Go to the Widow-Maker (72 page)

“I’ll take care of that, too,” he said flatly. “It’s no longer any of your business. Now let me explain something else. The only reason I came up here with Lucky is because I’m trying to protect your reputation, yours and Hunt’s. That Time-guy I met down in Kingston, and apparently a lot of others, about two-thirds of New York to be exact, seem to believe that you and I were lovers. So you only have two choices. You can be a nice girl and shut up and protect yourself, or you can keep on doing things like this. Don’t forget we may very well have to be living across the street from you in Indianapolis. How do you think it would look if we moved out of here right now? And went and stayed with Bonham? Or better yet moved into the West Moon Over?”

“Not very good,” Carol said, “of course.”

“Especially if that local Kingston Time-guy you saw left some local paid spies to keep an eye on all of us. They’d all love to do something with this story. Well, those are your two choices.”

She did not answer him and only stood, leaning forward from her lower back in that peculiar prissy way she had, her eyes wide and listening, a little sad half-smile playing about her face.

“Have you told Lucky about us?” she asked.

“That’s none of your business. But, no. I haven’t. Not yet.”

“I hope you won’t,” Carol said.

“That’s for me to decide.”

“Because the less people who know about it, the less—”

“I said that’s for
me
to decide,” he said.

Carol Abernathy said nothing.

“Well, see you later on,” Grant said, offhand, and walked away. It was the last conversation he had with her.

So he had been reasonably sure that everything would go all right, at least until they left here anyway. Then on the third day of the storm he had gone to town to see Bonham, about the weather and the job.

It didn’t rain all the time during the week of cold-front storm, and that particular day at that particular moment was beautifully fair. The rains had cooled everything off and laid the dust in the town although they made the air humid and very muggy, and from up on the hill you could look out to sea and see groups of large dark clouds marching southeastward in stately anger, and the slanting blue lines of rain squalls dotted the ocean’s surface. Bonham loafing in his shop with Orloffski (Orloffski’s sailing buddy had taken the bus down to Kingston) said it would take three days after the front moved on for the seas to calm sufficiently to hope to dive. When Grant got back to the villa and walked down to the Cottage, Lucky told him what had happened.

It had rained up on the hill while he was in town although it hadn’t rained in town, and in the midst of the slashing rainstorm Carol Abernathy had appeared at the door of the Cottage wearing Hunt’s trenchcoat which was almost too small for her and a pair of raveled old sneakers without socks. Her close-cropped hair with its not unbecoming streaks of gray was plastered to her skull, and she was in a fury. She had come for her suitcases, she said. If Ron Grant was big enough, old enough and mature enough to get married and assume the responsibility of a wife and family, he was also big enough, old enough and mature enough to buy and use his own goddamned suitcases instead of hers, and she wanted them, she raged, and she wanted them right here and now. Lucky, who was all alone with Mary-Martha (who was terrified), had no idea of what could have set her off. “Are they her suitcases?” she asked.

Grant thought about this and then had to go and look. “As a matter of fact they are,” he said, coming back. “I bought them for her. They’re the same two I had in New York. But I don’t know what she’s hollering about, nobody in our—nobody in our family ever paid any attention to what suitcases he grabbed when he went on a trip.” Obviously, he added, Lucky had not given them to her.

No, she said, she hadn’t. She had told her they were not hers to give and she would have to wait until Grant came back and talk to him, whereupon Carol had said she would take them by force, then. “No, you won’t,” Lucky had said. She had treated her like a disobedient child. “Look, Carol, you don’t want to fight me over a couple of suitcases. Ron will be back in an hour or so. If they’re yours, he’ll give them to you. Come on and sit down and have a drink with me and wait for him.” At this Carol Abernathy had sat down on the nearest couch and begun to cry.

Lucky had been scared to death, her belly was full of flutterings, but she did not intend to be intimidated either. But when the older woman began to weep she had gone over and put her arms around her, remembering always to treat her like a child. She had read that somewhere. And at this Carol Abernathy had begun to talk. Incoherently and in broken phrases she said that she had always tried to help Ron, that she had always believed he was a great talent, but now that was Lucky’s job. She was passing her the torch. It was a tremendous responsibility.

