The Haunted Life Page 4

  “That was reason enough for Wesley.” Mr. Martin relit his cigar slowly. “He was driving, so he felt responsible for everything that happened. The Copley girl’s face was smashed up. Young Wilson lost a couple of fingers. Wesley himself wasn’t hurt much, which made it worse for his conscience. He was a sensitive lad . . .”

  Aunt Marie leaned forward in her chair. “Why, Helen Copley looks just as good as ever today. Her scars healed up in a year’s time.”

  “Yep, I guess . . .” Mr. Martin sighed heavily. “I guess Wesley’s leaving home was just a matter of time anyway. The accident, and the remorse that followed it, only saw to it that he went off a few years ahead of schedule. Restless boy, he was, like all the Martins. Why, my brother Frank . . .”

  “Helen Copley’s married today and has children. She has a lovely husband. I wrote and told Wesley a dozen times, but he doesn’t seem to listen.”

  Aunt Marie bit her lip and went on. “He had no true reason for leaving a good home and going off as he did—at seventeen, for the love of God—a child . . .”

  “It was in the cards,” said Mr. Martin. “He was restless, like all the Martins. And I guess he’s done alright for himself . . . those seaman make good money and live in the open. By God,” Mr. Martin grinned slyly, “by God, I’ve always wanted to travel around the world in a freighter myself.”

  “But it’s so dangerous now,” objected Aunt Marie. “Don’t you read the papers? The Germans are sinking all the ships, American or otherwise. Soon there may be war and . . .”

  “Wesley’ll get more pay,” piped in Peter, almost enthusiastically. “They pay them big bonuses for taking the submarine risk.”

  “I don’t care how much they pay them,” insisted Aunt Marie in the face of the grinning males, both of whom were now launched on thoughts of the sea. “Human life is more important than money. I expect Wesley to come home someday, the poor child, when he gets a chance; and I want him to come home all in one piece. I’m only saying what his poor mother would have said.”

  In the silence that followed, in the middle of a pause on the radio, a large June moth smashed headlong into the screen and dropped in a dizzy flutter on the windowpane. The McCarthy dog barked from down the street. The Western sky was a cool pale blue, made alive by one dazzling silver star.

  “He’s seeing the world,” went on Mr. Martin, extending a monologue he’d been having with himself. “That’s more than I can say for myself. Selling insurance in this town wasn’t so bad in the old days. I liked it. But now,” he smashed the arm of the chair with a big fist, “now Galloway’s getting to be a crumbhole! Every store downtown that was ever worth a cent or two is now being run by Jews! And if not Jews, Greeks and Armenians! The Wops are pouring in from Lawrence and Haverhill! I tell you, I’m glad Wesley cleared out of this town; sometimes I wonder if he wasn’t the smartest of the bunch.”

  “Don’t start that again,” cried Aunt Marie almost savagely.

  Martin stared at her as though she were some indescribable creature from Mars.

  “Women,” he yelled, “never knew and never will know a damned thing! Right under your big nose this country is going to the dogs, and you want me to shut up! Good God Almighty, your brains don’t add up, I think, to more than a teaspoonful of sawdust!”

  “You don’t have to yell!”

  “Why not? This is my house, isn’t it? If the neighbors don’t like it, they can all go to hell!”

  Peter walked to the kitchen for a glass of water and snickered gleefully.

  “You can’t sell these foreigners a policy,” his father was shouting, “without having to sign your life’s blood away. They don’t know what a man’s word means—where they come from everybody is so damn dishonest and downright crooked they all have to sleep with one eye open. They don’t know a thing about America and the way people live here, and yet here they come! Here they come by the boatloads! Why the hell didn’t they stay in their cheesy European towns? Why the hell don’t they go back? When will they learn that the American people don’t want them here? Will we have to ship them back, ass baggage and all, before they find out we don’t want them here?”

  Chuckling mildly at the outburst, Aunt Marie now lit another Fatima and settled back with her reading. Peter was standing in the doorway.

  Martin suddenly remembered. “What time is it?”

  “Three minutes past nine.”

  “Fibber McGee!” cried Mr. Martin, jumping out of the chair. “Missed part of it!”

