The Railway Police and the Last Trolley Ride (20 page)

When they phoned the mate, at first there was no answer, though they had given him time to reach home. He couldn’t answer at first, he told them later; he couldn’t bear to, because of the way they knew him, and he them. If he’d been a stranger, he said, he could have had it out with them—their bewilderment, or Jim’s—and his rage. He himself, he said, was never bewildered. “From the first hour,” he said, “I knew what I was up against.” Then he too said no more. But that was later, when they saw him. Over the phone, when at last they reached him, he said only, “No, I won’t come after her,” but it must have been chance that he used those words, surely meaning only that he chose not to come and get her, at least not just now.

“Are you—all right yourself, mate?” said Jim. What a thing to have to ask!

“No sight for the marketplace,” said the mate; then he couldn’t go on; he made the queerest sound that said he couldn’t, and hung up.

While Lottie went on sleeping, the other two conferred.

“It can’t be—could it be—” said Jim, “that she just didn’t
know
about it—?” He said afterward that here, even as late as this, an edge of humor hovered—what a riot if it was merely that, then just give the pair time and all would be well, or as with the half the world not as lucky as some, at least smoothed over.

“No, of course not!” said Emily. “We kept horses.”

“Well, what the devil—then—?” he said, slow to anger as always. And why he should have been angry at
Emily,
he wondered after. “He’s a man, that’s all. I know the mate. A bit quick, maybe. And maybe one for the worn—never mind. But he’s no brute. I’d swear it.” He looked at her square. “And I can.”

If she flinched at that, he said he couldn’t tell it. She spoke softly, “I can’t say what men are, the way you can, or what women are. But I daresay you’re right.” It was a long speech, for Emily. “And I know Lottie,” she said.

“Then—if you knew what—why didn’t you—? Why didn’t you say something?” How absurd!—he could see that himself—and that they two should be quarreling about it. He never would again, he said after. For she stopped him cold, even if she didn’t mean to.

“I’m only a girl,” she said.

And she was too—not twenty yet. People like Emily—he said to the mate later—when they do speak, how they go to the heart of it!

“And why wouldn’t she,” the mate answered, “for that’s how
you
are, Jim.”

Anyway, when they saw him, that was maybe the worst shock of all. Lottie was gone by that time, taken by Jim down to Troy, to that woman friend she stayed with until Lottie found herself pregnant, some old maid friend. It couldn’t be said that Lottie had been deeply wounded that her sister wouldn’t keep her on and allow her to take up her old life there she had been a little hurt of course, but mostly—surprised. But they didn’t speak of her for a moment, now that they saw him.

“The eye I did myself,” he said. “On the bedpost.” Then there was the blue dent on his temple, which you all know, which never did go away. The scratches were nothing, he said. But one or two had festered; the human nail will do that. Emily went at once to get a basin, though it was two weeks since that night, and more.

“Thank you, Jim,” said the mate, while she was out of the room. “And let’s not speak of it again, of what or why, unless we have to.” He managed a smile. “Maybe someday, when we’re old.” He put the familiar hand on Jim’s shoulder. “There’s just something I want to ask Emily.”

When she returned, he asked her it, in the middle of her sponging his face. She had put a towel round his neck and was treating his cuts as firmly as any trainer. The iodine made him squint his good eye. His voice wasn’t much, not for him.

“When was it, Emily?” he said. “That you decided.”

“Decided what?” she said, but they all knew, just as the mate must have known at once that it would have been Emily’s force which had refused her sister; Jim on his own could never have done it.

“When I saw her walk into her room,” said Emily slowly. “When I saw her walk like that, back into her old room.”

The mate nodded, holding his face up to the washcloth, his eyes closed against the water; then he opened them so that she might look into them; he and she were a pair, both of them quick to seize people and size them, not long bewildered. Then he jumped up and went to the mirror.

“About my sister,” she said to his back. “There’s nothing to Lottie … except—what one sees.”

“And if she were my sister,” he said without turning, “I’d have seen it.”

His voice was bitter. For we’re so trained up to believe, Christian and infidel both, that
all
people are like icebergs, the greater part of them
beneath.
Why must we forget or deny that there are these others, too?

