The Partridge Festival

By Flannery O’ Connor

1961

CALHOUN parked his small pod-shaped car in the driveway to
his great-aunts' house and got out cautiously, looking to the
right and left as if he expected the profusion of azalea blossoms to
have a lethal effect upon him. Instead of a decent lawn, the old
ladies had three terraces crammed with red and white azaleas, beginning
at the sidewalk and running backwards to the very edge
of their imposing unpainted house. The two of them were on the
front porch, one sitting, the other standing.
  "Here's our baby;" his Aunt Bessie intoned in a voice meant to
reach the other one, two feet away but deaf. It turned the head of a
girl in the next yard, who sat cross-legged under a tree, reading.
She raised her spectacled face, stared at Calhoun, and then returned
her attention-with what he saw plainly was a smirk--to the book.
Scowling, he passed stolidly on to the porch to get over the preliminaries
with his aunts. They would take his voluntary presence
in Partridge at Azalea Festival time to be a sign that his character
was improving.
  They were box-jawed old ladies who looked like George Washington
with his wooden teeth in. They wore black suits with large
ruffled jabots and had dead-white hair pulled back. After each had
embraced him, he dropped limply into a rocker and gave them a
sheepish smile. He was here only because Singleton had captured
his imagination, but he had told his Aunt Bessie over the telephone
that he was coming to enjoy the festival.
  The deaf one, Aunt Mattie, shouted, "Your great-grandfather
would have been delighted to see you taking an interest in the
festival, Calhoun. He initiated it himself, you know."
  "Well," the boy yelled back, "what about the little extra excitement
you've had this time?"
  Ten days before the festival began, a man named Singleton had
been tried by a mock court on the courthouse lawn for not buying
an Azalea Festival Badge. During the trial he had been imprisoned
in a pair of stocks and when convicted, he had been locked in the
"jail" together with a goat that had been tried and convicted previously
for the same offense. The "jail" was an outdoor privy borrowed
for the occasion by the Jaycees. Ten days later, Singleton had
appeared in a side door on the courthouse porch and with a silent
automatic pistol, had shot five of the dignitaries seated there and by
mistake one person in the crowd. The innocent man received the
bullet intended for the mayor who at that moment had reached
down to pull up the tongue of his shoe.
  "An unfortunate incident," his Aunt Mattie said. "It mars the
festive spirit."
  He heard the girl on the other lawn slam her book. The top of
her rose into view above the hedge--a sloping-forward neck and a
small face with a fierce expression, which she trained briefly on
them before she disappeared. "It doesn't seem to have marred anything,"
he said. "As I passed through town I saw more people than
ever before and all the flags were up. Partridge," he shouted, "will
bury its dead but will not lose a nickel." The girl's front door
slammed in the middle of the sentence.
  His Aunt Bessie had gone into the house and come out again
with a small leather box. "You look very like Father," she said and
pulled up her chair beside him.
Without enthusiasm Calhoun opened the box, which shed a rustcolored
dust over his knees, and removed the miniature of his greatgrandfather.
He was shown this every time he came. The old
man-round-faced, bald, altogether unremarkable-looking-sat with
his hands knotted on the head of a black stick. His expression was
all innocence and determination. The master merchant, the boy
thought, and flinched. "And what would this stalwart worthy think
of Partridge today," he asked wryly, "with its festival in full swing
after six citizens have been shot?"
"  Father was progressive," his Aunt Bessie said, "--the most
forward-looking merchant Partridge ever had. He would either
have been one of the prominent men shot or he would have been
the one to subdue the maniac."
  The boy did not know how much of this he could stand. In the
paper there had been pictures of the six "victims" and one of Singleton.
Singleton's was the only distinctive face in the lot. It was broad
but bony and bleak. One eye was more nearly round than the
other and in the more nearly round one Calhoun had recognized
the composure of the man who knows he will and who is willing
to suffer for the right to be himself. A calculating contempt lurked
in the regular eye but in the general expression there was the tortured
look of the man who becomes maddened finally by the madness
around him. The other six faces were of the same general stamp as
his great-grandfather's.
  "As you get older, you'll look more and more like Father," his
Aunt Mattie prophesied. "You have his ruddy complexion and much
the same expression."
  "I'm a different type entirely," he said stiffly.
  "Peaches and cream," his Aunt Bessie guffawed. "You're getting
a little pot-tummy too," she said and took a lunge at his middle
with her fist. "How old is our baby now?"
  "Twenty-three," he muttered, thinking that it could not go on
like this for the whole visit, that once they had roughed him up a
bit, they would leave off.
  "And do you have a girl?" his Aunt Mattie asked.
  "No," he said wearily. "I take it," he went on, "that around here
Singleton is considered nothing but a mental case?"
  "Yes," his Aunt Bessie said, "--peculiar. He never conformed. He
was not like the rest of us here."
  "A terrible drawback," the boy said. Though his eyes were not
mismatched, the shape of his face was broad like Singleton's; but
the real likeness between them was interior.
  "Since he is insane, he is not responsible," his Aunt Bessie said.
The boy's eyes brightened. He sat forward and fixed the old lady
with a narrow gaze. "And where then," he asked, "does the real
guilt lie?"
  "Father's head was as smooth as an infant's by the time he was
thirty," she said. "You had better hurry and get you a girl. Ha ha,
What are you going to do with yourself now;"
  He reached into his pocket and withdrew Ls pipe and a sack of
tobacco. You could not ask them questions in depth. They were
both good low-church Episcopalians but they had amoral imaginations.
