Yet he continued to stand there in the dim yellow light. On a radio down the hall Mr. Jack Benny, another white man, mock-argued about a restaurant bill. The studio audience — gentle people, wizards, unapprehended malefactors, old ladies in itchy undergarments, girls with fever sores, men smelling of licorice schnapps — ignorant white people — laughed, as they say, fit to bust. Out there, among the passing audience of uncharged felons and saints and collectors of trash and the rustled and fractured losers and freakish layabouts and all the good people of the earth, among the tedious miles of the great republic, war-spooked and weary, in the elaborating dusk, these two, jailbird and slattern, doing their best to keep their feet as the cold ball rolled on through endless space, gazed at each other, eyes light-brown-gone-to-green peering into eyes dark-almost-to-black, and, as if nudged or prodded or slipped, or in frazzlement fallen, shifted the final micro measure that separates nothing from something.
Delvin began to turn away, but she called him back.
“Hey,” she said, “I’m sorry, soldier boy. Why don’t you come in.” There was a softening in the rasp of her voice, quiet, not quite kindness, almost a plea. “Hey,” she said, “you come a long way to get here, I bet, so why don’t you sit a while with me.”
She began to make room for him on the bed, swept soiled undergarments, pages torn from movie magazines, broken nail files, crumbs of misery, off the pale blue cotton cover.
“Come on,” she said.
She was trying, a little, to make up for her harsh manner just now, he could see this. He could see she still didn’t recollect who he was.
“I get to shooting off my mouth,” she said, “no telling what’s going to come out. You want some pop — or some gin? I got a little gin. Pete,” she said, speaking to the Ghost, “go down and get us a bucket of ice. And another bottle.”
Delvin looked into the Ghost’s pale eyes, into the eyes of this man who knew him. “It’s all right,” he said.
“Don’t take my foolishness to heart,” she said, smiling crookedly.
Delvin saw the brokenness, the faltering about to spill into helplessness. He thought of his mother and he could hardly remember her and this had been the truth of it for years. This woman’s unlucky hair, like wire rusted on her head, her pudgy graceless fingers reaching to grasp the lid of a jar of cold cream smeared at the rim with a streak of rouge, the yellow warty elbow showing from under the loose sleeve of her brownish, sweat-streaked wrapper, reminded him of something that had nothing to do with this place and time. Not his mother, and not anyone he recalled, but another world, faltering as it passed.
The Ghost was standing just out in the hall in the sight line of both people, waiting for Delvin to come along, waiting for the moment representing reason and hope for the future and the house’s wish for no disorder among the help to take hold.
“Where you from, soldier boy?” the woman asked, and even though she sounded as if she was reading from a paper Delvin could hear the restless appeal in her words.
She screwed the pale pink lid on the jar, set the jar aside on a table from which half-dollar-sized flakes of yellow paint had peeled and slopped gin into a squat glass she first wiped with a grime-gray handkerchief. A wire strung under the corner ceiling held a couple of fake-fancy dresses on hangers. She offered the glass to him.
This was a moment of great import. Did he take the glass that would in some sense extend forgiveness, if only in the most cursory way, to her? Or did he refuse? Did he in refusing dash the glass to the floor? Or did he take the glass and smash her across the face with it? Was this a trick? Had she recognized him after all and was only playing along — coldly or stiff with terror — until she could signal for Winston to get the laws up here?
He accepted the glass and set it on the low dresser that was close by, close enough to make it easy — appropriate even — to set the glass down; as if the universe had colluded with direction and destiny. He set the fluted cloudy glass down, just snagging it with his little finger and almost but not quite tipping it so she made a barely perceptible move toward it, the two of them leaning closer. She smiled in an unhappy, self-regarding way.
“Yes,” she said, “a drink might not be what you need just now.” She dipped her finger in the metallic-shiny gin and licked the liquor off it. “You must be from around here.”
“I can’t stay,” he said as one might to an unmarried older relative, sad solitary person without recourse or hope for fun, blurting the words like a rube or a boy. But I must be on my way. The living — the freshly escaped — have to be on their way.
“I can make love come down around us,” she said. “I got tricks. I got conjures.”
She flopped back down on the bed, staying just upright enough not to be defenselessly collapsing or offering, and smiled foolishly. He could see that her hand wanted to come up and hide her snaggle mouth. He wondered if she was drunk. The room had a faint medicinal smell.
“Well,” he said, half turning away.
“Wait,” she cried, leaned forward and pulled out the top drawer. “I’m famous.”
In the drawer were packets of newspaper clippings tied with red cotton string, half a dozen of them. She started to draw a fat packet from the drawer but he stopped her with his hand on top of hers. He could feel her soggy skin, the soft reddish hairs. His fingers were damp.
“I been in the news,” she said, “all over the country. Ask that boy there, he’ll tell you.” The Ghost had become ghostlike, silent, staring, the fingers of one hand twitching in the palm of the other. “Aint that true, boy.”
“Yes. . m,” the Ghost said, the final syllable or smear of syllable, the m or mam, still faintly snugged against the s, almost erased. The woman heard in this sound, so stifled it could hardly be caught by God himself, the disrespect, but she was infused with a thin solution of yearning — for kindness, for a tenderness that existed only in faint early morning dreams, themselves fading. The sound was like a distant bell tolling out the days of her life. Delvin saw her for what she was. He saw the unerasable sadness and the hate and the bitterness she couldn’t quite contain and the cravenness and beggary she couldn’t contain either; he knew the back precincts of near worthlessness she long ago had stopped trying to crawl out of — yearning even so for a little fanciness, a respite, a cool spot on a hot day — he had learned all about this yearning in prison and was an agent of it himself and he knew this too, and he had tried out the lame and careless usages of it that led nowhere except into deeper pain.