The Member of the Wedding by Carson Mccullers Read Free Book Online Page A

until it struck and shivered on the stairway door. And she had not known that she would say these words until already they were spoken. The swear was like the sudden knife; she felt it strike in her and tremble. Then when the words were quiet, she said again:
    "After the wedding I'm not coming back."
    Berenice pushed back the damp bangs of Frankie's hair and finally she asked: "Sugar? You serious?"
    "Of course!" said Frankie. "Do you think I would stand here and swear that swear and tell a story? Sometimes, Berenice, I think it takes you longer to realize a fact than it does anybody who ever lived."
    "But," said Berenice, "you say you don't know where you're going. You going, but you don't know where. That don't make no sense to me."
    Frankie stood looking up and down the four walls of the room. She thought of the world, and it was fast and loose and turning, faster and looser and bigger than ever it had been before. The pictures of the War sprang out and clashed together in her mind. She saw bright flowered islands and a land by the northern sea with the gray waves on the shore. Bombed eyes and the shuffle of soldiers' feet. Tanks and a plane, wing broken, burning and downward-falling in a desert sky. The world was cracked by the loud battles and turning a thousand miles a minute. The names of places spun in Frankie's mind: China, Peachville, New Zealand, Paris, Cincinnati, Rome. She thought of the huge and turning world until her legs began to tremble and there was sweat on the palms of her hands. But still she did not know where she should go. Finally she stopped looking around the four kitchen walls and said to Berenice:
    "I feel just exactly like somebody has peeled all the skin off me. I wish I had some cold good chocolate ice cream."
    Berenice had her hands on Frankie's shoulders and was shaking her head and staring with the live eye narrowed into Frankie's face.
    "But every word I told you was the solemn truth," she said. "I'm not coming back here after the wedding."
    There was a sound, and when they turned they saw that Honey and T. T. Williams were standing in the doorway. Honey, though he was her foster brother, did not resemble Berenice—and it was almost as though he came from some foreign country, like Cuba or Mexico. He was lightskinned, almost lavender in color, with quiet narrow eyes like oil, and a limber body. Behind the two of them stood T. T. Williams, and he was very big and black; he was gray-haired, older even than Berenice, and he wore a church suit with a red badge in the buttonhole. T. T. Williams was a beau of Berenice, a well-off colored man who owned a colored restaurant. Honey was a sick-loose person. The army would not include him, and he had shoveled in a gravel pit until he broke one of his in-sides and could not do heavy work any more. They stood, the three of them, dark and grouped together in the door.
    "What you all creep up like that for?" asked Berenice. "I didn't even hear you."
    "You and Frankie too busy discussing something," said T. T.
    "I am ready to go," said Berenice. "I been ready. But do you wish a small little quickie before we start?"
    T. T. Williams looked at Frankie and shuffled his feet. He was very proper, and he liked to please everybody, and he always wanted to do the right thing.
    "Frankie ain't no tattle-tale," said Berenice. "Is you?"
    Frankie would not even answer such a question. Honey wore a dark red rayon slack suit and she said: "That sure is a cute suit you got on, Honey. Where did you get it?"
    Honey could talk like a white school-teacher; his lavender lips could move as quick and light as butterflies. But he only answered with a colored word, a dark sound from the throat that can mean anything. "Ahhnnh," he said.
    The glasses were before them on the table, and the hair-straightening bottle that held gin, but they did not drink. Berenice said something about Paris and Frankie had the extra feeling that they were waiting for her to leave. She stood in the door