Collected Stories of Carson McCullers (2 page)

"Correspondence"—McCullers's only story in the epistolary form—is still another conversion of life into art. The tale consists of four letters from Henky Evans, a naive girl who pours out her adolescent heart to a Brazilian pen pal who never answers. Finally, she tells him that she cannot waste any more of her "valuable time" writing to him, but wants to know why he "put his name on the pen pal list" if he did not intend to fulfill his part of the agreement. In actuality, McCullers interrupted her work on
The Ballad of the Sad Café
to write this story, prompted by her husband's failure to answer her letters while she was at an artists' colony. Her realization at last that he had gone off secretly with
their
best friend—that she had been excluded from their "we of me"—was a decisive factor in their divorce.

The concept of the "immense complexity of love"—a phrase from her short story "A Domestic Dilemma"—surfaces repeatedly in McCullers's various writings, especially in her domestic tales that reflect many aspects of her life with Reeves McCullers. The earliest story of domestic discord, "Instant of the Hour After," written at nineteen, depicts a wretched evening in the life of a young wife and husband whose marriage is disintegrating because of his inability to control his drinking. Although the wife loves her husband, she is put off by his torrent of meaningless words and sarcasm when he is drunk; she wonders vaguely what life might have been like had she married Phillip, their close friend. Phillip has already left the apartment when the story opens, for his chess game was aborted by his host's having passed out. McCullers was not married when she wrote this story, but she and Reeves were already living together in New York while he worked sporadically on a novel, having illusions of becoming a successful writer himself.

They were married in 1937, a few months after McCullers presented "Instant of the Hour After" to Sylvia Chatfield Bates for a critique. The unpleasant husband in the story is a ringer for Reeves, who was already well on his way to alcoholism at twenty-three. They were divorced in 1941, then remarried in 1945 upon his return home from the war, an injured and decorated company commander in the U.S. Army Rangers. Reeves was forced to retire with a medical disability although his wounds (to the wrist and hand) were not disabling. Without his own personal caUse or a job, he soon became hopelessly alcoholic. Countless embittered separations and reconciliations marked their troubled second marriage, which ended with Reeves's suicide in Paris.

"Instant of the Hour After" is McCullers's only story in which both the husband and wife drink heavily. The young wife sees herself trapped with her husband in a bottle, "skeetering angrily up and down the cold blank glass like minute monkeys" until they collapse, exhausted, "looking like fleshy specimens in a laboratory. With nothing said between them." Despite her teacher's encouragement that she revise the tale, McCullers apparently found the material too close to home to attempt to rework it.

Twenty years after she wrote "Instant of the Hour After"—three years after Reeves's suicide—McCullers treated a similar domestic crisis in "Who Has Seen the Wind?" Whereas the husband in "Instant of the Hour After" was twenty, the alcoholic husband—a failed writer—in the later tale was forty (Reeves's age when he died). The most convincing line in the story is the husband's warning, to an eager young man who has published one story in seven years, that a "small, one-story talent" is the "most treacherous thing that God can give." On the verge of insanity, the husband threatens to kill his wife, then disappears into a blinding snowstorm and "the unmarked way ahead." Before Reeves killed himself he had tried repeatedly to convince his wife to commit suicide with him.

McCullers, who had tried to write "Who Has Seen the Wind?" as a play before turning it into the long story that was eventually published, attempted repeatedly to rework it for the theater. Finally, after three years and considerable revision of both plot and characterization, the tale became the play
The Square Root of Wonderful,
in which the protagonist has divorced the man to whom she was married twice, a failed writer of one successful novel.

