The Mortgaged Heart Page 4

  Then something happened between Maybelle and me. I never have figured out just what it was. Girls like her are hard to understand. She began to act different toward me. At first I wouldn't let myself believe this and tried to think it was just my imagination. She didn't act glad to see me anymore. Often she went out riding with this fellow on the football team who owns this yellow roadster. The car was the color of her hair and after school she would ride off with him, laughing and looking into his face. I couldn't think of anything to do about it and she was on my mind all day and night. When I did get a chance to go out with her she was snippy and didn't seem to notice me. This made me feel like something was the matter—I would worry about my shoes clopping too loud on the floor or the fly of my pants, or the bumps on my chin. Sometimes when Maybelle was around, a devil would get into me and I'd hold my face stiff and call grown men by their last names without the Mister and say rough things. In the night I would wonder what made me do all this until I was too tired for sleep.

  At first I was so worried I just forgot about Sucker. Then later he began to get on my nerves. He was always hanging around until I would get back from high school, always looking like he had something to say to me or wanted me to tell him. He made me a magazine rack in his Manual Training class and one week he saved his lunch money and bought me three packs of cigarettes. He couldn't seem to take it in that I had things on my mind and didn't want to fool with him. Every afternoon it would be the same—him in my room with this waiting expression on his face. Then I wouldn't say anything or I'd maybe answer him rough-like and he would finally go on out.

  I can't divide that time up and say this happened one day and that the next. For one thing I was so mixed up the weeks just slid along into each other and I felt like Hell and didn't care. Nothing definite was said or done. Maybelle still rode around with this fellow in his yellow roadster and sometimes she would smile at me and sometimes not. Every afternoon I went from one place to another where I thought she would be. Either she would act almost nice and I would begin thinking how nice things would finally clear up and she would care for me—or else she'd behave so that if she hadn't been a girl I'd have wanted to grab her by that white little neck and choke her. The more ashamed I felt for making a fool of myself the more I ran after her.

  Sucker kept getting on my nerves more and more. He would look at me as though he sort of blamed me for something, but at the same time knew that it wouldn't last long. He was growing fast and for some reason began to stutter when he talked. Sometimes he had nightmares or would throw up his breakfast. Mom got him a bottle of cod liver oil.

  Then the finish came between Maybelle and me. I met her going to the drug store and asked for a date. When she said no I remarked something sarcastic. She told me she was sick and tired of my being around and that she had never cared a rap about me. She said all that. I just stood there and didn't answer anything. I walked home very slowly.

  For several afternoons I stayed in my room by myself. I didn't want to go anywhere or talk to anyone. When Sucker would come in and look at me sort of funny I'd yell at him to get out. I didn't want to think of Maybelle and I sat at my desk reading Popular Mechanics or whittling at a toothbrush rack I was making. It seemed to me I was putting that girl out of my mind pretty well.

  But you can't help what happens to you at night. That is what made things how they are now.

  You see a few nights after Maybelle said those words to me I dreamed about her again. It was like that first time and I was squeezing Sucker's arm so tight I woke him up. He reached for my hand.

  "Pete, what's the matter with you?"

  All of a sudden I felt so mad my throat choked—at myself and the dream and Maybelle and Sucker and every single person I knew. I remembered all the times Maybelle had humiliated me and everything bad that had ever happened. It seemed to me for a second that nobody would ever like me but a sap like Sucker.

  "Why is it we aren't buddies like we were before? Why—?"

  "Shut your damn trap!" I threw off the cover and got up and turned on the light. He sat in the middle of the bed, his eyes blinking and scared.

  There was something in me and I couldn't help myself. I don't think anybody ever gets that mad but once. Words came without me knowing what they would be. It was only afterward that I could remember each thing I said and see it all in a clear way.

  "Why aren't we buddies? Because you're the dumbest slob I ever saw! Nobody cares anything about you! And just because I felt sorry for you sometimes and tried to act decent don't think I give a damn about a dumb-bunny like you!"

  If I'd talked loud or hit him it wouldn't have been so bad. But my voice was slow and like I was very calm. Sucker's mouth was part way open and he looked as though he'd knocked his funny bone. His face was white and sweat came out on his forehead. He wiped it away with the back of his hand and for a minute his arm stayed raised that way as though he was holding something away from him.

  "Don't you know a single thing? Haven't you ever been around at all? Why don't you get a girl friend instead of me? What kind of a sissy do you want to grow up to be anyway?"

  I didn't know what was coming next. I couldn't help myself or think.

  Sucker didn't move. He had on one of my pajama jackets and his neck stuck out skinny and small. His hair was damp on his forehead.

  "Why do you always hang around me? Don't you know when you're not wanted?"

  Afterward I could remember the change in Sucker's face. Slowly that blank look went away and he closed his mouth. His eyes got narrow and his fists shut. There had never been such a look on him before. It was like every second he was getting older. There was a hard look to his eyes you don't see usually in a kid. A drop of sweat rolled down his chin and he didn't notice. He just sat there with those eyes on me and he didn't speak and his face was hard and didn't move.

