Nothing That Meets the Eye Read online

  “What a magnificent piece of rust!” Aaron often exclaimed, delighted by his own eloquence, as they stepped inside. “What a miracle of ­ruination!”

  They would make their way down sloping, rotten floorboards that were too dead to creak, toward the broken rear wall where imprisoned river water lapped. Here they would sit on a great comfortable rafter jammed crosswise in the corner, and survey the conglomeration of smashed and tangled machinery. Fingers of sunlight came through gaps in roof and wall, pointing at certain spots as though for their attention. It was their private place. Never had anyone encroached upon it by so much as a glance or a word of reference.

  Generally Freya was serious and quiet here. Aaron swung his heels on the rafter and stared with bulging eyes and a bemused smile. He would imagine the place humming, bustling, gleaming, men shouting over the din of machinery, the factory reaching a peak of production, then declining, until its owner sold or died of heartbreak, and the building was abandoned to begin its still-progressing delapidation. Sometimes he merely stared at the cracked belts, rusted cogs, knife parts strewn about the floor, and let anything or nothing ramble in and out of his mind.

  Freya might point to some rust-riddled object half submerged in the stagnant water below them. “Look!” Her voice would be an articulate gasp. “Could you ever think of anything so old?”

  Aaron would look, silently, his train of thought gently merging with hers. Nothing ever, anywhere, was so old as this.

  “Can you imagine it when it was snowing?” Aaron once asked excitedly. “All the shiny machines and knives and the snow outside?”

  At other times the place would strike them as terribly funny. The evidence of destruction by man and nature would make them giggle as children must sometimes in church or at funerals. It was this way one afternoon, when they came with bags of penny candies Aaron had bought at the general store.

  He helped her onto the rafter, and they sat munching message-bearing hearts, licorice sticks, and taffy kisses that were wrapped in brown and yellow papers which floated in the water below their feet.

  “Let’s dance!” Freya said.

  Catching her hands, Aaron swung her around and around as he turned on the broad rafter.

  Then Aaron became conscious of someone’s presence. Looking toward the raised doorway, he saw a figure silhouetted. He let Freya swing to a stop against him, her slight weight unbalancing him not at all. The man in the doorway was Pete McNary.

  “Hello!” Pete said in a voice of muted surprise.

  “Hello!” Aaron called out, almost at the same instant. He released Freya and laughed a little, embarrassed and annoyed. “What are you doing out here?”

  Pete remained motionless, his face obscured. “Walkin’ home. What are you doin’?”

  Aaron could not quite realize he was there, that anyone was able to look inside the place and see him and Freya there. “Not much of anything,” Aaron replied, still smiling. He glanced at Freya, who stood on the rafter with her hands behind her, leaning against the broken wall in a way that reminded him of how she had leaned against the tree the first afternoon he had seen her.

  “I heard voices. I didn’t know what was goin’ on,” Pete went on explanatorily but somewhat self-righteously.

  “Oh, we come here now and then,” Aaron said.

  Pete looked at Aaron, who looked just as steadily at him. Neither had anything to say. “Well, I’ll be gettin’ on home.”

  Aaron listened to the slow footfalls on the ladder. He put out his hand and Freya took it.

  VI

  When Aaron asked her again and again about herself, Freya told him she was ten, that she had never gone to school because she helped her mother, who did washing and ironing. But Aaron never knew her to leave him in order to help her mother, or to spend any time at home except to eat and sleep. A vision of Freya’s mother at work over other people’s laundry never entered his mind, nor did any actuality of it seem to trouble Freya. They were too occupied with the pictures of their own minds, which far excelled those Aaron had found in movies. Freya would never go to a movie with him and he stopped asking her, having less need of them himself.

