Collected Stories by Tennessee Williams
Certainly Billy Spangler did not reconsider the hiring of the new girl, Gladys, but the night after he hired her was a restless night for him. He could not seem to get in the right position on his bed. The only position that seemed comfortable to him was on his belly but that position brought the wrong sort of thoughts, sensations and images into his mind and body, especially his body. At one point he even found himself pushing his pelvis rhythmically up and down at the luxuriously yielding mattress, and this undeliberate action made it plain to Billy that his experience with Big Edna had weakened, temporarily, the Spartan control which he prided himself on having over his healthy young urges. He turned at once on his back and began to say the Lord’s Prayer. Usually when he had a touch of insomnia, he wouldn’t get past the first few lines of the prayer before he started drifting into dreamland, but this night he got all the way through it and was as wakeful as before. Finally, he realized what he had on his mind. He had maybe put himself into a morally vulnerable situation by hiring a new girl who was not just a good-looker but a spectacular beauty. With this realization, he turned back onto his belly and seemed to go right to sleep.
When the new girl showed up for work the following morning, Billy was very careful to show her no special attention, no sign of favoritism. He put her right to work as if she’d been employed at the drive-in as long as the other two girls. Of course he kept an eye on her without letting her see it. He had to see how quickly she would catch on, and it was amazing how quickly she did. You’d think she’d been a carhop at a drive-in since her first day out of a crib or playpen, she moved around so briskly in response to orders. She kept her eyes and her mind on her work and showed absolutely no sign of any kind of emotional instability whatsoever.
By midafternoon, Billy was convinced that this new girl, Gladys, was one out of a million, at a conservative estimate. She was not only taking orders briskly and cheerily, but she was shouting the orders to the colored man in the kitchen with an authority of tone in her voice that made the orders come out double quick, quicker than they would come out when shouted by Billy himself.
My God, she is a goddess!
That’s what he said to himself about this new girl at the drive-in, and now that she had so brilliantly proven herself as the best imaginable drive-in employee, Billy felt free to express his pleasure with her.
Goddess, he would say to her, how are things going? Are they wearing you down?
And she would smile and say. No, sir, I feel fine, just fine!
Fine? he would say.
And she would say. Yes, sir, fine.
It was the sort of a conversation that has no purpose except to express good will. And Billy felt that good will was the keystone of their relations. Oddly enough, he did not feel uncomfortable over the beauty of the new girl. Perhaps his experience with Big Edna had purified him. It had been like an eruption and perhaps a great deal of violence in him had found a way out and left him a whole lot quieter and cleaner inside. He felt as though he had taken a purgative, one that removed all the waste matter in the body and left it sweet and clean as a newborn baby’s.
How are things going for you, honey? he would ask the new girl every time she went past him and she would say. Just fine, Mr. Spangler. I’m not tired a bit.
She had not yet put on the uniform of the drive-in. Big Edna’s uniform did not fit her and it had been sent over to the tailor for alterations. It would be back at a quarter after five and then the new girl would change into it. Billy Spangler was anxious to see how the uniform would fit her and he imagined that it would look extremely good on her. Her shape was young and perfect and the way that she moved her body, sinuously and briskly, spoke of good health and clean living.
Promptly at five fifteen the uniform came back from the tailor shop and Billy said to the new girl, Gladys, your uniform has come, honey.
Oh, good, said Gladys. Her tone was very excited. You could tell that she regarded the uniform as a privilege and was eager to get into it, the way that a proud young soldier exults in putting on the uniform of his army. But something had gone wrong, either in the measurements or in the alterations, for when the new girl came out of the girls’ lavatory there was a frown of dismay on her beautiful goddesslike face.
Oh, Mr. Spangler, she said, the pants are too tight on me! The top won’t button!
What? said Billy in a tone of chagrin.
Look, she said to him.
Billy could see it was true. The pants had been made too narrow across the hips or the waist and the top button of the fly could not be fastened. The fly gaped open exposing the sheer pink undergarments of the girl with the flesh showing through it the color of a fresh young rose, and all at once Billy was intensely embarrassed.
Shall I take them back off? asked the girl. Billy thought for a moment with his face to the window, gazing distractedly out and his hands in his pockets while he stood there reflecting.
No, he said, finally. Just leave them on for the present and tomorrow we can have them adjusted again or maybe even buy you a brand-new pair.
From then on Billy was acutely uncomfortable in the drive-in, and his discomfort seemed to affect the three girls. One thing went wrong after another, little things not worth mentioning, really, but the accumulated annoyance and strain was very heavy indeed by the time the drive-in closed up.
The new girl bore herself with irreproachable dignity. Billy had to give her credit for that. Even when another button popped off the gaping fly she did not lose her poise. I lost another button, was all that she said. She had already fastened a clean blue dish towel about her waist like a sash to cover the exposed pink drawers.