"I think I shall write," he said and began to load the bowl.
  "Well," his Aunt Bessie said, "that's fine. Maybe you'll be another
Margaret MitchelL"
  "I hope you'll do us justice," his Aunt Mattie shouted. "Few do."
"I'll do you justice all right," he said grimly. "I'm writing an
expos .... " He stopped and put the pipe in his mouth and sat back.
It would be ridiculous to tell them. He removed the pipe and said,
"Well, that's too much to go into. It wouldn't interest you ladies."
  His Aunt Bessie inclined her head significantly. "Calhoun," she
said, "we wouldn't want to be disappointed in you." They eyed
him as if it had just occurred to them that the pet snake they had
been fondling might after all be poisonous.
  "Know the truth," the boy said with his fiercest look, "and the
truth shall make you free."
  They appeared reassured at his quoting Scripture. "Isn't he sweet,"
his Aunt Mattie asked, "with his little pipe?”
  "Better get you a girl, boy," his Aunt Bessie said.

  He escaped them in a few minutes and took his bag upstairs
and then came down again, ready to go out and immerse himself
in his material. His intention was to spend the afternoon interviewing
people about Singleton. He expected to write something that
would vindicate the madman and he expected the writing of it to
mitigate his own guilt, for his doubleness, his shadow, was cast
before him more darkly than usual in the light of Singleton's purity.
  For the three summer months of the year, he lived with his parents
and sold air-conditioners, boats, and refrigerators so that for
the other nine months he could afford to meet life naturally and
bring his real self-the rebel-artist-mystic-to birth. During these
other months he lived on the opposite side of the city in an unheated
walk-up with two other boys who also did nothing. But
guilt for the summer pursued him into the winter; the fact was,
he could have fared without the orgy of selling he cast himself into
in the summer.
  When he had explained to them that he despised their values, his
parents had looked at each other with a gleam of recognition as if
this were what they had been expecting from what they had read,
and his father had offered to give him a small allowance to finance
the flat. He had refused it for the sake of his independence, but in
the depths of himself, he knew it was not for his independence but
because he enjoyed selling. In the face of a customer, he was carried
outside himself; his face began to beam and sweat and all complexity
left him; he was in the grip of a drive as strong as the drive
of some men for liquor or a woman; and he was horribly good at
it. He was so good at it that the company had given him an
achievement scroll. He had put quotation marks around the word
achievement and he and his friends used the scroll as a target for
darts.
  As soon as he had seen Singleton's picture in the paper, the face
began to burn in his imagination like a dark reproachful liberating
star. The next morning he had telephoned his aunts to expect him
and he had driven the hundred and fifty miles to Partridge in
a little short of four hours.
  On his way out of the house, his Aunt Bessie halted him and said,
"Be back by six, Baby Lamb, and we'll have a sweet surprise for
you."
  "Rice pudding?" he asked. They were terrible cooks.
  "Sweeter by far!" the old lady said and rolled her eyes. He hastened
away.
  The girl next door had returned with her book to the lawn. He
suspected that he might be supposed to know her. When he came
for visits as a child, his aunts had always produced one of the neighbor's
freak children to play with him--once a fat moron in a Girl
Scout suit, another time a near-sighted boy who recited Bible verses,
and another an almost square girl who had blackened his eye and
left. He thanked God he was now grown and they would no
longer dare to fill his time for him. The girl did not look up as
he passed and he did not speak.
  Once on the sidewalk, he was affected by the profusion of azaleas.
They seemed to wash in tides of color across the lawns until they
surged against the white house-fronts, crests of pink and crimson,
crests of white and a mysterious shade that was not yet lavender,
wild crests of yellow-red. The profusion of color almost stopped his
breath with insidious pleasure. Moss hung from the old trees. The
houses were the most picturesque types of run-down ante-bellum.
The taint of the place was expressed in his great-grandfather's
words which had survived as the town's motto: Beauty is Our
Money Crop.
  His aunts lived five blocks from the business section. He walked
them quickly and came after a few minutes to the edge of the bare
commercial scene, which had the ramshackle courthouse for its
center. The sun beat down fiercely on the tops of cars parked in
every available space. Flags, national, state and confederate, flapped
on every corner street light. People milled about. On the quiet
shaded street where his aunts lived and the azaleas were best, he
had not passed three people, but here they all were, staring avidly
at the pathetic store displays and moving with languid reverence
past the courthouse porch, the spot where blood had been spilled.
He wondered if any of them might think he was here for the
same reason they were. He would have liked to start, in Socratic
fashion, a street discussion about where the real guilt for the six
deaths lay, but as he surveyed the scene, he saw no one who looked
capable of any genuine interest in meaning. Without set purpose,
he entered a drugstore. The place was dark and smelled of sour
vanilla.
  He sat down on the high stool at the counter and ordered a
limeade. The boy preparing the drink had elaborate red sideburns
and wore on his shirtfront an Azalea Festival Badge-the emblem
which Singleton had refused to buy. Calhoun's eye fell on it at
once. "I see you've paid your tribute to the god," he said.
  The boy did not seem to get the significance of this.
  "The badge," Calhoun said, "the badge."
  The boy looked down at it and then back at Calhoun. He put
the drink on the counter and continued to look at him as if he
were serving someone with an interesting deformity.
