11/22/63: A Novel (50 page)

I held him at arm’s length. “You look great!”

“Nice try, George. But I feel better than I did. Meems dying . . .
I knew it was going to happen, but it still knocked me for a loop. Head could never get through to heart on that one, I reckon.”

“Come on in and have a cup of coffee.”

“I’d like that.”

We talked about his time in Mexico. We talked about school. We talked about the undefeated football team and the upcoming fall play. Then he put down his cup and said, “Ellen Dockerty asked me to pass on a word or two about you and Sadie Clayton.”

Uh-oh. And I’d thought we were doing so well.

“She goes by Dunhill now. It’s her maiden name.”

“I know all about her situation.
Knew when we hired her. She’s a fine girl and you’re a fine man, George. Based on what Ellie tells me, the two of you are handling a difficult situation with a fair amount of grace.”

I relaxed a little.

“Ellie said she was pretty sure neither of you knew about Candlewood Bungalows just outside of Kileen. She didn’t feel right about telling you, so she asked if I would.”

“Candlewood Bungalows?”

“I used to take Meems there on a lot of Saturday nights.” He was fiddling at his coffee cup with hands that now looked too big for his body. “It’s run by a couple of retired schoolteachers from Arkansas or Alabama. One of those
A
-states, anyway. Retired
men
schoolteachers. If you know what I mean.”

“I think I’m following, yes.”

“They’re nice fellows, very quiet about their own relationship and about the relationships of some of their guests.” He looked up from his coffee cup. He was blushing a little, but also smiling. “This isn’t a hot-sheet joint, if that’s what you’re thinking. Farthest thing from it. The rooms are nice, the prices are reasonable, and the little restaurant down the road is a-country fare. Sometimes a gal needs a place like that. And maybe a man does, too. So they don’t have to be in such a hurry. And so they won’t feel cheap.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“Very welcome. Mimi and I had many pleasant evenings at the Candlewood. Sometimes we only watched the TV in our pajamas and then went to bed, but that can be as good as anything else when you get to a certain age.” He smiled ruefully. “Or almost. We’d go to sleep listening to the crickets. Or sometimes a coyote would howl, very far away, out in the sage. At the moon, you know. They really do that. They howl at the moon.”

He took a handkerchief from his back pocket with an old man’s slowness and mopped his cheeks with it.

I offered my hand and Deke took hold.

“She liked you, although
she never could figure out what to make of you. She said you reminded her of the way they used to show ghosts in those old movies from the thirties. ‘He’s bright and shiny, but not all here,’ she said.”

“I’m no ghost,” I said. “I promise you.”

He smiled. “No? I finally got around to checking your references. This was after you’d been subbing for us awhile and did such a bang-up job with the play. The ones from the Sarasota School District are fine, but beyond there . . .” He shook his head, still smiling. “And your degree is from a mill in Oklahoma.”

Clearing my throat did no good. I couldn’t speak at all.

“And what’s that to me, you ask? Not much. There was a time in this part of the world when if a man rode into town with a few books in his saddlebags, spectacles on his nose, and a tie around his neck, he could get hired on as schoolmaster and stay for twenty years. Wasn’t that long ago, either. You’re a damn fine teacher. The kids know it, I know it, and Meems knew it, too. And that’s a
lot
to me.”

“Does Ellen know I faked my other references?” Because Ellen Dockerty was acting principal, and once the schoolboard met in January, the job would be hers permanently. There were no other candidates.

“Nope, and she’s not going to. Not from me, at least. I feel like she doesn’t need to.” He stood up. “But there’s one person who
does
need to know the truth about where you’ve been and what you’ve done, and that’s a certain lady librarian. If you’re serious about her, that is. Are you?”

“Yes,” I said, and Deke nodded as if that took care of everything.

I only wished it did.

Thanks to Deke Simmons, Sadie finally got to find out what it was like to make love after sundown. When I asked her how it was, she told me it had been wonderful.
“But I’m looking forward to waking up next to you in the morning even more. Do you hear the wind?”

I did. It hooted around the eaves.

“Doesn’t that sound make you feel cozy?”

“Yes.”

“I’m going to say something now. I hope it doesn’t make you uncomfortable.”

