“I got too much to do.” He looked at her and spoke angrily. “All winter I’m here alone. There’s snow up to my neck. The wind screams so, I can’t sleep. I work for you seventeen years and you never been here once in the bad weather.”
“What has the winter got to do with the lilies, Nils?” she asked calmly.
“I got too much to do. Move the lilies. Move the roses. Cut the grass. Every day you want something different. Why is it? Why are you better than me? You don’t know how to do anything but kill flowers. I grow the flowers. You kill them. If a fuse burns out, you don’t know how to do it. If something leaks, you don’t know how to do it. You kill flowers. That’s all you know how to do. For seventeen years I wait for you all winter,” he shouted. “You write me, ‘Is it warm? Are the flowers pretty?’ Then you come. You sit here. You drink. God damn you people. You killed my wife. Now you want to kill me. You?”
“Shut up, Nils,” Jim said.
Nils turned quickly and retreated across the lawn, so stricken with self-consciousness that he seemed to limp. None of them spoke, for they had the feeling, after he had disappeared behind the hedge, that he might be hiding there, waiting to hear what they would say. Then Ingrid and Greta came up the lawn from their evening walk, overburdened with the stones and wild flowers that they brought back from these excursions to decorate their rooms above the garage. Greta told Jim that something was caught in a trap in the corn patch. She thought it was a cat.
Jim got the rifle and a flashlight and went up the hill to the gardens. As he approached the corn patch, he could hear a wild, thin crying. Then the animal, whatever it was, began to pound the dirt. The stroke was strong, as regular as a heartbeat, and accompanied by the small rattling of the trap chain. When Jim reached the patch, he turned his light into the broken stalks. The animal hissed, sprang in the direction of the light; but it could not escape the chain. It was a fat, humpbacked coon. Now it hid from the light in the ruined corn. Jim waited. Against the starlight he could see the high, ragged stand of corn and when a breeze passed through the leaves they rattled like sticks. The coon, driven by pain, began to strike the ground convulsively and Jim held the light against the barrel of the rifle and fired twice. When the coon was dead, he unstaked the trap and carried it and the carcass out of the garden.
It was an immense, still, and beautiful night. Instead of returning to the drive, he took a short cut through the garden and across a field toward the tool house. The ground was very dark. He moved cautiously and awkwardly. The heavy carcass smelled like a dog. “Mr. Brown, Mr. Brown, oh, Mr. Brown,” someone called. It was Agnes. Her voice was breathless and fretful. Agnes and Carlotta were standing in the field. They were in nightgowns. “We heard the noise,” Agnes called. “We heard the gun going off. We were afraid there had been an accident. Of course I knew Carlotta was all right. She was right beside me. Weren’t you, dear? But we couldn’t sleep. We couldn’t close our eyes after we heard the noise. Is everything all right?”
“Yes,” Jim said. “There was a coon in the garden.”
“Where’s the coon?” Carlotta asked.
“The coon’s gone on a long, long journey, dear,” Agnes said. “Come now, come along, sweet. I hope nothing else will wake us up, don’t you?” They turned and started back toward the house, warning one another of the sticks and ditches and other perils of the country. Their conversation was filled with diminutives, timidity, and vagueness. He wanted to help them, he wanted urgently to help them, he wanted to offer them his light, but they reached the house without his help and he heard the back door close on their voices.
The Enormous Radio
Jim and Irene Westcott were the kind of people who seem to strike that satisfactory average of income, endeavor, and respectability that is reached by the statistical reports in college alumni bulletins. They were the parents of two young children, they had been married nine years, they lived on the twelfth floor of an apartment house near Sutton Place, they went to the theatre on an average of 10.3 times a year, and they hoped someday to live in Westchester. Irene Westcott was a pleasant, rather plain girl with soft brown hair and a wide, fine forehead upon which nothing at all had been written, and in the cold weather she wore a coat of fitch skins dyed to resemble mink. You could not say that Jim Westcott looked younger than he was, but you could at least say of him that he seemed to feel younger. He wore his graying hair cut very short, he dressed in the kind of clothes his class had worn at Andover, and his manner was earnest, vehement, and intentionally nadve. The Westcotts differed from their friends, their classmates, and their neighbors only in an interest they shared in serious music. They went to a great many concerts?although they seldom mentioned this to anyone?and they spent a good deal of time listening to music on the radio.
Their radio was an old instrument, sensitive, unpredictable, and beyond repair. Neither of them understood the mechanics of radio?or of any of the other appliances that surrounded them?and when the instrument faltered, Jim would strike the side of the cabinet with his hand. This sometimes helped. One Sunday afternoon, in the middle of a Schubert quartet, the music faded away altogether. Jim struck the cabinet repeatedly, but there was no response; the Schubert was lost to them forever. He promised to buy Irene a new radio, and on Monday when he came home from work he told her that he had got one. He refused to describe it, and said it would be a surprise for her when it came.
The radio was delivered at the kitchen door the following afternoon, and with the assistance of her maid and the handyman Irene uncrated it and brought it into the living room. She was struck at once with the physical ugliness of the large gumwood cabinet. Irene was proud of her living room, she had chosen its furnishings and colors as carefully as she chose her clothes, and now it seemed to her that the new radio stood among her intimate possessions like an aggressive intruder. She was confounded by the number of dials and switches on the instrument panel, and she studied them thoroughly before she put the plug into a wall socket and turned the radio