  "Are you enjoying the festive spirit?" Calhoun asked.
  "All these doings?" the boy said.
  "These grand events," Calhoun said, "commencing with, I believe,
six deaths."
  "Yessir," the boy said, "six in cold blood. And I knew four of
them myself."
  "You too have had your share of the glory then," Calhoun said.
He felt suddenly a distinct hush fall on the street outside. He turned
his eyes to the door just in time to see a hearse pass, followed by a
line of slowly moving cars.
  "That's the man that's having his funeral to himself," the boy
said reverently. "The five that were supposed to get shot had theirs
yesterday. One big one. But he didn't die in time for it."
  "They have innocent as well as guilty blood on their hands,"
Calhoun said and glared at the boy.
  "It wasn't no they," the boy said. "One man done it all. A man
named Singleton. He was bats."
  "Singleton was only the instrument," Calhoun said. "Partridge
itself is guilty." He finished his drink in a gulp and put down the
glass.
  The boy was looking at him as if he were mad. "Patridge can't
shoot nobody," he said in a high exasperated voice.
  Calhoun put his dime on the counter and left. The last car had
turned at the end of the block. He thought he observed less activity.
People had obviously hastened away at the sight of the hearse. Two
doors from him an old man leaned out of a hardware store and
glared up the street where the procession had disappeared. Calhoun's
need to communicate was urgent. He approached diffidently.
  "I understand that was the last funeral," he said.
  The old man put a hand behind his ear.
  "The funeral of the innocent man," Calhoun shouted and nodded
up the street.
  The old man cleared his nostrils loudly. His expression was not
affable. "The only bullet that went right," he said in a rasping voice.
  "Biller was a wastrel. Drunk at the time."
  The boy scowled. "I suppose the other five were heroes?" he suggested
archly.
  "Fine men," the old man said. "Perished in the line of duty . We
givem a hero's fu'nel-all five in one big service. Biller's folks tried
to rush up the undertaker so they could get Biller in on it but we
saw to it Biller didn't make it. Would have been a disgrace."
My God, the boy thought.
  "The only thing Singleton ever did good was to rid us of Biller,"
the old man continued. "Now somebody ought to rid us of Singleton.
There he is at Quincy, living in the laper luxury, laying in a
cool bed at no expense, eating up your taxes and mine. They should
have shot him on the spot."
  This was so appalling that Calhoun was speechless.
  "Going to keep him there, they ought to charge him board," the
old man said.
  With a contemptuous glance, the boy walked off. He crossed the
street to the courthouse square, moving at an odd angle in order
to put as much distance between himself and the old fool as quickly
as possible. Here benches were scattered beneath the trees. He found
an unoccupied one and sat down. To the side of the courthouse
steps, several viewers stood admiring the "jail" where Singleton
had been locked with the goat. The pathos of his friend's situation
was borne in on him with a rush of empathy. He felt himself
flung in the privy, the padlock clicked, he glared between the
rotting planks at the fools howling and cavorting outside. The
goat made an obscene noise; he saw that he was confined with
the spirit of the community.
  "Six men was shot here," an odd muffled voice close by said.
The boy jumped.
  A small white girl whose tongue was curled in the mouth of a
Coca-Cola bottle was sitting in a patch of sand at his feet, watching
him with a detached gaze. Her eyes were the same green as the
bottle. She was barefooted and had straight white hair. She withdrew
her tongue from the bottle with an explosive sound. "A bad
man did it," she said.
  The boy felt the kind of frustration that accompanies contact
with the certainty of children. "No," he said, "he was not a bad
man."
  The child put her tongue back in the bottle and withdrew it
silently, her eyes on him.
  "People were not good to him," he explained. "They were mean
to him. They were cruel. What would you do if someone were cruel
to you?"
  "Shoot them," she said.
  "Well, that's what he did," Calhoun said, frowning.
  She continued to sit there and did not take her eyes off him. Her
gaze might have been the depthless gaze of Partridge itself.
  "You people persecuted him and finally drove him mad," the
boy said. "He wouldn't buy a badge. Was that a crime? He was
the Outsider here and you couldn't stand that. One of the fundamental
rights of man," he said, glaring through the child's transparent
stare, "is the right not to behave like a fool. The right to be
different," he said hoarsely, "My God. The right to be yourself."
Without taking her eyes off him, she lifted one of her feet and
set it on her knee.
  "He was a bad bad bad man," she said.
  Calhoun got up and walked off, glaring In front of him. His
indignation swathed his vision in a kind of haze. He saw none of
the activity around him distinctly. Two high school girls in bright
skirts and jackets swung into his path and shrilled, "Buy a ticket
for the beauty contest tonight. See who'll be Miss Partridge Azalea!"
He swerved sharply to the side and did not throw them so much as
a glance. Their giggles followed him until he was past the courthouse
and onto the block behind it. He stood there a moment,
undecided what he would do next. He faced a barber shop which
looked empty and cool. After a moment he entered it.
  The barber, alone in the shop, raised his head from behind the
paper he was reading. Calhoun asked for a haircut and sat down
gratefully in the chair.
The barber was a tall emaciated fellow with eyes that might have
faded from some deeper color. He looked to be a man who had suffered
himself. He put the bib on the boy and stood staring at his
round head as if it were a pumpkin he was wondering how to slice.