A third tale in which marital harmony is set on edge by alcohol is "A Domestic Dilemma," its tone being reminiscent of "The Instant of the Hour After." This time it is the sherry-tippling housewife Emily Meadows who precipitates the conflict. Emily drinks furtively and cannot be trusted with the safe rearing of their two young children. Her husband, Martin, assumes some responsibility for the dilemma, for he has uproQted his wife from the South and moved her to an unnamed suburban town on the Hudson River (obviously Nyack, New York). Homesick and unable to adjust to the "stricter, lonelier mores of the North," Emily stays to herself, reads magazines and murder mysteries, and finds her interior life "insufficient without the artifice of alcohol." When Martin finds her drunk upstairs in the bedroom and their children unsupervised, he dreads the decisions he must make. Finally, after a drunken scene in front of the children, he puts his wife to bed, tenderly bathes the children, and setdes them for the night. Returning to the bedroom, he watches his sleeping wife "for the last time," and suddenly all thoughts of "blame and blemish abate" as "sorrow parallel[s] desire in the immense complexity of love."

"Court in the West Eighties," "The Orphanage," "Like That," "The Aliens," "Untitled Piece" (apprentice tales published posthumously), and such other fine stories as "The Jockey," "Madame Zilensky and the King of Finland," "A Tree • A Rock • A Cloud," "Art and Mr. Mahoney," and "The Sojourner"—indeed, every story in this collection combines notable autobiographical elements of characterization and setting with artistic integrity. McCullers was well into the writing of "Illuminations and Night Glare," a long, unpublished memoir, when she suffered a massive brain hemorrhage and died on September 29, 1967, after forty-five days in an irreversible coma. She was buried beside her mother on a hill overlooking the Hudson River in Nyack, New York. America had lost its lonely hunter.

Virginia Spencer Carr
Georgia State University, Atlanta
January 1987

It was always like I had a room to myself. Sucker slept in my bed with me but that didn't interfere with anything. The room was mine and I used it as I wanted to. Once I remember sawing a trap door in the floor. Last year when I was a sophomore in high school I tacked on my wall some pictures of girls from magazines and one of them was just in her underwear. My mother never bothered me because she had the younger kids to look after. And Sucker thought anything I did was always swell.

Whenever I would bring any of my friends back to my room all I had to do was just glance once at Sucker and he would get up from whatever he was busy with and maybe half smile at me, and leave without saying a word. He never brought kids back there. He's twelve, four years younger than I am, and he always knew without me even telling him that I didn't want kids that age meddling with my things.

Half the time I used to forget that Sucker isn't my brother. He's my first cousin but practically ever since I remember he's been in our family. You see his folks were killed in a wreck when he was a baby. To me and my kid sisters he was like our brother.

Sucker used to always remember and believe every word I said. That's how he got his nick-name. Once a couple of years ago I told him that if he'd jump off our garage with an umbrella it would act as a parachute and he wouldn't fall hard. He did it and busted his knee. That's just one instance. And the funny thing was that no matter how many times he got fooled he would still believe me. Not that he was dumb in other ways—it was just the way he acted with me. He would look at everything I did and quietly take it in.

There is one thing I have learned, but it makes me feel guilty and is hard to figure out. If a person admires you a lot you despise him and don't care—and it is the person who doesn't notice you that you are apt to admire. This is not easy to realize. Maybelle Watts, this senior at school, acted like she was the Queen of Sheba and even humiliated me. Yet at this same time I would have done anything in the world to get her attentions. All I could think about day and night was Maybelle until I was nearly crazy. When Sucker was a little kid and on up until the time he was twelve I guess I treated him as bad as Maybelle did me.

Now that Sucker has changed so much it is a little hard to remember him as he used to be. I never imagined anything would suddenly happen that would make us both very different. I never knew that in order to get what has happened straight in my mind I would want to think back on him as he used to be and compare and try to get things settled. If I could have seen ahead maybe I would have acted different.

I never noticed him much or thought about him and when you consider how long we have had the same room together it is funny the few things I remember. He used to talk to himself a lot when he'd think he was alone—all about him fighting gangsters and being on ranches and that sort of kids' stuff. He'd get in the bathroom and stay as long as an hour and sometimes his voice would go up high and excited and you could hear him all over the house. Usually, though, he was very quiet. He didn't have many boys in the neighborhood to buddy with and his face had the look of a kid who is watching a game and waiting to be asked to play. He didn't mind wearing the sweaters and coats that I outgrew, even if the sleeves did flop down too big and make his wrists look as thin and white as a little girl's. That is how I remember him—getting a little bigger every year but still being the same. That was Sucker up until a few months ago when all this trouble began.

