"Well," he said, "Sarah and I have often talked about what we would like to say most to you."
"I'm sure," I said.
"And it's this." he said, " 'Thank you very much, Walter. My going to prison was the best thing that ever happened to Sarah and me.' I'm not joking. Word of honor: It's true."
I was amazed. "How can that be?" I said.
"Because life is supposed to be a test," he said. "If my life had kept going the way it was going, I would have arrived in heaven never having faced any problem that wasn't as easy as pie to solve. Saint Peter would have had to say to me, 'You never lived, my boy. Who can say what you are?' "
"I see," I said.
"Sarah and I not only have love," he said, "but we have love that has stood up to the hardest tests."
"It sounds very beautiful," I said.
"We would be proud to have you see it," he said. "Could you come to supper sometime?"
"Yes — I suppose," I said.
"Where are you staying?" he said.
"The Hotel Arapahoe," I said.
"I thought they'd torn that down years ago," he said.
"No," I said.
"You'll hear from us," he said.
"I look forward to it," I said.
"As you'll see," he said, "we have nothing in the way of material wealth; but we need nothing in the way of material wealth."
"That's intelligent," I said.
"I'll say this though:" he said, "The food is good. As you may remember, Sarah is a wonderful cook."
"I remember," I said.
And now the shopping-bag lady offered the first proof that she really did know a lot about me. "You're talking about that Sarah Wyatt, aren't you?" she said.
There was a silence among us, although the uproar of the metropolis went on and on. Neither Clewes nor I had mentioned Sarah's maiden name.
I finally managed to ask her, woozy with shapeless misgivings, "How do you know that name?"
She became foxy and coquettish. "You think I don't know you were two-timing me with her the whole time?" she said.
Given that much information, I no longer needed to guess who she was. I had slept with her during my senior year at Harvard, while still squiring the virginal Sarah Wyatt to parties and concerts and athletic events.
She was one of the four women I had ever loved. She was the first woman with whom I had had anything like a mature sexual experience.
She was the remains of Mary Kathleen O'Looney!
14
"I was his circulation manager," said Mary Kathleen to Leland Clewes very loudly. "Wasn't I a good circulation manager, Walter?"
"Yes — you certainly were," I said. That was how we met: She presented herself at the tiny office of The Bay State Progressive in Cambridge at the start of my senior year, saying that she would do absolutely anything I told her to do, as long as it would improve the condition of the working class. I made her circulation manager, put her in charge of handing out the paper at factory gates and along breadlines and so on. She had been a scrawny little thing back then, but tough and cheerful and highly visible because of her bright red hair. She was such a hater of capitalism, because her mother was one of the women who died of radium poisoning after working for the Wyatt Clock Company. Her father had gone blind after drinking wood alcohol while a night watchman in a shoe-polish factory.
Now what was left of Mary Kathleen bowed her head, responded modestly to my having agreed that she had been a good circulation manager, and presented her pate to Leland Clewes and me. She had a bald spot about the size of a silver dollar. The tonsure that fringed it was sparse and white.
Leland Clewes would tell me later that he almost fainted. He had never seen a woman's bald spot before.
It was too much for him. He closed his blue eyes and he turned away. When he manfully faced us again, he avoided looking directly at Mary Kathleen — just as the mythological Perseus had avoided looking at the Gorgon's head.
"We must get together soon," he said.
"Yes," I said.
"You'll be hearing from me soon," he said.
"I hope so," I said.
"Must rush," he said.
"I understand," I said.
"Take care," he said.
"I will," I said.
He was gone.
Mary Kathleen's shopping bags were still banked around my legs. I was as immobilized and eye-catching as Saint Joan of Arc at the stake. Mary Kathleen still grasped my wrist, and she would not lower her voice.
"Now that I've found you, Walter," she cried, "I'll never let you go again!"
Nowhere in the world was this sort of theater being done anymore. For what it may be worth to modern impresarios: I can testify from personal experience that great crowds can still be gathered by melodrama, provided that the female in the piece speaks loudly and clearly.
"You used to tell me all the time how much you loved me, Walter," she cried. "But then you went away, and I never heard from you again. Were you just lying to me?"
I may have made some responsive sound. "Bluh," perhaps, or "fluh . . . "
"Look at me in the eye, Walter," she said.
Sociologically, of course, this melodrama was as gripping as Uncle Tom's Cabin before the Civil War. Mary Kathleen O'Looney wasn't the only shopping-bag lady in the United States of America. There were tens of thousands of them in major cities throughout the country. Ragged regiments of them had been produced accidentally, and to no imaginable purpose, by the great engine of the economy. Another part of the machine was spitting out unrepentent murderers ten years old, and dope fiends and child batterers and many other bad things. People claimed to be investigating. Unspecified repairs were to be made at some future time.
Good-hearted people were meanwhile as sick about all these tragic by-products of the economy as they would have been about human slavery a little more than a hundred years before. Mary Kathleen and I were a miracle that our audience must have prayed for again and again: the rescue of at least one shopping-bag lady by a man who knew her well.
Some people were crying. I myself was about to cry.
"Hug her," said a woman in the crowd.
I did so.
I found myself embracing a bundle of dry twigs that was wrapped in rags. That was when I mysellf began to cry. I was crying for the first time since I had found my wife dead in bed one morning — in my little brick bungalow in Chevy Chase, Maryland.
15
My nose, thank God, had conked out by then. Noses are merciful that way. They will report that something smells awful. If the owner of a nose stays around anyway, the nose concludes that the smell isn't so bad after all. It shuts itself off, deferring to superior wisdom. Thus is it possible to eat Limburger cheese — or to hug the stinking wreckage of an old sweetheart at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street.
It felt for a moment as though Mary Kathleen had died in my arms. To be perfectly frank, that would have been all right with me. Where, after all, could I take her from there? What could be better than her receiving a hug from a man who had known her when she was young and beautiful, and then going to heaven right away?
It would have been wonderful. Then again, I would never have become executive vice-president of the Down Home Records Division of The RAMJAC Corporation. I might at this very moment be sleeping off a wine binge in the Bowery, while a juvenile monster soaked me in gasoline and touched me off with his Cricket lighter.