The Mortgaged Heart Page 23

  Marian's eyes sparkled with alarm and she tried weakly to move. The vein writhed in her temple. "Don't you move." Then with a great effort he opened his hand and the scissors fell on the carpeted floor. "Sorry," he said. "Excuse me." After a dazed look around the room he saw the typewriter and went to it quickly.

  "I'll take the typewriter in the living room. I didn't finish my quota today—you have to be disciplined about things like that."

  He sat at the typewriter in the living room, alternating X and R for the sound. After some lines of this he paused and said in an empty voice: "This story is sitting up on its hind legs at last." Then he began to write: The lazy brown fox jumped over the cunning dog. He wrote this a number of times, then leaned back in his chair.

  "Dearest Pie," he said urgently. "You know how I love you. You're the only woman I ever thought about. You're my life. Don't you understand, my dearest Pie?"

  She didn't answer and the apartment was silent except for the rumble of the radiator pipes.

  "Forgive me," he said. "I'm so sorry I picked up the scissors. You know I wouldn't even pinch you too hard. Tell me you forgive me. Please, please tell me."

  Still there was no answer.

  "I'm going to be a good husband. I'll even get a job in an advertising office. I'll be a Sunday poet—writing only on weekends and holidays. I will, my darling, I will!" he said desperately. "Although I'd much rather fry hot dogs in the morgue."

  Was it the snow that made the rooms so silent? He was conscious of his own heart beating and he wrote:

  Why am I so afraid

  Why am I so afraid

  Why am I so afraid???

  He got up and in the kitchen opened the icebox door. "Hon, I'm going to fix you something good to eat. What's that dark thing in the saucer in the corner? Why, it's the liver from last Sunday's dinner—you're crazy about chicken liver or would you rather have something piping hot like soup? Which, Hon?"

  There was no sound.

  "I bet you haven't even eaten a bite of supper. You must be exhausted—with those awful parties and drinking and walking—without a living bite. I have to take care of you. We'll eat and afterward we can cozy."

  He stood still, listening. Then, with the grease-jelled chicken liver in his hands, he tiptoed to the bedroom. The room and bath were both empty. Carefully he placed the chicken liver on the white bureau scarf. Then he stood in the doorway, his foot raised to walk and left suspended for some moments. Afterward he opened closets, even the broom closet in the kitchen, looked behind furniture and peered under the bed. Marian was nowhere at all. Finally he realized that the leopard coat and her purse were gone. He was panting when he sat down to telephone.

  "Hey, Doctor. Ken Harris speaking. My wife has disappeared. Just walked out while I was writing at the typewriter. Is she with you? Did she phone?" He made squares and wavy lines on the pad. "Hell yes, we quarreled! I picked up the scissors—no, I did not touch her! I wouldn't hurt her little fingernail. No, she's not hurt—how did you get that idea?" Ken listened. "I just want to tell you this. I know you have hypnotized my wife—poisoned her mind against me. If anything happens between my wife and me I'm going to kill you. I'll go up to your nosy Park Avenue office and kill you dead."

  Alone in the empty, silent rooms, he felt an undefinable fear that reminded him of his ghost-haunted babyhood. He sat on the bed, his shoes still on, cradling his knees with both arms. A line of poetry came to him. "My love, my love, my love, why have you left me alone?" He sobbed and bit his trousered knee.

  After a while he called the places he thought she might be, accused friends of interfering with their marriage or of hiding Marian... When he called Mabel Goodley he had forgotten the episode of the early evening and he said he wanted to come around to see her. When she said it was three o'clock and she had to get up in the morning he asked what friends were for if not for times like this. And he accused her of hiding Marian, of interfering with their marriage and of being in cahoots with the evil psychiatrist....

  At the end of the night it stopped snowing. The early dawn was pearl gray and the day would be fair and very cold. At sunrise Ken put on his overcoat and went downstairs. At that hour there was no one on the street. The sun dappled the fresh snow with gold, and shadows were cold lavender. His senses searched the frozen radiance of the morning and he was thinking he should have written about such a day—that was what he had really meant to write.

