While Mortals Sleep: Unpublished Short Fiction Read online

  “I could just as easily stay at a hotel,” said Ruth. The woman’s gaze made her feel foreign, self-conscious about her drawling speech, about her clothes, which were insubstantial, better suited to a warmer climate.

  “I wouldn’t hear of your staying anywhere but here. We have so much to talk about. When is Ted’s child to be born?”

  “In four months.” Ruth slid her suitcase just inside the door, and sat, with an air of temporariness, on the edge of a sofa covered with slippery chintz. The only illumination in the overheated room came from a lamp on the mantel, its frail light muddled by a tortoiseshell shade. “Ted told me so much about you, I’ve been dying to meet you,” said Ruth.

  On the long train ride, Ruth had pretended for hours at a time that she was talking to Mrs. Faulkner, winning her affection from the first. She had rehearsed and polished her biography a dozen times in anticipation of Mrs. Faulkner’s saying, “Now tell me something about yourself.” She was ready with her opening line: “Well, I have no relatives, I’m afraid—no close ones, anyway. My father was a colonel in the cavalry, and …” But Ted’s mother didn’t put the opening question.

  Silent and thoughtful, Mrs. Faulkner poured two tiny glasses of sherry from an expensive-looking decanter. “The personal effects—” she said at last, “they told me they were sent to you.”

  Ruth was puzzled for a moment. “Oh, the things he had with him overseas? Yes, I have them. It’s customary, I think—I mean, it’s a matter of routine to send them to the wife.”

  “I suppose it’s all done automatically by machines in Washington,” said Mrs. Faulkner ironically. “A general just pushes a button, and—” She left the sentence unfinished. “Could I have the things, please?”

  “They’re mine,” said Ruth, and thought how childish that must sound. “I think he wanted me to have them.” She looked down at the absurdly small glass of sherry, and wished for twenty more to take the edge off the ordeal.

  “If it comforts you to think so, go right on thinking of them as yours,” said Mrs. Faulkner patiently. “I simply want to have everything in one place—what little is left.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

  Mrs. Faulkner turned her back, and spoke softly, piously. “Having it all together makes him just a little nearer.” She turned a switch on a floor lamp, suddenly filling the room with white brilliance. “These things will mean nothing to you,” she said. “If you were a mother, you might understand how utterly priceless they are to me.” She dabbed at a speck of dust on the ornate, glass-faced cabinet that squatted on lions’ paws against the wall. “You see? I’ve left room in the cabinet for the things I knew you had.”

  “It’s very sweet,” said Ruth. She wondered what Ted might have thought of the cabinet—with its baby shoes, the book of nursery rhymes, the penknife, the Boy Scout badge … Apart from its cheap sentimentality, Ted, too, would have sensed something unwholesome, sick about it. Mrs. Faulkner stared at the trinkets wide-eyed, unblinking, bewitched.

  Ruth spoke to break the spell. “Ted told me you were doing awfully well at your shop. Is business as good as ever?”

  “I’ve given it up,” said Mrs. Faulkner absently.

  “Oh? Then you’re giving all your time to your club activities?”

  “I’ve resigned.”

  “I see.” Ruth fidgeted, taking off her gloves and putting them on again. “Ted said you were an awfully clever decorator, and I see he was right. He said you liked to do this place over every year or two. What sort of changes do you plan for next time?”

  Mrs. Faulkner turned away from the shelf reluctantly. “Nothing will ever be changed again.” She held out her hand. “Are the things in your suitcase?”

  “There isn’t much,” said Ruth. “His billfold—”

  “Cordovan, isn’t it? I gave it to him in his junior year in high school.”

  Ruth nodded. She opened a suitcase, and dug into its bottom. “A letter to me, two medals, and a watch.”

  “The watch, please. The engraving on the back, I believe, says that it was a gift from me on his twenty-first birthday. I have a place ready for it.”

  Resignedly, Ruth held out the objects to her, cupped in her hands. “The letter I’d like to keep.”

  “You can certainly keep the letter and the medals. They have nothing to do with the boy I want to remember.”

  “He was a man, not a boy,” said Ruth mildly. “He’d want to be remembered that way.”

