The Torch by Kohn Cheever . Full Short Story

TORCH SONG BY JOHN CHEEVER**************************************************** After Jack Lorey had known Joan Harris in New York for a few years, he began to think of her as The Widow* She always wore black, and he was always given the feeling, by a curious disorder in her apartment, that the under* takers had just left. This impression did not stem from malice on his part, for he was fond of Joan. They came from the same city in Ohio and had readied New York at about the same time in the middle thirties. They were the same age, and during their first summer in the city they used to meet after work and drink Martinis in places like the Brevoort and Charles’, and have dinner and play check­ers at the Lafayette. Joan went to a school for models when she settled in the dty, but it turned out that she photographed badly, so after spending six weeks learning now to walk with a book on her head she got a job as a hostess in a Longchamps. For the rest of the summer she stood by the hatrack, bathed in an intense pink light and the string music of heart­break, swinging her mane of dark hair and her black skirt as she moved forward to greet the customers. She was then a big, handsome girl with a wonderful voice, and her face, her whole presence, always seemed infused with a gentle and healthy pleasure at ner surroundings, whatever they were. She was innocently and incorrigibly convivial, and would get out of bed and dress at three in the morning if someone called her and asked her to come out for a drink, as Jack often did. In the fall, she got some kind of fresh­man executive job in a department store. They saw less and less of each other and then for quite a while stopped seeing each other altogether. Jack was living with a girl he bad met at a party, and it never occurred to him to wonder what had become of Joan. Jack’s girl had some friends in Pennsylvania, and in the spring and summer of his second year in town he often went there with her for weekends. All of this—the shared apartment in the Village, the illicit relationship, the Fri­day-night train to a country house—were what he had imagined life in New York to be, and he was intensely happy. He was returning to New York with his girl one Sunday night on the Lehigh line. It was one of those trains that move slowly across the face of New Jersey, bringing back to the city hundreds of people, like the victims of an immense and strenuous picnic, whose faces are blazing and whose muscles are lame. Jack and his girl, like most of the other passengers, were overburdened with vegeta­bles and flowers. When the train stopped in Pennsylvania Station, they moved with the crowd along the platform, toward the escalator. As they were passing the wide, lighted windows of the diner, Jack turned his head and saw Joan. It was the first time he had seen her since Thanksgiving, or since Christmas. He couldn’t remember. Joan was with a man who had obviously passed out His , head was in his arms on the table, and an overturned high­ball glass was near one of his elbows. Joan was shaking his shoulders gently and speaking to him. She seemed to be vaguely troubled, vaguely amused. The waiters had cleared off all the other tables and were standing around Joan, waiting for her to resurrect her escort It troubled Jack to see in these straits a girl who reminded him of the trees and the lawns of his home town, but there was nothing he could do to help. Joan continued to shake the man’s shoulders, and the crowd pressed Jack past one after an­other of the diner’s windows, past the malodorous kitchen, and up the escalator. He saw Joan again, later that summer, when he was having dinner in a Village restaurant. He was with a new girl, a Southerner. There were many Southern girls in the city that year. Jack and his belle had wandered into the restaurant because it was convenient, but the food was terrible and the place was lighted with candles. Halfway through dinner, Jack noticed Joan on the other side of the room, and when he had finished eating, he crossed the room and spoke to her. She was with a tall man who was wearing a monocle. He stood, bowed stiffly from the waist, and said to Jack, "We are very pleased to meet you.” Then he excused himself and headed for the toilet. "He’s a count, he’s a Swedish count,” Joan said. "He’s on the radio, Friday afternoons at four-fifteen. Isn’t it exciting?” She seemed to be delighted with the count and the terrible restaurant. Sometime the next winter, Jack moved from the Village to an apartment in the East Thirties. He was crossing Park Avenue one cold morning on his way to the office when he noticed, in the crowd, a woman he had met a few times at Joan’s apartment. He spoke