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  DESPERATE ASYLUM

  Originally published in 1955.

  CHAPTER I

  SECTION 1

  Emerson Page thought about the girl waiting upstairs, and wished very much that he was up there with her. The girl’s name was Edwina and Emerson’s thinking of her was always pleasant and frequently glandular.

  Edwina, whose name was lovingly abbreviated to Ed, was Emerson’s wife, and at this moment he was wanting her very much, and he knew that she wanted him also. He regretted that this was not possible, or at least not practicable at the moment, but he consoled himself with the assurance that it would later be both.

  The time was eight o’clock of a Saturday night in November. The place was the kitchen of a small restaurant and bar of distinction, of which Emerson was owner, in the town of Corinth, which was not in Greece. Emerson stepped out of the kitchen, where he had just eaten his own dinner, into the dining room, where he stopped and looked around and was conscious of a familiar warm diffusion of pride in his work and his accomplishment. It was not a large dining room, but it was relaxed and pleasant and good for the digestion. The napery was snowy. The silver and crystal caught and reflected the light from the ceiling. The woodwork was fine walnut, shining softly as satin. On the beige carpet from wall to wall, the footsteps of patrons and waitresses fell without sound. It was a nice room, and he had raised it like an only child from a short-order diner, and he was very proud.

  Moving slowly, he skirted the room, nodding and smiling to guests at dinner, and turned under an arch into the bar. Here, light had been reduced even more than in the dining room, and he stood for a moment just inside the archway while the pupils of his eyes dilated in adjustment. A couple of men occupied stools. At a table in the rear, a man and a woman were drinking Manhattans. The woman reached over and lifted the cherry by its stem from the man’s glass. The man said something and the woman laughed, putting the cherry daintily between white teeth. Beyond the man and the woman, in an automatic coin machine with its volume carefully modulated, a platter was spinning out under a needle the reproduction of a throaty female voice: Let me go, let me go, let me go, lover.

  He listened to the voice, still thinking of Ed, and he knew that he would never want her to let him go. Never in the world. Thinking of her, he could see her. Upstairs in the apartment, as he had recently left her, wearing the red velvet toreador pants that were enough to excite the bull in any normal male. Curled up in the biggest chair in the room under a reading lamp, concentrating with childish intensity on one of her interminable books. Books were an obsession with her. Books on history and art and literature and all such heavy stuff as that. Even books on psychology. Stuff about what made you do things. Her hunger to know things was created by an early and deeply instilled feeling of inadequacy that was a result of her never having finished high school.

  “My God,” he’d said, “that was a long time ago. By now you probably know more than half the God-damn college professors in the country.”

  “Well,” she’d answered, “after a while I may know more than the other half. Only I don’t. Know more than almost anyone, I mean. I have such a hell of a time remembering the stuff. It makes me simply furious.”

  He stood very quietly, thinking and smiling, hoping that she would come down to have a drink with him before the night was gone. They would have a martini apiece, maybe two or three, and then they would go upstairs together, and it would be very wonderful, as it always was. It was a fine thing to have a wife you kept right on loving and wanting. It was a fine, lucky thing, and it didn’t happen to every man.

  Walking across the room, he crawled onto a stool at the lower end of the bar where it curved around to the wall. Roscoe Dooley, the bartender, came down on the inside and said, “Good-evening, Em. Drink?”

  Roscoe was more than an employee. He was an old friend. Even more than that. Emerson thought of him as an early benefactor, one of the people on Earth to whom he owed something. Time was, as a matter of fact, when their positions had been reversed. Roscoe had been the employer, Emerson the employee. But that was a long time ago, or seemed like a long time, before the second World War, in another world. Roscoe had then owned an owl diner across town near the high school. He had given Emerson a job and had sometimes read poetry to him.

  In response to the question, Emerson shook his head. “No, thanks, Roscoe. It’s too early.”

  Roscoe looked past him through the archway into the room of damask and silver and shining crystal where people talked softly and walked soundlessly and fed themselves well.

  “It looks like a good night,” he said.

  “Saturdays are always good.”

  “It’s a long way from the old diner.”

  “Quite a way.”

  “I think a lot about then. How it was and everything.”

  “So do I.”

  “You were a smart kid. Quiet and smart. I always knew you were going someplace.”

  “I haven’t gone much of anyplace, Roscoe. Just a restaurant and bar downtown.”

  He didn’t really feel that way about it. It was a violation of his pride in what he had wanted to do and had done, and it pleased him to hear Roscoe deny it.

  “It’s a fine place. It’s got character.”

  “Say it again, Roscoe. You’re good for me. You’re good for my ego.”

  “It’s true, anyhow. Almost anyone could operate a place to eat and drink. A lousy filling station. It takes someone like you to give a place the kind of character you’ve given this place. I couldn’t have done it. Not ever. I stayed out in the old diner for almost twenty years, and I’d still be there if you hadn’t come and got me out and given me this job.”

