‘No. There was some definite thing you did that for. We been knowing each other a pretty long time, and I understand by now that you got a real reason for every single thing you ever do. Your mind runs by reasons instead of just wants. Now, you promised you’d tell me what it was, and I want to know.’
‘It wouldn’t mean anything now.’
‘I tell you I got to know.’
‘All right,’ Biff said. ‘He came in that night and started drinking, and when he was drunk he shot off his mouth about you. He said he would come home about once a month and beat hell out of you and you would take it. But then afterward you would step outside in the hall and laugh aloud a few times so that the neighbors in the other rooms would think you both had just been playing around and it had all been a joke. That’s what happened, so just forget about it’ Lucile sat up straight and there was a red spot on each of her cheeks. ‘You see, Bartholomew, that’s why I got to be like I have blinders on all the time so as not to think backward or sideways. All I can let my mind stay on is going to work every day and fixing three meals here at home and Baby’s career.’
‘Yes.’
‘I hope you’ll do that too, and not start thinking backward.’
Biff leaned his head down on his chest and closed his eyes.
During the whole long day he had not been able to think of Alice. When he tried to remember her face there was a queer blankness in him. The only thing about her that was clear in his mind was her feet--stumpy, very soft and white with puffy toes. The bottoms were pink and near the left heel there was a tiny brown mole. The night they were married he had taken off her shoes and stockings and kissed her feet. And, come to think of it, that was worth considerable, because the Japanese believe that the choicest part of a woman--Biff stirred and glanced at his watch. In a little while they would leave for the church where the funeral would be held.
In his mind he went through the motions of the ceremony. The church-riding, dirge-paced behind the hearse with Lucile and Baby--the group of people standing with bowed heads in the September sunshine. Sun on the white tombstones, on the fading flowers and the can--was tent covering the newly dug grave. Then home again ‘ --and what? ‘No matter how much you quarrel there’s something about your own blood sister,’ Lucile said.
Biff raised his head. ‘Why don’t you marry again? Some nice young man who’s never had a wife before, who would take care of you and Baby? If you’d just forget about Leroy you would make a good man a fine wife.’
Lucile was slow to answer. Then finally she said: ‘You know how we always been--we nearly all the time understand each other pretty well without any kind of throbs either way. Well, that’s the closest I ever want to be to any man again.’
‘I feel the same way,’ Biff said.
Half an hour later there was a knock on the door. The car for the funeral was parked before the house. Biff and Lucile got up slowly. The three of them, with Baby in her white silk dress a little ahead, walked in solemn quietness outside.
Biff kept the restaurant closed during the next day. Then in the early evening he removed the faded wreath of lilies from the front door and opened the place for business again. Old customers came in with sad faces and talked with him a few minutes by the cash register before giving their orders. The usual crowd was present--Singer, Blount, various men who worked in stores along the block and in the mills down on the river. After supper Mick Kelly showed up with her little brother and put a nickel into the slot machine. When she lost the first coin she banged on the machine with her fists and kept opening the receiver to be sure that nothing had come down. Then she put in another nickel and almost won the jackpot. Coins came clattering out and rolled along the floor.
The kid and her little brother both kept looking around pretty sharp as they picked them up, so that no customer would put his foot on one before they could get to it The mute was at the table in the middle of the room with his dinner before him.
Across from him Jake Blount sat drinking beer, dressed in his Sunday clothes, and talking. Everything was the same as it had always been before. After a while the air became gray with cigarette smoke and the noise increased. Biff was alert, and no sound or movement escaped him.
‘I go around,’ Blount said. He leaned earnestly across the table and kept his eyes on the mute’s face. ‘I go all around and try to tell them. And they laugh. I can’t make them understand anything. No matter what I say I can’t seem to make them see, the truth.’
Singer nodded and wiped his mouth with his napkin. His dinner had got cold because he couldn’t look down to eat, but he was so polite that he let Blount go on talking. The words of the two children at the slot machine were high and clear against the coarser voices of the men. Mick was putting her nickels back into the slot. Often she looked around at the middle table, but the mute had his back turned to her and did not see.
‘Mister Singer’s got fried chicken for his supper and he hasn’t eaten one piece yet,’ the little boy said.
Mick pulled down the lever of the machine very slowly. ‘Mind your own business.’
‘You’re always going up to his room or some place where you know he’ll be.’
‘I told you to hush, Bubber Kelly.’
‘You do.’
Mick shook him until his teeth rattled and turned him around toward the door. ‘You go on home to bed. I already told you I get a bellyful of you and Ralph in the daytime, and I don’t want you hanging around me at night when I’m supposed to be free.’
Bubber held out his grimy little hand. Well, give me a nickel, then.’ When he had put the money in his shirt pocket he left for home.
Biff straightened his coat and smoothed back his hair. His tie was solid black, and on the sleeve of his gray coat there was the mourning band that he had sewn there. He wanted to go up to the slot machine and talk with Mick, but something would not let him. He sucked in his breath sharply and drank a glass of water. A dance orchestra came in on the radio, but he did not want to listen. All the tunes in the last ten years were so alike he couldn’t tell one from the other. Since 1928 he had not enjoyed music. Yet when he was young he used to play the mandolin, and he knew the words and the melody of every current song.
He laid his finger on the side of his nose and cocked his head to one side. Mick had grown so much in the past year that soon she would be taller than he was. She was dressed in the red sweater and blue pleated skirt she had worn every day since school started. Now the pleats had come out and the hem dragged loose around her sharp, jutting knees. She was at the age when she looked as much like an overgrown boy as a girl.
And on that subject why was it that the smartest people mostly missed that point? By nature all people are of both sexes. So that marriage and the bed is not all by any means. The proof? Real youth and old age. Because often old men’s voices grow high and reedy and they take on a mincing walk. And old women sometimes grow fat and their voices get rough and deep and they grow dark little mustaches. And he even proved it himself--the part of him that sometimes almost wished he was a mother and that Mick and Baby were his kids.
Abruptly Biff turned from the cash register.
The newspapers were in a mess. For two weeks he hadn’t filed a single one. He lifted a stack of them from under the counter.
With a practiced eye he glanced from the masthead to the bottom of the sheet. Tomorrow he would look over the stacks of them in the back room and see about changing the system of files. Build shelves and use those solid boxes canned goods were shipped in for drawers. Chronologically from October 27, 1918, on up to the present date. With folders and top markings outlining historical events. Three sets of outlines--one international beginning with the Armistice and leading through the Munich aftermath, the second national, the third all the local dope from the time Mayor Lester shot his wife at the country club up to the Hudson Mill fire. Everything for the past twenty years docketed and outlined and complete. Biff beamed quietly behind his hand as he rubbed his jaw. And yet Alice had wanted him to haul out the papers so she could turn the room into a ladies’ toilet. That was just what she had nagged him to do, but for once he had battered her down. For that one time.