Quitter

1

THE other night I met Josephine Tielman again. I hadn’t seen her since I left town to look for a secretarial job in Chicago, and I hadn’t thought of her for so long, you could have said I’d forgotten about her.

Perhaps I wouldn’t have recognized Josephine by day, she had changed so. But her voice hadn’t changed, and I recognized that in the dark. I was waiting for the Detroit train out by the baggage room because the bright lights inside the depot hurt my eyes. Light never bothered me all the years I used to paint, when I would stare into the neon glare for hours, but lately my eyes have been getting sensitive, although I don’t do any close work like painting or drawing now.

The train was late, but I didn’t mind. It was good to walk up and down outside, just breathing and not thinking. I leaned against the iron railing and looked at the brick wall of the baggage room when I got tired of moving. They had switched on some lights there, and a neon sign from a cafe across the street mixed in too. I leaned there several minutes before I remembered that red neon on red brick is one of the darndest, most beautiful jobs there is to do in water color. I hadn’t thought of that for years.

When the train came in, there was a rush for the doors, and while I was running along I heard this hoarse, quick voice in the dark, and it was Jo. It was hard to say, “Jo, isn’t that you?” and touch the arm of this tall, good-looking woman in a gray coat. But she turned right away and said, “Why, Kid, what you doing here? Come on, let’s sit together.”

She swung her big suitcase up on the step, wouldn’t let me help her. She still had that movement of the shoulders, like a fighter ready for anything, elbows loose and shoulders forward. It was still there, only softer now. She was going to hoist my suitcase in the rack, but I said, “See here, Grandma, you let me do this.”

Grandma — that’s what I used to call her. Not that she looked so old, but she acted so old. Maybe she had to. She and her brother took care of themselves and their father and their house. Jo knew things about real estate that most kids don’t know — like how long you can go without paying taxes and still not lose your property, and when it pays and doesn’t pay to keep up a mortgage. When I found out that she was only seventeen that year, she still didn’t seem any younger. Something was the matter with her teeth then that made her wear her face in a lopsided way. Now a big hat left her face free and it wasn’t lopsided any more. It was an expensive hat too, I could see that.

“How you making out in Detroit?” I said. “I heard you had a job in some big store. You still with them?”

“Yep,” she said, in that businesslike way. “I’m an accountant at Kingman’s.” She looked me over. “You need a job? Get you one any time you want. Thirty-five bucks a week to start with.”

I said, “Thanks,” and laughed because she couldn’t know how much I was making already and because it tickled me the way she was handing out jobs. A few years back, getting a job was the hardest thing we knew. Jo never had any money then, but she was never small about it. If all she had was a quarter she’d say, “Come on, I’ll treat you to a coke.” None of us had any money then, and it seemed as if we were fighting the whole world all the time. Funny how we had the nerve to paint.

“Done any work lately?” I said, thinking about painting. I wouldn’t have wanted her to ask me that. It’s been three years since I’ve carried my sketchbook.

“I work all the time,” she said. “That’s just the trouble. Last year I figured out this new system of accounting for the first floor, and when it worked they took it for the whole store. Now all of Kingman’s stores use it. Ten of them. Don’t think that isn’t a lot of work.”

“How come?” I said. “What do you know about accounting?”

“Oh, I had a little in high school and I just figured this out. There’s nothing to it, just common sense.”

“I see. Just common sense, but they needed you to figure it out?”

She was pleased, I could see that. She looked good, with her hair all done up in shiny loops. A permanent like that cost enough to keep her alive a month three years ago.

“You do look as though you were doing pretty well,” I said.

“The job’s O.K.,” she said. “They give me a lot of responsibility, and Mr. Monkton wants to make me head of the department because the head is going to quit. I like it O.K. You were going to say something? ”

“No,” I said. “Goon. Tell me some more about it.” Maybe she didn’t want to talk about painting with all the people sitting around. She seemed embarrassed about something.

“See, I been with this outfit three years now,” she said. “They’re good to me. I like it, and they let me do it my own way. I’ve got five people working for me, see, and when anything comes up, Mr. Monkton says, ‘I’ll trust your judgment.’ That makes you feel good. Kid, I’ve had four raises in three years. Every time I quit they give me a raise. I’ve quit so often it isn’t funny. Then they give me a raise and I stay.”

“Do you quit to get a raise?” I said, not meaning it, but she jumped on me.

“No!” she said, real loud. “I don’t quit to get a raise. That isn’t why. I don’t quit for the money.”

“Why do you quit all the lime then,” I said, “if it isn’t for the money? Don’t you like the place?”

“I like it O.K. It isn’t that; it’s a good job. But the trouble is, I don’t get time for anything else any more. Not anything. I never have time to paint anymore— What’s funny about that?”

2

I HADN’T meant to smile as if it was funny. I felt sorry for her, and I couldn’t understand it, Jo not painting. Anybody else might quit, but not Jo.

Because she was the one that nothing could stop. No matter where we would decide to paint or how far it was, she’d be there. And she would think up new places to go all the time. “Runyon’s is open till two every night. Let’s go to the end of town where the big trucks stop for coffee.”

Weather didn’t make any difference to her. If it rained too hard she’d borrow a truck to haul us and our easels around. I remember one night she had her paints all set up when it started to pour. I didn’t get anything done because I quit and sat on somebody’s porch till the worst was over. The rain came down so hard it smashed the dobs of oil paint a brush leaves on canvas — flattened them right out and carried the color down the picture a little way. When Jo’s picture was done it wasn’t good because with the lightning she hadn’t been able to gauge the color right, but as a drawing the tree was wonderful. It rose and fell and rose the way elms do right on and up through the rain.

