The Sojourner

by Carson McCullers
The twilight border between sleep and waking was a Roman one this morning:
splashing fountains and arched, narrow streets, the golden lavish city of blossoms
and age-soft stone. Sometimes in this semi-consciousness he sojourned again in
Paris, or war German rubble, or Swiss skiing and a snow hotel. Sometimes, also, in
a fallow Georgia field at hunting dawn. Rome it was this morning in the yearless
region of dreams. John Ferris awoke in a room in a New York hotel. He had the
feeling that something unpleasant was awaiting him -- what it was, he did not
know. The feeling, submerged by matinal necessities, lingered even after he had
dressed and gone downstairs. It was a cloudless autumn day and the pale sunlight
sliced between the pastel skyscrapers. Ferris went into the next-door drugstore and
sat at the end booth next to the window glass that overlooked the sidewalk. He
ordered an American breakfast with scrambled eggs and sausage.
Ferris had come from Paris to his father's funeral which had taken place the week
before in his home town in Georgia.
The shock of death had made him aware of youth already passed. His hair was
receding and the veins in his now
naked temples were pulsing and prominent and his body was spare except for an
incipient belly bulge. Ferris had loved
his father and the bond between them had once been extraordinarily close -- but the
years had somehow unraveled this
filial devotion; the death, expected for a long time, had left him with an unforeseen
dismay. He had stayed as long as
possible to be near his mother and brothers at home. His plane for Paris was to
leave the next morning.
Ferris pulled out his address book to verify a number. He turned the pages with
growing attentiveness. Names and
addresses from New York, the capitals of Europe, a few faint ones from his home
state in the South. Faded, printed
names, sprawled drunken ones. Betty Wills: a random love, married now. Charlie
Williams: wounded in the Hurtgen
Forest, unheard of since. Grand old Williams -- did he live or die? Don Walker: a
B.T.O. in television, getting rich.
Henry Green: hit the skids after the war, in a sanitarium now, they say. Cozie Hall:
he had heard that she was dead.
Heedless, laughing Cozie -- it was strange to think that she too, silly girl, could die.
As Ferris closed the address book,
he suffered a sense of hazard, transience, almost of fear.
It was then that his body jerked suddenly. He was staring out of the window when
there, on the sidewalk, passing by,
was his ex-wife. Elizabeth passed quite close to him, walking slowly. He could not
understand the wild quiver of his
heart, nor the following sense of recklessness and grace that lingered after she was
gone.
Quickly Ferris paid his check and rushed out to the sidewalk. Elizabeth stood on
the corner waiting to cross Fifth
Avenue. He hurried toward her meaning to speak, but the lights changed as she
crossed the street before he reached
her. Ferris followed. On the other side he could easily have overtaken her, but he
found himself lagging
unaccountably. Her fair brown hair was plainly rolled, and as he watched her Ferris
recalled that once his father had
remarked that Elizabeth had a "beautiful carriage." She turned at the next corner
and Ferris followed, although by now
his intention to overtake her had disappeared. Ferris questioned the bodily
disturbance that the sight of Elizabeth
aroused in him, the dampness of his hands, the hard heartstrokes.
It was eight years since Ferris had last seen his ex-wife. He knew that long ago she
had married again. And there were
children. During recent years he had seldom thought of her. But at first, after the
divorce, the loss had almost
destroyed him. Then after the anodyne of time, he had loved again, and then again.
Jeannine, she was now. Certainly
his love for his ex-wife was long since past. So why the unhinged body, the shaken
mind? He knew only that his
clouded heart was oddly dissonant with the sunny, candid autumn day. Ferris
wheeled suddenly, and walking with long
strides, almost running, hurried back to the hotel.
Ferris poured himself a drink, although it was not yet eleven o'clock. He sprawled
out in an armchair like a man
exhausted, nursing his glass of bourbon and water. He had a full day ahead of him
as he was leaving by plane the next
morning for Paris. He checked over his obligations: take luggage to Air France,
lunch with his boss, buy shoes and an
overcoat. And something -- wasn't there something else? Ferris finished his drink
and opened the telephone directory.
His decision to call his ex-wife was impulsive. The number was under Bailey, the
husband's name, and he called
before he had much time for self-debate. He and Elizabeth had exchanged cards at
Christmastime, and Ferris had sent
a carving set when he received the announcement of her wedding. There was no
reason not to call. But as he waited,
listening to the ring at the other end, misgiving fretted him.
