Of Time and the River (58 page)

“You see, don’t you? . . . You see what I’ve got to put up with, don’t you? . . . You only get it for a little while when you come here, but with me it’s ALL the time and ALL the time”—Suddenly she turned to him, looked him directly in the eye, and speaking quietly to him, but with a curious, brooding and disturbing inflection in her voice, she said:

“Do you know what day this is?”

“No.”

“Do you realize that Ben died five years ago this morning?—I was thinking of it yesterday when she was talking about getting that room ready for those people who are coming,” she muttered, and with a note of weary bitterness in her voice. For a moment her big- boned face was marked with the faint tension of hysteria, and her eyes looked dark and lustreless and strained as she plucked absently at her large chin. “But do you see how she can do it?” she went on in a low tone of brooding and weary resignation. “Do you understand how she can ever bear to go back in there? Do you see how she can rent that room out to any cheap lodger who comes along? Do you realize that she’s got the same bed in there he died on,” she said morbidly, “the same mattress?—K-k-k-k-k-k!” she laughed softly and huskily, poking at his ribs. “She’ll have you sleeping on it next—”

“I’ll be damned if she does!”

“K-k-k-k-k-k-k!”

“Do you think I could be sleeping on it now?” Eugene said with a feeling of black horror and dread around his heart.

“K-k-k-k-k-k!” she snickered. “Would you like that? Would you sleep better if you knew it was? . . . No,” she said quietly, shaking her head. “Uh-uh! I don’t think so. It’s still up there in the same room. She may have painted the bed, but otherwise I don’t think she’s changed a thing. Have you ever been back up there since he died?” she said curiously.

“My GOD, no! Have you?”

She shook her head: “Not I,” she said with weary finality. “I’ve never even been upstairs since that morning. . . . Hugh hates the place,” she muttered, looking towards him. “He doesn’t even like to stop and wait for me. He won’t come in.”

Then she was silent for a moment as they looked at the gaunt ugly bay of the room upstairs where Ben had died. In the yard the maple trees were thinning rapidly; the leaves were sere and yellow and were floating to the ground. And the old house stood there in all its ugly, harsh, and prognathous bleakness, its paint of rusty yellow scaling from it in patches, and weathered and dilapidated as Eugene had never seen it before, but incredibly near, incredibly natural and familiar, so that all its ghosts of pain and grief and bitterness, its memories of joy and magic and lost time, the thousand histories of all the vanished people it had sheltered, whom all of them had known, revived instantly with an intolerable and dream-like strangeness and familiarity.

And now, as they looked up at the bleak windows of the room in which he died, the memory of his death’s black horror passed across their souls a minute, and then was gone, leaving them only with the fatality of weary resignation which they had learned from it. In a moment, with a look of ancient and indifferent weariness and grief in her eyes, Helen turned to him, and with a faint rough smile around her mouth, said quietly:

“Does he ever bother you at night?—When the wind begins to howl around the house, do you ever hear him walking up there? Has he been in to see you yet?—K-k-k k-k-k!” she poked him with her big stiff finger, laughing huskily, and then in a low, sombrely brooding tone, as if the grisly suggestion were his, she shook her head, saying:

“Forget about it! They don’t come back, Eugene! I used to think they did, but now I know they never do.—He won’t come,” she muttered, as she shook her head. “Forget about it. He won’t come. Just forget about it,” she continued, looking at Eliza with weary resignation. “It’s not her fault. I used to think that you could change them. But you can’t. Uh-uh!” she muttered, plucking at her large cleft chin. “It can’t be done. They never change.”

Luke stood distractedly for a moment on the curbstone, breathing his large unhappy breath and thrusting his clumsy fingers strongly through the flashing whirls and coils of his incredible hair.

“Now—ah!” he sang out richly. “Let me see! I—wy—I fink! M-m- m-mama, if you PLEASE!” he said. “Wy if you PLEASE!” with an exasperated and ironic obsequiousness.

She had been standing there, planted squarely on the sidewalk, facing her house. She stood with her hands clasped loosely across her stomach, and as she looked at the gaunt weathered shape of the old house, her mouth was puckered in an expression of powerful rumination in which the whole terrible legend of blood and hunger and desperate tenacity—the huge clutch of property and possession which, with her, was like the desperate clutch of life itself—was evident.

