Alice Read online

  I looked behind me. All the way home, six blocks from where the bus dropped me, I kept looking behind me.

  At dinner, I barely tasted the food. Alice had cooked a duck on the electric spit, turning slowly until it was crisp and dry and as good as anything anyone cooks, and she served it with rice and orange sauce, but I barely tasted it, and when I tried to force myself to eat, I failed at that too.

  I was irritable and unpleasant, and turned my peevishness to the fact that Polly was asleep when I entered the house. It wasn’t bad enough to come home exhausted, I muttered, but I couldn’t even see my own child.

  “Have you ever tried to keep a little girl awake?” Alice asked me. “Even if I wanted to?”

  “But you didn’t want to.”

  “That’s fine. You talk as if I gave her a sleeping pill. Johnny, you’ll feel better after you eat.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “If you would only try to relax, you would eat. The duck is good.”

  “It has nothing to do with my relaxing or not relaxing. I’m not hungry. Suppose we leave it at that, or am I breaking up a marriage because I won’t eat roast duck?”

  Alice stared at me, shook her head slowly, and then said, “Johnny, what happened today?”

  “What happens every day?” I replied petulantly. “Nothing happens. Not one God-damn thing happens. I sit over a lousy drafting board and I earn my pay. Nothing happens. Nothing has happened. Nothing is going to happen.”

  “All right,” Alice said gently. “This was one of those days. Perhaps you’ll be hungry later. We’ll try to relax.”

  “How?”

  “What?”

  “How? How do we do it? How do we try to relax?”

  “It’s a good night for television,” Alice said.

  “Oh yes. It’s a good night for television.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Nothing. Nothing. I’m only agreeing with you. It’s a good night for television.”

  “You’re not agreeing with me, Johnny. You’re trying to provoke something. In five minutes, we’ll be at each other like cats and dogs. Is that what you want?”

  “Do you know how many times in the past few weeks you’ve sat across the table from me and told me to try to relax?”

  “I love you, Johnny. Sometimes, you’re so tense. Then I tell you to relax. Is that so terrible?”

  “I’m not ten years old. If I could relax, I would. I’m not ten years old.”

  “I know that. What happened, Johnny?”

  “I saw a man fall in front of a subway train,” I said, and then I told her about it but not about thin-face or the key, only about the old man in the subway. She listened silently, her face full of compassion and pain, for myself and for the old man and for the whole world. She was very sweet-looking, something that occurred to me while I spoke, still young and emotional, still presenting the problem of why she had ever married me at all.

  “What a terrible thing!” she said when I had finished.

  “I ran away. I’m full of the disease, mind your own business—just stay away from the human race.”

  “No.”

  “Sure. Be proud of me.”

  “Polly and myself—” she tried a smile, “—we’re still part of the human race.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Johnny darling, the man was dead. You couldn’t do anything for him. There are people who hang on to such a horrible thing. They’re spellbound by it and it’s like a drug for them. I remember that once I saw a poor woman run down by a truck, and the crowd stood over her and fought each other to get to the front and see. They didn’t want to help her. They just wanted to look. I don’t think that’s so admirable. And I don’t think there’s anything wrong in not wanting to see.”

  “That wasn’t why I ran away.”

  “It was part of it, Johnny.”

  “Not even part of it. I was afraid. I was afraid of the possibility that someone who saw me would say I had pushed him. I didn’t push him. He tore away from me. But that’s what I was afraid of.”

  “Isn’t that natural enough, Johnny?”

  “Oh, it’s natural and beautiful. It’s a sort of good-conduct medal with me. I’m afraid of walking out on a lousy, rotten job. I’m afraid to face myself and exactly what I am. I’m afraid to take anything better or try for anything better. I’m also afraid to be a human being. It follows. Sure it’s natural.”

  We were going to bed, myself in pajamas and Alice in her nightgown, when she said to me, “You know, Johnny—we have a lot to be thankful for, you and me, a little girl like Polly, and this house and each other—”

  “A two-bedroom house on a fifty by eighty lot.”

  “It’s a good house with good people in it.”

  “What’s the premium for good people in the world we live in? A remark like that is not only old-fashioned, it’s downright stupid.”

  “Johnny!”

  “All right,” I said. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry I said that.”

  She was trying hard to contain her own anger. “I’m sorry too. You didn’t have to say that, Johnny.”

  2: The Girl

  in the Subway

  In the morning, my daughter Polly, four years old, was charming. Alice made no reference to what had happened the night before, and the sun was shining in a blue sky. It was the beginning of a fine, warm spring day. Polly was bursting with a poem she had made about our name.

  “I put amber in the Camber.”

  It was a very short but successful poem, and my daughter was full of the pride of authorship, which did not interfere with her appetite. Alice had blueberry pancakes with honey, a breakfast dish that I rank very highly, and when Alan Harris, twelve years old, came in to negotiate about cutting our small patch of grass each week and turning our beds, he was persuaded to join us for pancakes. Polly adored him, a surprising manifestation in a four year old, but not unusual.

  “I put amber in the Camber,” she said to him.