to her and asked about his friend. “Haven’t you heard?” she said. She pulled a long face. “Perhaps I’d better tell you. Perhaps you can help.” She and Jack had breakfast in a drugstore on Madison Avenue and she unburdened herself of the story. The count had a program called “The Song of the Fiords,” or something like that, and he sang Swedish folk songs. Everyone suspected him of being a fake, but that didn’t bother Joan. He had met her at a party and, sensing a soft touch, had moved in with her the following night. About a week later, he complained of pains in ms back and said he must have some morphine. Then he needed morphine all the time. If he didn't get morphine, he was abusive and violent Joan began to deal with those doctors and druggists who peddle dope, and when they wouldn’t supply her, she went down to the bottom of the city. Her friends were afraid she would be found some morning stuffed in a drain. She got pregnant. She had an abortion. The count left her and moved to a flea bag near Times Square, but she was so impressed by then with his helpless­ness, so afraid that he would die without her, that she followed him there and shared his room and continued to buy his narcotics. He abandoned her again, and Joan waited a week for him to return before she went back to her place and her friends in the Village. It shocked Jack to think of the innocent girl from Ohio having lived with a brutal dope addict and traded with criminals, and when he got to ms office that morning, he telephoned her and made a date for dinner that night He met her at Charles’. When she came into the bar, she seemed as wholesome and calm as ever. Her voice was sweet and reminded him of elms, of lawns, of those glass --- arrangements that used to be hung from porch ceilings to tinkle in the summer wind. She told him about the count She spoke of him charitably and with no trace of bitter­ness, as if her voice, her disposition, were incapable of registering anything beyond simple affection and pleasure. Her walk, when she moved ahead of him toward their table, was light and graceful. She ate a large dinner and talked enthusiastically about her job. They went to a movie and said goodbye in front of her apartment house. That winter, Jack met a girl he decided to marry. Their engagement was announced in January and they planned to marry in July. In the spring, he received, in his office mail, an invitation to cocktails at Joan’s. It was for a Sat­urday when his fiancee was going to Massachusetts to visit her parents, and when the time came and he had nothing better to do, he took a bus to the Village. Joan had the same apartment. It was a walkup. You rang the bell above the mailbox in the vestibule and were answered with a death rattle in the lock. Joan lived on the third floor. Her calling card was in a slot on the mailbox, and above her name was written the name Hugh Bascomb. Jack climbed the two flights of carpeted stairs, and when he reached Joan’s apartment, she was standing by the open door in a black dress. After she greeted Jack, she took his arm and guided him across the room. “I want you to meet Hugh, Jack,” she said. Hugh was a big man with a red face and pale-blue eyes. His manner was courtly and his eyes were inflamed with drink. Jack talked with him for a little while and then went over to speak to someone he knew, who was standing by the mantelpiece. He noticed then, for the first time, the indescribable disorder of Joan’s apartment. The books were in their shelves and the furniture was reasonably good, but the place was all wrong, somehow. It was as if things had been put in place without thought or real interest, and for the first time, too, he had the impression that there had been a death there recently. As Jack moved around the room, he felt that he had met the ten or twelve guests at other parties. There was a woman executive with a fancy hat, a man who could imi­tate Roosevelt, a grim couple whose play was in rehearsal, and a newspaperman who kept turning on the radio for news of the Spanish Civil War. Jack drank Martinis and ~ talked with the woman in the fancy hat. He looked out of the window at the back yards and the ailanthus trees and heard, in the distance, thunder exploding off the cliffs of the Hudson. Hugh Bascomb got very drunk. He began to spill liquor, as if drinking, for him, were a kind of jolly slaughter and he enjoyed the bloodshed and the mess. He spilled whiskey from a bottle. He spilled a drink on his snirt and then tipped over someone else’s drink. The party was not quiet, but Hugh’s hoarse voice began to dominate the others. He attacked a photographer who was sitting in a corner ex­plaining camera techniques to a homely woman. “What aid you come to the party for if all you wanted to do was to sit there and stare at your shoes?” Hugh shouted. “What did you come for? Why don’t you stay at home?” Tne photographer didn't know what to say. He was not staring at his shoes. Joan moved lightly to Hugh’s side. “Please don’t get into a fight now, darling,” she said.