“This isn’t the regular air from up here that I’m breathing,” she said to herself. “It’s the air from down there. It’s a trick I can do.”
She felt her blood tingle as it always did whenever she scored a victory, and she needed to score several of them in the course of each day. This time she was defeating the older woman.
The following afternoon, even though it was raining hard, her mother could not stop her from going out, but she had promised to keep her hood buttoned and not to sit on the ground.
The stone steps were running with water. She sat down and looked into the enveloping mist, a fierce light in her eyes. Her fingers twitched nervously, deep in the recess of her rubber pockets. It was unbelievable that they should not at any moment encounter something wonderful and new, unbelievable, too, that he should be ignorant of her love for him. Surely he knew that all the while his mother was talking, she in secret had been claiming him for her own. He would come out soon to join her on the steps, and they would go away together.
Hours later, stiff with cold, she stood up. Even had he remained all day at the window he could never have sighted her through the heavy mist. She knew this, but she could never climb the steps to fetch him; that was impossible. She ran headlong down the stone steps and across the highway. When she reached the pit she stopped dead and stood with her feet in the soft clay mud, panting for breath.
“Men,” she said after a minute, “men, I told you we were going to specialize.” She stopped abruptly, but it was too late. She had, for the first time in her life, spoken to her men before summoning them to order with a bugle call. She was shocked, and her heart beat hard against her ribs, but she went on. “We’re going to be the only outfit in the world that can do real mountain-goat fighting.” She closed her eyes, seeking the dark gulf again; this time she needed to hear the men’s hearts beating, more clearly than her own. A car was sounding its horn on the highway. She looked up.
“We can’t climb those stone steps up there.” She was shouting and pointing at the house. “No outfit can, no outfit ever will.…” She was desperate. “It’s not for outfits. It’s a flight of steps that’s not for outfits … because it’s … because.…” The reason was not going to come to her. She had begun to cheat now, and she knew it would never come.
She turned her cold face away from the pit, and without dismissing her men, crept down the hill.
Other Stories
The fictional pieces collected here are fragments of longer, unfinished works, taken from the author’s notebooks. They date from the 1940s and 1950s.
Andrew
Andrew’s mother looked at her son’s face. “He wants to get away from us,” she thought, “and he will.” She felt overcome by a mortal fatigue. “He simply wants to spring out of his box into the world.” With a flippant and worldly gesture she described a flight through the air. Then abruptly she burst into tears and buried her face in her hands.
Andrew watched her thin shoulders shaking inside her woollen dress. When his mother cried he felt as though his face were made of marble. He could not accept the weeping as a part of her personality. It did not appear to be the natural climax of a mood. Instead it seemed to descend upon her from somewhere far away, as if she were giving voice to the crying of a child in some distant place. For it was the crying of a creature many years younger than she, a disgrace for which he felt responsible, since it was usually because of him that she cried.
There was nothing he could say to console her because she was right. He wanted to go away, and there was nothing else he wanted at all. “It’s natural when you’re young to want to go away,” he would say to himself, but it did not help; he always felt that his own desire to escape was different from that of others. When he was in a good humor he would go about feeling that he and many others too were all going away. On such days his face was smooth and he enjoyed his life, although even then he was not communicative. More than anything he wanted all days to be like those rare free ones when he went about whistling and enjoying every simple thing he did. But he had to work hard to get such days, because of his inner conviction that his own going away was like no other going away in the world, a certainty he found it impossible to dislodge. He was right, of course, but from a very early age his life had been devoted to his struggle to rid himself of his feeling of uniqueness. With the years he was becoming more expert at travesty, so that now his mother’s crying was more destructive. Watching her cry now, he was more convinced than ever that he was not like other boys who wanted to go away. The truth bit into him harder, for seeing her he could not believe even faintly that he shared his sin with other young men. He and his mother were isolated, sharing the same disgrace, and because of this sharing, separated from one another. His life was truly miserable compared to the lives of other boys, and he knew it.
When his mother’s sobs had quieted down somewhat, his father called the waitress and asked for the check. “That’s good tomato soup,” he told her. “And ham with Hawaiian pineapple is one of my favorites, as you know.” The waitress did not answer, and the engaging expression on his face slowly faded.
They pushed their chairs back and headed for the cloakroom. When they were outside Andrew’s father suggested that they walk to the summit of the sloping lawn where some cannonballs were piled in the shape of a pyramid. “We’ll go over to the cannonballs,” he said. “Then we’ll come back.”
They struggled up the hill in the teeth of a bitterly cold wind, holding on to their hats. “This is the north, folks!” his father shouted into the gale. “It’s hard going at times, but in a hot climate no one develops.”
Andrew put his foot against one of the cannonballs. He could feel the cold iron through the sole of his shoe.
* * *
He had applied for a job in a garage, but he was inducted into the Army before he knew whether or not they had accepted his application. He loved being in the Army, and even took pleasure in the nickname which his hutmates had given him the second day after his arrival. He was called Buttonlip; because of this name he talked even less than usual. In general he hated to talk and could not imagine talking as being a natural expression of a man’s thoughts. This was not shyness, but secretiveness.
One day in the Fall he set out on a walk through the pine grove surrounding the camp. Soon he sniffed smoke and stopped walking. “Someone’s making a fire,” he said to himself. Then he continued on his way. It was dusk in the grove, but beyond, outside, the daylight was still bright. Very shortly he reached a clearing. A young soldier sat there, crouched over a fire which he was feeding with long twigs. Andrew thought he recognized him — he too was undoubtedly a recent arrival — and so his face was not altogether unfamiliar.
The boy greeted Andrew with a smile and pointed to a tree trunk that lay on the ground nearby. “Sit down,” he said. “I’m going to cook dinner. The mess sergeant gives me my stuff uncooked when I want it that way so I can come out here and make a campfire.”
Andrew had an urge to bolt from the clearing, but he seated himself stiffly on the end of the tree trunk. The boy was beautiful, with an Irish-American face and thick curly brown hair. His cheeks were blood red from the heat of the flames. Andrew looked at his face and fell in love with him. Then he could not look away.
A mess kit and a brown paper package lay on the ground. “My food is there in that brown bag,” the boy said. “I’ll give you a little piece of meat so you can see how good it tastes when it’s cooked here, out in the air. Did you go in for bonfires when you were a kid?”