The Mortgaged Heart Read online

  "I'm looking forward to the Chopin," she said. "I always love minor music, don't you?"

  "I guess you enjoy your misery," Mr. Mahoney answered.

  Miss Walker, the English teacher, spoke up promptly. "It's Mother's melancholy Celtic soul. She's of Irish descent, you know."

  Feeling he had somehow made a mistake, Mr. Mahoney said awkwardly, "I like minor music all right."

  Tip Mayberry took Mr. Mahoney's arm and spoke to him chummily. "This fellow can certainly rattle the old ivories."

  Mr. Mahoney answered with reserve, "He has a very brilliant technique."

  "It's still an hour to go," Tip Mayberry complained. "I wish me and you could slip out of here."

  Mr. Mahoney moved discreetly away.

  Mr. Mahoney loved the atmosphere of Little Theatre plays and concerts—the chiffon and corsages and decorous dinner jackets. He was warm with pride and pleasure as he went sociably about the lobby of the high school auditorium, greeting the ladies, speaking with reverent authority of movements and mazurkas.

  It was during the first number after the intermission that the calamity came. It was a long Chopin sonata: the first movement thundering, the second jerking and mercurial. The third movement he followed knowingly with tapping foot—the rigid funeral march with a sad waltzy bit in the middle; the end of the funeral march came with a chorded final crash. The pianist lifted up his hand and even leaned back a little on the piano stool.

  Mr. Mahoney clapped. He was so dead sure it was the end that he clapped heartily half a dozen times before he realized, to his horror, that he clapped alone. With swift fiendish energy José Iturbi attacked the piano keys again.

  Mr. Mahoney sat stiff with agony. The next moments were the most dreadful in his memory. The red veins in his temples swelled and darkened. He clasped his offending hands between his thighs.

  If only Ellie had made some comforting secret sign. But when he dared to glance at Ellie, her face was frozen and she gazed at the stage with desperate attentiveness. After some endless minutes of humiliation, Mr. Mahoney reached his hand timidly toward Ellie's crepe-covered thigh. Mrs. Mahoney moved away from him and crossed her legs.

  For almost an hour Mr. Mahoney had to suffer this public shame. Once he caught a glimpse of Tip Mayberry, and an alien evil shafted through his gentle heart. Tip did not know a sonata from the Slit Belly Blues. Yet there he sat, smug, unnoticed. Mrs. Mahoney refused to meet her husband's anguished eyes.

  They had to go on to the party. He admitted it was the only proper thing to do. They drove there in silence, but when he had parked the car before the Harlow house Mrs. Mahoney said, "I should think that anybody with a grain of sense knows enough not to clap until everybody else is clapping."

  It was for him a miserable party. The guests gathered around Jos6 Iturbi and were introduced. (They all knew who had clapped except Mr. Iturbi; he was as cordial to Mr. Mahoney as to the others.) Mr. Mahoney stood in the corner behind the concert-grand piano drinking Scotch. Old Mrs. Walker and Miss Walker hovered with the "bell cow" around Mr. Iturbi. Ellie was looking at the titles in the bookcase. She took out a book and even read for a little while with her back to the room. In the corner he was alone through a good many highballs. And it was Tip Mayberry who finally joined him. "I guess after all those tickets you sold you were entitled to an extra clap." He gave Mr. Mahoney a slow wink of covert brotherhood which Mr. Mahoney at that moment was almost willing to admit.

  [Mademoiselle, February 1949]

  THE HAUNTED BOY

  HUGH LOOKED for his mother at the corner, but she was not in the yard. Sometimes she would be out fooling with the border of spring flowers—the candytuft, the sweet William, the lobelias (she had taught him the names)—but today the green front lawn with the borders of many-colored flowers was empty under the frail sunshine of the mid-April afternoon. Hugh raced up the sidewalk, and John followed him. They finished the front steps with two bounds, and the door slammed after them.

  "Mamma!" Hugh called.