  “What’s that?”

  She put her elbows on the table, her chin in her hands, and she devoured him with her eyes. They were wide, lovely, rapacious blue eyes, full of improbable and immodest worship and desire. But not enough so to penetrate Alan Harris’ appetite, or to disturb it, and he went on stuffing his face with blueberry pancakes soaked with honey. I watched him with distaste. This kind of triumph of hunger over love seemed unbecoming to a twelve-year-old. My daughter, I decided, bestowed her heart all too readily.

  “It’s a poem,” she said to him.

  “A poem?” Through the pancakes, poem became foam.

  “A poem.”

  He took another huge bite and said that it didn’t sound like a poem.

  “Don’t you see—amber and Camber.”

  He didn’t see, and I decided that he was a dull young man and that my daughter was wasted on him.

  “That makes it a poem,” Polly said, her voice faltering. I suppose it is always a shock to a woman who loves a man for his looks to discover that his brains leave something to be desired.

  When I was ready to leave, Polly took my hand and walked with me to the sidewalk. “Lift me up for a kiss, please,” she said. I did that. But she was full of sadness and wanted to know whether I knew why Alan Harris disliked her.

  “I think he likes you fine.”

  “He don’t like my poem.”

  “That’s not exactly the same thing, Polly.”

  “I think it is,” she said.

  When I reached the corner and looked back, she still stood there, small, doll-like, and probably a good deal wiser than I. I waved to her, and she waved back—and then I walked on toward the bus stop.

  I felt far better than I can say, and like all nightmares, the day before had blurred and lost most of its dark shape and threat. At some time, falling asleep or waking, I had come to the conclusion that the incident was over, that I was clear with no tracks left, and that I had made altogether too much out of not
hing. Whatever happened inside my head, whether the state of nerves had been blocked or submerged, it was gone and I forgot about it. I forgot about it, not for very long, but for long enough to make it a nice morning.

  On the bus, I read my newspaper, and then, almost in New York, with the George Washington Bridge in sight ahead of us, I began to remember, and I put my hand into my pocket to take out the key and look at it again.

  It wasn’t there.

  Everything came back with a rush, a sickness around my heart and a frantic nervousness that sent my hands searching through every pocket, but in every pocket, the key was missing.

  Then I relaxed and breathed a sigh of relief. I had three medium-weight suits, a dark gray flannel, a dark gray worsted and a charcoal, hard-surface worsted—not a very interesting selection, but in my income bracket, you don’t go in for interesting selections. You buy one suit a year, and it has to be the kind of suit that passes downtown. Yesterday, I had worn the gray worsted. Today, I was wearing the gray flannel. Alice takes care of that, and I empty my pants pockets each night before bed, not my jacket pockets but my pants pockets. So the question was answered, and I was able to relax for a while, and at the bus terminal, at the risk of being a few minutes late downtown, I went into a phone booth and called Alice.

  “Look, honey,” I said to her, “I’m at the bus terminal in New York and this isn’t the most important thing in the world, but anyway just to satisfy me—would you go through the pockets of the suit I wore yesterday, the gray worsted, and see if you can find a key.”

  “You mean you forgot your keys? Johnny, it doesn’t matter—I’ll be here—”

  “No,” I interrupted, “not my keys. This is one key. A flat key. A safe-deposit box key.”

  “Johnny, we don’t have a box. I know we were talking about it, but it’s one more expense. Did you go and get one?”

  “Alice, this isn’t my key. Please do as I say.”

  “You sound as if the fate of the world depends on that key.”

  “I’m sorry, honey. I don’t mean to sound that way,” I said, controlling myself, forcing a calm, light note into my voice. “The truth is that the key belongs in the office, and I just wanted to make sure it wasn’t lost.”

  “All right, Johnny. Hold on and I’ll look.”

  I paid a second toll while I waited. I was cold, and my heart was like a piece of lead, and I took out my handkerchief to wipe the sweat from my face, and I called myself all kinds of a fool for my witlessness and thoughtlessness.

  Then Alice was back on the phone, and she told me, “I have it, Johnny—a flat key with a tiny f stamped at the top of it.”

  She must have heard the sigh of relief I breathed, and she asked me, “Johnny, is it so important?”

  I could afford to be offhand about it now. “Important? No, not very. But hang onto it, like a good girl. Will you?”

  “Of course,” she said.

  It was a day for things. I came out of the phone booth, and the sun was back in the sky, and a Negro boy grinned up at me and said, “Shine, mister?”

  He should have been in school, I told him. My heart had stopped racing, and I wanted to stand still for a few minutes.

  I put my foot up on his box, and he said, “Well, there you are, mister, ain’t it true that somebody always thinks the worst of you? I’m a junior in high school on the afternoon session. That leaves me my mornings free.”

  It sounded like a reasonable argument, and I gave him twenty-five cents. It was a larger gesture than you might imagine, and it switched my lunch from a cheap restaurant to a cafeteria, and I was sick of it again, sick of scrimping and saving and counting pennies, and not being able to afford a shine and lunch but only to split the difference between them. I owned a house that was mortgaged to the hilt at the Savings and Loan and a car that belonged to the Acceptance Company and a washing machine and a television set on time, and of myself, the small part that had belonged to me was mortgaged to a key.

