Michael Cunningham - Specimen Days

“Can’t I come in with you?”

“No. It’s best if I go in alone.”

“Catherine?”

“Yes?”

“May I see the bowl again, first?”

“Of course you may.”

She opened her reticule and removed the bowl. It was bright in the evening light, almost unnaturally so. It might have been carved from pearl. Its line of strange symbols, its blue curls and circles, stood out boldly, like a language that insisted on its own cogency in a world that had lost the skill to decipher its message.

“You mustn’t sell it.” Lucas was briefly host to an urge to snatch it away from her, to hold it to his breast. It seemed for a moment that if the bowl was lost something else would be lost as well, something he and Catherine needed and would not be offered again.

She said, “Sell it is exactly what I must do. I won’t be long.”

She went inside. Lucas waited. What else could he do? He stood before the shop window, watching the hats and jewelry live their silent lives.

Presently, Catherine returned. She wearily mounted the stairs to the street. Lucas thought of his mother’s weariness. He wondered if she would improve, with the music box gone.

Catherine said, “I could get fifty cents. It’s all she would give me.”

She held out the coins to him. He wanted the money, he needed the money, but he couldn’t bring himself to take it. He stood dumb, with his hands at his sides.

Catherine said, “It can’t be what you paid for it. It’s the best I could do.”

He couldn’t move or speak.

“Don’t reproach me,” she said. “Please. Take the money.”

He stood helpless. His ears roared.

“Lucas, you begin to try my patience,” she said. “It was difficult in there. I don’t like being treated as a thief.”

So he had done that to her. He had forced her to demean herself. He imagined Gay a of the emporium. He thought she’d be skeletally thin, with skin the color of candle wax. He thought he knew she’d have taken the bowl and examined it greedily and disdainfully. She’d have named her price with the superior finality of those accustomed to dealing in stolen goods.

He said, “The spinning-girl retreats and advances to the hum of the big wheel.” He could not be certain how loudly he’d spoken.

Catherine faltered. She said, “You’ve never repeated yourself before.”

How could she know that? Had she been listening to him, all this time, when he spoke as the book? If so, she’d given no sign.

He couldn’t control himself. He said, “The bride unrumples her white dress, the minute-hand of the clock moves slowly.”

Catherine blinked. Her eyes were bright. She asked, “What did Simon tell you?”

What had Simon told him? Nothing. Simon sang the old songs, teased Lucas for being small, went to Emily’s room in secret.

Lucas said, “The nine months’ gone is in the parturition chamber.”

Catherine dropped the money at Lucas’s feet. One of the coins rolled and stopped against the toe of his boot.

“Pick it up and take it home,” she said. “I have no more patience for you.”

He said, “The prostitute draggles her shawl, her bonnet bobs on her tipsy and pimpled neck.”

Catherine began to weep. It took her like a spasm. She stood one moment erect, with a single tear meandering down her cheek, and the next moment her face sagged, and the tears came coursing out. She put her face into her hands.

He couldn’t think what to do or say. He put his fingers gently on her shoulder. She shrugged him away.

“Leave me alone, Lucas,” she sobbed. “Please, just leave me alone.”

He couldn’t leave her weeping on Eighth Street, with people passing by. He said, “Come with me. You must sit down.”

To his surprise, she obeyed. She had lost herself to weeping. She had become someone who wept and walked with him as he led her back to Washington Square, where the child’s pennant snapped against the sky and the flute player hopped nimbly from foot to foot.

He found a bench and sat on it. She sat beside him. Timidly, he put his arm over her shaking shoulders. She didn’t seem to mind.

He said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you. I don’t know what I said.”

Her weeping diminished. She raised her head. Her face was red and haggard. He had never seen her so.

“Would you like to know something?” she said. “Would you?”

“Yes. Oh, yes.”

“I’m going to have a baby.”

Again he paused in confusion over something that was true but could not be true. She hadn’t married.

He said, “I see,” because it seemed what he ought to say.

“They won’t keep me at work. I’ll be too big to hide it in a month or so.”

“How could you get too big to go to work?”

“You don’t know anything, you’re a child. Why am I talking to you?”

She made as if to rise but sank down again on the bench. Lucas said, “I want you to talk to me. I’ll try to understand.”

She went away again, into her weeping. Lucas put his arm again across her shoulders, which shook violently. The people who passed looked at them and then looked politely away, to help deliver Lucas and Catherine from their own shamefulness. The people who passed were intricately made, with gold buckles and little clocks on chains. Lucas and Catherine were made of cruder stuff. If they lingered on the bench, a policeman would come and send them along.

At length Catherine was able to say, “I’ve spoken to no one of this. It isn’t fair, saying it to you.”

“It is fair,” he said. “You could never be anything but fair.”

She gathered herself. She wasn’t through crying, but her aspect changed. Something new took hold of her, a rage with grief caught up in it.

She said, “All right, then. I’m going to teach you something.”

“Please.”

Her voice when she spoke was like a wire, thin but strong.

She said, “I told your brother he must marry me. I don’t know if the child is his. It probably isn’t. But Simon was willing. Would you like to know something else?”

“Yes,” Lucas said.

“I suspect. He had his accident because he was unhappy. He may have been so distracted by the thought of our wedding that he allowed it to happen. Think of it. He’d been in the works for years. He knew better than to let his sleeve get caught.”

Lucas said, “Simon loved you.”

“Did he tell you that?”

“Yes,” Lucas said, though Simon had never said the words. How could he help loving her? Not everything needed to be said in words.

Catherine said, “I’m a whore, Lucas. I tried to force myself on your brother.”

“Simon loved you,” he said again. He couldn’t think of anything else.

Catherine said, “I’m going to have the baby. It’s what I can do for poor Simon.”

Lucas could not think of an answer. How could she do anything but have the baby?

She said at length, “I told him he’d taken advantage, I told him he must make it right. I told him he’d come to love me, in time. So there you are. I’m a whore and a liar and I’m going to give birth to your brother’s bastard. You mustn’t come to see me anymore. You mustn’t buy me things with the money you need for food.”

Her face took on a new form. It grew older; its flesh sagged. She became a statue of herself, an effigy. She was not who she’d been. She was going somewhere.

Lucas said, “I can help you.”

She stood with grave finality. She was formal now.

“No one can help me,” she said.

She walked resolutely eastward, toward home. Lucas went alongside her.

“You are in danger,” he said.

“I’m in the same danger as every woman who draggles her shawl, neither more nor less.”