  A hunched and haggard figure with luminous, lost eyes, Ken plodded slowly toward the subway. He thought of the wheels of the train and the gritty wind, the roar. He wondered if it was true that in the final moment of death the brain blazes with all the images of the past—the apple trees, the loves, the cadence of lost voices—all fused and vivid in the dying brain. He walked very slowly, his eyes fixed on his solitary footsteps and the blank snow ahead.

  A mounted policeman was passing along the curb near him. The horse's breath showed in the still, cold air and his eyes were purple, liquid.

  "Hey, Officer. I have something to report. My wife picked up the scissors at me—aiming for that little blue vein. Then she left the apartment. My wife is very sick—crazy. She ought to be helped before something awful happens. She didn't eat a bite of supper—not even the little chicken liver."

  Ken plodded on laboriously, and the officer watched him as he went away. Ken's destination was as uncontrollable as the unseen wind and Ken thought only of his footsteps and the unmarked way ahead.

  [Mademoiselle, September 1956]

  ESSAYS AND ARTICLES

  Editor's Note

  FASHION MAGAZINES in America have long been a home for some of the finest writing from this country and abroad. Certainly Harper's Bazaar, Vogue and Mademoiselle are outstanding examples of this contribution to both readers and writers, which in turn has enhanced the reputations of the magazines. Harper's Bazaar published some of Carson's finest fiction: The Ballad of the Sad Café; "A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud"; and Reflections in a Golden Eye. Since all of these are now among her readily available work, they are not included in this volume. Vogue published articles by Carson and Mademoiselle published stories, articles and poems. Most of Carson's nonfiction is gathered together in this section. What is omitted are those pieces that are either similar in content to the ones chosen or that simply don't hold up as well as the bulk of her writing.

  The articles have been arranged loosely by subject. There was hardly a family we knew that was not involved in some way with World War II. The servicemen were our contemporaries: Reeves (Carson's husband) volunteered for the Rangers, our brother Lamar for the Navy and our cousins and in-laws and friends were in the service. Carson's commitment involved in part, as it did for most of us, a very personal concern.

  There are as many articles on Christmas (three are included here) as there are on World War II and one of them written during the war years. Christmas was Carson's favorite holiday and fall and winter her favorite times of the year. Often her work evokes a longing for the cold and snow as seen in Frankie Addams' dreams of Winter Hill, or she summons the autumn with her descriptions of a "hunting dawn," the making of cane syrup, or slaughtering day after the first frost. Mother's fruitcakes were baked before Thanksgiving and were so famous that the time our house burned down when we were children, the only thing that our brother thought was valuable enough to save were a few freshly baked fruitcakes soaking in good bourbon and wrapped in linen napkins and not to be cut until Christmas. When Carson suffered her massive brain hemorrhage at the end of the summer of 1967, she had completed most of her Christmas shopping which she conducted by phone, through the mail or with the good services of her friends.

  It is fitting that the very last writing of Carson's was a brief piece on Christmas for McCall's. It was published after she died. In this, she tells of reading "The Dead" to her young hospital roommate. Mother always read this story aloud to us at Christmastime. No doubt it was Carson who introduced Mother to James Joyce's work and "The Dead" became a family
favorite.

  The rest of the nonfiction published in a range of magazines, including the now defunct Decision edited by Klaus Mann, is for the most part concerned with writing—her own and that of other writers. "The Flowering Dream" is actually some of the notes from a longer work still in progress at the time of her death.

  In addition to being able to detect suggestions of characters that appear in her fiction, such as the unlikely pair in "Brooklyn Is My Neighbourhood" who bear a similarity to Miss Amelia and Cousin Lymon in The Ballad of the Sad Café, the reader can see Carson's themes weaving throughout all that she wrote—predominantly the search for identity, the ecclesiastical sense of time and chance, and love.