Then he twirled the chair so that Calhoun faced the mirror. He was
confronted with an image that was round-faced, unremarkablelooking
and innocent. The boy's expression turned fierce. "Are
you eating up this slop like the rest of them?" he asked belligerently.
  "Come again?" the barber said.
  “Do the tribal rites going on here improve the barber trade? All
these doings, all these doings," he said impatiently.
  "Well," the barber said, "last year it was a thousand extra people
here and this year it looks to be more--on account," he said, "of
the tragedy."
  "The tragedy," the boy repeated and stretched his mouth.
  "The six that was shot," the barber said.
  "That tragedy," the boy said. "And what about the other tragedy
--the man who was persecuted by these idiots until he shot six of
them?"
  "Oh him," the barber said.
  "Singleton," the boy said. "Did he patronize your place?"
  The barber began clipping his hair. A peculiar expression of disdain
had come over his face at the mention of the name. "Tonight
it's a beauty contest," he said, "tomorrow night it's a band concert,
Thursday afternoon it's a big parade with Miss .... "
  "Did you or didn't you know Singleton?" Calhoun interrupted.
  "Known him well," the barber said and shut his mouth.
  A tremor went through the boy as he realized that Singleton had
probably sat in the chair he himself was now sitting in. He searched
his face in the mirror desperately for its hidden likeness to the man.
Slowly he saw it appear, a secret message brought to light by the
heat of his feelings. "Did he patronize your shop?" he asked and
held his breath for the answer.
  "Him and me was related by marriage," the barber said indignantly,
"but he never come in here. He was too big a skinflint to
have his hair cut. He cut his own."
  "An unpardonable crime," Calhoun said in a high voice.
  "His second cousin married my sister-in-law," the barber said,
  "but he never known me on the street. Pass him as close as I am
to you and he'd keep going. Kept his eye on the ground all the time
like he was following a bug."
  "Preoccupied," the boy muttered. "He doubtless didn't know you
were on the street."
  "He known it," the barber said and his mouth curled unpleasantly.
  "He known it. I clip hair and he clipped coupons and that
was that. I clip hair," he repeated as if this sentence had a particularly
satisfying ring to his ears, "and he clipped coupons."
  The typical have-not psychology, Calhoun thought. "Was the
Singleton family once wealthy?" he asked.
  "It wasn't but half of him Singleton," the barber said, "and the
Singleton's claimed there wasn't none of him Singleton. One of the
Singleton girls gone off on a nine-months vacation and come back
with him. Then they all died off and left him their money. It's no
telling what the other half of him is. Something foreign I would
judge." His tone insinuated more.
  "I begin to get the picture," Calhoun said.
  "He ain't clipping no coupons now," said the barber.
  "No," Calhoun said and his voice rose, "now he's suffering. He's
the scapegoat. He's laden with the sins of the community. Sacrificed
for the guilt of others."
  The barber paused, his mouth partway open. After a moment
he said in a more respectful voice, "Reverend, you got him wrong.
He wasn't a church-going man."
  The boy reddened. ''I'm not a church-going man myself," he said.
The barber seemed stopped again. He stood holding the scissors
uncertainly.
  "He was an individualist," Calhoun said. "A man who would
not allow himself to be pressed into the mold of his inferiors. A
non-conformist. He was a man of depth living among caricatures
and they finally drove him mad, unleashed all his violence on themselves.
  Observe," he continued, "that they didn't try him. They
simply had him committed at once to Quincy. Why? Because," he
said, "a trial would have brought out his essential innocence and
the real guilt of the community."
  The barber's face lightened. "You're a lawyer, ain't you?" he
asked.
  "No," the boy said sullenly. "I'm a writer."
  "Ohhh," the barber murmured. "I known it must be something
like that." After a moment he said, "What you written?"
  "He never married?" Calhoun went on rudely. "He lived alone
in the Singleton place in the country?"
  "What there was of it," the barber said. "He wouldn't have spent
a nickel to keep it from falling down and no woman wouldn't
have had him. That was the one thing he always had to pay for,"
he said and made a vulgar noise in his cheek.
  "You know because you were always there," the boy said, barely
able to control his disgust for this bigot.
  "Naw," the barber said, "it was just common knowledge. I clip
hair," he said, "but I don't live like a hog. I got plumbing in my
house and a refrigerator that spits ice cube's into my wife's hand."
  "He was not a materialist," Calhoun said. "There were things
that meant more to him than plumbing. Independence, for instance."
  "Ha," the barber snorted. "He wasn’t so independent. Once
lightning almost struck him and those that saw it said you should
have seen him run. Took off like bees were swarming in his pants.
They liked to died laughing," and he gave a hyena-like laugh himself
and slapped his knee.
"Loathsome," the boy murmured.
  "Another time," the barber continued, "somebody went out there
and put a dead cat in his well. Somebody was always doing something
to see if they could make him turn loose a little money.
Another time ... "
  Calhoun began fighting his way out of the bib as if it were a net
he was caught in. When he was free of it, h« thrust his hand in his
pocket and brought out a dollar which he flung on the startled
barber's shelf. Then he made for the door, letting it slam behind him
in judgment on the place.
  The walk back to his aunts' did not calm him. The colors of the
azaleas had deepened with the approach of sundown and the trees
rustled protectively over the old houses. No one  here had a thought
for Singleton, who lay on a cot in a filthy ward at Quincy. The boy
felt now in a concrete way the force of his innocence, and he
thought that to do justice to all the man had suffered, he would
have to write more than a simple article. He would have to write
a novel; he would have to show, not say, how primary injustice
operated. Preoccupied with this, he went four doors past his aunts'
house and had to turn and go back.