  Peter’s kid sister Diane came in from the front porch carrying her high school books. She dashed across the room toward the living room, calling: “Aunt Marie, did you make some lemonade tonight?”

  “It’s on the icebox.”

  Diane, in a neat blouse and skirt, her brown hair falling straight down to the shoulders, rummaged furiously through the living room buffet drawer. Peter watched her from the doorway, toothpick in mouth.

  “What you looking for?”

  “None of your business.”

  Annoyed, Peter said: “Huh! Big stuff now that you’re finished with Junior year.” Diane did not reply.

  Aunt Marie called: “Diane, I thought you said rehearsals would end in time for supper?”

  “Didn’t! Miss Merriom wanted us to make up for lost time. I ate at Jacqueline’s house.”

  “Quiet!” yelled Mr. Martin. “I want to hear this program.”

  Diane emerged from the living room with a dangle of blue ribbon. She said, “Rose said she was coming with Billie tonight.”

  “I know,” mumbled Aunt Marie. “She should be here any minute.”

  “Rose!” exploded Mr. Martin.

  “Yes, Rose, my daughter Rose. Did you ever hear of her?” taunted Aunt Marie.

  “She’ll bring the kid! I’ll never hear the program! Goddamnit! He cries like a baby!”

  “He is a baby.”

  Peter, grinning, went out to the screened porch and sat in the creaking hammock. It was a chilly night, thick with odorous dew, swarming with stars and cricket sounds. The radio blared behind; across the street, in the cluster of trees where he had played as a boy, fireflies blinked erratically. Over the cooling fields toward the Merrimac River a train whistle howled.

  ROSE LARGAY, Aunt Marie’s only daughter, came at quarter past nine with her four-year-old son, Billie, and her neighbor, Maggie Sidelinker, a newlywed bride. Mr. Martin took refuge on the screened porch with Diane’s portable radio; and Peter escaped up to his room, turned on the reading lamp and slumped in a sagging leather easy chair with Patterns for Living. It was hot in the room from the latent heat of a sunblazing June afternoon. A June bug raged at the bay window screen. Peter could hear the portable from the porch where his father sat, an exile from the front room with its flurry of gossip and smells of sticky lollipops and women.

  “Young Writer Remembering Chicago.” Peter read slowly, admiring the young Halper’s tragic sense of youth and lonesomeness. “My arms are heavy, I’ve got the blues; there’s a locomotive in my chest and that’s a fact.”

  Peter leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes, and tried to visualize the young Albert Halper in a cheap rooming house in Manhattan, his arms heavy, his spirit driven and wearied by a heavy, vital drive. Someday, he, Peter, would rent a cheap room in Manhattan, and sit in a chair to stare at the flecked plaster wall. There would be the fundamental challenges of reality! There he would be pitted against the problems of the spirit (and of the stomach), a lonely youth, friendless in the great city, whose chief occupation would be that of ferreting out whatever beauty was left to be seen and smelled and touched and felt. A mission of that sort, appealing to the romantic instincts he knew he had inherited from something essentially American in his boyhood, held a billion fertile possibilities. He must try that sometime! There were many jobs to be had in New York . . . all the way down to dishwashing. Suppose he were to go to New York someday, get a job washing dishes in a big hotel, and it turned out that his fellow dishwashers wer
e (1) a discontented Communist, (2) a careless vagabond from New Orleans, and (3) a young artist seeking to sell his watercolors. What a world of promise New York must hold!

  Here in Galloway—

  Peter kneeled at the bay window and looked out at the summer night. Down by the corner the streetlight shone, illuminating the front porch of Dick Sheffield’s house. Beyond, over a cluster of homes partly buried in heavy oak and maple foliage—with soft squares of gold light falling from parlor windows onto green lawns—in the hazy summer night distance, the lights of downtown Galloway glowed, topped by the gangling red-lighted frame of the WGLH radio station antenna.

  Straight across the street, a cluster of trees, and beyond, the field where the boys played ball, rolling toward the railroad tracks and the river. Silent night fields, with perhaps a couple or two strolling in search of thick bramble.

  Down toward the other corner, where the streetlamp illumined a heavy, rustling mass of foliage and threw a faint glow across the street to the rambling McCarthy house. Light from the McCarthy porch.