  THE WAR YEARS

  LOOK HOMEWARD, AMERICANS

  FROM THE WINDOWS of my rooms in Brooklyn, there is a view of the Manhattan sky-line. The sky-scrapers, pastel mauve and yellow in colour, rise up sharp as stalagmites against the sky. My windows overlook the harbour, the grey East River, and the Brooklyn Bridge. In the night, there are the lonesome calls of the boats on the river and at sea. This water-front neighbourhood is the place where Thomas Wolfe used to live, and Hart Crane. Often when I am loafing by the window, looking out at the lights and the bright traffic crossing the Bridge, I think of them. And I am homesick in a way that they were often homesick.

  It is a curious emotion, this certain homesickness I have in mind. With Americans, it is a national trait, as native to us as the roller-coaster or the jukebox. It is no simple longing for the home town or the country of our birth. The emotion is Janus-faced: we are torn between a nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.

  All men are lonely. But sometimes it seems to me that we Americans are the loneliest of all. Our hunger for foreign places and new ways has been with us almost like a national disease. Our literature is stamped with a quality of longing and unrest, and our writers have been great wanderers. Poe turned inward to discover an eerie and glowing world of his own. Whitman, that noblest of vagabonds, saw life as a broad open road. Henry James abandoned his own adolescent country for England and the airy decadence of nineteenth-century drawing-rooms. Melville sent out his Captain Ahab to self-destruction in the mad sailing for the great white whale. And Wolfe and Crane—they wandered for a lifetime, and I am not sure they knew themselves just what it was they sought.

  But these writers, our spokesmen, are dead. And although the harbour and the Bridge instinctively make me think of them, I have these days remembered also a friend of mine from whom I got a card a couple of weeks ago.

  My friend is named Lester, and he lives down in North Carolina. Lester is about twenty years old with a gangling body and a pleasant, sunburned face. He has some responsibility, as he is the eldest child in the family and his father is dead. He and his mother have a little store and filling-station on Highway U.S. I. This road runs from New York down through to Miami. It cuts through the long coastal plain that lies between the Appalachian Hills and the Atlantic. There are thousands of stands and filling-stations on this highway.

  Lester takes care of the gas-pump and waits behind the counter of the store. This filling-station is out in the country a few miles from the town where I used to live, so sometimes when I was out walking in the woods I would stop in and warm myself by the stove and drink a glass of beer. Coming out of the pine woods and crossing the grey winter fields, it was good to see the lights ahead.

  In the afternoon, the store would be cosy and quiet, with the air smelling of sawdust and smoke, and with the sleepy ticking of a clock the only sound in the room. Sometimes Lester would be out hunting and would come in as I was drinking my beer. He would come in from the frosty twilight with his wet-nosed hound, and maybe in his sack there would be a couple of quail for his mother to fry at suppertime. Other days, if the weather were warm, I would watch Lester just sitting on a crate by the gas-pump, a peaceful halo of flies around his head, waiting for some tourist to pass along the road and stop for service.

  Lester was a great traveller. He had hitch-hiked a good deal and seen much of the country. But mostly he had travelled in his mind. On the shelf behind the counter of the store there were stacks of old National Geographies and a collection of atlases. When I knew Lester first it was long before the war had started, and the maps were different then. "Paris, France," Lester would say to me. "That's where I mean to go someday. And Russia and India and down in the jungles of Africa—"

  It was a passion with Lester—this hunger to know the world. As he talked of the cities of Europe, his grey eyes widened, and there was about them a quality of quiet craziness. Sometimes as we were sitting there, a car would pull up to the gas-pump, and the manner in which Lester treated the customer would depend on several things. If the driver were known to him, someone from those parts, Lester did not put himself to much trouble. But if the licence plate were from some distant place, such as New York or California, he polished the windshield lovingly, and his voice became gentle and slurred.

  He had a deft way of extracting information as to the places the tourist had seen in his lifetime. Once a man stopped who had lived in Paris, and Lester made friends with him and got him drunk on white-lightning so that the customer had to stay overnight in the town.

  Lester did not often talk about the places he had actually seen, but he knew much of America. A couple of years before he had gone into the C.C.C. and had been sent out to the forests of Oregon. He had passed over the prairies of the Middle West and seen the tawny wheat-fields under the summer sun. He had crossed the Rockies and looked out on the magnificence of the Pacific Ocean.