  It was then, in the unanswering silence as they stood in the empty, wax-floored hall, that Hugh felt there was something wrong. There was no fire in the grate of the sitting room, and since he was used to the flicker of firelight during the cold months, the room on this first warm day seemed strangely naked and cheerless. Hugh shivered. He was glad John was there. The sun shone on a red piece in the flowered rug. Red-bright, red-dark, red-dead—Hugh sickened with a sudden chill remembrance of "the other time." The red datkened to a dizzy black.

  "What's the matter, Brown?" John asked. "You look so white."

  Hugh shook himself and put his hand to his forehead. "Nothing. Let's go back to the kitchen."

  "I can't stay but just a minute," John said. "I'm obligated to sell those tickets. I have to eat and run."

  The kitchen, with the fresh checked towels and clean pans, was now the best room in the house. And on the enameled table there was a lemon pie that she had made. Assured by the everyday kitchen and the pie, Hugh stepped back into the hall and raised his face again to call upstairs.

  "Mother! Oh, Mamma!"

  Again there was no answer.

  "My mother made this pie," he said. Quickly he found a knife and cut into the pie—to dispel the gathering sense of dread.

  "Think you ought to cut it, Brown?"

  "Sure thing, Laney."

  They called each other by their last names this spring, unless they happened to forget. To Hugh it seemed sporty and grown and somehow grand. Hugh liked John better than any other boy at school. John was two years older than Hugh, and compared to him the other boys seemed like a silly crowd of punks. John was the best student in the sophomore class, brainy but not the least bit a teacher's pet, and he was the best athlete too. Hugh was a freshman and didn't have so many friends that first year of high school—he had somehow cut himself off, because he was so afraid.

  "Mamma always has me something nice for after school." Hugh put a big piece of pie on a saucer for John—for Laney.

  "This pie is certainly super."

  "The crust is made of crunched-up graham crackers instead of regular pie dough," Hugh said, "because pie dough is a lot of trouble. We think this graham-cracker pastry is just as good. Naturally, my mother can make regular pie dough if she wants to."

  Hugh could not keep still; he walked up and down the kitchen, eating the pie wedge he carried on the palm of his hand. His brown hair was mussed with nervous rakings, and his gentle gold-brown eyes were haunted with pained perplexity. John, who remained seated at the table, sensed Hugh's uneasiness and wrapped one gangling leg around the other.

  "I'm really obligated to sell those Glee Club tickets."

  "Don't go. You have the whole afternoon." He was afraid of the empty house. He needed John, he needed someone; most of all he needed to hear his mother's voice and know she was in the house with him. "Maybe Mamma is taking a bath," he said. "I'll holler again."

  The answer to his third call too was silence.

  "I guess your mother must have gone to the movie or gone shopping or something."

  "No," Hugh said. "She would have left a note. She always does when she's gone when I come home from school."

  "We haven't looked for a note," John said. "Maybe she left it under the door mat or somewhere in the living room."

  Hugh was inconsolable. "No. She would have left it right under this pie. She knows I always run first to the kitchen."

  "Maybe she had a phone call or thought of something she suddenly wanted to do."

  "She might have," he said. "I remember she said to Daddy that one of these days she was going to buy herself some new clothes." This flash of hope did not survive its expression. He pushed his hair back and started from the room. "I guess I'd better go upstairs. I ought to go upstairs while you are here."

  He stood with his arm around the newel post; the smell of varnished stairs, the sight of the closed white bathroom door at the top revived again "the other time." He clung to the newel post,
and his feet would not move to climb the stairs. The red turned again to whirling, sick dark. Hugh sat down. Stick your head between your legs, he ordered, remembering Scout first aid.

  "Hugh," John called. "Hugh!"

  The dizziness clearing, Hugh accepted a fresh chagrin—Laney was calling him by his ordinary first name; he thought he was a sissy about his mother, unworthy of being called by his last name in the grand, sporty way they used before. The dizziness cleared when he returned to the kitchen.

  "Brown," said John, and the chagrin disappeared. "Does this establishment have anything pertaining to a cow? A white, fluid liquid. In French they call it lait. Here we call it plain old milk."