  “It’s Ed’s character, not mine. I probably wouldn’t be here myself if it hadn’t been for her.”

  Roscoe’s face got soft. He loved Ed in a way that went with his age. It made him happy to look at her and smell her and maybe touch her fingers when he handed her a drink.

  “She’s a sweet girl,” he said. “I’m glad you married. Ed.”

  “You should have married a girl like Ed yourself.”

  “Me? Why the hell would a girl like Ed want to marry someone like me? I’m just a bum. Besides, there weren’t any girls like Ed when I was young enough to be interested, and I’ve never seen another one like her since then, either.”

  Roscoe was in one of his gloomy periods. He was looking back and wishing things had been different for him. Emerson tried to think of something to say, but he couldn’t, and just then a patron got onto a stool down the line, so it wasn’t necessary to keep on trying. Roscoe went to get the order, and Emerson slipped off his stool and walked up to the big front window. He drew the drapes apart a little and stood looking out into the street.

  It had begun to snow. Great flakes descended lazily from darkness into the light of the street lamps and shop windows to make a thin, white cover for this street of Corinth. Watching the slow and silent transformation of his town, Emerson felt his quiet happiness swell within him and become for a moment an enjoyable pain. He had lived all his life in Corinth and would not have considered living anyplace else. He liked the town, and the town liked him, and he had been successful in it. Not that everything had come easily. His father had died when he was very young, leaving enough insurance to pay for a funeral and retire a small mortgage on a house that was getting old and hadn’t been much when it was new, and Emerson started earlier than most boys to work at odd jobs. He delivered the local paper, The Corinth Reporter, and when he was finally able to buy a bicycle he began delivering parcels for various small merchants who didn’t have e
nough business to maintain a regular service.

  At the age of sixteen, the year before the war began, he got a job working in an owl diner from six to midnight. This was the diner owned by Roscoe Dooley, a man of unsuspected sensitivity and compassion. He felt that he had lost his way in life, and this had created in him a kind of gentle resignation instead of the bitterness that often comes to people who feel that way. He didn’t have much of anything to do in the evenings after Emerson relieved him in the diner, and so he often stayed on until nine or ten o’clock, sitting in a canvas lawn chair behind the counter and reading the poetry of Edwin Arlington Robinson. Sometimes, when there were no customers on the little stools on the other side, he read some of the poetry aloud to Emerson. Emerson thought the poetry was very beautiful, especially the way Roscoe read it, but he couldn’t understand why anyone should feel as bad about everything as this Robinson did…

  Emerson liked his job in the diner, and he began to think about having a diner of his own. He was very good with food, and after a while Roscoe began to let him make a few changes in a menu that hadn’t changed in ten years, except that the chili was omitted when the weather got hot. He began to save a little money, though not much, and he had it all planned how he would buy an old coach from the railroad and fix it up with booths and have it moved onto a spot of ground where the trade would be good. But all this was spoiled by the war. While he was in the army, his mother died and he came home briefly on leave to see her buried beside the father he could hardly remember, and there was no time, as there never was in those days, for more than a gesture of mourning, the slightest concession to grief. To tell tie truth, his mother had been a tired, morose woman for many years, and he had admired her courage and respected her position, but had never loved her greatly.

  Two years later, on the island of Leyte, he was hit in the right leg by a machinegun bullet while he was going up the slope of a ridge one wet, gray dawn. The bone was broken, and while he lay patiently in the rain until a medic could get to him, the mortar platoon that was supporting the attack from the rear dropped half a dozen short rounds on their own men, which was something that happened more often than is generally admitted, and he picked up a couple pieces of shrapnel in addition to the bullet, one of which broke the same leg in another place. He was left with a bad limp, but in compensation for this he was released early from the army and received a small pension.

  Back in Corinth, he sold the house his mother had left and got much more for it than he had expected because of the inflated value of real estate. With the money from the house to invest and the pension to help carry him through the hard time of getting started, he was able to do a little better than an old railway coach. He rented a narrow building next door to a bowling alley and opened a diner. He served only short-orders, but the food was good, and maybe he got some breaks besides, but for whatever reasons there were, he did well and made some money. And all the time he kept thinking about the kind of place he really wanted to own, a small restaurant and bar of distinction where good people came for good food and good drinks. A place of integrity, he called it in his mind.

  It was not long before there was more work than he could do by himself in the diner next door to the bowling alley. He had a boy who washed dishes, but he needed someone to help him with the short-orders behind the counter and to serve the four booths along the opposite wall, and he decided that it would be good for business to have a pretty girl. He put an ad in The Reporter, and half a dozen girls answered it, but the last two were wasting their time, because the fourth was Edwina, and she was just what he wanted. As a waitress, of course. That was what he kept telling himself, anyhow, and he honestly tried to convince himself that it was true. But after a while, in spite of his efforts, he had to admit that he also wanted her another way, and a little while after that he had her. It happened in the diner one night after the dishwasher was gone and the door was locked, and it was a thoroughly co-operative and satisfactory performance.