  His Aunt Bessie met him at the door and drew him into the
hall. "Told you we'd have a sweet surprise [or you!" she said, pulling
him by the arm into the parlor.
  On the sofa sat a rangy-looking girl in a lime-green dress. "You
remember Mary Elizabeth," his Aunt Mattie said, "--the cute little
trick you took to the picture show once when you were here."
Through his rage he recognized the girl who had been reading
under the tree. "Mary Elizabeth is home for the spring holidays,"
his Aunt Mattie said. "Mary Elizabeth is a real scholar, aren't you,
Mary Elizabeth?"
  Mary Elizabeth scowled, indicating she was, indifferent to whether
she was a real scholar or not. She gave him a Iook which told him
plainly she expected to enjoy this no more than he did.
  His Aunt Mattie gripped the knob of her cane and began to
lift herself from her chair. "We're going to have supper early," the
other one said, "because Mary Elizabeth is going to take you to the
beauty contest and it begins at seven."
  "Great," the boy said in a tone that would be lost on them but
he hoped not on Mary Elizabeth.
  Throughout the meal he ignored the girl completely. His repartee
with his aunts was markedly cynical but they did not have sense
enough to understand his allusions and laughee like idiots at everything
he said. Twice they called him "Babyboy" and the girl
smirked. Otherwise she did nothing to suggest she was enjoying
herself. Her round face was still childish behind her glasses. Retarded,
Calhoun thought.
  When the meal was over and they were on the way to the beauty
contest, they continued to say nothing to each other. The girl, who
was several inches taller than he, walked slight]y n advance of him
as if she would like to lose him on the way, but after two blocks she
stopped abruptly and began to rummage in a huge grass bag she
carried. She took out a pencil and held it between her teeth while
she continued to rummage. After a minute she brought up from
the bottom of the bag two tickets and a stenographer's note pad.
With these out, she closed the pocketbook and walked on.
"Are you going to take notes;" Calhoun inquired in a tone heavy
with irony.
  The girl looked around as if trying to identify the speaker. "Yes,"
she said, ''I'm going to take notes."
  "You appreciate this sort of thing?" Calhoun asked in the same
tone. "You enjoy it?"
  "It makes me vomit," she said, "I'm going to finish it off with
one swift literary kick."
  The boy looked at her blankly.
  "Don't let me interfere with your pleasure in it," she said, "but
this whole place is false and rotten to the core." Her voice came with
a hiss of indignation. "They prostitute azaleas!"
  Calhoun was astounded. After a moment he recovered himself.
"It takes no great mind to come to that conclusion," he said
haughtily. "What requires insight is finding a way to transcend it."
  "You mean a form to express it in."
  "It comes to the same thing," he said.
  They walked the next two blocks in silence but both appeared
shaken. When the courthouse was in view they crossed the street
to it and Mary Elizabeth stuck the tickets at a boy who stood beside
an entrance that had been formed by roping in the rest of the
square. People were beginning to assemble on the grass inside.
"And do we stand here while you take notes?" Calhoun asked.
The girl stopped and faced him. "Look, Baby Lamb," she said,
"you can do what you please. I'm going up to my father's office in
the building where I can work. You can stay down here and help
select Miss Partridge Azalea if you want to."
  "I shall come," he said, controlling himself, "I'd like to observe a
great female writer taking notes."
  "Suit yourself," she said.
  He followed her up the courthouse steps and through a side door.
His irritation was so extreme that he did not realize he had passed
through the very door where Singleton had stood to shoot. They
walked through an empty barnlike hall and silently up a flight of
tobacco-stained steps into another barn like hall. Mary Elizabeth
rooted in the grass bag for a key and then unlocked the door to
her father's office. They entered a large threadbare room lined with
lawbooks. As if he were an incompetent, the girl dragged two
straight chairs from one wall to a window that overlooked the porch.
Then she sat down and stared out, apparently absorbed at once in
the scene below.
  Calhoun sat down in the other chair. To annoy her he began to
look her over thoroughly. For what seemed at least five minutes, he
did not take his eyes off her as she leaned with her elbows in the
window. He stared at her so long that he was afraid her image
would be etched forever on his retina. Finally he could stand the
silence no longer. "What is your opinion of Singleton?" he asked
abruptly.
  She raised her head and appeared to look through him. "A
Christ-figure," she said.
  The boy was stunned.
  "I mean as myth," she said scowling. "I'm not a Christian." She
returned her attention to the scene outside. Below a bugle sounded.
  "Sixteen girls in bathing suits are about to appear," she drawled.
"Surely this will be of interest to you?"
  "Listen," Calhoun said fiercely, "get this through your head. I'm
not interested in the damn festival or the damn azalea queen. I'm
here only because of my sympathy for Singleton. I'm going to write
about him. Possibly a novel."
  "I intend to write a non-fiction study," the girl said in a tone that
made it evident fiction was beneath her.
  They looked at each other with open and intense dislike. Calhoun
felt that if he probed sufficiently he would expose her essential
shallowness. "Since our forms are different," he said, again with
his ironical smile, "we might compare findings."
  "It's quite simple," the girl said. "He was the scapegoat. While
Partridge flings itself about selecting Miss Partridge Azalea, Singleton
suffers at Quincy. He expiates .. .'''
