If Morning Ever Comes Read online

  “Don’t think about what?” he asked.

  “Your coming and your going.”

  “Shelley, for God’s sake.”

  “And then on top of all that, there’s your sister.”

  He stopped in the middle of putting his drink on the table and looked up. There was something nightmarish about this. It was like one of those dreams in which he was playing the leading role in a play on opening night and had no idea what the play was.

  “My sister,” he said.

  “Yes, your sister.”

  “Which one?”

  “Benjamin Hawkes, don’t you joke with me.”

  “Well, but what sister?”

  “What sister my foot. How can you—”

  “I have six,” Ben Joe said patiently. He took another breath to go on and then suddenly, realizing what she meant, let his breath out again and sank back. Once more John Horner and Joanne stood looking at him on the porch steps, stood defensively close together in the Hawkes’s living room, and Ben Joe shook his head at his own stupidity. There was something about Joanne; the minute she met a man, that man seemed to belong to her. Even John Horner, whom Shelley had so definitely identified as her own, was associated in Ben Joe’s mind only with Joanne now that he had seen the two of them together. He had seen them first, after all, the night that Shelley had seemed to forget about John Horner completely. It was too confusing; he shook his head and said, “Lord, I’m stupid.”

  “Why?” Shelley asked curiously. She seemed to have expected more of a fight, and now she was temporarily taken aback.

  “Joanne, you meant.”

  “Well, of course.” She put both hands together in her lap and stared down at them. “Mrs. Murphy told me,” she said. “Well, if it hadn’t of been her, it’d been someone else. This town knows everything. I know she’s your sister, Ben Joe, but I tell you she’s just wild. With a husband and a baby, even, she’s wild. She’s wild and no-count and after anyone who’ll pay a little attention to her. Anyone can tell you that. Doesn’t take a detective to figure it out. It’s just you that won’t listen. You don’t hear facts too good if it’s your own precious sister they concern.”

  “I hear them,” Ben Joe said. He sat there, not looking at her, twisting his hands aimlessly between his knees.

  “Oh, I didn’t mean to go mud-slinging …” Shelley said suddenly. For the first time that evening Ben Joe saw the beginnings of tears in her eyes. She looked up shinily, with her mouth blurred and shaky, and stared hard at a point just above his head to keep from blinking the tears onto her cheeks. Shelley was the kind of girl who cried often, and from years of experience he had learned that with her the best thing was to be cheerful and brisk and to pay as little attention to the tears as possible. The little anonymous voice in his head picked up the tune again and went cheerfully da-da-deeing along. He kept his eyes upon an empty knickknack shelf in the corner behind Shelley’s chair.

  “Anyway,” he said finally. He kept his voice pleasant and reasonable. “At least we’ve got to why you’re angry with me.”

  “Why?” Shelley asked, and bit her lip hard and went on staring above him.

  “Well, you were with me and therefore John went out with Joanne. It was black magic. Once in college I was in love with a coquette. She had a cute little pony tail that bobbed on the back of her head every time she took a step, and I thought she was wonderful. I would go for whole weeks without even looking at other girls, not even looking at one that I just saw on the campus somewhere, because I thought that then she wouldn’t look at another boy. Sometimes it amazes me how superstitious I am. In the end, of course, she ran away and got married to this tuba player from Ditch 29, Arkansas—”

  “You are just as lighthearted as a bird,” Shelley said. “I declare, every time a body gets sad, it’s a fact that someone’ll come along all cheerful and tell them their problems, which aren’t a bit more related—”

  “I’m sorry,” Ben Joe said. “I thought it was related. I’m sorry.”

  He began twisting his hands between his knees again, still not looking at her. When it seemed safe to start speaking again, when he was fairly sure that he hadn’t sent her off into a real crying fit, he said, “All I meant was, that’s why I’m to blame. Because it was me you were with. If you’re superstitious too, of course. But I surely didn’t mean to send John Horner off to my sister. God knows I—”

  One of Shelley’s tears must have escaped. She was too far away and the room was too dim for him to tell for sure, but he saw her hand flicker up to her cheek and then back to her lap again.

