Departure Page 12

  At the Andrewses’, aside from the professor and his wife, there was just an amiable young instructor from the law school. There was a good fire in the old-fashioned living room, and they all sat in front of it, drinking bourbon and soda, and talking that kind of literary talk Carrol loved better than anything else. When Carrol remarked, “I’m afraid I took the edge off the reception, bolting out like that,” Andrews observed that the host and hostess were probably everlastingly indebted to him for ending it so early. They made no further reference to his impending departure, but Carrol was conscious by now of their liking for him, a strange liking that was tinged, at least on the part of Eve Andrews, with a curiosity he hardly understood. If it had not been for the very naturalness and warmth of this late evening gathering, he might have sensed something terrible and impending; but how could he when the conversation flowed so normally and well?

  They talked about the ten best tales that men had written, and then, enthralled, as people whose work is literature will be, by the process of storytelling and storymaking, they traced the lines of development through many lands and cultures. That kind of talk, Carrol reflected, can be in this world a sort of wine, gentle and civilized, heart-warming and soul-comforting, reclaiming as it does what man has achieved and not what he has destroyed. At first Carrol had to fight down a sort of childish resentment against the young law school instructor, but everything he said and did made it self-evident that he was no more than a good friend to Lucy Reed, while everything Lucy Reed did and said made it plainly apparent to Carrol, if not to everyone else there, that he was a special quality with her. With no self-consciousness, innocently as a small girl, she gave her heart to him, and he would have had to be insensitive indeed not to feel it and respond to it. Withal, she was so easily a part of the group that Carrol found himself completely unable to fathom what relationship she bore to the others.

  That they loved her was obvious, but the quality and nature of the love only puzzled Carrol. He habitually made the mistake of so many intellectuals, that of oversimplifying people whom he considered of lesser capacity, and he found himself revising his estimate of Professor Andrews and his wife—and his estimate of Lucy Reed too. Watching her pale, clean-cut, lovely face in the shadows of the firelight, he became more and more convinced that the seemingly aimless flow of events had paused meaningfully as it brought them together, and as the early morning began, he no longer denied to himself that he was completely and wonderfully in love.

  During the decade past, he would have strongly and reasonably denied the spirituality of love, the selflessness and wonder of it, and now he accepted it wholly and felt as so many others have felt, that he suddenly was different from and beyond all other human beings. The imminence of age, which only lately had come to prey upon him and bedevil him, turned into a flower of youth, and the youthfulness became a bond between them. His whole future suddenly had turned and fixed upon a woman, and between fragments of conversation, he made plans. He would go to New York, even as he was scheduled to, but in a week at the most he would be back here. He might live and work here for a while; the place would not only be bearable, but charming. After all, he told himself, the attitude which led him to reject this place was a manufactured sophistication; had he not told himself a hundred times, during the war, that any corner of America could be wonderful?

  That way, his thoughts roved along, and suddenly it was past one in the morning. Lucy Reed rose and said abruptly:

  “I’m very tired. Will you excuse me?”

  Carrol got up and took her warm hand in his. “Good night,” she said. She left then and Carrol heard her going upstairs. The evening was over now, and Eve Andrews, catching his eye, said, “I’ll drive you home whenever you’re ready to go, Brighton.”

  “What about a nightcap?” the professor asked. “One more small one.”

  The law school instructor stretched his arms and yawned, and at that moment, while Eve Andrews emptied an ash tray into a silent butler, Carrol heard the noise—a harsh grating human noise. Someone was moaning or calling aloud in pain, he thought, but no one else appeared to notice it. The noise came again, and he started and demanded:

  “Didn’t you hear it? What was that?”

  “Lucy,” Eve Andrews said shortly. Suddenly the professor and the law school instructor were contemplatively silent, absorbed in their drinks.

  After a long moment, Carrol said, “What do you mean, Lucy?”

  “She’s ill. She has difficulty keeping anything on her stomach.”

  “She doesn’t look sick,” Carrol said. “What is it—an ulcer?”

  “It’s worse than an ulcer,” Eve Andrews said quietly. “It’s a kind of cancer called ‘Hodgkin’s disease.’”

  “Is it bad?”

  The professor asked shortly, almost angrily, “How bad can cancer be?”

  Driving Carrol back to the Grand Union, where he had boarded during his stay at the University, Eve Andrews was strangely unresponsive to Carrol’s horror. “It happens,” she said, almost coldly. “And her family couldn’t face it. They couldn’t deal with it. Every night the girl went to bed with mortal fear that she wouldn’t wake in the morning. She’s better since she came to live with us.”

  “When—” Carrol began.

  “Six months ago was the date they set.”

  “But she doesn’t look sick or act sick.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And isn’t there anything to hope for?” Carrol pleaded.

  “A miracle—if you believe in them.”

  “No cure, no method …?”

  “No cure, that’s right.”

  “No, it can’t be,” Carrol said. “Not that beautiful, wonderful girl. It can’t be.”

