“So long,” he said.
“So long.”
When she still stood there, he whirled around abruptly and headed for the drugstore at a businesslike pace. Once inside, he peered out the glass door and saw that her back was to him now; she was calmly waiting for a car to pass before she crossed the street.
The drugstore smelled like his house did when all the girls were getting ready to go out on dates at once. It was spicy and perfumey, with several different kinds of scents that were mingled together and made him want to sneeze. He headed toward the back, where the toilet articles were kept. From the rack on top of the counter he chose a pack of razor blades, taking a long time to compare prices and brand names, and then he turned to the magazine counter and picked out a crossword-puzzle book that was made of dull comic-booklike paper, which would depress him before he finished the first puzzle. These he paid for at the cash register; he counted out the exact change to pay a white-haired man he had not seen before.
“Don’t bother about a bag,” he said.
He dropped the razor blades into his shirt pocket, next to the pink envelope and his cigarettes. The crossword-puzzle book he rolled up carelessly and stuck into his back trouser pocket. Then he looked out toward the street again. This time there was not a sister of his in sight. He smiled good-by to the man at the cash register and headed outside.
Beyond the A & P, which was the last real store on Main Street, the millworkers’ houses again. At first they were the big old houses that had been built by well-to-do families but had turned gray and peeling with “Room for Rent” signs on them. Their side yards, once grassy and shaded with oak trees, were now cement squares where Esso stations sat. And beyond these were smaller, grayer houses, most of them duplexes. Dirty-faced children played on the porches in skimpy sweaters; the yards were heaped with old tires and rusty scrap metal. Behind the houses, barely visible above the tar-paper roofs, were the tall smoking chimneys of the textile factory where all these people worked. They made blue denim, day in and day out. It was toward these chimneys that Ben Joe headed. He crossed a vacant lot, knee-high with weeds and brambles, and stumbled over a rusted-out potbellied stove that lay smack in the middle of the field. Then he was on the gravel road that ran down to the muddy little river where the factory was. Opposite the factory was Lili Belle Mosely’s house.
He had been here before, many times. The first time was when his father was still alive, living at Lili Belle’s as if it were his home and having his patients call him there in the night if they needed him. He had first rented a room there; people said that one night he had finished mending a millworker’s arm and was setting out for home when it suddenly hit him that he couldn’t bear to go home again, so he had stopped here and rented a room. His wife, hearing about it, clamped her mouth shut and said that was his lookout, nothing she could do about it. She said the same when she heard that he had taken to sharing a room with the landlady’s daughter; and the same when she heard about little Phillip’s being born. But Ben Joe, who never could resign himself to the fact that it was his father’s lookout alone, had come to see his father at Lili Belle’s one night with his heart pounding and his eyes wide with embarrassment. They had fed him supper — green beans cooked with fat back, hash-brown potatoes in a puddle of Mazola, pork chops coated with grease that turned white when he let the chops cool on his plate. Everyone laughed a lot, and his father ate more than Ben Joe had seen him eat in years. And Ben Joe had not been able to say a word to his father about coming home. He hadn’t tried.
As he stood now, facing the long, squat house with its dingy front porch, he could almost see how he must have looked coming out of it. His head down, his face puzzled, his feet dragging. Not just once, but many times, because he had gone back again and again. First he had gone to see his father. Then his father died and left a request that Lili Belle and her son get a little money each month, which Ben Joe’s mother could have contested but didn’t; she said it wasn’t worth her bother. So Ben Joe took Lili Belle her money in person once each month. And once each month his mother said, “Ben Joe, have you mailed off all our bills for this month?” and Ben Joe said, “Yes’m,” not ever letting on he had taken it in person. Every month he had taken it, up until he had left for New York and turned the money matters over to Jenny. Now Jenny mailed the money, as she was supposed to, in a business envelope. She wouldn’t have that feeling Ben Joe always had, looking at his mother with pure guilt on his face and wondering why he kept on lying to her and visiting a woman whose name was never mentioned in the house. He couldn’t have given a reason. When he was a senior in high school, his father came home for an hour one day (after he’d been gone a year) to say that all his life he had been saving the money for Ben Joe to go to Harvard and now there was enough. Ellen Hawkes said that unless he came home she wouldn’t take a penny, and he said, well, he didn’t see that it would really matter to her if he never came home again. Ellen Hawkes didn’t answer that. So Ben Joe went to Sandhill College. But even so, even knowing that Lili Belle was the reason he had to go there, he still came to sit in Lili Belle’s house and talk to her about the weather and he still threw little Phillip up in the air and caught him again, laughing.
He crossed the scrubby little yard and climbed up to the porch. The wooden floor boards made a hollow sound under his shoes. At the door he knocked and waited, and then knocked again. One corner of the chintz curtain rose slowly. The door swung open.
“Lili Belle?” he said.
“It’s me, boy.”
It was her old mother standing in the shadows behind the door. Ben Joe had seldom seen her before. She was fat and puffing but very dignified, and she had kept out of sight for sheer shame ever since the day her daughter’s baby had been born. Now she closed the door sharply behind him and said, “What you want, anyway?”
“I want to see Lili Belle.”
“Hmm.” She crossed her fat arms under the shelflike bosom of her black crepe dress. “Lilian Belle is very tired, Benjamin,” she said. “Got troubles of her own. What you wanting to see her for?”
“Mrs. Mosely, I won’t stay long. I just wanted to see her a minute. It’s important.”
“Well, I’ll tell her. But I don’t know, I don’t know.”
“Thank you, ma’am.”
He followed her across the small, mousy-smelling hallway into the almost totally dark sitting room. Against the shaded window he could make out the outline of an unlit lamp, double-globed and beaded. Mrs. Mosely stood like a mountain barring the rest of the view; she called into the room, “Back.”
Lili Belle was in the shadows, sitting on a cane chair. She stirred a little and said, “You say something, Mama?”
“Back again to pester us.”
“Who?”
“Him.” She jerked a thumb behind her. “Ben Joe.”
“Oh, my goodness. Benjy, honey, come in!” She stood up and ran to the windows to raise the shades. In her right hand was a bowl of soup, which she shifted awkwardly to her left hand when she tried to maneuver the shade. The room was suddenly light again. With the light a feeling of relief came to Ben Joe; this wasn’t going to be as hard as he thought. He always forgot how easy Lili Belle made him feel the minute he saw her.