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The Sound Tape
by Wright Morris
· I've lived across from the Porters most of my life. During the twenties, when it was fashionable to open developments that closed in the thirties, they built a chalet-type mansion across the road from my place. It was said to resemble something Mrs. Porter saw in France. We were not neighbors, however, as the Porter chalet was the first house in the new development, and mine was the last in what is charitably called the old. The road between us, I suppose, is a kind of Mason-Dixon line.
Although we lived in separate worlds, every morning Mr. Porter and I joined forces and rode into town on the same commuter's local, and in the late afternoon we rode home again. On occasion I found him walking home from the station and gave him a lift. I observed that he chain-smoked my brand of cigarettes, traded in his Ford coupe every second year and checked the arrival and departure of the trains by glancing at his watch. Along with everybody else I made the observation that he led an orderly, careful life and that Mrs. Porter led a careless, somewhat disorderly one. Not that it mattered, except for the little problem of keys. When Mrs. Porter left her purse in the seat of some car or on some department store counter, she also left, with certain unimportant matters, the keys to her house. As she did this five or six times a year, some thirty sets of keys were in distribution before Mr. Porter had the locks changed on all the doors. The distribution of the new keys, of course, promptly began. At this point Mr. Porter washed his hands of the matter, he rubbed his palms briskly together as he told me, it was her house, and she could do with it as she liked. Mrs. Porter solved the problem, as usual, by letting nature take its course, losing the last set of keys and entering the house through the garage. I could tell when she came home by the thump of the heavy overhead doors.
When they first moved in, I used to speculate about Mr. Porter's line. He seemed to have money, but I told myself that he worked for it. He kept the same monotonous schedule that I kept myself. He took the 8:04 in the morning, the 4:48 in the afternoon, with only Saturdays and national holidays off. It was nearly ten years before I discovered that Mr. Porter had no line, or rather that his only line was how to pass the time. But he went about it, as he did everything else, in a competent, businesslike way. He put in his eight-hour day at the club where he applied himself to his growing tax problems and a wide range of anti-Roosevelt literature. He was the most informed man on obscure subjects I have ever known. A certain pride of class, I suppose, as one of the surviving unearned increment boys, forbade him to apply himself to anything useful. But nothing prevented him from putting his mind to work. It was a good mind, and he worked it around the clock.
He preferred to sit alone, while commuting, but there were times when he found himself compelled to stand in the aisle or take the seat beside me. As he had paid for this seat, he always took it. Without troubling to open the discussion or indicating that he knew who it was that sat beside him, he would share some of the strange lore he had stored away: the air distance between the capitals of the world, the reason for the smallness of French equestrian armor or the meaning of the serial numbers to be found on the sides of freight cars. He spoke on all these matters with an air of authority, knowing that his listener would be poorly informed, which led most people to think that he was merely a kind of cybernetic marvel full of facts and figures, waiting to be tapped. I found it hard to explain the touch of covert sympathy I felt for him.
My knowledge of Mrs. Porter is of a different sort. What I choose to call my knowledge began on a fine summer dawn, just twenty years ago, when I saw her out padding around in her garden in what she called a shift. An abundant woman, built along the lines of the concrete goddesses that brooded in her garden, she sometimes fancied herself a suburban Diana with a pack of sleek hounds. Draped in her shift and armed with a pair of garden shears in case some urban interloper might stop to marvel, she loved to pad around her acres with the spread- legged gait of a big circus cat. That summer morning, as I remember, she went along making tracks in the dewy grass, stopping now and then to lift the shift and gaze at her well-turned calves. Like in many big women, she was vain of her shapely ankles and small feet.
Later in the morning, a wrapper over the shift, and holding aloft a few wilted flowers. she would cross the road to my seedy lawn and call on me. Would I like a few flowers? She knew that I didn't grow my own. So we would start with the flowers, which she would drop, sometimes head down, in the highball glasses, and then we would get around to the latest pet in her house. It had usually run off, flown off or simply rolled over and died. She had tried, over the years, nearly everything: exotic imported birds, which I could hear in the summer when the windows were open, and pedigreed dogs which I could hear whether the windows were open or not. Sooner or later the birds stopped singing, the dogs stopped whining and barking and the cats I had seen at the windows disappeared. Our discussion usually centered on what sort of creature she should try next.