  “Oh, well,” he said, “you’re probably not superstitious at all. It’s probably nothing to do with that. But I’m trying to think what I’ve done and I can’t come up with anything—”

  “Oh, you silly,” Shelley said. She hunched forward and began crying in earnest now, without trying to hide it any more, burying her face in her brittle white hands.

  “Well,” Ben Joe said for no reason. He searched hurriedly through his pockets, but there wasn’t a handkerchief. On the mantel he spied a purse, a black leather clutch purse with a clasp, that always reminded him of old ladies. He rose and went to it just at the moment when the tune started up in his head again, but this time not even the little voice could drown out the whispery choking sounds behind him. He rushed through the contents of the purse—glasses, keys, coin purse, lipstick, arranged neatly inside—and found beneath them an unused Kleenex. Shaking the folds out of it as he went, he crossed over to Shelley and stuck the Kleenex in her hand.

  “The way you talk,” she said in a thick voice as she took the Kleenex, “you haven’t done a thing in the world and are just asking what you did wrong to humor me, like. Well, I’ll tell you what you’ve done.” She blew her nose lightly. Ben Joe, standing over her, felt as if she might be Tessie or Carol. He wanted to say, “Come on now, blow hard. You’ll never breathe again if you blow that way,” but he resisted the urge and only waited silently for her to continue. “You just come to me when you want comforting,” she said, “without ever thinking, without giving it any thought. My own mama told me that, although she thought the world of you. Like when things got bad at home you would drop over to get comforted and then leave, bam, no thought to it, and when it came time for the Pom-Pom prom you asked Dare Georges, who I will say was as flighty as the day is long, her and that little majorette suit she wore everywhere but church—”

  “Oh, Shelley,” Ben Joe said wearily, “try and stick to the subject, will you?”

  She blew her nose and nodded at the floor. When Shelley cried she became almost ugly, with that translucent skin of hers suddenly mottled and blurred. As if she were thinking of this now, she passed one hand across her face and then through her uncombed hair, and she sat up straighter.

  “It’s worse this time,” she said. “Worse than the times before, I mean. Because this time I had a steady boyfriend, who was getting serious, and then along you came and superstition nothing, it’s plain fact I had to tell John Sunday night was out because of you. Well, I know it’s my fault going out with you. And I know I shouldn’t be crying if I turned him down for you, but he’s someone, isn’t he? Someone that’ll stay, and think about me sometimes, and let me have a kitchen with pots and pans?”

  She had worked herself up to a good crying session again. Her voice was shaky and her chin wobbled. Sometimes Ben Joe thought girls must actually enjoy crying, the way they kept dwelling on what made them sad. He reached down for her drink, which stood almost untouched beside her chair, and bent over her with it.

  “Take a good drink,” he said.

  “No.”

  “Come on.”

  He held it to her mouth and she took a swallow and tried to smile. Her face was puffy, with her eyes sleepy little slits, like a child’s, and her mouth smooth and swollen. He thought there must be something about tonight that made it right for crying. First Gra
m, and then Shelley, and in a way even he felt like crying now.

  “One more drink,” he said.

  She drank obediently.

  “You want a cigarette?”

  She pressed her lips together stubbornly and shook her head. “No, thank you,” she said. “They give me halitosis.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  He took one for himself and lit it. It was the first he had had all day and it tasted bad, but he kept puffing hard and not looking at her.

  “Well, it’s really me to blame,” Shelley said, as if they were in the middle of an unfinished conversation. “It’s me. For years, now, I haven’t let anyone sweep under my feet.”