For a couple of hours before closing time Billy had been saying to himself, I better send her home first. But somehow it slipped his mind and when it came time to close up he was startled to discover that he had dismissed the other two girls and had told the new one to stay.
Well, he said to himself, I guess that I felt she needed a little more briefing on how things are done around here.
It may be that a touch of paranoia is necessary to individual felicity in this world. A man does not necessarily have to have a messianic complex but on the other hand, little good is derived from a continually and totally iconoclastic point of view in regard to himself and his relative position. Gewinner was a romantic. We have already found that out about him. The mere fact of his ascent to the tower of the Pearce residence offered us more than a clue to this dominant trait of his character. Of course, America, and particularly the Southern states, is the embodiment of an originally romantic gesture. It was discovered and established by the eternal Don Quixote in the human flux. Then, of course, the businessmen took over and Don Quixote was an exile at home: at least he became one when the frontiers had been exhausted. But exile does not extinguish his lambent spirit. His castles are immaterial and his ways are endless and you do not have to look into many American eyes to suddenly meet somewhere the beautiful grave lunacy of his gaze or to observe his hands making some constrained but limitless gesture, if only in the act of passing a salt shaker to an adjacent stranger in some nondescript beanery along Skid Row. He can talk to you with quiet wisdom about the ways of the world which he has traveled in his knightly quest. He can tell you where to get an excellent piece of nookie in a city two thousand miles removed from the place where you meet him or he can conduct you to one around the corner. Or perhaps his pocketknife has just carved a romantically large glory hole in the wooden partitions of the depot lavatory. He is not a good worker though he is sometimes brilliant. His jobs are not large enough for his knees and elbows and he detests the accumulation of fat on his body that comes with sedentary employment. He gets along badly with policemen. He is much too American for them. Our police force only gets along with false and dispirited people, broken upon the ancient wheel of Europe. Quixote de la Mancha has never been broken. The long skeleton of him is too elastic and springy. Our hope lies in the fact that our public instinctively loves him and th
America was built of paranoia by men who thought themselves superior to the common lot, who overlooked the ignominy of death, who observed the mysteries but did not feel belittled by them, who never paused to consider the vanity of their dreams and who consequently translated them into actions. So perpetually Quixote travels along his steep and windy roads, encumbered by rusty armor and mounted upon a steed whose ribs are as protuberant as his own. Behind him totters Sancho Panza bearing the overflow of knightly equipment and possibly a shade madder, by this time, than his ancient master. Sancho Panza has been elevated to knighthood in his heart and Quixote often dismounts in order that his equerry can rest in the saddle. Democracy has been taken in stride by Don Quixote and Sancho Panza as something forever implicit in the romantic heart, wrhich is the true heart of man. Their language has changed. It is simplified. Now? a syllable suffices wrhere a sentence wras necessary once. Sometimes they may go for days with only signs exchanged between them, the elevation of a single gaunt finger, slightly crooked at both joints, a cock of the head as it climbs into silhouette against a bank of gray cloud, the heavenward roll of the eyes, blue in the case of Quixote, dark brown in Sancho’s. By silent agreement they will stop for the night, and now it is not unusual for both heads to rest in the padded crook of the saddle nor for the weatherworn hands to intertwine in slumber. Distance and time have purified their manners. Their customs are private. Sometimes they may fall out. That, too, is romantic. But somehow the roads they take in different directions always manage to cross again somewhere, and at the next encounter they are bashful as girls and each one wishes to take the smaller share of the wretched fish or chop, ceremonially prepared in honor of the reunion. And what of their deaths? They meet beyond the grave. Each one observes that the other is older and thinner but neither is so unkind as to comment upon it even to himself, for love of this kind is also a lunatic thing. Birds know them and understand them better than men. Have you ever seen the skeleton of a bird? If you have, you will know how completely they are still flying…
Gewinner was solitary nearly always, he gave no evidence of being a very warmhearted person and in all external respects he bore but little resemblance to Quixote. But in his vision was that alchemy of the romantic, that capacity for transmutation somewhere between a thing and the witness of it. The gods used to do that for us. Ceaselessly lamenting women were changed into arboreal shapes and fountains. Masterless hounds became a group of stars. The earth and the sky were full of metamorphosed beings. Behind all of this there must have been some truth. Perhaps it was actually the only truth. Things may be only what we change them into, now that we have taken over this former prerogative of the divine.
It may be remembered, if it isn’t forgotten, that Violet once received a message by carrier pigeon from her school chum Gladys and that, on that occasion, she asked Gewinner if he would like to receive a message from Gladys dispatched in the same quaint manner. At that time Gewinner could not imagine what the message might be. More recently, a number of pigeons had delivered a corresponding number of messages to the two conspirators, Violet and Gewinner, in the Pearce castle, and Gewinner sometimes, and sometimes Violet, had sent the pigeons back with answers to their dispatcher, Gladys, who was now, it so happened, employed as a carhop at the Laughing Boy Drive-in. Gewinner had even learned to swallow the incoming messages and found them not distasteful. They came in several flavors, and the importance of the message was signified by the flavor. Messages of routine importance tasted like lemon sherbet while messages of special gravity had a licorice flavor.