  The stupidity of shock lightened. "Oh. Laney, I am a dope! Please excuse me. I clean forgot." Hugh fetched the milk from the refrigerator and found two glasses. "I didn't think. My mind was on something else."

  "I know," John said. After a moment he asked in a calm voice, looking steadily at Hugh's eyes: "Why are you so worried about your mother? Is she sick, Hugh?"

  Hugh knew now that the first name was not a slight; it was because John was talking too serious to be sporty. He liked John better than any friend he had ever had. He felt more natural sitting across the kitchen table from John, somehow safer. As he looked into John's gray, peaceful eyes, the balm of affection soothed the dread.

  John asked again, still steadily: "Hugh, is your mother sick?"

  Hugh could have answered no other boy. He had talked with no one about his mother, except his father, and even those intimacies had been rare, oblique. They could approach the subject only when they were occupied with something else, doing carpentry work or the two times they hunted in the woods together—or when they were cooking supper or washing dishes.

  "She's not exactly sick," he said, "but Daddy and I have been worried about her. At least, we used to be worried for a while."

  John asked: "Is it a kind of heart trouble?"

  Hugh's voice was strained. "Did you hear about that fight I had with that slob Clem Roberts? I scraped his slob face on the gravel walk and nearly killed him sure enough. He's still got scars or at least he did have a bandage on for two days. I had to stay in school every afternoon for a week. But I nearly killed him. I would have if Mr. Paxton hadn't come along and dragged me off."

  "I heard about it."

  "You know why I wanted to kill him?"

  For a moment John's eyes flickered away.

  Hugh tensed himself; his raw boy hands clutched the table edge; he took a deep, hoarse breath. "That slob was telling everybody that my mother was in Milledgeville. He was spreading it around that my mother was crazy."

  "The dirty bastard."

  Hugh said in a clear, defeated voice, "My mother was in Milledgeville. But that doesn't mean that she was crazy," he added quickly. "In that big State hospital, there are buildings for people who are crazy, and there are other buildings, for people who are just sick. Mamma was sick for a while. Daddy and me discussed it and decided that the hospital in Milledgeville was the place where there were the best doctors and she would get the best care. But she was the furtherest from crazy than anybody in the world. You know Mamma, John." He said again: "I ought to go upstairs."

  John said: "I have always thought that your mother is one of the nicest ladies in this town."

  "You see, Mamma had a peculiar thing happen, and afterward she was blue."

  Confession, the first deep-rooted words, opened the festered secrecy of the boy's heart, and he continued more rapidly, urgent and finding unforeseen relief.

  "Last year my mother thought she was going to have a little baby. She talked it over with Daddy and me," he said proudly. "We wanted a girl. I was going to choose the name. We were so tickled. I hunted up all my old toys—my electric train and the tracks ... I was going to name her Crystal—how does that name strike you for a girl? It reminds me of something bright and dainty."

  "Was the little baby born dead?"

  Even with John, Hugh's ears turned hot; his cold hands touched them. "No, it was what they call a tumor. That's what happened to my mother. They had to operate at the hospital here." He was embarrassed and his voice was very low. "Then she had something called change of life." The words were terrible to Hugh. "And afterward she was blue. Daddy said it was a shock to her nervous system. It's something that happens to ladies; she was just blue and run-down."

  Although there was no red, no red in the kitchen anywhere, Hugh was approaching "the other time."

  "One day, she just sort of gave up—one day last fall." Hugh's eyes were wide open and glaring: again he climbed the stairs and opened the bathroom door—he put his hand to his eyes to shut out the memory. "She tried to—hurt herself. I found her when I came in from school."

  John reached out and carefully stroked Hugh's sweatered arm.

  "Don't worry. A lot of people have to go to hospitals because they are run-down and blue. Could happen to anybody."

  "We had to put her in the hospital—the best hospital." The recollection of those long, long months was stained with a dull loneliness, as cruel in its lasting unappeasement as "the other time"—how long had it lasted? In the hospital Mamma could walk around and she always had on shoes.

  John said carefully: "This pie is certainly super."