  “Under your—”

  “So that I wouldn’t be an old maid. I worry too much about having someone to settle down with, but I can’t help it. Back home, when my family was alive, I would come in from work every day at the same time and climb the front steps of where we all lived thinking, ‘It’s five-ten just like it was yesterday and the day before, and just like then I am climbing these steps with no one but the family to greet me and the family to spend my evening with playing parcheesi and no man to care if I ever get home.’ And I’d come in and head up the stairs toward my room and Mama would call from the parlor, she’d say, ‘That you, Shelley?’ and I’d say, ‘It’s me.’ I’d climb the rest of the stairs and go toward my room and then out of Phoebe’s room Phoebe would call, ‘That you, Shelley?’ and I’d say, ‘It’s me—’ ”

  “Shelley, I don’t think we’re really getting anywhere with this,” Ben Joe said.

  “I’m explaining something, Ben Joe. I’m explaining. I’d go to my room and change to my house clothes, and I’d hang up my work dress neatly and I’d take my stockings to the bathroom and wash them out and hang them over the shower rail. Then I’d go back to my room and rearrange my underwear drawer, which I’d rearranged the week before, or I’d mend something or work a double crostic. At suppertime there’d be two questions for me. Daddy always said, ‘You have a good day, Shelley?’ and I said, ‘Yes, Daddy,’ and Mama’d say, ‘You going to be doing anything special tonight?’ and I’d say, ‘I don’t guess so, Mama.’ Which was true and which went on and on, so sometimes I think I could have just sent a tape recording home from work with my same old answers on it and done as well—”

  “Well, what are you telling me for?”

  “I’m explaining why I’m mad at you.”

  “You’re still mad?” he asked.

  “Course I am.”

  “Oh, look now. Look, don’t be mad at me.”

  “You come, you go,” she said doggedly.

  “I don’t either.”

  “You don’t?”

  “Well, I won’t,” he said. He had a desperate, sinking feeling; there swam into his mind again the picture of himself on the train and Shelley behind in Sandhill calmly washing dishes as if he’d never been there.

  “I don’t believe you’ll ever change, Ben Joe,” she said.

  “Shelley, I won’t come and go. I won’t go on not thinking. Look, you come with me. You come to New York.”

  “Oh, now, wouldn’t that give people—”

  “No, I mean it. We could … hell, get married. You hear? Come on, Shelley.”

  She stopped looking at her hands and stared at him. “I beg your pardon?” she said.

  “We could …” The words in his mouth sounded absurd, like another line from the unknown play in his nightmare. He hesitated, and then went on. “Get married,” he said.

  “Why, Ben Joe, that wasn’t what I was after. I wasn’t asking—”

  “No, I mean it, Shelley. I mean it. Don’t be mad any more. You come with me on the train tomorrow and we’ll be married in New York when we get there. You want to? Just pack a bag, and Jeremy will be our best man …”

  She was beginning to believe him. She was sitting up in the chair with her mouth a little open and her face half excited and half doubtful still, trying to search underneath his words to see how much he meant them.

  “Sure,” he said. “Oh, hell, who wants to go away and leave you with the dishes—”

  “The what?”

  “And come back like, I don’t know, Jamie Dower maybe, with no one to recognize him but a girl, and even she went on and married someone else—”

  “Ben Joe,” Shelley said, “I’m not following you too well, but if you mean what you say—”

  “Of course I do,” Ben Joe said. And he did; he was becoming excited now, watching her face eagerly to see that she was convinced and not angry any more. “Do you want to, Shelley? I’ll meet you at the station for the early-evening train tomorrow. Do you want to?”

  “Well, I reckon so,” Shelley said slowly. “I just don’t know …” For the first time that evening she really smiled, even with her eyes, and she rose and crossed over to where he stood. “You won’t be sorry?”

  “No, I won’t be sorry.”

  “All right,” she said.

  “Will you? Be sorry, I mean. Will you?”

  “Oh, no. Didn’t I always tell you that, even back in high school?”

  “I guess so,” he said.

  “Seems like you are always loving the people that fly away from you, Ben Joe, and flying away from the people that love you. But if you’ve decided, this once, to do something the other way, I’ll be happy to agree. I’ll meet you at the station, then.”