  Such was Galloway. What could a man do in a burg like this? What cultural opportunities flowered, what learning and art flourished here?

  The smell?

  Field smell, flower smell, and the smell of cooling black tar in the night. The air misty and drooping with its weight of odors, the river’s moist gust of breeze, the rotting cherry blossoms in the backyard, and the strong green smell of tree leaves trembling against the bay window screen.

  The sounds?

  Peter held his breath to listen . . . the voices of the McCarthys drinking lemonade on their porch. The radio next door, Mary Quigley and her girlfriend from Riverside St., dancing to a soothing Bob Eberly ballad in the living room littered with new and old recordings. The McCarthy dog barking at the kids who slink by in the dark playing gangsters or cowboys or maybe war.

  Again the train . . . moving north to Montreal . . . howling long and hoarse, a mournful night sound . . .

  Silence now for a moment . . . and the river hush, and the trembling of tree leaves. Far across the field, over the tracks and over to the boulevard across the river, where the cars move endlessly back and forth from the city to the ice cream road stands, the fried clam restaurants, the pink-lit roadhouses all crowded with shuffling dancers, the faint beep of klaxons returns.

  Now the sound of crickets, and that old bullfrog from the reeds in Haley’s Creek. And Pop’s Fibber McGee program from below on the porch, the audience crashing with sudden laughter. And Aunt Marie, Cousin Rose, her little brat, her friend, and Diane bubbling about trifles in the parlor; high laughter . . .

  As such, Galloway—

  PETER GOT UP off his knees and stood surveying his room, idly lighting a fresh cigarette. It was a small but useful room, useful in the sense that it fitted his personality. Peter was the “den-type.” He wanted a place to retreat to, a place—a room—containing certain necessities which he felt, as perhaps an Alaskan trapper might feel, would be near at hand in an emergency unpredictable in length. Here were stored his rations of the spirit . . . books, a typewriter, paper, pencils and pens, envelopes, old letters, recent letters, mementos of childhood and boyhood, scrapbooks containing pertinent clippings and notebooks containing impertinent remarks, clusters of junk bearing no relation to one another and long out of purpose—pieces of colored crayon and chalk, marbles and migs, buttons, Yale locks, rolls of tape and string, seashore rocks and shells, matchbooks filled with assortments of tacks and small magnets and bottle caps, pieces of elastic and bunting, empty inkbottles, old keys: all the minutiae a lad collects and, when he is fortunate enough, keeps, as a trinket-link with the always golden past.

  Of a more singular nature, Peter here also hoarded the cunning achievements of his boyhood—a large slat-ribbed box overflowing with notebooks and stacks of paper now yellowed and crinkling. These notebooks contained systematic records of his imaginary “events” . . . a complicated system of nations, and their wars and sports, with appropriate native historian’s bombast, mellow sentimentality, elaborate detail, and proud, neat script. Thousands of names were buried in this slat-ribbed box, names culled from phonebooks for personalities of high or low estate conjured from the mind of boyhood . . . kings of nations, the official maps of which were preserved in great cracking scrolls; giants of the battlefield whose achievements dwarfed, as can be expected, the Napoleons; athletes of mellow renown, whose exploits were eked out in a hundred thousand hours bent over an arrangement of marbles and sticks and stacks of paraphernalia incomprehensible, of course, to anyone but Peter Martin forever. Here were files upon files, painstakingly accurate, recording forever in the boy’s mind the fruits of a weird but original imagination.

  And then there were the first watercolors, stiff landscapes, the inevitable island with palm leaning over the surf at sunset, the riotously green trees and mad blues and purples of sky and water. And the first novel . . . printed by hand in a notebook, a hundred pages on the adventures of “Jack” with illustrations. And the countless strips of cartoon drawings, extending adventure upon adventure to the square-jawed, pipe-smoking, angularly built hero, “Bart Lawson” or “Secret Operative K-11.”

  Too, the attempts at humor . . . the morbidly ridiculous little cartoon character who forever gets in trouble and is not funny at all, but somehow vaguely insane. All of this, and more . . . piles of handwritten “daily newspapers,” telling of the news in a loud and insolent voice; containing editorials which somehow resemble real grown-up editorials, strangely enough, in that they strain to fill up the allotted space and say nothing worth one line of the news itself. And, of course, diaries abounding with temperament, stoic admissions of ennui, and gleefully excited eyewitness reports of flood, fire, and hurricane.