  Then later, after a year in the Oregon camp, he had stayed for a while with an uncle in San Diego. On his way home again, he had hitch-hiked and taken a zigzagged course—through Arizona, Texas, the delta of the Mississippi. He had seen south Georgia in peach time and discovered the lazy grandeur of Charleston. He had come back to North Carolina in time for the tobacco harvest, after having been away from home two years.

  But about this odyssey Lester did not talk much. His longing was never for home, or for the places he had seen and known and made a part of himself. He hungered always for the alien, the country far away and unattainable. And in the meantime he was wretched in his own countryside, and waited by the gas-pump thinking always of distant things.

  When the war started, Lester did not concern himself as much with the happenings in Europe as I had expected. He was convinced that the war could not last longer than a few months because Hitler would run out of gasoline. Then in the late spring I went away and did not hear from him until his card reached me this autumn. He mentioned the tobacco crop and told me his hound had got mange. At the end he wrote: "Look at what happened to the places I meant to go. There is certainly one thing about this war. It leaves you no place to be homesick for."

  A lonely little store and gas-pump down on Highway U.S. I seems far away from the harbour of Manhattan. And Lester, a foot-loose adolescent, does not appear to have very much in common with our poets of the time before the war—with Wolfe and Hart Crane. But their longing, their restlessness, their turning to the unknown is the same.

  There are thousands of Lesters, but poets come rarely and are the spiritual syntheses of their time and place. And the world of these poets, and of all of us who lived before this debacle, has been ruthlessly amputated from the world of today. Frontiers, both of the earth and of the spirit, were open to them and have since been closed to us. America is now isolated in a way that we never before could have foreseen.

  The Manhattan harbour is quiet this year. Wolfe and Hart Crane no longer wander in these water-front streets—Wolfe maddened by unfocused longing. Hart Crane sick for a nameless place and broken and inflamed by drink. The harbour, yes, is quieter now, and the great ships from abroad do not come to port so often any more. Most of the boats I see from my windows are the small sort that did not go out far from shore. In the late
autumn afternoons, a soft fog veils the sky-line of Manhattan. There is a sadness about this scene. And no wonder—a sky-line facing outward toward the Atlantic and the grim convulsions of the world beyond. Not only sad, but somehow hopeless.

  So we must turn inward. This singular emotion, the nostalgia that has been so much a part of our national character, must be converted to good use. What our seekers have sought for we must find. And this is a great, a creative task. America is youthful, but it can not always be young. Like an adolescent who must part with his broken family, America feels now the shock of transition. But a new and serene maturity will come if it is worked for. We must make a new declaration of independence, a spiritual rather than a political one this time. No place to be homesick for. We must now be homesick for our own familiar land, this land that is worthy of our nostalgia.

  [Vogue, December 1, 1940]

  NIGHT WATCH OVER FREEDOM

  ON THIS NIGHT—the last dark evening of the old year and the first morning of the new—there will be listeners over all the earth. Big Ben will sound at midnight. It may be that in the last hour the Clock Tower itself will be damaged or destroyed. But even so the bells of Big Ben will be heard. For there is a tense listening independent of the ear, a listening that causes the blood to wait and the heart itself for a moment to be hushed.

  England will hear Big Ben in darkness. Perhaps as the hour is tolled, there will be the roar of explosives and the deathly murmur of bombing planes—or the night may be a quiet one over there. In any case the bell will sound in our mind's ear. And these will be among the listeners: the sentries keeping watch over the dark channel; the city people in the air-raid shelters; and the homeless who huddle together on the platforms of the tubes; old farmers in wayside pubs. In the wards of hospitals the hurt and restless they also will hear. And somewhere a frightened child with an upturned face. A rough, rosy soldier on duty at an airport will blow warm breath into his cupped hands, stamp on the frosty ground, and stand silent for a moment at midnight These, then, will hear—for the sound will echo through the cities and all the countryside of the dark island.