The End of the Road (2 page)

The first thing that went wrong was that I found an entirely satisfactory room at once. As a rule I was extremely hard to please in the matter of renting a room. I required that no one live above me; that my room be high-ceilinged and large-windowed; that my bed be high off the floor, wide, and very soft; that the bathroom be equipped with a good shower; that the landlord not live in the same building (and that he be not very particular about his property or his tenants); that the other tenants be of an uncomplaining nature; and that maid service be available. Because I was so fussy, it usually took me a good while to find even a barely acceptable place. But as ill luck would have it, the first room I saw advertised for rent on my way out College Avenue from the hotel met all these qualifications. The landlady, an imposing widow of fifty whom I just chanced to meet on her way out of the old two-story brick house, showed me to the second-floor room in the front.

“You’re teaching at the college?” she asked.

“Yes, ma’am. Grammar teacher.”

“Well, pleased to meet you. I’m Mrs. Alder. Let’s shake hands and all now, because you won’t see me very much around here.”

“You don’t live in the house?”

“Live
here?
God, no! Can’t stand tenants around me. Always pestering for this or that. I live in Ocean City all year round. Any time you need anything, don’t call me; you call Mr. Prake, the janitor. He lives in town.”

She showed me the room. Six-foot windows, three of them. Twelve-foot ceiling. Dark gray plaster walls, white woodwork. An incredible bed three feet high, seven feet long, at least seven feet wide; a black, towering, canopied monster with four posts as thick as masts, fluted and ringed, and an elaborately carved headboard extending three feet above the bolster. A most adequate bed! The other furniture was a potpourri of styles and periods—one felt as if one had wandered into the odd-pieces room of Winterthur Museum—but every piece was immensely competent. The adjective
competent
came at once to mind, rather than, say
efficient.
This furniture had an air of almost contemptuous competence, as though it were so absurdly well able to handle its job that it would scarcely notice
your
puny use of it. It would require a man indeed, a man’s man, to make his presence felt by this furniture. I was impressed.

In short, the whole place left nothing to be desired. Shower, maid service—everything was there.

“What about the other tenants?” I asked uneasily.

“Oh, they come and they go. Bachelors, mostly, a few young couples now and then, traveling men, a nurse or two from the hospital.”

“Any students?” In Baltimore it was desirable to have students for neighbors, for they are singularly uncritical, but I suspected that in Wicomico all the students would know all the teachers rather too well.

“No students. The students generally live in the dorms or get rooms farther out College Avenue.”

It was too perfect, and I was skeptical.

“I guess I should tell you that I practice on the clarinet,” I said. This of course was untrue: I was not musical.

“Well, isn’t that nice! I used to sing, myself, but my voice seemed to go after Mr. Alder died. I had the most marvelous voice teacher at the Peabody Conservatory when I was younger! Farrari. Farrari used to tell me, ‘Alder,’ he’d say, ‘you’ve learned all I can teach you. You have precision, style,
éclat.
You are
una macchina cantanda,’
he’d say—that’s Italian. ‘Life will have to do the rest. Go out and live!’ he’d say. But I never got to live until poor Mr. Alder died five years ago, and by that time my voice was gone.”

“Do you object to pets?”

“What kind?” Mrs. Alder asked sharply. I thought I’d found an out.

“Oh, I don’t know. I’m fond of dogs. Might pick up a boxer sometime, or a Doberman.”

My landlady sighed, relieved. “I forgot you were a grammar teacher. I had a biology teacher once,” she explained.

I snatched at a last hope: “I couldn’t go over twelve a week.”

“The rent’s eight,” Mrs. Alder said. “The maid gets three dollars a week extra, or four-fifty, depending.”

“Depending on what, for heaven’s sake?”

“She does laundry, too,” Mrs. Alder said evenly.

There was nothing to do but take the room. I paid my landlady a month’s rent in advance, though she required only a week’s and ushered her out to her car, a five-year-old Buick convertible.

I call this windfall a stroke of ill luck because it gave me the whole of the afternoon and evening, and the next morning, with nothing to do. Even checking out of the Peninsula Hotel, moving to my new quarters, and arranging my belongings took but an hour and a half, after which time there was simply nothing to be done. I had no interest in touring Wicomico: it was the sort of small city that one knows adequately at the first glance—entirely without character. A humdrum business district and a commonplace park, surrounded by middle-class residential neighborhoods varying only in age and upkeep. As for the Wicomico State Teachers College, one look was enough to lay any but the most inordinately pricked-up curiosity. It was a state teachers’ college.