“Tell me.”

“I guess I’ve fallen in love with you. Maybe it’s just the sex, I’ve heard that’s a mistake people make, but I don’t think so.”

“Sadie?”

“Yes?” She was trying to smile, but she looked frightened.

“I love you, too. No maybe or mistake about it.”

“Thank God,” she said, and snuggled close.

On our second visit to the Candlewood Bungalows, she was ready to talk about Johnny Clayton. “But turn out the light, would you?”

I did as she asked. She smoked three cigarettes during the telling. Toward the end, she cried hard, probably not from remembered pain so much as simple embarrassment. For most of us, I think it’s easier to admit doing wrong than being stupid. Not that she had been. There’s a world of difference between stupidity and naïveté, and like most good middle-class girls who came to maturity in the nineteen-forties and-fifties, Sadie knew almost nothing about sex. She said she had never actually looked at a penis until she had looked at mine. She’d had glimpses of Johnny’s, but she said if he caught her looking, he would take hold of her face and turn it away with a grip that stopped just short of painful.

“But it always
did
hurt,” she said. “You know?”

John Clayton came from a conventionally religious family, nothing nutty about them. He was pleasant, attentive, reasonably attractive. He didn’t have the world’s greatest sense of humor (almost none might have been closer
to the mark), but he seemed to adore her. Her parents adored
him.
Claire Dunhill was especially crazy about Johnny Clayton. And, of course, he was taller than Sadie, even when she was in heels. After years of beanpole jokes, that was important.

“The only troubling thing before the marriage was his compulsive neatness,” Sadie said. “He had all his books alphabetized, and he got very upset if you moved them around. He was nervous if you took even one off the shelf—you could feel it, a kind of tensing. He shaved three times a day and washed his hands all the time. If someone shook with him, he’d make an excuse to rush off to the lav and wash just as soon as he could.”

“Also color-coordinated clothes,” I said. “On his body and in the closet, and woe to the person who moved them around. Did he alphabetize the stuff in the pantry? Or get up sometimes in the night to check that the stove burners were off and the doors were locked?”

She turned to me, her eyes wide and wondering in the dark. The bed squeaked companionably; the wind gusted; a loose windowpane rattled. “How do you know that?”

“It’s a syndrome. Obsessive-compulsive disorder. OCD, for short. Howard—” I stopped.
Howard Hughes has a bad case of it,
I’d started to say, but maybe that wasn’t true yet. Even if it was, people probably didn’t know. “An old friend of mine had it. Howard Temple. Never mind. Did he hurt you, Sadie?”

“Not really, no beating or punching. He slapped me once, that’s all. But people hurt people in other ways, don’t they?”

“Yes.”

“I couldn’t talk to anyone about it. Certainly not my mother. Do you know what she told me on my wedding day? That if I said half a prayer before and half a prayer during, everything would be fine.
During
was as close as she could come to the word
intercourse.
I tried to talk to my friend Ruthie about it, but only once. This was after school, and she was helping me pick up the library. ‘What goes on behind the bedroom
door is none of my business,’ she said. I stopped, because I didn’t really
want
to talk about it. I was so ashamed.”

Then it came in a rush. Some of what she said was blurred by tears, but I got the gist. On certain nights—maybe once a week, maybe twice—he would tell her he needed to “get it out.” They would be lying side by side in bed, she in her nightgown (he insisted she wear ones that were opaque), he in a pair of boxer shorts. Boxers were the closest she ever came to seeing him naked. He would push the sheet down to his waist, and she would see his erection tenting them.

“Once he looked at that little tent himself. Only once that I remember. And do you know what he said?”

“No.”

“‘How disgusting we are.’ Then he said, ‘Get it over with so I can get some sleep.’”

She would reach beneath the sheet and masturbate him. It never took long, sometimes only seconds. On a few occasions he touched her breasts as she performed this function, but mostly his hands remained knotted high on his chest. When it was over, he would go into the bathroom, wash himself off, and come back in wearing his pajamas. He had seven pairs, all blue.