This problem puzzled me, as Mrs. Porter had a friendly, sympathetic nature, and while the pets were alive she often carried them around in her arms. "Baby," she would say, I was not that type, but she liked to believe she had that type around her, "Baby, isn't he a lover?" and scoop her dachshund, Himmel, into her arms. But there was always more than the usual melancholy in Himmel's eyes. He had learned, much quicker than I did, that when Mrs. Porter put him back on the ground, she had also put him, for the time being, out of her mind. She might forget for a day or two that she owned a dog. There were times when she forgot what the name or breed of her latest dog was.
"Did that boxer, the lover, leave me, Baby?" she would ask, and it was sometimes quite awhile before she found out. Missing cats were often found trapped in her enormous closets, and some of the smaller dogs were hard to hear at the back of the house. But not to smell. In the summer Mr. Porter soon found them out. I would hear him going through the house from wing to wing, opening and closing doors.
It was by slow stages, I suppose, that Mrs. Porter moved from pets to goldfish, from fish to flowers, and from flowers to the house. The house was always there. When a door was left open it did not run off. Something of the concern she felt for her pets, when they began to act distracted, now crept into her voice when she spoke of the house. As she had once said, "Baby, isn't he a lover?" and held up something for me to pet, she now called my attention to her house. From my porch we had a fine view of it. While I was getting her a drink she would move her chair around so that she faced the house. I'm not sure just when I came to know that the place across the road was something more than a house, or when she first noticed the change in its personality. She was the one to point out to me that its character had changed. She spoke of it as of a friend who had lost some endearing faculty.
"Baby," she would say, "what am I going to do about my house?" As a man would say, "what am I going to do about my wife?" I never knew. From where I sat it looked about the same. Every spring the same handy man painted the fence, whitewashed the concrete urns that flanked the doorway and repaired the holes that Mr. Porter's chains made each winter in the drive. Nor had she changed. She still left on my porch whatever she had brought along with the wilting flowers: sometimes her shoes, as she liked to cross the lawn without them; sometimes her squashed pack of menthol cigarettes. "I can't stand menthol, Baby," she would say, "so I don't smoke much."
But she smoked more and more that summer, and if she left a squashed pack on my porch, she went off with my fresh pack tucked into the pocket of her gown. In August she spent a month at the shore, but when she returned it was not to my porch, and she no longer crossed the road to ask me what I thought of her house. There were also other changes; and when it was clear that Mrs. Amory Porter would soon be a mother, it was assumed that Mr. Porter had little to do with it. He had fathered the child, so to speak, by a legal transmission of the pollen, but in every matter that counted, the flower would be hers. Mr. Porter more Or less said so himself. He was the first to joke about the matter; and when talk got around to the child, he would make that characteristic washing gesture with his hands, rubbing the dry palms together as if he stood before a fire. I didn't see Mrs. Porter that winter, but every day I drove past the house and I sometimes felt that I observed a change in it. As a last resort, it amused me to think, Mrs. Porter had got around to changing her house by altering, insofar as possible, the inhabitants.
Eloise, as the child was named, was born in March. On the balcony, when the weather was pleasant, I sometimes saw the nurse with the hooded carriage, and I read in the paper that Mrs. Porter had returned to life, her name appeared on the usual committees and her voice was heard at the usual parties. Mrs. Porter, was back, but only half of Mr. Porter turned up.
As I seemed to be the only person who missed him, I'm not sure anybody else remarked that Mr. Porter no longer came home on the 4:48. He went in as usual, but he came home at one o'clock. Early in May I came home early myself, as there were things to do around the house, and when I reached the Porter house I saw him wheeling something up the drive, a baby carriage, the perambulator I had seen on the balcony. When I stopped, I think I stopped to ask him what was the trouble, he wheeled it up so I could peer into it from the car. Eloise, at that time, was about ten weeks old. But the connection between the child in the carriage and the man who was pushing it was more than a resemblance, I felt I was looking at Porter himself. As if time, right there before my eyes, had unraveled the old man who stood before me, layer by layer, until nothing remained but the Porter seed itself in swaddling clothes; the Porter essence there in the perambulator. Porter knew this, he had wheeled the carriage up, so to speak, in order to prove it; and all the proof he needed he found on my face. Without waiting for me to speak or to recover, he wheeled her off.
For a year or more I saw very little of him. He had taken over, as he told those who asked him, the education of his child. But the following summer when I dropped into the big public market where I did my shopping, Mr. Porter and Eloise were often there. In the spacious air-cooled market, full of soothing music and educational educational commercials, Mr. Porter, as well as Eloise, felt right at home. In the second year, as if to meet his needs, the new baby shopper made its appearance, and he would hustle down the aisles with Eloise propped up between the handle bars. Before she could talk, and long before there was reason to believe that she understood, he described to her the contents of the cans he purchased. He pointed out the label and other important details. It was a great comfort to him to find that this child of his old age, he was then in his late fifties, had a mind that was very much like his own. Curious, precise and absolutely disinterested.
