The Mortgaged Heart Page 12

  "Three?"

  "Yeah—all fine good looking girls. And that's another reason why I thought it fit to go off on this trip just now. You see when I come back I can look at them fresh and maybe make up my mind which one I want to ask."

  The Jew laughed—a smooth hearty laugh that changed him completely. All trace of strain left his face, his head was thrown back, and his hands clasped tight. And although the joke was at his own expense, the southerner laughed with him. Then the Jew's laughter ended as abruptly as it had begun, finished with a great intake and release of breath that trailed off in a groan. The Jew closed his eyes for a moment and seemed to be according this morsel of fun a place in some inward repertoire of the ridiculous.

  The two travellers had eaten together and had laughed together. By now they were no longer strangers. The Jew settled himself more comfortably in his seat, took a tooth-pick from his vest pocket and made use of it unobtrusively, half hiding his mouth with his hand. The young man removed his tie and unbuttoned his collar to the point where brown curling hairs showed on his chest. But it was evident that the southerner was not so much at ease as was the Jew. Something perplexed him. He seemed to be trying to frame some question that was painful and difficult to ask. He rubbed the damp bangs on his forehead and rounded his mouth as though about to whistle. At last he said: "You are a foreign man?"

  "Yes."

  "You come from abroad?"

  The Jew inclined his head and waited. But the young man seemed unable to go further. And while the Jew waited for him either to speak or to be silent the bus stopped to take on a Negro woman who had signaled from the roadside. The sight of this new passenger disturbed the Jew. The Negro was of indeterminate age and, had she not been clothed in a filthy garment that served as a dress, even her sex would have been difficult at first glance to define. She was deformed -—although not in any one specific limb; the body as a whole was stunted, warped and undeveloped. She wore a dilapidated felt hat, a torn black skirt and a blouse that had been roughly fashioned from a meal sack. At one corner of her mouth there was an ugly open sore and beneath her lower lip she carried a wad of snuff. The whites of her eyes were not white at all, but of a muddy yellow color veined with red. Her face as a whole had a roving, hungry, vacant look. As she walked down the aisle of the bus to take her place on the back seat the Jew turned questioningly to the young man and asked in a quiet, taut voice: "What is the matter with her?"

  The young man was puzzled. "Who? You mean the nigger?"

  "Sh—" the Jew cautioned, for they were on the next to the last seat and the Negro was just behind them.

  But already the southerner had turned in his seat and was staring behind him with such frankness that the Jew winced. "Why there's nothing the matter with her," he said when he had completed this scrutiny. "Not that I can see."

  The Jew bit his lip with embarrassment. His brows were drawn and his eyes were troubled. He sighed and looked out of the window although, because of the light in the bus and the darkness outside, there was little to be seen. He did not notice that the young man was trying to catch his eye and that several times he moved his lips as though about to speak. Then finally the young man's question was spoken. "Was you ever in Paris, France?"

  The Jew said yes.

  "That's one place I always wanted to go. I know this man was over there in the war and somehow all my life I wanted to go to Paris, France. But understand—" The young man stopped and looked earnestly into the Jew's face. "Understand it's not the wimming." (For, due either to the influence of the Jew's careful syllables or to some spurious attempt at elegance the young man actually pronounced the word "wimming.") "It's not because of the French girls you hear about."

  "The buildings—the boulevards?"

  "No," said the young man with a puzzled shake of his head. "It's not any of those things. That's how come I can't understand it. Because when I think about Paris just one thing is in my mind." He closed his eyes thoughtfully. "I always see this little narrow street with tall houses on both sides. It's dark and it's cold and raining. And nobody is in sight except this French fellow standing on the corner with his cap pulled down over his eyes." The young man looked anxiously into the Jew's face. "Now how come I would have this homesick feeling for something like that? Why—do you reckon?"

  The Jew shook his head. "Maybe too much sun," he said finally.

  Soon after this the young man reached his destination—a little cross roads village that appeared to be deserted. The southerner took his time about leaving the bus. He pulled down his tin suitcase from the rack and shook hands with the Jew. "Goodbye, Mister—" The fact that he did not know the name seemed to come as a sudden surprise to him. "Kerr," said the Jew. "Felix Kerr." Then the young man was gone. At the same stop the Negro woman—that derelict of humanity the sight of whom had so disturbed the Jew—left the bus also. And the Jew was alone again.

  He opened his lunch box and ate the sandwich made with rye bread. Afterward he smoked a few cigarettes. For a time he sat with his face close to the window screen and tried to gather some impression of the landscape outside. Since nightfall clouds had gathered in the sky and there were no stars. Now and then he saw the dark outline of a building, vague stretches of land, or a clump of trees close to the roadside. At last he turned away.

  Inside the bus the passengers had settled down for the night. A few were sleeping. He looked about him with a certain rather jaded curiosity. Once he smiled to himself, a thin smile that sharpened the corners of his mouth. But then, even before the last trace of this smile had faded, a sudden change came over him. He had been watching the deaf old man in overalls on the front seat and some small observation seemed suddenly to cause in him intense emotion. Over his face came a swift grimace of pain. Then he sat with his head bowed, his thumb pressed to his right temple and his fingers massaging his forehead.