“Not this afternoon.” “Shut up,” he said. “Let me alone. Mind your own busi­ness.” He lost his balance, and in struggling to steady him­self he tipped over a lamp. “Oh, your lovely lamp, Joan,” a woman sighed. “Lamps!” Hugh"roared. He threw his arms into the air and worked them around his head as if he were bludgeon­ing himself. “Lamps. Glasses. Cigarette boxes. Dishes. They're killing me. They’re killing me, for Christ’s sake. Let’s all go up to the mountains, for Christ's sake. Let’s all go up to the mountains and hunt and fish and live like men, for Christ’s sake.” People were scattering as if a rain had begun to fall in the room. It had, as a matter of fact, begun to rain outside. Someone offered Jack a ride uptown, and he jumped at the chance. Joan stood at the door, saying goodbye to her routed friends. Her voice remained soft, and her manner, unlike that of those Christian women who in the face of disaster can summon new and formidable sources of com­posure, seemed genuinely simple. She appeared to be ob­ livious of the raging drunk at her back, who was pacing up and down, grinding glass into the rug, and haranguing one of the survivors of the party with a story of how he, Hugh, had once gone without food for three weeks. In July, Jack was married in an orchard in Duxbury, and he and his wife went to West Chop for a few weeks. When they returned to town, their apartment was clut­tered with presents, including a dozen after-dinner coffee cups from Joan. His wife sent her the required note, but they did nothing else. Later in the summer, Joan telephoned Jack at his office and asked if he wouldn’t bring his wife to see her; she named an evening the following week. He felt guilty about not having called her, and accepted the invitation. This made his wife angry. She was an ambitious girl who liked a social life that offered rewards, and she went unwillingly to Joan’s Village apartment with him. Written above Joan’s name on the mailbox was the name Franz Denzel. Jack and his wife climbed the stairs and were met by Joan at the open door. They went into her apartment and found themselves among a group of people for whom Jack, at least, was unable to find any bearings. Franz Denzel was a middle-aged German. His face was pinched with bitterness or illness. He greeted Jack and his wife with that elaborate and clever politeness that is intended to make guests feel that they have come too early or too late. He insisted sharply upon Jack’s sitting in the chair in which he himself had been sitting, and then went and sat on a radiator. There were five other Germans sit­ting around the room, drinking coffee. In a corner was another American couple, who looked uncomfortable. Joan passed Jack and his wife small cups of coffee with whipped cream. "These cups belonged to Franz's mother," she said. “Aren't they lovely? They were the only things he took from Germany when he escaped from the Nazis." Franz turned to Jack and said, "Perhaps you will give us your opinion on the American educational system. That Is what we were discussing when you arrived.” Before Jack could speak, one of the German guests opened an attack on the American educational system. The other Germans joined in, and went on from there to describe every vulgarity that had impressed them in Amer­ican life and to contrast German and American culture generally. Where, they asked one another passionately, could you find in America anything like the Mitropa din­ing cars, the Black Forest, the pictures in Munich, the music in Bayreuth? Franz and his friends began speaking in German. Neither Jack nor his wife nor Joan could un­derstand German, and the other American couple had not opened their mouths since they were introduced. Joan went happily around the room, filling everyone’s cup with coffee, as if the music of a foreign language were enough to make an evening for her. Jack drank five cups of coffee. He was desperately un­comfortable. Joan went into the kitchen while the Ger­mans were laughing at their German jokes, and he hoped she would return with some drinks, but when she came back, it was with a tray of ice cream and mulberries. "Isn't this pleasant?” Franz asked, speaking in English again. Joan collected the coffee cups, and as she was about to take them back to the kitchen, Franz stopped her. "Isn’t one of those cups chipped?” "No, darling,” Joan said. “I never let the maid touch them. I wash them myself.” , „ „ "What's