To Make Death Love Us (14 page)

His fortune was
seven dollars and twenty-eight cents when he took ill with a cold that settled in his chest.
Three of it went to the doctor who advised long bed-rest and medicines beyond the competence of
his purse.

He lay in the dark
and chill of his mean room and thought of his own death and was not surprised to find that he
desired it. Why not give over his life? Have an end to the sorry view of garbage spinning through
the gutters of the city, finding his hat burned with the embers flicked
upon his head from cigarettes in the hands of passing
strangers, the uncomfortable view that ladies afforded him, all unknowingly, of their garters. He
was weary of chairs too wide to support his arms either side, too high to allow his feet to be
placed upon the floor. Weary of bar stools that made him a figure of fun when he climbed them to
order a man's drink. Tired of pointing fingers, whispers, and, perhaps worst of all, so
everlastingly tired of the quickly turned heads of persons too polite to stare.

He folded his hands
upon his chest and upon the sheet that covered him. He closed his eyes. The dark of this mean
room was that of the grave. It was peaceful.

He was irked when
the knock sounded tentatively upon the door. He was in the third day of his death, having gone
without food and spending the time spiritually preparing himself for the end. The tapping, like a
frightened mouse, sounded again, and John, somewhat testily, shouted that whoever it was who
meant to desecrate his final resting time should come in. He supposed it to be the landlady on
the subject of the rent.

He opened his eyes
and regarded the pale girl who stood uncertainly within his doorway upon the worn
car­pet.

"I hadn't seen you
about for several days. ..." she began.

"Several? Has it
been several?" John asked cheerfully.

"Three at
least."

His smile left him.
"I had hoped it was more. You said several."

"Well, several is
more than two. It can be three."

"Three is a few,
not several. Sit down and tell me what you want."

She sat down beside
him, her eyes anguished, lips dry and fingers making patterns upon themselves.

"I don't want
anything. I just hadn't seen you about and
thought . . . thought perhaps you were ill," she said somewhat shyly.

"I am. I am dying,"
said John. "Although that is not so much a disease as the cure for one."

She gasped, quite
startled by the news.

"Of what . . . But
I didn't even know. ..." She was quite confused. "It must be very sudden. I hadn't even known you
were sick."

"No. Not sudden.
More's the pity. It seems damnably slow. I am starving to death and a preciously tedious way to
go, too, I might add."

She gave a gasp and
he reached out a hand to comfort her.

She looked very
unhappy for him.

"There, there, my
dear, it shouldn't concern you. I feel little enough pain. I have a cold with the attendant
be­numbing ache and my senses are so befuddled I suffer very little."

"But it seems so
unfair."

Colonel John nodded
his head. "Ah, yes. I can only agree. But still, your visit in this last act of my life is a
pleasant surprise."

"But must you
die?"

"I've had little
choice. I am without funds, without food, and without hope."

"And if those
things were offered to you, what would you say?"

A tear formed in
the corner of one of his eyes.

"But we are
strangers, but briefly met in the lobby and you know nothing of me."

"Every friend I've
ever met was a stranger until I met him," she said, and smiled softly at him.

Colonel John felt a
warm pang flow through his cold body, as if a ray of sunlight had shown through the win­dow,
warming him with its heat.

"You are
wonderfully kind. But I fear it is too late. I'm so cold I must be dead or nearly so."

"I have some very
nourishing hot soup in my room."

"Hot
soup?"

"I know it's not
allowed, but I have a little hot plate on which to cook my meals."

"So do I and so
does nearly everyone in this tenement of bad fortune."

She blushed as
though she thought he was somehow scolding her.

"Shall I get
it?"

Colonel John
flushed with embarrassment. "I am not sure I can repay your suggested kindness."

"I don't expect you
to. I'll just dash off and get it." With that she got up and left the room.

When she was gone
to fetch the soup, John thought to rise from his bed, the better to receive his guest but he was
almost unable to move his head, let alone rise. He had hoped to don his red-velvet smoking jacket
and at least wash his face and comb his hair, but it would have to wait. The idea of being tended
and fussed over appealed to him. Flickeringly, he thought of the way his mother, so long ago, had
fussed over him when he was ill as a child. It was the warmest love he'd ever received from
her.

The girl's name was
Susy and she worked as a clerk in a five-and-dime, whose prices had long ago ceased being five
and ten cents.

She came back into
the room and propped his head up on the pillow and fed him the warm soup, with apparent pleasure
in the task. It was somewhat akin to nursing a tiny bird with a broken wing until it was strong
enough to fly again.

When she had
spooned the thick, creamy broth down him, he shivered and still complained of being cold.
Her
eyes darted about, seeking other
blankets with which to cover him, but the barren room held no more.

He touched her hand
with his own well-formed one. "Are you cold, as well?" There was no guile in his
voice.

"I have been cold
all my life," she said in a voice of sadness.

"Ah," he said,
nodding companionably. "Then we have shared much of the same long, cold night."

She pondered his
tiny, shivering body for a time and then, finally, drew the coverlet aside and, still dressed,
crawled in beside him. Her body, touching his, didn't start at the contact. She was not repelled.
Perhaps she felt safe with him. A small lover—for that's what they were soon to be to each
other—that would not hurt her or be unfaithful to her dreams.

And so they fell in
love and moved, after John's recov­ery, south to escape the cold winters. It was an uneasy love
affair. They sometimes spoke of marriage but never quite came round to it. They found themselves
somehow unable to find one particular place that suited them. The longer they stayed in a place,
the less it seemed to suit them. Just why this was, neither could say.

