1954-Vol6-No21

QUARTO

FALL 1954 COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF GENERAL STUDIEs\ 25c

V

QUARTO VOLUME VI NUMBER 2 1

A Literary Magazine PUBLISHED AT THE SCHOOL OF GENERAL STUDIES COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY INDEX For Theirs is the Kingdom

Charles E. Foster

3

Stick, Stack Stander

Robert Chamblee

14

Homecoming

William Eastlake

17

August in an Orchard

Winifred Hunt

30

Do Not Believe the Bread

Jane Esty

31

La Figlia Che Scrive

Morris Golub

32

The Korean Firewood Carrier

Sy Syna-

33

Mm Mellowes

Jack Parr

35

The Return

Rosanne Smith Robinson .... 45

Editors Commentary

Harry Prince Combs, Jr

Contributors

58 59

EDITOR

Harry Prince Combs, Jr. PROSE EDITOR

POETRY EDITOR

Armand J. Ferretti

Judith Bishop

FACULTY ADVISORS

Helen Hull Vernon hoggins WOODCUTS

BUSINESS MANAGER

Hans Mueller

Mary D. Scheffler ART DEPARTMENT

Joyce Yanow Patricia Williams Irene Krieger Richard Mumma CIRCULATION ASSISTANTS Ann Brier, Thayer Bodman, Margery Baer, Mary Dalton, Cae Hewitt, Clara Lee Hansson, Carmencita Hoge, Audrey Jewett, Ellen Kelly, Susan Kerin, Rita Livingston, Marjorie Malcolm, Marianne MacDonald, Ani Nicolayevitch, Ann Palmer, Monique Purris, Florence Peluso, Joan Risko, Bettina Schoelkopf, Maria Warner, Marcel Akselrod, Edgar Acken, Frederick Baldwin, Fred Krieger. is published semi-annually during the winter and spring sessions by the students of the School of General Studies, Columbia University. Copyright 1954 by QUARTO. Office of Publication and Editorial Office, 801 Business Building, Columbia University, New York 27, N.Y. Manuscripts will not be returned unless accompanied by a self-addressed, stamped envelope. No material in this magazine may be reprinted without permission of the Publishers.

QUARTO

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Set in Linoytpe Caledonia, ten point, leaded two points, on fifty-five pound book paper, antique, laid.

Printed in the United States of America by The Columbia University Press.

FOR THEIRS IS THE KINGDOM Charles E. Foster

T HE SCREECHING WHISTLE sounded like a peculiar kind of thunder, waking the men from sound sleep. Geechie pulled the musty blanket from his head where he'd tucked it to keep the mosquitoes away. He could hear the squeak of the metal straps in the bunk above him as Lijah sluggishly stirred on the hay filled mattress that crunched under his movement. Through the small squares of woven metal he could see the growing blaze of the camp fire, lighting the cook's tent, a wagon sheet stretched over a sapling nailed to two tall pines. A gentle breeze from the south brought odors of squirrel stew, steaming grits, simmering beans and weak coffee, which, with dried bread baked several days before, would be their pre-dawn breakfast.

He lifted the sweat soaked mattress at his head, felt along the angle iron edge of his bed and found his can of Prince Albert and the box of kitchen matches. Inside the can he fumbled for the papers and clumsily rolled a cigarette in his stubby fingers which he lit and smoked before slipping the matches and can in the single patch pocket over his right thigh.

Across the mobile calaboose he could see the tiers of bunks against the opposite wall and the movement of the men, their black and white horizontally striped jumpers and pants looking grey in the darkness. Geechie threw his legs over his second bunk, folded his blanket at the foot of his mattress and dropped to the floor where he yawned and stretched before sitting on the lower bed where he felt for and put on his hobnailed shoes in the darkness.

His heavy clothes felt hard against his back and legs, for the sweat salt had caked and made the denim stiff, leaving large white circles on the back of his uniform.

The heavy padlock on the steel door rattled and the twelve men lined up in the aisle between the bunks. Slowly the door swung open.

"Awright, you Goddamned coons. Roll out!" The voice had the familiar harshness that made the men restive, yet silent and still.

As they filed down the steps they saw the shadows of the guards on either side of them, each holding his double barreled shotgun by forearm and small of the stock, both hammers cocked.

The line automatically moved toward the cook's tent, the guards on both sides. There the men took their tin plates, cups and large spoons and silently walked through the line where the three men wearing the convict's clothes served the food. Afterwards they went to the wide boards nailed chest high between the pines where they set their plates, backed away and awaited the signal to eat. After the last man had been served a guard blew his whistle and the men ate ravenously.

While they walked past the tub of boiling water set on three wagon axles driven into the sand, they washed their hardware, later leaving it upturned on the tables to dry. In the east, the orb of twilight brightened, and what was shadow in the night slowly turned into visible shape. An owl in the swamp hooted its farewell to darkness and the ever screeching bluejays made the first birdsounds of creatures awakening for the day to forage for early morning food. A flock of curlew circled a shallow pond east of the camp, slowly coming down to the water where they would search for minnows, frogs and crayfish. A slow winged heron floated over the pond and dropped abruptly into the sawgrass, cattails and water lilies. The flight of ducks overhead changed its course, circled and disappeared behind the tops of the large cypresses of Telegraph Strand to the west of camp where deep lakes emptied into the creek that carried water to the Caloosahatchee and down to the Gulf of Mexico. In the tops of the tall pines north of camp brown-grey fox squirrels jumped from branch to branch searching for the feathered seeds hiding in the tightly sealed fingers of the cones.

Southeast of camp was the mule pen where two animals ground their breakfast corn and oats, and beside the cypress rails nailed to the pines were two one horse wagons with large gum covered barrels and sticky buckets on the pitch covered slats of the wagon bed.

The men in guarded groups took turns going to the crude outhouses away from camp, while others gathered lightwood for the cook and campfire, later sweeping the pine needles, cones and bark from the sand with brooms of maiden cane, myrtle boughs or cabbage palm fronds. Six men went to the pen, caught

the mules and harnessed them to the wagons. The rest took files and sharpened their long handled, curved bladed box knives, used to cut large vees in the pines where in the sunlight sap would ooze, trickle down the naked face of the tree, follow the small metal gutters and drip into red clay pots where it would stay until gathered in barrels on wagons and hauled off to the turpentine still, five miles east of camp.

Before the sun had risen the forty-five men stood in a double line near the ebbing bonfire, facing west, where in the pre-dawn twilight they could see the large tent belonging to the guards and the smaller one of Cap'n Ab's.

Each man saw the fly of the small tent part and when Cap'n Ab stepped out, brushed and put on his large black hat, a chill crept through the group in the silence of soft breathing, rigid hands, faces and feet. As he came closer, his high topped boots leaving a visible path in the wet wiregrass, all the men were conscious of his six foot six, for most of them had been whipped with his strap, a doubled piece of four inch wide heavy leather, nailed to a narrower hardwood handle which only his large hand was big enough to grasp. He did not now carry the strap, but in the minds of the men the two were inseparable. His large pearl handled, silver plated revolver hung from the wide belt that was filled with polished brass and steel jacketed .45 cartridges.

As he walked closer they could see his eyes, dark as charred lightwood, deeply sunken into his ruddy sunburned and weather beaten face. His features were large and coarse expect for his sharp nose and narrow lips tightly drawn over his irregular and browned teeth.

A limb burned in two in the dying fire and the lightwood branches tumbled, sending sparks upward in the faint smoke from the coals that cracked as they cooled. But the men did not hear it or see it, only watched the large man coming toward them.

Cap'n Ab walked slowly in front of the group, counting. He cleared his throat and spat into the embers. "Ain't aire one you nigger sonsabitches worth the powder it'd take t'blow yer Goddamned thick heads t'hell, and don't ne'r fergit it long's yer here.

Yer a gang of sorry crooks what got caught and now yer gonna work or git the living hell beat outta you." His blue shirt sleeves moved as he clenched his fists. He stopped in front of Geechie and looked down at the short man, hardly over five feet tall, broad

shouldered, heavy muscled, staunchily built. "You done good yesterday, Geech. The checker said you done ninety-eight trees.

T'day I wanta see a hundred and fifteen new boxings outta you.

Show them other slow bastards how a good nigger works."

Geechie nodded, the words still straightening themselves in his head. "Yessir, Cap'n, yessir," he said after Cap'n Ab had turned and started walking back toward his tent.

The men formed into their usual groups, walked by the pile of box knives where each selected his own and marched away in different directions into the tall virgin timber. While they walked through the palmettos and wiregrass their pants got wet to the knees and the water trickled inside their heavy shoes, making their feet slosh as they went deeper into the woods.

Geechie's group went northwest to box the trees near Telegraph Strand. On the way to the place a mile from camp where they had stopped the night before, they flushed a covey of quail from low palmettos; on a gallberry ridge a flock of turkey flew, their wings squeaking as they flew between the pines until reaching the cypress where they dropped to the ground and ran. Once the breeze shifted its direction and an instant later they saw a doe and fawn galloping into the thick swamp, upwind from them.

In the distance they saw the white tail of a speckled bobcat chasing its prey through the palmettos.

The group dispersed and the men began hacking silently.

None spoke, hummed or sang to himself and all were watched by a squint eyed guard who held his Winchester 30-30 until tired, then shifted it to the crook of his left arm, later resting the muzzle on the toe of his boot, leaning against the stock. When the sun rose higher and the men's clothes got sweaty, they took off their jumpers and tied the sleeves around their waists above the sash cord belt that held their pants, leaving their jet backs glistening in the heat and intense sunlight.

Geechie worked fast, automatically walking from tree to tree, stopping only long enough to hack the fresh scars, the sap laden chips sticking to the hair on his chest until he brushed them away.

His jumper came loose and began to fall below his waist and he dropped his box knife while he re-tied the knot in the sleeves.

"Git moving, you Geechie bastard!" the guard yelled, "Y'wantcher black bottom busted off?"

For a moment Geechie stared at the old boxing in front of him 6

while the words made meaning inside his head. Then he grabbed the knife and began to slash the tree. "Yessir, Mistuh Herbert, Yessir, Boss." He finished the cut, put his mark beside it and moved on.

'How long it gonna be?' he thought, 'How much longer an' will Ah live to de day wen Ahse free? Mus' be near'bout two year 'till July sebenteen, nineteen an' twelve wen Ah leaves. How long, how long?'

He wanted to think about something away from camp and the work that confined him. Trying to think ahead confused him, for all he could imagine was endless acres of pines to be boxed and re-boxed each time a tract was completed. He thought of the past, trying to remember his childhood and early manhood, but the memories were fading as did the old picture calendars and newspapers that covered the inside walls of his father's shanty in South Carolina. He knew he used to gather tobacco and carry it to the curing barn, but could not remember how it looked growing on the land. Cotton he had picked, once winning a dollar from Marse Wilson for taking the lead in a race, yet he could not see himself dragging the large bag and plucking the matured bolls that would be weighed at the end of the day. Once he broke a stubborn mule to harness and saddle after others had given up because they had been kicked and hurt, but he could not remember the mule's color or if he ever worked it. He could see himself for only a flash during the time when they'd put the dynamite under the stump at the edge of the clearing, had lit the fuse and all had backed away when the pickaninny ran from the woods and stood staring at the yelling men. He had run to the stump, jerked the burning fuse from the hole and had thrown it away, the cap exploding before it hit the ground, sending brass fragments into his back when he bent over to pick up the child. Then there was Froney and he'd courted her, winning her from the other men. But he could not remember how she looked or acted, or how he felt when her father said they had to be married and he ran away to Florida. He did not know how he got to Florida, but could remember his first job picking oranges from the tall seedlings along the river.