  For this Jew was grieving. Although he was careful of his checked threadbare trousers, although he had eaten with enjoyment and had laughed, although he hopefully awaited this new strange home that lay ahead of him—in spite of these things there was a long dark sorrow in his heart. He did not grieve for Ada, his good wife to whom he had been faithful for twenty-seven years, or for his little daughter, Grissel, who was a charming child. Those two—God be willing—would join him here as soon as he could prepare for them. Neither was this grief concerned with his anxiety for his friends, nor with the loss of his home, his security, and his content. The Jew sorrowed for his elder daughter, Karen, whose whereabouts and state of welfare were unknown to him.

  And grief such as this is not a constant thing, demanding in measure, taking its toll in fixed proportion. Rather (for the Jew was a musician ) such grief is like a subordinate but urgent theme in an orchestral work—-an endless motive asserting itself with all possible variations of rhythm and tonal coloring and melodic structure, now suggested nervously in flying-spiccato passage from the strings, again emerging in the pastoral melancholy of the English horn, or sounding at times in a strident but truncated version down deep among the brasses. And this theme, although for the most part subtly concealed, affects by its sheer insistence the music as a whole far more than the apparent major melodies. And also there are times in this orchestral work when this motive which has been restrained so long will at a signal volcanically usurp all other musical ideas, commanding the full orchestra to recapitulate with fury all that hitherto had been insinuated. But with grief there is a difference here. For it is no fixed summons, such as the signal from the conductor's hand, that activates a dormant sorrow. It is the uncalculated and the indirect. So that the Jew could speak of his daughter with composure and without a quiver could pronounce her name. But when on the bus he saw a deaf man bend his head to one side to hear some bit of conversation the Jew was at the mercy of his grief. For his daughter had the habit of listening with her face turned slightly away and of looking up with one quick glance only when the speaker was done. And this old man's casual gesture was the summo
ns that released in him the grief so long restrained—so that the Jew winced and bowed his head.

  For a long time the Jew sat tense in his seat and rubbed his forehead. Then at eleven o'clock the bus made a scheduled stop. By turns the passengers hastily visited a cramped, stale urinal. Later in a café they gulped down drinks and ordered food that could be carried away and eaten with the hands. He had a beer and on his return to the bus pre-parted for sleep. He took from his pocket a fresh, unfolded handkerchief and, settling himself in his corner with his head resting in the crotch made by the side of the bus and the rounded back of his seat, he placed the handkerchief over his eyes to guard them from the light. He rested quietly with his legs crossed and his hands clasped loosely in his lap. By midnight he was sleeping.

  Steadily, in darkness, the bus travelled southward. Sometime in the middle of the night the dense summer clouds dispersed and the sky was clear and starry. They were travelling down the long coastal plain that lies to the east of the Appalachian hills. The road wound through melancholy fields of cotton, and tobacco, through long and lonesome stretches of pine woods. The white moonlight made dreary silhouettes of the tenant shacks close by the roadside. Now and then they went through dark, sleeping towns and sometimes the bus stopped to take on or leave off some traveller. The Jew slept the heavy sleep of those who are mortally tired. Once the jolting of the bus caused his head to fall forward on his chest but this did not disturb his slumber. Then just before daylight, the bus reached a town somewhat larger than most of those through which they had been passing. The bus stopped and the driver laid his hand on the Jew's shoulder to awaken him. For at last his journey was ended.

  UNTITLED PIECE

  THE YOUNG MAN AT THE TABLE of the station lunch room knew neither the name nor the location of the town where he was, and he had no knowledge of the hour more exact than that it was some time between midnight and morning. He realized that he must already be in the south, but that there were many more hours journeying before he would reach home. For a long time he had sat at the table over a half finished bottle of beer, relaxed to a gangling position—with his thighs fallen loose apart and with one foot stepping on the other ankle. His hair needed cutting and hung down softly ragged over his forehead and his expression as he stared down at the table was absorbed, but mobile and quick to change with his shifting thoughts. The face was lean and suggestive of restlessness and a certain innocent, naked questioning. On the floor beside the boy were two suitcases and a packing box, each tagged neatly with a card on which was typewritten his name—Andrew Leander, and an address in one of the larger towns in Georgia.

  He had come into the place in a drunken turmoil, caused partly by the swallows of corn a man on the bus had offered him, mostly by a surge of expectancy that had come to him during the last few hours of travelling. And that feeling was not unaccountable. Three years before, when he was seventeen years old, the boy had left home in an inner quandary of violence, a gawky wanderer going with fear into the unknown, expecting never to come back. And now after these three years he was returning.

  Sitting at the table in the lunch room of that little nameless town, Andrew had become more calm. All during the time of his absence he had put away thoughts of his home town and his family—of his Dad and his sisters, Sara and Mick, and of the colored girl Vitalis, who worked for them. But as he sat with his beer (so completely a stranger, that it was as though he were magically suspended from the very earth) the memories of all of them at home revolved inside him with the clarity of a reel of films—sometimes precise and patterned, again in a chaos of disorder.