After a few years
of wandering, they found themselves at last in Charleston, Kanewha County, West Virginia, and it
was there that Susy and John fell out of love once and for all.

John tried to still
her fears, to reassure her, but, the battle once entered upon, could not be stilled until the war
was won or lost.

She became shrewish
because she had to find things on which to blame John—failures, real and imagined, on which she
could pillory him, the better to exorcise the real demon, the underlying truth she could not
quite admit to herself.

Her voice became
thin and querulous, raised in a con­tinual litany of scorn and abuse.

Slowly, John's
awareness of her changed. She was, he finally realized, a most unattractive creature. Her hair
had the consistency and color of shredded wheat. Her eyes, while not actually crossed, were so
close together as to make her appear forever looking at the tip of her nose. As her mouth moved,
spilling out her frustrations of the time past, he saw her lips as shapeless bits of pure
petu­lance, and wondered to himself that they had once tasted sweet to him. But yet, he did love
her.

"Why here?" he
asked. "Why have you reached the breaking point in Charleston, of all places?"

She just glared at
him, thinking him stupid, thinking the question stupid, too.

"Why the hell not?
I'm sick and tired of filthy hotel rooms and rooming houses and washing my underwear out in the
sink!" said Susy.

"As if it were my
fault alone. You said we should move on at least as often as I did, perhaps even more times than
I did. It's you that ..." began John reasonably.

"Don't hand me that
line of guff. I've had it with you. I'm fed up with lousy food in crummy restaurants."

John stared at her
in surprise. "Through good times and bad, at least we've had each other."

"There have been no
good
times.
Only stinking, misera­ble ones, a day late and a dollar short."

"Come now, my
love," he began but she would have none of it. She ranted on at him at great length.

At last, John began
to see what was really bothering her. Not the places they had been, the economic situation in
which they were trapped. It was being with him, having to cope with his condition, having to face
the rest of the world coupled with what seemed only half of a man.

How much it must
pain her, thought John, how cruel
and
unkindly the world out there must treat her, certainly much worse than they treat me. I have no
choice in the matter but she is with me by choice and surely the world heaps scorn on her for
what must be in their minds a very bad choice.

He smiled rather
wistfully. "Have you so hated being with me all these years. Have I been that unkind, that
unloving to you?" She turned her back on him. "No." It was, at best, a grudging admission. He
looked at the body that had warmed him, that had once brought him back to life, and gave her a
compli­ment. "Since we first met, in your way, your body has grown more womanly, all the more
lovely, while mine has stayed its small self, not an inch taller." She ignored the compliment,
remaining silent. "What is it you want?" he asked. "To settle down somewhere. Anywhere." It was
not what she wanted, not what she wanted of him, but it was as good an excuse to combat as any
other she could devise.

"I'll see what can
be done," promised John. "Tomor­row."

"No you bloody well
won't." She whirled back to face him. "You'll go out right now and see to steady work this
morning or I'll . . ." The threat trembled in the air.

Good Lord, thought
John, she is playing a part from a really bad motion picture. Was she being Bette Davis? There
was no grace or lasting truth to the scene and John grew angry with offense. How had it come that
he should have become burdened with such an impossible creature, and she with him, a pairing as
doomed as any that ever met. He supposed she really did love him. And no doubt
hated herself for placing her love in so small
and unsuit­able a vessel.

"Then let us not go
on in this manner. The fact is, my life has always been," he said—joining her in the same bad
movie, of spurious lines and mock heroics—"devoted to the life of the open road. I am a loner by
nature, a free spirit. Almost a minstrel, as it were, a wandering player, needing ever to travel
on."

"Liar. You're just
a little man! A child really!" she said with calculated cruelty.

"I am a young
giant," he said, wanting somehow to make light of the situation.

"You are a
forty-one-year-old midget."

"A lady does not
confront a gentleman with the indeli­cate matter of his age." The fine high mockery in his
tone!

She shook her head
in disbelief. The pomposity of the little man enraged her.

He went to the
door, holding it carefully so that he might slam it with a satisfactory bang when he went through
it. "We will have to discuss this whole affair later when we can both be civilized about it.
Perhaps two years from now."

"What the hell are
you talking about?"

He opened the
door.

"Where the hell do
you think you are going?" she yelled at him, arms akimbo.

"To ride a bomb
into Adolf Hitler's lap," he said, and the door slammed most pleasingly and finally as he
left.

Instead, John took
a beer in the corner tavern and stared out the window, feeling terribly alone and lost when he
saw her hurry by the window, dressed in her best dress and wearing her highest and most
ridiculous heels.

For no reason he
could explain, John followed her.

She stopped at a
movie theater, whose marquee an­nounced that it was inaugurating a policy of vaudeville with
their cinema offerings, in a nostalgic—and they vainly hoped profitable—salute to yesteryear.
John bought a ticket and followed Susy into the darkened the­ater. A number of variety turns were
in progress as John took a seat at some distance behind her.

There was on the
program an act billed as "Will Carney, Juggler Extraordinaire." It was an all too familiar act,
but John noted that Susy leaned forward in her seat as though enchanted by the performer's
admittedly graceful hands. At the conclusion of the olio, Susy left her seat and walked to the
front, where the juggler was making his bows to a not very impressed audience. The juggler caught
her eye and her eager look. He bowed deeply to her and said several phrases under his breath,
loud enough only for her to hear. She smiled with pleasure, a look John noted, as she turned from
the stage and began walking back up the aisle.