Elizabeth answered; her familiar voice was a fresh shock to him. Twice he had to
repeat his name, but when he was
identified, she sounded glad. He explained he was only in town for that day. They
had a theater engagement, she said -
- but she wondered if he would come by for an early dinner. Ferris said he would
be delighted.
As he went from one engagement to another, he was still bothered at odd moments
by the feeling that something
necessary was forgotten. Ferris bathed and changed in the late afternoon, often
thinking about Jeannine; he would be
with her the following night. "Jeannine," he would say, "I happened to run into my
ex-wife when I was in New York.
Had dinner with her. And her husband, of course. It was strange seeing her after all
these years."
Elizabeth lived in the East Fifties, and as Ferris taxied uptown he glimpsed at
intersections the lingering sunset, but by
the time he reached his destination it was already autumn dark. The place was a
building with a marquee and a
doorman, and the apartment was on the seventh floor.
"Come in, Mr. Ferris."
Braced for Elizabeth or even the unimagined husband, Ferris was astonished by the
freckled red-haired child; he had
known of the children, but his mind had failed somehow to acknowledge them.
Surprise made him step back
awkwardly.
"This is our apartment," the child said politely. "Aren't you Mr. Ferris? I'm Billy.
Come in."
In the living room beyond the hall, the husband provided another surprise; he too
had not been acknowledged
emotionally. Bailey was a lumbering red-haired man with a deliberate manner. He
rose and extended a welcoming
hand.
"I'm Bill Bailey. Glad to see you. Elizabeth will be in, in a minute. She's finishing
dressing."
The last words struck a gliding series of vibrations, memories of the other years.
Fair Elizabeth, rosy and naked before
her bath. Half-dressed before the mirror of her dressing table, brushing her fine,
chestnut hair. Sweet, casual intimacy,
the soft-fleshed loveliness indisputably possessed. Ferris shrank from the unbidden
memories and compelled himself
to meet Bill Bailey's gaze.
"Billy, will you please bring that tray of drinks from the kitchen table?"
The child obeyed promptly, and when he was gone Ferris remarked
conversationally, "Fine boy you have there."
"We think so."
Flat silence until the child returned with a tray of glasses and a cocktail shaker of
Martinis. With the priming drinks
they pumped up conversation: Russia, they spoke of, and the New York
rainmaking, and the apartment situation in
Manhattan and Paris.
"Mr. Ferris is flying all the way across the ocean tomorrow," Bailey said to the
little boy who was perched on the arm
of his chair, quiet and well behaved. "I bet you would like to be a stowaway in his
suitcase."
Billy pushed back his limp bangs. "I want to fly in an airplane and be a
newspaperman like Mr. Ferris." He added with
sudden assurance, "That's what I would like to do when I am big."
Bailey said," I thought you wanted to be a doctor."
"I do!" said Billy. "I would like to be both. I want to be a atom-bomb scientist too."
Elizabeth came in carrying in her arms a baby girl.
"Oh, John!" she said. She settled the baby in the father's lap. "It's grand to see you.
I'm awfully glad you could come."
The little girl sat demurely on Bailey's knees. She wore a pale pink crêpe de Chine
frock, smocked around the yoke
with rose, and a matching silk hair ribbon tying back her pale soft curls. Her skin
was summer tanned and her brown
eyes flecked with gold and laughing. When she reached up and fingered her
father's horn-rimmed glasses, he took
them off and let her look through them a moment. "How's my old Candy?"
Elizabeth was very beautiful, more beautiful perhaps than he had ever realized. Her
straight clean hair was shining. Her
face was softer, glowing and serene. It was a madonna loveliness, dependent on the
family ambiance.
"You've hardly changed at all," Elizabeth said, "but it has been a long time."
"Eight years." His hand touched his thinning hair self-consciously while further
amenities were exchanged.
Ferris felt himself suddenly a spectator -- an interloper among these Baileys. Why
had he come? He suffered. His own
life seemed so solitary, a fragile column supporting nothing amidst the wreckage
of the years. He felt he could not bear
much longer to stay in the family room.
He glanced at his watch. "You're going to the theater?"
"It's a shame," Elizabeth said, "but we've had this engagment for more than a
month. But surely, John, you'll be
staying home one of these days before long. You're not going to be an expatriate,
are you?"
"Expatriate," Ferris repeated. "I don't much like the word."
"What's a better word?" she asked.
He thought for a moment. "Sojourner might do."
Ferris glanced again at his watch, and again Elizabeth apologized. "If only we had
know ahead of time--"
"I just had this day in town. I came home unexpectedly. You see, Papa died last
week."
"Papa Ferris is dead?"
"Yes, at Johns-Hopkins. He had been sick there nearly a year. The funeral was
down home in Georgia."