  Often they sat on the hill where Aaron had climbed his first evening, where they had a fine view of the town. With a few phrases they could create for themselves the world of Clement as it had been in Revolutionary times, or when it was peopled with men in tailcoats and women in tight-waisted dresses, when the knife factory sent durable and handsome knives down the river. And doubtless the daydreams he lived with her, in which they governed the fortunes of the people they imagined, satisfied to some extent Aaron’s compunctions to bestir himself. Comfort enveloped him on the sunny hilltop. He watched the few cars and pedestrians on Trevelyan Boulevard as he might have watched a puppet show, and felt in harmony with all he saw. Trains chugged like toys into the station, and brought a sense of the benevolence and perfection of the universe. He would try to explain some of this to Freya, but if she understood, she made no sign as she sat beside him and gazed impassively at the town.

  The bond between them was lighter than air itself. It was a bond of complete individual and mutual freedom, for neither knew the burden of a single chore or obligation even to each other. There was an understanding between them, however, that they were somehow the chosen people of Clement, that all they saw was mere scenery set for their amusement. Joy sat on their heads, and they betrayed their awareness of it perhaps only in the way, whether together or apart, they walked and looked at things with a kind of arrogant innocence.

  VII

  “Been seein’ a lot o’ that little Wolstenholme girl, ain’t yuh?” Aaron blinked at her. He had just come out of the bathroom, and had nearly collided with her in the hall. “Oh, yes,” he said, smiling and frank. He had left Freya not half an hour before. “We take walks quite a lot.”

  Mrs. Hopley nodded, and looked at Aaron’s belt buckle, which bore the letter B. “Course there mightn’t be no haam in it, but some folks thinks otherwise.”

  “Harm?” The soap leapt from his hand and flew toward the stairs.

  “Might be. Yes. Don’t look s’good. A man an’ a young child like that.” She delivered her words quickly.

  Aaron had gone down a few steps to get the soap. It was covered with lint and was disgusting to hold. He blew on it, opened the washrag and put the soap in its center. When he looked up, Mrs. Hopley’s eyes were huge and ugly.

  “Not that I see why folks should care much,” she added contemptuously.

  “About what?”

  Mrs. Hopley eyed him. Then she glanced to the floor as though casting about for a way to speak. Bitterly, as though voicing an opinion to herself, she said, “Not that people should care what happens to trash like the Wolstenholmes!”

  “What?”

  “Yes, trash. Faather killed in a baarroom brawl. Mother just as trashy as him. Worthless people an’ a disgrace to the town.”

  “Father killed? Here in Clement?”

  “We ain’t got no baarrooms in this town.”

  Aaron was silent.

  “You thinkin’ o’ gettin’ work here finally, I s’pose.”

  Aaron’s whirling thoughts were checked suddenly and brought to focus upon his own idleness. “Yes, I am.” He wondered if he should explain again, tell her that he had saved his money for just this sort of a vacation.

  “I’d set about it, then.” Her eyes moved toward the stairs and seemed to draw her after them.

  Aaron was rigid with shame and guilt. He would look for work without delay.

  VIII

  “Morning, Pete!” Pete turned in at his shop, fumbling with his keys.

  Aaron’s lips opened to say “Morning” once more, when a shock went over him. Pete had not spoken to him. Of course he had heard him, must even have seen him. Pete had snubbed h
im!

  Aaron walked quickly past the barbershop before Pete should have time to turn around and to look out his window. He had contemplated being shaved that morning before he went to look for work. It was more than likely an accident, he thought, as he walked on slowly. Still, he was disturbed because he found he had not the courage to enter the barbershop.

  He wanted to spend the rest of the morning walking over roads he loved, soothing the irritation Mrs. Hopley’s remarks had caused, rationalizing Pete’s behavior, but instead he set out grimly for the leather factory, simply because it was the closest place where he might find work and because it was ugly and nothing to his liking. What Mrs. Hopley had said had not touched his conscience about his idleness so much as it had suggested the town might think him a ne’er-do-well if he did not soon get something to do. Now, suppose Pete, for instance, had not spoken to him because he was beginning to think him a good-for-nothing?

