September Song Read online

  When her cart could hold no more Lily took from it a can of soup and a loaf of bread and, leaving it parked in an aisle, went to the quick checkout. As she was paying for her purchases she felt a grip on her shoulder.

  “Come with me,” said the man.

  “Mama,” said Elizabeth. “Mama, I’m talking to you. This is it. You hear me? This is IT. I have never been so humiliated. How that man lectured me! Well, I don’t blame him. Have you no idea how many man-hours are lost in putting all those things back in their places on the shelves? He told me that every store manager in town has been on the lookout for you. Well, you’ve been nabbed. Your little shopping sprees are a thing of the past. They’ve got you on videotape. You can never show your face in a supermarket again. I’ll give you until tomorrow to pack your things. You’re off to the home. And high time,” she concluded with a sniff at her surroundings.

  Lily knew the home. When newly widowed she had volunteered a day’s work a week there, until she could stand it no more.

  “Home” was a cruel misnomer. Home was just what it was not. It was a graveyard full of living ghosts. Home might be nothing more than a sparsely furnished room, but so long as it was yours and yours alone you were you.

  Pallid as creatures that lived under planks, the inmates were propped in rows along the walls to drowse. The waking and howling of one would set them all howling like the dogs of a neighborhood. The bedridden stared at the ceiling. Those who were able stalked the corridors, their split gowns exposing their backsides, a look in their eyes as though searching for the selves they had lost. The most pitiful were those who knew where they were. “Get me out of this place. Get me out of here,” Lily had heard them plead with their relatives. Sharp instruments, cords, even bedsheets were kept from them. During Lily’s time there one inmate drowned herself in a toilet bowl. Another suffocated his screeching roommate with a pillow.

  “Be ready for me at ten,” said Elizabeth.

  The bed was made. Now Lily sat waiting in her coat, hat and gloves.

  There came a rap on the door.

  “Good morning, Mr. Ellis,” she called.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Harper.”

  “How are you this morning, Mr. Ellis?”

  “Very well, thank you, Mrs. Harper. Yourself?”

  “Very well, thank you.”

  “Dress warmly if you’re going out today.”

  Too softly for him to hear she said, “Goodbye, dear Mr. Ellis.”

  She allowed him time to return down the hall. Then she stood and took a last look around the room.

  “Goodbye,” she said, as though to herself.

  So that it need not be broken open she left the door unlocked behind her.

  A Heart in Hiding

  IT WAS HIS MORNING to make breakfast. They took turns. For today he had in store a treat. This being a Sunday they would lie abed late, reading the paper over their tea. Not that it mattered anymore what day of the week it was nor what hour they got up, but you felt less guilty lazing while others were not at work either. Leaving her sleeping, he stole downstairs, clinging to the rail, testing his footing before proceeding. The old stairs creaked, and so did his joints.

  He got the paper from the porch. While around the world war raged, here the scent of lilacs perfumed the air and a wren sang his love song.

  In the kitchen the cat stirred from sleep, stretched herself and yawned. As he poured a saucer of milk she twined around his legs.

  “Puss, Puss, always underfoot,” he said. “Someday you’re going to trip me, I’ll fall, break my leg and be taken to the hospital. Then won’t you be sorry?”

  Having heard this many times before, Puss purred.

  He laid out the makings of the meal. As he was peeling the caps of the mushrooms an old song tapped at the door of his memory. He welcomed it like a long-lost friend. He had picked it up from a street singer on the Via Partenope during that sabbatical year in Naples long ago. Now to recall the words he had first to translate them.

  I’ll build myself a house in the middle of the ocean

  Made of peacock feathers.

  Me voglio fa na casa mmiez’ ’o mare

  Fravacata de penne de pavune.

  Of silver and gold I’ll make the grates

  And of precious stones the balconies.

  D’argento e d’oro voglio fa lli ggrare

  E de prete preziose lli balcune.

  When my Nennella appears

  Everyone will say:

  “Now the sun has risen!”

  Quanno Nennella mi se va affacciare

  Ognuno dice, ognuno dice:

  “Mo sponta lo sole!”

  Trallalallalla llallarallalla.

  Who said his memory was going bad!

  He put the mushrooms and the tomato slices in one pan of slowly simmering butter, the kippers in another, set the kettle on to boil and spooned the tea into the pot.

  Climbing the stairs, balancing the tray, he raised his voice and sang again the song’s last verse. She would waken to fond Italian memories.

  He was winded when he gained the landing. He paused for breath, then went down the hall and entered the bedroom singing the refrain: Trallarallalla lla … la … la…

  She was dead.