  "No you don't know when you're not wanted. You're too dumb. Just like your name—a dumb Sucker."

  It was like something had busted inside me. I turned off the light and sat down in the chair by the window. My legs were shaking and I was so tired I could have bawled. The room was cold and dark. I sat there for a long time and smoked a squashed cigarette I had saved. Outside the yard was black and quiet. After a while I heard Sucker lie down.

  I wasn't mad any more, only tired. It seemed awful to me that I had talked like that to a kid only twelve. I couldn't take it all in. I told myself I would go over to him and try to make it up. But I just sat there in the cold until a long time had passed. I planned how I could straighten it out in the morning. Then, trying not to squeak the springs, I got back in bed.

  Sucker was gone when I woke up the next day. And later when I wanted to apologize as I had planned he looked at me in this new hard way so that I couldn't say a word.

  All of that was two or three months ago. Since then Sucker has grown faster than any boy I ever saw. He's almost as tall as I am and his bones have gotten heavier and bigger. He won't wear any of my old clothes any more and has bought his first pair of long pants—with some leather suspenders to hold them up. Those are just the changes that are easy to see and put into words.

  Our room isn't mine at all any more. He's gotten up this gang of kids and they have a club. When they aren't digging trenches in some vacant lot and fighting they are always in my room. On the door there is some foolishness written in Mercurochrome saying "Woe to the Outsider who Enters" and signed with crossed bones and their secret initials. They have rigged up a radio and every afternoon it blares out music. Once as I was coming in I heard a boy telling something in a loud voice about what he saw in the back of his big brother's automobile. I could guess what I didn't hear. That's what her and my brother do. It's the truth—parked in the car. For a minute Sucker looked surprised and his face was almost like it used to be. Then he got hard and tough again. "Sure, dumbbell. We know all that." They didn't notice me. Sucker began telling them how in two years he was planning to be a trapper in Alaska.

  B
ut most of the time Sucker stays by himself. It is worse when we are alone together in the room. He sprawls across the bed in those long corduroy pants with the suspenders and just stares at me with that hard, half-sneering look. I fiddle around my desk and can't get settled because of those eyes of his. And the thing is I just have to study because I've gotten three bad cards this term already. If I flunk English I can't graduate next year. I don't want to be a bum and I just have to get my mind on it. I don't care a flip for Maybelle or any particular girl any more and it's only this thing between Sucker and me that is the trouble now. We never speak except when we have to before the family. I don't even want to call him Sucker any more and unless I forget I call him by his real name, Richard. At night I can't study with him in the room and I have to hang around the drug store, smoking and doing nothing, with the fellows who loaf there.

  More than anything I want to be easy in my mind again. And I miss the way Sucker and I were for a while in a funny, sad way that before this I never would have believed. But everything is so different that there seems to be nothing I can do to get it right. I've sometimes thought if we could have it out in a big fight that would help. But I can't fight him because he's four years younger. And another thing—sometimes this look in his eyes makes me almost believe that if Sucker could he would kill me.

  [The Saturday Evening Post, 1963]

  COURT IN THE WEST EIGHTIES

  IT WAS NOT UNTIL SPRING that I began to think about the man who lived in the room directly opposite to mine. All during the winter months the court between us was dark and there was a feeling of privacy about the four walls of little rooms that looked out on each other. Sounds were muffled and far away as they always seem when it is cold and windows everywhere are shut. Often it would snow and, looking out, I could see only the quiet white flakes sifting down against the gray walls, the snow-edged bottles of milk and covered crocks of food put out on the window sills, and perhaps a light coming out on the dimness in a thin line from behind closed curtains. During all this time I can remember seeing only a few incomplete glimpses of this man living across from me—his red hair through the frosty window glass, his hand reaching out on the sill to bring in his food, a flash of his calm drowsy face as he looked out on the court. I paid no more attention to him than I did to any of the other dozen or so people in that building. I did not see anything unusual about him and had no idea that I would come to think of him as I did.

  There was enough to keep me busy last winter without looking at things outside my window. This was my first year at university, the first time I had been in New York. Also there was the necessity of trying to get and keep a part time job in the mornings. I have often thought that when you are an eighteen year old girl, and can't fix it so you look any older than your age, it is harder to get work than at any other time. Maybe I would say the same thing, though, if I were forty. Anyway those months seem to me now about the toughest time I've had so far. There was work (or job-hunting) in the morning, school all afternoon, study and reading at night—together with the newness and strangeness of this place. There was a queer sort of hungriness, for food and for other things too, that I could not get rid of. I was too busy to make any friends down at school and I had never been so much alone.