When she was five or six, and when Mr. Porter was not at home. Eloise, like one of Singer's midgets. Would sometimes cross the road and enlighten me. All of my opinions, as she knew them through her father, were woefully misinformed. The correct opinion was the one she brought along. Her great field, as was his, was politics. From Eloise I learned, in the course of several summers, more about the workings of the Administration than I would ever have mastered by myself. I have no mind for figures; Eloise had no mind for anything else. Very early we discovered, or rather Eloise discovered, the fatal flaw, the Achilles, heel in nearly every statement I put forth. Invariably I fell back upon the word feel,
"Now don't you feel Eloise." I would say, whereupon she would shriek and jump up and down. Like her father, she would rub her little hands together.
"You just feel," she would reply, "Daddy thinks."
That, of course, saw early, in the beginning, for later there was no particular need to let me what Daddy did, or anybody else. At seven and one-half Eloise could do it for herself.
"You're always just feeling. Mr. Brady," she would say, "I think."
She was right. I was always feeling, but she could think. She would come to my porch, that side of the porch where the grass and the robins had taken over, with her little head, like a worming robin's, cocked to one side, ready to pounce on the first wormy feeling I let slip out.
A thin, sober-faced little girl, with the oversized clothes her father bought for her, she seemed to be a woman without ever having been a child. As she stood there reciting. I seemed to hear many small fine wheels going around.
She went to school, but she was not popular. Neither dolls nor other little girls seemed to interest her. She would do her lessons many months in advance and, using the books of the girls ahead of her, master the subjects she would be having the next year. She had the time. There was nothing else that she cared to do. On weekends she might walk across to tell me where macaroni was made or to name the city with the largest smelting works. She knew. And she never seemed to forget. If I happened to meet Porter at the A. and P. or coming home on the local, I could tell by the nature of his lecture what subject Eloise was now on at school. They read the same books, went over the questions carefully. Mr. Porter would pick her up at school, and I would often find them, an hour or so later, sitting in the front seat of the car that was parked in front of his house. Winter afternoons, when the days were short, the overhead light in the car would be on, and I would see Mr. Porter's head bent over some book. Or the head of Eloise, nodding briskly, as she talked to him. A their backs was the great empty house, like abandoned barracks, with a pale light burning behind the blind in Mrs. Porter's room.
In this manner he instructed her in fractions, learned something about algebra himself and brushed up on the French he had not used for many years. In the A. and P., around the frozen food locker. I would sometimes hear an excited exchange, as if a pair of expensive imported servants were having it out debating in French the merits of stringless or French-style cut beans. Their arguments were full of a kind of heat lightning, intended to sharpen the faculties and illuminate the subject, and he would sometimes turn his back on her to conceal the pleasure on his face.
That was the fall that Harry Truman was a doomed, nearly pitiful man. Mr. Porter had never been in better spirits, and sometimes two or three times a week Eloise would come over, ring my doorbell and recite a bon mot. But just before the election I saw very little of her. Then on Halloween, early in the evening somebody rang my bell. When I opened the door, there stood Eloise. She carried a pumpkin lantern, made of orange and black paper, and on her small sober head sat a pointed witch's cap. The black sateen lining of one of Mr. Porter's coats covered her like a sheet. The effect was that of a dummy that had been dolled up. I failed to notice for a moment that her hand, the palm up, was extended toward me.
"That's a wonderful costume. Eloise." I said. carefully screening my language.
"You're supposed to give me something." she said.
"Oh." I said. "Oh, all right. What would you like? How about a piece of cake?"
"I'd rather have money," she said, "if you don't mind."
That set me back a bit but I said. "Is it customary to ask for money?"
"Father says if he's elected, we'll all be begging." she said. "Well, there isn't much chance of that." I said. "Is there?"
We stood there while she thought. I could see that she thought there saw not much chance but that she had been impressed by what she had heard.
"Father says if he's elected, he's just going to give up."
"If he's elected, Eloise," I said, sounding quite a bit like her father, "it means that most of the people in the country voted for him. It means he may not be your man, but he's our president." When she didn't reply to that I said, "Well, how do you feel about it?" It was out before I knew it.
"It's not a matter of feeling, Mr. Brady," she said, controlling herself. "it's a matter of thinking."