  "My mother is a super cook. She cooks things like meat pie and salmon loaf—as well as steaks and hot dogs."

  "I hate to eat and run," John said.

  Hugh was so frightened of being left alone that he felt the alarm in his own loud heart.

  "Don't go," he urged. "Let's talk for a little while."

  "Talk about what?"

  Hugh could not tell him. Not even John Laney. He could tell no one of the empty house and the horror of the time before. "Do you ever cry?" he asked John. "I don't."

  "I do sometimes," John admitted.

  "I wish I had known you better when Mother was away. Daddy and me used to go hunting nearly every Saturday. We lived on quail and dove. I bet you would have liked that." He added in a lower tone, "On Sunday we went to the hospital."

  John said: "It's kind of a delicate proposition selling those tickets. A lot of people don't enjoy the High School Glee Club operettas. Unless they know someone in it personally, they'd rather stay home with a good TV show. A lot of people buy tickets on the basis of being public-spirited."

  "We're going to get a television set real soon."

  "I couldn't exist without television," John said.

  Hugh's voice was apologetic. "Daddy wants to clean up the hospital bills first because as everybody knows sickness is a very expensive proposition. Then we'll get TV."

  John lifted his milk glass. "Skoal," he said. "That's a Swedish word you say before you drink. A good-luck word."

  "You know so many foreign words and languages."

  "Not so many," John said truthfully. "Just 'kaput' and 'adios' and 'skoal' and stuff we learn in French class. That's not much."

  "That's beaucoup," said Hugh, and he felt witty and pleased with himself.

  Suddenly the stored tension burst into physical activity. Hugh grabbed the basketball out on the porch and rushed into the back yard. He dribbled the ball several times and aimed at the goal his father had put up on his last birthday. When he missed he bounced the ball to John, who had come after him. It was good to be outdoors and the relief of natural play brought Hugh the first line of a poem. "My heart is like a basketball." Usually when a poem came to him he would lie sprawled on the living room floor, studying to hunt rhymes, his tongue working on the side of his mouth. His mother would call him ShelleyPoe when she stepped over him, and sometimes she would put her foot lightly on his behind. His mother always liked his poems; today the second line came quickly, like magic. He said it out loud to John: " 'My heart is like a basketball, bounding with glee down the hall.' How do you like that for the start of a poem?"

  "Sounds kind of crazy to me," John said. Then he corrected himself hastily. "I mean it sounds—odd. Odd, I meant
."

  Hugh realized why John changed the word, and the elation of play and poems left him instantly. He caught the ball and stood with it cradled in his arms. The afternoon was golden and the wisteria vine on the porch was in full, unshattered bloom. The wisteria was like lavender waterfalls. The fresh breeze smelled of sun-warmed flowers. The sunlit sky was blue and cloudless. It was the first warm day of spring.

  "I have to shove off," John said.

  "No!" Hugh's voice was desperate. "Don't you want another piece of pie? I never heard of anybody eating just one piece of pie."

  He steered John into the house and this time he called only out of habit because he always called on coming in. "Mother!" He was cold after the bright, sunny outdoors. He was cold not only because of the weather but because he was so scared.

  "My mother has been home a month and every afternoon she's always here when I come home from school. Always, always."

  They stood in the kitchen looking at the lemon pie. And to Hugh the cut pie looked somehow—odd. As they stood motionless in the kitchen the silence was creepy and odd too.

  "Doesn't this house seem quiet to you?"

  "It's because you don't have television. We put on our TV at seven o'clock and it stays on all day and night until we go to bed. Whether anybody's in the living room or not. There're plays and skits and gags going on continually."

  "We have a radio, of course, and a vie."

  "But that's not the company of a good TV. You won't know when your mother is in the house or not when you get TV."

  Hugh didn't answer. Their footsteps sounded hollow in the hall. He felt sick as he stood on the first step with his arm around the newel post. "If you could just come upstairs for a minute—"

  John's voice was suddenly impatient and loud. "How many times have I told you I'm obligated to sell those tickets. You have to be public-spirited about things like Glee Clubs."