that?” he asked, pointing at the rim of one of the cups. "That’s the cup that’s always been chipped, darling. It was chipped when you unpacked it. You noticed it then.” “These things were perfect when they arrived in this country,” he said. Joan went into the kitchen and he followed her. Jack tried to make conversation with the Germans. From the kitchen there was the sound of a blow and a cry. Frame returned and began to eat his mulberries greedily. Joan came back with her dish of ice cream. Her voice was gentle. Her tears, if she had been crying, had dried as quickly as the tears of a child. Jack and his wife finished their ice cream and made their escape. The wasted and unnerving evening enraged Jack’s wife, and he supposed that he would never see Joan again. Jack’s wife got pregnant early in the fall, and she seized on all the prerogatives of an expectant mother. She took long naps, ate canned peaches in the middle of the night, and talked about the rudimentary kidney. She chose to see only other couples who were expecting children, and the parties that she and Jack gave were temperate. The baby, a boy, was born in May, and Jack was very proud and happy. The first party he and his wife went to after her convalescence was the wedding of a girl whose family Jack had known in Ohio. The wedding was at St. James’, and afterward there was a big reception at the River Club. There was an orchestra dressed like Hungarians, and a lot of champagne and Scotch. Toward the end of the afternoon, Jack was walk­ing down a dim corridor when he heard Joan’s voice. “Please don’t, darling,” she was saying. “You’ll break my arm. Please don’t, darling.” She was being pressed against the wall by a man who seemed to be twisting her arm. As soon as they saw Jack, the struggle stopped. All three of them were intensely embarrassed. Joan’s face was wet and she made an effort to smile through her tears at Jack. He said hello and went on without stopping. When he re­turned, she and the man had disappeared. When Jack’s son was less than two years old, his wife flew with the baby to Nevada to get a divorce. Jack gave her the apartment and all its furnishings and took a room in a hotel near Grand Central. His wife got her decree in due course, and the story was in the newspapers. Jack had a telephone call from Joan a few days later. “I’m awfully sorry to hear about your divorce, Jack,” she said. “She seemed like such a nice girl. But that wasn’t what I called you about. I want your help, and I wondered if you could come down to my place tonight around six. It’s something I don't want to talk about over the phone.” He went obediently to the Village that night and climbed the stairs. Her apartment was a mess. The pic­tures and the curtains were down and the books were in boxes. “You moving, Joan?” he asked. "That's what I wanted to see you about, Jack. First, I’ll give you a drink.” She made two Old-Fashioneds. “I’m being evicted, Jack,” she said. “I'm being evicted because I’m an immoral woman. The couple who have the apart­ment downstairs—they’re charming people, I’ve always thought—have told the real-estate agent that I’m a drunk and a prostitute and all kinds of things. Isn’t that fan­tastic? This real-estate agent has always been so nice to me that I didn’t think he’d believe them, but he’s cancelled my lease, and if I make any trouble, he’s threatened to take the matter up with the store, and I don’t want to lose my job. This nice real-estate agent won’t even talk with me any more. When I go over to the office, the receptionist leers at me as if I were some kind of dreadful woman. Of course, there have been a lot of men here and we some­times are noisy, but I can't be expected to go to bed at ten every night. Can I? Well, the agent who manages this building has apparently told all the other agents in the neighborhood that I’m an immoral and drunken woman, and none of them will give me an apartment. I went in to talk with one man—he seemed to be such a nice old gentle­man—and he made me an indecent proposal. Isn’t it fan­tastic? I have to be out of here on Thursday and I’m liter­ally being turned out into the street.” Joan seemed as serene and innocent as ever while she described this scourge of agents and neighbors. Jack lis­tened carefully for some sign of indignation or bitterness or even urgency in her recital, but there was none. He was reminded of a torch song, of one of those forlorn and touching ballads that had been sung neither for him nor for her but for their older brothers and sisters by Marion Harris. Joan seemed to be singing her wrongs. “They’ve made my life miserable,” she went on quietly. “If I keep the radio on after ten o’clock, they telephone 66 Torek Song the agent in the morning and