  And there was one little episode that kept recurring again and again in his mind, although until that night he had not thought of it in years. It was about the time he and his sister made a glider in the back yard, and perhaps he kept remembering it because the things he had felt at that time were so much like the expectancy this journey now brought.

  At that time they had all been kids and at the age when all the new things they learned about on the radio and in books and at the movies could set them wild with eagerness. He had been thirteen, Sara a year younger, and little Mick (she didn't count in things like this) was still in kindergarten. He and Sara had read about gliders in a science magazine in the school library and immediately they began to build one in their back yard. (They began to build it one afternoon in the middle of the week and by Saturday they had worked so hard that it was almost finished.) The article had not given any exact directions for making the glider; they had had to go by the way they imagined it should be and to use whatever materials they could find. Vitalis would not give them a sheet to cover the wings and so they had to cut up his canvas camping tent to use instead. For the frame they used some bamboo sticks and some light wood they snitched from the carpenters who were building a garage up on the next block. When it was finished the glider was not very big, and seemed very different from the ones they had seen in the movies—but he and Sara kept telling each other that it was just as good and that there was nothing to keep their ship from flight.

  That Saturday was a time that none of them would ever forget. The sky was a deep, blazing blue, the color of gas flames, and at times there was a thick and sultry breeze. All morning he and Sara stayed out in the hot sun of the back yard working. Her face was strained and pale with excitement and her full, almost sullen lips were red and dry as though from a fever. She kept running back and forth to get things she thought they might need, her thin legs overgrown and clumsy, her damp hair streaming out behind her shoulders. Little Mick hung around the back steps, watching. It seemed to him then that they were as different as any sisters could be. Mick sat quietly, her hands on her fat little knees, not saying much but gazing at everything they did with a wondering look to her face and with her little mouth softly open. Even Vitalis was out there with them most of the time. She didn't know whether to believe in it or not. She was a nervous, light colored girl and there was something about the glider that excited her as much as it did the rest of them—and that scared her too. As she watched them her fingers kept fooling with her red earrings or picking at her swollen quivering lips.

  They all felt that there was something wild about that day. It was like they were shut off from all other people in the world and nothing mattered except the four of them planning and working out in the quiet, sun-baked yard. It was as though they had never wanted anything except this glider and its flight from the earth up toward the hot blue sky.

  It was the launching that gave them the most worry. He kept saying to Sara: "We ought to have a car to hitch it to because that's the way the real flyers get them up. Or else one of those elastic ropes like they described in the magazine."

  But beside their garage was a tall pine tree, with the limbs growing high and stretching out almost as far as the house. From one of these branches hung a swing and it was from this that they intended to make their start. He and Sara took out the board seat and put in its place a larger plank. And it was from the start that the swing would give them that they would be launched.

  Vitalis felt like she ought to be responsible and she was afraid. "I been having this here queer feeling all day."

  There was a hot slow breeze and from the top of the pine came a gentle soughing. She held up her hands to feel the wind and stood for a moment looking at the sky—intent as some savage rapt in prayer.

  "You all think just because your mother ain't living that you don't have to mind nobody. Why don't you wait till your Daddy come home and ask him? I been having this here feeling all day that something bad ghy happen from that thing."

  "Hush," said Sara.

  "I know it ain't no real airplane even if it do have them big wings made out of a old torn up tent. And I know you just as human as I is. And your head just as easy to bust."

  But no matter what she said Vitalis believed in the glider as much as any of them. When she was in the kitchen they could see her come to the window every few minutes and stare out at them, her
broad nose pressed to the glass, her dark face quivering.

  By the time they were finished the sun was almost down. The sky had blanched to a pale jade color and the breeze that had been blowing most of the day seemed cooler and stronger to them. The yard was very quiet and neither he nor Sara said anything or looked at each other as they tensely balanced the glider on the swing. They had already argued about who would be the one to go up first and he had won. They called Vitalis out from the house and told her to help Sara give the final push and when she did not want to they said they would call Chandler West or some other kid in the neighborhood so she might as well be the one. Little Mick got up from the steps where she had been looking at them all day long and watched him step carefully up into the swing and squat down on the frame of the glider, gripping the wood with the rubber soles of his sneakers.

  "Do you think you'll go as far as Atlanta or Cleveland?" she asked. Cleveland was the place where their cousin lived and that was how she knew the name.

  It seemed to him as he crouched in there trying to keep his balance that already he was leaving the ground. He could feel his heart beating almost in his throat and his hands were shaking.

  Vitalis said: "And even if this slow little wind do carry you up in the air, what you ghy do then? Is you just ghy fly around up there all night like you is an angel?"

  "Will you be back in time for supper, Drew?" Mick asked.

  Sara looked like she didn't hear anything that was said. There were drops of sweat on her forehead and he could hear her breath coming quick and shallow. She and Vitalis each took a rope of the swing and pulled with all their strength. Even little Mick helped them balance the glider. It seemed like it took them hours to hoist him up as far as their head while he waited, crouched tensely, with his jaw stiff and his eyes half closed. During that moment he thought of himself soaring up and up into the cool blue sky and the joy of it was such as he never felt before.