Clock Without Hands (19 page)

Martha was the daughter of Mr. Greenlove and it was only natural, or seemed natural, when he asked her to a dance. He was dressed up in his best blue suit and she had on a chiffon dress. It was an Elk's Club dance. He had just become an Elk. What had he felt as he touched her body and why had he asked her to the dance? After the dance he had dated her a number of times because he knew few girls in Milan and her father was his boss. But still he never thought of love, let alone marriage, with Martha Greenlove. Then suddenly old Mr. Greenlove (he was not old, he was only forty-five but the young Malone thought of him as old) died of a heart attack. The drugstore was put up for sale. Malone borrowed fifteen hundred dollars from his mother and bought it on a fifteen-year mortgage. So he was saddled with a mortgage, and before he even realized it his own self, with a wife. Martha did not actually ask him to marry her, but she seemed to assume so much that Malone would have felt an irresponsible man if he had not spoken. So he spoke to her brother who was now the head of the family, and they shook hands and had a drink of Blind Mule together. And it all happened so naturally that it seemed supernatural; yet he was fascinated by Martha who wore afternoon dainty dresses and a chiffon dress for dances and who, above all, restored the pride he had lost when he failed at Columbia. But when they were married in the Greenloves' living room in the presence of his mother, her mother, the Greenlove brothers, and an aunt or two, her mother had cried, and Malone felt like crying also. He didn't cry, but listened to the ceremony, bewildered. After the rice had been thrown they had gone on the train to their honeymoon in Blowing Rock, North Carolina. And ever afterward there was no particular time when he regretted marrying Martha, but regret, or disappointment was certainly there. There was no particular time when he asked, "Is this all there is of life?" but as he grew older he asked it wordlessly. No, he had not lost an arm, or a leg, or any particular five dollars, but little by little he had lost his own self.

If Malone had not had a fatal disease he would not have brooded about this. But dying had quickened his livingness as he lay in the hospital bed, seeing the bright blood drop, drop by drop. He said to himself he didn't care about the hospital expenses, but even while he was there he was worried about the twenty-dollars-a-day bill.

"Hon," Martha said on one of her daily visits to the hospital, "why don't we take a nice relaxing trip?"

Malone stiffened on his sweaty bed.

"Even resting here at the hospital you always seem tense and worried up. We could go to Blowing Rock and breathe the nice mountain air."

"I don't feel like it," Malone said.

"...or the ocean. I've seen the ocean only once in my life and that was when I was visiting my cousin, Sarah Greenlove, in Savannah. It's a nice climate at Sea Island Beach, I hear. Not too hot, not too cold. And the little change might perk you up."

"I've always felt that traveling is exhausting." He did not tell his wife about the trip he was planning later on to Vermont or Maine where he could see snow. Malone had carefully hidden
Sickness unto Death
beneath the pillow for he did not want to share anything that was intimate with his wife. He did say fretfully, "I'm sick of this hospital."

"One thing I'm sure you ought to do," Mrs. Malone said, "you ought to make a habit of turning the pharmacy over to Mr. Harris in the afternoons. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy."

Home from the hospital with every afternoon off, Malone blundered through his days. He thought of the mountains, the North, snow, the ocean ... thought of all the life he had spent unlived. He wondered how he could die since he had not yet lived.

He took hot baths after his morning work and even darkened the bedroom to try to take a nap, but it had never been his habit to sleep in the middle of the day and he could not sleep. Instead of waking at four or five o'clock in the morning to roam the house in fear, the flashes of terror had flickered for a season, leaving boredom and a dread that he could not formulate. He hated the blank afternoons when Mr. Harris took over the pharmacy. He was always fearing that something might go wrong, but what could go wrong? The loss of another Kotex sale? A bad judgment on a physical complaint? He actually had no reason to advise in the first place, having never finished medical school. Other dilemmas plagued him. He was now so thin that his suits hung in baggy folds. Should he go to a tailor? Though the suits would long outlast him, he did go to a tailor instead of going to Hart, Schaffner & Marx, where he had always gone, and ordered an Oxford gray suit and a blue flannel suit. The fittings were tiresome. Another thing, he had paid so much on orthodontist's bills for Ellen that he had neglected his own teeth, so that suddenly so many teeth had to be pulled that the dentist gave him a choice of pulling twelve teeth and having false teeth or making expensive bridges. Malone decided on the bridges, even knowing he couldn't get the good of them. So dying, Malone took more care of himself than he had done in life.

