Джеймс Кейн - Root of His Evil [= Shameless]

“Central Park? What are you talking about?”

“A wooden bench, Carrie. With a bum on one end of it and me on the other, and newspapers in the middle. Where I spent last night and the night before — without room service. They didn’t send up no meals.”

“You slept on a park bench?”

“I didn’t do very good after I left my happy home in the Hutton. Took that job minding babies till I could find something better, but a fat chance I could hold that after I dropped them canapes all over the floor. Sweetheart, I’m telling you, Lady Norris was a little annoyed. I got fired fast, but not so fast I didn’t get a sweet bawling out. Carrie, you’d of died laughing if you’d heard what I told her. Then was when I begun to live in the park.”

“Didn’t you get paid off?” I asked this in all sincerity, for it did seem peculiar that she had to live in the park immediately after getting her money. As to how this came about I was to find out much more later, but in view of her exhausted condition, or what at any rate appeared to be her exhausted condition, I didn’t press her too hard when she became, as I thought, extremely vague.

“Circumstances, Carrie — just circumstances. They drive me nuts. Say, you got something to eat in the house? My stomach is a little empty, if you know what I mean.”

I got her a glass of milk, for I thought if she hadn’t eaten in forty-eight hours, as seemed to be the case, she had better be a little careful about how she resumed her relations with food. Then I said something about making her some coffee and went out in the kitchen again and put the water on to heat, but what I was really doing was getting off by myself for a few minutes so I could think what I was going to do with her. I had got to the point of calculating that if I jumped in a taxi and dashed over to the bank very quickly I could draw $50, give it to her and get her out of there before Grant came home. I even improved on this by deciding I would take her to the bank with me and then I wouldn’t risk her being there if he got home while I was gone.

But then something in me began to rebel. In the first place, I felt that if it had been I who had spent two nights in a park and she who was living in a comfortable apartment, there would be no question of getting me out of there at all. I would be taken in simply as a matter of course, and in spite of the complicated trick that she was playing on me, as it later turned out, I still believe that this much, at least, she would have done for me. And in the second place, as I had pointed out to Mr. Hunt, Lula was the one person, aside from Mr. Holden, perhaps, who had meant something to me before I married Grant, and in some instinctive way I knew that I must not give her up. I stood looking out into the bright sunlight, waiting for the water to boil, and there popped into my mind a recollection of the big waves racing past the boat while the sun was still shining that afternoon on the Sound, and I had the same tingling sensation that a storm was coming up. But this time, whether there would be a buoy to grab I wasn’t at all sure.

In addition to the coffee I made Lula soft-boiled eggs and toast and she began gobbling them down there in the living room. Later, in some connection, I learned that people who have not eaten for some time are not at all hungry and have to force themselves to eat. But at the time Lula’s appetite seemed wholly natural, and I left her there for a while to do what I had to do.

There was a den in the apartment that Grant used as a storage place for a lot more Indian stuff than there was space for in the living room. But there was a cot in there and this I made up with clean sheets, pillow cases and blankets. Among the things stored in there were a bundle of Navajo blankets. I cut the string on this and spread a couple of them on the floor so the room wouldn’t feel so bare. The rest of them, as well as the other things, I piled as neatly as I could in one corner of the room, draped a sheet over them and called Lula. She came in and I went into the living room and got her suitcase. When I came back she had lifted the sheet and was peeping at the Indian things. But she dropped it when she saw me and I pretended not to notice. Then I suggested that she go to bed and get some sleep. She didn’t want to, but I insisted and helped her undress. She had no clean pajamas in her suitcase but I got a suit of my own and pretty soon I had her tucked in. I pulled the shade to keep the sun out of her eyes and went in the living room to wait for Grant. It was nearly one o’clock when he came in and at once suggested that we go out somewhere for lunch. I still had this tingling sensation all over me, and my mouth felt dry and hot, because I knew I had to tell him about Lula, and yet I couldn’t seem to begin. So I said all right but I wasn’t hungry yet, and he went in the bedroom.

When he came out he lit a cigarette, inhaled it nervously three or four times, then squashed it out and looked at me. “May I make a request?”

“Certainly.”

“Well — there are certain little decencies around an apartment I like to observe. I realize that women have their own ways of doing things. Just the same — damn it, this is what I’m trying to say: do you mind in the future not using the bathroom for a laundry?”

I got up and went into the bathroom. It was the worst mess I had ever seen in my life, even worse than our bathroom at the Hutton used to be on the infrequent occasions when Lula had decided that her things were too dirty to wear any more and that she had to wash them. She had tied two or three strings across the room and they were full of stockings, brassieres, and everything else imaginable. The beautiful porcelain hand-basin was full of rings, dirt and soap where she hadn’t washed it out properly after she got done, and even the bathtub was draped with more of her things drying, such as girdles. And in addition to that, you could hardly breathe for the horrible stench of laundry drying.

I jerked down the strings, gathered everything up into one armful and went in to where she was lying in bed smoking a cigarette. I dumped the whole wet pile over her head, turned on my heel and walked out. Then I went back in the living room.

I sat down, closed my eyes and tried to begin. But all I could say was: “They weren’t my things.”

“Then whose were they?”

“...Lula’s.”

“Who is Lula?”

“The maid at the cocktail party.”

I think I have told you that Grant is very heavily sunburned and under that there is usually a touch of his mother’s high color. As he looked at me and realized the implication of what I had said I saw every bit of the color slowly leave his face until it was like gray chalk. “...You mean she’s here?”

“She got fired. She... had no place to stay. I took her in.”

“I... don’t want her here.”

“Neither do I.”

“Then what did you let her in for?”

“I had to.”

“Why?”

“She would have done the same for me.”

“But good God, we can’t have her here. Why — I won’t have it! I—”

“I will have it.”

“You—? You’ll have it?”

“I invited her in. It’s my home.”

Afterwards I liked to remember that Grant did not get excited when I told him that or say that it was his home and I had only recently been brought into it, or anything like that. In these trying days Grant constantly seemed like a weak, spineless creature and helpless in the hands of his mother for reasons that he could not at that time help. But meanness was never a part of him. There was a generosity in him that I could always count on and this was one reason why, even when I had the most contempt for him, some little part of me was always proud of him and confident that he would never strike at me in some unfair way.