36
PARTISAN REVIEW
"Oh yes I know Joan, and you must both come up to see me
some time, will you?" This was her after-church manner. Mark had
seen it in operation for years. "I'd simply love it."
She backed out into the state road and then there was nothing
for Mark to look at there but his own car, equally well polished and
new only not paid for yet. There were fourteen months to go. He
closed his eyes and began figuring again, in the crazy sick way that
had come over him lately: dollars in a week, weeks in fourteen
months, cans on a shelf in a year.... The -sun was already at its
highest, slapping down on the truck roof, making
his
pale curls itch
and dampen at the roots. The face of Jake rose up, wilted, there was
nothing to it after all. Father Williams was more important and Mark
would put a dime in the collection plate on Sunday as he always had.
Perhaps when he was married they would have to put in a dime
apiece. Do come to see me, will you? I'm not a dictator, I only talk
that way. He thought, if only something would happen, if something
would knock the damn figures out of his head, it might be nice to go
calling on Mrs. Aldington in his new car.
Jake came out at last, his arms full of butter.
"All set?"
"Yes."
"You took your time all right."
But he couldn't manage to be ugly -about it. Summer had come
to the store, all the best people were there feeling the fruit, and Jake
was a young man still. He smiled, the handsome slabs of his face
going pudgy with the heat, his wet blue eyes-not piggish as Mark
had been picturing them-wide open. Where did he get
all
that
power? Won't he melt one of these days? Not yet anyway. There
was still enough of him to need a special steering-gear with a hinge
so he could get in behind it. He hoisted himself up like an aviator,
clicked the wheel down against his belly, and was off. The pencil
teetered over
his
ear and a bit of saliva leaked down into the crevice
beneath his chin. He began a long story about a girl. ... Mark gave
himself up to
his
sickness and to his watery vision of Joan and her
white hands in a white hospital. The truck rolled on, huge and metho–
dical, as if devouring the countryside, and people ran to meet it inno–
cently at their picket gates.
She was waiting for him in the new house after work, fixing
fi;;;:'
ers in a cheap vase, blue and yellow. He watched her through the
window. The late sun was striking in shafts from the other side, mak–
ing her look like a five-and-ten Catholic saint. The picture was right
in other ways too: her hair, pale like his but pulled back straight and
