The Street (46 page)

She couldn't stop the quivering that started in her stomach, that set up a spasmodic contracting of her throat so that she felt as though her breath had been cut off. The only thing she could do was to go away and never come back, because the best thing that could happen to Bub would be for him never to know that his mother was a murderer. She took half the bills out of the wallet, wadded them into her purse, left the wallet on the sofa.

Getting back to the foyer door was worse this time. The four corners of the room were alive with silence—deepening pools of an ominous silence. She kept turning her head in an effort to see all of the room at once; kept fighting against a desire to scream. Hysteria mounted in her because she began to believe that at any moment the figure on the sofa might disappear into one of these pools of silence and then emerge from almost any part of the room, to bar her exit.

When she finally turned the key in the door, crossed the small foyer, and reached the outside hall, she had to lean against the wall for a long moment before she could control the shaking of her legs, but the contracting of her throat was getting worse.

She saw that the white gloves she was wearing were streaked with dust from the candlestick. There was a smear of blood on one of them. She ripped them off and put them in her coat pocket, and as she did it she thought she was acting as though murder was something with which she was familiar. She
walked down the stairs instead of taking the elevator, and the thought recurred.

When she left the building, it was snowing hard. The wind blew the snow against her face, making her walk faster as she approached the entrance to the Eighth Avenue subway.

She thought confusedly of the best place for her to go. It had to be a big city. She decided that Chicago was not too far away and it was big. It would swallow her up. She would go there.

On the subway she started shivering again. Had she killed Boots by accident? The awful part of it was she hadn't even seen him when she was hitting him like that. The first blow was deliberate and provoked, but all those other blows weren't provoked. There wasn't any excuse for her. It hadn't even been self-defense. This impulse to violence had been in her for a long time, growing, feeding, until finally she had blown up in a thousand pieces. Bub must never know what she had done.

In Pennsylvania Station she bought a ticket for Chicago. ‘One way?' the ticket man asked.

‘One way,' she echoed. Yes, a one-way ticket, she thought. I've had one since the day I was born.

The train was on the track. People flowed and spilled through the gates like water running over a dam. She walked in the middle of the crowd.

The coaches filled up rapidly. People with bags and hatboxes and bundles and children moved hastily down the aisles, almost falling into the scats in their haste to secure a place to sit.

Lutie found a seat midway in the coach. She sat down near the window. Bub would never understand why she had disappeared. He was expecting to see her tomorrow. She had promised him she would come. He would never know why she had deserted him and he would be bewildered and lost without her.

Would he remember that she loved him? She hoped so, but she knew that for a long time he would have that half-frightened, worried look she had seen on his face the night he was waiting for her at the subway.

He would probably go to reform school. She looked out of the train window, not seeing the last-minute passengers hurrying down the ramp. The constriction of her throat increased. So he will go to reform school, she repeated. He'll be better off there. He'll be better off without you. That way he may have some kind of chance. He didn't have the ghost of a chance on that street. The best you could give him wasn't good enough.

As the train started to move, she began to trace a design on the window. It was a series of circles that flowed into each other. She remembered that when she was in grammar school the children were taught to get the proper slant to their writing, to get the feel of a pen in their hands, by making these same circles.

Once again she could hear the flat, exasperated voice of the teacher as she looked at the circles Lutie had produced. ‘Really,' she said, ‘I don't know why they have us bother to teach your people to write.'

Her finger moved over the glass, around and around. The circles showed up plainly on the dusty surface. The woman's statement was correct, she
thought. What possible good has it done to teach people like me to write?

The train crept out of the tunnel, gathered speed as it left the city behind. Snow whispered against the windows. And as the train roared into the darkness, Lutie tried to figure out by what twists and turns of fate she had landed on this train. Her mind balked at the task. All she could think was, It was that street. It was that god-damned street.

The snow fell softly on the street. It muffled sound. It sent people scurrying homeward, so that the street was soon deserted, empty, quiet. And it could have been any street in the city, for the snow laid a delicate film over the sidewalk, over the brick of the tired, old buildings; gently obscuring the grime and the garbage and the ugliness.

THE END

A
NN
P
ETRY
(1912–1997) is also the author of
The Narrows, Country Place,
and
Miss Muriel and Other Stories. The Street
was her first novel.