A new chain drugstore opened in Milan which did not have the quality and trustworthiness of Malone's pharmacy, but it was a competitor which undercut fair prices and this annoyed Malone immoderately. Sometimes he even wondered if he shouldn't sell the pharmacy while he could supervise the sale. But the thought was more shocking and bewildering than the thought of his own death. So he did not dwell on it. Besides, Martha could be trusted to dispose of the property, including stock, good will and reputation, when the occasion arose. Malone spent whole days with a pencil and paper, writing down his assets. Twenty-five thousand (it comforted Malone that his figures were conservative) for the pharmacy, twenty thousand life insurance, ten thousand for the home, fifteen thousand for the three run-down houses Martha had inherited ... while the combined assets were not a fortune, they were considerable when added up; Malone totaled the figures several times with a fine-sharpened pencil and twice with a fountain pen. Deliberately he had not included his wife's Coca-Cola stock. The mortgage on the pharmacy had been burned two years ago and the insurance policy converted from retirement insurance to plain life insurance, as it had been to begin with. There were no outstanding debts or mortgages. Malone knew that his financial affairs were in better order than they had ever been before, but this comforted him little. Better, perhaps, if he had been harried by mortgages and unpaid bills than to feel this flat solvency. For Malone still felt he had unfinished business which the ledgers and his figuring did not show. Although he had not talked more about his will with the Judge, he felt that a man, a breadwinner, should not die intestate. Should he set five thousand legally aside for the children's education, the residue going to his wife? Or should he leave it all to Martha, who was a good mother if she was anything? He had heard of widows buying Cadillac cars when their husbands had died and left them in full charge of the estate. Or widows being rooked into phony oil well deals. But he knew that Martha would neither breeze around in Cadillac cars nor buy any stock more chancy than Coca-Cola or A. T. & T. The will would probably read: To my beloved wife, Martha Greenlove Malone, I bequeath all monies and properties that comprise my entire estate. Although he had long since ceased loving his wife, he respected her judgment, and it was the ordinary will to make.

Until that season, few of Malone's friends or relatives had died. But his fortieth year seemed a time for death. His brother from Macon died of cancer. His brother had been only thirty-eight years old and he was the head of the Malone Wholesale Drug Company. Also, Tom Malone had married a beautiful wife and J.T. had often envied him. But blood being thicker than jealousy, Malone began packing his suitcase when Tom's wife telephoned he was failing. Martha objected to the trip because of his own ill health, and a long argument followed which made him miss the Macon train. So he was unable to see Tom again in life, and in death the body was too much rouged and terribly shrunken.

Martha came the next day when she had arranged for someone to care for the children. Malone, as the elder brother, was the chief spokesman in financial matters. The affairs of the Malone Wholesale Drug Company were in worse shape than anyone had imagined. Tom had been a drinking man, Lucille extravagant, and the Malone Wholesale Drug Company was faced with bankruptcy. Malone went over the books and figured for days. There were two boys of high school age and Lucille, when faced with the necessity of earning a living, said vaguely that she would get a job in an antique shop. But there were no vacancies in an antique shop in Macon, and besides, Lucille didn't know scat about antiques. No longer a beautiful woman, she cried less for her husband's death than that he had managed the Malone Wholesale Drug Company so badly, leaving her a widow with two growing children and no ideas about work or jobs. J.T. and Martha stayed for four days. After the funeral when they left, Malone gave Lucille a check for four hundred dollars to tide the family over. A month later Lucille got a job in a department store.