  When the body had been taken away he sat awaiting the onslaught of grief like a man in the electric chair. But the switch was not thrown. He felt nothing. Nothing whatever. He shook his head like shaking a watch to make it tick. It responded with tra la la la …

  Without her it was as though the day had not begun. The house was silent. Always before it had been filled with music every waking hour. There was a radio in the bedroom, another in the kitchen, a player and records by the hundreds in the den. He sometimes called her his Anna Livia Plurabelle, and quoted, “‘Sea shell ebb music wayriver she flows.’” She liked all kinds: symphonic, chamber, opera, jazz, the popular songs of their youth. Now it was as though the house had been submerged.

  After forty-two years it must have come to seem to him that their marriage would just go on and on. It ought to have been the very opposite with each passing day. But when he warned himself that it could not go on forever like this, it was more to scare himself into a fuller appreciation of his good fortune than it was out of conviction. It was not that he took his wife for granted, but rather that he could not imagine—could scarcely even remember—life without her, and he could neither remember nor imagine not living. He had marveled at how it was that of all the potential pairs on this earth he and she had found each other as unerringly as lock and key. Throughout his working life as a professor he had been much at home; since his retirement they were together at all times, seldom out of each other’s call. To accept the sudden end of so permanent a partnership was impossible.

  It was said that after the fall of the blade of the guillotine and the severance of the head from the trunk the eyes went on fluttering and the limbs twitching—something similar seemed to have happened to him. He watered the plants, took out the garbage, emptied the machine of yesterday’s dishes. In this state of suspended animation he spent the day, waking like a sleepwalker from time to time to wonder how he had gotten where he was. The inappropriateness and triviality of his thoughts appalled him. Had he undergone some atrophy of the heart, hardening of the arteries? He would have been lost without her, he used to say. Now he was lost. And even telling himself this did not flush his heart from hiding.

  He had forgotten the cat. It was late, and having been kept waiting long past her dinner hour, she clambered up his leg as he diced the raw liver.

  He had no idea what time it was, for time had stopped. He told himself he ought to go to bed. He switched off the lights. But three steps up the stairs he realized that he was going to bed alone, would wake alone. He turned back and went to the living room. The cat came and leapt on his lap.

  Lulled by her purring he grew drowsy. Up to his last waking moment there kept running in his mind that refrain tra la la la …

 
; The blood pressure pill he took the next morning was the last one in the bottle. He went into town to have the prescription refilled.

  As he was leaving the drugstore he saw an item for sale that stopped him in the aisle. It was a bamboo backscratcher. The sight brought to mind the countless times he had asked her to scratch his back. He could feel again the touch of her fingers, the soothing relief. “Higher. There. Ahh …”

  His tears flowed and, grateful for his grief, he shook with sobs.

  A Biography of William Humphrey

  William Humphrey (1924–1997) was an American author and a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction in 1959 for his classic book Home from the Hill, which told the story of a small-town family in rural Texas. Indeed, themes of family life, hardship, and rural struggle are the defining characteristics of his writing, appearing in all thirteen of his works.

  Humphrey was born on June 18 in Clarksville, Texas, to Clarence and Nell Humphrey. Nestled in the heart of Red River County, Clarksville in the early 1920s resembled the Old South more than the Texan West. It is from this time and place that Humphrey drew inspiration for much of his writing career. Daily life in rural, isolated Clarksville was built around cotton farming and was emotionally and physically taxing. Neither of Humphrey’s parents attended school beyond the third grade, and the family moved frequently during his childhood: fifteen times in five years. His father, an alcoholic, hunted in the snake-infested swamplands of the Sulphur River to help feed his wife and son. Although Clarence was a difficult and quick-tempered man, Humphrey cared deeply for him, and his love for his father had a profound impact on his writing.

  As the Great Depression progressed into the 1930s, so did the strain on the Humphreys’ already-precarious finances. Clarence worked as a shade-tree mechanic, yet was too poor to buy a car of his own. He would test-drive the cars he fixed as fast as they could go, taking them screaming down the back roads of Red River County.

  In 1937 Clarence was killed in an auto accident. Humphrey was just thirteen at the time. Much later, in his memoir Farther Off From Heaven (1977), Humphrey commented on this period, which was to be the end of his childhood: “What my new life would be like I could only guess at, but I knew it would be totally different from the one that was ending, and that a totally different person from the one I had been would be needed to survive in it.” Soon after his father’s death, Humphrey and his mother moved to Dallas to live with relatives. He did not return to Clarksville for thirty-two years.

  Humphrey exceled in school and was able to attend an art academy in Dallas on a scholarship. At the onset of the Second World War, Humphrey attempted to join the navy but was rejected for being color blind. Having seriously considered being an artist up to this point, Humphrey decided to focus on his writing instead. He attended the University of Texas and the Southern Methodist University for short spells during the early 1940s but did not graduate from either college. In 1944 he left SMU in his final semester and headed briefly to Chicago and then went on to live in New York City’s Greenwich Village.

