The Moviegoer

“I could put you down right now.” Harold is actually getting mad at me.
    â€œListen, Harold,” I say, laughing. “Do you go into the city every day?”
    Harold nods but does not raise his eyes.
    â€œHow did you decide to live here?”
    â€œSylvia’s family live in Glencoe. Rollo, how do you like it way down yonder in New Orleans?”
    Harold would really like to wrestle and not so playfully either. I walked in and brought it with me, the wrenching in the chest. It would be better for him to be rid of it and me.
    Ten minutes later he lets us out at the commuter station and tears off into the night.
    â€œWhat a peculiar family,” says Kate, gazing after the red turrets of Harold’s Cadillac.
    Back to the Loop where we dive into the mother and Urwomb of all moviehouses—an Aztec mortuary of funeral urns and glyphs, thronged with the spirit-presences of another day, William Powell and George Brent and Patsy Kelly and Charley Chase, the best friends of my childhood—and see a movie called The Young Philadelphians. Kate holds my hand tightly in the dark.
    Paul Newman is an idealistic young fellow who is disillusioned and becomes cynical and calculating. But in the end he recovers his ideals.
    Outside, a new note has crept into the wind, a black williwaw sound straight from the terrible wastes to the north. “Oh oh oh,” wails Kate as we creep home to the hotel, sunk into ourselves and with no stomach even for hand-holding. “Something is going to happen.”
    Something does. A yellow slip handed across the hotel desk commands me to call operator three in New Orleans.
    This I accordingly do, and my aunt’s voice speaks to the operator, then to me, and does not change its tone. She does not bother to add a single overtone of warmth or cold, love or hate, to the monotone of her notification—and this is more ominous than ten thousand williwaws.
    â€œIs Kate with you?”
    â€œYes ma’am.”
    â€œWould you like to know how we found you?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œThe police found Kate’s car at the terminal.”
    â€œThe police?”
    â€œKate did not tell anyone she was leaving. However, her behavior is not unexplainable and therefore not inexcusable. Yours is.”
    I am silent.
    â€œWhy didn’t you tell me?”
    I think. “I can’t remember.”
    4
    IT IS IMPOSSIBLE to find a seat on a flight to New Orleans the night before Mardi Gras. No trains are scheduled until Tuesday morning. But buses leave every hour or so . I send my aunt a telegram and call Stanley Kinchen and excuse myself from the talk on Selling Aids—it is all right: the original speaker had recovered. Stanley and I part even more cordially than we met. It is a stratospheric cordiality such as can only make further meetings uneasy. But I do not mind. At midnight we are bound for New Orleans on a Scenicruiser which takes a more easterly course than the Illinois Central, down along the Wabash to Memphis by way of Evansville and Cairo.
    It is good to be leaving; Chicago is fit for no more than a short rotation. Kate is well. The summons from her stepmother has left her neither glum nor fearful. She speaks at length to her stepmother and, with her sure instinct for such matters, gets her talking about canceling reservations and return tickets, wins her way, decides we’ll stay, then changes her mind and insists on coming home to ease their minds. Now she gazes curiously about the bus station, giving way every few seconds to tremendous face-splitting yawns. Once on the bus she collapses into a slack-jawed oblivion and sleeps all the way to the Ohio River. I doze fitfully and wake for good when the dawn breaks on the outskirts of Terre Haute. When it is light enough, I take out my paper-back Arabia Deserta and read until we stop for breakfast in Evansville. Kate eats heartily, creeps back to the bus, takes one look at the black water of the Ohio River and the naked woods of the bottom lands where winter still clings like a violet mist, and falls heavily to sleep, mouth mashed open against my shoulder.
    Today is Mardi Gras, fat Tuesday, but our bus has left Chicago much too late to accommodate Carnival visitors. The passengers are an everyday assortment of mothers-in-law visiting sons-in-law in Memphis, school teachers and telephone operators bound for vacations in quaint old Vieux Carré. Our upper deck is a green bubble where, it