Then it was her turn to go into the bathroom and wash her hands. He insisted that she do this for at least three minutes, and under water hot enough to turn her skin red. When she came back to bed, she held her palms out to his face. If the smell of Lifebuoy wasn’t strong enough to satisfy him, she would have to do it again.

“And when I came back, the broom would be there.”

He would put it on top of the sheet if it was summer, on the blankets if it was winter. Running straight down the middle of the bed. His side and her side.

“If I was restless and happened to move it, he’d wake up. No matter how fast asleep he was. And he’d push me back to my side. Hard. He called it ‘transgressing the broom.’”

The time he slapped her was when she asked how they would ever have children if he never
put it in her. “He was furious. That’s why he slapped me. He apologized later, but what he said right then was, ‘Do you think I’d put myself in your germy womanhole and bring children into this filthy world? It’s all going to blow up anyway, anyone who reads the paper can see that coming, and the radiation will kill us. We’ll die with sores all over our bodies, and coughing up our lungs. It could happen any day.’”

“Jesus. No wonder you left him, Sadie.”

“Only after four wasted years. It took me that long to convince myself that I deserved more from life than color-coordinating my husband’s sock drawer, giving him handjobs twice a week, and sleeping with a goddam broom. That was the most humiliating part, the part I was sure I could never talk about to anyone . . . because it was
funny.
”

I didn’t think it was funny. I thought it was somewhere in the twilight zone between neurosis and outright psychosis. I also thought I was listening to the perfect Fifties Fable. It was easy to imagine Rock Hudson and Doris Day sleeping with a broom between them. If Rock hadn’t been gay, that was.

“And he hasn’t come looking for you?”

“No. I applied to a dozen different schools and had the answers sent to a post office box. I felt like a woman having an affair, sneaking around. And that’s how my mother and father treated me when they found out. My dad has come around a little—I think he suspects how bad it was, although of course he doesn’t want to know any of the details—but my mother? Not her. She’s furious with me. She had to change churches and quit the Sewing Bee. Because she couldn’t hold her head up, she says.”

In a way, this seemed as cruel and crazy as the broom, but I didn’t say so. A different aspect of the matter interested me more than Sadie’s conventional Southern parents. “
Clayton
didn’t tell them you were gone? Have I got that right? Never came to see them?”

“No. My mother understood, of course.” Sadie’s ordinarily faint Southern accent deepened. “I just shamed that poor boy so bad that he didn’t want to tell
anyone.
” She dropped the drawl. “I’m not being sarcastic, either. She understands shame,
and she understands covering up. On those two things, Johnny and my mama are in perfect harmony.
She’s
the one he should have married.” She laughed a little hysterically. “Mama probably would have
loved
that old broom.”

“Never a word from him? Not even a postcard saying, ‘Hey Sadie, let’s tie up the loose ends so we can get on with our lives?’”

“How could there be? He doesn’t know where I am, and I’m sure he doesn’t care.”

“Is there anything you want from him? Because I’m sure a lawyer—”

She kissed me. “The only thing I want is here in bed with me.”

I kicked the sheets down to our ankles. “Look at me, Sadie. No charge.”

She looked. And then she touched.

I drowsed afterward. Not deep—I could still hear the wind and that one rattling windowpane—but I got far enough down to dream. Sadie and I were in an empty house. We were naked. Something was moving around upstairs—it made thudding, unpleasant noises. It might have been pacing, but it seemed as if there were too many feet. I didn’t feel guilty that we were going to be discovered with our clothes off. I felt scared. Written in charcoal on the peeling plaster of one wall were the words I WILL KILL THE PRESIDENT SOON. Below it, someone had added NOT SOON ENOUGH HES FULL OF DISEEZE. This had been printed in dark lipstick. Or maybe it was blood.

Thud, clump, thud.

From overhead.

“I think it’s Frank Dunning,” I whispered to Sadie. I gripped her arm. It was very cold. It was like gripping the arm of a dead person. A woman who had been beaten
to death with a sledgehammer, perhaps.

Sadie shook her head. She was looking up at the ceiling, her mouth trembling.

Clud, thump, clud.

Plaster-dust sifting down.

“Then it’s John Clayton,” I whispered.

“No,” she said. “I think it’s the Yellow Card Man. He brought the Jimla.”