  In 1949 Humphrey published his first short story, “The Hardys,” in the Sewanee Review. He was so excited to receive the letter of acceptance that he tripped and fell as he was running up the steps to his house to share the news with his wife, the painter Dorothy Cantine, and broke his ankle. On the strength of that story, Humphrey was hired to teach creative writing and English literature at Bard College. Starting around this time, renowned writer Katherine Anne Porter, Humphrey’s contemporary and a fellow Texan, became a close friend and a firm supporter of his work, and remained so for many years.

  The 1950s were a period of prosperity for Humphrey, who continued to publish stories in magazines like the New Yorker and Harper’s Bazaar. These works drew on Humphrey’s childhood in the Texan scrub, and many were collected in The Last Husband and Other Stories (1953). During this early stage of his career, Humphrey also formed a lifelong friendship with the poet Theodore Weiss and mentored playwright and author Sherman Yellen.

  In 1957 Humphrey’s debut novel, Home from the Hill, rocketed him into modern conversation and defined him as an author. Previously regarded as a Western writer due to his Texan roots and their resonance in his work, Humphrey now became firmly grounded in the Southern literary tradition. Comparisons to Faulkner were constant throughout his life and long after his death.

  Home from the Hill was an instant success and was made into a motion picture in 1960 starring Robert Mitchum. Variety reported that the film rights sold to MGM for $750,000, to which Humphrey humorously responded, “Unfortunately, they had one zero too many.” Still, it was enough money for Humphrey and his wife to travel extensively in Europe, moving to England in 1958 and later to Italy. Humphrey also used this time to focus on one of his greatest passions: fly-fishing.

  In 1963 Humphrey returned to the United States and over the next few years partially returned to the world of academia, taking up short-term positions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton University, Smith College, and Washington and Lee University. But he continued to publish short stories and essays in major magazines such as Esquire, Sports Illustrated, and the Atlantic Monthly and in 1964 was nominated for an Edgar Award for Best Short Story for his work “The Ballad of Jesse Neighbors.” In 1965 Humphrey bought an apple farm in Hudson, New York. Though he would travel extensively in the coming years, the apple farm was to be his home for the rest of his life.

  During the same year, Humphrey published his second novel, The Ordways, which received extremely strong critical reviews and was compared to the writings of Mark Twain. A second collection of short stories, A Time and a Place, was published in 1968, and two essays, The Spawning Run and My Moby Dick, which first appeared in Esquire and Sports Illustrated, respectively, were eventually expanded and published as short books.

  Over the next few years, Humphrey continued to publish with discipline, writing books that incorporated his signature microcosmically expressed theme of family values. These included Proud Flesh (1973), Hostages to Fortune (1984), The Collected Stories of William Humphrey (1985), and Open Season (1986). His last novel, No Resting Place (1989), was based on the forced removal of the Cherokee nation along the Trail of Tears and was heralded by the Los Angeles Times as “a novel every American should be required to read.”

  Humphrey’s final collection of short stories, September Song (1992), conveyed his mounting sense of frustration at his declining health. By his seventieth birthday, Humphrey had undergone treatment for skin cancer and was hard of hearing. Diagnosed with cancer of the larynx, he died on August 20, 1997, at his home in Hudson. He was seventy-three years old.

  William Humphrey in the 1960s, shortly after returning to the United States.

  The author in Alsace, France. The image was taken in 1965, the year The Ordways was published. Two years prior, the manuscript almost disappeared when Humphrey accidentally left it aboard an express train from Rome to Milan. He added a prefatory note in the published edition thanking “Capostazione Michele Fortino of the Stazione Terminal in Rome” for his efforts in recovering the manuscript.

  By the 1970s Humphrey was well established within contemporary literature.

  William and Dorothy Humphrey in August 1995 in Hudson, New York.

  The author and his wife loved roaming through local thrift stores and modeling their finds.

  Dorothy did both of these paintings: Humphrey in his black-and-red hunting cap (at top) and a portrait of Humphrey based on a photograph sent by his mother, taken when he was three years old.

  Humphrey at his farm in Hudson, New York. The author required and enjoyed a high degree of quietude all his life.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  These are works of fiction. Names, characters, place
s, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Quotation from “Falling in Love Again” by Frederick Hollander

  Copyright © 1930 by Famous Music Corporation. Copyright renewed 1957 and 1958 by Famous Music Corporation.

  Copyright © 1992 by William Humphrey

  Cover design by Drew Padrutt

  ISBN: 978-1-5040-0633-0

  This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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