“It’s hard to admit you’re nothing,” Loftus said. “I’m admitting it now. My life has been without meaning or purpose or satisfaction. I should never have been born; my father didn’t want children and my mother felt trapped by the responsibility. The whole thing has been a mistake from beginning to end. I am afraid of my moment of dying, terribly afraid. But I will be glad to be gone. You don’t read poetry, Mr. Meecham?”
“No.”
“There’s a phrase that Yeats used. I have it written down in my book.” He took a little black notebook from his shirt pocket and leafed through it. Each page that Meecham could see was crammed from top to bottom with writing, writing so small that it seemed impossible to read with the naked eye. He wondered whether this was Loftus’ natural handwriting, or whether he wrote that way deliberately to save space in the little book.
“Here it is,” Loftus said. “I’m not sure exactly what it means, it’s out of context. But this one phrase keeps cropping up in my head lately: ‘That this pragmatical preposterous pig of a world, its farrow that so solid seem, Must vanish on the instant if the mind but change its theme.’
“‘Pragmatical preposterous pig of a world,’” he said, spitting out the words like pits that he’d been chewing too long. “That describes it. I will be glad to leave.”
He lapsed into silence again. The only sound in the room was the whirring of the ventilator, though there was a sensation of sound and movement, as if beyond the closed door many things were happening, preposterous things.
Meecham said, “Why did you ask me to come here?”
“I want to hire you. Oh, not to defend me, that won’t be necessary. But there are one or two little things that I won’t be able to take care of. I’d like you to do them for me.”
“What are they?”
“I have some money. I sold my car and a few little articles. It amounted to $716.00 I want my mother to have it.”
“Where is it?”
“Emmy will give it to you. It’s in an envelope in the middle of a package of letters. Deduct your fee, whatever it is, and give the rest of the money and all the letters to my mother. They’re her letters. She wrote them to me when I came here. Tell her...” He hesitated, clenching and unclenching his hands. “Tell her to reread them, every one of them, to see... No. No, don’t tell her that. Let her do what she likes with them. It’s too late anyway. Just give her the money and tell her to go away somewhere for a while.”
“Why?”
“She can’t... can’t face things very well. It’s better if she goes away. Her address was in one of the morning papers. That’s bad. She may be hounded by reporters or — well, Kincaid is a small cruel town.”
“I’ll deliver your message. I don’t guarantee that I can persuade her to leave.”
“You can try. Here, I’ll write the address down for you.”
“Don’t bother, I saw the papers,” Meecham said. He remembered the address, not from any newspaper, but from the Railway Express consignment slip that had been pasted across Loftus’ suitcase: From Mrs. Charles E. Loftus, 231 Oak Street, Kincaid, Michigan, to Mr. Earl Duane Loftus, 611 Division Street, Arbana, Michigan. Contents valued at $50.00.
“I know it’s asking a lot, Mr. Meecham. But if you could go sometime today, get to her first — it’s only a hundred miles...”
“I’ll go today.”
“Thank you.” Loftus rose, clumsily, supporting himself by leaning one hand on the card table and the other on the back of the chair. “Thank you very much.”
“Why didn’t you keep her picture, Loftus?”
“I wanted to be alone. Entirely alone, without even a picture. Can you understand that?”
“It isn’t a good thing to be alone. Relatives have a way of standing by in emergencies. Haven’t you got any, except your mother?”
“I had a wife once. She left me, got a divorce. I can’t blame her. She was a big, strong, healthy woman. At least she was then, I haven’t seen her for a long time.”
“Has it occurred to you that your mother might want to come here to see you?”
Loftus shrugged, wearily. “She won’t come. Oh, she’ll want to come, she may even plan to come, have everything arranged, suitcase neatly packed, everything. She may even get as far as the bus depot. Then she’ll take a little drink to calm her nerves. You can guess the rest.”
“Yes.” He recalled the number of books about alcoholism that Loftus kept in his room.
“She was always death against liquor. She never had a drink until she was nearly fifty. My father had run out on her by that time, and one day she went out and bought a bottle of wine to calm her nerves. It happened right away. One drink, and she was a drunk. She’d been a drunk for maybe thirty years and didn’t find it out until then. For her the world vanished in that instant. She has never seen it since. She never will again.”
“Perhaps. There are cures.”
Loftus only shook his head.
“I’ll see to it personally that she comes to visit you, if you want her to.”
“No, thank you,” Loftus said politely. “I don’t want to see anyone.”
The door from the corridor opened and the policeman, Samuels, came in. He had taken his handcuffs from the leather case fastened to his belt and he was playing with them, clicking them from wide to narrow and back again, the way Miss Jennings played with her ring of keys and for the same reason, because he was bored and a little embarrassed.
“All through, Mr. Meecham? We got orders to be on the move.”
Meecham turned to Loftus. “Are we all through?”
“I think so,” Loftus said.
“If something else comes up, let me know. In any case, I’ll be around to see you when I’ve transacted the business we discussed. Perhaps early in the morning.”
“Thank you.”
“I’ll see Emmy right away.”
“Tell her not to worry. Everything’s going to be fine.”
“I will. Good luck.”
Meecham stood in the doorway of the small windowless room and watched the two men go down the corridor, handcuffed together, walking slowly and in step. Then he turned, abruptly, and walked as fast as he could in the other direction and out the rear entrance.
It was noon, but there was no sun. The sky hung close over the smoky city like a sagging tent top that would some day blow away, exposing the vast blackness of space.
Meecham waited for the traffic signal to change. A car went through the yellow light and almost sideswiped another car. Both drivers began to curse, ineffectually through closed windows, like little boys hurling threats from the safety of their own doorsteps. A woman came out of the supermarket across the street, jerking the arm of the crying child staggering along behind her. An old man on crutches inched his way across the icy sidewalk to the curb and stood eyeing the speeding cars with hate and fear.
A column of bitterness rose like mercury in Meecham’s throat. Pig of a world, he thought. Preposterous pig of a world.
11
When he rang the doorbell Emmy Hearst answered it herself, immediately, as if she’d been there at the door watching from behind the lace curtains of the little window for someone who would never come. Her eyes were so swollen that they didn’t look like human eyes at all, but like twin blisters raised by fire. When she spoke she held one hand against her throat as if to ease its aching:
You saw him?”
Mecham nodded. “Yes.”
I tried to. They wouldn’t let me. They said I had no right, no right.” She clung to the door for support, a tall strong woman who had come abruptly, in a single day, to the end of her strength.
They’ve transferred him to the hospital,” Meecham said.