A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

Then, around the time he was entering his teens, his father finally got tired of her marathon, around-the-clock drinking and threw her out of the house. Paradoxically, he no sooner had than he started drinking heavily himself. He lost his job, and Don had to support the two of them by whatever means he could, working as a grocery delivery-boy and anything else he could rummage up. When he was seventeen his father finally had to be taken away to an institution. And that about ended all further family-life, as far as Don was concerned.

The rest, for the ten-odd years or so that followed until he met Marie, was just humdrum but honest hard work. Little rooms in rooming-houses run by motherly women (who sometimes washed and hung his socks for him while he was at work). No real friends, just the men he worked alongside. No individual girls, just an occasional transient, without any commitment.

And that was he, the part she didn’t know.

A curious sort of regression seemed to have taken place in him during the course of the simple, plaintive little recital; she couldn’t tell whether it was just in her imagination or not. He seemed to have grown younger. He seemed less mature than he had at the start. Whether in mien, or posture, or whether it was because of the substance of what he’d been telling her, she couldn’t divine. When he’d first begun, he’d been sitting there adult, casual, self-sure, hand curled at case on table, cigarette spiking its knuckles. By the time he was done, he was huddled like an awkward, abashed boy, hunched forward over his lap, hands limply linked as if to wring them, feet slanted toward each other on the floor, toe to toe. He harassedly brushed some hair that wasn’t there back from his forehead.

She felt a sudden urge to put her arms around him and hold him to her, and she couldn’t understand it, it almost frightened her a little, for she knew it wasn’t love, the mutual love of the equal for the equal, but something else. And how could she, anyone like she, have any of the maternal in her?

But as a matter of fact, even in the larger, over-all picture, something parallel to this had been going on, unobtrusively but steadily, almost from the time she’d first known him. That first day on the sidewalk, her quick, confused impression of him had been that of a seasoned, hard-bitten man, who knew the score, who knew what he was doing, every move of it; who threw a punch and then calmly walked her off with him. Not a word wasted, not a motion wasted.

Then, as she got to know him better, as the artichoke-leaves of his heart slowly peeled off one by one beneath her tender, prying fingers, he seemed to become younger, or at least less mature, all the time. This wasn’t a physical thing, a thing of appearance, it was more a matter of outlook, of attitude, of occasional remarks and unguarded responses and unpremeditated reactions, the pattern of the personality.

There were even times when she felt as if she were the older of the two, which was absurd of course.

It came at last, and when it came it came quite impromptu, as everything between them had so far.

They were out walking together, aimlessly, contentedly, the crowd streaming all around them, their hands hanging loosely down between them, just linked by their hooked pinkeys.

“Know something?” he said.

“No, what?”

“Gee, I’d like to be married to you.”

Her face blazed with joy like a bonfire. “You would!”

Then she saw that he was waiting for more than that, so she gave it to him. “I’d like to be married to you too, Don.”

And that was all there was to it. There went her balcony-scene, her suitor on bended knee, her moonlight, mandolins and magnolias.

They just stopped and stood there where they were, pressed close to each other but not embracing, he looking down into her eyes, she looking up into his, his hands resting on her shoulders, hers within the crook of his arms. The people coursing by had to split into two streams to pass them, then came together again farther on. One or two noticed them and smiled. Most of them didn’t even see them.

They only said two things in all that time they stood there.

They said, “Don.”

They said, “Marie.”

That night, alone in her room, alone in her bed, alone with her happiness, for the first lime that little black speck, that single cinder in all the immensity of her serene blue sky, started to whirl nearer, to enlarge, to elongate like the black funnel-cloud of an onrushing tornado into the semblance of a looming, brow beating exclamation-point.

Something inside her kept saying, I’ve got to tell him, now that we’re going to get married. I can’t marry him without telling him.

But something else, less dogmatic or maybe just less brave, answered: “Or can I? Others have, and gotten away with it. Why can’t I?”