Heavy step of sallow-faced landlady. Transformation still in order. “God bless you, you dear, sweet little girl,” she says to the baby. High, squeaky voice. “Look at her dear little fingers,” says she. “Look at her dear little toes. I’ll take her now.” “Let her suck for a little while,” says Clarissa. “Let her finish her dinner,” says I. “Well, you ain’t going to take the baby with you,” says she, “and since you ain’t going to take the baby with you and since she ain’t going to be your baby there’s no point in your suckling her.” “Let her suck for a little while longer,” says Clarissa. “I’m not one to judge others,” says she, “and I don’t put my nose in their business but if you hadn’t done wrong you wouldn’t be coming out here to have your baby in this Godforsaken place and when a baby drinks milk from a mother who’s done wrong all the wickedness and sinfulness and lustfulness goes right into the baby through its mother’s milk,” says she. “You’ve got a wicked tongue,” I said, “and we’d appreciate it if you’d leave us alone now.” “Let her suck for a little while longer,” Clarissa said. “I’m only doing what I’m paid to do,” she said, “and what’s more she’s God’s little creature and it ain’t fair to have her imbibing all the weaknesses of another the first thing in her life.” “Leave us alone,” I said. “She’s right, Leander,” Clarissa said and she took the child off her pretty breast and gave it to the intruder. Then she turned her face away and cried.
She cried all the day long; she cried all night. She cried the bed full of tears. In the morning I helped her dress. She was too weak to dress herself, too weak even to lift her dark hair, and I lifted it for her and held it while she put it up with pins. There was a nine-o’clock train to Boston and I sent a message for a livery to pick us up in time to get it. Then I packed the valises and carried them out to the side of the road. Then I heard the landlady screaming: “You, you, where is she?” Oh, she looked then like a harpy. “She’s run away. Go up to the Dexters’, go up the Dexter path. I’ll go down by the shell road. We’ve got to head her off.” Off she goes in her muddy boots. Off goes former livery-stable proprietor with his manure fork. Pursued quarry over horizon. Heard baby crying in garden. Whimper, really. She had flown; but she had not gone far.
Pear tree in garden pruned to look like fountain, sunshade perhaps. Graceful tent of leaves. Under this she sat. Bodice unbuttoned. Camisole unlaced. Child at breast. Fretful crying. Did not speak; she and me. Eyes only. No explanations, names even. Child sucking, but crying also. A little rain began to fall; but not on us. Pear tree served as adequate shelter. Baby fell asleep. How long we sat there I don’t know. Half hour perhaps. Watched oyster-shell road darken in rain. Still no drops touched us. “I have more tears than milk,” she said. “I have more tears than milk. I’ve cried my breasts dry.” Carried sleeping baby, sheltered by head, shoulders from rain, back to soapbox in kitchen near stove. Took livery to station.
Have no wish to dwell on sordid matters, sorrows, etc. Bestiality of grief. Times in life when we can count only on brute will to live. Forget. Forget. (By this Leander meant to say that Clarissa was drowned in the Charles River that night.) Took cars to St. Botolphs next morning with old mother and poor Clarissa.
Overcast day. Not cold. Variable winds. South, southwest. Hearse at station. Few rubbernecks watching. Father Frisbee said the words. Old man then; old friend. Purple face. Skirts blowing in wind. Showed old-fashioned congress boots. Thick stockings. Family lot on hill above river. Water, hills, fields restore first taste of sense. Never marry again. Roof of old house visible in distance. Abode of rats, squirrels, porcupines. Haunted house for children. Wind slacked off in middle of prayer. Distant, electrical smell of rain. Sound amongst leaves; stubble. Hath but a short span, says Father Frisbee. Full of misery is he. Rain more eloquent, heartening and merciful. Oldest sound to reach porches of man’s ear.
Chapter Twenty
The fat man who had given Coverly pointers on how to shave had begun to come into Coverly’s room at night after supper and give him advice on how to get ahead in the world. He was a widower who had a house somewhere to the north where he went for week ends and who pinched pennies by living in the rooming house so that he would have a comfortable retirement. He had a job with Civil Service and it was his feeling that Coverly should get on the Civil Service lists. He brought him those newspapers that list Civil Service openings and kept pointing out opportunities for high-school graduates or opportunities for specialists who had been trained by the Civil Service schools in the city. There was a demand that year for Tapers and he pointed this out to Coverly as his best bet. The government would pay half of Coverly’s tuition at the MacIlhenney Institute. It was a four-month course and if he passed his exams he would be taken into government service at seventy-five dollars a week. Advised and encouraged by his friend, Coverly enrolled in some night classes on Taping. This involved the translation of physics experiments into the symbols—or tape—that could be fed into a computation machine.
Coverly’s schedule went like this. He punched Warburton’s time clock at half-past eight and went down a back staircase into the basement. The air was spectacularly bad: the reek and the closeness of a department store backstage. The other stock boys were of varying ages—one of them was in his sixties—and they were all amused by Coverly’s catarrhal accent and his references to life in St. Botolphs. They unpacked the merchandise as it came in and kept it flowing up the freight elevators to the departments overhead. When there were sales they worked sometimes as late as midnight, unloading racks of fur-trimmed coats or cartons of bed sheets. On three nights a week, when Coverly had finished work at Warburton’s, he signed the monitor’s book at the MacIlhenney Institute. This was in the fourth floor of an office building that seemed to contain a good many other schools—institutes of portrait photography, journalism and music. The only elevator that ran in the evening was a freight elevator, operated by an old man in overalls who could, by pursing his lips, give a fairly good imitation of a French horn. He performed the William Tell Overture while he took his passengers up and down and he liked to be complimented. There were twenty-four students in Coverly’s class and the instructor was a young man who seemed to have put in a hard day himself by the time he got to them. The first lecture was an orientation talk on cybernetics or automation, and if Coverly, with his mildly rueful disposition, had been inclined to find any irony in his future relationship to a thinking machine, he was swiftly disabused. Then they got to work memorizing the code.
This was like learning a language and a rudimentary one. Everything was done by rote. They were expected to memorize fifty symbols a week. They were quizzed for fifteen minutes at the opening of each class and were given speed tests at the end of the two-hour period. After a month of this the symbols—like the study of any language—had begun to dominate Coverly’s thinking, and walking on the street he had gotten into the habit of regrouping numbers on license plates, prices in store windows and numerals on clocks so that they could be fed into a machine. When the class ended he sometimes drank a cup of coffee with a friend who was going to school five nights a week. His name was Mittler and his second enrollment was at Dale Carnegie’s and Coverly was very much impressed with how likeable Mittler had learned to make himself. Moses came over one Sunday to visit Coverly and they spent the day banging around the streets and drinking beer but when it came time for Moses to go back the separation was so painful for both of them that Moses never returned. Coverly planned to go to St. Botolphs for Christmas but he had a chance to work overtime on Christmas Eve and he took it, for he was in the city, after all, to make his fortune.