The Complete Stories - Flannery O'Connor [217]
“Then what’s keeping you from going and having a look at him?” she said. “What are you asking me what he looks like for? Go see for yourself.”
The words fell on his head like a sack of rucks. After a moment he said, “Go see for yourself? Go see where?”
“At Quincy,” the girl said. “Where do you think?”
“They wouldn’t let me see him,” he said. The suggestion was appalling to him; for some reason he could not at the moment understand, it struck him as unthinkable.
“They would if you said you were kin to him,” she said. “It’s only twenty miles from here. What’s to stop you?”
He was about to say, “I’m not kin to him.” but he stopped and reddened furiously on the edge of the betrayal. They were spiritual kin.
“Go see whether his eyes are brown or blue and have yourself a little old exis…”
“I take it,” he said, “that if I go you would like to go along? Since you aren’t afraid to see him.”
The girl paled. “You won’t go,” she said. “‘You’re not up to the old exis…”
“I will go,” he said, seeing his opportunity to shut her up. “And if you care to go with me, you can be at my aunts’ at nine in the morning. But I doubt,” he added, “that I’ll see you there.”
She thrust forward her long neck and glared at him. “Oh yes you will,” she said. “You’ll see me there.”
She returned her attention to the window and Calhoun looked at nothing. Each seemed sunk suddenly in some mammoth private problem. Raucus cheers came intermittently from outside. Every few minutes there was music and clapping but neither took any notice of it, or of each other. Finally the girl pulled away from the window and said, “If you’ve got the general idea, we can leave. I prefer to go home and read.”
“I had the general idea before I came,” Calhoun said.
He saw her to her door and when he had left her, his spirits lifted dizzily for an instant and then collapsed. He knew that the idea of going to see Singleton would never have occurred to him alone. It would be a torturing experience, but it might be his salvation. The sight of Singleton in his misery might cause him suffering sufficient to raise him once and for all from his commercial instincts. Selling was the only thing he had proved himself good at; yet it was impossible for him to believe that every man was not created equally an artist if he could but suffer and achieve it.
As for the girl, he doubted if the sight of Singleton would do anything for her. She had that particular repulsive fanaticism peculiar to smart children—all brain and no emotion.
He spent a restless night, dreaming in snatches of Singleton. At one point he dreamed he was driving to Quincy to sell Singleton a refrigerator. When he awoke in the morning, a slow rain was descending indifferently. He turned his head to the gray window pane. He could not remember what he had dreamed but he sensed it had been unpleasant. A vision of the girl’s flat face came to him. He thought of Quincy and saw rows and rows of low red buildings with rough heads sticking out of barred windows. He tried to concentrate on Singleton but his mind shied from the thought. He did not wish to go to Quincy. He remembered that it was a novel he was going to write. His desire to write a novel had gone down overnight like a defective tire.
While he lay in bed, the drizzle turned into a steady downpour. The rain might keep the girl from coming, or at least she might think she could use it as an excuse. He decided to wait until exactly nine o’clock and if she had not shown up by then to be off. He would not go to Quincy but would go home. It would be better to see Singleton at a later date when he would perhaps have responded to treatment. He got up and wrote the girl a note to be left with his aunts, saying he presumed she had decided, upon consideration, that she was not equal to the experience. It was a very concise note and he ended it, “Cordially yours.”
She arrived at five minutes