  After it was over, he drew two cups of coffee and handed her one. He was pleasantly surprised to see that she looked as good to him now as she had before, which was something that had never been true with anyone else at any other time. She took the cup of coffee and set it down and combed fingers through dark hair that was thick and almost straight, curling only a little at the ends. She wore it pretty long then, almost to the shoulders, which was the fashion. Her white uniform, re-donned, fitted her slender body snugly.

  “I’ll get the cream out of the refrigerator,” she said.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I forgot you use cream.”

  She got the cream and put some in her coffee. She used a lot of it. The color of the coffee after the cream was in it, he noticed, was almost exactly the same color as her skin.

  “I shouldn’t have done that,” he said.

  “Done what?”

  “You know. What I just got through doing.”

  “It wasn’t you. It was us.”

  “It was my fault, though. I started it.”

  “Did you? That’s what men always think.”

  “I’ve been trying not to do it. The trouble is, you’re so damn pretty.”

  “Thank you. Have you really wanted to before?”

  “Lots of times.”

  “Why haven’t you, then?”

  “Because you’re a good girl. Does that sound corny? Because I can’t get married or anything for quite a while yet.”

  “Don’t be silly. I don’t expect you to marry me.”

  “I wouldn’t blame you if you did.”

  “Do you think a fellow ought to marry the first girl he makes love to?”

  “Well, not necessarily. This isn’t my first time. I’ll admit that.”

  “If a fellow married the first girl, I’d already be married. Would you like that?”

  “No, I wouldn’t. I never thought about it like that. As a matter of fact, I didn’t even think about its having happened to you before.”

  “Well, you’re pretty green for a fellow who talks so big, I must say. Couldn’t you tell?”

  “I guess I could have told if I’d thought about it.”

  “All right. Now you can quit thinking about it.”

  “I don’t think I want to quit. You’re the prettiest gill I’ve ever seen.”

  “Being pretty isn’t enough. A girl has to be smart to keep a man interested.”

  “You’re smart enough.”

  “No, I’m not. I’m not smart at all. I’m ignorant. I didn’t even finish high school.”

  “Finishing high school doesn’t make you smart. Lots of dumb kids finish high school.”

  “Just the same, anyone ought to finish high school, at least. I’ll bet you finished.”

  “Well, I just did. I never went to college or anything. I went into the army instead.”

  “You could have gone after you got out. On the GI Bill.”

  “I didn’t want to go.”

  “Don’t you ever wish you had?”

  “No. There’s something else I want to do.”

  “What?”

  “I want to have a restaurant and bar downtown. A nice place people will come to and talk about and come back to.”

  “That would be fun. Someday you’ll have a place like that, too. Sooner than you think, maybe. May I come and work there?”

  “Probably you won’t even want to. Probably you’ll be married to a millionaire by that time.”

  He drank some coffee. It had got cold, so he went over and poured it down the drain beneath the water tap and drew some hot from the urn.

  “More coffee?” he said.

  “No, thanks.”

  He carried his own cup back to where she was and set it down and let it start getting cold like the other. The flush of color was still in her
cheeks that had risen there in the excitement earlier.

  “Who were the others?” he said.

  “Others?”

  “The ones before me.”

  “What difference does it make? It had nothing to do with you then.”

  “I know. I guess I’m jealous.”

  “You shouldn’t be. If you’d been there, it wouldn’t have happened. Except with you, I mean. Anyhow, it wasn’t others. It was just other.”

  “That doesn’t make me feel any better. It makes him sound like someone special, whoever he was.”

  “I thought he was special, but it turned out he wasn’t.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “It was during the war. He went into the army and didn’t come back.”

  “Killed?”

  “No. I don’t think so. He just didn’t come back.”

  “Were you sorry?”

  “I was glad. I didn’t want him to get killed, but I didn’t want him to come back, either.”

  He picked up his cup and hers and carried them to the sink.

  “I’ll take you home,” he said.

  “You don’t have to. I can go alone.”

  “I want to do it.”

  “All right. If you really want to.”

  She lived with her mother in a house that was about two miles from the diner, and he said he would get a taxi, but she said she would rather walk, so they did. At the house it happened again, and it hadn’t lost anything, and afterward he walked back to town to his own room and sat there thinking about her. He looked down from his window into the street and watched a policeman walk slowly along the other side. The policeman stopped to rattle the door of each shop to see if it was locked, and after he had passed, the street was empty for a long time. Then there was a drunk who got too close to the curb and slipped off and fell in the gutter and got up and stayed in the gutter and walked carefully to the corner and out of sight across the intersection. The street was empty again for a while, after which there was a taxi going one way and a milk truck going the other, and by that time Emerson had decided that he would marry Edwina, not because of what they had done, because he felt like he had to, but just because it was something he wanted.