What was this great claw in her life—this thing that was stronger than life or death or motherhood—which made her hold on to anything which had ever come into her possession, which made her cling desperately to everything which she had ever owned—old bottles, papers, pieces of string, worn-out gloves with all the fingers missing, frayed cast-off sweaters which some departed boarder had left behind him, postcards, souvenirs, sea-shells, coco-nuts, old battered trunks, dilapidated furniture which could be no longer used, calendars for the year 1906, showing coy maidens simpering sidewise out beneath the crisply ruffled pleatings of a Japanese parasol—a mountainous accumulation of old junk for which the old dilapidated house had now become a fit museum.

Then in the wink of an eye she would pour thousands of dollars after the crazy promises of boom-town real-estate speculation that by comparison made the wildest infatuation of a drunken race-track gambler look like the austere process of a coldly reasoning mind.

Even as she stood there staring at her house with her pursed mouth of powerful and ruminant satisfaction, another evidence of this madness of possession was staring in their face. At the end of the alley slope, behind the house, there was a dilapidated old shed or house of whitewashed boards, which had been built in earlier times as a carriage house. Now through the open entrance of this shed they could see the huge and dusty relic of Eliza’s motor car. She had bought it four years before, and bought it instantly one day before they knew about it, and paid $2000 in hard cash for it—and why she bought it, what mad compulsion of her spirit made her buy it, no one knew, and least of all Eliza.

For from that day to this that car had never left the carriage house. Year by year, in spite of protest, oaths, and prayers, and all their frantic pleading, she had got no use from it herself, and would let no one else use it. No, what is more, she had even refused to sell it later, although a man had made her a good offer. Rather she pursed her lips reflectively, smiled in a bantering fashion, and said evasively: “Well, I’ll see now! I’ll think it over!—I want to study about it a little—you come back later and I’ll let you know! . . . I want to think about it!”—as if, by hanging on to this mass of rusty machinery, she hoped it would increase in value and that she could sell it some day for twice the price she paid for it, if only she “held on” long enough.

And at first they had all wrestled by turns with the octopal convolutions of her terrific character, exhausting all the strength and energy in them against the substance of a will that was like something which always gave and never yielded, which could be grasped, compressed, and throttled in the hard grip of their furious hands, only to bulge out in new shapes and forms and combinations—which flowed, gave, withdrew, receded and advanced, but which remained itself for ever, and beat everything before it in the end.

Now, for a moment, as Luke saw the car he was goaded into the old madness of despair. Thrusting his fingers through his hair, and with a look of desperate exasperation in his tortured eyes, he began: “M-m-m-mama—M-m-m-mama—I beg of you, I—wy I entreat you,—w-w-w-wy I BESEECH you either to s-s-s-sell that God-damn thing or—wy—g-g-g-get a little s-s-service out of it.”

“Well, now,” Eliza said quickly and in a conciliatory tone, “we’ll see about it!”

“S-s-s-see about it!” he stammered bitterly. “See about it! In G- g-g-God’s name, what is there to see about? M-m-m-mama, the car’s there—there—there—” he muttered crazily, poking his clumsy finger in a series of jerky and convulsive movements in the direction of the carriage house. “It’s THERE!” he croaked madly. “C-c-c-can’t you understand that? W-w-w-wy, it’s rotting away on its God-damn wheels—M-m-m-mama, will you PLEASE get it into your head that it’s not g-g-g-going to do you or anyone else any good unless you take it out and use it?”

“Well, as I say now”—she began hastily, and in a diplomatic tone of voice.

“M-m-m-m-mama”—he began, again thrusting at his hair—“wy, I beg of you—I beseech you to sell it, g-g-g-give it away, or wy-wy-wy try to get a little use out of it!—Let me take it out and drive you round the block in it—w-w-w-wy—just once! Just once! F-f-f- frankly, I’d like to have the satisfaction of knowing you’d had THAT much out of it!” he said. “Wy, I’ll p-p-p-pay for the p-p-p- petrol, if that’s what’s worrying you! Wy, I’ll do it with pleasure! . . . But just let me take it out of that G-g-g-g-God- damn place if all—if all—wy if all I do is drive you to the corner! Now, PLEASE!” he begged, with an almost frantic note of entreaty.

“Why, no, boy!” she cried out in a startled tone. “We can’t do that!”

“C-c-c-can’t do that!” he stuttered bitterly. “Wy, in G-g-g-g- God’s name, why can’t we?”