"Oh, I'm so sorry, John. Papa Ferris was always one of my favorite people."
The little boy moved from behind the chair so that he could look into his mother's
face. He asked, "Who is dead?"
Ferris was oblivious to apprehension; he was thinking of his father's death. He saw
again the outstretched body on the
quilted silk within the coffin. The corpse flesh was bizarrely rouged and the
familiar hands lay massive and joined
above a spread of funeral roses. The memory closed and Ferris awakened to
Elizabeth's calm voice.
"Mr. Ferris' father, Billy. A really grand person. Somebody you didn't know."
"But why did you call him Papa Ferris?"
Bailey and Elizabeth exchanged a trapped look. It was Bailey who answered the
questioning child. "A long time ago,"
he said, "your mother and Mr. Ferris were once married. Before you were born -- a
long time ago."
"Mr. Ferris?"
The little boy stared at Ferris, amazed and unbelieving. And Ferris' eyes, as he
returned the gaze, were somehow
unbelieving too. Was it indeed true that at one time he had called this stranger,
Elizabeth, Little Butterduck during
nights of love, that they had lived together, shared perhaps a thousand days and
nights and -- finally -- endured in the
misery of sudden solitude the fiber by fiber (jealousy, alcohol and money quarrels)
destruction of the fabric of married
love.
Bailey said to the children, "It's somebody's suppertime. Come on now."
"But Daddy! Mama and Mr. Ferris -- I --"
Billy's everlasting eyes -- perplexed and with a glimmer of hostility -- reminded
Ferris of the gaze of another child. It
was the young son of Jeannine -- a boy of seven with a shadowed little face and
nobby knees whom Ferris avoided and
usually forgot.
"Quick march!" Bailey gently turned Billy toward the door. "Say good night now,
son."
"Good night, Mr. Ferris." He added resentfully, "I thought I was staying up for the
cake."
"You can come in afterward for the cake," Elizabeth said. "Run along now with
Daddy for your supper."
Ferris and Elizabeth were alone. The weight of the situation descended on those
first moments of silence. Ferris asked
permission to pour himself another drink and Elizabeth set the cocktail shaker on
the table at his side. He looked at the
grand piano and noticed the music on the rack.
"Do you still play as beautifully as you used to?"
"I still enjoy it."
"Please play, Elizabeth."
Elizabeth arose immediately. Her readiness to perform when asked had always
been one of her amiabilities; she never
hung back, apologized. Now as she approached the piano there was the added
readiness of relief.
She began with a Bach prelude and fugue. The prelude was as gaily iridescent as a
prism in a morning room. The first
voice of the fugue, an announcement pure and solitary, was repeated intermingling
with a second voice, and again
repeated within an elaborated frame, the multiple music, horizontal and serene,
flowed with unhurried majesty. The
principal melody was woven with two other voices, embellished with countless
ingenuities -- now dominant, again
submerged, it had the sublimity of a single thing that does not fear surrender to the
whole. Toward the end, the density
of the material gathered for the last enriched insistence on the dominant first motif
and with a chorded final statement
the fugue ended. Ferris rested his head on the chair back and closed his eyes. In the
following silence a clear, high
voice came from the room down the hall.
"Daddy, how could Mama and Mr. Ferris--" A door was closed.
The piano began again -- what was this music? Unplaced, familiar, the limpid
melody had lain a long while dormant
in his heart. Now it spoke to him of another time, another place -- it was the music
Elizabeth used to play. The delicate
air summoned a wilderness of memory. Ferris was lost in the riot of past longings,
conflicts, ambivalent desires.
Strange that the music, catalyst for this tumultuous anarchy, was so serene and
clear. The singing melody was broken
off by the appearance of the maid.
"Miz Bailey, dinner is out on the table now."
Even after Ferris was seated at the table between his host and hostess, the
unfinished music still overcast his mood. He
was a little drunk.
"L'improvisation de la vie humaine," he said. "There's nothing that makes you so
aware of the improvisation of human
existence as a song unfinished. Or an old address book."
"Address book?" repeated Bailey. Then he stopped, noncommittal and polite.
"You're still the same old boy, Johnny," Elizabeth said with a trace of the old
tenderness.
It was a Southern dinner that evening, and the dishes were his old favorites. They
had fried chicken and corn pudding
and rich, glazed candied sweet potatoes. During the meal Elizabeth kept alive a
conversation when the silences were
overlong. And it came about that Ferris was led to speak of Jeannine.