“She actually said torch?” Grant asked.

“Yes,” Lucky said.

“Jesus!” Grant said. “I’m a torch.”

“Wait. You haven’t heard it all yet.” Carol had gone on to say that he was a strange wild boy when she first met him, probably half crazy from the war, but she had tried her best, and had kept him going until he became a success, for which he had thanked her little. Lucky should note that last. Then, wiping her eyes and lifting her face from her cupped hands with a strange sly little smile, she said that she thought Lucky ought to know that she, Carol, had always suspected he was a queer. A homosexual. She had never told anybody this before, but she thought Lucky ought to know. And now that she had told it, she said, she might as well go on and say that she thought he and Al Bonham were having an affair. A regular affair.— “I always thought that perhaps he and Hunt, my husband, were having an affair,” Carol said. “I know they used to go off together and get terribly drunk. And I know that Ron used to go off and stay for days and days. I know for a fact that he used to go to whorehouses in Indianapolis and over in Terre Haute. And sometimes Hunt went with him. What they actually did there I have no idea.” She had gone on, elaborating on this theme for quite a while, and then apologized for having told Lucky all this but she thought she ought to know, and then she left.

“Jesus!” Grant said.

Lucky had been so stunned she had simply listened and hardly said anything in reply.

Grant was stunned too. “Jesus!” he said again, hopelessly. “What the hell could you have said?” He stopped and thought. “I guess a couple of years ago that would have made me so furious I’d have flipped my lid. Well, what do you think we ought to do? Do you think we should leave?”

“I don’t know,” Lucky said. “I do know I’m not too terribly happy around here.”

“And I’ve about had it with this salvage diving routine. I’ve done it, I know what it’s like, and I’m ready to move on. I don’t really give a damn about the money from it anyway. Orloffski can finish it up with him.”

“By the way,” Lucky said, “none of that stuff is true, is it?”

Grant stared at her. “Well, yes. I mean, no. I mean,
some
of it’s true. I mean, I used to go to whorehouses a lot in Indianapolis and Terre Haute. Yes. And why not? I wasn’t getting laid good at—I wasn’t getting laid good anywhere else. But I never went with Hunt. I thought of asking him a couple of times. But he was always so sealed-off and distant. And I didn’t feel that, you know, in my place, I ought to.

“And as far as my having an affair with Bonham, that part’s absolutely true. You ought to know that. Can’t you tell from the way I treat you?”

Lucky began to grin, then threw back her champagne-colored head of hair and laughed. Grant went over and put his arms around her. “Maybe we should leave.”

“On the other hand,” Lucky said, “maybe she’s straightened herself out for a while, blown off enough of her internal steam that her pressure is relieved and she won’t bother us for a while. They say they do that. Boy, you sure picked yourself some foster-mother! But maybe she’ll let us be now. For a while.”

“Maybe,” Grant said dubiously.

But they were disabused of this illusion about an hour later.

Grant happened to be in the shower at the time. Suddenly over the rush of the water he heard voices from the vicinity of the kitchen, and then the word “cocksucker” repeated over and over several times in Carol Abernathy’s hysterical shout. When he shut off the shower, and the water noise ceased to act like the filter screen that it was, it all came in clear. Too clear. “I don’t give a damn! You’ll not lock me out! I have as much right here as you have! More! Don’t you
ever
try to lock me out! What did you ever do for him? Fuck him, that’s all! He only married you because you were a good easy lay! The best cocksucker in New York! That’s what he told me, yes! The best cocksucker in New York! The best . . .”

Calmness spread over Grant in a slow quiet flow. Curiously, enough he felt exactly the same way he had felt that time when he watched the big jewfish dragging Grointon off towards its cave and knew that he was going down there, the same way he felt each time on the bottom during the salvage diving. Methodically and carefully he wrapped one of the big lush towels around his waist and tucked it in and, still wet, went out toward the kitchen. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. If he was dead five minutes from now, it wouldn’t matter. Carol Abernathy was standing just inside the splintered remnants of the screendoor, bent forward tautly from the waist, her eyes hysterical, her mouth shouting as if it were a separate creature. Lucky was standing in the center of the room eight feet away, small and brave, and saying in a quietly nervous voice between Carol’s shouts, “Carol. Carol. This is my house. This is my house. You can’t come in here and do this. You can’t come in here and do this.” She obviously had not backed off, and Carol obviously had not come any closer. And by the sink Mary-Martha the maid was standing utterly terrified.