tell him I had some kind of orgy here. One night when Phillip—I don't think you've met Phillip; he’s in the Royal Air Force; he’s gone back to England—one night when Phillip and some other peo- pie were here, they called the police. The police came Dursting in the door and talked to me as if I were I don't know what and then looked in the bedroom. If they think there’s a man up here after midnight, they call me on the telephone and say all kinds of disgusting things. Of course, I can put my furniture into storage and go to a hotel, I guess. I guess a hotel will take a woman with my kind of reputation, but I thought perhaps you might know of an apartment. I thought—” It angered Jack to think of this big, splendid girl’s being persecuted by her neighbors, and he said he would do what he could. He asked her to have dinner with him, but she said she was busy. Having nothing better to do, Jack decided to walk up­town to his hotel. It was a hot night. The sky was overcast; Chi his way, he saw a parade in a dark side street off Broad­way near Madison Square. All the buildings in the neigh­borhood were dark. It was so dark that he could not see the placards the marchers carried until he came to a street light. Their signs urged the entry of the United States into the war, and each platoon represented a nation that had been subjugated by the Axis powers. They marched up Broadway, as he watched, to no music, to no sound but their own steps on the rough cobbles. It was for the most part an army of elderly men and women—Poles, Nor­wegians, Danes, Jews, Chinese. A few idle people like him­self lined the sidewalks, and the marchers passed between them with all the self-consciousness of enemy prisoners. There were children among them dressed in the costumes in which they had, for the newsreels, presented the Mayor with a package of tea, a petition, a protest, a constitution, a check, or a pair of tickets. They hobbled through the darkness of the loft neighborhood like a mortified and destroyed people, toward Greeley Square. In the morning, Jack put the problem of finding an apartment for Joan up to his secretary. She started phon­ing real-estate agents, and by afternoon she had found a couple of available apartments in the West Twenties. Joan called Jack the next day to say that she had taken one of the apartments and to thank him. Jack didn't see Joan again until the following summer. It was a Sunday evening; he had left a cocktail party in a Washington Square apartment and had decided to walk a few blocks up Fifth Avenue before he took a bus. As he was passing the Brevoort, Joan called to him. She was with a man at one of the tables on the sidewalk. She looked cool and fresh, and the man appeared to be respectable. His name, it turned out, was Pete Bristol. He invited Jack to sit down and join in a celebration. Germany had invaded Russia that weekend, and Joan and Pete were drinking champagne to celebrate Russia's changed position in the war. The three of them drank champagne until it got dark. They had dinner and drank champagne with their dinner. They drank more champagne afterward and then went over to the Lafayette and then to two or three other places. Joan had always been tireless in her gentle way. She hated to see the night end, and it was after three o’clock when Jack stumbled into his apartment. The fol­lowing morning he woke up haggard and sick, and with no recollection of the last hour or so of the previous evening. His suit was soiled and he had lost his hat. He didn’t get to his office until eleven. Joan had already called him twice, and she called him again soon after he got in. There was no hoarseness at all in her voice. She said that she had to see him, and he agreed to meet her for lunch in a sea­food restaurant in the Fifties. He was standing at ttie bar when she breezed in, looking as though she had taken no part in that calamitous night. The advice she wanted concerned selling her jewelry. Her grandmother had left her some jewelry, and she wanted to raise money on it but didn't know where to go. She took some rings and bracelets out of her purse and showed them to Jack. He said that he didn’t know anything about jewelry but that he could lend her some money. “Oh, I couldn’t borrow money from you, Jack,” she said. “You see, I want to get the money for Pete. I want to help him. He wants to open an advertising agency, and he needs quite a lot to begin with.” Jack didn’t press her to accept his offer of a loan after that, and the project wasn’t men­tioned again during lunch. He next heard about Joan from a young doctor who was a friend of theirs. “Have you seen Joan recently?” the doctor asked Jack one evening when they were having dinner together. He said no. “I gave her a checkup last week," the doctor said, “and while she’s been through enough to kill the average mortal—and you’ll never know what she’s been through—she still has the constitution of a virtuous and healthy woman. Did you hear about the last one? She sold her jewelry to put him into some kind of a business, and as soon as he got the money, he left her for another girl, who had a car—a convertible.’