“Why … Emily—” said Jim. “Why—Jim.” He rarely called the mate by their common name. “She’s right, do you see? And—if we could—remember it. Wouldn’t—could that make it easier?”

The mate turned from the mirror, slowly, fingertips still to the stickingplaster he’d been dabbed with. “For
whom?
”

Emily only looked at them both with her level glance. The mate came up to her, his head cocked the way one has to with an eye puffed closed. “Maybe I’m like that too,” he said. “Nothing to me, except what you see.”

“Not if you can say it,” said Emily, and Jim with a nod agreed.

All three were silent for some minutes. Then the two men both shook their heads, like dogs out of water, away from this kind of talk. “Well—I’m off,” said the mate. Instead, he rested the palms of his hands stiff-armed on the table and stared down into its center. “Got to admit it though, I’m dashed. I’m a bit—dashed.”

Maybe that’s why he’s had to be the opposite, ever since.

“I’m making her an allowance, of course,” he said. “But I don’t plan to go down there after her.”

“But otherwise—” said Jim.

“Otherwise … I’ll have to sell Oriskany. It’s her money bought it.” He looked at them as squarely as his eye allowed him. “Maybe I’ll sell it to you.”

He did always have a business head, even at odd times. Of course they both smiled at the idea, Emily the more.

“But if she’ll come back—” said Jim, poor Jim, always seeking to make his kind of peace, or to find out what that was.

“Something may come of it.” The mate spoke lightly. Then he screwed his face the way a person does when he intends to look mean. “Something … may … come of it all. We’ll wait and see.”

Something did of course, the child. And though in these days, a woman mightn’t have come back to have it, Lottie did—maybe a Lottie always would. Later he said that he would have divorced her otherwise, but that’s blarney; the mate would never divorce the mother of his child, and that’s how it’s worked out, hasn’t it?—in the mate’s own way. For, during the months before the child came, it was a sight to see, how he cossetted her, bringing her up breakfast before he went off to the job he’d decided to hold on to, going against the doctor, to push her to eat. And to look at Lottie, though she didn’t appear to give much thought to the baby itself that was coming, or even to her having it, everything was smooth as cream. It was repellent, maybe, to see a man use what he knew of his wife to get what he wanted out of her—which was dynasty—and maybe the mate himself knew it was, beneath that blind, horn-forward stare which always came on him when he was after something. And he got him, by God—the lone boy who was dynasty and is dead now, but not before he in turn fathered four of his own; can it be fifteen years now, and the war
after
the second world one in its turn an old one? And the mate has him still—however way many of us are conceived; here we are—or were. And here you are, the fruit of us, burdened with the tale.

Once the baby was born and coddled out of its two-month frailty, everyone knew that things were going badly out at Oriskany. It dragged on so for a few months more, then ended, though there was no more violence, at least as far as was let be seen. Then Lottie left again, this time very quietly, by what private arrangements were never publicly known. That she had made some agreement was taken for granted since, though she made no more forays on her sister, indeed not even a letter so far as was known, she wasn’t the sort to manage alone. Then indeed the town could reflect back on how the mate had always been the doting parent and the mother the negligent or perhaps confounded one—and could take the mate to its bosom. For Lottie had left behind the child.

So—the mate never got his garage, or Jim either—though that too remains to be explained. Oriskany was sold—it’s funny now to think of the mate having to sell a place to get money—and the money presumably reverted, from a distance, to “the mother,” as the town has since persistently referred to her, always in hushed tone. The mate moved nearer Jim, so that Emily could tend his child, which was subsequently brought up during the day with her others, joining its father at night. And that’s why such a rich grandfather lives in such a small house; half of reality has these kindergarten reasons for it—this being part of the general undertow and sneakwork of the world. Surely it’s also why, when we can see a trolley ride clear, we cling to it.