He could remember most of the men and things that took place at the big card game where the stakes were high and everybody was drinking: the tall yaller nigger who cheated and started the

fight which he stopped with the knife; and the judge who gave him five years for manslaughter; his first days in the penitentiary where he shared a cell with Old Joe, a lifer, who said, 'Dey ain' no mo spirit onct y'gits 'ere. Ifn y'got hit dey soon takes hit frum yuh er beats hit outcha.'

While he was trying to recall, his memories were suddenly stopped by Cap'n Ab's yelling at one of the men not far from him.

"You Goddamned boneheaded fool," Cap'n Ab said. "You been here long 'nuf t'learn how t'box 'em right. Git back and fix it!"

He pointed to a tree near Willie, holding his strap, doubled.

Willie hacked two fresh vees at the top of the boxing. "Now c'mere," Cap'n Ab said, pointing to the ground in front of him.

Geechie did not look, but knew that Willie was straight legged, holding his ankles, as all the men were taught to do for their whipping. He heard the crack of the strap, the hollering, the repeated blows, and each time the strap struck Willie's flesh Geechie felt as if he were being sandbagged from behind by a ghost, the jar following down his spine to his feet where he felt as if his heels were sinking into the soft earth. Cap'n Ab hit Willie six times and the man stopped screaming when he fell to his hands and knees after the last swing of the strap.

"Now git working and do it right," Cap'n Ab said, moving to watch the next man. When he stopped behind Geechie, Cap'n Ab said nothing, only watched a moment before returning to his horse which he mounted and rode away.

They marched to the camp for dinner, took fifteen minutes to eat their meal and sharpen their box knives, then returned to finish the day's work which would end with the early stages of darkness.

Geechie had started a fresh boxing when the guard yelled for them to line up. For the past hour he'd prayed for more daylight, for he'd not boxed as many trees as Cap'n Ab had ordered. He finished the tree, ran to the lineup and put on his jumper after they started to move toward camp. On the way he took his can of tobacco from his hip pocket and rolled a cigarette, striking one of the matches from the crushed box on the narrow corrugated strip on the bottom of the can. While he smoked nervously he put the matches back in his pocket and the can above them.

After a few puffs he threw the cigarette away without tearing it 8

apart to save the leftover tobacco as he usually did. He stumbled while they walked across the scrub, striking palmetto roots and lightwood limbs. When they could see the bonfire at camp, lighting the undersides of the high treetops, the lead man stepped up the pace and Geechie had to trot to keep from falling behind.

When they reached the fire the other gangs were standing on the east side of the blaze, waiting. Cap'n Ab came from his tent, carrying his strap. He slowly counted the men as usual, stopping twice, whipping a man who had dropped a bucket of pitch and another for not cleaning out the frog of the limping mule's foot.

When he came to Geechie he stood and stared downward at the short stocky man as though he were trying to remember something.

"How many'd you git t'day, Geech?"

Geechie thought briefly, for he was ready to speak before the Cap'n reached him. "Hunret an' eight, Ah tink," he said. "Work fas' as Ah could, Suh. OF knife get dull toward evenin'."

Cap'n Ab squinted his dark eyes as he held the long strap, rubbing the leather with his left fingers. Geechie felt a crawling, oozing movement in his left chest, the muscles of his back twitching as though they were cold.

"That's a good day's work, Geech," Cap'n Ab began. "More'n any these other lazy bastards did. But it ain't what I told you t'do and I reckon I gotta make you know it so's you'll do better tomorrow." He pointed toward the ground before him.

Geechie stared at the big man until he caught up with what Cap'n had said. Then he slowly stepped out of line, bent over, grasping his ankles, digging his fingernails into the flesh and clenching his teeth.

"Take that air tobacco can outta yer pocket," Cap'n Ab said.

As soon as Geechie understood Cap'n, he half straightened, jerked the can from his pocket, dropping it on the ground in front of him, again grasping his ankles.

Cap'n Ab raised the strap and Geechie felt as if a mule had kicked him when he took a step to keep from falling. For an instant he felt nothing, then came the burning in his right thigh that felt like branding irons gnawing through his leg. He did not stand, for he'd seen ribs broken with the heavy strap.

He felt Cap'n Ab's large hand on his beltline and the other on his pocket that was ripped off as though it were a flake of pine 9

bark torn away by the wind. When he straightened he saw the smoldering matches on the ground near the fire and smelled the sulphurous fumes. The convicts stared at him, their whites looking like ivory rings floating on a bucket of tar.

"You Goddamned fool," Cap'n Ab said. "You outta know better'n t'leave matches in yer pocket." He turned toward the cook's tent. "Bring a slab of lard. Quick!"

When Geechie saw the cook running toward him, he felt the air strike the burn and it seemed to cover his whole thigh. After Cap'n Ab ordered the cook to rub grease on the blisters, he grasped the large muscles on the inside of his leg to forget the pain. When the cook had gone Geechie bent forward and held his ankles, waiting.

"That's all fer now, Geech," Cap'n Ab said. "You had enough fer one day." He put his large boot beside Geechie's tobacco can and kicked it toward the short Negro. "George'll give you matches. I don't need t'tell you t'take 'em out next time. We'll git you them dead nigger's britches soon's we can find 'em." He bit off a chew of tobacco, bent down and picked up the heavy strap in his nervous hand and walked toward his tent without looking to either side or back of him.

After Cap'n Ab had gone the guards lined up the men to go through the chow tent. When Geechie passed the cooks he did not hold out his tin plate, but it was filled with extra large helpings of the venison, swamp cabbage and beans. Outside the tent when they began to eat, Geechie swallowed only a few mouthfuls before turning to lose it. He tried to eat several times, having to throw away most of his supper, going to the calaboose hungry.

He did not sleep through the night, for when cloth touched his burn he awakened and when nothing covered him the mosquitoes kept him restive with their buzzing and biting. He tried taking off his pants and sleeping with the cotton blanket over him, but when the light cloth settled on his thigh it was like a nest of ants, all stinging at once. When morning came he slid over the edge of his bunk on his stomach and when his bare feet struck the iron floor he wished he'd tried sleeping there.

When he walked he limped, for his leg muscles were aching and the skin drawn tight and cracked in spots. By the time they reached their workplace the exercise had loosened his leg and he 10

began to slash more furiously and anxiously than he could remember having done before.

'Don' wan' no mo' o'that,' he thought, running from tree to tree, forgetting his leg, hacking and putting his mark beside the fresh cuts. He worked harder and harder, barely conscious of the salty sweat seeping from his pores, running over the raw spots; running, stopping, running, unmindful of his direction, not noticing that he was wandering away from the group or seeing the guard who started to yell before Cap'n Ab hushed him, tying the horse to a sapling and slowly following Geechie, hiding behind trees and moving only while the short Negro was busily hacking fresh boxes.

Geechie felt hunger when the sun got high in the sky, but by mid afternoon it had left him. When he started to run from one tree, he paused at the waist high cluster of palmetto ahead of him, surprised when he saw the narrow wiregrass slough between him and the thick water-oak swamp of Telegraph Strand. He looked around and did not see the other men. He noticed the sun was near the treetops in the west and mumbled to himself, "Wunner how come?" Then he ran to another pine east of him.

"Don' matter none, now. Ah gotta box. Cap'n said Ah gotta box lots t'day." He hacked the tree and when he finished, he looked about him again. "Wunner is Ah me? Is Ah here er in heben? How come nobody round t'beat er bother?" He reached for his tobacco, finding the pocket missing and feeling the sweatsalted burn and aching muscles of his leg. Again he scanned the tall pine forest and gazed toward the thick hammock, experiencing a feeling he'd not known for years, unsure of its meaning. He stood on a fallen log and looked for his group, breathing deeply and squinting his eyes.

"Don't try sneaking away, Geech. Y'won't git far."

After a moment he recognized the voice and when he turned saw only half the face and large hat beside the big tree. Cap'n Ab stepped aside, his hand on his big revolver.

Geechie shook his head and stepped from the log. "No Suh, Cap'n. Din' have no idee where Ah was goin'." He backed a step, holding his box knife so Cap'n Ab could see it. "Jus' workin' hard as Ah kin. Din' mean no hahm, no Suh. See, Suh?" He turned and ran to another tree where he raised his knife, but did not start hacking, for from the palmettos came a sound that sent a 11

subconscious fear through his body.

He did not at first recognize the noise, yet knew it to be tense and nervous. It reminded him of kicking a dead bush of cowpeas when the dried seeds rattled in their browned hulls. Then the clouds cleared from his mind and he jumped to his right, tripping on a root. "Snake!" he yelled, falling in the low palmettos and crawling on his hands and knees.

"Snake hell! Don'tcha try running, you black Geechie bastard!"

Cap'n Ab yelled before the pistol shot. The bullet whistled through the tall timber after knocking bark from the tree where Geechie had stood before falling and crawling.

Geechie heard the palmetto fans rustling and cracking as Cap'n Ab walked through them. He wanted to call, but his mind would not tell him what to say.

Cap'n Ab screamed in an unfamiliar way. Geechie stood on his trembling knees and saw Cap'n Ab sitting on the fallen log, grasping his left leg at the knee. The big black hat lay on the ground and the large holster was empty. Cap'n Ab reached into his right pocket, jerked out a large spring backed 'gator nosed pocket knife and pressed the button on the handle that sent the long blade whipping open. He ripped his pants leg above his boot, split and gouged and slashed his leg below the knee, cutting out a large hunk of flesh so the blood gushed over the grass and palmetto fans. Then he wrapped his large blue bandanna around it and the handkerchief was red by the time he'd tied it.

Geechie got to his feet and took several unsteady steps toward Cap'n Ab, his mouth open, not knowing what to say or do.

Cap'n Ab stood, holding to a palmetto fan for support. The big man tried to take a step, but his left leg buckled and he stumbled back to the log where he sat and stared at Geechie.

"You sorry no good black sonuvabitch, this is your fault.

C'mere."

Geechie stood for a moment before shuffling toward Cap'n Ab. He stopped about ten feet away and from the lower part of his vision could see the shiny revolver between his feet in the wiregrass.

"Gimme the gun!" Cap'n Ab pointed at Geechie's feet, his black eyes glistening from anger.

Geechie stared at Cap'n Ab, then bent over and jumped when his finger touched the smooth pearl. Carefully he put a finger on 12

either side of the handle, picking it up as if it were a dead putrid animal. He laid the pistol in his left hand, feeling the lifelessness of the silvery cylinder and barrel and sensing the heat caused by the empty chamber near his palm. He grasped the handle firmly, small bumps rising at the root of each hair on his arms and chest.

"Hurry up, you slow brained bastard!" Cap'n Ab yelled, extending his hand.

Geechie looked from the pistol toward Cap'n Ab whose dark eyes were like a witch's, encircling him and drawing him closer.

He bent forward without moving his feet, his muscles vibrating like a cat's purring. He took a wavering step, slowly dragging his feet through the wiregrass, holding the pistol in his left palm, extended in front of him. Cap'n Ab snatched the gun, stuck it in the holster and snapped the small strap over the gun below the hammer.

"Gimme my hat." Cap'n Ab pointed once more. Later he stood, holding to the palmetto fan to keep from falling, his left knee bent in pain. "I gotta git back to camp where there's whiskey.

C'mere, Geech. Turn around."

Geechie felt the big man's arms over his shoulders, clasped together over his chest, and he hooked his left arm under Cap'n Ab's injured leg, wet, warm and sticky. When he slipped his right forearm underneath Cap'n Ab's other knee he felt like he was sinking into the ground with the large man's weight on his back and hips. His right thigh began to ache and when he took a step he felt a cramp which relaxed as he continued to walk through the wiregrass, around clusters of palmetto and tops of fallen lightwood trees.

The sun went down and he knew it was time that the other men were starting for camp. Slowly he made his way toward the only home he knew, the Cap'n's body feeling heavier than any barrel of pitch he'd ever lifted.

