Come Along with Me (7 page)

Catharine laughed and went into the kitchenette.

When Catharine was twelve her mother tried to give her a party. She bought little invitation cards at the five and ten, and paper hats and small baskets to hold candies. She bought ice cream and made a cake, and bought a game of pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey. “The whole thing didn't cost but about three dollars,” she told Catharine's father. “I took most of the money out of my house money this week.”

“There's no reason why Catharine should have expensive entertainments,” her father said, frowning. “Her position as my daughter explains the absence of worldly frivolity in her life.”

“The child has never had a party before,” her mother said firmly.

“I don't want a party,” Catharine told herself, alone upstairs in her room, lying on the bed. “I don't want any of the kids to come here.” Her mother sent out the little invitations (Catharine Vincent, Thursday, August
24
th,
2
–
5
), and almost all of the twelve children invited had come.

The party was a miserable failure. Catharine, in an old dress with new collar and cuffs, and her mother in the dress she wore to church, greeted the guests at the door and sat them down in the living room where the little baskets of candy sat around on tables. The guests took the candy one piece at a time, played pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey as long as Mrs. Vincent wanted them to, and then sat quietly until one of them thought to say she ought to be getting home now. “But you haven't had your ice cream,” Catharine's mother cried with bright gaiety, “you
can't
leave before the ice cream.” Catharine's memories of that party were of her mother, working furiously, laughing and humming when she walked from place to place, her old dress showing constantly among the party dresses of the children; her mother saying “Well, don't you look pretty!” and “You must be the smartest little girl in Catharine's class.”

Afterward, at the dinner table, her mother said encouragingly, “Did you enjoy your party, dear?”

“I told you they'd act like that,” Catharine said without emotion. “They don't like me.”

“Catharine has no business wanting parties if her friends don't know how to behave to her mother,” Mr. Vincent said, devoting himself to a platter of liver and bacon. “You've worn yourself out and spent a lot of money to let the child have something she didn't need to have.”

“Remember the party you gave for me?” Catharine said to her mother lying on the bed. “Remember that terrible party you insisted on having?”

“You are an ungrateful daughter,” her mother said, moving under the blankets. “You always were a cold thoughtless child.”

One day when Catharine was about fourteen her mother came into the bedroom where Catharine was cleaning her dresser drawers. Sitting on the bed, her mother said to Catharine's back, “Your father wants me to talk to you, Catharine.”

Catharine, frozen, went on piling handkerchiefs and folding scarves. “What does he want you to talk to me about?”

“He thinks it's time I spoke to you,” her mother said unhappily.

All the time her mother talked, apologizing and fumbling, Catharine sat on the floor folding and unfolding a scarf. “Have the girls at school been talking about things like this?” her mother asked once.

“All the time,” Catharine said.

“You mustn't listen,” her mother said earnestly. “Your father and I are equipped to tell you the truth, the girls at school don't know anything. Catharine, I want you to promise me never to talk to anyone but your mother and father about these things.”

“If I have any questions I'll ask Daddy,” Catharine said.

“Don't laugh at your mother and father,” her mother said.

Catharine turned around to look at her mother. “Are you all finished?” Her mother nodded. “Then please let's never talk about it again,” Catharine said. “I don't want to talk about it again, ever.”

“Neither do I,” her mother said angrily. “It's hard enough to tell you anything at all, young lady, without having to talk about delicate subjects.”

“You tell Daddy you told me,” Catharine said as her mother went out the door.

“Did you love my father?” Catharine asked her mother lying on the bed, “did you ever love my father, Mother?”

“You never loved him,” her mother said, moving against the pillow, “you were an ungrateful child.”

“When you married him did you think you were going to be happy?”

“He was a good husband,” her mother said, “he tried very hard to be a good father, but you only wanted to make trouble. All your life.”

 * * * 

Catharine sat on the edge of the seat; she was nineteen and her hands were neatly on the booth table, her books beside her, her eyes on the door. If only someone comes in, just this once, she was thinking if only one of the girls could see me, just this once.

“You look
très sérieuse
,” Aaron said. “Coffee?”

“Yes, please,” Catharine said.

“Now listen,” Aaron said. “I ask you to come out for coffee with me because I think you're interesting to talk to. You can't just sit there and not say anything.” Catharine looked up and saw he was smiling. “Say something witty,” he said.

