“That’s six months too long,” said one policeman. “He only had a temporary visa. We’ve just got around to looking for him.”
Soon after Mr. Ramirez had arrived he bought a radio for his little room; evenings, he turned it up very loud and enjoyed it. And he had bought a wristwatch and enjoyed that too. And on many nights he had walked silent streets and seen the bright clothes in the windows and bought some of them, and he had seen the jewels and bought some of them for his few lady friends. And he had gone to picture shows five nights a week for a while. Then, also, he had ridden the streetcars—all night some nights—smelling the electricity, his dark eyes moving over the advertisements, feeling the wheels rumble under him, watching the little sleeping houses and big hotels slip by. Besides that, he had gone to large restaurants, where he had eaten many-course dinners, and to the opera and the theater. And he had bought a car, which later, when he forgot to pay for it, the dealer had driven off angrily from in front of the rooming house.
“So here I am,” said Mr. Ramirez now, “to tell you I must give up my room, Mrs. O’Brian. I come to get my baggage and clothes and go with these men.”
“Back to Mexico?”
“Yes. To Lagos. That is a little town north of Mexico City.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Ramirez.”
“I’m packed,” said Mr. Ramirez hoarsely, blinking his dark eyes rapidly and moving his hands helplessly before him. The policemen did not touch him. There was no necessity for that.
“Here is the key, Mrs. O’Brian,” Mr. Ramirez said. “I have my bag already.”
Mrs. O’Brian, for the first time, noticed a suitcase standing behind him on the porch.
Mr. Ramirez looked in again at the huge kitchen, at the bright silver cutlery and the young people eating and the shining waxed floor. He turned and looked for a long moment at the apartment house next door, rising up three stories, high and beautiful. He looked at the balconies and fire escapes and back-porch stairs, at the lines of laundry snapping in the wind.
“You’ve been a good tenant,” said Mrs. O’Brian.
“Thank you, thank you, Mrs. O’Brian,” he said softly. He closed his eyes.
Mrs. O’Brian stood holding the door half open. One of her sons, behind her, said that her dinner was getting cold, but she shook her head at him and turned back to Mr. Ramirez. She remembered a visit she had once made to some Mexican border towns—the hot days, the endless crickets leaping and falling or lying dead and brittle like the small cigars in the shop windows, and the canals taking river water out to the farms, the dirt roads, the scorched scape. She remembered the silent towns, the warm beer, the hot, thick foods each day. She remembered the slow, dragging horses and the parched jack rabbits on the road. She remembered the iron mountains and the dusty valleys and the ocean beaches that spread hundreds of miles with no sound but the waves—no cars, no buildings, nothing.
“I’m sure sorry, Mr. Ramirez,” she said.
“I don’t want to go back, Mrs. O’Brian,” he said weakly. “I like it here, I want to stay here. I’ve worked, I’ve got money. I look all right, don’t I? And I don’t want to go back!”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Ramirez,” she said. “I wish there was something I could do.”
“Mrs. O’Brian!” he cried suddenly, tears rolling out from under his eyelids. He reached out his hand and took her hand fervently, shaking it, wringing it, holding to it. “Mrs. O’Brian, I see you never, I see you never!”
The policemen smiled at this, but Mr. Ramirez did not notice it, and they stopped smiling very soon.
“Good-by, Mrs. O’Brian. You have been good to me. Oh, good-by, Mrs. O’Brian. I see you never!”
The policemen waited for Mr. Ramirez to turn, pick up his suitcase, and walk away. Then they followed him, tipping their caps to Mrs. O’Brian. She watched them go down the porch steps. Then she shut the door quietly and went slowly back to her chair at the table. She pulled the chair out and sat down. She picked up the shining knife and fork and started once more upon her steak.
“Hurry up, Mom,” said one of the sons. “It’ll be cold.”
Mrs. O’Brian took one bite and chewed on it for a long, slow time; then she stared at the closed door. She laid down her knife and fork.
“What’s wrong, Ma?” asked her son.
“I just realized,” said Mrs. O’Brian—she put her hand to her face—“I’ll never see Mr. Ramirez again.”
The dark porch air in the late afternoon was full of needle flashes, like a movement of gathered silver insects in the light. The three women’s mouths twitched over their work. Their bodies lay back and then imperceptibly forward, so that the rocking chairs tilted and murmured. Each woman looked to her own hands, as if quite suddenly she had found her heart beating there.
“What time is it?”
“Ten minutes to five.”
“Got to get up in a minute and shell those peas for dinner.”
“But—” said one of them.
“Oh yes, I forgot. How foolish of me.... ” the first woman paused, put down her embroidery and needle, and looked through the open porch door, through the warm interior of the quiet house, to the silent kitchen. There upon the table, seeming more like symbols of domesticity than anything she had ever seen in her life, lay the mound of fresh-washed peas in their neat, resilient jackets, waiting for her fingers to bring them into the world.
“Go hull them if it’ll make you feel good,” said the second woman.
“No,” said the first. “I won’t. I just won’t.”
The third woman sighed. She embroidered a rose, a leaf, a daisy on a green field. The embroidery needle rose and vanished.
The second woman was working on the finest, most delicate piece of embroidery of them all, deftly poking, finding, and returning the quick needle upon innumerable journeys. Her quick black glance was on each motion. A flower, a man, a road, a sun, a house; the scene grew under hand, a miniature beauty, perfect in every threaded detail.
“It seems at times like this that it’s always your hands you turn to,” she said, and the others nodded enough to make the rockers rock again.
“I believe,” said the first lady, “that our souls are in our hands. For we do everything to the world with our hands. Sometimes I think we don’t use our hands half enough; it’s certain we don’t use our heads.”
They all peered more intently at what their hands were doing. “Yes,” said the third lady, “when you look back on a whole lifetime, it seems you don’t remember faces so much as hands and what they did.”
They recounted to themselves the lids they had lifted, the doors they had opened and shut, the flowers they had picked, the dinners they had made, all with slow or quick fingers, as was their manner or custom. Looking back, you saw a flurry of hands, like a magician’s dream, doors popping wide, taps turned, brooms wielded, children spanked. The flutter of pink hands was the only sound; the rest was a dream without voices.
“No supper to fix tonight or tomorrow night or the next night after that,” said the third lady.
“No windows to open or shut.”
“No coal to shovel in the basement furnace next winter.”
“No papers to clip cooking articles out of.”
And suddenly they were crying. The tears rolled softly down their faces and fell into the material upon which their fingers twitched.
“This won’t