"Hurry up, Geech," Cap'n Ab said after they'd gone a short distance. "Hurry up, Goddamnit. Y'want me t'die?"

Geechie went a few steps further. "Yessir Cap'n," he puffed, nodding unconsciously, the back of his head striking the Cap'n's chest. "Yessir." Then he tried to run, staggering sideways and stumbling ahead.

13

STICK STACK STANDER Robert Chamblee

I PASSED THERE the other day and when I saw those red doors again I stopped and started to go in. I didn't, though. For one thing I don't carry my beads anymore, and for another — well, I just decided not to. I had already walked up the steps and had grasped the brass latch when it occurred to me that the only person I had ever seen go through those doors was that little girl they called Sandra. Actually, it wasn't so much that I thought about the little girl as it was that I never did get to tell Julie about her. I had meant to. I remember I was going to tell Julie her name was Rosita. With her dark eyes, her bright coat and all that dark hair, she looked like a Rosita. I never saw a Rosita that wasn't lovely.

It seems so long ago that I saw her and yet, it was only last year. I used to park over there just beyond the front of that church. It is only a block behind the science building, where I was teaching an eight-thirty class that semester, and every morning at eight-fifteen a parking place was vacated there by a maroon Chevrolet station wagon with the words "Our Lady Day Camp" printed on the side. I used to get there around eight-ten or eight-twelve and wait for the station wagon to pull out. The driver was seldom late. I never knew there was a school behind that church until the day I saw Sandra. Usually I left my office around five or so and I suppose that by then Sandra was home sewing on a mantilla or making paper flowers or doing whatever little girls who have a lot of dark hair and who look as if they should be named Rosita do at five o'clock. I had left my office around three the afternoon that I saw her. It was the Friday before Christmas, the day that the school holidays began, but that wasn't the reason I had left early: My wife had been taken to the hospital at noon and they had called to say the baby would probably be born that evening.

14

School children crowded from the alleyway beside the church onto the sidewalk as I approached. I heard some of them singing Sandra's name before I saw her. "Sandra Mander, stick stack stander. If you don't eat your shoes will squeak." The laughter of a group of children has a shrill sound, and on that cold, dry December afternoon their squealing had a double-edged incisiveness. "Go home and oil them, Sandra. Olive oil will do," a tall girl shouted, and the bunch around her laughed. Then I saw the little girl in the bright coat come out of the alleyway. She walked with her head down, but there was no cowed look about her. She turned at the church, went up the steps and through the red doors before me. Inside there were some more steps to climb.

With each step Sandra took there was an irritating squeak. She stopped at the fount and crossed herself. The squeaking which accompanied each step she took down the center aisle past the white pews grew louder as she neared the altar. The flames of the candles at the base of the statues flickered, but all else was still until Sandra reached the railing where, with a concerted whine from her shoes, she knelt.

I had come into the church to say the rosary before driving back to New Jersey. I knew Julie would like for me to, and I felt like doing it that day. After Sandra had stopped squeaking down the aisle I took a place in one of the rear pews. There was no one else in the church. On the floor a few pews ahead of me there was a piece of Kleenex which was not crumpled. At first I thought it was a handkerchief which had slipped off the head of some woman who had come in without a hat. Perhaps she had pinned the Kleenex to her hair with a bobby pin. I've seen women do that. It could have slipped off while she was praying there. I remember, too, that huge glass chandelier hanging from the center of the ceiling, so large that its arms had to be supported by black wires spraying out from the center like a monster spider. When it is lit I suppose one doesn't notice the black wires.

As soon as I saw it I thought of the Phantom of the Opera and thought how ironic it would have been if that menacing thing had fallen on the little girl as she had passed under it. What, I wondered, if the squeaking of her shoes should set up a sympathetic vibration with the attachment at the ceiling and that spider-like monstrosity, which had no business being in a church, should . . . I remember the terror that I felt then, for I saw 15

I

Sandra stand up and start down the aisle. I tried to cry to her to stop, but I was numb and cold and silenced. I remember that I thought of extra-sensory perception and of an article I had read that morning about experiments they were conducting at Duke and I thought, "God, what if this thing is capable of it!" Sandra walked down the aisle. I tried to move, to call to her, but I could not. Sandra had passed under the chandelier and was going out of the door before I was aware that the only sound her shoes made was the normal patter that any little girl's shoes would make on a marble floor.

It was while I was driving across George Washington Bridge that day that I decided I would tell Julie the girl's name was Rosita. I always got ideas while crossing George Washington Bridge, perhaps because I liked crossing it. Going either way I liked crossing it, but I suppose that most of all I liked crossing it when I was going home to New Jersey. But that idea wasn't much good, because I never got to tell Julie. I don't seem to get ideas any more. Of course, I don't cross George Washington Bridge any more. Before school opened after those Christmas holidays I moved into the faculty club. I didn't miss any of my classes and I don't think any of my students ever knew. If they had I'm sure one of them would have said something.

16

HOMECOMING William Eastlake THERE WAS a special spur track they had built out to the hospital for such transfers as this. Of course there was the endless waiting in the endless corridors, those hours where you study the ceiling, where you watch the smoke curl up through those maze-test corridors, where they carry you and you are still watching the ceiling and you count how many times the front man on the stretcher turns right and how many times left and how many times back, and after ten minutes by the watch (you timed them now) the whole thing has become a game. At first these things swelled inside you in terrible outrage and you thought you would never, never get there. And then after many, many times and the long sweating outrages and the cursing and the stupid patience of the orderlies and the million, same nurses switching by in dead white and the two and three packs of cigarettes crawling blue across the ceiling, and the same certitude of hopelessness — the train missed the switch at Van Nuys or the loading platform is smashed to Hell at Cherbourg — and way back, it was the artillery barrage that had to lift before they could move you — and then there were the fourteen hospitals and the forty seven wards (these are exact figures, this too was part of the game now. It was a twelve hour, fourteen minute and twenty second wait in the corridor before you were assigned a bed at Staten Island Receiving) — the terrible outrage is replaced by the dull hopelessness and that in turn by the game, the statistics, all part of the great wall now. The trouble with walls is they are never built big enough, or most of all they are built without intent. That is the trouble with walls, they are never built on purpose and they go to Hell because of course they are not built strong enough someplace, built slapdash, unconsciously as they are. But he was building a beauty, and these statistics were at once part of it and inside of it, something he could play with and wall with.

They left him there in the corridor and another hour passed by and the parade switched past above him, elongated and distorted from below. And another pack chased blue across the

17

ceiling. Some one had stopped over him, straight over him, massive and wide at the top, narrowing, pointing near his head.

Coming for the first time out of a New York subway and looking up at the buildings, it is the same thing, this perspective. This was part of the game now, to classify the social workers and test their reactions to a certain, planned stimulus. They fell into these pigeon-holes of the mind; the professional, career, Red Cross worker of higher echelon, efficient, inhuman, case-hardened almost to the point of being ruthless; the uncertain, volunteer social worker, dispensing interruptions, hoar-hound drops, nickle Tootsie Rolls and joy; the nothing-is-too-good-for-our-boys but how-the-Hell-do-we-go-about-it type, wandering pathetically around the ward with their bag of goodies, that you do your best to encourage and hearten. This one towering over him now was a woman, her face hidden up there someplace above that mass of bosom.

"And what little state are you from?" she said.

"You go to Hell," he said.

She was leaving him to his smoke on the ceiling and his concentration camps. He often wondered whether he had started on his concentration camps because of the lulu he had read about that happened at Lordsburg, New Mexico, where they were herding the Japanese across the desert from the train to the camp where one of them carrying all he owned on his back was too slow for one of the M.P.'s who lost a brother in the Philippines, and so he shot the slow bastard and the army was going to court martial him but transferred him instead to the Tule Lake Camp at Klamath Falls, and the citizens of Lordsburg took up a collection and gave him two hundred dollars as a jobwell-done going away present, which was about all the money there was in town. Oh, he considered himself quite an expert on concentration camps now. Not that our relocation camps for the Japanese were concentration camps. No, no. But he had branched out in his studies to the ones in Europe and he had probably read twenty books now and there were many more for tomorrow. He understood that in France alone since the war there were over three hundred titles and that only scratched the surface. They were pouring off the press in Germany and Poland. There would be translations of some and the French ones he would send for. He was going to become the world 18

authority on concentration camps. But it was going to be his own world, the others would have to build their own walls. No one could be absolutely certain at this point but that in this study might lie the key to the future. Germain Tilton's scholarly work on Ravensbruck had proved to be extremely profitable to him.

Separated from the emotional German stupidity that murdered all the inhabitants, and keyed to the American efficiency and know-how, concentration camps might forever solve the problems of the states in the western world. Without strikes they could whip out all the shiny gadgets in America. Every year there was not a war with Russia, every American could have all the gadgets he wanted. Oh joy! Oh joy! Oh terrible joy! In Russia how close has the state approached this heaven already?

There was Spiron's book but he was obviously a Red-baiter and the book was sloppily done. But clearly the glorious Soviet Union had the jump on the rest of the world. Their camps were shaping up beautifully. He must get some more information on them.

The attendants moved him over to the other side of the corridor and set him down with a slight bump.

"There exists a Goering ordinance for the protection of frogs," this was the opening line of Rosset's book on Buchenwald. He thought about it quite often.

The train finally arrived. They finally got him in one of the cars. The train even began to move, but then it stopped again.

There would be a four hour wait for a clear track and the provisions were to be picked up in Glendale so there would be no dinner. Most of the boys in his car were tubercular. Several of them had been together for quite a while and they had an understanding among themselves. They had the running gags and the pattern of what to say. They talked easily, there was an understanding among them. The boy underneath his cot and the boy stacked at his feet (they were in tiers of three) had been together since Salerno. Although in different outfits they had been captured the same day at Salerno and had ridden the same sealed freight train on a two week trip to Hamburg where it had been unsealed long enough to remove the dead and then sent to Munich where it did not belong and was sent back again to Hamburg where they were wondering what had happened to it.

And those that could walk when the enormous door was opened 19

and the fierce, shooting light of a dull day blinded them, crawled out and stumbled fifteen miles to the barbwire stalag. And the other thirty were buried in an enormous hole in the freight yard prepared for such things.

"You got a match?"

Ishimoto reached over and dropped one down on the soldier's stomach.

"Thanks."

"Sure."

That's the way it had started between them, with that match.

And it had led to other talk and then to still other talk and soon he was telling him of that freight train to Hamburg.

Ishimoto, his huge head resting on his fists, tipping that oriental shock of coal black hair downwards for such a while that his eyeballs bulged, watched and heard, sometimes listened to, the man lying beneath him. If it were not for the man's head, not animated but talking out of a white thin face — watching the almost transparent teeth appear and disappear between the blood tinted lips — if it were not for this small sign and the occasional spector movements of a wasted —. Well, you just had to figure there was a body under the blanket. And there was too. If you looked real close sometimes you could see it stir. A string of a body must have been there someplace. He talked for a long while from that hole of a mouth, those huge lumps of coal eyes buried deep in long, dark sockets, the eyes saying nothing, not even looking nor alive, only open, and the balls themselves invisible, lost somewhere in the dark well. And he talked on and on and on, hot and full of the old rale. And then he ceased suddenly and without warning as he had begun. And then Ishimoto might have said something like 'Yeah' or 'Sure' or some such small words, but there was only a long silence. And then after a time the soldier below said, and he half smiled now as he said it, cracking the mask face, "She's a rough son of a bitch."

"She is, you know," Ishimoto said.

"But we beat it," the soldier below said. "Whatever it was, we beat it."

"We know what it is," Ishimoto said. "And we beat it all right.

We beat it all right."

"When the chips were down and it was important we beat it.

When it was important we beat it," the soldier below said. "Now 20

that it's not important maybe we won't do so good. But then, it's not important."

