“She did, didn’t she?”
“Well, I won’t take it.”
“Oh, yes, you will,” said Joe. “Get out, Thelma!”
Thelma looked at him out of her dark, handsome, brooding eyes, and she regained the island of safety a woman depends on. “Joe,” she asked, “are you really just pure son of a bitch or do you just pretend to be?”
“What do you care?” Joe asked.
“I don’t,” said Thelma. “You son of a bitch.”
2
Joe planned to move slowly, cautiously, and only after long consideration. “I got the breaks, I got to use ’em right,” he told himself.
He went in to get his evening orders and took them from the back of Kate’s head. She was at her desk, green eyeshade low, and she did not look around at him. She finished her terse orders and then went on, “Joe, I wonder if you’ve been attending to business. I’ve been sick. But I’m well again or very nearly well.”
“Something wrong?”
“Just a symptom. I’d rather Thelma drank whisky than vanilla extract, and I don’t want her to drink whisky. I think you’ve been slipping.”
His mind scurried for a hiding place. “Well, I been busy,” he said.
“Busy?”
“Sure. Doing that stuff for you.”
“What stuff?”
“You know—about Ethel.”
“Forget Ethel!”
“Okay,” said Joe. And then it came without his expecting it. “I met a fella yesterday said he seen her.”
If Joe had not known her he would not have given the little pause, the rigid ten seconds of silence, its due.
At the end of it Kate asked softly, “Where?”
“Here.”
She turned her swivel chair slowly around to face him. “I shouldn’t have let you work in the dark, Joe. It’s hard to confess a fault but I owe it to you. I don’t have to remind you I got Ethel floated out of the county. I thought she’d done something to me.” A melancholy came into her voice. “I was wrong. I found out later. It’s been working on me ever since. She didn’t do anything to me. I want to find her and make it up to her. I guess you think it’s strange for me to feel that way.”
“No, ma’am.”
“Find her for me, Joe. I’ll feel better when I’ve made it up to her—the poor old girl.”
“I’ll try, ma’am.”
“And, Joe—if you need any money, let me know. And if you find her, just tell her what I said. If she doesn’t want to come here, find out where I can telephone her. Need any money?”
“Not right now, ma’am. But I’ll have to go out of the house more than I ought.”
“You go ahead. That’s all, Joe.”
He wanted to hug himself. In the hall he gripped his elbows and let his joy run through him. And he began to believe he had planned the whole thing. He went through the darkened parlor with its low early evening spatter of conversation. He stepped outside and looked up at the stars swimming in schools through the wind-driven clouds.
Joe thought of his bumbling father—because he remembered something the old man had told him. “Look out for a soup carrier,” Joe’s father had said. “Take one of them dames that’s always carrying soup to somebody—she wants something, and don’t you forget it.”
Joe said under his breath, “A soup carrier. I thought she was smarter than that.” He went over her tone and words to make sure he hadn’t missed something. No—a soup carrier. And he thought of Alf saying, “If she was to offer a drink or even a cupcake—”
3
Kate sat at her desk. She could hear the wind in the tall privet in the yard, and the wind and the darkness were full of Ethel—fat, sloppy Ethel oozing near like a jellyfish. A dull weariness came over her.
She went into the lean-to, the gray room, and closed the door and sat in the darkness, listening to the pain creep back into her fingers. Her temples beat with pounding blood. She felt for the capsule hanging in its tube on the chain around her neck, she rubbed the metal tube, warm from her breast, against her cheek, and her courage came back. She washed her face and put on make-up, combed and puffed her hair in a loose pompadour. She moved into the hall and at the door of the parlor she paused, as always, listening.
To the right of the door two girls and a man were talking. As soon as Kate stepped inside the talk stopped instantly. Kate said, “Helen, I want to see you if you aren’t busy right now.”
The girl followed her down the hall and into her room. She was a pale blond with a skin like clean and polished bone. “Is something the matter, Miss Kate?” she asked fearfully.
“Sit down. No. Nothing’s the matter. You went to the Nigger’s funeral.”
“Didn’t you want me to?”
“I don’t care about that. You went.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Tell me about it.”
“What about it?”
“Tell me what you remember—how it was.”
Helen said nervously, “Well, it was kind of awful and—kind of beautiful.”
“How do you mean?”
“I don’t know. No flowers, no nothing, but there was—there was a—well, a kind of—dignity. The Nigger was just laying there in a black wood coffin with the biggest goddam silver handles. Made you feel—I can’t say it. I don’t know how to say it.”
“Maybe you said it. What did she wear?”
“Wear, ma’am?”
“Yes—wear. They didn’t bury her naked, did they?”
A struggle of effort crossed Helen’s face. “I don’t know,” she said at last. “I don’t remember.”
“Did you go to the cemetery?”
“No, ma’am. Nobody did—except him.”
“Who?”
“Her man.”
Kate said quickly—almost too quickly, “Have you got any regulars tonight?”
“No, ma’am. Day before Thanksgiving. Bound to be slow.”
“I’d forgotten,” said Kate. “Get back out.” She watched the girl out of the room and moved restlessly back to her desk. And as she looked at an itemized bill for plumbing her left hand strayed to her neck and touched the chain. It was comfort and reassurance.
Chapter 49
1
Both Lee and Cal tried to argue Adam out of going to meet the train, the Lark night train from San Francisco to Los Angeles.
Cal said, “Why don’t we let Abra go alone? He’ll want to see her first.”
“I think he won’t know anybody else is there,” said Lee. “So it doesn’t matter whether we go or not.”
“I want to see him get off the train,” said Adam. “He’ll be changed. I want to see what change there is.”
Lee said, “He’s only been gone a couple of months. He can’t be very changed, nor much older.”
“He’ll be changed. Experience will do that.”
“If you go we’ll all have to go,” said Cal.
“Don’t you want to see your brother?” Adam asked sternly.
“Sure, but he won’t want to see me—not right at first.”
“He will too,” said Adam. “Don’t you underrate Aron.”
Lee threw up his hands. “I guess we all go,” he said.
“Can you imagine?” said Adam. “He’ll know so many new things. I wonder if he’ll talk different. You know, Lee, in the East a boy takes on the speech of his school. You can tell a Harvard man from a Princeton man. At least that’s what they say.”
“I’ll listen,” said Lee. “I wonder what dialect they speak at Stanford. “ He smiled at Cal.
Adam didn’t think it was funny. “Did you put some fruit in his room?” he asked. “He loves fruit.”
“Pears and apples and muscat grapes,” said Lee.
“Yes, he loves muscats. I remember he loves muscats.”
Under Adam’s urging they got to the Southern Pacific Depot half an hour before the train was due. Abra was already there.
“I can’t come to dinner tomorrow, Lee,” she said. “My father wants me home. I’ll come as soon after as I can.”
“You’re a little breathless,” said Lee.
“Aren’t you?”
“I guess I am,” said Lee. “Look up the track and see if the block’s turned green.”
Train schedules are a matter of pride and of apprehension to nearly everyone. When, far up the track, the block signal snapped from red to green and the long, stabbing probe of the headlight sheered the bend and blared on the station, men looked at their watches and said, “On time.”
There was pride in it, and relief too. The split second has been growing more and more important to us. And as human activities become more and more intermeshed and integrated, the split tenth of a second will emerge, and then a new name must be made for the split hundredth, until one day, although I don’t believe it, we’ll say, “Oh, the hell with it. What’s wrong with an hour?” But it isn’t silly, this preoccupation with small time units. One thing late or early can disrupt everything around it, and the disturbance runs outward in bands like the waves from a dropped stone in a quiet pool.