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“I wrote her a letter after I was hit,” Arnold was saying, “but I never got no answer. Maybe her husband come home. And from that day, to this I never touched a woman. I got hit early on and I been in the hospital ever since. The first time I got out was last Saturday. We had an afternoon pass, Billy and me.” Billy was the other Negro in the ward. “Nothin’ much for two colored boys to do in this valley. It ain’t Cornwall, I’ll tell you that.” He laughed. “Not even any colored folk around. Imagine that, being sent to maybe the one hospital in the United States that’s in a town without any colored folk. We drank a couple of beers that we got in the market and we took the bus upriver a bit, because we heard there was a colored family up at the Landing. Turned out it was just an old man from South Carolina, living all by himself in an old house on the river, with all his family gone and forgotten. We gave him some beer and told him some lies about how brave we were in the war, and said we’d come back fishin’ on our next pass. Fishin’!”
“I’m sure,” Gretchen said, looking at her watch, “that when you get out of the hospital for good and go back home you’ll find a beautiful girl and be very happy again.” Her voice sounded prissy and false and nervous all at the same time and she was ashamed of herself, but she knew she had to get out of that room. “It’s awfully late, Arnold,” she said. “I’ve enjoyed our little talk, but now I’m afraid I …” She started to get off the table, but he held her arm in his hand, not hard, but firmly.
“It ain’t all that late, Miss Jordache,” Arnold said. “To tell you the truth, I been waiting for just such an occasion, all alone like this.”
“I have to catch a bus, Arnold. I …”
“Wilson and me, we’ve been discussing you.” Arnold didn’t let go of her arm. “And we decided on our next pass, that’s this Saturday, we would like to invite you to spend the day with us.”
“That’s very kind of you and Wilson,” Gretchen said. She had difficulty trying to keep her voice normal. “But I’m terribly busy on Saturdays.”
“We figured it wouldn’t do to be seen in the company of two black boys,” Arnold went on, his voice flat, neither menacing nor inviting, “being as how this is your town and they’re not used to seeing things like that around here, and we’re only enlisted men …”
“That really has nothing to do with …”
“You take the bus up to the Landing at twelve-thirty,” Arnold continued, as though there had been no interruption. “We’ll go earlier and give that old man five bucks to buy himself a bottle of whiskey and go to the show and we’ll fix up a nice meal for the three of us in his house. You turn left directly at the bus stop and walk on about a quarter of a mile down to the river and it’s the only house there, sitting real pretty on the bank, with nobody around to snoop or make a fuss, just the three of us, all folksy and friendly.”
“I’m going home now, Arnold,” Gretchen said loudly. She knew she would be ashamed to call out, but she tried to make him think she was ready to shout for help.
“A good meal, a couple of nice long drinks,” Arnold said, whispering, smiling, holding her. “We been away a long time, Miss Jordache.”
“I’m going to yell,” Gretchen said, finding it hard to speak. How could he do it—be so polite and friendly in one breath and then … She despised herself for her ignorance of the human race.
“We have a high opinion of you, Miss Jordache, Wilson and me. Ever since I first laid eyes on you I can’t think about anybody else. And Wilson says it’s the same with him …”
“You’re both crazy. If I tell the Colonel …” Gretchen wanted to pull her arm away, but if anybody happened to come in and saw them struggling, the explanations would be painful.
“As I said, our opinion is high,” Arnold said, “and we’re willing to pay for it. We got a lot of back pay accumulated, Wilson and me, and I been particularly lucky in the crap game in the ward. Listen careful, Miss Jordache. We got eight hundred dollars between us and you’re welcome to it. Just for one little afternoon on the river …” He took his hand off her arm and, unexpectedly, jumped down from the table, landing lightly on his good foot. He started limping out, his big body made clumsy by the floating maroon bathrobe. He turned at the door. “No need to say yes or no this minute, Miss Jordache,” he said politely. “Think on it. Saturday’s two days away. We’ll be there at the Landing, from eleven A.M. on. You just come anytime you get your chores done, Miss Jordache. We’ll be waiting on you.” He limped out of the room, standing very straight and not holding onto the walls for support.
For a moment, Gretchen sat still. The only sound she heard was the hum of a machine somewhere in the basement, a sound she didn’t remember ever having heard before. She touched her bare arm, where Arnold’s hand had held it, just below the elbow. She got off the table and turned off the lights, so that if anybody came in, they wouldn’t see what her face must look like. She leaned against the wall, her hands against her mouth, hiding it. Then she hurried to the locker room and changed into her street clothes and almost ran out of the hospital to the bus stop.
She sat at the dressing table wiping off the last of the cold cream from the delicately veined pale skin under her swollen eyes. On the table before her stood the jars and vials with the Woolworth names of beauty—Hazel Bishop, Coty. We made love like Adam and Eve in the Garden.
She mustn’t think about it, she mustn’t think about it. She would call the Colonel tomorrow and ask to be transferred to another block. She couldn’t go back there again.
She stood up and took off her bathrobe and for a moment she was naked in the soft light of the lamp over the dressing table. Reflected in the mirror, her high, full breasts were very white and the nipples stood disobediently erect. Below was the sinister, dark triangle, dangerously outlined against the pale swell of her thighs. What can I do about it, what can I do about it?
She put on her nightgown and put out the light and climbed into the cold bed. She hoped that this was not going to be one of the nights that her father picked to claim her mother. There was just so much that she could bear in one night.
The bus left every half hour on the way upriver toward Albany. On Saturday it would be full of soldiers on weekend passes. All the battalions of young men. She saw herself buying the ticket at the bus terminal, she saw herself seated at the window looking out at the distant, gray river, she saw herself getting off at the stop for the Landing, standing there alone, in front of the gas station; under her high-heeled shoes she felt the uneven surface of the gravel road, she smelled the perfume she couldn’t help but wear, she saw the dilapidated, unpainted frame house on the bank of the river, and the two dark men, glasses in their hands, waiting silently, knowing executioners, figures of fate, not rising, confident, her shameful pay in their pockets, waiting, knowing she was coming, watching her come to deliver herself in curiosity and lust, knowing what they were going to do together.
She took the pillow from beneath her head and put it between her legs and clamped it hard.
VI
The mother stands at the lace-curtained window of the bedroom staring out at the cindery back yard behind the bakery. There are two spindly trees there, with a board nailed between them, from which swings a scuffed, heavy, leather cylinder, stuffed with sand like the heavy bags prize fighters use to train on. In the dark enclosure, the bag looks like a hanged man. In other days in the back gardens on the same street, there were flowers and hammocks strung between the trees. Every afternoon, her husband puts on a pair of wool-lined gloves and goes out into the back yard and flails at the bag for twenty minutes. He goes at the bag with a wild, concentrated violence, as though he is fighting for his life. Sometimes, when she happens to see him at it, when Rudy takes over the store for her for awhile to let her rest, she has the feeling that it isn’t a dead bag of leather and sand her husband is punishing, but herself.