* Jack was drafted into the Army in the spring of 1942. He was kept at Fort Dix for nearly a month, and during this time he came to New York in the evening whenever he could get permission. Those nights had for him the intense keenness of a reprieve, a sensation that was height­ened by the fact that on the train in from Trenton women would often press upon him dog-eared copies of Life and half-eaten boxes of candy, as though the brown clothes he wore were surely cerements. He telephoned Joan from Pennsylvania Station one night. “Come right over, Jack,” she said. “Come right over. I want you to meet Ralph.” She was living in that place in the West Twenties that Jack had found for her. The neighborhood was a slum. Ash cans stood in front of her house, and an old woman was there picking out bits of refuse and garbage and stuf­fing them mto a perambulator. The house in which Joan’s apartment was located was shabby, but the apartment it­self seemed familiar. The furniture was the same. Joan was the same big, easy-going girl. “I’m so glad you called me,” she said. “It’s so good to see you. I’ll make you a drink. I was having one myself. Ralph ought to be here by now. He promised to take me to dinner.” Jack offered to take her to Cavanagh’s, but she said that Ralph might come while she was out. “If he doesn’t come by nine, I’m going to make myself a sandwich. I’m not really hungry.” Jack talked about the Army. She talked about the store. She had been working in the same place for—how long was it? He didn’t know. He had never seen her at her desk and he couldn’t imagine what she did. “I’m terribly sorry Ralph isn’t here,” she said. “I’m sure you’d* like him. He’s not a young man. He’s a heart specialist who loves to play the viola.” She turned on some lights, for the summer sky had got dark. “He has this dreadful wife on Riverside Drive and four ungrateful children. He—” The noise of an air-raid siren, lugubrious and seeming to spring from pain, as if all the misery and indecision in the city had been given a voice, cut her off. Other sirens, in distant neighborhoods, sounded, until the dark air was full of their noise. “Let me fix you another drink before 1 have to turn out the lights,” Joan said, and took his glass. She brought the drink back to him and snapped off the lights. They went to the windows, and, as children watch a thunderstorm, they watched the city darken. All the lights nearby went out but one. Air-raid wardens had begun to sound their whistles in the street. From a distant yard came a hoarse shriek of anger. “Put out your lights, you Fas­cists!" a woman screamed. “Put out your lights, you Nazi Fascist Germans. Turn out your lights. Turn out your lights.” The last light went off. They went away from the window and sat in the lightless room. In the darkness, Joan began to talk about her departed lovers, and from what she said Jack gathered that they had all had a hard time. Nils, the suspect count, was dead. Hugh Bascomb, the drunk, had joined the Merchant Ma­rine and was missing in the North Atlantic. Franz, the German, had taken poison the night the Nazis bombed Warsaw. “We listened to the news on the radio,” Joan said, “and then he went back to his hotel and took poison. The maid found him dead in the bathroom the next morning.” When Jack asked her about the one who was going to open an advertising agency, she seemed at first to have forgotten him. "Oh, Pete,” she said after a pause. "Well, he was always very sick, you know. He was sup­posed to go to Saranac, but he kept putting it off and putting it off and—” She stopped talking when she heard steps on the stairs, hoping, he supposed, that it was Ralph, but whoever it was turned at the landing and continued1 to the top of the house. “I wish Ralph would come,” she said, with a sigh. "I want you to meet him.” Tack asked her again to go out, but she refused, and when the all-clear sounded, he said goodbye. Jack was shipped from Dix to an infantry training camp in the Carolinas and from there to an infantry divi­sion stationed in Georgia. He had been in Georgia three months when he married a girl from the Augusta board­ing-house aristocracy. A year or so later, he crossed the continent in a day coach and thought sentendously that the last he might see of the country he loved was the desert towns like Barstow, that the last he