  “That’s your way of remembering him,” said Mrs. Faulkner. “Respect mine.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Ruth, “I do respect it. But you should be proud of him for being brave and—”

  “He was gentle and sensitive and intelligent,” interrupted Mrs. Faulkner passionately. “They should never have sent him overseas. They may have tried to make him hard and cheap, but at heart he was still my boy.”

  Ruth stood, and leaned against the cabinet, the shrine. Now she understood what was going on, what was behind Mrs. Faulkner’s hostility. To the older woman, Ruth was one of the shadowy, faraway conspirators who had taken Ted.

  “For heaven’s sake, dear, look out!”

  Startled, Ruth jerked her shoulder away from the cabinet. A small object tottered from an open shelf and smashed into white chips on the floor. “Oh!—I’m so sorry.”

  Mrs. Faulkner was on her knees, brushing the fragments together with her fingers. “How could you? How could you?”

  “I’m awfully sorry. Can I buy you another one?”

  “She wants to know if she can buy me another one,” quavered Mrs. Faulkner, again to an unseen audience. “Where is it you can buy a candy dish made by Ted’s little hands when he was seven?”

  “It can be mended,” said Ruth helplessly.

  “Can it?” said Mrs. Faulkner tragically. She held the fragments before Ruth’s face. “Not all the king’s horses and all the king’s men—”

  “Thank heaven there were two of them,” said Ruth, pointing to a second clay dish on the shelf.

  “Don’t touch it!” cried Mrs. Faulkner. “Don’t touch anything!”

  Trembling, Ruth backed away from the cabinet. “I’d better be going.” She turned up the collar of her thin cloth coat. “May I use your phone to call a cab—please?”

  Mrs. Faulkner’s aggressiveness dissolved instantly into an expression of pitiability. “No. You can’t take my boy’s child away from me. Please, dear, try to understand and forgive me. That little dish was sacred. Everything that’s left of my little boy is sacred, and that’s why I behaved the way I did.” She gathered a bit of Ruth’s sleeve in her hand and held it tightly. “You understand, don’t you? If there’s an ounce of mercy in you, you’ll forgive me and stay.”

  Ruth drove the air from her lungs with pent-up exasperation. “I’d like to go right to bed, if you don’t mind.” She wasn’t tired, was so keyed up, in fact, that she expected to spend the night staring at the ceiling. But she didn’t want to exchange another word with this woman, wanted to hide her humiliation and disappointment in the white oblivion of bed.

  Mrs. Faulkner became the perfect hostess, respectful and solicitous. The small guest room, tasteful, crisp, barren, like all guest rooms implied an invitation to make oneself at home, and at the same time admitted that it was an impossibility. The room was cool, as though the radiators had only been turned on an hour or so before, and the air was sweet with the smell of furniture polish.

  “And this is for the baby and me?” said Ruth. She had no intention of staying beyond the next morning, but felt forced to make conversation as Mrs. Faulkner lingered in the doorway.

  “This is for you alone, dear. I thought the baby would be more comfortable in my room. It’s larger, you know. I hardly know where you’d put a crib in here.” She smiled primly. “Now, you will forgive me, won’t you, dear?” She turned without waiting for an answer, and went to her room, humming softly.

  Ruth lay wide-eyed for an hour between the stiff sheets. H
er thoughts came in disconnected pulses of brilliance—glimpses of this moment and that. Ted’s long, contemplative face appeared again and again. She saw him as a lonely child—as he had first come to her; then as a lover; then as a man. The shrine—commemorating a child, ignoring a man—made a pathetic kind of sense. For Mrs. Faulkner, Ted had died when he’d loved another woman.

  Ruth threw back the covers, and walked to the window, needing the refreshment of a look at the outdoors. There was only a brick wall a few feet away, chinked with snow. She tiptoed down the hall, toward the big living room windows that framed the blue Adirondack foothills. She stopped.

  Mrs. Faulkner, her gross figure silhouetted through a thin nightgown, stood before the shelf of souvenirs, talking to it. “Good night, darling, wherever you are. I hope you can hear me and know that your mother loves you.” She paused, and appeared to be listening, and looked wise. “And your child will be in good hands, darling—the same hands that cradled you.” She held up her hands for the shelf to see. “Good night, Ted. Sleep tight.”