I drove about aimlessly for twenty minutes and then returned to my room. The one dusty maple outside my window exhausted its scenic potentialities in a half minute. My phonograph records—nearly all Mozart—sounded irritating in a room with which I was still too unfamiliar to be at ease. My statuette on the mantel, a plaster head of Laocoön done by a sculpting uncle of mine who had died of influenza in the First World War, so annoyed me with his blank-eyed grimace that, had I been the sort of person who did such things, I’d have turned his ugly face to the wall. I got the wholesale fidgets. Finally, at only nine o’clock (but I’d been fidgeting since three-thirty, not counting supper hour), I went to my great bed and was somewhat calmed by its imposing grotesqueness, which, however, kept me from sleep for a long time.

Next morning was worse. I slept fitfully until ten and then went to breakfast logy and puffy-eyed, nursing a headache. The interview was set for two in the afternoon, and so I had more than enough time to become entirely demoralized. Reading was impossible, music exasperating. I nicked myself twice while shaving, and ran out of polish before the heel of my left shoe was covered. Since I’d put off shining my shoes until the last minute, hoping thus to occupy those most uncomfortable moments before I left the room, there was no time to go downtown for more polish. In a rage I went down to the car. But I’d forgotten my pen and my brief case, which, though empty, I thought it fitting to carry. I stormed back upstairs and fetched them, glaring so fiercely at a nurse who happened to look from her doorway that she sniffed and closed her door with some heat. Tossing the brief case onto the seat, I left with an uncalled-for spinning of tires and drove out to the college.

My exasperation would have carried me safely into the interview had there not been a cluster of young people lounging on the front steps. I took them for students, although, it being vacation time, it is unlikely that they were. At any rate they stared at my approaching car with a curiosity no less unabashed for its being mild. My courage failed me; as I passed them I glanced indifferently at my wrist watch, to suggest that it was only to check the time that I’d slowed down. I was assisted in my ruse by the college clock, which at that instant chimed two: I nodded my head shortly, as though satisfied with the accuracy of my timepiece, and drove purposefully down the other arc of the semicircular drive, back to College Avenue. There my anger returned at once, this time directed at myself for being so easily cowed. I went again to the entrance drive and headed up the semicircle for another try. But if it took determination to approach those impassive gatekeepers the first time, with their adolescent eyes as empty as Laocoön’s directing a stupid enfilade along the driveway, it took raw courage to run their fire again. I shoved the accelerator to the floor and rocked the Chevrolet around the bend, not even deigning to glance at them. Let the ninnies think what they would! The third time I did not hesitate for a moment, but drove heedlessly around to the parking lot behind the building and entered through a doorway near at hand. I was already six minutes late.

I found the president’s office without difficulty and introduced myself to the receptionist.

“Mr. Horner?” she repeated, vaguely troubled.

“That’s right,” I said shortly. I was in no mood to be trifled with.

“Just a minute.”

She disappeared into an inner office, from which I heard then a low-voiced conversation between her and, I presumed. Dr. Schott, the president. My heart sank; I felt nauseated.

A gray, fatherly gentleman came smiling from the inner office, the receptionist in his wake.

“Mr. Horner!” he exclaimed, grasping my hand. “I’m John Schott! Glad to meet you!”

Dr. Schott was of an exclamatory nature.

“Glad to meet
you,
sir. Sorry I’m a little late…”

I was going to explain: my unfamiliarity with the little city, uncertainty as to where I should park, natural difficulty finding the office,
etc.

“Late!” cried Dr. Schott. “My boy, you’re twenty-four hours early! This is only Monday!”

“But isn’t that what we decided on the phone, sir?”

“No, son!” Dr. Schott laughed loudly and placed his arm around my shoulders.
“Tuesday!
Isn’t that so, Shirley?” Shirley nodded happily, her troubled look vindicated. “Monday in the letter, Tuesday on the phone! Don’t you remember now?”

I laughed and scratched my head (with my left hand, my right being pinioned by Dr. Schott).

“Well, I swear, I thought sure we’d changed it from Tuesday to Monday. I’m awfully sorry. That was stupid of me.”

“Not a bit! Don’t you worry!” Dr. Schott chuckled again and released me. “Didn’t we tell Mr. Horner Tuesday?” he demanded again of Shirley.

“I’m afraid so,” Shirley affirmed. “On account of Mr. Morgan’s Boy Scouts. Monday in the letter and Tuesday on the phone.”