"But when it was important we beat it," Ishimoto said.

"Yes, yes," the soldier below said, his voice becoming almost real now. "When we thought it was important we beat it."

"You want a hunk of candy to eat?" Ishimoto said.

"Yes, I would like a hunk of candy to eat," the soldier below said.

Ishimoto dropped him down a Love Nest and then Ishimoto relaxed back into the bed and took the wrapper off the Love Nest he had saved for himself and bit off a chaw of it and smoothed out the wrapper and read and reread about the ingredients it contained and the soldier below him did likewise.

The train jerked, quit and tried again, jerked again, and this time made it. It didn't gather up and take off but racked along barely moving up the dry, hot valley with the hills ochre and shaped like Indian mounds, monotonous and same and without beauty. The train stopped, started, waited — waited for a switch or a clear track, or because it was ahead of schedule, or because, as the beaten face of the old Wobblie brakeman said, working it out of the side of his face like a convict, "They're giving the clear track to the money freight." "Sure," the conductor answered, spinning his lodge tooth, flipping it and spinning it on its thin gold chain. "You guys are right. You bright boys are always right."

The train began to wind and twist, squeal and argue its slow way on the S curves, not doubling back yet, that would come later on, just before you got to Bakersfield, now it poked, feeling forward, twisting and screeching in and out, and sometimes the track curved through an Indian mound hill, but most times it just touched them, wailing on through the badlands, screeching and nerve piercing, slow steel on steel, interminable and again and again S curve and screech and the desiccated hills, ochre and without life and shaped like Indian mounds.

"This is it," the voice coming through the pallet from below him said. "Maybe we didn't beat anything. Maybe this is it."

"It sure as Hell looks like it," Ishimoto said, his head tilted towards the window, watching it go by.

"It sure as Hell does," the voice coming through the pallet said.

"But then it all does."

21

"You got it bad," Ishimoto said. "You want me to come down there and hold your hand?"

"Yeah, you come down here and hold my middle hand."

"You need rehabilitation," Ishimoto said, smiling, his voice impersonal, medical.

"Yes, rehabilitate this man," the voice rising from beneath him said. "They don't want to be rehabilitated but rehabilitate them.

Rehabilitate them till they can't stand up. Rehabilitate the Hell out of them. Teach them to weave baskets and visit their loved ones — You want a drink?"

A folded newspaper was passed up to Ishimoto. He laid it on his chest and took out the bottle of Seagram's rye.

"You suppose that's what life on the outside is now, people weaving baskets and visiting with their loved ones?"

"Sure, sure, sure," Ishimoto answered, unscrewing the top and jerking the bottle suddenly up to his lips. He drank it as you would a bottle of Coca Cola allowing the air in over his lip so that he could stay with it a while and then he very slowly drew the bottle back to his chest and read the label again and then he carefully screwed the top back and checked the amount left in the bottle. He made these movements with great patience and tenderness and almost dignity, as though handling and appraising a priceless thing.

"You kill it," the soldier below said. "You go ahead and kill it.

Be sure and hide the bottle."

There was very little left but he would nurse it along. This was the precious stuff. It was not the oil or the pipe lines or the peace of Bulgaria like the papers had it. It was this. This was the precious stuff and it had to be nursed along, and it had to be carefully hidden or they took it away from you and they destroyed it. He could still see it running away down the side of the waste disposal where the orderly had smashed it. That was the trouble with the world, they smashed everything, the ideas and the people. But whiskey was the great builder and no one could smash the stuff it built. And it was also the great destroyer of the bad dreams you had when you were awake. He put it under the cover next to his chest and stroked the blanket and he smiled and the tears were in his eyes from the long, hot slug of it and the good warm feeling was flooding him.

"You getting out?" It was the soldier below him.

22

"Yeah."

"You glad you're getting out?"

"Of course. I guess so."

"What you gonna do when you get out?"

"I don't know. What are you going to do when you get out?"

"I'm not getting out."

"Would you take out if you could get it?"

There was a pause in the quick exchange and then the soldier below him said slowly, "I don't know. Jesus, I don't know."

That's the way it went, Ishimoto thought. They all talk it up about when they will get out and then some of them, those that stayed on and on, some of them got so they didn't talk about it so much and then when it came their time — well, Hell — they didn't know. They'd have to sweat it out a while before they knew for sure. Out in the field when you first get hit and you know it isn't It, when you know it is just a lucky wound, you think this is the one they all wait for — this is the good deal — this is the ticket to the soft bed and the hot chow and the roof. Some of them who were not too bad were patched up right now and sent back to the lines in maybe a day or a week or so, away from the good things, back into that filth, bone-ache and fear. And some of these bitched and screamed murder, and some of them went back quietly, sometimes for the third time, sometimes for the last, but they went back quietly. And others of them sucked ass and tried to impress the Brass that they were needed at the hospital and knocked themselves out carrying the bed-pans and serving the chow. And others didn't sweat out going back to the lines at all. They knew they were in for the long go. They had had it.

That first day after the amputation when they put you in a private room all alone and you wept, and not because of the pain, and a nurse looked into the room you hid your face under the sheets, but you couldn't stop the crying, and then later they moved you into the ward with the other boys and it was better.

But just before they moved you into the vast ward with the others they moved that Cheerful-Jesus into your room, the guy who meant well and wanted to spread the light, who was very cheerful and full of sunshine, who kept telling you that, as bad as you were, it could be worse, you could be much worse. Who kept comparing you to the poor dead to uplift you, and the poor 23

boys without any arms to uplift you. And then, because you had only one stump exposed, compared you to the poor guys who had lost both legs to uplift you. He liked that one. He kept telling you how impossible it would be to get around with both legs gone, how they had not invented anything would help a guy much with both legs gone, how a guy with both legs gone might just as well go and blow his brains out. And lying there trying to figure out a way to word it so you would not shatter him, how to word it, how to tell him that both your legs were gone, without hurting him, how to let him down easily — and then exploding with it. "God damn it, both my legs are gone!"

And it did shatter him. He never said anything after that, just tossed from side to side in his bed, cursing himself until soon they gave him his orders to go back to the line, and oddly enough you felt sorry for him. Then when they moved you out into the big ward with the others it went better, especially among the badly hit. They talked it up between themselves.

There is only one thing worse than not living and that is guilt and there was none there. Yes, there was the suffering there.

There was the boy next to you who chewed on his metal dogtags when it was bad, and there was the pain of the sharp, sudden noises at night, and the voices begging for an injection of stuff when it got unbearable. But there was an understanding and knowledge they developed among them there, sitting on the edge of it. They could look both ways and they were still on the edge of it. And you could shout at civilians and they would not hear. And it is not the soldier and army hospital argot that separates us, nor the years in the mud nor that explosion nor the long months lying on the edge there together. But one moment and they will have the answer and they will stop the train at Good River and they will carry you away from us. The writers and the black men and the medics will have the answer. They have the answer. It was decided back at the hospital and they are only doing what is absolutely necessary and they are stopping the train. My God! Don't stop this train! Don't ever stop this train! But then you will interfere. You bastards will interfere.

You will interfere won't you?

"Hello up there." It was the soldier beneath him.

"Yes." "You getting out in California?"

24

"Yeah."

"Hell of a state."

Ishimoto didn't say anything.

"I hear they're pretty rough on Japs in this state."

Ishimoto sjill didn't say anything.

"It's like a nigger going back to live in Texas."

There was a silence and the soldier beneath him went on.

"You ought to go live in my state. It wouldn't be bad there.

They'd just stare at you once in a while, think you was a Chinaman or something."

"You go to Hell," Ishimoto said. "What are you doing, smoking a cigar?"

"Yeah."

"Give me a proud cigar."

One shot up alongside him and he plucked it, ripped off the cellophane and stuck it in his face.

"Where did I put those matches?"

The hand came up from below him with matches and he took these.

"You want me to come up there and smoke it for you?"

"Yeah, you big farmer. Yeah."

He took a long pull on the cigar and let it out slowly, allowing the heavy smoke to settle around him. "What kind of a cigar is this?"

"Somebody gave them to me."

"Lousy cigar," he said, enjoying it, taking another long pull.

He was getting sleepy, very sleepy. He remembered putting the cigar out and then he was looking into an enormous room, absolutely white, lit brilliantly by a cold, hard, sourceless light.

Someone entered from the end of the room through an invisible door. He was a tall, spare man with a long slanting face and he carried a large, framed oil painting. He placed it on the wall in about the middle of the room and then stepped back several paces to examine it. The painting was almost just a drawing, almost a mere caricature. The background was barely the original white sizing of the canvas, the foreground was a loose painting of a man with almond shaped eyes. The almond shaped eyes dominated the canvas, not because they were large or strongly painted but because there were two of them and it was a profile view. The other almond eye was painted outside the figure over 25

the bridge of the nose. The man shook his head thoughtfully from side to side as though he did not approve of it, then he took a long knife from his pocket and scraped off the legs. Before redrawing them he stepped back to have a look. It was good.

It seemed to be what he was trying for. He nodded his head approvingly and put the knife back in his pocket. It was finished, and for the first time since the man entered the room — the tall, bony, long, slant-faced man dressed in black, who was obviously the artist — for the first time an expression came into his face.

Watching the canvas steadily, a perceptible smile waved the corner of his mouth. The man then took the painting off the wall, exposing a large hole. From it he took a huge statue and struggled to the center of the room with it and set it down. He stepped away from it, watching it, apparently trying to figure what there was still to be done on it. The piece of statuary was a figure of a man on his knees digging his hands in the soil that formed the base of the work. It was abstract, relying on forms rather than representation but you could figure out what it was without a drink. The work had almond eyes, huge gouges in the plasticene, but even from this long view into the hard and naked room it was quite obvious what was wrong with the statue. It was the legs. They were small, Oriental, bandy, incongruous on the long Occidental body. Until the legs the artist had succeeded in interlocking the mass of long forms. Those ridiculous legs destroyed all the effect. The creator, the tall man dressed in black with the long, slanting face, kneeled down and began working on the legs. He worked for a long time but he could not get what he wanted. Huge, baseball sized drops of sweat slashed off his face and flooded the floor, and every few minutes he would take an enormous gold watch, the size of a dinner plate, from his coat pocket, and then stabbing it back he would work even faster. Now he had finished. He backed away from it till he got the right viewing distance. He was shaking his head. No, the legs shot out apart from the mass of the statue, even shorter and more Oriental than before. While he stood there worried and sweating, from all around the great, hard room came noises of hundreds of fine locks opening, enormous tumblers falling, keys being twisted. Now suddenly around the room there were hundreds of doors about to be opened. The artist wiped off some of the sweat with the sleeve of his black coat, then yanked out 26

his enormous watch, consulted it, threw it back in his pocket, ran at the statue, ripped off the legs, rushed over to the hole in the wall and threw the legs in there and hung the painting over it again, put a bunch of sunflowers in his button-hole, applied a monocle and then crossing his legs struck a pose of calm and complete indifference. Thousands of people all bearing large tickets poured into the room filling it quickly, but still they came.

He could feel himself being crushed. It was difficult to breathe.

Everyone was shouting. Someone stuck a fist in his mouth, he couldn't pull it out. Still the thing to do was to keep an eye on the artist. If you could squeeze your way toward him, if you could get closer, if you could discover who it was. He was being squeezed toward him. Soon he would have the answer. If one had a good close look and then that jolt of recognition, you would know. He was almost up to him now. The mob was beginning to destroy itself. He could feel the cruel pain of his body being pulled apart. His arm was being wrenched off. Someone was hollering something in his ear he couldn't catch. It was still far away now. There it was, the word was closer. The word was "Chow!"

The hospital orderly's face came in front of him. He was pulling on his arm.

"OK. OK," Ishimoto said.

The orderly released his arm and passed him up a tray of food.