  Eve Andrews shrugged, and Carrol turned on her fiercely and demanded, “How in hell can you be so cold about it?”

  “Do you think I’m cold about it?” she said tiredly. “I grew up with Lucy. I’m a year older than she. We played together as kids and then we had dates together. Now we try to make the little bit left normal and worthwhile. You don’t want to face that, do you? Were you falling in love with her before you found this out?”

  When he didn’t answer, she went on. “What have you ever faced? You saw no death in the war, did you? You don’t live in a world where people are born and where they die.”

  “That’s a hell of a thing to say.”

  “What do you want me to say? Did you see her eyes tonight? Suppose you had a day or three days or three weeks to live? There’s a good deal of nonsense talked about love, but there’s something else about love too—or maybe you don’t know?”

  They had drawn up before the Grand Union now, and for a minute or two, they sat there in silence. Then Eve Andrews said, “Good night, Brighton.”

  “Good night,” Carrol said.

  Carrol spent a sleepless night. It was not until sunrise that he understood how foolish a quixotic action can be. It was not until sunrise that he could blend peace and pity with a calm understanding that grown men did not fall in love in that fashion. He told himself that he would always remember Lucy Reed with pity and affection; and he also told himself that the quick image he had conceived the night before of marrying a girl in such a position was hardly sensible and beneficial surely to neither.

  A few hours later he was boarding his plane, reflecting, as he so often did, on the virtues of a civilized man in a basically uncivilized world.

  Dumb Swede

  TOM ANDERSON HAD not been born in the old country, but growing up on the farm among Swedish and Norwegian folk gave him a slight accent that for some reason persisted all his life. He was not very quick with his tongue or his thoughts and perhaps that was what preserved the accent. Sometimes, also, he thought that this same slowness accounted for the fact that he never learned to read or write; while it was true that he had no schooling, ever, again and again he met people without schooling who had learned to read. He never learned, just as he never learned to remove
the quality from his speech that marked him as a Swede.

  Certainly, he had been around enough. He was eleven years old when he left the farm to work at the mill, and there he spent three years with the taste of flour always in his mouth, flour in his clothes, in his hair, and in every crevice of his skin. How he hated flour, the taste of it, the smell of it, the stinging burn of it! But in those three years he grew a full twelve inches; he broadened out, and at fourteen he was able to heave two hundred-pound sacks onto his back and carry them with ease. When he was able to do that, he figured he was able to take care of himself, and he told the mill operator, Ole Svenson:

  “I’m going away now and get a job pays better than four dollars a week”—a speech he had rehearsed slowly and carefully for at least ten days.

  “You stay here, or your old man’ll beat your hide off,” Svenson said.

  “My old man can go to hell, and you too,” Tom Anderson replied, and with that he shook the mill dust out of his clothes and set out on the dirt road that led north through the wheat fields.

  Often enough afterwards, in the years that followed, Tom Anderson thought of that day, and sometimes he regretted that he had walked off that way, with never a word of sweetness or departure to his mother and father. But neither had he ever had a good word from them, only beatings and blows as one of seven children, and turned out to work when he was eleven, and not a day of schooling in his life. Stupid he was, as they told him often enough, and schooling was for those with brains—although he never understood the logic of that. So while he regretted his leave-taking, he did not regret it too much, nor was he given to brooding about it overmuch.

  At seventeen, he had three years of work in the lumber camps behind him, and he stood six feet and two inches in his stockings, weighed one hundred and ninety pounds, and could use an ax and a saw as well as the next man. The women he saw, the bad women who lived around the camps, in the little towns near by, thought he was older than he was and considered him very handsome, what with his light blue eyes, his sandy hair, and his broad, even-featured face. But they also thought him stupid, not knowing his age and the fact that he had known no other women before them. The reputation they gave him as a “dumb Swede” spread through the camps, and because Tom Anderson was slow-going and good-natured, it was never seriously contested. There were other factors too. Most of the men spent their spare time reading Western magazines or Nick Carter novels; Tom Anderson could not read, but he was ashamed to admit it to anyone; he bought a corncob pipe, learned to smoke it, and spent hours just sitting and doing nothing in particular, except smoking his pipe. Because he was big and strong, he avoided fights; if prodded into one, he usually did well enough.

  Then the work in the lumber camps fell off, and men were laid off right and left. A Wobbly organizer appeared, and some of the men listened to him and others didn’t. Tom Anderson didn’t. Ever since he had worked in the flour mill and earned four dollars a week, two of which were given over to his father and two of which he paid back for room and board, he had been jealous of the wages he made. Now the Wobblies seemed to threaten his right to work as he pleased, and he talked against them. He had been laid off, but the straw boss hired him back on at five dollars more a month. It was all right for a while, but then a bunch of the men ganged up on him and gave him an awful beating. Strangely enough, he didn’t hold the beating against them, nor was that the reason he pulled out. He had never really been very much afraid of anything, and he would not have been afraid to take another beating if he had to. It was just that he was sick and tired of lumbering, and he thought if he were to make a new start somewhere else, maybe people would act differently toward him and he would get away from the business of being a “dumb Swede.”