  "I don't mean your abstract findings," the boy said. "I mean your
concrete findings. Have you ever seen him? What did he look like?
The novelist is not interested in narrow abstractions-particularly
when they're obvious. He's .. ."
  "How many novels have you written?" she asked.
  "This will be my first," he said coldly. "Have you ever seen him?"
  "No," she said, "that isn't necessary for me. What he looks like
makes no difference-whether he has brown eyes or blue-that's
nothing to a thinker."
  "You are probably," he said, "afraid to look at him. The novelist
is never afraid to look at the real object."
  "I would not be afraid to look at him," the girl said angrily, "if
it were at all necessary. Whether he has brown eyes or blue is nothing
to me."
  "There is more to it," Calhoun said, "than whether he has brown
eyes or blue. You might find your theories enriched by the sight of
him. And I don't mean by finding out the color of his eyes. I mean
your existential encounter with his personality. The mystery of
personality," he said, "is what interests the artist. Life does not
abide in abstractions."
  "Then what's keeping you from going and having a look at
him?" she said. "What are you asking me what he looks like for?
Go see for yourself."
  The words fell on his head like a sack of rucks. After a moment
he said, "Go see for yourself? Go see where?"
  "At Quincy," the girl said. "Where do you think?"
"They wouldn't let me see him," he said. The suggestion was
appalling to him; for some reason he could not at the moment
understand, it struck him as unthinkable.
"They would if you said you were kin to him," she said. "It's
only twenty miles from here. What's to stop you?"
  He was about to say, "I'm not kin to him." but he stopped and
reddened furiously on the edge of the betrayal. They were spiritual
kin.
  "Go see whether his eyes are brown or blue and have yourself
a little old exis ... "
  "I take it," he said, "that if I go you would like to go along?
Since you aren't afraid to see him."
  The girl paled. "You won't go," she said. "'You're not up to the
old exis . . ."
  "I will go," he said, seeing his opportunity to shut her up. "And if
you care to go with me, you can be at my aunts' at nine in the morning.
But I doubt," he added, "that I'll see you there."
  She thrust forward her long neck and glared at him. "Oh yes you
will," she said. "You'll see me there."
  She returned her attention to the window and Calhoun looked
at nothing. Each seemed sunk suddenly in some mammoth private
problem. Raucus cheers came intermittently from outside. Every
few minutes there was music and clapping but neither took any
notice of it, or of each other. Finally the girl pulled away from
the window and said, "If you've got the general idea, we can leave.
I prefer to go home and read."
  "I had the general idea before I came," Calhoun said.

  He saw her to her door and when he had left her, his spirits
lifted dizzily for an instant and then collapsed. He knew that
the idea of going to see Singleton would never have occurred to
him alone. It would be a torturing experience, but it might be his
salvation. The sight of Singleton in his misery might cause him
suffering sufficient to raise him once and for all from his commercial
instincts. Selling was the only thing he had proved himself
good at; yet it was impossible for him to believe that every man was
not created equally an artist if he could but suffer and achieve it.
As for the girl, he doubted if the sight of Singleton would do anything
for her. She had that particular repulsive fanaticism peculiar
to smart children-all brain and no emotion.
  He spent a restless night, dreaming in snatches of Singleton. At
one point he dreamed he was driving to Quincy to sell Singleton a
refrigerator. When he awoke in the morning, a slow rain was
descending indifferently. He turned his head to the gray window
pane. He could not remember what he had dreamed but he sensed
it had been unpleasant. A vision of the girl's flat face came to him.
He thought of Quincy and saw rows and rows of low red buildings
with rough heads sticking out of barred windows. He tried to concentrate
on Singleton but his mind shied from the thought. He did
not wish to go to Quincy. He remembered that it was a novel he
was going to write. His desire to write a novel had gone down
overnight like a defective tire.
  While he lay in bed, the drizzle turned into a steady downpour.
The rain might keep the girl from coming, or at least she might
think she could use it as an excuse. He decided to wait until exactly
nine o'clock and if she had not shown up by then to be off. He
would not go to Quincy but would go home. It would be better to
see Singleton at a later date when he would perhaps have responded
to treatment. He got up and wrote the girl a note to be left with
his aunts, saying he presumed she had decided, upon consideration,
that she was not equal to the experience. It was a very concise note
and he ended it, "Cordially yours."
  She arrived at five minutes to nine and stood dripping in his
aunts' hall, a tubular bundle of baby-blue plastic from which nothing
showed but her face. She was holding a damp paper sack and
her large mouth was twisted in an uncertain smile. Overnight she
had apparently lost some of her self-assurance.
  Calhoun was barely able to be polite. His aunts, who thought this
was a romantic outing in the rain, kissed him out the door and
stood on the porch idiotically waving their handkerchiefs until he
and Mary Elizabeth were in the car and gone.
  The girl was much too big for the small car. She kept shifting
about and twisting inside her raincoat. "The rain has beat the azaleas
down," she observed in a neutral tone.
  Calhoun rudely kept silent. He was trying to obliterate her from
his consciousness so that he could reestablish Singleton there. He
had lost Singleton completely. The rain was coming down in gray
swaths. When they reached the highway, they could barely see
across the fields to a faint line of woods. The girl kept leaning
forward, squinting into the opaque windshield. "If a truck were to
come out of that," she said with a gawkish laugh, "that would be
the end of us."
