Корнелл Вулрич - A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

I went home again to wait. This second wait was even worse than the first, for it was added to the first, was a continuation of it, and therefore seemed to have gone on twice as long as it actually had. But I outlasted it, I outlived it. Everything comes to an end, and at last it did, too.

When he called me this time, he did it indirectly. He had his assistant — he seemed to have attained the status of having his own secretary by now, or perhaps it was just the general operator for the office — put the call through for him, and he didn’t get on himself. She asked if I could come down that afternoon, said he’d like to see me. I said I would, of course, but when I asked if I could talk to him himself, she told me that he was either tied up in a meeting or had stepped out of the office for a short while, I forget now which it was. Which could have been perfectly true, after all.

I let it go at that; what difference did an extra hour or two make, after all those leaden-footed days and weeks I’d put in waiting?

On my way to his office from the subway stop, I took a shortcut through a side-street. As I was moving briskly along through it, the figure of a middle-aged woman descending a short flight of stone steps just ahead of me caught my eye. She was shrouded completely in black, apparently in widow’s weeds, but the brief glimpse I had of her face as she turned away and went up the street before me had showed a serenity, a passivity, that struck me. It was a sad cast of expression with its downlidded eyes, but it was completely at peace, that much couldn’t be doubted.

I glanced at the steps, and then up above them. The cool, dingy and yet dignified facade of a church met my eyes. I had never yet been inside one. Neither for any joyous occasion nor any sad one. Neither for a wedding nor a funeral, a baptism nor a confirmation nor a mass.

I stopped, and turned halfway, and stood there looking at it. Then I moved slowly back again the few steps past it that I’d gone, and stood and looked some more.

People went into them for help; why shouldn’t I? That woman I’d seen just now had, and you could tell by her face that she’d found it, been given what she asked.

But, something inside me argued, that woman’s concerns are with death, her black garb shows that. Yours are with life and life only; it isn’t the same thing.

I loitered around out there thinking the thing out, a sort of sidewalk loafer in front of a church, my hands deep in my pockets in uncertainty, the inevitable cigarette clenched in my mouth.

My sense of fair play, my sense of good manners, told me: You shouldn’t go in just when you have something to ask for. You should have been going in steadily all along before now. Then you would be entitled to go in now and ask for your favor. This way you’re not. You’re only trying to use God. It’s your problem, you should keep it to yourself.

Everyone uses God. Why shouldn’t I? Every prayer that was ever sent up is asking God a favor. Why shouldn’t my prayer go up too, along with all the other millions? I’m entitled to my happiness as much as anyone else.

Then another thought came to further cloud the issue: You wouldn’t let your mother help you. You claimed it would take something away from you. Then why are you willing to let God help you? Won’t that also take something away from you?

It’s not the same thing, I answered in thought. My mother is weaker than I am, God is stronger. My mother looks up to me, admires me. God certainly doesn’t. When you let the weaker help you, you detract from yourself. When you let the stronger help you, you don’t. If you see a small child fall flat and lie there on the ground bawling, and you go over and help it back to its feet, do you detract from that child?

I threw my cigarette over my shoulder, jerked my hands out of my pockets, and ran tautly up the steps, neck slightly bent, as though they were a springboard into a pool of icy-cold water.

I had a fleeting impression of a marble-floored vestibule with a stone basin of water (was that what they called holy water? I wondered) set between two massive inner doors, and then I was standing stock still in the dim interior, as suddenly as I’d surged forward from outside just now.

The hush was the first thing I noticed about it. There was some sort of an inner quiet here that other buildings didn’t have, for surely its walls were no thicker than many of theirs and yet they lacked it. The absence of windows? I asked myself. Far ahead, it seemed, there were little taper-lights. They seemed to be up on the wall, although I knew they actually weren’t. They reminded me of shimmering teardrops and little ruddy drops of blood that had trickled down a certain distance, and then stopped and stayed there, pulsing, each one where it was.

Finally I moved again. I didn’t go too far forward, I was too timid to. I think subconsciously I was fearful somebody would come out from the side, down there by the altar, and ask me what I was doing in there, what right I had to be in there.

I chose about the fourth or fifth row from the back, entered it, and sat down three or four seats from the outside. I clasped my hands and rested them on the back of the seat in front of me, and just sat for a while, my head respectfully lowered a trifle, but taking everything in from under my eyelids. It had a tragic grandeur to it, and yet an infinite loneliness too. I wondered if the next world was going to be this lonely. People took your loneliness away; God made you feel vastly lonely. I wondered why that was; it should be the other way around, I thought, shouldn’t it?

My unaccustomed mundane eye, no conscious irreverence intended, kept traveling in the direction of the altar and expecting to come up against a big, blank picture-screen that was not to be found there. The cavernous grandiloquence was like that of a large motion-picture palace before the audience has filed in and the cameras have started turning in the projection room. I kept trying to put the thought out of my head, but it kept coming back again each time. It was the only comparison my past experience could conjure up.

I brought one knee down to the floor, but since that was an awkward position — there wasn’t space enough there to comfortably allow the length of a bent leg — I finally brought the other one down beside it, and crouched there like that, my forehead pillowed against my clasped hands.

I had common sense enough to realize that formula didn’t matter, it wasn’t what counted. I knew no stylized prayers or forms of addressing God, because I’d never used any. And even words, that is, unspoken words within my mind, were difficult to marshal. So I contented myself with offering my prayer in thought form only, letting the smooth-flowing current of my thoughts carry it along far more evenly and naturally than any word-forms could have.

It was about like this:

“Dear God: Nature or You — if you are separate, and I don’t think you are, or both — have put an unusually strong love of life in me. Everybody has it, I know, but I have it to an inordinate degree. And by love of life, I don’t mean just the act of breathing and the wish not to stop breathing. I mean having fun, having a good time.

“My youthfulness is about to end, and I myself robbed it of many of the years it was entitled to.

“That’s why I ask you: Let me have this money now, while I can still enjoy it as it should be enjoyed, to the hilt. Five years from now will be too late. Or even four. Even three.

“I don’t want it for security. I don’t want it to hoard, or put away in a musty bank, or count over, or scheme with. I want it to live with.

“Let me have it now.

“Now.

“Now, or not at all.”

I noticed a strange thing immediately afterward. I felt strangely emptied out, weak, as when you’ve just expended all the energy you’re capable of. I knew by that, whatever my prayer’s merits, whatever its importunity, whatever its impertinence, it had been at least sincere, not feigned, not superficial, not play-acting.