might hear of it was the ringing of the trolleys on the Bay Bridge. He was sent into the Pacific and returned to the United States twenty months later, uninjured and apparently un­changed. As soon as he received his furlough, he went to Augusta. He presented his wife with the souvenirs he had brought from the islands, quarrelled violently with her and all her family, and, after making arrangements for her to get an Arkansas divorce, left for New York. Jack was discharged from the Army at a camp in the East a few months later. He took a vacation and then went back to the job he had left in 1942. He seemed to have picked up his life at approximately the moment when it had been interrupted by the war. In time, everything came to look and feel the same. He saw most of his old friends. Only two of the men he knew had been killed in the war. He didn’t call Joan, but he met her one winter afternoon on a crosstown bus. Her fresh face, her black clothes, and her soft voice in­stantly destroyed the sense—if he had ever had such a sense—that anything had changed or intervened since their last meeting, three or four years ago. She asked him up for cocktails and he went to her apartment the next Sat­urday afternoon. Her room and her guests reminded him of the parties she had given when me had first come to New York. There was a woman with a fancy hat, an elder­ly doctor, and a man who stayed close to the radio, listen­ing for news from the Balkans. Jack wondered which of the men belonged to Joan and decided on an Englishman who kept coughing into a handkerchief that he pulled out of his sleeve. Jack was right “Isn’t Stephen brilliant?” Joan asked him a little later, when they were alone in a corner. “He knows more about the Polynesians than any­one else in the world.” Jack had returned not only to his old job but to his old salary. Since living costs had doubled and since he was paying alimony to two wives, he had to draw on his sav­ings. He took another job, which promised more money, but it didn’t last long and he found himself out of woriL This didn’t bother him at alL He still had money in the bank, and anyhow it was easy to borrow from friends. His indifference was the consequence not of lassitude or des­pair but rather of an excess of hope. He had the feeling that he had only recently come to New York from Ohio. The sense that he was very young and that the best years of his life still lay before him was an illusion that he could not seem to escape. There was all the time in the world. He was living in hotels then, moving from one to another every five days. In the spring, Jack moved to a furnished room in the badlands west of Central Park. He was running out of money. Then, when he began to feel that a job was a des­perate necessity, he got sick. At first, he seemed to have only a bad cold, but he was unable to shake it and he began to run a fever and to cough blood. The fever kept him drowsy most of the time, but he roused himself occasion­ally and went out to a cafeteria for a meal. He felt sure that none of his friends knew where he was, and he was glad of this. He hadn’t counted on Joan. Late one morning, he heard her speaking in the hall with his landlady. A few moments later, she knocked on his door. He was lying on the bed in a pair of pants and a soiled pajama top, and he didn't answer. She knocked again and walked in. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you, Jack,” she said. She spoke softly. “When I found out that you were in a place like this I thought you must be broke or sick. I stopped at the bank and got some money, in case you’re broke. I’ve brought you some Scotch. I thought a little drink wouldn’t do you any harm. Want a little drink?” Joan’s dress was black. Her voice was low and serene. She sat in a chair beside his bed as if she had been coming there every day to nurse him. Her features had coarsened, he thought, but there were still very few lines in her face. She was heavier. She was nearly fat. She was wearing black cotton gloves. She got two glasses and poured Scotch into them. He drank his whiskey greedily. '*1 didn’t get to bed until three last night,” she said. Her voice had once before reminded him of a gentle and despairing song, but now, perhaps because he was sick, her mildness, the mourning she wore, her stealthy grace, made him uneasy. “It was one of those nights,” she said. “We went to the theatre. Afterward, someone asked us up to his place. I don’t know who he was. It was one of those places. They’re so strange. There were some meat-eating plants and a collection of Chinese snuff bottles. Why do people collect Chinese snuff bottles? We all autographed a lampshade, as I remember, but I can’t remember much.” Jack tried to sit up in