“Don’t you try to paint any more at all?” I said. “There must be a lot of swell things to paint in Detroit at night.” She didn’t answer. Maybe she remembered the time we used to meet every night in Three Rivers — the darkness just beginning to pour into the streets, and the street lamps trying to pin it back. Water was what I always thought of — water rising to the treetops till it filled the sky with darkness and sank the whole world on the bottom of the night. A middle-sized American town at night is a wonderful thing and we knew it.

We were crazy about the neon lights and the show windows, the people in the street and the empty alleys. I never saw an alley just like the next one. I thought once I’d do nothing but alleys the rest of my life, and just number them the way musicians do their stuff, alley No. 33, alley No. 34, and people might say, “No. 79 is the best one she ever did.”

“I heard old man Brownley that was in the United Electric building died lately,” I said.

“Is that so?” Jo said, but she didn’t sound very interested.

Looking for sketches at night, we got to know some janitors and night watchmen pretty well. They’d let us into their buildings and up on some of the big ones. We’d sketch the machines in the service rooms, and the parking lots from ten stories up, and Jo made drawings of the charwomen.

A good head janitor is as crazy about his skyscraper as a sailor is about his ship. Brownley used to just rave about his. “Now here,” he’d say, “out this window you’d like it, but that’s the best around six o’clock. You come earlier next time and I’ll show you. And the basements. You haven’t seen the basements yet.” There was a swimming pool in his building too, but after ‘29 they couldn’t afford to keep it repaired and the painted fish were peeling off the walls. A live lake inside a building is a queer thing, but a dry lake is awful. It gave me the creeps.

Whenever there was a fair or a circus, we’d go. But the gas stations and drugstores were circus enough with the little lights flickering on and off over the people and the big light in the sky shifting screens all the time till late at night it would finish with plain dark blue.

We tried to get all that. Jo had a hard, slow way of working. She wasn’t even quite sure of perspective, and sometimes streets that should have lain flat went right up into the sky in her pictures. One night we were down by the police station again, sketching the backs of cheap rooming houses. Some of the people didn’t draw their shades, and you could see dirt-brown wallpaper and bone-brown chairs behind sooty curtains. All the different fire escapes and the shades, some lighted, some dark, some pulled all the way down and some up, and some halfway down — all that made a nice cheerful pattern and that’s all I saw.

But Jo’s perspective was wrong and on her board the buildings were shoved together so that they looked as if they had grown into each other. She didn’t give them enough depth to hold real bricks and first I thought she was all wrong. But then I saw her picture was the real thing because it had those shacks just growing like weeds, reaching out to blacken the sky and getting shakier all the time till they would have to fall and break everything under them.

Jo’s sketchbook was always full of the kind of people who sleep in places like that. She’d see them in the stores or on the street — fat women and funny little girls, big girls dressed for a date, a man and a woman coming home from the grocery with bundles. She didn’t always draw them right away, but she’d go home and think about them, whittle on them with hard little strokes of her pencil, carve their faces out of her memory. There was a lot she had to say about people, except that she couldn’t put it in words.

Now she didn’t even look at them. She just sat and looked straight ahead.

Sometimes I’d leaf through her notebook and say, “Why, Jo, where did you see that man? What you want to draw him for?” And she’d get real excited. " Why, Kid, he was coming down Main Street, that little old man, driving his wagon in all the cars. Just this little old man, all alone, driving his wagon and his horse. I been thinking about him all day.”

She never smudged to make a light shadow when she wasn’t sure of a shape. If she was wrong, she stuck by it till it came true. Her wrong, hard way of drawing was right. Her people were right. Sometimes it hurt you to look at them, but there was no getting around them. They were there to stay.

3

SHE was that way herself, and that was why it made me feel so queer to think she had quit.

“Jo,” I said, “I can’t get over it. You didn’t quit for good!”

She gave me a hard look.

“Jo, you simply got to find some time to sketch.”

“Do you?” she said. “Do you ever get any time for it?”

I laughed. She had me there.

“Look, Kid,” she said, “I know I ought to get back to it. But if I quit now and go to art school I’ll be just where I started, and you know how that was. Clothes — I could give up clothes. And a good place to live. But when you don’t have a job you don’t have any place to live and nothing to eat. If it got too tough I could get a job again any time in a factory, but how would that get me ahead? I’d only be throwing out a good job for a tough one and still not get to paint. And you need time to do a good picture. Plenty of time to think about it. You can’t do it the last ten minutes at night the way you can curl up your hair.

“Now look. Last year I made up my mind I was going to art school at night and get something done, no matter what. Worked all day and went to school three times a week. Well, I couldn’t stand it. Got sick and almost lost my job. It can’t be done. Don’t kid yourself.”

“No,” I said. “I guess not. It wouldn’t be right to throw up a good job. For all you know, it wouldn’t make good painters of us anyway. I just thought — It just seems as though maybe there was something —”

“Sure,” she said, “sure, sure.” But she didn’t even look at me.

The train began to scream and sigh, slowing down for the station. I got up and grabbed my bag. Jo moved into my place by the window and smiled good-bye.

“O.K., Kid,” she said.

I said, “So long,” and went down the aisle, trying not to fall when the train shucked to a stop.

Outside, it was a warm, easy night, but I felt tired all over. All we’d talked about was Jo. She hadn’t asked about me. But maybe she didn’t have to. As I thought it over, it seemed we’d said a lot about me too.