Maybelle was somehow mixed up in what happened so I guess I ought to start with her. Until I knew her I hadn't given much time to girls. Last fall she sat next to me in General Science class and that was when I first began to notice her. Her hair is the brightest yellow I ever saw and occasionally she will wear it set into curls with some sort of gluey stuff. Her fingernails are pointed and manicured and painted a shiny red. All during class I used to watch Maybelle, nearly all the time except when I thought she was going to look my way or when the teacher called on me. I couldn't keep my eyes off her hands, for one thing. They are very little and white except for that red stuff, and when she would turn the pages of her book she always licked her thumb and held out her little finger and turned very slowly. It is impossible to describe Maybelle. All the boys are crazy about her but she didn't even notice me. For one thing she's almost two years older than I am. Between periods I used to try and pass very close to her in the halls but she would hardly ever smile at me. All I could do was sit and look at her in class—and sometimes it was like the whole room could hear my heart beating and I wanted to holler or light out and run for Hell.

At night, in bed, I would imagine about Maybelle. Often this would keep me from sleeping until as late as one or two o'clock. Sometimes Sucker would wake up and ask me why I couldn't get settled and I'd tell him to hush his mouth. I suppose I was mean to him lots of times. I guess I wanted to ignore somebody like Maybelle did me. You could always tell by Sucker's face when his feelings were hurt. I don't remember all the ugly remarks I must have made because even when I was saying them my mind was on Maybelle.

That went on for nearly three months and then somehow she began to change. In the halls she would speak to me and every morning she copied my homework. At lunch time once I danced with her in the gym. One afternoon I got up nerve and went around to her house with a carton of cigarettes. I knew she smoked in the girls' basement and sometimes outside of school—and I didn't want to take her candy because I think that's been run into the ground. She was very nice and it seemed to me everything was going to change.

It was that night when this trouble really started. I had come into my room late and Sucker was already asleep. I felt too happy and keyed up to get in a comfortable position and I was awake thinking about Maybelle a long time. Then I dreamed about her and it seemed I kissed her. It was a surprise to wake up and see the dark. I lay still and a little while passed before I could come to and understand where I was. The house was quiet and it was a very dark night.

Sucker's voice was a shock to me. "Pete?..."

I didn't answer anything or even move.

"You do like me as much as if I was your own brother, don't you, Pete?"

I couldn't get over the surprise of everything and it was like this was the real dream instead of the other.

"You have liked me all the time like I was your own brother, haven't you?"

"Sure," I said.

Then I got up for a few minutes. It was cold and I was glad to come back to bed. Sucker hung on to my back. He felt little and warm and I could feel his warm breathing on my shoulder.

"No matter what you did I always knew you liked me."

I was wide awake and my mind seemed mixed up in a strange way. There was this happiness about Maybelle and all that—but at the same time something about Sucker and his voice when he said these things made me take notice. Anyway I guess you understand people better when you are happy than when something is worrying you. It was like I had never really thought about Sucker until then. I felt I had always been mean to him. One night a few weeks before I had heard him crying in the dark. He said he had lost a boy's beebee gun and was scared to let anybody know. He wanted me to tell him what to do. I was sleepy and tried to make him hush and when he wouldn't I kicked at him. That was just one of the things I remembered. It seemed to me he had always been a lonesome kid. I felt bad.

There is something about a dark cold night that makes you feel close to someone you're sleeping with. When you talk together it is like you are the only people awake in the town.

"You're a swell kid, Sucker," I said.

It seemed to me suddenly that I did like him more than anybody else I knew—more than any other boy, more than my sisters, more in a certain way even than Maybelle. I felt good all over and it was like when they play sad music in the movies. I wanted to show Sucker how much I really thought of him and make up for the way I had always treated him.