“I’d be AFRA-A-ID!” she said with a little troubled smile, as she shook her head. “Hm! I’d be AFRAID!”

“Wy-wy-wy-wy AFRAID?” he yelled. “Wy, what’s there to be afraid of, in God’s name?”

“I’d be afraid you’d DO something to it,” she said with her troubled smile. “I’d be afraid you’d smash it up or run over someone with it. No, child,” she said gravely, as she shook her head. “I’d be afraid to let you drive it. You’re too nervous.”

“Ah-h-h-h-h-h!” he breathed clutching convulsively in his hair as his eyes flickered madly about in his head. “Ah-h-h-h-h! M-m-m- merciful God!” he muttered. “M-m-m-m-m-merciful God!”—and then laughed wildly, frantically, and bitterly.

Now Helen spoke curiously, plucking reflectively at her large chin, but with weariness and resignation in her accent as if already she knew the answer:

“Mama, what are you going to do with your car? It seems a shame to let it rot away back there after you’ve paid out all that money for it. Aren’t you going to try to get any use out of it at all?”

“Well, now, as I say,” Eliza began smugly, pursing her lips with ruminative relish as she looked into the air, “I’m just waitin’ for the chance—I’m just waitin’ till the first fine day to come along— and then, I’ve got a good notion to take that thing out and learn to run it myself.”

“Oh, Mama,” Helen began quietly and wearily, “good heavens—”

“Why, yes!” Eliza cried nodding her head briskly. “I could do it! Now, I can do most anything when I make my mind up to it! Now I’ve never seen anything yet I couldn’t do if I had to! . . . So I’m just waitin’ until spring comes round again, and I’m goin’ to take that car out and drive it all around,” she said. “I’m just goin’ to sit up there an’ enjoy the scenery an’ have a big time,” said Eliza with her little tremulous smile. “That’s what I’m goin’ to do,” she said.

“All right,” Helen said wearily. “Have it your own way. Do as you please: it’s your own funeral! Only it seems a shame to let it go to waste after you’ve spent all that money on it.”

But turning to Eugene, and speaking in a lowered tone, she said to him, with the faint tracing of hysteria on her big-decent face and weariness and resignation in her voice:

“Well, what are you going to do about it? I used to think that you could change her, but now I know she never will. . . . I’ve given up trying. It’s no use,” she muttered. “It’s no use. I worked my fingers to the bone to help them save a copper—and you see what comes of it. . . . I did the work of a nigger in the kitchen from the time I was ten years old—and you see what comes of it, don’t you? I went off and sang my way around the country in cheap moving-picture shows . . . and came up here and waited on the tables to help feed a crowd of cheap boarders—and Luke sold The Saturday Evening Post, and peddled hot dogs and toy balloons—and you got up at three o’clock, carried the morning paper—and they let Ben go to hell until his lungs were gone and it was too late— and you see what it all comes to in the end, don’t you? . . . It’s all given away to real-estate men or thrown away for motor cars they never use. I’ve given up worrying,” she said. “I don’t think about it any more. . . . They don’t change,” she muttered. “I used to think they did, but now I know they don’t. Uh-uh! They don’t change! . . . Well, forget about it,” and she turned wearily away.

The year Eliza bought the car, Eugene was eighteen years old and was a Junior at the State University. When he came home that year he asked her if she would let him learn to drive it. It was about the time when everyone in town was beginning to own motor cars. When he walked up town everyone he knew would drive by him in a car. Everyone on earth was beginning to live upon a wheel. Somehow it gave him a naked and desolate feeling, as if he had nowhere to go and no door to enter. When he asked her if she would let him take the car out and learn to drive it, she had looked at him a moment with her hands clasped loosely at the waist, her head cocked quizzically to one side, and the little tremulous and bantering smile that had always filled him with such choking exasperation and wordless shame, and somehow with a nameless and intolerable pity, too, because behind it he felt always her high white forehead and her faded, weak, and childlike eyes, the naked intelligence, whiteness, and immortal innocence of the child that was looking straight through the mask of years with all the deathless hope and faith and confidence of her life and character.

Now, for the last time, he asked her again the question he had asked with such an earnest hope so many times before. And instantly, as if he had dreamed her answer, she replied—the same reply that she had always made, the only reply the invincible procrastination of her soul could make.