She got a minute to think when the waiter came over and Aaron ordered the coffee, but when the waiter was gone and Aaron turned politely to her, she could only shake her head and smile.

“Let me start a conversation, then,” Aaron said. “What was the book you were carrying yesterday?”

“Did you see me?” Catharine asked before she thought.

“Certainly I saw you,” Aaron said. “I see you every day. Sometimes you wear a green sweater.”

Catharine felt that this had to be said quickly, urgently, before the moment got away from her. “I don't like clothes at all,” she said. “I think everyone makes too much fuss over them. I think the human body is too fine.”

Aaron stared. “Well!” he said.

Catharine thought back on what she had said and blushed. “I didn't mean to sound so vulgar,” she said.

Another time, when Catharine knew how to answer more easily, Aaron asked her, “Why don't we go to the five and ten and buy you a lipstick?”

“My father would kill me,” Catharine said.

“You could just wear it in school,” Aaron said. “I want my girl to be pretty.”

Catharine carried that “my girl” around with her in her mind ever afterward; she bought a lipstick and powder and rouge and nail polish, and put them on inexpertly in the girl's lavatory every morning before classes, and took them off each afternoon after leaving Aaron. Her father never knew; she kept them in a box in her pocketbook, and had a story prepared (“Gerry's family doesn't like her to wear make-up either, but she does anyway, and she asked me if I'd just keep these things—”).

Aaron liked to sit with a cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth; he kept his eyes narrow when he talked, and the smoke from the cigarette went past his eyebrow. He smiled more than anyone Catharine had ever known, and she thought once that he looked satanic; she told him so and he smiled at her, smoke in his eyes.

“The devil is the only true god,” he said.

Once her father frightened Catharine badly by saying to her abruptly at the dinner table “You're not running around with a young man, are you, Catharine?”

“
Catharine
?” her mother said.

“I was speaking to Mr. Blake this afternoon about a matter of business,” her father said ponderously, “and he mentioned that he had seen Catharine walking out of her business school with a young man. No one he knew.”

“It was probably one of the instructors,” Catharine said in a clear voice. “I was probably asking about an assignment.”

“I would not like to think that my daughter is associating with young men she is ashamed to introduce to her parents,” her father said.

“Mother and Daddy have a great deal of faith in you,” her mother said.

“It was probably Mr. Harley, our typing instructor,” Catharine said. “I had to ask him about an assignment and we walked down the hall talking and out the door. I did the wrong assignment and had to find out what to make up.”

“You should have told him to go to hell,” Aaron said later when Catharine told him.

“Someday I will,” Catharine said.

“Yes, Daddy dear,” Aaron said in a high voice, “I am associating with a young man I am definitely ashamed to introduce to you, because he is a thief and a murderer. And he rapes young women. Even Mother wouldn't be safe with him.”

Catharine shook her head helplessly. “He'd die,” she said. “He'd just die.”

When Aaron met Mr. and Mrs. Vincent he was very agreeable and Catharine was able to feel for a few minutes as though everything were going to pass off well. Aaron had escorted her home from school very properly and she had very properly invited him in. Her mother and father, sitting in the living room, watched Aaron and Catharine come in, and when Catharine said, “Mother and Daddy, this is Aaron, a friend of mine from school,” her father came over and took Aaron's hand. “Pleased to meet you, my boy,” he said.

“How do you do.” Aaron stood next to Catharine, comfortable in his yellow sweater.

“Aaron is in school too,” Catharine said to her mother.

“How do you like the school?” Catharine's mother said.

Conversation had continued without silences, they were sitting down, and Catharine met Aaron's eye and he smiled. She smiled back, and then realized that her mother and father were silently waiting. Aaron said smoothly, “Look at Cara's hands, Mrs. Vincent. They're like white waves on a white shore. They touch her face like white moths.”

Catharine met her father at the dinner table that night, with a sort of sick resignation that left her unsurprised when he said immediately, “I don't know about that young man.” He thought heavily. “Your mother and I have been talking about him.”

“It seems like your friends ought to be finer, somehow,” her mother said earnestly. “With your background.”

“He doesn't seem quite right, to me,” her father said. “Not quite right.”

