Collected Stories of Carson McCullers (4 page)

Late at night I would sit by the window and read. A friend of mine back home would sometimes send me three or four dollars to get certain books in secondhand book stores here that he can't get in the library. He would write for all sorts of things—books like "A Critique of Pure Reason," or "Tertium Organum," and authors like Marx and Strachey and George Soule. He has to stay back home now and help out his family because his Dad is unemployed. He has a job as a garage mechanic. He could get some sort of office work, but a mechanic's wages are better and, lying under an automobile with his back to the ground, he has a chance to think things out and make plans. Before mailing him the books I would study them myself, and although we had talked about many of the things in them in simpler words there would sometimes be a line or two that would make a dozen things I'd half known definite and sure.

Often such sentences as these would make me resdess and I'd stare out the window a long time. It seems strange now to think of me standing there alone and this man asleep in his room on the other side and me not knowing anything about him and caring less. The court would be dark for the night, with the snow on the roof of the first floor down below, like a soundless pit that would never awaken.

Then gradually the spring began to come. I cannot understand why I was so unconscious of the way in which things began to change, of the milder air and the sun that began to grow stronger and light up the court and all the rooms around it. The thin, sooty-gray patches of snow disappeared and the sky was bright azure at noon. I noticed that I could wear my sweater instead of my coat, that sounds from outside were beginning to get so clear that they bothered me when reading, that every morning the sun was bright on the wall of the opposite building. But I was busy with the job I had and school and the restlessness that these books I read in my spare time made me feel. It was not until one morning when I found the heat in our building turned off and stood looking out through the open window that I realized the great change that had come about. Oddly enough, too, it was then when I saw the man with the red hair plainly for the first time.

He was standing just as I was, his hands on the window sill, looking out. The early sun shone straight in his face and I was surprised at his nearness to me and at the clarity with which I could see him. His hair, bright in the sunlight, came up from his forehead red and coarse as a sponge. I saw that his mouth was blunt at the corners, his shoulders straight and muscular under his blue pajama jacket. His eyelids drooped slighdy and for some reason this gave him a look of wisdom and deliberateness. As I watched him he went inside a moment and returned with a couple of potted plants and set them on the window sill in the sun. The distance between us was so little that I could plainly see his neat blunt hands as they fondled the plants, carefully touching the roots and the soil. He was humming three notes over and over—a little pattern that was more an expression of well-being than a tunc. Something about the man made me feel that I could stand there watching him all morning. After a while he looked up once more at the sky, took a deep breath and went inside again.

The warmer it got the more things changed. AH of us around the court began to pin back our curtains to let the air into our small rooms and move our beds close to the windows. When you can see people sleep and dress and eat you get to feel that you understand them—even if you don't know their names. Besides the man with the red hair there were others whom I began to notice now and then.

There was the cellist whose room was at a right angle with mine and the young couple living above her. Because I was at my window so much I could not help but see nearly everything that happened to them. I knew the young couple were going to have a baby soon and that, although she didn't look so well, they were very happy. I knew about the cellist's ups and downs too.

At night when I wasn't reading I would write to this friend of mine back home or type out things that happened to come into my head on the typewriter he got me when I left for New York. (He knew I would have to type out assignments at school.) The things I'd put down weren't of any importance—just thoughts that it did me good to try to get out of my mind. There would be a lot of x marks on the paper and maybe a few sentences such as:
fascism and
war cannot exist for long because they are death and death is the only evil in the world,
or
it is not right that the boy next to me in Economics should have had to wear newspapers under his sweater all winter because he didn't have any overcoat,
or
what are the things that I ^now and can always believe?
While I would sit writing like this I would often sec the man across from me and it would be as if he were somehow bound up in what I was thinking—as if he knew, maybe, the answers to the things that bothered me. He seemed so calm and sure. When the trouble we began to have in the court started I could not help but feel he was the one person able to straighten it out.

The cellist's practicing annoyed everybody, especially the girl living directly above her who was pregnant. The girl was very nervous and seemed to be having a hard time. Her face was meager above her swollen body, her little hands delicate as a sparrow's claws. The way she had her hair skinned back tightly to her head made her look like a child. Sometimes when the practicing was particularly loud she would lean down toward the cellist's room with an exasperated expression and look as though she might call out to her to stop awhile. Her husband seemed as young as she did and you could tell they were happy. Their bed was close to the window and they would often sit on it Turkish fashion, facing each other, talking and laughing. Once they were sitting that way eating some oranges and throwing the peels out the window. The wind blew a bit of a peel into the cellist's room and she screamed up to them to quit littering everyone else with their trash. The young man laughed, loud so the cellist could hear him, and the girl laid down her half finished orange and wouldn't eat anymore.

The man with the red hair was there the evening that happened. He heard the cellist and looked a long time at her and at the young couple. He had been sitting as he often did, at the chair by the window—in his pajamas, relaxed and doing nothing at all. (After he came in from work he rarely went out again.) There was something contented and kind about his face and it seemed to me he wanted to stop the tension between the rooms. He just looked, and did not even get up from his chair, but that is the feeling I had. It makes me restless to hear people scream at each other and that night I felt tired and jittery for some reason. I put the Marx book I was reading down on the table and just looked at this man and imagined about him.