  Ruth stole back to bed. A few moments later, bare feet padded down the hall, a door closed, and all was still.

  * * *

  “Good morning, Miss Hurley.” Ruth blinked up at Ted’s mother. The brick wall outside the guest room window glared, the snow gone. The sun was high. “Did you sleep well, my child?” The voice was cheerful, intimate. “It’s almost noon. I have breakfast for you. Eggs, coffee, bacon, and biscuits. Would you like that?”

  Ruth nodded and stretched, and drowsily doubted the nightmare of their meeting the night before. Sunlight was splashed everywhere, dispelling the funereal queasiness of their first encounter.

  The table in the kitchen was aromatic with the peace and plenty of a leisurely breakfast.

  As Ruth returned Mrs. Faulkner’s smile across her third cup of coffee, she was at her ease, content with starting a new life in these warm surroundings. The night before had been no more than a misunderstanding between two tired, nervous women.

  Ted wasn’t mentioned—not at first. Mrs. Faulkner talked wittily about her early days as a businesswoman in a man’s world, made light of what must have been desperate years after her husband’s death. And then she encouraged Ruth to talk about herself, and she listened with flattering interest. “And I suppose you’ll be wanting to go back to the South to live someday.”

  Ruth shrugged. “I have no real ties there—or anywhere else, for that matter. Father was an Army regular, and I’ve lived on practically every post you can name.”

  “Where would you most like to make your home?” Mrs. Faulkner coaxed.

  “Oh—this is a pleasant enough part of the country.”

  “It’s awfully cold,” said Mrs. Faulkner with a laugh. “It’s the world headquarters for sinus trouble and asthma.”

  “Well, I suppose Florida would be more easy going. I guess, if I had my choice, I’d like Florida best.”

  “You have your choice, you know.”

  Ruth set down her cup. “I plan to make my home here—the way Ted wanted me to.”

  “I meant after the baby is born,” said Mrs. Faulkner. “Then you’d be free to go wherever you liked. You have the insurance money, and with what I could add to that you could get a nice little place in St. Petersburg or somewhere like that.”

  “What about you? I thought you wanted to have the child near you.”

  Mrs. Faulkner reached into the refrigerator. “Here, you poor dear, you need cream, don’t you.” She set the pitcher before Ruth. “Don’t you see how nicely it would work out for both of us? You could leave the child with me, and be free to lead the life a young woman should lead.” Her voice became confiding. “It’s what Ted wants for both of us.”

  “I’m darned if it is!”

  Mrs. Faulkner stood. “I think I’m the better judge of that. He’s with me every minute I’m in this house.”

  “Ted is dead,” said Ruth incredulously.

  “That’s just it,” said Mrs. Faulkner impatiently. “To you he is dead. You can’t feel his presence or know his wishes now, because you hardly knew him. One doesn’t get to know a person in five months.”

  “We were man and wife!” said Ruth.

  “Most husbands and wives are strangers till death does them part, dear. I hardly knew my husband, and we had several years together.”

  “Some mothers try to make their sons strangers to every woman but themselves,” said Ruth bitterly. “Praise be to God, you failed by a hair!”

  Mrs. Faulkner strode man-like into the living room. Ruth listened to the springs creaking in the chair before the sacred cabinet. Again the whispered dialogue with silence drifted down the hall.

  In ten minutes, Ruth was packed and standing in the living room.

  “Child, where are you going?” said Mrs. Faulkner, without looking at her.

  “Away—South, I guess.” Ruth’s feet were close together, her high heels burrowing in the carpet as she shifted petulantly from one foot to the other. She had a great deal to say to the older woman, and she waited for her to face her. A hundred vengeful phrases had sprung to mind as she packed—just, unanswerable.

  Mrs. Faulkner didn’t turn her head, continued to stare at the mementos. Her big shoulders were hunched, her head down—an attitude of stubborn mass and wisdom. “What are you, Miss Hurley, some sort of goddess who can give or take away the most precious thing in a person’s life?”