  She reached up and kissed him and he smiled down at her, relieved.

  “What time is it?” he asked.

  “About one.”

  “Lord. Shelley, if it’s all right with you, I want to sleep on your couch. I can’t face going home right yet, and I’ll be out of here before morning.”

  She looked a little doubtful, but then after a minute she nodded. “Won’t do any harm, I guess,” she said.

  “But it’s bumpy.”

  “That’s all right.”

  “Phoebe used to sleep there sometimes. She was a little bit sway-backed, and she said there was a poking-up spring on that couch that would support the curve in her back.”

  She gave his cheek a pat and then turned and went quickly over to the hall closet. From the top shelf she took a crazy quilt, permanently dingy from years of use.

  “This ought to keep you warm,” she said as she walked back to the couch. “You just hold this end, now, and I’ll wrap you up in it. That’s warmer than just having it over the top of you. Here.”

  He kicked off his shoes and then took the end of the quilt she handed him. Shelley walked around him in a circle, winding the blanket about him like a cocoon. When she was done she stood looking him over and then nodded to herself.

  “You’ll be fine in that,” she said. “The lamp’s above your head, and if you need anything you just call. Good night, Ben Joe.”

  “Good night.”

  He stood there by the couch, wrapped tightly in his quilt, until she had smiled for the last time and climbed the stairs to her room. When her bare feet padded gently across the floor above his head he laboriously unwound himself again and tucked the quilt around the foot of the couch. Then he took one of the throw cushions and placed it at the head for a pillow. He did these things with the special businesslike air that he always adopted when he didn’t want to be bothered with thinking; if he let himself think tonight he would never get to sleep at all. So he sat on the couch and worked his feet down under the quilt methodically, concentrating solely upon the mechanical business of getting settled. And once he was in bed he made his mind into nothing but a blank, faceless blackboard, bare of everything that might remind him of the restless puzzling at the back of his mind.

  14

  It was not yet morning when Ben Joe passed through the gate in front of his house again. The night was at the stage when the air seemed to be made up of millions of teeming dust specks, and although he could see everything, the outlines were f
uzzy and the objects were flat and dim, like a barely tinted photograph. Ahead of him his house loomed, blank-faced. If he were passing by in a car at this hour, he would look at the house for a second and envy the people inside it, picturing them gently asleep in silent darkness. Even now he envied them, in a way. His eyes were gritty from a bad night and he thought of his sisters in their clean white beds beneath neatly curtained windows, most probably sound asleep and dreamless. But because he was no mere stranger passing by, he paused at the gate, and stared harder at the house than any stranger would have. It was such a locked-looking house, and so importantly secretive. In the daylight, especially in summer daylight, the house passed off those secrets carelessly and took on an open, joyous look; the screen door banged innumerable times and the girls in pastel dresses passed out lemonade to the young men lounging on the porch railing, and bumblebees buzzed among the overgrown hollyhocks beside the steps. But now, with those voices stilled and the porch deserted and all the windows black and closed against the winter darkness, who knew how many secrets lay inside? Who knew, from that self-important, tightly shut front door, what had gone on tonight and what new decisions his sleeping sisters had arrived at? He hesitated with his hand upon the gate and found himself swinging between loving that house and hating it, between rushing into the sleepy darkness of it and turning away and shrugging off its claim on him forever. Then the gate squeaked a little, and he pushed harder against it and walked on up the sidewalk to the front steps.

  His feet on the cement made a gritty, too-clear sound; except for a few aimless chirpings in the trees around the house it was the only sound he heard. When he began climbing the steps his footsteps seemed dogged and heavy, and he thought again of how unreasonably tired he was. He had awakened often during the night, always with a sense of having forgotten something or left something undone, and even his sleep had been restless and strewn with brightly colored fragments of dreams. Now his head swam with just the effort of climbing the porch steps. Instead of going directly into the house, he turned toward the porch glider and let himself sink slowly down on it, to rest a minute and look out across the yard.