"I first knew Jeannine last autumn -- about this time of the year -- in Italy. She's a
singer and she had an engagement
in Rome. I expect we will be married soon."
The words seemed so true, inevitable, that Ferris did not at first acknowledge to
himself the lie. He and Jeannine had
never in that year spoken of marriage. And indeed, she was still married -- to a
White Russian money-changer in Paris
from whom she had been separated for five years. But it was too late to correct the
lie. Already Elizabeth was saying:
"This really makes me glad to know. Congratulations, Johnny."
He tried to make amends with truth. "The Roman autumn is so beautiful. Balmy
and blossoming." He added. "Jeannine
has a little boy of seven. A curious trilingual little fellow. We go to the Tuileries
sometimes."
A lie again. He had taken the boy once to the gardens. The sallow foreign child in
shorts that bared his spindly legs
had sailed his boat in the concrete pond and ridden the pony. The child had wanted
to go in to the puppet show. But
there was not time, for Ferris had an engagement at the Scribe Hotel. He had
promised they would go to the guignol
another afternoon. Only once had he taken Valentin to the Tuileries.
There was a stir. The maid brought in a white-frosted cake with pink candles. The
children entered in their night
clothes. Ferris still did not understand.
"Happy birthday, John," Elizabeth said. "Blow out the candles."
Ferris recognized his birthday date. The candles blew out lingeringly and there was
the smell of burning wax. Ferris
was thirty-eight years old. The veins in his temples darkened and pulsed visibly.
"It's time you started for the theater."
Ferris thanked Elizabeth for the birthday dinner and said the appropriate good-
byes. The whole family saw him to the
door.
A high, thin moon shone above the jagged, dark skyscrapers. The streets were
windy, cold. Ferris hurried to Third
Avenue and hailed a cab. He gazed at the nocturnal city with the deliberate
attentiveness of departure and perhaps
farewell. He was alone. He longed for flighttime and the coming journey.
The next day, he looked down on the city from the air, burnished in sunlight,
toylike, precise. Then America was left
behind and there was only the Atlantic and the distant European shore. The ocean
was milky pale and placid beneath
the clouds. Ferris dozed most of the day. Toward dark he was thinking of Elizabeth
and the visit of the previous
evening. He thought of Elizabeth among her family with longing, gentle envy and
inexplicable regret. He sought the
melody, the unfinished air, that had so moved him. The cadence, some unrelated
tones, were all that remained; the
melody itself evaded him. He had found instead the first voice of the fugue that
Elizabeth had played -- it came to him,
inverted mockingly and in a minor key. Suspended above the ocean the anxieties
of transience and solitude no longer
troubled him and he thought of his father's death with equanimity. During the
dinner hour the plane reached the shore
of France.
At midnight Ferris was in a taxi crossing Paris. It was a clouded night and mist
wreathed the lights of the Place de la
Concorde. The midnight bistros gleamed on the wet pavements. As always after a
transocean flight the change of
continents was too sudden. New York at morning, this midnight Paris. Ferris
glimpsed the disorder of his life: the
succession of cities, the transitory loves; and time, the sinister glissando of the
years, time always.
"Vite! Vite!" he called in terror. "Dépêchez-vous."
Valentin opened the door to him. The little boy wore pajamas and an outgrown red
robe. His gray eyes were shadowed
and, as Ferris passed into the flat, they flickered momentarily.
"J'attends Maman."
Jeannine was singing in a night club. She would not be home before another hour.
Valentin returned to a drawing,
squatting with his crayons over the paper on the floor. Ferris looked down at the
drawing -- it was a banjo player with
notes and wavy lines inside a comic-strip balloon.
"We will go again to the Tuileries."
The child looked up and Ferris drew him closer to his knees. The melody, the
unfinished music that Elizabeth had
played, came to him suddenly, Unsought, the load of memory jettisoned -- this
time bringing only recognition and
sudden joy.
"Monsieur Jean," the child said, "did you see him?"
Confused, Ferris thought only of another child -- the freckled, family-loved boy.
"See who, Valentin?"
"Your dead papa in Georgia." The child added, "Was he okay?"
Ferris spoke with rapid urgency: "We will go often to the Tuileries. Ride the pony
and we will go into the guignol. We
will see the puppet show and never be in a hurry any more."
"Monsieur Jean," Valentin said. "The guignol is now closed."
Again, the terror the acknowledgement of wasted years and death. Valentin,
responsive and confident, still nestled in
his arms. His cheek touched the soft cheek and felt the brush of the delicate
eyelashes. With inner desperation he
pressed the child close -- as though an emotion as protean as his love could
dominate the pulse of time.