The Heart is a Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers [89]
One night soon after Christmas all four of the people chanced to visit him at the same time. This had never happened before.
Singer moved about the room with smiles and refreshments and did his best in the way of politeness to make his guests comfortable. But something was wrong.
Doctor Copeland would not sit down. He stood in the doorway, hat in hand, and only bowed coldly to the others.
They looked at him as though they wondered why he was there. Jake Blount opened the beers he had brought with him and the foam spilled down on his shirtfront. Mick Kelly listened to the music from the radio. Biff Brannon sat on the bed, his knees crossed, his eyes scanning the group before him and then becoming narrow and fixed.
Singer was bewildered. Always each of them had so much to say. Yet now that they were together they were silent. When they came in he had expected an outburst of some kind. In a vague way he had expected this to be the end of something.
But in the room there was only a feeling of strain. His hands worked nervously as though they were pulling things unseen from the air and binding them together.
Jake Blount stood beside Doctor Copeland. ‘I know your face.
We run into each other once before--on the steps outside.’
Doctor Copeland moved his tongue precisely as though he clipped out his words with scissors. ‘I was not aware that we were acquainted,’ he said. Then his stiff body seemed to shrink. He stepped back until he was just outside the threshold of the room.
Biff Brannon smoked his cigarette composedly. The smoke lay in thin layers across the room. He turned to Mick and when he looked at her a blush reddened his face. He half-closed his eyes and in a moment his face was bloodless once more. ‘And how are you getting on with your business now?’
‘What business?’ Mick asked suspiciously.
‘Just the business of living,’ he said. ‘School--and so forth.’
‘O.K., I reckon,’ she said.
Each one of them looked at Singer as though in expectation.
He was puzzled. He offered refreshments and smiled.
Jake rubbed his lips with the palm of his hand. He left off trying to make conversation with Doctor Copeland and sat down on the bed beside Biff. ‘You know who it is that used to write those bloody warnings in red chalk on the fences and walls around the mills?’
‘No,’ Biff said. ‘What bloody warnings?’
‘Mostly from the Old Testament I been wondering about that for a long time.’
Each person addressed his words mainly to the mute. Their thoughts seemed to converge in him as the spokes of a wheel lead to the center hub.
‘The cold has been very unusual,’ Biff said finally. The other day I was looking through some old records and I found that in the year 1919 the thermometer got down to ten degrees Fahrenheit.
‘It was only sixteen degrees this morning, and that’s the coldest since the big freeze that year.’
‘There were icicles hanging off the roof of the coal house this morning,’ Mick said.
‘We didn’t take in enough money last week to meet the payroll,’ Jake said.
They discussed the weather some more. Each one seemed to be waiting for the others to go. Then on an impulse they all rose to leave at the same time. Doctor Copeland went first and the others followed him immediately. When they were gone Singer stood alone in the room, and as he did not understand the situation he wanted to forget it He decided to write to Antonapoulos that night The fact that Antonapoulos could not read did not prevent Singer from writing to him. He had always known that his friend was unable to make out the meaning of words on paper, but as the months went by he began to imagine that perhaps he had been mistaken, that perhaps Antonapoulos only kept his knowledge of letters a secret from everyone. Also, it was possible there might be a deaf-mute at the asylum who could read his letters and then explain them to his friend. He thought of several justifications for his letters, for he always felt a great need to write to his friend when he was bewildered or sad. Once written, however, these letters were never mailed. He cut out the comic strips from the morning and evening papers and sent them to his friend each Sunday. And every month he mailed a postal money order. But the long letters he wrote to Antonapoulos accumulated in his pockets until he would destroy them.