If Lottie got the best or the worst of things, the town never precisely knew, nor could they tell whether Jim and Emily knew either. At first she was heard of quite simply and normally, as working in a bakery down in Troy. The bakery was in character, and not only in hers—you watch. Later they heard she was working in a similar capacity in the town of North Adams, Massachusetts—and the migration of people, by foot or wheel or hunger, is always interesting—for there is no other town in the state of Massachusetts which more resembles a New York State town called Troy. Why a woman whom surely the mate supported, and who had had ten thousand dollars of her own in the bargain, should need to work in such places, only those who saw her could say. Bulletins got vaguer as times got leaner, and if it was heard that she had invested her money in oil stock and lost it, others had done the same. There was shock when some vacationer reported seeing her in a place called Squaw Village, not what it might sound but one of those tourist places on the Molly Stark trail, with a big country store and Indian tepee setups; the shock was that she had let her hair grow down in a braid, dyed black surely, to add to her squaw-weight, and was on charade in the gifts-and-goodies shop, billed as the mother of an Indian family, in a troup of hired braves and papooses selling everything from carnival glass to saltwater taffy. “Surrounded by
children!
” the shocked vacationer said. By which it could be seen that our town, like many in the region, had in some ways maintained its own character.

Then, in the forties somewhere, it heard for sure—or at least from her—that she was rich again or very comfortable; the oil stock—think of it, oil stock bought by a Lottie!—had panned out after all. It was in Florida that some folks met her; by this time we upstate farmers, and business people too, were wintering in Florida ourselves, and not busing it down there either, flying there, just like the birds. She was very dressy now—the women of the party said—in a way that hid her bulk, and like a well-heeled widow with her bracelets and gold charms. She lived in one of the warm coastal towns where the older boat-crowd sat a lot on deck or by the water, her distinction being, and maybe her respectability too, that she didn’t drink—diabetes had lost her a toe. “Didn’t
drink,
” the women said. “Dressed like Rochester, sure, but there’s that bazoom to make you think of Miami,” some of the men said. Others said, “Oil stock, nuts, anybody knows what he’s worth now, and he’s never divorced her, that’s all.” The wildest tale of all, which should encourage us all as to the civic imagination, was that the mate himself had been seen down there, in that hotel like a French chateau, coming out of a suite behind her or her image, in the wee hours of the morn. A lovely conclusion, only not possible. True enough, that he’s often seen down there at that place or others, and that he goes to some trouble to see that the middle-aged tarts he chooses will look to strangers as if they could be his wives. Seeing him at a table, bending his fine head of white hair very courtly over some nice, fullblown woman with not much makeup and good manners, who’d think otherwise—unless the real wife was known to the observer from before? It may be that he was showing the lady out of his suite all right, and treating her like one—whoever she was. But it wasn’t Lottie. To dream of Lottie as her husband’s whore or anyone else’s is to—well no, it’s neither to laugh nor to cry. It’s to wonder how a woman who hadn’t it much in her to stir the emotions, could hold a man down, and for a lifetime too, and by emotions he never had it in him to have. If to be that is to be a whore, then, poor thing, she was one. But there are those who say she never could have been one conventionally, not even with him. How do they know? Because, though it’s said she used to see the boy now and then—for his own good, as maybe Emily insisted—she never came back to Sand Spring, not once. If she’d been a whore somewhere, rich or not, she could have come back to town—and been respectable.

Now Emily, though for her there is no key. For, all her life, unlike the other three, each of whom wanted something in a way which overpowered or colored them—Emily was concerned with the workings of daily living only, and so her mystery, like its, is only hinted at here and there in the shadows and gildings of that ordinary living, and is as hard to see. When the mate, one solemn day, carried his baby into her house to be cared for forever, although she had none of her own even begun yet, she received the infant handily, yet not greedily, in no doubt that her own babies would come along, when called. Though it was a sad day, to the two men watching she left no doubt either that in any day where such a child was, there were still tweaks of joy. The three things she said might have come one by one out of a casket of the sort women keep by them. To the mate, whose face, except for the blue dent, was now healed to an even hardness, she said lightly, “Don’t fret, don’t fret”—whereas to the baby cradled in her arms she said almost formally, “It can’t be helped.” Shouldn’t it have been the other way round? Or did she hope to make the little man see as early as possible a view of the world—her sex’s—in which, if he grew up like the rest of his, he would never believe? Or was it simply that she was one of those who from birth know the position of the generations and can act by it, needing no other compass or calendar.