“We'll find some money somehow,” her mother said, “and see if we can get you another dress. Sensible, but pretty enough to wear to parties.”

Sitting by the window with her mother's trunk open on the floor and her old report card (“English, B–, History, D, Geography, D”) in her hand, Catharine, to spite her mother, thought about Aaron. Because the dull eyes of William Vincent and his wife were no longer on her, because she was loose, at least, from their questions (“Catharine, have you been seeing—”) and their sudden quiet when she opened the front door, Catharine went to the little cedar box where she kept all her most secret treasures, and always had, and took out Aaron's only letter. In the box were a bright cotton handkerchief, and a tarnished silver charm bracelet. In her years in New York she had collected a match folder from a night club, and a printed note which read “We thank you for submitting the enclosed material and regret that we cannot make use of it.” It had come attached to some watercolor impressions Catharine had sent to a magazine; she kept it because of the word “regret” and because it had been addressed to her name and addressed by someone there at the magazine, some bright golden creature who called writers by their first names and sat at chromium bars and walked different streets than Catharine did, from her apartment on West Twentieth Street to her typist's job on Wall Street. And at the chromium bars Aaron was sitting, and he walked quickly past the bright stores, and he might be in any taxi passing, smiling at someone with his quick sudden amusement, saying, “Catharine? I once cared for a girl named Catharine . . .”

[
1946
]

THE BEAUTIFUL STRANGER

What might be called the first intimation of strangeness occurred at the railroad station. She had come with her children, Smalljohn and her baby girl, to meet her husband when he returned from a business trip to Boston. Because she had been oddly afraid of being late, and perhaps even seeming uneager to encounter her husband after a week's separation, she dressed the children and put them into the car at home a long half hour before the train was due. As a result, of course, they had to wait interminably at the station, and what was to have been a charmingly staged reunion, family embracing husband and father, became at last an ill-timed and awkward performance. Smalljohn's hair was mussed, and he was sticky. The baby was cross, pulling at her pink bonnet and her dainty lace-edged dress, whining. The final arrival of the train caught them in mid-movement, as it were; Margaret was tying the ribbons on the baby's bonnet, Smalljohn was half over the back of the car seat. They scrambled out of the car, cringing from the sound of the train, hopelessly out of sorts.

John Senior waved from the high steps of the train. Unlike his wife and children, he looked utterly prepared for his return, as though he had taken some pains to secure a meeting at least painless, and had, in fact, stood just so, waving cordially from the steps of the train, for perhaps as long as half an hour, ensuring that he should not be caught half-ready, his hand not lifted so far as to overemphasize the extent of his delight in seeing them again.

His wife had an odd sense of lost time. Standing now on the platform with the baby in her arms and Smalljohn beside her, she could not for a minute remember clearly whether he was coming home, or whether they were yet standing here to say good-by to him. They had been quarreling when he left, and she had spent the week of his absence determining to forget that in his presence she had been frightened and hurt. This will be a good time to get things straight, she had been telling herself; while John is gone I can try to get hold of myself again. Now, unsure at last whether this was an arrival or a departure, she felt afraid again, straining to meet an unendurable tension. This will not do, she thought, believing that she was being honest with herself, and as he came down the train steps and walked toward them she smiled, holding the baby tightly against her so that the touch of its small warmth might bring some genuine tenderness into her smile.

This will not do, she thought, and smiled more cordially and told him “hello” as he came to her. Wondering, she kissed him and then when he held his arm around her and the baby for a minute the baby pulled back and struggled, screaming. Everyone moved in anger, and the baby kicked and screamed, “No, no, no.”

“What a way to say hello to Daddy,” Margaret said, and she shook the baby, half-amused, and yet grateful for the baby's sympathetic support. John turned to Smalljohn and lifted him, Smalljohn kicking and laughing helplessly. “Daddy, Daddy,” Smalljohn shouted, and the baby screamed, “No, no.”

Helplessly, because no one could talk with the baby screaming so, they turned and went to the car. When the baby was back in her pink basket in the car, and Smalljohn was settled with another lollipop beside her, there was an appalling quiet which would have to be filled as quickly as possible with meaningful words. John had taken the driver's seat in the car while Margaret was quieting the baby, and when Margaret got in beside him she felt a little chill of animosity at the sight of his hands on the wheel; I can't bear to relinquish even this much, she thought; for a week no one has driven the car except me. Because she could see so clearly that this was unreasonable—John owned half the car, after all—she said to him with bright interest, “And how was your trip? The weather?”