  Calhoun stopped the car. "I'll be glad to take you back and go
on by myself," he said.
  "I have to go," she said hoarsely, staring at him. "I have to see
him." Behind her spectacles, her eyes appeared larger than they
should have been and suspiciously liquid. "I have to face this," she
said.
  Roughly, he started the car again.
  "You have to prove to yourself that you can stand there and
watch a man be crucified," she said. "You have to go through it
with him. I thought about it all night."
  "It may give you," Calhoun muttered, "a more balanced view of
life."
  "This is personal," she said. "You wouldn't understand," and she
turned her head to the window.
  Calhoun tried to concentrate on Singleton. Feature by feature,
he brought the face together in his mind and each time he had it
almost constructed, it fell apart and he was left with nothing. He
drove in silence, at a reckless speed as if he would like to hit a hole
in the road and see the girl go through the windshield. Every now
and then she blew her nose weakly. After fifteen mlies or so the
rain slackened and stopped. The treeline on either side of them
became black and clear and the fields intensely green. They would
have an unmistakable view of the hospital grounds as soon as these
should come in sight.
  "Christ only had to take it three hours," the girl said all at once
in a high voice, "but he'll be in this place the rest of his life!"
  Calhoun cut his eyes toward her. There was a fresh wet line down
the side of her face. He turned his eyes away, awed and furious.
"If you can't stand this," he said, "I can still take you home and
come back by myself."
  "You wouldn't come back by yourself," she said, "and we're
almost there." She blew her nose. "I want him to know that somebody
takes his side. I want to say that to him no matter what it
does to me."
  Through his rage, the terrible thought occurred to the boy that
he would have to say something to Singleton. What could he say
to him in the presence of this woman? She had shattered the communion
between them. "We've come to listen I hope you understand,"
he burst out, "I haven't driven all this way to hear you
startle Singleton with your wisdom. I've come to listen to him."
  "We should have brought a tape recorder!" she cried, "then
we'd have what he says all our lives!"
  "You don't have elementary understanding," Calhoun said, "if
you think you approach a man like this with a tape recorder."
  "Stop!" she shrieked, leaning toward the windshield, "that's it!"
Calhoun slammed on his brakes and looked forward wildly.
A cluster of low buildings, hardly noticeable, rose like a rich
growth of warts on the hill to their right.
  The boy sat helpless while the car, as if of its own volition, turned
and headed toward the entrance. The letters QUINCY STATE HOSPITAL
were cut in a concrete arch which it rolled effortlessly through.
  "Abandon hope all ye who enter here," the girl murmured.
They had to stop within a hundred yards of the gate while a
fat white-capped nurse led a line of patients, straggling like elderly
schoolchildren, across the road in front of them, Ac snaggle-toothed
woman in a candy-striped dress and black wool hat shook her fist
at them, and a baldheaded man waved energetically. A few threw
malevolent looks as the line shuffled off across the green to another
building.
  After a moment the car rolled forward again, "Park in front of
that center building," Mary Elizabeth directed,
  "They won't let us see him," he mumbled.
  "Not if you have anything to do with it," she said. "Park and let
me out. I'll handle this." Her cheek had dried and her voice was
businesslike. He parked and she got out. He watched her disappear
into the building, thinking with grim satisfaction hat she would soon
turn into a full-grown ogre--false intellect, false emotions, maximum
efficiency, all operating to produce the dominant hair-splitting
Ph.D. Another line of patients passed in the road and several of
them pointed at the small car. Calhoun did not look but he sensed
he was being watched. "Hup up there," he heard the nurse say.
  He looked again and gave a little cry A gentle face, wrapped
around with a green hand towel, was in his, window, smiling
toothlessly but with an agonizing tenderness.
  "Get a move on, sweetie," the nurse said and the face retreated.
  The boy rolled his window up rapidly but his    heart was wrenched.
He saw again the agonized face in the stocks--the slightly mismatched
eyes, the wide mouth parted in a stifled  useless cry. The
vision lasted only a moment but when it passed, he was certain
that the sight of Singleton was going to effect a change in him,
that after this visit, some strange tranquility he had not before conceived
of would be his. He sat for ten minute  with his eyes closed,
knowing that a revelation was near and trying  to prepare himself
for it.
  All at once the car door opened and the girl folded herself, panting,
in beside him. Her face was pale. She held up two green permission
slips and pointed to the names written on them: Calhoun
Singleton on one, Mary Elizabeth Singleton on the other. For a
moment they stared at the slips, then at each other. Both appeared
to recognize that in their common kinship with hi .n, a kinship with
each other was unavoidable. Generously, Calhou.i ..eld out his hand.
She shook it. "He's in the fifth building to the left," she said.
  They drove to the fifth building and parked. It was a low red
brick structure with barred windows, like all the others except that
the outside of it was streaked with black stains. In one window two
hands hung out, palms downward. Mary Elizabeth opened the paper
sack she had brought and began to take out presents for Singleton.
She had brought a box of candy, a carton of cigarettes and three
Bookss--a Modern Library Thus Spake  Zarathustra ,a paperback Revolt
of the Masses, and a thin decorated volume of Housman. She
handed the cigarettes and the candy to Calhoun and got out of the
car with the books herself. She started forward, but halfway to the
door she stopped and put her hand to her mouth. "I can't take it,"
she murmured.