Cab Bickerstaff died, and Malone had seen and talked with him that very same morning before he just fell over dead at his desk in the Milan Electric and Power Company. Malone tried to remember every act and word of Cab Bickerstaff that morning. But they were so ordinary that they would have been unnoticed if he had not slumped at his desk at eleven o'clock, dying instantly of a stroke. He had seemed perfectly well and absolutely ordinary when Malone had served him the coke and some peanut butter crackers. Malone remembered that he had ordered an aspirin along with the coke, but there was nothing unusual about that. And he had said on entering the pharmacy, "Hot enough for you, J.T.?" Again perfectly ordinary. But Cab Bickerstaff had died an hour later and the coke, the aspirin, the peanut butter crackers, the hackneyed phrase were fixed in an inlay of mystery that haunted Malone. Herman Klein's wife died and his shop was closed for two full days. Herman Klein no longer had to hide his bottle in the compounding room at the pharmacy, but could drink at his own home. Mr. Beard, a deacon at the First Baptist Church, died also that summer. None of these people had been close to Malone, and in life he had not been interested in them. But in death they were all fixed in the same curious inlay of mystery that compelled an attention that they had not exerted in life. So Malone's last summer had passed in this way.

Afraid to talk to the doctors, unable to speak of anything intimate with his own wife, Malone just blundered silently. Every Sunday he went to church, but Dr. Watson was a folksy preacher who spoke to the living and not to a man who was going to die. He compared the Holy Sacraments with a car. Saying that people had to be tanked up once in a while in order to proceed with their spiritual life. This service offended Malone, although he did not know why. The First Baptist Church was the largest church in town with a property worth, offhand, two million dollars. The deacons were men of substance. Pillars of the church, millionaires, rich doctors, owners of utility companies. But though Malone went every Sunday to church, and though they were holy men, in his judgment, he felt strangely apart from them. Though he shook hands with Dr. Watson at the end of every church service, he felt no communication with him, or any of the other worshipers. Yet he had been born and reared in the First Baptist Church, and there was no other spiritual solace he could think of, for he was ashamed and timid to speak of death. So one November afternoon, shortly after his second stay at the hospital, he dressed up in his new tailored Oxford gray suit and went to the parsonage.

Dr. Watson greeted him with some surprise. "How well you are looking, Mr. Malone." Malone's body seemed to shrink in the new suit. "I'm glad you've come. I always like to see my parishioners. What can I do for you today? Would you like a coke?"

"No thanks, Dr. Watson. I would like to talk."

"Talk about what?"

Malone's reply was muted and almost indistinct. "About death."

"Ramona," Dr. Watson bawled to the servant who quickly answered him, "serve Mr. Malone and me some cokes with lemon."

As the cokes were served, Malone crossed and uncrossed his withered legs in their fine flannel pants. A flush of shame reddened his pale face. "I mean," he said, "you are supposed to know about things like that."

"Things like what?" Dr. Watson asked.

Malone was brave, determined. "About the soul, and what happens in the afterlife."

In church, and after twenty years of experience, Dr. Watson could make glib sermons about the soul; but in his own home, with only one man asking, his glibness turned to embarrassment and he only said, "I don't know what you mean, Mr. Malone." "My brother died, Cab Bickerstaff died in this town, and Mr. Beard died all in the course of seven months. What happened to them after death?"

"We all have to die," said the plump, pale Dr. Watson.

"Other people never know when they are going to die."

"All Christians should prepare for death." Dr. Watson thought the subject was getting morbid.

"But how do you prepare for death?"

"By righteous living."

"What is righteous living?" Malone had never stolen, had seldom lied, and the one episode in his life that he knew was a mortal sin had happened years ago and lasted only one summer. "Tell me, Dr. Watson," he asked, "what is eternal life?"

"To me," Dr. Watson said, "it is the extension of earthly life, but more intensified. Does that answer your question?"

Malone thought of the drabness of his life and wondered how it could be more intensified. Was afterlife continual tedium and was that why he struggled so in order to hold onto life? He shivered although the parsonage was hot. "Do you believe in heaven and hell?" Malone asked.