out on the shifty landscape. She had seduced him without even making up her mind to try. “How?” she asked, feeling that he should be delayed a little.
He leaned over and put his lips to her ear. “Show me where your wooden leg joins on,” he whispered.
The girl uttered a sharp little cry and her face instantly drained of color. The obscenity of the suggestion was not what shocked her. As a child she had sometimes been subject to feelings of shame but education had removed the last traces of that as a good surgeon scrapes for cancer; she would no more have felt it over what he was asking than she would have believed in his Bible. But she was as sensitive about the artificial leg as a peacock about his tail. No one ever touched it but her. She took care of it as someone else would his soul, in private and almost with her own eyes turned away. “No,” she said.
“I known it,” he muttered, sitting up. “You’re just playing me for a sucker.”
“On no no!” she cried. “It joins on at the knee. Only at the knee. Why do you want to see it?”
The boy gave her a long penetrating look. “Because,” he said, “it’s what makes you different. You ain’t like anybody else.”
She sat staring at him. There was nothing about her face or her round freezing-blue eyes to indicate that this had moved her; but she felt as if her heart had stopped and left her mind to pump her blood. She decided that for the first time in her life she was face to face with real innocence. This boy, with an instinct that came from beyond wisdom, had touched the truth about her. When after a minute, she said in a hoarse high voice, “All right,” it was like surrendering to him completely. It was like losing her own life and finding it again, miraculously, in his.
Very gently, he began to roll the slack leg up. The artificial limb, in a white sock and brown flat shoe, was bound in a heavy material like canvas and ended in an ugly jointure where it was attached to the stump. The boy’s face and his voice were entirely reverent as he uncovered it and said, “Now show me how to take it off and on.”
She took it off for him and put it back on again and then he took it off himself, handling it as tenderly as if it were a real one. “See!” he said with a delighted child’s face. “Now I can do it myself!”
“Put it back on,” she said. She was thinking that she would run away with him and that every night he would take the leg off and every morning put it back on again. “Put it back on,” she said.
“Not yet,” he murmured, setting it on its foot out of her reach. “Leave it off for awhile. You got me instead.”
She gave a little cry of alarm but he pushed her down and began to kiss her again. Without the leg she felt entirely dependent on him. Her brain seemed to have stopped thinking altogether and to be about some other function that it was not very good at. Different expressions raced back and forth over her face. Every now and then the boy, his eyes like two steel spikes, would glance behind him where the leg stood. Finally she pushed him off and said, “Put it back on me now.”
“Wait,” he said. He leaned the other way and pulled the valise toward him and opened it. It had a pale blue spotted lining and there were only two Bibles in it. He took one of these out and opened the cover of it. It was hollow and contained a pocket flask of whiskey, a pack of cards, and a small blue box with printing on it. He laid these out in front of her one at a time in an evenly-spaced row, like one presenting offerings at the shrine of a goddess. He put the blue box in her hand. THIS PRODUCT TO BE USED ONLY FOR THE PREVENTION OF DISEASE, she read, and dropped it. The boy was unscrewing the top of the flask. He stopped and pointed, with a smile, to the deck of cards. It was not an ordinary deck but one with an obscene picture on the back of each card. “Take a swig,” he said, offering her the bottle first. He held it in front of her, but like one mesmerized, she did not move.
Her voice when she spoke had an almost pleading sound. “Aren’t you,” she murmured, “aren’t you just good country people?”
The boy cocked his head. He looked as if he were just beginning to understand that she might be trying to insult him. “Yeah,” he said, curling his lip slightly, “but it ain’t held me back none. I’m as good as you any day in the week.”
“Give me my leg,” she said.
He pushed it farther away with his foot. “Come on now, let’s begin to have us a good time,” he said coaxingly. “We ain’t got to know one another good yet.”
“Give me my leg!” she screamed and tried to lunge for it but he pushed her down easily.
“What’s the matter with you all of a sudden?” he asked, frowning as he screwed the top on the flask and put it quickly back inside the Bible.
“You just a while ago said you didn’t believe in nothing. I thought you was some girl!”
Her face was almost purple. “You’re a Christian!” she hissed. “You’re a fine Christian! You’re just like them all – say one thing and do another. You’re a perfect Christian, you’re…”
The boy’s mouth was set angrily. “I hope you don’t think,” he said in a lofty indignant tone, “that I believe in that crap! I may sell Bibles but I know which end is up and I wasn’t born yesterday and I know where I’m going!”
“Give me my leg!” she screeched.
He jumped up so quickly that she barely saw him sweep the cards and the blue box back into the Bible and throw the Bible into the valise. She saw him grab the leg and then she saw it for an instant slanted forlornly across the inside of the suitcase with a Bible at either side of its opposite ends.
He slammed the lid shut and snatched up the valise and swung it down the hole and then stepped through himself. When all of him had passed but his head, he turned and regarded her with a look that no longer had any admiration in it. “I’ve gotten a lot of interesting things,” he said. “One time I got a woman’s glass eye this way. And you needn’t to think you’ll catch me because Pointer ain’t really my name. I use a different name at every house I call at and don’t stay nowhere long. And I’ll tell you another thing, Hulga,” he said, using the name as if he didn’t think much of it, “you ain’t so smart. I been believing in nothing ever since I was born!” and then the toast-colored hat disappeared down the hole and the girl was left, sitting on the straw in the dusty sunlight. When she turned her churning face toward the opening, she saw his blue figure struggling successfully over the green speckled lake.
Mrs. Hopewell and Mrs. Freeman, who were in the back pasture, digging up onions, saw him emerge a little later from the woods and head across the meadow toward the highway.
“Why, that looks like that nice dull young man that tried to sell me a Bible yesterday,” Mrs. Hopewell said, squinting. “He must have been selling them to the Negroes back in there. He was so simple,” she said, “but I guess the world would be better off if we were all that simple.”
Mrs. Freeman’s gaze drove forward and just touched him before he disappeared under the hill. Then she returned her attention to the evil-smelling onion shoot she was lifting from the ground. “Some can’t be that simple,” she said. “I know I never could.”