  "Now now," Calhoun said kindly. He put his hand on her back
and gave her a slight push and she began to move forward again.
  They entered a stained linoleum-covered hall where a peculiar
odor met them at once like an invisible official. There was a desk
facing the door, behind which sat a frail harassed-looking nurse
whose eyes darted to right and left as if she expected ultimately to
be hit from behind. Mary Elizabeth handed her the two green permits.
The woman looked at them and groaned.  “Go in yonder and
wait," she said in a weary insult-bearing voice, 'He'll have to be got
ready. They shouldn't have give you these over there. What
do they know about what goes on over here and what do
them doctors care anyhow?  If it was up to me,  the ones that don't
cooperate wouldn't see nobody."
  "We're his kin," Calhoun said. "We have every right to see him."
The nurse threw her head back in a soundless laugh and went off
muttering.
  Calhoun put his hand on the girl's back again and guided her
into the waitng room where they sat down close together on a
mammoth black leather sofa which faced an identical piece of furniture
five feet away. There was nothing else in the room but a
rickety table in lone corner with an empty white vase on it. A barred
window cast squares of damp light on the floor at their feet. There
seemed an intense stillness about them although the place was anything
but quiet. From one end of the building came a continuous
mourning sound as delicate as the fluttering wail of owls; at the
other end they heard rocketing peals of laughter. Closer at hand, a
steady monotonous cursing broke the silence around it with a machine-
like regularity. Each noise seemed to exist isolated from every
other.
  The two sat together as if they were waiting for some momentous
event in their lives--a marriage or instantaneous deaths. They
seemed already joined in a predestined convergence. At the same
instant each made an involuntary motion as if to run but it was too
late. Heavy footsteps were almost at the door and the machine-like
curses were bearing down.
  Two burly attendants entered with Singleton spider-like between
them. He was holding his feet high up off the floor so that the
attendants had to carry him. It was from him the curses were coming.
He had on a hospital gown of the type that opens and ties up
the back and his feet were stuck in black shoes from which the laces
had been removed. On his head was a black hat, not the kind
countrymen wear, but a black derby hat such as might be worn
by a gunman in the movies. The two attendants came up to the
empty sofa from behind and swung him over the back of it, then
still holding him, each passed around the sofa arms and sat down
beside him, grinning. They might have been twins for though one
was blond and the other bald, they had identical looks of goodnatured
stupidity.
  As for Singleton, he fixed Calhoun with his green slightly mismatched
eyes. "Whadaya want with me?" he shrilled. "Speak up!
My time is valuable." They were almost exactly the eyes that Calhoun
had seen in the paper, except that the penetrating gleam in
them had a slight reptilian quality.
  The boy sat mesmerized.
  After a moment, Mary Elizabeth said in a slow, hoarse, barely
audible voice, "We came to say we understand."
  The old man's glare shifted to her and for one instant his eyes
remained absolutely still like the eyes of a treetoad that has sighted
its prey. His throat appeared to swell. "Ahhh," he said as if he had
just swallowed something pleasant, "eeeee."
  "Mind out now, dad," one of the attendants said.
  "Lemme sit with her," Singleton said and jerked his arm away
from the attendant, who caught it again at once. "She knows what
she wants."
  "Let him sit with her," the blond attendant said, "she's his niece."
  "No," the bald one said, "keep aholt to him. He's liable to pull
off his frock. You know him."
  But the other one had already let one of his wrists loose and
Singleton was leaning outward toward Mary Elizabeth, straining
away from the attendant who held him. The girl's eyes were glazed.
The old man began to make suggestive noises through his teeth.
  "Now now, dad," the idle attendant said.
  "It's not every girl gets a chance at me," Singleton said. "Listen
here, sister, I'm well-fixed. There's nobody in Partridge I can't skin.
I own the place--as well as this hotel." His hand grasped toward
her knee.
  The girl gave a small stifled cry.
  "And I got others elsewhere," he panted. "You and me are two
of a kind. We ain't in their class. You're a queen. I'll put you on a
float!" and at that moment he got his wrist free and lunged toward
her but both attendants sprang after him instantly. As Mary Elizabeth
crouched against Calhoun, the old man jumped nimbly over
the sofa and began to speed around the room. The attendants, their
arms and legs held wide apart to catch him, tried to close in on
him from either side. They almost had him when he kicked off his
shoes and leaped between them onto the table, sending the empty
vase shattering to the floor. "Look girl!" he shrilled and began to
pull the hospital gown over his head
  Mary Elizabeth was already dashing out the room and Calhoun
ran behind her and thrust open the door just in time to prevent her
crashing into it. They scrambled into the car and the boy drove it
away as if his heart were the motor and would never go fast enough.
The sky was bone-white and the slick highway stretched before
them like a piece of the earth's exposed nerve. After five miles Calhoun
pulled the car to the side of the road and stopped from exhaustion.
They sat silently, looking at nothing until finally they
turned and looked at each other. There each was at once the likeness
of their kinsman and flinched. They looked away and then
back, as if with concentration they might find a more tolerable
image. To Calhoun, the girl's face seemed to mirror the nakedness
of the sky. In despair he leaned closer until he was stopped by a
miniature visage which rose incorrigibly in her spectacles and fixed
him where he was. Round, innocent, undistinguished as an iron
link, it was the face whose gift of life had pushed straight forward
to the future to raise festival after festival. Like a master salesman,
it seemed to have been waiting there from all time to claim him.

End