  Late at night I would sit by the window and read. A friend of mine back home would sometimes send me three or four dollars to get certain books in secondhand book stores here that he can't get in the library. He would write for all sorts of things—books like "A Critique of Pure Reason," or "Tertium Organum," and authors like Marx and Strachey and George Soule. He has to stay back home now and help out his family because his Dad is unemployed. He had a job as a garage mechanic. He could get some sort of office work, but a mechanic's wages are better and, lying under an automobile with his back to the ground, he has a chance to think things out and make plans. Before mailing him the books I would study them myself, and although we had talked about many of the things in them in simpler words there would sometimes be a line or two that would make a dozen things I'd half known definite and sure.

  Often such sentences as these would make me restless and I'd stare out the window a long time. It seems strange now to think of me standing there alone and this man asleep in his room on the other side and me not knowing anything about him and caring less. The court would be dark for the night, with the snow on the roof of the first floor down below, like a soundless pit that would never awaken.

  Then gradually the spring began to come. I cannot understand why I was so unconscious of the way in which things began to change, of the milder air and the sun that began to grow stronger and light up the court and all the rooms around it. The thin, sooty-gray patches of snow disappeared and the sky was bright azure at noon. I noticed that I could wear my sweater instead of my coat, that sounds from outside were beginning to get so clear that they bothered me when reading, that every morning the sun was bright on the wall of the opposite building. But I was busy with the job I had and school and the restlessness that these books I read in my spare time made me feel. It was not until one morning when I found the heat in our building turned off and stood looking out through the open window that I realized the great change that had come about. Oddly enough, too, it was then when I saw the man with the red hair plainly for the first time.

  He was standing just as I was, his hands on the window sill, looking out. The early sun shone straight in his face and I was surprised at his nearness to me and at the clarity with which I could see him. His hair, bright in the sunlight, came up from his forehead red and coarse as a sponge. I saw that his mouth was blunt at the corners, his shoulders straight and muscular under his blue pajama jacket. His eyelids drooped slightly and for some reason this gave him a look of wisdom and deliberateness. As I watched him he went inside a moment and returned with a couple of potted plants and set them on the window sill in the sun. The distance between us was so little that I could plainly see his neat blunt hands as they fondled the plants, carefully touching the roots and the soil. He was humming three notes over and over—a little pattern that was more an expression of well being than a tune. Something about the man made me feel that I could stand there watching him all morning. After a while he looked up once more at the sky, took a deep breath and went inside again.

  The warmer it got the more things changed. All of us around the court began to pin back our curtains to let the air into our small rooms and move our beds close to the windows. When you can see people sleep and dress and eat you get to feel that you understand them—even if you don't know their names. Besides the man with the red hair there were others whom I began to notice now and then.

  There was the cellist whose room was at a right angle with mine and the young couple living above her. Because I was at my window so much I could not help but see nearly everything that happened to them. I knew the young couple were going to have a baby soon and that, although she didn't look so well, they were very happy. I knew about the cellist's ups and downs too.

  At night when I wasn't reading I would write to this friend of mine back home or type out things that happened to come into my head on the typewriter he got me when I left for New York. (He knew I would have to type out assignments at school.) The things I'd put down weren't of any importance—just thoughts that it did me good to try to get out of my mind. There would be a lot of x marks on the paper and maybe a few sentences such as: fascism and war cannot exist for long because they are death and death is the only evil in the world, or it is not right that the boy next to me in Economics should have had to wear newspapers under his sweater all winter because he didn't have any overcoat, or what are the things that I know and can always believe? While I would sit writing like this I would often see the man across from me and it would be as if he were somehow bound up in what I was thinking—as if he knew, maybe, the answers to the things that bothered me. He seemed so calm and sure. When the trouble we began to have in the court started I could not help but feel he was the one person ab
le to straighten it out.

  The cellist's practicing annoyed everybody, especially the girl living directly above her who was pregnant. The girl was very nervous and seemed to be having a hard time. Her face was meager above her swollen body, her little hands delicate as a sparrow's claws. The way she had her hair skinned back tightly to her head made her look like a child. Sometimes when the practicing was particularly loud she would lean down toward the cellist's room with an exasperated expression and look as though she might call out to her to stop awhile. Her husband seemed as young as she did and you could tell they were happy. Their bed was close to the window and they would often sit on it Turkish fashion, facing each other, talking and laughing. Once they were sitting that way eating some oranges and throwing the peels out the window. The wind blew a bit of a peel into the cellist's room and she screamed up to them to quit littering everyone else with their trash. The young man laughed, loud so the cellist could hear him, and the girl laid down her half finished orange and wouldn't eat anymore.

  The man with the red hair was there the evening that happened. He heard the cellist and looked a long time at her and at the young couple. He had been sitting as he often did, at the chair by the window—in his pajamas, relaxed and doing nothing at all. (After he came in from work he rarely went out again.) There was something contented and kind about his face and it seemed to me he wanted to stop the tension between the rooms. He just looked, and did not even get up from his chair, but that is the feeling I had. It makes me restless to heat people scream at each other and that night I felt tired and jittery for some reason. I put the Marx book I was reading down on the table and just looked at this man and imagined about him.