“Wonderful,” he said, and again she was angered at the warmth in his tone; if she was unreasonable about the car, he was surely unreasonable to have enjoyed himself quite so much. “Everything went very well. I'm pretty sure I got the contract, everyone was very pleasant about it, and I go back in two weeks to settle everything.”

The stinger is in the tail, she thought. He wouldn't tell it all so hastily if he didn't want me to miss half of it; I am supposed to be pleased that he got the contract and that everyone was so pleasant, and the part about going back is supposed to slip past me painlessly.

“Maybe I can go with you, then,” she said. “Your mother will take the children.”

“Fine,” he said, but it was much too late; he had hesitated noticeably before he spoke.

“I want to go too,” said Smalljohn. “Can I go with Daddy?”

They came into their house, Margaret carrying the baby, and John carrying his suitcase and arguing delightedly with Smalljohn over which of them was carrying the heavier weight of it. The house was ready for them; Margaret had made sure that it was cleaned and emptied of the qualities which attached so surely to her position of wife alone with small children; the toys which Smalljohn had thrown around with unusual freedom were picked up, the baby's clothes (no one, after all, came to call when John was gone) were taken from the kitchen radiator where they had been drying. Aside from the fact that the house gave no impression of waiting for any particular people, but only for anyone well-bred and clean enough to fit within its small trim walls, it could have passed for a home, Margaret thought, even for a home where a happy family lived in domestic peace. She set the baby down in the playpen and turned with the baby's bonnet and jacket in her hand and saw her husband, head bent gravely as he listened to Smalljohn. Who? she wondered suddenly; is he taller? That is not my husband.

She laughed, and they turned to her, Smalljohn curious, and her husband with a quick bright recognition; she thought, why, it is
not
my husband, and he knows that I have seen it. There was no astonishment in her; she would have thought perhaps thirty seconds before that such a thing was impossible, but since it was now clearly possible, surprise would have been meaningless. Some other emotion was necessary, but she found at first only peripheral manifestations of one. Her heart was beating violently, her hands were shaking, and her fingers were cold. Her legs felt weak and she took hold of the back of a chair to steady herself. She found that she was still laughing, and then her emotion caught up with her and she knew what it was: it was relief.

“I'm glad you came,” she said. She went over and put her head against his shoulder. “It was hard to say hello in the station,” she said.

Smalljohn looked on for a minute and then wandered off to his toybox. Margaret was thinking, this is not the man who enjoyed seeing me cry; I need not be afraid. She caught her breath and was quiet; there was nothing that needed saying.

For the rest of the day she was happy. There was a constant delight in the relief from her weight of fear and unhappiness, it was pure joy to know that there was no longer any residue of suspicion and hatred; when she called him “John” she did so demurely, knowing that he participated in her secret amusement; when he answered her civilly there was, she thought, an edge of laughter behind his words. They seemed to have agreed soberly that mention of the subject would be in bad taste, might even, in fact, endanger their pleasure.

They were hilarious at dinner. John would not have made her a cocktail, but when she came downstairs from putting the children to bed the stranger met her at the foot of the stairs, smiling up at her, and took her arm to lead her into the living room where the cocktail shaker and glasses stood on the low table before the fire.

“How nice,” she said, happy that she had taken a moment to brush her hair and put on fresh lipstick, happy that the coffee table which she had chosen with John and the fireplace which had seen many fires built by John and the low sofa where John had slept sometimes, had all seen fit to welcome the stranger with grace. She sat on the sofa and smiled at him when he handed her a glass; there was an odd illicit excitement in all of it; she was “entertaining” a man. The scene was a little marred by the fact that he had given her a martini with neither olive nor onion; it was the way she preferred her martini, and yet he should not have, strictly, known this, but she reassured herself with the thought that naturally he would have taken some pains to inform himself before coming.

He lifted his glass to her with a smile; he is here only because I am here, she thought.