  The foreman, called outside from a job that had left his hands coated with grease, informed Aaron there was no place for anyone in the factory at the moment. “You’d have to know a little about the business before we took you on as anything but a baler anyway.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  The foreman said something else and pointed somewhere, but Aaron did not follow him. He could only stare at the foreman’s face. The horrible change in their relationship from nodding acquaintances to that of job-seeker and employer fixed Aaron with its torture.

  When the foreman paused, Aaron said, “Thank you very much,” and fled up the slope.

  He entered the covered bridge and went to one of the windows on the side away from the factory. He put his forearms on the sill, bent his head, and began tearing at his thumbnails. He tried to crush himself into as small a space as possible.

  In the last two minutes, in the interview with the foreman, he had completely changed the world in which he had been living for four weeks. He had made the relationship between himself and the town ugly, uncomfortable, mercenary. He had banished the sense of the unspoiled paradise. He had not only asked, but he had been refused!

  Suddenly, as he huddled in the window, the town seemed to rise up cold and hostile about him. He shuddered as he might have at something supernatural. The familiar riverbank frightened him, and so did the church spire over the trees, the barn whose roof he could just see, where he had often visited the goats. He squirmed farther into the window at the sight of Mrs. Coolidge, the wife of the postmaster, who was entering the bridge from the other end. He wondered if she would speak to him. He remembered she had smiled at him last Sunday in church. Almost everybody smiled at him, and he was handed an open hymnal when they stood up to sing. But couldn’t their smiles from the first have been sarcastic or pitying?

  Aaron flung himself about and, bowing slightly, forced himself to say, “Good morning, Mrs. Coolidge!”

  “Good morning!” she returned in an astonished, cracked voice. She cleared her throat and passed on, without a change in her pace.

  Aaron looked after her and a wave of uncertainty passed over him. What had she meant? How had she meant the “Good morning”? He held fast to the sill, barely resisting an impulse to run after her and demand his answers.

  He stared and frowned before him and began to rip his nails. He thought of Mrs. Hopley, remembered Pete in the doorway, recalled that Mac had seemed cool last evening. Wally, the switchman, had greeted him with only a wave of the hand. He remembered George Shmid’s smiling mouth, asking him questions about Freya. He could recall a dwindling sincerity in people’s voices, even times when he might have been snubbed, when he thought he had not been seen. Suppose the whole town suspected evil of him? Of him and Freya? Of course, everyone in Clement had seen him with her at one time or another! He tried to remember when anyone had mentioned Freya or the Wolstenholmes to him. Were they so bad that no one spoke of them? Did the town suspect evil of him or not? And if it did, why didn’t it come out and say so?

  There was a report like a gunshot behind him. Aaron turned around, as a plank of the bridge floor rattled hollowly into place, and a car moved toward him.

  IX

  With the relief that it was only a car came a kind of snap inside him, and a relaxation. Slowly and without passion, the idea took form in his mind to go and get his things and to leave the town.

  Rather than use Trevelyan Boulevard, he chose the quiet road that ran by the railroad tracks and the river, which would bring him to Pleasant Street. He passed an old man, then a young woman, neither of whom he knew nor who paid him any notice. And though the sight of each had caused a little shock inside him, he began to swing his arms in a physical expression of confidence that almost set his mind at rest.

  A block away now, George Shmid stepped out from Mrs. Hopley’s walk and turned in the other direction. The sight of his squat, odiously familiar back was enough. Aaron realized suddenly that he could not face anyone he knew, Mrs. Hopley, the baler, any of the roomers. And yet, even now he considered running after George and explaining to him, not for Freya or for himself, but for the town’s sake. If he explained, though, could he change what had happened to the town that morning? And how could he explain? What was there to explain?

  His thoughts foundered in an emotion he could not at once identify. It felt like guilt. But what was he guilty of? Why had he not been good enough? What was so wrong with him that his best efforts had not made him fit in the town? His mysterious fault seemed to date farther back even than New York, and to be something over which he had no control, and could never grasp and cast out of himself. Then, in an instant, his half vision was cut off, and he felt the guilt and its cause both sealed in him once more.

