That night in bed I said to Lily, “Well now, I’m ready to talk this thing over.”
Lily said, “Oh, Gene, I’m very glad.” She gave me a high mark for this, and told me, “It’s good that you are more able to accept reality.”
“What?” I said. “I know more about reality than you’ll ever know. I am on damned good terms with reality, and don’t you forget it” After a while I began to shout, and Ricey, hearing me carrying on and perhaps seeing me through the door, threatening and shaking my fist, standing on the bed in my jockey shorts, probably became frightened for her baby. On the twenty-seventh of December she ran away with the child. I didn’t want the police in on this and phoned Bonzini, a private dick who has done some jobs for me, but before he could get on the case the headmistress called from Ricey’s boarding school and said she had arrived and was hiding the infant in the dormitory. “You go up there,” I said to Lily.
“Gene, but how can I?”
“How do I know how you can?”
“I can’t leave the twins,” she said.
“I guess it will interfere with your portrait, eh? Well, I’m just about ready to burn down the house and every picture in it.”
“That’s not what it is,” said Lily, muttering and flushing white. “I have got used to your misunderstanding. I used to want to be understood, but I guess a person must try to live without being understood. Maybe it’s a sin to want to be understood.”
So it was I who went and the headmistress said that Ricey would have to leave her institution as she had already been on probation for quite a while. She said, “We have the psychological welfare of the other girls to consider.”
“What’s the matter with you? Those kids can learn noble feelings from my Ricey,” I said, “and that’s better than psychology.” I was pretty drunk that day. “Ricey has an impulsive nature. She is one of those rapturous girls,” I said. “Just because she doesn’t talk much …”
“Where does the child come from?”
“She told my wife she found it in Danbury in a parked car.”
“That’s not what she says. She claims to be the mother.”
“Why, I’m surprised at you,” I said. “You ought to know something about that. She didn’t even get her breasts till last year. The girl is a virgin. She is fifty million times more pure than you or I.”
I had to withdraw my daughter from the school.
I said to her, “Ricey, we have to give the little boy back. It isn’t time yet for you to have your own little boy. His mama wants him back. She has changed her mind, dear.” Now I feel I committed an offense against my daughter by parting her from this infant. After it was taken by the authorities from Danbury, Ricey acted very listless. “You know you are not the baby’s mama, don’t you?” I said. The girl never opened her lips and she made no answer.
As we were on our way to Providence, Rhode Island, where Ricey was going to stay with her aunt, Frances’ sister, I said, “Sweetheart, your daddy did what any other daddy would do.” Still no answer, and it was vain to try, because the silent happiness of the twenty-first of December was gone from her eyes.
So bound home from Providence alone, I was groaning to myself on the train, and in the club car I took out a deck of cards and played a game of solitaire. A bunch of people waited to sit down but I kept the table to myself, and I was fuddled, but no man in his right mind would have dared to bother me. I was talking aloud and groaning and the cards kept falling on the floor. At Danbury the conductor and another fellow had to help me off the train and I lay on a bench in the station swearing, “There is a curse on this land. There is something bad going on. Something is wrong. There is a curse on this land!”
I had known the stationmaster for a long time; he is a good old guy and kept the cops from taking me away. He phoned Lily to come for me, and she arrived in the station wagon.
But as for the actual day of tears and madness, it came about like this: It is a winter morning and I am fighting with my wife at the breakfast table about our tenants. She has remodeled a building on the property, one of the few I didn’t take for the pigs because it was old and out of the way. I told her to go ahead, but then I held back on the dough, and instead of wood, wallboard was put in, with other economies on down the line. She made the place over with a new toilet and had it painted inside and out. But it had no insulation. Came November and the tenants began to feel cool. Well, they were bookish people; they didn’t move around enough to keep their body heat up. After several complaints they told Lily they wanted to leave. “Okay, let them,” I said. Naturally I wouldn’t refund the deposit, but told them to get out.
So the converted building was empty, and the money put into masonite and new toilet and sink and all the rest was lost. The tenants had also left a cat behind. And I was sore and yelling at the breakfast table, hammering with my fist until the coffee pot turned over.
Then all at once Lily, badly scared, paused long and listened, and I listened with her. She said, “Have you seen Miss Lenox in the last fifteen minutes? She was supposed to bring the eggs.”
Miss Lenox was the old woman who lived across the road and came m to fix our breakfast. A queer, wacky little spinster, she wore a tam and her cheeks were red and mumpy. She would tickle around in the corners like a mouse and take home empty bottles and cartons and similar junk.
I went into the kitchen and saw this old creature lying dead on the floor. During my rage, her heart had stopped. The eggs were still boiling; they bumped the sides of the pot as eggs will do when the water is seething. I turned off the gas. Dead! Her small, toothless face, to which I laid my knuckles, was growing cold. The soul, like a current of air, like a draft, like a bubble, sucked out of the window. I stared at her. So this is it, the end-farewell? And all this while, these days and weeks, the wintry garden had been speaking to me of this fact and no other; and till this moment I had not understood what this gray and white and brown, the bark, the snow, the twigs, had been telling me. I said nothing to Lily. Not knowing what else to do, I wrote a note DO NOT DISTURB and pinned it to the old lady’s skirt, and I went through the frozen winter garden and across the road to her cottage.
In her yard she had an old catalpa tree of which the trunk and lower limbs were painted light blue. She had fixed little mirrors up there, and old bicycle lights which shone in the dark, and in summer she liked to climb up there and sit with her cats, drinking a can of beer. And now one of these cats was looking at me from the tree, and as I passed beneath I denied any blame that the creature’s look might have tried to lay upon me. How could I be blamed-because my voice was loud, and my anger was so great?
In the cottage I had to climb from room to room over the boxes and baby buggies and crates she had collected. The buggies went back to the last century, so that mine might have been there too, for she got her rubbish all over the countryside. Bottles, lamps, old butter dishes, and chandeliers were on the floor, shopping bags filled with string and rags, and pronged openers that the dairies used to give away to lift the paper tops from milk bottles; and bushel baskets full of buttons and china door knobs. And on the walls, calendars and pennants and ancient photographs.
And I thought, “Oh, shame, shame! Oh, crying shame! How can we? Why do we allow ourselves? What are we doing? The last little room of dirt is waiting. Without windows. So for God’s sake make a move, Henderson, put forth effort. You, too, will die of this pestilence. Death will annihilate you and nothing will remain, and there will be nothing left but junk. Because nothing will have been and so nothing will be left. While something still is-now! For the sake of all, get out.”