The food looked wholesome and uninteresting but there was plenty of it and he ate most of it. The coffee wasn't bad. When he had finished the orderly took the tray.

Outside the grape country was running past. They had been going past the same vineyard now for twenty minutes. Must be at least fifteen miles long. He looked at the vines carefully, pressing his nose against the glass. They were Thompsons and made a vile, rough-tasting wine but the yield was very high.

Ishimoto recalled that they had portioned off a part of their farm for grapes once. Before planting they went into it very carefully to select the best possible grapes. They read all the books and the stuff from Washington and they finally decided on the Pinot Noir as the finest. It was a difficult grape to grow but, being very careful and patient, they finally licked it. When they took their yield to the corporation winery the man sitting there in the chromium office named the price they would pay the ton.

27

"But these are Pinot Noir grapes," your father repeated. "I heard you the first time," the man said without looking up, and again he quoted the same price. "But you know they make a fine, delicate, even wine and the yield is very low." "Have you been reading our labels?" the man said, looking up now. "They are written by an advertising firm in New York that never saw, let alone tasted, the damn stuff." "At that price I cannot sell," your father said. "It seems to me there would be many who would pay a bit more for a delicate, even wine." And now the man got up in his chromium office and repeated the same word till we closed the door on the way out. "Quantity. Quantity. Quantity.

Quantity," he said.

And now the endless vineyards with the large, coarse grapes leaped by to the rhythm of the word — Quantity-QuantityQuantity-Quantity. And then the train passed a great wine factory belching like a huge chemical plant in the field and then another endless vineyard began and the words again picked up the rhythm of the rows and he turned from it to break it, looking straight up at the ceiling.

"Ishimoto! Ishimoto!"

"Yes. Yes." "This is where you get off, soldier. You're home."

The orderly's big, white face smiled as he said it. He was particularly cheerful when he said the word 'home.'

"So?" Ishimoto smiled back a forced, quick smile.

They rolled him off on a stretcher and then quickly they were lifting him and moving forward and he again had that old sensation of floating through the air and the dull grey ceiling of the train to watch. And now that suddenly gave way to the blinding, hard blue sky. It hurt. He blinked his eyes and tried again. If you squinted and opened them to mere slits you could stand the terrible brilliance. And then there was the sensation of being slid into the ambulance and it was all dark again.

28

29

AUGUST IN AN ORCHARD Silently August rounds the fruit to fall.

There is no room for music here At the torrid bottom of the year Where the fugitive flower is lost Again.

Summer apples stutter On the soft drum of the orchard floor: Unheard, so hushed by the stolid sun, Their tart prophecies of windfall, downfall, Fall when music will return, return In the distillation of crisis.

Bruised from apples the cider sings, And the dying leaves, whose Music is drought redeemed in light.

Over the anvil month no melody wings, Only the heavy-handed beat Of the sun, the hammer unleavened by flight Pounding the hot quince, the pear, to sweet, To sour, crushing the long-melted flower To the dry seed of the now immutable year.

Breaking the leaden acts of day Only the katydids, Intermission critics at a ponderous play, More shrill than quarrels their assertions Shredding the darkness cry from cry, Sound not music punctuates The sun grown serious, the mute tirades.

Fireflies cruising — when was that? — for love, Their commas and brief periods clear As dew or flute, flicked among the boughs A mirror of the durable stars.

30

Music if it can still be known Is perhaps the passage of light, Swiftly a celebration of doom.

Do you remember how The innocent blossoms scurried Off in a white flurry Of music without sound?

WINIFRED HUNT

DO NOT BELIEVE THE BREAD Do not believe the bread bent between thumb And finger, rant and recessional, is true Flesh, nor the chaliced wine His cherished blood; Wine is intoxicant and crust is food, Their forms unaltered by a Latin phrase Bleated above bent knee, or by a numb Mantis with human headpiece who expects Tyrants to tumble as he genuflects.

Believe, instead, that night's wake and noon's dream Are Christ, the slanted moon in its first phase, The cricket's rhythm and the organ's rise A child's starwatching eyes; the wormspun thread Of silk before man's seam.

Believe the break of wings, shudder and start Of rain at spring's beginning; also the slow Time before seed-pods burst and full leaves fly; Quick-settling winter on a country stream Where summer merely sleeps, and no snake dies.

The shepherd's gesture and the leopard's grace Are Christ's cathedrals, do not believe the dead Fragments of Him, blood-wine and broken bread.

And then believe the face Of forests, there a man can dare the space Of his own nature, leap into its night With streaming stars, and in its darkness do The rite which dust of prayer denies, in spite Of priest and praying mantis saint; and know That Christ is dead only where dies the heart.

JANE ESTY

31

LA FIGLIA CHE SCRIVE Parlez-moi d'amour, redites-moi des choses tendres Be maudlin, Mabel, when you write; My bosom is obtuse; Regard my feelings in the light Of long-accustomed use.

Use words like "love" and "miss you more," And, (should you lose control), You might imply a frenzy for The beauty of my soul.

Consider, Mabel, what you'll do When you become my wife; Your time will be devoted to The finer things in life; The passage of the days and nights Which fuses both our wills, Will find you steeped in rare delights And me in paying bills.

In our culture, dear, a man Whose pleasure is his bride's, Needs something more substantial than Laforgian asides.

The coming of your billets-doux Resound from head to feet; I daily run with threadbare shoes To find an exegete; And since, to me, the only crime Is not to cherish you, I will, if all goes well, in time, Endow a small review; But til that day, my font of bliss, My hope, my joy, my queen; Resign your tender heart to this: You love a Philistine.

MORRIS GOLUB

32

THE KOREAN FIREWOOD CARRIER The yellow road from Chunchon to Capyung lengthens like the beard upon my face.

The sun that burns the grains of rice draws the sweat for farmers bent upon their paddies.

My eyes seek the purple valleys and the rocks where azaleas, the faithful flowers, grow in violet spring.

And often when the crow cries across the land in autumn I think my burden is my life; my life, my burden.

Above my head a green kite flies among the souls of my ancestors.

SY SYNA

33

Hans A. Mueller

34

MISS MELLOWES Jack Parr A s rr WAS JUST A quarter to nine, there were only a few persons present out of the large office staff of Ridley & Morris, Incorporated. These conscientious workers were preparing themselves for the enterprise of the day by rearranging their papers, sharpening pencils, checking ink wells, exploring the drawers of their individual desks when Audrey Mellowes strode briskly into the premises.

Harvey McGarven, whose desk was the nearest to the door, was on the point of saying "Good morning," when he was disconcerted from his intention by an unusual aspect to the mechanics of a fellow employee's entrance. Miss Mellowes was stark naked.

The juxtaposition of Audrey's pink flesh amidst the oakwood furnishings of the office threw McGarven's natural animal impulses into total confusion. The bestial thing to do would have been to gape at the exposed female but all McGarven could do was to critically examine his freshly sharpened pencil.

"Good morning, Harvey," Miss Mellowes said in crisp businesslike tones.

"Oh, — er, good morning, Audrey," McGarven diffidently replied. He felt at that moment as if his face had been exposed to the cruel sun of the Sahara.

Miss Mellowes walked forward to her desk in the centre of the office offering morning felicitations to the portion of the staff who were then present. They all responded adequately to her greeting not one of them indicating there was anything peculiar about the situation.

When George Ridley stepped into the office at several minutes past nine expecting his hive of busy bees to be happily turning out invoices, requisitions and other technical items, without which his seed business could not function, he was startled to observe the naked woman, which detracted from the customarily uniform scene. Mr. Ridley didn't believe fate could be quite so perverse.

He stared at the rest of his employees to observe their reaction to this discordant element in their midst. All of them appeared 35

devoted to their tasks of the day and the unprofessional appearance of one of their members seemed to serve in no way as a distraction from the duties at hand.

George Ridley thought a ghastly nightmare was being acted out in his daily life. He must do something at once! He started to walk towards Audrey's desk. Then he stopped. Exactly what would he say once he got there?

"Pardon, miss, but your navel's showing," came to his mind but he could hardly say that.

Could he upbraid her for lack of respect, shameless conduct and so forth? No, his position was simply too difficult. He altered the direction of his walk and entered his private office where he buzzed for Miss Enright immediately. He sat behind his large desk drumming rather fretfully. If only his partner were there, he reflected. Harry would know what to do.

"Yes sir?" Miss Enright said in a matter of seconds.

"Miss Enright. . . ."

"Yes sir." She waited patiently.

"Did you have any dictation, sir?"

"No, as a matter of fact I was wondering about Miss . . . , — uh, whatever her name is — the one that just joined us a few months ago. Came from the university."

"Oh, you mean Miss Mellowes, sir."

"Yes, Miss Mellowes. Well, — er, just why is she acting the way she is?"

"How do you mean, Mr. Ridley?"

"You know very well what I mean! Why is she naked?"

"I don't know, sir."

"Well, can't you find out? We can't have her sitting there all day like that. What will our clients think if they should come in?

And besides it's bad for office morale."

"I'm not sure what I can do, sir."

"What do you mean you aren't sure. You're a woman, aren't you? Just go out there and tell her to put some clothes on."

"I don't think that's my job, Mr. Ridley. I was simply hired as your secretary. I really don't think it's up to me to do anything."

George Ridley stared appalled at the woman who had been his private secretary for over five years.

36

"Very well then, that's fine. Is this all the mail?"

"Yes, sir."

"All right. And, Miss Enright, I don't want to be disturbed for a while."

"Yes sir."

George Ridley thought he had never been in such a tight situation. His personal secretary wouldn't handle the matter for him and he didn't think there was a thing he could do himself.

Maybe he should just walk out there, tell her she was fired and that would be that. No, he thought and sat down again in his swivel chair. If he walked out to the center of the office and barked out in peremptory tones to the girl that she was through there might be a considerable disturbance on the part of the staff.

It would be quite a scene all right if he were to stand over the naked woman reviling her for her crimes. The incident would likely turn into the sort of office legend he himself had longed to tell against his superiors when he had been among the ranks of the hirelings years before.

Strange the way the employees were reacting to this indecent predicament. Could it be that they were so zealous in regard to their functions with Ridley & Morris, Incorporated, that they simply hadn't noticed Audrey Mellowes wasn't properly outfitted for her performance at the typewriter? He walked over to the curtain of his office window and peered into the outer office.

His thirty-five minions were working resolutely away as was Audrey Mellowes herself. The whole thing was impossible he then decided. It was an hallucination induced by nerves, the first step in a nervous breakdown, that had to be the answer. But no, it was not. He observed the astounded countenance of the office boy who was hiding behind the water-cooler and staring in adolescent dumbfoundedness at the lushness of Miss Mellowes.

Here indeed was evidence that the girl's defection from office routine was a very real event. Ridley felt relieved about his own sanity but at the same time he was once again faced with his unsolvable problem. And there was also the office boy to be taken care of. He could hardly let the boy stand there as if the office activity were some sort of sexual carnival. Ridley stared with all his business dynamism at the youth for about a minute until an impulse from the boy's unconscious informed him that he was being observed. He looked toward the parted curtains where he 37

saw his superior's cool, cutting gaze. At once he recalled the envelopes which he put through the Addressograph machine every day at this time and turned without hesitation from the scene of carnality to his customary function.

The secondary problem of the office lecher disposed of, Ridley reviewed every conceivable aspect of the case of the naked stenographer. After about ten minutes had gone by, an idea managed to assert itself in his confused mind.

He picked up his phone and said "Mr. Wells, please."

"Hello?" said Mr. Wells several seconds later.

"Will, this is George. Could you come down here right away?

I've got something pretty important I'd like to talk over with you."

"Of course, George, I'll be right there."

"And, Will, would you bring along the file on Audrey Mellowes?"

As Ridley replaced the telephone he reflected that if there was any man on the staff of Ridley & Morris, Incorporated, who might know the answer to Audrey Mellowes' nudity it would be Will Wells. This man was in charge of the Personnel Office which regulated the employment situation for the office, plant and warehouse.