Of course the important elements of these messages were not the flavors of the paper on which they were inscribed, but—to avoid a premature disclosure of what was developing among Gewinner and the two young ladies—it is possible to quote the contents of a single message only. This message from Gladys to Gewinner, delivered at dusk by a pigeon white as a dove, gave him this bit of pleasantly romantic advice, if advice you can call it.
Dear Pen Pal and Pigeon Fancier, went the message quotable at this point, it is advisable for me to remind you that the use of the term “knightly quest” instead of “nightly quest” is not just a verbal conceit but a thing of the highest significance in every part of creation, wherever a man in the prison of his body can remember his spirit. Sincerely, Gladys. Then there was a short postscript: Watch the white bird returning!
Gewinner watched the white bird returning, he saw it open its snowy wings but rising straight up without moving them as if it were caught in a sudden, sweeping updraft of wind, and it disappeared in the air as if it were changed to mist.
Only a day or so after she started working at the drive-in, Gladys had taken Billy aside and told him that she was engaged in counterespionage for The Project but that he must mention this fact to no one, including Braden Pearce.
Billy believed her. He was so enamored of Gladys that she could have told him she was God’s mother and he would have believed her, but it did seem to Billy that her methods were lacking in the sort of subtlety that counterespionage seemed to call for. She was continually putting through long-distance calls on the public phone at the drive-in, and whenever she had a spare minute, she opened a brief case and pored over photostatic copies of blueprints. At least twice a week she was visited by a man with whiskers that had a false look about them and they talked together in a foreign tongue that sounded like no earthly language, and one evening Billy was startled to see this man with the whiskers remove from his pocket a live bird and give it to Gladys, along with cardboard tags, bits of wire and a little dog-eared book that Billy presumed was a code book. Such methods of counterespionage seemed much too obvious to Billy. They were outdated. That night, when he and Gladys were alone closing up the drive-in, he told her about these misgivings.
Gladys reassured him. We’re using these obvious methods, she said, to disarm the enemy spies with the impression we’re stupid. And you’ve got to make up your mind, Billy, whether you trust me or not. You’ve got to make up your mind about that now, right now, if you want me to go on operating here at the drive-in…or change to some other place.
This conference took place in the little office of the drive-in, and it suddenly turned into a very intimate thing between them when she switched off the office light.
Afterward Billy had a very proud and elated feeling. He felt that something big and wonderful was about to happen, and that he, in his own humble and ignorant way, was a partisan in it, chosen to be one.
Father Acheson of St. Mary’s Cathedral and the Reverend Doctor Peters of the Methodist Episcopal Church had both been invited to dine at the Pearce residence on the night of Saturday, March 16. This was a sign of the new amity that had sprung up between the two rival pastors. Only a year ago Dr. Peters had been heard to say, I am going to break the Catholic stranglehold on this town, and Father Acheson had remarked that Protestantism and atheism were holding open the door to the wolves of Asia. The peacemaking had been brought about by none other than Braden Pearce who was to be their host at the Saturday night dinner party at the Pearce mansion. Braden had taken a very bold step to bring about this new amity. He had sent each pastor a check for five thousand dollars, payable one month from the date of receipt, and with it a note saying, I want you two fellows to shake hands with each other on the speakers’ platform at the next meeting of the Civic Good-Fellowship League, which is to be next Wednesday, and unless you do shake hands and pull together for the common cause of making this a one hundred percent Christian community, why, these two checks are going to be worth just as much as the paper they’re written on when you go to cash them.
The device had worked like a charm. The two pastors had not only shaken hands on the speakers’
Now they were coming together on a special occasion at the peacemaker’s home. This occasion was the seventh anniversary of Braden’s marriage to Violet. Only Braden’s mother knew that this was the last anniversary of that event which would ever be celebrated. What happened that night was that Violet got really good and drunk for the first time since the marriage in spite of the fact that she had only one more than her usual number of cocktails. Mother Pearce had mixed them. A scene occurred at the dinner table. Father Acheson and Dr. Peters were dreadfully embarrassed. They had to pretend that they didn’t notice a thing, though Violet was leaning forward so far that her string of pearls was dangling into her soup. Braden would now and then reach out and pinch her arm or pat her shoulders. She would sit up straight for a minute or two, but then she would slump forward again.
At last Mother Pearce rang a bell. Two uniformed attendants came in as though they had been planted right outside the door for Violet’s apparent collapse to occur. They picked her up by her legs and shoulders and whisked her out of the dining room. Only Gewinner made any comment on the occurrence.
Violet seems to be tired. That was his comment. Then he rose from his seat at the table and said. Excuse me, please. I’ll go check her condition.