I think the cellist moved in about the first of May, because during the winter I don't remember hearing her practice. The sun streamed in on her room in the late afternoon, showing up a collection of what looked to be photographs tacked on the wall. She went out often and sometimes she had a certain man in to see her. Late in the day she would sit facing the court with her cello, her knees spread wide apart to straddle the instrument, her skirts pulled up to the thighs so as not to strain the seams. Her music was raw toned and lazily played. She seemed to go into a sort of coma when she worked and her face took on a cowish look. Nearly always she had stockings drying in the window (I could see them so plainly that I could tell she sometimes only washed the feet to save wear and trouble) and some mornings there was a gimcrack tied on to the cord of the window shade.

I felt that this man across from me understood the cellist and everyone else on the court as well. I had a feeling that nothing would surprise him and that he understood more than most people. Maybe it was the secretive droop of his eyelids. I'm not sure what it was. I just knew that it was good to watch him and think about him. At night he would come in with a paper sack and carefully take his food out and eat it. Later he would put on his pajamas and do exercises in his room and after that he'd usually just sit, doing nothing, until almost midnight. He was an exquisite housekeeper, his window sill was never cluttered up. He would tend his plants every morning, the sun shining on his healthily pale face. Often he carefully watered them with a rubber bulb that looked like an ear syringe. I could never guess for sure just what his job in the day time was.

About the end of May there was another change in the court. The young man whose wife was pregnant began to quit going regularly to work. You could tell by their faces he had lost his job. In the morning he would stay at home later than usual, would pour out her milk from the quart bottle they still kept on the window sill and see that she drank the whole amount before it had time to sour. Sometimes at night after everyone else was asleep you could hear the murmuring sound of his talking. Out of a late silence he would say
listen here
so loud that it was enough to wake all of us, and then his voice would drop and he would start a low, urgent monologue to his wife. She almost never said anything. Her face seemed to get smaller and sometimes she would sit on the bed for hours with her little mouth half open like a dreaming child's.

The university term ended but I stayed on in the city because I had this five hour job and wanted to attend summer school. Not going to classes I saw even fewer people than before and stayed closer to home. 1 had plenty of time to realize what it meant when the young man started coming in with a pint of milk instead of a quart, when finally one day the bottle he brought home was only one of the half pint size.

It is hard to tell how you feel when you watch someone go hungry. You see their room was not more than a few yards from mine and I couldn't quit thinking about them. At first I wouldn't believe what I saw. This is not a tenement house far down on the East side, I would tell myself. We are living in a fairly good, fairly average part of town—in the West eighties. True our court is small, our rooms just big enough for a bed, a dresser and a table, and we are almost as close as tenement people. But from the street these buildings look fine; in both entrances there is a little lobby with something like marble on the floor, an elevator to save us walking up our six or eight or ten flights of stairs. From the street these buildings look almost rich and it is not possible that inside someone could starve. I would say: because their milk is cut down to a fourth of what they used to get and because I don't see him eating (giving her the sandwich he goes out to get each evening at dinner time) that is not a sign they are hungry. Because she just sits like that all day, not taking any interest in anything except the window sills where some of us keep our fruit that is because she is going to have the baby very soon now and is a little unnatural. Because he walks up and down the room and yells at her sometimes, his throat sounding choked up, that is just the ugliness in him.

After reasoning with myself like this I would always look across at the man with the red hair. It is not easy to explain about this faith I had in him. I don't know what I could have expected him to do, but the feeling was there just the same. I quit reading when I came home and would often just sit watching him for hours. Our eyes would meet and then one of us would look away. You see all of us in the court saw each other sleep and dress and live out our hours away from work, but none of us ever spoke. We were near enough to throw our food into each others' windows, near enough so that a single machine gun could have killed us all together in a flash. And still we acted as strangers.

After a while the young couple didn't have any sort of milk bottle on their window sill and the man would stay home all day, his eyes looped with brown circles and his mouth a sharp straight line. You could hear him talking in bed every night—beginning with his loud
listen here.
Out of all the court the cellist was the only one who didn't show in some little gesture that she felt the strain.

Her room was directly below theirs so she probably had never seen their faces. She practiced less than usual now and went out more. This friend of hers that I mentioned was in her place almost every night. He was dapper like a little cat—small, with a round oily face and large almond shaped eyes. Sometimes the whole court would hear them quarreling and after a while he would usually go out. One night she brought home one of those balloon-men they sell along Broadway—a long balloon for the body and a round small one for the head, painted with a grinning mouth. It was a brilliant green, the crepe paper legs were pink and the big cardboard feet black. She fastened the thing to the cord of the shade where it dangled, turning slowly and shambling its paper legs whenever a breeze came.

By the end of June I felt I could not have stayed in the court much longer. If it had not been for the man with red hair I would have moved. I would have moved before the night when everything came finally to a show down. I couldn't study, couldn't keep my mind on anything.

There was one hot night I well remember. The cellist and her friend had their light turned on and so did the young couple. The man across from me sat looking out on the court in his pajamas. He had a bottle by his chair and would draw it up to his mouth occasionally. His feet were propped on the window sill and I could see his bare crooked toes. When he had drunk a good deal he began talking to himself. I couldn't hear the words, they were merged together into one low rising and falling sound. I had a feeling, though, that he might be talking about the people in the court because he would gaze around at all the windows between swallows. It was a queer feeling—like what he was saying might straighten things out for all of us if we could only catch the words. But no matter how hard I listened I couldn't understand any of it. I just looked at his strong throat and at his calm face that even when he was tight did not lose its expression of hidden wisdom. Nothing happened. I never knew what he was saying. There was just that feeling that if his voice had been only a little less low I would have learned so very much.