There was a strained and furtive manner about Wells when he entered Ridley's office.

"Do you know what's happening out in your office?" he asked.

"Yes," Ridley replied.

"Well, aren't you going to do anything about it?"

"Yes, that's why I asked you to come in to see me. Let me see that file."

"You mean that's Audrey Mellowes out there?"

"That's right."

"In the flesh, eh?"

Ridley gave his Personnel Manager a cold stare.

"I looked at that file on the way down here," Wells said quickly by way of atonement. "I couldn't find anything out of the ordinary about the girl."

"Hmm . . . Says she graduated from university this spring, took a course in shorthand and typing about a year ago and joined us a few weeks after her final exams. She's had several minor jobs, such as filing, clerking and so forth during her vacations throughout high school and university. And that's all it says.

38

What about her references, did you check them?"

"Yes, George. We got in touch with a couple of her past employers."

"What did they have to say?"

"Nothing much. Good reliable girl, that's about all."

"I see. No trouble in her background that you could find out?" "]$ot according to the information we received."

"What about her home life? Any difficulties there?"

"Not from the record anyway. Both parents living, one sister, two brothers. The family seems settled enough. And she's not an only child."

"What does that mean?"

"It means she'd likely to be spoiled if she were."

"What does her father do?"

"Works in an insurance office — an underwriter. A pretty fair position."

"I see. Well, just what do you think the trouble is?"

"I don't know. I'd advise you to fire her and forget the whole business."

"It's customary to give a week's notice. I can't have her sitting out there for a week like that."

"No, I see your problem. I'm not really sure what to suggest, though. Of course if you let her go it will be quite a black mark against her. 'Dismissed for nudity while on duty' — that will be a fine thing to say if she wants a reference on her next job."

"Well, what do you expect me to do? She didn't have to come to work naked."

"Maybe it's some sort of strike." •.

"Strike? . . . Strike for what?"

"I don't know. I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll check with the university, the schools she attended, every employer she's ever had, friends of the family and anyone else I can think of. I'll let you know as soon as I get anything definite on what could be wrong with her."

"All right, Will. Call me as soon as you do. I may think of something myself in the meantime."

About ten-thirty that morning Walter Hendricks, one of the salesmen, dropped into the office. He had just about completed his breezy stride into Ridley's inner sanctum before he observed the undraped stenographer. Instantly he pivoted in his tracks.

39

The woman was a model of naked splendor. It was incredible!

Hendricks stood transfixed revelling in all the beauty that was visible above the level of the desk. For months he had tried unsuccessfully to arrange a date with Audrey, but this revelation was considerably more than his experienced imagination had allowed him to expect.

Before Hendricks had been merely attracted by her; now he was nearly beside himself with romantic delirium. What should he do, though? He was usually a man of exceptional virility but the incongruousness of this situation interfered with his spontaneous impulses. The scene was one of pagan glory and yet he knew he could hardly walk over to her and submit his elemental request. It just wasn't done. But then neither was sitting naked at one's desk during working hours. Hendricks was confused so he stood staring with frustrated rapture at the pink damsel.

Gradually, though, he began to be aware through his state of tormented introspection that he in turn was being regarded.

Almost the entire office staff of thirty-five was staring at him with undisguised hostility. They seemed to regard his presence as an obscene intrusion. Hendricks suddenly felt like a Peeping Tom. There was no alternative for him except to walk quickly out of the office.

When Audrey Mellowes' friend, Betty Fielder, arrived at twelve o'clock, the usual time for their luncheon engagement, she was the most disconcerted of everyone who had observed Audrey in her nude state.

"Audrey, what's happened to you?" she demanded in a shrill manner.

"Well, nothing. I just thought I'd come natural today for a change."

"You better get some clothes on right away. You can't go out to lunch looking like this."

"Why not? It's a warm day. And I don't sunburn."

"Audrey, you don't understand. You haven't got any clothes on."

Audrey looked down. "Yes, so I see," she said.

"Well, what are you going to do?"

"Nothing. Come on, Betty, let's go. My lunch hour is short enough as it is."

In the street many onlookers turned to look at Audrey ques40

tioningly but the girls reached the restaurant two blocks away without incident.

Audrey was distracted from her study of the menu by Betty's incessant criticism.

"You've got to get some clothes on right away. Everybody is looking at you. You might get arrested. And you don't know what else will happen if you go around without any clothes on."

"Nothing will happen. I know." Audrey looked very sad momentarily.

"How do you know nothing will happen? Why you're violating all the social mores of our times. You're risking the harshest forms of social censure."

"Betty, everything we took in psychology and sociology is ridiculous. I've just found out this morning. If I were going to take a Master's degree I'd know exactly what I'd write my thesis on."

"What?"

"Well, everybody is afraid of doing anything that their neighbor doesn't do. This social defensiveness is naturally most pronounced in matters relating to sex. And this state of sexual tension that exists in western civilization has its emotional releases in off-color jokes and incredible fantasies, such as are offered in the majority of movies and third-rate fiction."

"Well, suppose you do show everybody the real thing—what does it matter? Audrey, I can hardly believe this is happening.

Come on to the Powder Room right away. I'll run out and buy you some things."

"No, Betty, I started out to prove something today and I'm going to go through with it."

"Audrey, this isn't your idea of an academic stunt, is it?"

"No, it means something quite vital in terms of my personality."

"I don't understand what you mean."

"Just what do you think of your job at the library?"

"It's sort of boring at times but on the whole it's all right."

"Well, my job with Ridley & Morris is terrible."

"I don't understand. I've met a few of the people there. They seem decent enough."

"Yes, individually they are. But it's the basic situation that's oppressive. I've just felt like I was drying up ever since I started to work there. You feel there's no human recognition involved in 41

anything you do. The work is so mechanical. It's like being one particle of an immense robot!"

"I don't see what this has to do with your taking your clothes off."

"It's my way of asserting myself as an individual — as a woman."

"Well, I think everybody in your office will admit you're a woman now." Betty looked appraisingly at her friend's body.

"That's just it. Nobody paid the slightest bit of attention today.

I might just as well have been a store dummy!"

When Audrey returned from lunch she found a brief note: "Come to my office. G.R." Perhaps this might be the very invitation to disaster that she had originally expected, Audrey thought as she placed the note in the bottom drawer of the desk.

"Yes, Mr. Ridley?" she said as she stepped into the office.

"Ah, Miss Mellowes. I've been waiting to see you." And indeed he had. He had even gone without lunch so that he might devote the time to his problem.

"There's something I wanted to discuss with you." He glanced at the bare form and quickly averted his eyes. This was going to be difficult, he thought. It wasn't as easy to begin as he'd imagined. If he'd been able to get in touch with his partner longdistance he might now have an alternative solution; as it was he simply had to go ahead.

"Uh, Miss Mellowes, have you noticed anything about office deportment that's different from, well, say, what went on at the university?"

"I beg your pardon, Mr. Ridley?"

"I mean there's a certain way of doing things in the business world."

"Yes sir."

"What I mean is — have you noticed the way the other girls do their hair?"

"I think so, sir."

"I mean it's done up in a neat, efficient-appearing style, not in flowing locks like a movie-star or a little girl."

"I think I know what you mean, Mr. Ridley."

"Good. Perhaps we can apply the parallel to your own case."

"Well, I have an Italian Boy' cut. That should be quite adequate."

42

"No, what I mean is, have you noticed the way the other girls dress?"

"Yes. Suits, blouses, skirts . . . And also shoes and stockings."

"Very good. Now let's consider what you're wearing."

"Why I'm not wearing anything, Mr. Ridley."

"Exactly. I think I've made my point. You may go, Miss Mellowes."

"You mean I'm fired, sir?" Audrey said expectantly.

"No, of course not. Just see that you're adequately prepared when you come to work tomorrow. I think we can forget the matter now."

Audrey returned forlornly to her typewriter and manipulated the alphabet until five o'clock. She decided then to give the experiment one more chance by walking home. And once more the world did not explode as she offered strangers the knowledge of her naked body. However, at one point, when someone took a photograph of her, Audrey's heart skipped a beat but the diffidence of everyone she passed soon restored her to the state of gloom and discouragement that had slowly accumulated throughout the day.

That evening a phone call came from Walter Hendricks requesting her presence at an evening-just-for-two anytime in the immediate future. Audrey offered the customary excuses and replaced the telephone. Somehow an assignation with Walter Hendricks was not the hallelujah chorus she had imagined would occur when she had begun her individualistic mission.

Several days later when Audrey's life had returned to more or less normal — she now reported for work in the clothing expected of all good little business girls — there was another phone call, this time from her friend, Betty Fielder.

"Audrey!" Betty's voice exploded against her ear. "I saw your picture today in MOMENT! I can't tell you how surprised I was.

They must have taken it last week, the day when you, well, you know . . ."

Audrey excused herself from the presence of her parents on the pretext of going to buy some nail polish. She entered the corner drugstore looking furtively around wondering if anyone there were aware now who she really was. She turned several pages until she found herself with the caption, "Who's in the Nudes This Week." And there she was walking down Central Street 43

as composed as ever and wearing not a thread of clothing. Unfortunately, as far as she was concerned, the effect was ruined because of the interfering hand of an editor, or some other unknown censor. The most intimate portions of her body had been obliterated with white spaces. It was at this second in her life that Audrey experienced the most profound disappointment in the human race she had ever known. Even her eyes had been blotted out making it impossible to identify her face. It just seemed to Audrey that there was no fulfillment possible for a modern girl no matter how hard she tried.

44

THE RETURN Rosanne Smith Robinson

ELLEN sat in the seat next to the window and watched the big rain drops collide with the pane as the streamliner raced and swayed through the winter sparseness of the Indiana countryside.

The sky was a vapid grey but it was light enough now so that she could no longer see her reflection in the window. With a rap loud enough to have been made by a fingernail flicked against the glass, a blob of rain hit, trembled a moment and then started to course down the pane. If that drop runs all the way down, she said to herself, she'll die. But the drop zigzagged, joined its force with several other drops, and the tiny stream leaked down out of sight. Then the lights inside the coach blinked on and her own image leapt up beside her.

In less than an hour she would be in Indianapolis. She had spent an irritating night trying to force herself past the first warm edge of sleep but at best she had only dozed, started into wakefulness and then dozed again. Her stockings were bagged out of shape and kept twisting on her legs and a nerve under her left eye kept jumping. She had known after the first phone call from Ralph saying that Grandmother had fallen that either she or Margaret would have to go out. The exasperating thing was that Margaret had said at first that she would go. Then she had called back that night with a handful of excuses that Ellen could not stop. Jack had just got a job out of town, the baby was sick and none of the relatives would take care of Stevie because he was such a handful. When she had finally offered to send a check to help out with the travelling expenses, there had been nothing to do but give in as gracefully as possible.

"You might as well go out and get it over with," John had said when he came home that night. "Dickie and I can manage all right. Try to talk her into going to a nursing home. And for God's sake, don't let her get you all upset."

45

Ellen had packed in a rage of resentment. It was unfair that the old woman was still alive. She had been born the youngest of the thirteen children of an enterprising farmer. She had always been sickly. "Poor Sarah," everyone had said, "she won't live long." And here she was, just brimming over ninety. She had outlived her only child, all of her brothers and sisters, and one grandchild.

Ellen had never seen her until she was twelve and they had moved from the south to stay with the old woman because her father had lost his business and there was no place else to go.

They had come from a grey, raining world into the deeper gloom of the house. And there perched on the overstuffed couch, her feet not quite touching the floor, had sat, as though on a throne, the little birdlike woman with fluttery, bony hands and glittery eyes. She had been in her seventies then. She had clutched at Ellen and Margaret and it had been all that the girl could do not to draw back from the old woman.