Grant moved in like a slow-moving but inexorable avalanche, using his chest and belly like a snowplow blade. Carol did not allow him to come near enough to touch her and backed off still shouting. If she had had a gun or knife in her hand it would not have mattered and he would not have cared. Slowly but swiftly he bellied her toward the door. Unfortunately the shattered screendoor was still locked and after fumbling with it once he did not bother and stiffarmed it with the heel of his palm as if stiffarming a tackler. It popped open, its latch broken (what the hell it was already smashed anyhow), and Carol backed out past it, still shouting. Grant followed her, his face feeling like a plaster-of-paris mask. “Out! Out! Get out!” was all he said. He continued to follow her down the walk like some pacific but nonetheless inexorable Nemesis until she turned and fled. Then he came back to the hysterical kitchen and broken screendoor.

Lucky was white. Reconstructing it all it appeared that Carol had come up the walk, whether to reclaim her suitcases from Grant or for some other reason, and at just that moment Mary-Martha had—as she was wont to do—reached over and pulled shut and locked the screendoor which because it was warped had a habit of standing open slightly. Carol had interpreted this to be the result of an order from Lucky who was sitting in the little dinette, a deliberate hint, snub or insult to herself to show her she wasn’t wanted. She had then kicked in the door, smashing the thin lathing that held it together, and come in through it actually lacerating one arm.

“I don’t know,” Lucky said half-hysterically, “I don’t know. I never saw anything like that.” She stood breathing in a shaky way for a moment and smiling a shaky smile. “I have to pee,” she said.

Grant followed her out of the kitchen into the little corridor, down which she disappeared. At that moment, for no especial reasons, he decided that he had to tell her the truth about himself and Carol. And now he thought about it. It was not at all unpleasant. He was sure she would understand. And what if she didn’t? He didn’t care. That great calmness of non-caring came over him again. By the time he heard the water flushing and she reappeared at the other end of the corridor he had prepared himself.

“There’s something I have to tell you, Lucky,” he said, making his voice grave so she would catch the great import of what he had to say. “I was Carol Abernathy’s lover when I met you.”

There was a pause as she continued to walk toward him along the corridor. “You weren’t,” she said finally. “Really? Not really!”

“Yeh,” Grant said. “Really. That explains a lot of the things that have been happening around here.”

“It sure does,” Lucky said. She suddenly let out a high-pitched peal of nervous laughter that rather than running its course and tapering off seemed to be cut off in the middle deliberately so that it left a shocking echo of itself in the air. Then she stepped into the kitchen. “Mary-Martha, go up to the great house and get us two bottles of gin, will you please? We’ve run out down here.” Grant realized he never would have thought of that.

“Yem,” Mary-Martha said, and left, but it was clear that she didn’t want to.

Lucky stood in the little baywindow of the dinette looking after her until she disappeared. “How long?” she said finally, without moving.

“Ever since I first met them,” Grant said. “Fourteen years ago. But for the past ten years—”

“And you
lived
with them!” Lucky said cutting him off.

“I sure did.”

“And Hunt
paid
for you! Everything! He
supported
you!”

“He sure did.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know why,” Grant said truthfully.

“Because
she
dominates him,” Lucky said, still standing there, still looking out. “Like she dominates you.”

“Maybe. But not any more,” Grant said. “If she ever did. I—”

“She did,” Lucky said, still looking out. “And did you fuck her again down here? After you sent me back to New York from Miami?”

“No,” Grant said, then bit his tongue. “Well, yes. Once. No, twice. I’m trying not to lie. But the only reason I did was because I felt so sorry for her. I couldn’t hurt her that much to turn her down. She came to me asking. Can you understand that?”

“Sure,” Lucky said. “Sure. I can understand everything. That’s my job. That’s what you pay me for. Isn’t it? You actually put your thing in me again after sticking it in that dirty old hole!”