Джеймс Кейн - The Moth

“Were you sick?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are you sick now?”

“No.”

“If you were sick, you could hardly thresh him.”

“Then I wasn’t sick.”

“You did thresh him?”

“So the cop said.”

“So the complaint said, with many affecting particulars, and so several affidavits said, with a startling unanimity.”

“Then I beat him up.”

“What are you concealing?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“You may go to your room.”

For the next hour or so there was a lot more telephoning, all of them trying to find out what it was about, and a fat chance I’d tell them. But then the phone rang, and I could tell from the way Sheila began to talk that it was Miss Eleanor, and I knew I had to see her no matter what they did to me for it. I took off my shoes and stepped out the window to the roof of the back porch. There was an arbor at one side with Virginia creeper on it, and I climbed down on that. As I started for the back gate Sheila called. I didn’t stop, and it wasn’t till I got to North Avenue that I sat on the curb and put on my shoes.

“What happened?”

“Miss Eleanor, I saw my mother.”

“Where?”

“In church.”

“Ah — the one in green?”

“I didn’t notice her clothes.”

“She sat on the aisle? One or two pews back?”

“Yes, that was her.”

“And you recognized her?”

I told how I had felt those eyes looking at me, and about the pat, and the perfume. I broke down two or three times telling about the perfume in the attic, because it seemed so silly, but she held me close and said it wasn’t silly at all, and after I got a little bit under control I let her ask me questions, and answered them, and finally she had it. “I’m sure it was she.”

“I know it, Miss Eleanor.”

“I saw her, and do you know what I noticed?”

“What was it, Miss Eleanor?”

“How much she looked like you.”

“Like — me?”

I had a light, happy feeling, because she’d been so beautiful. “You’re very beautiful, Jack. Now tell me the rest of it.”

“In the basement, when I got the surplice off, I waited a minute, so I wouldn’t make a holy show of myself, and then I came back upstairs in the church, looking for her. And I looked everywhere, in the vestry room, in the vestibule, in the library, in the chapel, all over. Everybody else was there, saying goodbye to Dr. Grant, but not her. Then I went down in the basement again, and then it hit me and I tried to keep from crying and couldn’t. And then that son of a—”

“Yes, Mr. Anderson.”

“Started to whistle Una Furtiva Lagrima.”

“Mr. Anderson has beautiful hands and an ugly mind.”

“And I hit him, that’s all.”

“There’ll be some who won’t exactly weep.”

“You mean it was all right?”

“Jack, hitting Mr. Anderson, just because he made himself objectionable in some way, wasn’t so very important, one way or the other, except to let him have it good, if you were going to let him have it at all. Hitting him because it got mixed up with your mother and how you felt about her was beautiful. Silly and utterly divine. My little Jack, that’s no longer a boy, but has become a man. I’ve thought about her, Jack, and I’ve tried, in a way—”

“To take her place?”

“Well?”

“I think you’re wonderful.”

“And it was with her in mind, anyway quite a little with her in mind, that I made the arrangements for the records we’re going to do tomorrow. So she could hear them, and keep them. So, if you want really to do something for her, sing as well as you know how, and then when they’re made I’ll see that she gets them.”

“You’re coming with me?”

“Of course. I don’t leave for St. Louis until night.”

The first number I was to record was The Glow Worm, which was to be done with the cutie pies. The studio was in Camden, New Jersey, and they went by train, with a man from the company. But Miss Eleanor drove me in her little green coupé, after quite some argument about it when she took me home. The Old Man was all for having a showdown about me running out of the house, but she had to get it through his head that a boy who has to stand up in front of a symphony orchestra and do a performance can’t be put through a workout the night before with a hair brush. But on the chorus, where I was to do an obbligato with the others singing under me, I had hardly started when I broke. They put in a new master and we got going again. I broke again. Miss Eleanor said something to the conductor about my having had a trying time the day before and took me outside in the hall. She made me take a drink from the water bubbler, then squeezed my hand and brought me back. “All right, sir, I think I’m all right now.”

But even as I was talking to him my voice popped. And one of the bull fiddlers said: “That boy’s got the goslins.”

It was the cutie pies’ turn, and from the way they yelped I knew what was the matter with me, and that that ended my days as a soprano. Miss Eleanor didn’t take me home right away. She took me to her house, and phoned my aunts about it, and made me some supper, and had me ride with her in the cab to the train she was taking for St. Louis. It wasn’t till we were in Union Station, sitting on one of the benches in the waiting room, that she really said anything about it. “Now nothing has happened. You’re going to forget it.”

“It’s all right. I don’t care.”

“But you must care!”

“For that bunch of—”

“For yourself! And singing and music and beauty and doing things well and everything we’ve been so excited about! Hasn’t it meant anything to you?”

“Why, sure. But if I’ve got the pip—”

“Don’t you know why? You’re a man!”

She put her arm around me and looked at me a long time and smiled. “You’re growing up so fast, and I’m so proud of you! And soon it won’t be a boy’s voice any more, but a man’s, much more beautiful, and then we’ll go on, and—”

She kept on talking like that, but pretty soon came the rumble of her train, and I went down to the platform with her to see her aboard. She wouldn’t let me take her to her berth, but said goodbye on the step, after the redcap went aboard with her things. We shook hands, and she pushed her cheek against my face, and I remembered to wish her well with the engagement. She turned to go, then came running down the steps again, pulled me to her, and kissed me warm on the mouth, the only time she did, ever. Then she ran into the car.

But we never went on with my voice, because in the first place when it got through turning it was nothing but a beer-barrel bass, just good enough, with what was left of the belly support she had given me, to fool somebody that didn’t know anything about music, and just bad enough, from the wood that had got into it, to set crazy somebody that did. And in the second place she never came back, except once, when she dropped by the house at the end of the summer to say hello, after she got home from the opera. I was plenty glad to see her, and proud of the two inches I had grown, and of the blue spot on my lip, where I had begun to shave. But she seemed anxious to get away, and I thought it funny she said nothing about coming over to make peach ice cream, which she had cooked and I had cranked. Next day I found out she had met another lady, and was going to open a studio with her in New York. She wrote me for years and I wrote her, and she didn’t drop out of my life. But she wasn’t in it either, and it would come over me all the time, the loneliness I had felt the day I beat up Anderson. I didn’t mope off by myself, it was nothing like that. I went around with guys and played on the high-school basketball team and got moved from forward to center on account of the way I was shooting up all the time, and studied a little. Anyhow, I got A in math and physics and mechanics, and C in English and French and Sociology. But I got D in deportment on account of the fights I got into, which was the tip-off on how I was enjoying life.