For two years they had lived with grandmother. Two years in which the grass was not to be stepped on, the cellar must be hosed and swept twice a week, the windows washed on sunny Saturday mornings, the whole house turned out each week as though it were spring. And always Sarah sat perched on the couch, occasionally doing painstaking darning, still threading the needle without using her glasses. In the late afternoon she read through the death notices in the afternoon paper, looking up any terms which she did not know in the medical dictionary that had belonged to her husband. One evening one of Ellen's friends had dropped by to pick her up to go to the movies. Grandmother had been upstairs and Helen had sat on the couch to wait for Ellen to finish the dishes. Grandmother had come downstairs and, holding on to furniture, made her way to the living room. Ellen had hurried for her coat. Grandmother had settled herself heavily into a rosewood rocker and said in a plaintive voice, "You know, Ellen's grandfather died on that couch." After that Ellen met her friends outside.

Ellen had slept in a little unheated sleeping porch where, in the winter, she often shivered and shook for half an hour before she grew warm enough to go to sleep. She was the first up and raced from the house without breakfast often arriving at school before the doors had been unlocked by the janitor.

46

When they had moved to a house of their own, Grandmother came for dinner on Sunday. Ellen found it hard to look at her.

She could not look at that face with its air of injured patience and the sunken mouth without the thought, the wish for death coming like a swallow to her mind. "She'll live forever," Ellen's mother would say. "She's had practically everything out. What could go wrong with her?" Her tombstone was already up at Crown Hill, her name and the date of her birth already engraved on the marker.

But instead Ellen's mother, a robust woman with great, strong teeth and an indomitable hold on life, had died, and Ellen spent the summer before she went away to college living with Grandmother again. She had spoken to her only when she had to and when Sarah had asked her querulously where she was going she would force the tightlipped, hating reply, "Out." After that she spent her summers with her father out in Montana where he was working. They visited Sarah at Christmas, eating cheerless holiday dinners in restaurants. Then she had married soon after she got out of school and her father had come to visit her. She had not seen Grandmother again until Roger's funeral. Her brother was many years older than Ellen and she had hardly known him but she had resented the sight of her grandmother standing before her grandson's coffin.

Two years later on a sunny November day another call had come. She felt her heart jump when the operator said, "Indianapolis calling," and she had thought almost triumphantly, "Well, the old girl's finally given up." But it had been her father this time. Retired, he had moved to Indianapolis to take care of his aged mother, and he had dropped dead on the dining room floor with the glass of milk he was bringing to her in his hand. Grandmother had called the next door neighbor, Mrs. Cohn, who had found her standing over her son, poking him with her toe and saying, "Get up, Charles. Get up. You've spilt the milk all over the floor."

Ellen clenched her fist at the memory and closed her eyes.

The old woman had become a sinister symbol to her now. There was one grave plot left in the family lot at the cemetery. Ellen and Margaret had kidded about it. "I don't want it," Ellen had told Margaret. "You take it."

"I've made other plans," Margaret would say.

47

But there it was — a patch of ground that had become a superstitious omen to Ellen. She thought about it sometimes at night lying wakeful, listening to planes droning over the great city where she lived. By God, she would think, why doesn't she die.

It was as though she were involved in some game of chance and that if the old woman would just die then she would be safe.

She felt guiltier too because she knew that she and her sister would be her grandmother's heirs. And now when she thought of the old woman she would grow angry that the money was there complicating the death wish she held for her. The money seemed to taint the purity of her hatred.

The porter tapped her on the shoulder just as she felt the train go into a long glide followed by the lurch of braking. The train had reached the fringe of the grim, colorless city.

She had the cab wait while she ran into the McKean's house and left her bag. When she had called Gladys McKean, who was the mother of a high school friend now married and living in the south, she had not known what train she would take, and she wasn't surprised to find that Gladys was out. Ellen gave her bag to the maid and told her she would call later from the hospital. The McKean's home was pleasant and had always seemed a home to her. She had spent most of her time there after her mother died and it had become accepted that she should stay there whenever she came to the city. "God knows," she had said to John, "I'm not going to stay at her house. There isn't a room in the place where someone hasn't dropped dead."

The rain had settled into a fine drizzle and as Ellen settled back into the cab she felt herself shivering with the unaccustomed dampness of the middle western cold. It was a cold that penetrated and made her feel more miserable than a biting wind could have. The tires of the cab sang in the wetness and as she looked out at the streets down which she had walked so many times she made a conscious effort to remember what she had been like then and found that she could not.

Ellen paused in the lobby of the hospital and then decided to call Dr. Harolds before she went to the room and to let Ralph, the distant cousin who was Sarah's great nephew, know that she had arrived. It was Ralph and his wife who looked in on the old woman each week and helped her with taxes and whatever business affairs she could not manage by herself. Ellen had met him 48

she was sure but she could not remember what he looked like.

Dr. Harolds was an elderly man who had relinquished much of his practice to a son. Ellen arranged to meet him at the hospital the next morning. "She's just not giving us any cooperation," he said over the phone in a slow nasal voice. "She won't do anything we ask so there's no use her staying there any longer than necessary. She says her back don't hurt her but that's because she wants to leave. Dr. Kelly, he's the bone man, I'll call him and have him drop by there with the X-rays in the morning."

Ralph's voice sounded soft and hurt. "We just can't do a thing with her," he said. Ellen promised to meet him at the hospital at seven.

Then deliberately postponing the ordeal, Ellen went into the hospital drug store and ordered and slowly drank a cup of coffee.

This was the same hospital where her mother had died and the few times she had been in it since she had been able to catch faint traces of the sick sweetish smell of cancer that clung to mother's room as thickly as dripping honey. She took the elevator to the second floor and walked down the corridor, conscious of the loudness of her own footsteps, to her grandmother's room. A screen blocked any view of the bed and the nurse sitting in a chair across from the door jumped up animatedly and came out to the hall.

She was a plump pleasant faced woman with very blue eyes.

"You're the granddaughter," the nurse said. "She's been telling me all morning that you were coming to take her home. We had a time with her this morning. Dr. Kelly tried to show her the X-ray and she was just a clapping her hands and singing away and wouldn't listen to a word he said. He practically yelled at her, he got so mad." The nurse smiled gently as though she were recollecting the escapade of a naughty but lovable child.

Ellen learned from the nurse that there was an orthopedic ward for elderly patients on the same floor in another wing of the hospital.

"She'd get good care there," the nurse said, "but I don't know as she'd want to go. How old is she anyway?"

"She's ninety-one," Ellen said, drawing the numeral out impressively.

"Great heavens to moses," the nurse said. "Why she's practically

a monument. She wouldn't tell the doctors nothing 'cept she was over eighty. Ninety-one, well heavens to Betsy."

Ellen was smiling at the nurse's amazement when they heard the thin, familiarly querulous voice call out, "Who is it? Is that you, Ellen?"

The moment had come. There was now no escaping. Ellen walked slowly into the room. I'm a cold-hearted bitch, she thought, and then she caught sight of the slight figure on the high hospital bed. Bars were up on both sides of the bed. The nurse caught Ellen's look. "She tries to get out of bed at night," she explained. "I think if she had her shoes and clothes here, she'd just get up and go home, wouldn't you, Mrs. Townsend?"

But the old woman was looking at Ellen. Her face, still remarkably unwrinkled, lighted up and she pulled her thin arms out from under the stiff covers and stretched them toward Ellen.

Ellen was astounded to feel tears start in her own eyes. She felt still numb and guarded. The tears came as a sort of reflex action.

The old woman was as thin as a dying reed and her white hair was sparse. Her body had reached a state of final economy.

Only the bones and muscles and skin were left and to Ellen's mind came the quick vivid picture of a sailing ship, shorn of all ballast, as it headed into a storm to do battle for its fragile life.

"Hello, grandmother," she said and she moved quickly into the range of those skeletal arms. She pressed her lips against the forehead which was so dry that it seemed that she was kissing fine, powdery dust.

Ellen stood by the bed and listened to the old woman's recital of complaints. The nurse had left the room and Sarah continually cautioned Ellen not to discuss anything with anyone.

Ellen was simply to arrange to take her home tomorrow.

"But grandmother," Ellen said and found herself speaking in a firm clear voice and looking directly into the old woman's eyes, "you can't stay alone any more you know."

"Why not?" her grandmother asked and Ellen was amused to see that she was actually feigning surprise.

"You know perfectly well, why not," she said. "You've got to take it easy until your back is better."

"Oh," her grandmother said. The birdlike movements that had always seemed affected in her before were now appropriate to 50

V

her delicate frame. "Well, I wouldn't want someone I didn't know." She spoke in a supplicating voice.

"I'll find someone you'll like," Ellen said, "and then when you're sure you can get around all right again you can get rid of her. But you've got to promise to keep her for a month. They won't come for less than a month."

She knew her grandmother knew she was lying and she knew she would accept the lie.

"You're tired now," Ellen said. "Get some rest. I'll be back tonight."

"Yes, I'm tired," the old woman said, and she started to cry but no tears came. Ellen felt suddenly desperately ashamed. "I'm so glad you're here," Sarah said.

"Everything's going to be all right," Ellen said, and it seemed the most natural thing in the world to kiss that dry forehead again.

On her way out of the hospital she stopped by the orthopedic ward and looked in. A cursory glance was enough. Six beds jammed into a room and four vacant eyed old women so lost in their timeless reveries that they did not bother to glance up.

Ellen shivered and turned away.

After dinner the McKeans lost themselves in television with the fascination of babies watching a ball of twine unwound for the first time. She borrowed their car to drive back to the hospital.

She remembered Ralph the minute she saw him in the corridor outside of Sarah's room. He was a sandy-complexioned man and had the bulging forehead of Sarah's family. He seemed worried and upset and very much in awe of the old woman. Ellen began to realize that she was not simply putting in an appearance for convention's sake. Whatever was going to be done, she would have to do.

"How long can you stay?" Ralph asked her after they had talked to Sarah a few minutes.

Ellen took a deep breath and said, "I'll have to leave on Monday."

"That's not much time," Ralph said, looking depressed.

"Oh," said her grandmother, "she's got a family. She can't stay here. She's got to get home. Bless her heart for coming."

My God, thought Ellen, can this be true or am I losing my mind. The old woman was at last willing to bargain. In order 51

to get home she was willing to accept any lies that did not interfere with the goal.

When she arrived the next morning, Dr. Harolds was already in the room. He was holding a large sheaf of papers in his hand.

"Well," he said after shaking hands with Ellen, "she's let the nurse go. It's all right now, I guess, but I do feel having a nurse here all the time saved her life. She started to go into shock you know. You can see right here on the chart where her temperature started to go up."

Harolds was a man in his seventies and he talked with a slight embarrassment and without looking at Ellen as though he were addressing a group of deformed or crippled people. Sarah was shaking her head and clasping her skinny hands together again and again.

"Well now," Dr. Harolds went on, "we didn't want to put her in a cast. At her age, you know, she might get hemostatic pneumonia and bed sores, but she's still got a lot of pain. Here I'll show you." He moved to the side of the bed and slid his hands under the old woman's back. The old woman looked at him.

"Doesn't that hurt," he asked.

"No," she said.

"Well," he said, moving back to the end of the bed. "Hurt yesterday. Now Dr. Kelly thinks this may have been an old vertebrae fracture and this fall sort of shook some of the calcification loose. Now her heart's enlarged but at her age, of course, it would be. I don't think there's as much chance now of her getting pneumonia but — " Sarah had started clapping her hands and singing to herself to shut out the sound of the doctor's voice.

"You'll have to be quiet and behave yourself, Mrs. Townsend.

I'm trying to tell your granddaughter about your case since you wouldn't listen," Harolds said.