“One of the committee members is a scoutmaster!” Dr. Schott explained. “He’s had his boys up to Camp Rodney for two weeks and is bringing them home today. Joe Morgan, fine fellow, teaches history! That’s why we changed the interview to Tuesday!”

“Well, I’m awfully sorry.” I smiled ruefully.

“No! Not a bit! I could’ve gotten mixed up myself!”

He was.

“Well, I’ll come back tomorrow.”

“Wait! Wait a minute! Shirley, give Joe Morgan a call, see if he’s in yet. He might be in. I know Miss Banning and Harry Carter are home.”

“Oh no,” I protested; “I’ll come back.”

“Hold on, now! Hold on!”

Shirley called Joe Morgan.

“Hello? Mrs. Morgan. Is Mr. Morgan there? I see. No, I know he’s not. Yes, indeed. No, no, it’s nothing. Mr. Horner came in for his interview today unexpectedly; he got the date mixed up and came in today instead of tomorrow. Dr. Schott thought maybe Mr. Morgan just might happen to have come back early. No, don’t bother. Sorry to bother
you.
Okay. ’By.”

I wanted to spit on Shirley.

“Well, I’ll come back,” I said.

“Sure, you come back!” Dr. Schott said. He ushered me toward the front door, where, to my chagrin, I saw the sentries still on duty. But I threw up my hands at the idea of attempting to explain to him that my car was in the rear of the building.

“Well, well, we’ll be seeing you!” Dr. Schott said, pumping my hand. “You be back tomorrow, now hear?”

“I will, sir.”

We were outside the main door, and the watch regarded me blankly.

“Where’s your car? You need a lift anywhere?”

“Oh, no, thanks; my car’s in the back.”

“In the back! Well, say, you don’t want to go out the front here! I’ll show you the back door! Ha!”

“Never mind sir,” I said. “I’ll just walk around.”

“Well! Ha! Well, all right, then!” But he looked at me. “See you tomorrow!”

“Good-by, sir.”

I walked very positively past the loungers on the steps.

“You dig up that letter!” Dr. Schott called from the doorway. “See if it doesn’t say Monday!”

I turned and waved acknowledgment and acquiescence, but when, back in my room at last (which already seemed immensely familiar and comforting), I searched for it, I found that I’d thrown it out before leaving Baltimore. Since I would not in a hundred years have been at home enough in Dr. Schott’s office to ask Shirley to investigate her letter files, the question of my appointment date could not be verified by appeal to objective facts.

One might suppose that after such an inauspicious start I would have been less prepared than ever to face my interview, but this supposition, though entirely reasonable, does not happen to be the case. On the contrary, I was disgusted enough not to care a damn about the interview. I didn’t even bother to polish the rest of my left shoe next morning; in fact, after breakfast I sat in the park for several hours watching the children romp in the small artificial lake and didn’t even think about the interview more than two or three times. When it occurred to me at all, I merely ticked my right cheek muscle. At ten minutes before two I drove out to the college, parked unhesitatingly in the front driveway, and walked through the main entrance. The steps happened to be uninhabited, but no reception committee could have daunted me that day. My mood had changed.

“Oh, hello,” Shirley said brightly.

“How do you do. Tell Dr. Schott I’m here, will you please?”

“Everybody’s
here today. Just a minute, please, Mr. Horner.”

I turned my smile on, and then I turned it off, so, as a gentleman might tip his hat politely, but impassively, at absolutely any lady of his acquaintance, whether she merited the courtesy or not. Shirley stepped into and out of Dr. Schott’s office.

“Go right on in, Mr. Horner.”

“Thank you.”

Inside I was introduced by Dr. Schott to Miss Banning, teacher of Spanish and French, a dear-elderly-lady type whom one accepted on her own terms because there was absolutely nothing else to be done about her; Dr. Harry Carter, teacher of psychology, a thin scholarly old man about whom one wondered at once what he was doing in Wicomico, but not so strongly that one didn’t decide rather easily that he doubtless had his reasons; and Mr. Joseph Morgan, scoutmaster and teacher of ancient, European, and American history, a tall, bespectacled, athletic young man, terribly energetic, with whom one was so clearly expected to be charmed, he was so bright, busy, and obviously on his way up, that one had one’s hands full simply trying to be civil to him, and realized at once that the invidious comparisons to oneself that he could not for the life of him help inviting would effectively prevent one’s ever being really tranquil about the mere fact of his existence, to say nothing of becoming his friend.