“It's nice to be here,” he said. He had, then, made one attempt to sound like John, in the car coming home. After he knew that she had recognized him for a stranger, he had never made any attempt to say words like “coming home” or “getting back,” and of course she could not, not without pointing her lie. She put her hand in his and lay back against the sofa, looking into the fire.

“Being lonely is worse than anything in the world,” she said.

“You're not lonely now?”

“Are you going away?”

“Not unless you come too.” They laughed at his parody of John.

They sat next to each other at dinner; she and John had always sat at formal opposite ends of the table, asking one another politely to pass the salt and the butter.

“I'm going to put in a little set of shelves over there,” he said, nodding toward the corner of the dining room. “It looks empty here, and it needs things. Symbols.”

“Like?” She liked to look at him; his hair, she thought, was a little darker than John's, and his hands were stronger; this man would build whatever he decided he wanted built.

“We need things together. Things we like, both of us. Small delicate pretty things. Ivory.”

With John she would have felt it necessary to remark at once that they could not afford such delicate pretty things, and put a cold finish to the idea, but with the stranger she said, “We'd have to look for them; not everything would be right.”

“I saw a little creature once,” he said. “Like a tiny little man, only colored all purple and blue and gold.”

 * * * 

She remembered this conversation; it contained the truth like a jewel set in the evening. Much later, she was to tell herself that it was true; John could not have said these things.

 * * * 

She was happy, she was radiant, she had no conscience. He went obediently to his office the next morning, saying good-by at the door with a rueful smile that seemed to mock the present necessity for doing the things that John always did, and as she watched him go down the walk she reflected that this was surely not going to be permanent; she could not endure having him gone for so long every day, although she had felt little about parting from John; moreover, if he kept doing John's things he might grow imperceptibly more like John. We will simply have to go away, she thought. She was pleased, seeing him get into the car; she would gladly share with him—indeed, give him outright—all that had been John's, so long as he stayed her stranger.

She laughed while she did her housework and dressed the baby. She took satisfaction in unpacking his suitcase, which he had abandoned and forgotten in a corner of the bedroom, as though prepared to take it up and leave again if she had not been as he thought her, had not wanted him to stay. She put away his clothes, so disarmingly like John's and wondered for a minute at the closet; would there be a kind of delicacy in him about John's things? Then she told herself no, not so long as he began with John's wife, and laughed again.

The baby was cross all day, but when Smalljohn came home from nursery school his first question was—looking up eagerly—“Where is Daddy?”

“Daddy has gone to the office,” and again she laughed, at the moment's quick sly picture of the insult to John.

 * * * 

Half a dozen times during the day she went upstairs, to look at his suitcase and touch the leather softly. She glanced constantly as she passed through the dining room into the corner where the small shelves would be someday, and told herself that they would find a tiny little man, all purple and blue and gold, to stand on the shelves and guard them from intrusion.

When the children awakened from their naps she took them for a walk and then, away from the house and returned violently to her former lonely pattern (walk with the children, talk meaninglessly of Daddy, long for someone to talk to in the evening ahead, restrain herself from hurrying home: he might have telephoned), she began to feel frightened again; suppose she had been wrong? It could not be possible that she was mistaken; it would be unutterably cruel for John to come home tonight.

Then, she heard the car stop and when she opened the door and looked up she thought, no, it is not my husband, with a return of gladness. She was aware from his smile that he had perceived her doubts, and yet he was so clearly a stranger that, seeing him, she had no need of speaking.

She asked him, instead, almost meaningless questions during that evening, and his answers were important only because she was storing them away to reassure herself while he was away. She asked him what was the name of their Shakespeare professor in college, and who was that girl he liked so before he met Margaret. When he smiled and said that he had no idea, that he would not recognize the name if she told him, she was in delight. He had not bothered to master all of the past, then; he had learned enough (the names of the children, the location of the house, how she liked her cocktails) to get to her, and after that, it was not important, because either she would want him to stay, or she would, calling upon John, send him away again.

“What is your favorite food?” she asked him. “Are you fond of fishing? Did you ever have a dog?”

“Someone told me today,” he said once, “that he had heard I was back from Boston, and I distinctly thought he said that he heard I was dead in Boston.”

He was lonely, too, she thought with sadness, and that is why he came, bringing a destiny with him: now I will see him come every evening through the door and think, this is not my husband, and wait for him remembering that I am waiting for a stranger.