  Along with this—and everything else—Peter had stored in his den all the old toys, bats-balls-and-gloves, puppy love presents and rings, and photographs necessary to round out the wholeness of his past.

  Now, on top of this stratum with its deep undercurrents—fecund and psychological—of boyhood, Peter had and was amassing a new private civilization. He had a radio-phonograph, complete with a growing collection of classical, swing, and jazz records. The music covered a wide field, from Gershwin with his romantic hint of far Manhattan, or back to Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw—whose rhythms excited the present younger generation and prepared them, or at least Peter and a few scattered others, for the serious side of the new music, call it jazz or swing, which culminated in the highly complicated and quite profound melodic improvisations of soloists Coleman Hawkins, Roy Eldridge, and Lester Young to mention a few, Negroes all, to whom the music actually belonged—and over to Delius, whose haunting lyrics struck Peter at first hearing (something compatibly mystic in his nature) and paved the way for an appreciation of like moderns, Debussy, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Shostakovich; which in turn developed the senses, groomed and prepared them, for the masters themselves—Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, Brahms.

  Foremost on Peter’s bookshelf, that is standing on the top in an elite group, were Thoreau, Homer, the Bible, Melville’s Moby Dick, Ulysses, Thomas Wolfe, Shakespeare, Whitman, Faust, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy. On the next shelf, Peter had relegated several authors of more than passing interest to him, but of less than passing interest, he feared, to Homer-Bible-Shakespeare and company. These flickering lights included William Saroyan, Sherwood Anderson, Albert Halper, and a few other whimsical favorites such as Rupert Brooke, Carl Sandburg, and Edna St. Vincent Millay—and the Hemingway–Fitzgerald–Dos Passos group.

  In a pile on the desk lay Peter’s periodical reading, a smattering of liberal publications running from The Nation on—or back, or up or down—to New York’s daily PM and over the side to the New Masses and whatever few copies of the Daily Worker he was able to pick up. These he read a great deal puzzled—but he read with intent to learn. He mistrusted political texts, preferred glancing simultaneously at two divergently opinionated organs to get each side’s o
pinion of the other, and thus achieve a glimpse of motives, split propaganda from fact, and try to understand the issue as it was. In this vein, he often sought opinions on the same subject in the two papers PM and Hearst’s Boston Daily Record. Here he found people at each other’s throats and wondered mildly—with his eye searching for motives, even for the vital motive behind the motives—what warranted such agitation.

  Above the old working desk were emblems also representative of Peter’s present life—a Boston College banner and a brilliant constellation of track medals of honor. This display, sophomoric though it was, served mainly to identify—in this strange bedlam of a room—a phase of Peter’s life. The room’s purpose justified the conceit. It told the legend of his scholarship at Boston College, partly athletic and partly scholastic, while the large “44” indicated he had completed his freshman year.

  These, in part, were the objects which lived in Peter’s room, and which more or less manifested his life up to the summer of 1941. On to Africa as an explorer, and return with a Kenyan’s spear, and he would lean it in a corner to show for that. With satisfaction and a pride touched with humor, Peter thus surveyed his room.

  It was furnished not the way he would have desired, however; it bore Aunt Marie’s daily touch. The wallpaper suggested a nursery or a playroom, it was that bright and flowery. The new bookcase she had replaced the old brown one with had that new varnished maple look that seemed somehow unintellectual—more, unscholarly. The curtains sang with sunshine and joy, the quilted rug before the dresser needed only an angora kitten playing with a ball of darning.

  But the old brown leather easy chair was still there, and the littered desk with the stuffed pigeonholes, the dusty big typewriter, the spare simple floor lamp, the old-fashioned living room chair with wooden back and leather seat, and the old iron bedstead with its brown paint chipping off to show an older integument of scholar’s brown—these remained; and somehow, Aunt Marie’s light and cheerful touch did not do too much harm. Her bright, neat spirit hovered over the stuffy brownness, vowing dust and disrepair could never turn this room, in spite of its stiff bookshelvean resistance, into a Faustian dungeon. This was a secure thought for one who lived in, but was not responsible entirely for, a room.