Making a sudden decision, Meecham swung the car around in a U-turn at the next corner. “I’ll take you home, Garino.”
“No, no. Mama said, find her. I’ve got to...”
“There’s no point in both of us wasting time and this is my job, not yours,” Meecham said. The fact was, that although he enjoyed Garino’s company, Garino slowed him down; he seemed to know everyone in town and he stopped to chat, shake hands, inquire after wives and children, like a politician touring the city, not forgetting the details in spite of more important issues in his mind. Meecham’s impatience had spread from the weather and the ugly little city to the Garinos and to Mrs. Loftus herself. She was a pathetic figure, but her very pathos was a burden and a nuisance. He wished he had never heard of her.
“This is my job,” he repeated. “You’ve done what you could, Garino.”
“Little enough,” Garino said gloomily. “I don’t know where else. She has no friends anymore.”
“I’ll take you home.”
“To tell the truth, I have a stomach-ache. Yes, and the cats... I have to look after the cats. And the furnace too, suppose it needs shaking down and Mama can’t shake it down right, and the complaints start coming in, no heat, no hot water...”
His voice trailed away. Meecham turned left, in the direction of Oak Street, while Garino sat, stiff and uncomfortable, his back barely touching the back of the seat, as if he was unaccustomed to driving in cars and wasn’t sure what disaster the next corner would bring.
“Do you think you’ll find her?” Garino said.
“Yes.”
“Then what? Then you bring her home, she goes to sleep, and in the morning it starts all over again. One day is like another. Sometimes,” he said soberly, “sometimes I think, ah, the hell with everything.”
Meecham stopped the car in front of the white-brick apartment building. He could see Mrs. Garino peering out of the window of the basement apartment. She had her face right up against the glass with both hands cupped around her eyes to shut out the kitchen light behind her. When she saw the car, and Garino getting out, she ducked her head in guilty haste.
“I hope you find her soon,” Garino said nervously.
“I hope so.”
“I will wait up, to see things are all right. Where will you go?”
“I’m not sure,” Meecham said. He was almost sure, though. Pulling away from the curb he tried to recall Loftus’ words about his mother: “She may want to come, she may have everything arranged, even get as far as the bus depot...”
The depot was on a little side street toward the west side of town. Half of the small waiting room was taken up by rows of benches and the other half by a newsstand and a lunch counter. A bus had just left, or was loaded and ready to leave, because the benches were empty except for a man with a little girl about ten. Both the man and the little girl were completely absorbed in comic books.
Meecham sat down at the lunch counter and ordered coffee. There was only one other customer, an intense- looking, pimply young man in a bus-driver’s uniform.
“I’ve got a few minutes yet,” the driver said. “Give me another cherry coke, Charley.”
“The way you guzzle that stuff, it’s coating the insides of your stomach.” Charley put the drink on the counter and wiped his hands on his apron. He was a big burly man with a round face and a worried little smile. “I heard on the radio, more snow coming.”
“Snow don’t bother me. It’s the people asking questions and craning their necks all over the place trying to drive the bus.”
“Say, did the old lady get on all right?”
“I didn’t see any old lady.”
“She bought a ticket. Maybe she’s in the rest room and didn’t hear the announcement. You better go and check, Roy.”
“Listen, Charley, I drive a bus, I don’t run no old-ladies’ home. You want to check, check.”
“Jesus, no one moves a muscle around this place excepting me.”
Charley took off his apron and chef’s hat and went toward the rest room. Meecham got up and followed him.
“I heard you talking,” Meecham said. “About an old lady.”
Charley paused at the door of the rest room, his hand on the knob. “So?”
“I’m looking for the mother of a friend of mine, woman in her late sixties, white hair, nice-looking, refined.”
“Could be her. Myself, I don’t pay much attention to old ladies.”
Charley glanced around carefully to see that no one else had come in, and that the man and the little girl weren’t watching, before he opened the door of the rest room.
It was a small square box of a room equipped with a chair and a moth-eaten couch, and smelling heavily of wet paper towels and disinfectant.
She was lying on her back on the couch with her eyes closed, a tiny woman, thin to the point of atrophy. Her face had the same look of fragility and innocence as her son’s: high cheekbones with shadowed hollows underneath, wide serene forehead, and brown lashes thick and straight as bristles. She was dressed for a winter day in a black cloth coat with a lamb collar and high velvet carriage boots trimmed with black-dyed rabbit fur. Where the boots touched the calves of her withered legs, the fur was entirely rubbed away. At the foot of the couch, on the floor, was a paper bag and a stained and battered calfskin purse with a chain handle.
“I never been in here before,” Charley said with interest. “I guess women don’t write on walls.”
“Mrs. Loftus,” Meecham said.
Her breathing paused at the mention of her name, just for a fraction of a second, and then it went on as before, heavy and uneven. Her hands were at her sides, palms up, in a supplicating way, as if she was asking for something, money, help, mercy, love, or just another drink. She wore short kid gloves, and protruding from the wrist of the right glove was her bus ticket. She had put it, not in her purse as a grown woman would, but in her glove for safekeeping. It reminded Meecham of the Sunday School collection nickels he had carried when he was a boy, in the thumb of his mitten or the toe of his shoe; the uncomfortable but wonderfully virtuous feeling of that nickel-for-the-Lord in his shoe. The old lady and the old memory pierced him like unexpected arrows from a long bow.
“Hey, lady,” Charley said. “Wake up. Your bus is leaving.”
She moved her head to one side and her hat slipped to the floor, exposing her white silky hair, a little yellowed in places from neglect and curling tongs. Charley bent down to pick up the hat, but he didn’t reach it. He straightened up with a grunt of surprise. “Hell, she’s drunk. Catch that breath, will you? She’s kayoed.”
The bus driver, too, had come into the room. He stared down at the woman with his pale lips pressed together in disapproval. “It’s a fine thing, isn’t it, having people like that hanging around our depot.”
“Come on, lady. Wake up now.”
“You can just save your breath, Charley. I wouldn’t dream of taking her on my bus, not if she’s got thirty tickets.”
“Oh, shut up. Give the old girl a break. She’s somebody’s mother.”
“Just so long as she ain’t mine,” the driver said. “Personally, I’ve got a good mind to call the police. They know how to deal with people like that.”
Charley’s face hardened. “Call the police and I’ll clobber you. Now get out of here.”
“You can’t order...”
“Turn blue. Just turn blue.”
The driver backed out of the room, still talking, but inaudibly, under his breath.
“That stinking lily,” Charley said. “I ought to poke him, but I don’t want to bust my knuckles.”
Meecham was bending over Mrs. Loftus. He had taken off her gloves and was rubbing her small bony hands. The skin felt very dry and cold like a leaf in autumn.