"Most people will vote as they feel," I said, letting the bars down. "and that's probably how I'll vote myself." But I didn't need to tell her. She could see that for herself.
"What reason is there to go on in a world like that?" she said.
Was that her father? I wasn't sure it was. I put my hand into my pocket, took out some change, then said. "Well, here's twenty-five cents if you spend it right away, Eloise," which was pretty sharp, but she settled for it. I held out the quarter and placed it in the hand with the long fingers and the small palm that snapped shut like a trap when the coin touched it. She turned without another word and walked off. Her small feet made a tapping sound on my brick walk. When she first faced me I had thought how little like a Halloween witch she was, but as she walked off, her witch's head bowed, I wasn’t so sure. It crossed my mind, just faintly, that is, that my grown-up idea of witches was silly, but her idea of a witch was one that meant business, Not foolishness.
I closed the door and forgot about Mr. Porter and Eloise until four days later when I sat in my room listening to the returns. A little after midnight I stepped out in the yard to smoke a cigarette. It was a sharp, but very pleasant night. The Porter house was dark, without a light burning, but out in front was the Porter car with the parking lights on. The front window was down and I could hear the radio. The voice was announcing what appeared to be a surprising trend.
That left a certain impression on me but I didn't think too much about it until the next morning, about eight o'clock. The phone rang just as I was getting ready to leave the house. It was Mrs. Porter. I could hear the bath water spilling into the tub behind her and the blurred nasal noise from her radio.
"This you. Baby?"
"This is me," I said.
"Is my little sound tape over there, honey?"
"Your sound tape" I said, and turned to look around the room. I knew that they were making and selling such things.
"You're cute as cotton, Baby," she said, "You know what I mean, his little sound tape, She isn't here. Is she over there?"
"Oh," I said. "Oh no. No, she isn't over here."
"Is he over there?"
"No, he isn't either," I said.
As there was no reply to that. I said, "I suppose you know they've elected Truman."
"They did?" she said.
"I mean the people did." I said.
"You think they went to an all-night movie?" she said.
"I've no idea. Mrs. Porter." I said, "And right now I've got to run for the train.".
She didn't answer.
"Well, I've got to run." I said, and did. With the single exception of Mr. Porter, I'm usually the first car out in the morning, and I sometimes pass him on the highway where he waits for the school bus. When the weather is cold, he and Eloise sit there in the car. He was there ahead of me as usual, and through the glass at the back of the car I could see their heads leaning together bent over some book. Some lesson or problem that she had to puzzle out. When I pulled alongside, I gave a tap on the horn as I usually do when I pass them, but this time he didn't toot back, In the rear view mirror I glanced back at them. Eloise, her head lolling to the side, was asleep on his arm. Mr. Porter's chin was resting on his chest. At that point it occurred to me that they had been up all night. They had probably sat right there in the car taking in the returns. Eloise was wearing her new school cap with the bright school colors, and the yellow tassel dangled where the sunlight streamed through the glass. I was relieved that my toot on the horn hadn't waked them. That was something I could leave to the school bus.
In the evening on my walk through the station I took particular trouble to steer clear of Mr. Porter's usual route. The election might be too much for him. I bought a paper for the late returns, went down and took my seat in the smoker, then opened the paper and stared at Porter's face, a photograph taken, I would say, thirty years ago. What struck me was how much he looked like Eloise. Mr. Porter had been found, the report said, with his only child, Eloise, in their car parked in the neighborhood in which they lived. They had died apparently sometime during the night. A faulty heater had flooded the car with poisonous gas.
Very little was said openly, but under the talk that got around to me was the feeling that Porter had acted deliberately; had persuaded his impressionable child to go along with him. This came from people who bad known him very well, who now referred to him as "poor Amory" and sometimes crossed my lawn to ask if I had any insight into the case. I said I hadn't really known Mr. Porter at all. We usually agreed that he had been a hard man to figure out.
Now that he is gone, I find he is often in my mind. I seldom board the local or back to my car without thinking for a moment of Mr. Porter, though I doubt that we ever exchanged a personal remark. Mrs. Porter, they tell me, now spends her time in France. The house across the road is empty, but not long ago a prospective tenant who had got wind of its history stepped over to ask me what it was all about. He had heard, he said, about the Porter case. He I couldn't believe that a man would treat his only child like that. It made me think of that night many years before when I had opened the door of my house, and Eloise Porter in her witch's costume had confronted me.
"It's not a matter of feeling. Mr. Brady," she said, "it's what you think."
As usual, Eloise was right. So far as I know she was never wrong. -----------------
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