bed, as if there were some need to defend himself, and then fell back again, against the pil­lows. “How did you find me, Joan?” he asked. “It was simple,” she said. “I called that hotel. The one you were staying in. They gave me this address. My secre­tary got the telephone number. Have another little drink.” “You know you’ve never come to a place of mine before —never,” he said. “Why did you come now?” "Why did I come, darling?” she asked. “What a ques­tion! I’ve known you for thirty years. You're the oldest friend I have in New York. Remember that night in the Village when it snowed and we stayed up until morning and drank whiskey sours for breakfast? That doesn’t seem like twelve years ago. And that night—” “I don’t like to have you see me in a place like this,” he said earnestly. He touched his face and felt his beard. “And all the people who used to imitate Roosevelt,” she said, as if she had not heard him, as if she were deaf. “And that place on Staten Island where we all used to go for dinner when Henry had a car. Poor Henry. He bought , a place in Connecticut and went out there by himself, one weekend. He fell asleep with a lighted cigarette and the house, the barn, everything burned. Ethel took the children out to California.” She poured more Scotch into his glass and handed it to him. She lighted a cigarette and put it between his lips. The intimacy of this gesture, which made it seem not only as if he were deathly ill but as if he were her lover, troubled him. “As soon as I’m better,” he said, “I’ll take a room at a good hotel. I’ll call you then. It was nice of you to come.” “Oh, don’t be ashamed of this room, Jack,” she said. “Rooms never bother me. It doesn’t seem to matter to me where I am. Stanley had a filthy room in Chelsea. At least, other people told me it was filthy. I never noticed it. Rats used to eat the food I brought him. He used to have to hang the food from the ceiling, from the light chain.” “I’ll call you as soon as I’m better,” Jack said. “I think I can sleep now if I’m left alone. I seem to need a lot of sleep.” “You really are sick, darling,” she said. “You must have a fever.” She sat on the edge of his bed and put a hand on his forehead. “How is that Englishman, Joan?” he asked. “Do you . still see him?” "What Englishman?” she said. “You know. I met him at your house. He kept a hand­kerchief up his sleeve. He coughed all the time. You know the one I mean.” “You must be thinking of someone else,” she said. “I haven't had an Englishman at my place since the war. Of course, I can’t remember everyone.” She turned and, tak- here.” ing one of his hands, linked her fingers in his. "He’s dead, isn’t he?” Jack said. “That Englishmans dead.” He pushed her off the bed, and got up himself. “Get out,” ne said. “You’re sick, darling,” she said. “I can’t leave you alone “Get out,” he said again, and when she didn’t move, he shouted, “What kind of an obscenity are you that you can smell sickness and death the way you do?” "You poor darling.” “Does it make you feel young to watch the dying?” he shouted. “Is that the lewaness that keeps you young? Is that why you dress like a crow? Oh, I know there’s nothing 1 can say that will hurt you. I know there’s nothing filthy | or corrupt or depraved or brutish or base that the others haven’t tried, but this time you’re wrong. I’m not ready. My life isn’t ending. My life’s beginning. There are won­derful years ahead of me. There are, there are wonderful, wonderful, wonderful years ahead of me, and when they’re over, when it’s time, then I’ll call you. Then, as an old friend, I’ll call you and give you whatever dirty pleasure you take in watching the dying, but until then, you and your ugly and misshapen forms will leave me alone.” She finished her drink and looked at her watch. “I guess I’d better show up at the office,” she said. “I’ll see you later. I’ll come back tonight. You’ll feel better then, you poor darling.” She closed the door after her, and he heard her light step on the stairs. Jack emptied the whiskey bottle into the sink. He began to dress. He stuffed his dirty clothes into a bag. He was trembling and crying with sickness and fear. He could see the blue sky from his window, and in his fear it seemed miraculous that the sky would be blue, that the white clouds should remind him of snow, that from the sidewalk he could hear the shrill voices of children shrieking, “I’m the king of the mountain, I’m the king of the mountain, I’m the king of the mountain.” He emptied the ashtray containing his nail parings and cigarette butts into the toilet, ana swept the floor with a shirt, so that there would be no trace of his life, of his body, when that lewd and searching shape of death came there to find him in the evening.