  I went down into the subway, got my train and a seat, and opened my paper again. In New York, a man had fallen off a subway platform. In Algiers, members of the Secret Army had murdered twelve Moslems. In one case, the murderer had walked up to a man on the street, put a gun to his head, and pulled the trigger. In another case, a Secret Army member had approached a group of Moslems who were waiting for a bus and had sprayed them with machine-gun fire. The murders were cold, heartless—as perhaps every murder is—and methodical, but it seemed to me that here was a note of such brutality and inhumanity as the world had not seen before. There were pictures in the newspaper. One showed a subway platform. Another showed one of the streets in Algiers where the murders had taken place. Three bodies were sprawled on the sidewalk, and the sidewalk was in use, active use, by well-dressed European men and women who walked past the bodies, apparently indifferent to them.

  I am not a politically aware person, and often enough the thought has occurred to me that I am not a very bright person; but if I read a newspaper with detachment and from a great distance, there at least I am not too unlike others, most others. I read it from a distance, a record of man’s hatred for man, of man’s brutality to man, and of man’s tissuelike mortality, and it leaves me untouched.

  Except that now I was not untouched. I had made a connection with fear and horror, and I wondered whether, once you make such a connection, it ever departs from you.

  I glanced up and saw a woman standing, and after I had looked at her for a moment or two, I rose and gave her my seat, not because I am a gentleman; there are no gentlemen left in the New York subways; but because she was the most beautiful girl I remember seeing, and it would be easier to look at her if she were sitting down and I were standing. She smiled and thanked me and took my seat. She had black hair and gray eyes that gave the impression of slanting slightly, a skin like cream, and the face of an angel. It was a delight to look at her—it gave you the feeling that you had never looked at a woman before.

  I only looked at her. If I don’t love my wife with the same gasping passion I seem to have experienced eight years ago, I love her nevertheless, and the man who tells you he won’t go out of his way to look at a beautiful woman is a liar.

  Alice and I had been married four years before Polly was born. When we married, Alice was twenty-five and I was twenty-seven. Alice had come to the United States from England six years before. At the age of fifteen, during the terror bombing of London, she had lost both parents and had gone to live with an aunt who had a tiny income from some securities. At the age of fifteen, Alice left school and went to work. Coming from a lower-middle-class family, but one with all the pretensions of the lower middle class in Great Britain, she still had enough guts to go into a factory and learn how to operate a machine. She worked in the factory until the war was over, and then she was out of a job, and few enough jobs there were for a woman.

  The aunt died, and the small pittance she drew went to a brother in Scotland. A few months later, Alice signed a contract with a domestic agency. They were to pay for her passage to America and place her as a domestic, and in return she would agree to remain with the job until the regular weekly deductions to repay the passage money and the agency fee were completed.

  The third-class passage appeared to be a fairly modest sum and the fee of a month’s wages, while stiff, did not seem too unreasonable. What they failed to explain to Alice was their method of computing interest on the money advanced and owed, which, while nominally placed at 7 per cent, turned out to be about 30 per cent, since she continued to pay interest on the full sum until the last dollar was paid. As a result of this, she worked for three years in a Park Avenue apartment for a family of five, cooking, cleaning, and washing, on an average of fifteen hours a day.

  Unaware of what legal privileges she might have resorted to, she worked out the time among a group of selfish, arrogant, and thoughtless people, and finished with enough savings to support her through a course in the operation of an IBM comptometer.


  I met her at Stevens Associates, a huge architectural firm where we both worked; and we liked each other and we needed each other, since we were both alone, my own place of origin being Toledo, Ohio. We were married a year after we met.

  She desperately wanted a place with a little green, some grass and a place where you could make a garden, no matter how small, so we pooled our savings and put down a payment on the house in Telton. It was to be only a beginning, since we were full of our dreams and confident of them too. We loved children, and we were determined to have a lot of them, and to give them all the love and advantages that we were denied during our own childhoods.

  But for almost four years, no children came. We spent our money on doctors and doubled the fees for specialists, but they gave us no help and no comfort, except to assure us that we were both physiologically able to have children.

  Then Polly was born, but it was a difficult, dangerous touch-and-go situation, with Alice’s life in the balance. Polly was delivered with a Caesarean section, and postoperative complications forced Alice to remain in the hospital five weeks. The doctors did not think she would be able to have any more children, and they had turned out to be right.

  At the office, I was twenty minutes late. Fritz Macon said to me, “A diller a dollar a ten o’clock scholar—”

  I told him to shut up, and he remarked that I was touchy this morning, very touchy, and I told him to go to hell.

  Then he looked at me curiously, and I felt that I should apologize to him or say something as an explanation, but I didn’t care enough to go to the effort. I fixed paper to my drawing board and studied a set of plans, and then I heard Fritz say, “Anything wrong, Johnny?”

  “Why?”