While Mortals Sleep_ Unpublished Short Fiction - Kurt Vonnegut [35]
Mrs. Faulkner turned away from the shelf reluctantly. “Nothing will ever be changed again.” She held out her hand. “Are the things in your suitcase?”
“There isn’t much,” said Ruth. “His billfold—”
“Cordovan, isn’t it? I gave it to him in his junior year in high school.”
Ruth nodded. She opened a suitcase, and dug into its bottom. “A letter to me, two medals, and a watch.”
“The watch, please. The engraving on the back, I believe, says that it was a gift from me on his twenty-first birthday. I have a place ready for it.”
Resignedly, Ruth held out the objects to her, cupped in her hands. “The letter I’d like to keep.”
“You can certainly keep the letter and the medals. They have nothing to do with the boy I want to remember.”
“He was a man, not a boy,” said Ruth mildly. “He’d want to be remembered that way.”
“That’s your way of remembering him,” said Mrs. Faulkner. “Respect mine.”
“I’m sorry,” said Ruth, “I do respect it. But you should be proud of him for being brave and—”
“He was gentle and sensitive and intelligent,” interrupted Mrs. Faulkner passionately. “They should never have sent him overseas. They may have tried to make him hard and cheap, but at heart he was still my boy.”
Ruth stood, and leaned against the cabinet, the shrine. Now she understood what was going on, what was behind Mrs. Faulkner’s hostility. To the older woman, Ruth was one of the shadowy, faraway conspirators who had taken Ted.
“For heaven’s sake, dear, look out!”
Startled, Ruth jerked her shoulder away from the cabinet. A small object tottered from an open shelf and smashed into white chips on the floor. “Oh!—I’m so sorry.”
Mrs. Faulkner was on her knees, brushing the fragments together with her fingers. “How could you? How could you?”
“I’m awfully sorry. Can I buy you another one?”
“She wants to know if she can buy me another one,” quavered Mrs. Faulkner, again to an unseen audience. “Where is it you can buy a candy dish made by Ted’s little hands when he was seven?”
“It can be mended,” said Ruth helplessly.
“Can it?” said Mrs. Faulkner tragically. She held the fragments before Ruth’s face. “Not all the king’s horses and all the king’s men—”
“Thank heaven there were two of them,” said Ruth, pointing to a second clay dish on the shelf.
“Don’t touch it!” cried Mrs. Faulkner. “Don’t touch anything!”
Trembling, Ruth backed away from the cabinet. “I’d better be going.” She turned up the collar of her thin cloth coat. “May I use your phone to call a cab—please?”
Mrs. Faulkner’s aggressiveness dissolved instantly into an expression of pitiability. “No. You can’t take my boy’s child away from me. Please, dear, try to understand and forgive me. That little dish was sacred. Everything that’s left of my little boy is sacred, and that’s why I behaved the way I did.” She gathered a bit of Ruth’s sleeve in her hand and held it tightly. “You understand, don’t you? If there’s an ounce of mercy in you, you’ll forgive me and stay.”
Ruth drove the air from her lungs with pent-up exasperation. “I’d like to go right to bed, if you don’t mind.” She wasn’t tired, was so keyed up, in fact, that she expected to spend the night staring at the ceiling. But she didn’t want to exchange another word with this woman, wanted to hide her humiliation and disappointment in the white oblivion of bed.
Mrs. Faulkner became the perfect hostess, respectful and solicitous. The small guest room, tasteful, crisp, barren, like all guest rooms implied an invitation to make oneself at home, and at the same time admitted that it was an impossibility. The room was cool, as though the radiators had only been turned on an hour or so before, and the air was sweet with the smell of furniture polish.
“And this is for the baby and me?” said Ruth. She had no intention of staying beyond the next morning, but felt forced to make conversation as Mrs. Faulkner lingered in the doorway.
“This