  “You asked me to give a great deal more than you have any right to ask.” Ruth imagined how a small boy might have felt, standing on this spot while the keen bully of a woman decided what, exactly, he was to do next.

  “I ask only what my son asks.”

  “That isn’t so.”

  “She’s wrong, isn’t she, dear?” said Mrs. Faulkner to the cabinet. “She doesn’t love you enough to hear you, but your mother does.”

  Ruth slammed the door, ran into the wet street, and flagged a puzzled motorist to a stop.

  “I ain’t no cab, lady.”

  “Please, take me to the station.”

  “Look, lady, I’m going uptown, not downtown.” Ruth burst into tears. “All right, lady. For heaven’s sakes, all right. Get in.”

  “Train number 427, the Seneca, arriving on track four,” said the voice in the loudspeaker. The voice seemed intent on shattering any illusions passengers might have of their destinations’ being better than what they were leaving. San Francisco was droned as cheerlessly as Troy; Miami sounded no more seductive than Knoxville.

  Thunder rolled across the ceiling of the waiting room. The pillar by Ruth trembled. She looked up from her magazine to the station clock. Her train would be next, southbound.

  When she bought her ticket, checked her baggage through, and settled on a hard bench to read away the dead minutes, her movements had been purposeful, quick, her walk almost a swagger. The motions had been an accompaniment to a savage dialogue buzzing in her head. In her imagination she had lashed out at Mrs. Faulkner with merciless truths, had triumphantly wrung from that rook of a woman apologies and tears.

  For the moment, the vengeful fantasy left Ruth satisfied, forgetful of her recent tormentor. She felt only boredom and incipient loneliness. To dispel these two, she looked from group to group in the waiting room, reading in faces and clothes and luggage the commonplace narratives that had brought each person to the station.

  A tall, baby-faced private chatted stiffly with his well-dressed mother and father: yanked out of gray flannels and college by the draft … nothing but a marksman’s medal … bright, lots of money … father uncomfortable about son’s rank and overparking …

  A racking cough cut into Ruth’s thoughts. An old man, cramped against the armrest at the end of a completely vacant bench, was doubled by a coughing fit. He waited for the coughing to subside, so that he could take another puff on the cigarette butt between his dirty fingers.

  A frail, bright-eyed old woman handed a redcap a dollar, and demanded his polite attention as she
gave precise instructions as to how her luggage was to be handled: on her annual expedition to criticize her children and spoil her grandchildren …

  Again the agonized coughing. Now Ruth caught the stench of the dirty man’s breath, brought to her nostrils by a sudden gust from the door. The cough worsened, tearing the breath from him. The cigarette dropped.

  Ruth twisted around on the bench so that her gaze wouldn’t naturally fall on him. A winded fat man, his red face determinedly cheerful beneath a homburg, begged to be let in at the first of the ticket line: salesman … ball bearings or boilers or something like that …

  Again the agonized coughing. Irritated that so disagreeable a sight should make demands on her attention, Ruth glanced once more at the old man. He had slumped over the arm of the bench, twisted, quaking.

  The fat salesman looked down at the old man, and then straight ahead again, keeping his place in line.

  The old lady, still instructing the redcap, raised her voice to be heard above the interruption.

  The young soldier and his correct parents weren’t so vulgar as to acknowledge that something unsightly was at hand.

  A newsboy burst into the station, started to stride down the aisle between Ruth and the old man, stopped a few feet short, and headed for the other end of the waiting room, shouting news of a tragedy a thousand miles away. “Read all about it!”

  Another train rumbled overhead. Everyone was moving toward the ramp now, avoiding the aisle in which the old man lay, giving no sign that it was anything but luck that made them choose another route to the train.

  “Buffalo, Harrisburg, Baltimore, and Washington,” said the voice in the loudspeaker.

  Ruth realized that it was her train, too. She stood without looking again at the old man. He was no more than disgustingly drunk, she told herself. He deserved to lie there, sleeping it off. She tucked her magazine and purse under her arm. Someone—the police or some charity or whoever’s job it was—would be along to pick him up.