Focus by Arthur Miller

Author:Arthur Miller [Miller, Arthur]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241960158
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2011-06-10T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

HOURS come when the familiar seems about to change its shape, verging on the strange and unexplored. He kept scanning the old factory streets of Long Island City through which they were driving on their way home early the next evening. He had never before noticed how many houses were boarded up as condemned, how much smoke hung in the air and how the setting sun made it sparkle like dew on the windshield. The forge shops and the gray slime dried on their sidewalks, the block-long factories and their slate-colored windows, the Negroes sitting on the broken steps of their wooden houses–the ghastly stillness of Sunday twilight and its sense of pause caught him and he saw it like a scene lifted up out of the world.

On both sides of the street they were traveling two-family houses began to appear, and then trees, and then a few open lots, and they were nearing their neighborhood. He stopped for a light and stretched his sunburned legs and only now noticed that the sky was darkening. His eyes felt gritty and tired.

‘I guess the day’s over,’ he said quietly.

She glanced skyward through her window and remained silent. He started ahead again with the green light.

Darkness was falling very fast. A fine need to get home pressed his foot down on the accelerator … home and the lights on, he thought, and all quiet and known. Uneasily he noticed the happenings outside the car. Two fellows hurrying across the street all dressed up, a small group of old people waddling home from church, a tall man pushing a baby carriage and dragging a puppy which skidded unwillingly on its haunches, two ice cream vendors jangling the little bells over their white refrigerator boxes …

He frowned, remembering the carousel, the white and colored swans, the yellow swans jerking ahead and then back, and underneath them in the ground that terrible rumbling …

The street lights burst into glow. Night. Now it was night. He switched on his headlights.

He turned right into a sidestreet. Three blocks straight ahead was home. His lights swept the deserted sidewalks on each side.

She stirred. He heard her stockings whisper as she uncrossed her legs. ‘When Fred goes hunting he takes Elsie to a place in Jersey somewhere. Why don’t you find out where it is? Maybe we can go there. Although that hotel wasn’t too bad.’

He nodded, ‘All right.’

‘You won’t do it.’

‘I will,’ he lied.

He was crossing over into his block when he saw Mrs Depaw in her starched white dress standing in front of the candy store, whose windows were dark. The store always kept open Sunday nights. The old lady was talking to a man who kept shifting as he listened, while she leaned forward and spoke excitedly into his face. Passing, Mr Newman glanced beyond her at the store, wondering why it was closed, when the flash of his lights crossed the large window and he saw the long strips of adhesive tape stretched the length of the pane.

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