  He faced about and began walking with fast weak steps. He went back to the quiet dirt road that led almost to the factory before it turned and went northward beside the river, away from Clement.

  What hurt was the sense that it had been almost avoidable, the sense of the destruction in the very act of his leaving. The town was crumbling at every step, the facade of Trevelyan Boulevard, the Dandy Diner, all the fine trees that grew among the houses, Mrs. Hopley’s house and his room, all the fine things he had somehow ruined. And Freya, his best friend. The thought of never seeing Freya again made him waggle his head like a drunken man. The river, the railroad, the men climbing in slow strides up the slope from the factory, the noonday whistle, the good meals served by Mac’s hands, the mornings in his big room and with them the joy in his existence and the sense of the eternal potential.

  He walked until he had lost the river, until the sun changed its position, not knowing where he walked except that the town was at his back. His feet swished dismally through high grass. Then he tripped and was too tired to catch himself. The stillness was delicious. The river, the railroad, the facade of Trevelyan Boulevard passed in pictures before his eyes. The grizzled old men, the church and the hymnals, the railroad, Freya, the knife factory, the bud on the rosebush, the mornings of the eternal potential and the eternal nothing.

  UNCERTAIN TREASURE

  The khaki utility bag was sitting by itself on the subway platform near a post that had a slot machine. He looked at it for almost a minute over the top of the Daily News comic strip, and gave finally a convulsive wriggle that ended in a bobble of his large head. Slowly, ingenuously, he examined each of the seven or eight persons who stood on the platform awaiting their trains. A train pulled in, changed the pattern of the people, but when it was gone, the khaki bag was still unclaimed. He drew closer, limping deeply on his crooked left leg, rising tall again on the other, like a running-down piece of machinery, holding the forgotten newspaper before him.

  A soldier strode in front of him, dropped a penny in the gum slot and leaned there, his shoes crossed beside the bag, which was the same color as his trousers. The cripple edged away, shuffling his big feet sideways. When the next train came in, the soldier got on it without
a glance at the bag.

  Then as the cripple came forward he saw a man strolling toward him, a smallish man in a green felt hat and a polo coat unbuttoned over a royal blue suit. His eyes were small and green, and as they fixed on him, the cripple kept shuffling forward in timid fascination. They passed so closely their sleeves touched, and when the bag lay between them again, both turned, the one slow, the other foxlike, and looked at each other.

  The little man’s eyes were steady, but around them the wizened, unshaven face turned this way and that. He sized up the cripple, took in the simple, ugly face, the seedy overcoat. He looked straight ahead, sauntered toward the khaki bag, and stopped with one tan shoe touching its side. He bounced on his toes, and the wooden heels made assertive thock-thocks on the cement. The cripple retreated a few feet. The smaller man went quickly to the edge of the platform, looked first into the black tunnel and then at his wristwatch.

  When he turned around, the bag was gone, and the cripple was on his way down the platform, rising, falling, scraping toward the Third Street exit. He did not hurry, but his face was bent into the upturned lapels of his coat with the effort of walking, and one arm threshed the air at his side.

  The man in the polo coat hesitated, then went after him. The sloping tunnel echoed the high-pitched thock-thocks of the wooden-heeled shoes.

  The cripple pulled himself energetically up the stairs. Outside it was raining, a tired thin rain. It was about quarter to six, but night was already falling. The cripple made his way up Sixth Avenue, past the wire fence that enclosed the cement handball courts, the grass plots and the row of benches. As the thock-thocks behind him continued, he realized with vague uneasiness that the green-eyed man was following him. He lengthened his sloppy steps and caught the bag up under his arm.

  After a few yards the green-eyed man called, “Hey!” and stretched forth a crooked finger.

  The cripple kept going.

  “Hey!” the smaller man said, running up, seizing the wild arm and wrenching the cripple around. “That’s my bag you’ve got there!” His face was bristling and determined.