“I should say I do,” said Mrs. Chase. “She was on the Red Cross committee. Dreadful.”
“No,” said Alice Severn, pondering, “Jeannie isn’t dreadful. We were very good friends. The strange thing is, Arthur used to say he hated her, but then I guess he was always crazy about her, certainly he is now, and the kids, too. Somehow I wish the kids didn’t like her, though I should be happy that they do, since they have to live with her.”
“It isn’t true: your husband married to that awful Bjorkman girl!”
“Since August.”
Mrs. Chase, pausing first to suggest that they have coffee in the living room, said, “It’s outrageous for you to be living alone in New York. At least you could have the children with you.”
“Arthur wanted them,” said Alice Severn simply. “But I’m not alone. Fred is one of my closest friends.”
Mrs. Chase gestured impatiently: she did not enjoy fantasy. “A dog. It’s nonsense. There is nothing to think except that you’re a fooclass="underline" any man that tried to walk over me would get his feet cut to pieces. I suppose you haven’t even arranged that he should,” she hesitated, “should contribute.”
“You don’t understand, Arthur hasn’t any money,” said Alice Severn with the dismay of a child who has discovered that grownups after all are not very logical. “He’s even had to sell the car and walks back and forth between the station. But you know, I think he’s happy.”
“What you need is a good pinch,” said Mrs. Chase, as though she were ready to do the job.
“It’s Fred that bothers me. He’s used to space, and only one person doesn’t leave many bones. Do you suppose that when I finish my course I could get a job in California? I’m studying at a business school, but I’m not awfully quick, especially at typing, my fingers seem to hate it so. I guess it’s like playing the piano, you should learn when you’re very young.” She glanced speculatively at her hands, sighing. “I have a lesson at three; would you mind if I showed you the coat now?”
The festiveness of things coming out of a box could usually be counted on to cheer Mrs. Chase, but as she saw the lid taken off, a melancholy uneasiness cornered her.
“It belonged to my mother.”
Who must have worn it sixty years, thought Mrs. Chase, facing a mirror. The coat hung to her ankles. She rubbed her hand against the lusterless, balding fur and it was moldy, sour, as though it had lain in an attic by the seashore. It was cold inside the coat, she shivered, at the same time a flush heated her face, for just then she noticed that Alice Severn was gazing over her shoulder, and in her expression there was a drawn, undignified expectancy that had not been there before. Where sympathy was concerned, Mrs. Chase knew thrift: before giving it she took the precaution of attaching a string, so that if necessary it could be yanked back. Looking at Alice Severn, however, it was as though the string had been severed, and for once she was confronted head-on with the obligations of sympathy. She wriggled even so, hunting a loophole, but then her eyes collided with those other eyes, and she saw there was none. The recollection of a word from her linguaphone lessons made a certain question easier: “Combien?” she said.
“It isn’t worth anything, is it?” There was confusion in the asking, not frankness.
“No, it isn’t,” she said tiredly, almost testily. “But I may have some use for it.” She did not inquire again; it was clear that part of her obligation was to be fulfilled by fixing a price herself.
Still trailing the clumsy coat, she went to a corner of the room where there was a desk and, writing with resentful jabs, made a check on her private account: she did not intend that her husband should know. More than most Mrs. Chase despised the sense of loss; a misplaced key, a dropped coin, quickened her awareness of theft and the cheats of life. Some similar sensation was with her as she handed the check to Alice Severn who, folding it, and without looking at it, put it in her suit pocket. It was for fifty dollars.
“Darling,” said Mrs. Chase, grim with spurious concern, “you must ring me and let me know how everything is going. You mustn’t feel lonely.”
Alice Severn did not thank her, and at the door she did not say goodbye. Instead, she took one of Mrs. Chase’s hands in her own and patted it, as though she were gently rewarding an animal, a dog. Closing the door, Mrs. Chase stared at her hand, brought it near her lips. The feel of the other hand was still upon it, and she stood there, waiting while it drained away: presently her hand was again quite cold.
A DIAMOND GUITAR
(1950)
The nearest town to the prison farm is twenty miles away. Many forests of pine trees stand between the farm and the town, and it is in these forests that the convicts work; they tap for turpentine. The prison itself is in a forest. You will find it there at the end of a red rutted road, barbed wire sprawling like a vine over its walls. Inside, there live one hundred and nine white men, ninety-seven Negroes and one Chinese. There are two sleep houses—great green wooden buildings with tar-paper roofs. The white men occupy one, the Negroes and the Chinese the other. In each sleep house there is one large potbellied stove, but the winters are cold here, and at night with the pines waving frostily and a freezing light falling from the moon the men, stretched on their iron cots, lie awake with the fire colors of the stove playing in their eyes.
The men whose cots are nearest the stove are the important men—those who are looked up to or feared. Mr. Schaeffer is one of these. Mr. Schaeffer—for that is what he is called, a mark of special respect—is a lanky, pulled-out man. He has reddish, silvering hair, and his face is attenuated, religious; there is no flesh to him; you can see the workings of his bones, and his eyes are a poor, dull color. He can read and he can write, he can add a column of figures. When another man receives a letter, he brings it to Mr. Schaeffer. Most of these letters are sad and complaining; very often Mr. Schaeffer improvises more cheerful messages and does not read what is written on the page. In the sleep house there are two other men who can read. Even so, one of them brings his letters to Mr. Schaeffer, who obliges by never reading the truth. Mr. Schaeffer himself does not receive mail, not even at Christmas; he seems to have no friends beyond the prison, and actually he has none there—that is, no particular friend. This was not always true.
One winter Sunday some winters ago Mr. Schaeffer was sitting on the steps of the sleep house carving a doll. He is quite talented at this. His dolls are carved in separate sections, then put together with bits of spring wire; the arms and legs move, the head rolls. When he has finished a dozen or so of these dolls, the Captain of the farm takes them into town, and there they are sold in a general store. In this way Mr. Schaeffer earns money for candy and tobacco.
That Sunday, as he sat cutting out the fingers for a little hand, a truck pulled into the prison yard. A young boy, handcuffed to the Captain of the farm, climbed out of the truck and stood blinking at the ghostly winter sun. Mr. Schaeffer only glanced at him. He was then a man of fifty, and seventeen of those years he’d lived at the farm. The arrival of a new prisoner could not arouse him. Sunday is a free day at the farm, and other men who were moping around the yard crowded down to the truck. Afterward, Pick Axe and Goober stopped by to speak with Mr. Schaeffer.
Pick Axe said, “He’s a foreigner, the new one is. From Cuba. But with yellow hair.”
“A knifer, Cap’n says,” said Goober, who was a knifer himself. “Cut up a sailor in Mobile.”
“Two sailors,” said Pick Axe. “But just a café fight. He didn’t hurt them boys none.”
“To cut off a man’s ear? You call that not hurtin’ him? They give him two years, Cap’n says.”