Ellen felt a rising sense of anger and awareness. He's afraid of her, she thought to herself. He's actually afraid of her because she should be dead and she's not. And because he was afraid he was standing there torturing her with details that he would never dream of disclosing to a younger patient —not even a patient of seventy or eighty. Longevity now was her single achievement and the only prize she could collect was death.

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Ellen realized how closely the old woman had been living with death all these years. She had resigned herself to it some thirty years ago and still that monumental heart went on beating, beating. For her, death came not in an occasional thought or anxiety but was borne on every second, with the winking of a light, the lowering of a shade. And this man stood there rubbing her nose in it.

Ellen walked out of the room. In a minute the startled doctor followed her.

"Thank you, so much, Dr. Harolds," she said. "We'll let you know what we decide and I'll call you."

He gave her a puzzled nod and walked away.

Back in the room, Ellen patted the old woman's hand. "He won't bother you again," she said.

"You know," Sarah said, "sometimes I think I'll just go to the country to get away from his voice."

Her face lighted with surprised pleasure at Ellen's hoot of laughter.

Ellen spent most of Sunday interviewing applicants who answered the ad she had put in the paper for a companion for a semi-invalid. She had already investigated all of the nursing homes that were recommended and come to the conclusion that they were not the answer. None of them were actually dirty and none of them were really clean. They were staffed by nurses who rouged too heavily and wore brightly colored handkerchiefs in their uniform pockets like beauty operators. All of these establishments had the appearance of private homes turned into emergency stations in a countryside stricken by flood and disaster.

"I'd die just to get out of one of them," Ellen told Gladys McKean. When her grandmother died, she would do it on her own without any outside help.

Late in the afternoon, she called the woman she had finally decided to hire. She was an easy going Kentuckian who had lived for two years with an elderly woman. Ellen had painted the job in dire colors and the woman, a Mrs. Green, had seemed unperturbed at the same time that she had asked practical questions about shopping, cleaning and emergencies. After exacting a promise from her that she would stay on the job for at least a month, Ellen told her to come to her Grandmother's house on Monday morning.

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She called an ambulance and arranged for Sarah to be picked up at ten in the morning and rang up the doctor so that he could sign the release in the morning. Then she took a cab to the station to pick up a reservation on the next afternoon train and went out to the hospital.

Sarah had eaten and was asleep. Ellen tiptoed to the edge of the bed and looked down at her. She could see her pulse throbbing slowly in the ridge-like veins of her skull. The incredibility of this woman's age struck her at that moment with a tickling, thrilling sensation up and down her spine. This woman had been born before the Civil War. Through decades that had brought changes almost impossible to comprehend or to imagine, that heart had gone on throbbing and pulsing, and its owner, intent only on her own narrow destiny, survived spiritually almost unchanged. Self-consciously Ellen realized that she was staring down at her grandmother with the same bemused look she had often seen on the faces of pleased relatives gazing through the glass windows of hospital nurseries.

Leaning over, she shook Sarah's shoulder gently. The old woman moved reluctantly out of her twilight reverie.

"The ambulance is coming at ten," she said. "We're taking you home. Now go back to sleep." She tiptoed out before Sarah could answer.

She dined with an old friend that night and although they talked with the old easy familiarity there was none of the wordless intimacy that had existed between them when they were adolescents together. Ellen was glad to get away and when she got into bed that night she felt a curious subdued excitement not unlike the feeling she remembered from childhood on the eve of an unexpected holiday.

Sarah was lying fully dressed on the bed when Ellen walked into her room. She wore a look of angelic triumph as she was trundled down the hospital corridor on the ambulance stretcher.

"Good-bye," she sang out to the nurses. "Good-bye, forever."

Ellen found herself grinning foolishly.

The ambulance eased up in front of the house, and Mrs. Green opened the door, smiling out at them like a jovial wash woman.

"Oh, dear," Sarah said, "she's letting all that cold air in."

Ellen followed the stretcher into the house aware that half the neighborhood was peering out from behind curtains. Perhaps, 54

she thought, I should make a speech from the porch or bow or wave. The ambulance attendants lifted Sarah skillfully on to the great couch and before the door was shut on them, Sarah started giving orders.

"That chair goes over there," she said peremptorily to Mrs. Green. "Ellen, open the piano up. I never played the piano but I always open it up every morning. No, the stool goes out a little. I expect everything needs dusting."

Ellen felt a flush of irritation.

"I can see you're glad to be home," Mrs. Green said.

And as Ellen looked at the old woman, doll-like on the couch, there seemed already settled upon her the air of one who has never been away. In two weeks she could probably claim that she had never fallen.

Ellen walked over to her. "I'd better do some shopping for you," she said. "Have you got any cash?"

"Oh, I don't need anything," Sarah said.

"Well, you can't starve Mrs. Green," Ellen said.

"Oh," Sarah said and reached reluctantly for her pocketbook.

"Well," she said slowly, "will a dollar be enough?"

"No," Ellen said good humoredly. "A dollar will not be enough."

"Oh," Sarah said again and took her time about fishing out a ten dollar bill.

Ellen walked down the street to the big triangle lot where a super-market had been built. The lot had been vacant and overgrown when she first lived here, and she had chased butterflies and fireflies there in the summer and tramped across it with her sled in the winter to go belly-flopping down Watson Hill. It was the first time she had remembered that in years. That Christmas Sarah had given her a chemistry set and she had set up a lab in the cellar and labored passionately to produce a secret formula compounded of Worcestershire sauce and baking soda. Strange how one forgot.

She shopped and struggled back to the house with ten dollars and five cents worth of groceries. That was probably more food than had been in the house since they had lived there during the depression.

While her grandmother lunched, Ellen went to the McKeans to pick up her bag and say her good-byes. While she had been gone Ralph had called to say that he would come that evening 55

to move a bed downstairs. Everything was taken care of, it seemed. Ellen went to the phone and called a cab.

"Well, grandmother," she said a little too heartily. "I want you to behave yourself now."

"Oh, don't worry about me," Sarah said.

Ellen stood in the center of the room and she knew that the next time she stood there the old woman would be dead. It might be years but it would not do to come here again. Now that the time was gone she wanted to ask Sarah a thousand questions. She remembered the rage she used to fly into when her mother told her that she looked like Sarah. She was bigger, of course, but there was a resemblance.

The cab horn beeped, and Ellen leaned down and kissed Sarah on the mouth. "Good-bye," she said. "Now you can take your nap."

Sarah nodded and closed her eyes. There was no need for more effort. With a wave of her hand to Mrs. Green, Ellen picked up her bag and went out, closing the door firmly behind her. For the first time she felt a relatedness to the old woman. And she knew she would worry no more about bad omens.

She moved away, full of a sense of proud accomplishment and as she walked down the narrow cement path a strange half-wild exultation struck her and it was as though she were a young girl again and swinging high, high, high toward the highest green branches of a great tree. She handed the suitcase to the driver and eased sideways into the back seat of the cab.

The cab pulled away from the curb and she let herself relax and give way to the pull of motion. She had felt this way before and she tried to remember. She could almost glimpse the memory and then it dodged and twisted languidly away. It was like feeling in dreams she sometimes had — a sense of having been on the scene of this dream once before. Usually she felt vexed when a memory fell away but now she watched her own attempts to remember with a kind of detached amusement.

The cab turned into Meridian street and she slid a little in the seat toward the window. As she righted herself she caught the sight of her own eyes in the rear vision mirror of the cab. The flood of remembrance came a second after she saw her eyes startle and narrow. She was awakening in the delivery room and she saw her face in the mirror reflectors. Her arms were still 56

strapped to the table and, one leg bent, she was indolentlv moving her knee back and forth as though she were lying on a beach in warm sand. How big my eyes are, she had thought. I never knew I had such large eyes. And then she had looked across the room and seen, for the first time, her newborn child.

Ah, yes, she thought, I have been there before. And slipping her right hand inside her jacket, she placed her palm against her left side and felt the surging pulse of her exultant heart.

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EDITOR'S COMMENTARY

Autumn brings so many pleasant events to us all. Among them is the opportunity to take a brisk walk on a sunny day, idly scattering leaves as we search for a secluded, warm spot to read a few lines in a good book.

May we hope that you get a measure of enjoyment out of reading this Autumn issue of QUARTO? Our stories have been selected with your entertainment in mind. There has been no desire to burden you with the petty quarrels, animosities, jealousies and frustrations of authors who believe that the world revolves around hate, mistrust and gloom.

We realize that all is not sweetness and light, but, at the same time, we know that many of life's stories have happy endings.

These selections do not run in the "Pollyanna" or "Horatio Alger" vein but are written to leave you in bon naturel.

It is customary to speed the departing editors and staff on with high praise and best wishes. In this instance, it is not custom, but heartfelt desire.

Robert Cluett is now in the Coast Guard after devoting all his spare time to the new magazine. Glen Foster had to relinquish his position under the pressure of finishing school, managing his fraternity house and preparing for the forthcoming Atlantic Cup Race. Thanks again.

Judy Bishop has a section all her own for poetry this year amid our new fiction editor's — Armand J. Ferretti — selections.

I would like to thank each one of the many girls and boys from Columbia, Barnard, Texas U., Stamford, Alabama, Manhattanville, Boston U., Universities of Chicago and Miami, who worked so hard as circulation assistants.

Comments and thanks concluded; HARRY PRINCE COMBS, JR.

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FICTION CONTRIBUTORS CHARLES E. FOSTER attended short story classes of Martha Foley and John R. Humphreys in General Studies. He also studied at Teachers College before teaching junior high school in southern Florida.

ROBERT CHAMBLEE was born in Starr, South Carolina, which was his home until he was drafted into the Army. Since returning from Europe in 1952, where he served as a first lieutenant with the unit establishing the Army's communication zone in France, he has lived in New York where, God and the Army willing (he is in the ORC), he will stay. Mr. Chamblee is a writing major at Columbia University, and his Stick Stack Stander is another Quarto first.

WILLIAM EASTLAKE who was bom in New York, raised in New Jersey and California wrote for some of the smaller magazines in Europe after his separation from the Army. He now has a small cattle ranch in New Mexico where he writes for Accent, Hudson Review and Harpers.

JACK PARR was born in Chicago in 1928, moved to Winnipeg, Canada, when he was ten and received his education at the University of Manitoba. He is now living in London with his wife. Quarto is pleased to be the first to publish a story by Mr. Parr.

ROSANNE SMITH ROBINSON a graduate of Northwestern and a student in Helen Hulls', Dr. Mabel Robinson's and Martha Foley's short story classes at G.S., Miss Robinson has had stories published in Harpers' Bazaar, Cosmopolitan, Charm and Epoch.

The Harpers' Bazaar story, The Mango Tree, has been reprinted in The Best American Short Stories 1954.

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POETRY CONTRIBUTORS WINIFRED HUNT - Miss Hunt's poem, August In An Orchard, the editors felt to be unusually fine. She is a resident of New York City.

MORRIS GOLUB - Mr. Golub lives in the Bronx, New York City.

JANE ESTY — Recently married, Mrs. Lett also lives in New York. She has been published in the Vassar Review and is now working on a book of poems.

SY SYNA — Mr. Syna was an Army reporter in Korea. He now is studying for his M.A. in Dramatic Arts at Columbia University.

He has had a play produced at the Pasadena Playhouse where he studied for several years.

•J

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY SUMMER SESSION July 5 to August 12, 1955 Registration, June 30 and July 1

COURSES IN WRITING SHORT STORY NON-FICTION TELEVISION AND RADIO

WRITER'S CONFERENCE July 18 to August 4 Speakers will include well-known novelists, short story writers, poets, playwrights, authors of non-fiction books and articles, representatives from radio and television studios, and publishers and editors.

All courses are subject to the conditions and regulations stated in the Summer Session Bulletin of Information which may be obtained on written request to the Office of University Admissions, Columbia University, New York 27, N. Y.