  He caught a string of boxcars south, and for the next five years he drifted from job to job, from Minneapolis to St. Louis to El Paso to San Francisco and Seattle. But everywhere it was the same, and wherever he went, they caught on sooner or later to the fact that he was just a big dumb Swede. Anderson was a good worker, and even if he had money in his pocket, he couldn’t stay idle. The need for work, the drive for work was deeply imbedded within him. Almost since he could remember now, the principal avocation and expression of his life was in work with his hands.

  He had the large, square, beautiful hands of big-boned, hard-working men. He didn’t know it, of course. He met a girl once, just a girl in a house, who looked at his hands and saw a little of what Rodin or Epstein would have seen in them, and her face lit up; but she didn’t know how to put it into words and you don’t tell a big, blond squarehead that his hands are beautiful. She stared at his hands until he asked her what she was looking at, and then she said:

  “Nothing, nothing at all.”

  But for a long time afterwards she remembered those hands.

  Anderson never became much of a drinker. He didn’t like the stuff, and when he had a pile, most of it went on women. Moving from job to job, the steel mills, a cannery, the railroad, the stockyards, reaping, picking fruit, pick and shovel, pouring concrete, a cowcamp—moving along that way, he never met any girls that he could just get to know and go around with. Women lived in a house; that was the begining and the end of it for him.

  This wasn’t good, and one time, working on a right of way in Idaho, he met up with another Swede, Jack Orlaffson, a man of about fifty who had been born in the old country. Tom Anderson never made many friends, because he was the sort of open-handed young fellow who could be taken advantage of too easily, and so many were willing to make a mark of him that there was hardly any opening for someone to make a friend of him. But Orlaffson took a real and sincere liking to him. Anderson was twenty-three years old, and Orlaffson told him that he ought to think of settling down.

  “You been a working man,” Orlaffson said to him. “You get a dollar and you spend a dollar. But how many fellows like you I see been working men, been just a bum sooner or later.”

  “I never been without a job,” Tom Anderson said.

  “Well, you just wait until hard times come. You listen to me, you get a nice girl. Get a family. A man got nothing in world outside a family.”

  “Where am I going to find a nice girl?” Tom Anderson wondered.

  “Just look around you, I tell you, and you see a nice girl all right. You see one.”

  So Tom Anderson looked around him, but since most of the places he was outside of the job were whorehouses, beer halls, and dance halls, he didn’t see many nice girls. Then the right of way was finished, and he and Orlaffson went to Butte, where they worked in a mine.

  Here again, Tom Anderson ran into the Wobblies. They came into Butte to work on copper, and Anderson’s mistrust was shared by Orlaffson. “They got nothing for us,” Orlaffson said. “They’re crazy as hell with strike, strike, strike—all the time.” Orlaffson had two children with his mother-in-law in Omaha; a widower, he sent every penny he made there. When the Wobblies sent a deputation of three big Swedes to talk with Anderson and Orlaffson, Orlaffson shook his head stubbornly:

  “I never been a union man—I don’t be one now.”

  “I don’t be one,” said Anderson. “I look after myself.” Which was strange, because he was a mark for anyone who was broke two days after pay day, or who had a sob story to tell him.

  “Okay,” they said. “Okay—you big dumb Swede. We see you today and tomorrow you’ll be out there scabbing.”

  But when the strike broke, both Orlaffson and Anderson pulled out and went to Chicago. Neither of them wanted trouble; they just wanted to work and hold down their jobs. But there were bad times in Chicago then, and in the rest of America too. Orlaffson felt it more than Anderson; Anderson was strong as an ox, and he could find certain kinds of work when they turned away anyone past forty, regardless of strength. All that cold, long winter, Anderson gave his friend money. To a degree, he adopted Orlaffson’s two children as his own responsibility, and twice he scabbed so that he could earn money for the two children he had never seen
. Orlaffson was very grateful, and Tom Anderson was happy that he had found a real friend.

  Then Tom Anderson found a steady job in the big harvester plant and he found a girl. Never in this wildest dreams would he have hoped for that kind of girl. She had yellow hair that was like fine, spun-metal wire, and she had beautiful red lips and lovely features. She had a sensuous, full figure, and Tom Anderson considered her the most beautiful creature he had ever seen. Her name was Jane Bogan, and she affectionately called Anderson “my big, beautiful dumb Swede.” She was beautiful and she called him beautiful! He met her in a dance hall, and a week later they were married. After that, he introduced her to Orlaffson. The older man was nice to her, but she called him “Pop” and said later to Anderson:

  “So that’s your friend! Why he’s a worse squarehead than you are!”

  Anderson tried to explain, but he was not nimble enough with words to say what he felt for Orlaffson. The older man was still not working steadily, but Jane wouldn’t hear of giving him money.