Cloud Nine (14 page)

The next day, the next night, were practically a retake, but the night after that was different, I’m here to tell you it was. Mother called late, as usual, around midnight I would say, and from the very first word she spoke, acted all wrung up and excited. She wouldn’t begin until she made sure that Sonya was on the extension and could hear what she would say.

“Chiliens, hold your breath and hold on to your hats... it worked, Sonya’s idea did, beyond our wildest dreams, her dreams, my dreams, and Gramie’s dreams, all of our dreams, put together. Feature this if you can: She’s resigned to losing Gramie—she loves him, that she betrays with every word she says, but knows she can’t get him back. But, she’s leaving the farm to
me!
To
me—or
in other words, the dream is left as it was, because on this, of course, Gramie and I are one! She’s leaving it all to me, and all because Sonya made me kid her along. Made me act with compassion, made me do the decent thing by a stricken soul, because she was willing to do the decent thing! I’m so happy I could sing.”

“Mrs. Stu,” yelped Sonya, “how
wonderful!”

“Sonya, you don’t
have
to go!”

“Well not that I ever
wanted
to!”

It went on for at least twenty minutes, with Mother giving details of how Jane “had thought it over all day, and then was ready, when she came, to say what she would do”; and also giving credit to Sonya, for thinking the idea up of smoothing Jane down and stringing it out, and heading the explosion off. And then at last when she hung up, came the sound of running feet, and the clutch of arms flung around me. I carried her up to our cloud, and we stayed on it all night, all next day, which was Sunday, and all Sunday night.

Or part of Sunday night.

Sunday evening, being exact.

The phone rang around twelve, and we both went piling downstairs, but I didn’t lift the receiver, there on the hall phone, until she gave me a shout from the kitchen. Then I answered, but all I could hear at the other end was what sounded like somebody crying. I said: “Hello? Hello?
Hello?”
but still nothing was said.

Then Sonya asked: “Mrs. Stu, is that you?”

“Yes, Sonya. ... I’m sorry.”

“Where are you? Home?”

“Yes. In bed.”

“But what happened?”

“Sonya, everything happened. She came over again, and was friendlier than ever—she’d called Mort Leonard, her lawyer, and made arrangements to see him tomorrow. And so on and so on. And then
he
had to come!”

“He? Who’s he?”

“Well who do you think?”

“Burl?”

“He walked from that dump he has to bring back a corkscrew he took, by mistake, thinking I might need it. That’s all it took.”

“You mean, he told how Gramie beat him up? Or what?”

“He told about your pregnancy!”

“Well that was nice of him!”

“I hadn’t mentioned it to her; well why should I? It was no business of hers! But she turned on me like a viper for ‘concealing the truth from her!’ ...don’t ask me to tell you the rest. He treated her like his child, patting her, kissing her, calming her. Perhaps women are his specialty, and perhaps I don’t respect it, but don’t think he’s not good at it, that he doesn’t know how to handle them. They left together—as soon as she could talk, she offered to drive him home. That was a half hour ago—I called as soon as I could. Now
I’ve
been like something demented.”

“Mrs. Stu, don’t take it so hard.”

She came, when Mother hung up, but not on running feet, and we went upstairs very slow, taking separate beds once more. I turned out the light, and after a long time she turned it on.

“Her check goes out tomorrow? Is that what you said, Gramie?”

“It’s due out tomorrow, yes.”

“If I were you, I’d take it in person.”

“And have it out with her? Why?”

“At least you’ll know where you stand.”

S
O I WENT OVER
there, around 9:30 the next morning, first stopping by the office, where Helen Musick drew the check, and when I’d signed it, put it in an envelope for me, marked “Mrs. Sibert.” I parked out front, went up on the porch, and rang.

Almost at once came her voice: “Who is it?”

Thinking fast I decided to stall, because if I said my name, she might decide not to come to the door, and just leave me standing there. So, raising my voice to change it, I called: “Special Delivery!”

She answered: “Just a moment, please,” and I heard movement inside. Then the chain bolt rattled and she opened the door, but when she saw who it was, tried to close it. But I was ready for that, and shoved my foot inside the jamb, so she couldn’t. She tried to kick my shin, but had on tennis shoes, and hurt herself, so she winced. But it took long enough for me to take note of her changed appearance.

She had on a blue gingham dress I’d seen a hundred times, white socks, and the white sneakers. Her top two buttons were open, to show quite a bit of cleavage, and her hair had a ribbon on it, a new frill for her. And if it was the ribbon, the buttons, or what, I can’t rightly say, but there was something gamy about her that wasn’t like her at all.

After a moment she snapped: “What are you doing here at this hour? Pretending to be the postman?”

I told her, “I said ‘Special Delivery’ and very special it is—I brought you your check.”

“Then, I’ll take it.”

“You will when you’ve asked me in.”

“Very well. But give me a moment, please.”

She disappeared, and I heard her going upstairs. Then she was back, holding the door wide, and I went into a place I knew like the palm of my hand, and yet never got used to. I mean, it was more like a gag, a museum someone thought up, a stage set to play a comedy in, than a sure-enough, actual house.

In the hall was a cozy-corner, in under the turn of the stairs, consisting of built-in seat, with Navajo blanket on it, and leather cushions with Indian heads burned on. Over the seat were pipe racks, and over the pipes, college pennants, mostly M.A.C., for Maryland Agricultural College, which was what the university was called before they bigged it up. Facing the stairs was a hat rack, and on the floor was a hooked rug. There wasn’t any living room, of the kind a modern house had, but instead there was a “parlor,” and beyond that a “library.” In the parlor were horsehair sofas, marbletop tables, wax flowers under glass, vases of gilded cattails, a bookcase with a ship model on it, and steel engravings of the Three Graces, Paolo and Francesca, and Grover Cleveland. On the floor was an Axminster rug, and in a corner a square piano. Everything was just as it had been, except for the smell of bacon frying, which had a meaning, as I realized later, though when I first went in I paid no attention to it.

She led me into the parlor, drew herself up, and said: “You may sit down if you wish.”

“Well I damn well wish.”

“Don’t you dare swear at me!”

“Hey, hey, hey, come off it, this is me—and anything short of poking you one in the jaw comes under the head of gentle, considerate kindness. What was the big idea, hanging up on me?”

“What was the big idea, playing that trick on me?”

“And what trick did I play on you?”

She had left me an opening, I thought, and I was ready to let her have it at one word about my marriage. But she crossed me up. Pointing to a chair and waiting until I took it, she came over, looked down at me, and whispered: “Leading me on as you did! Play acting at being a man, and all the time not being one. Being nothing but a vegetable in human form!”

“You mean, like a potato?”

“More like an onion, slippery inside.”

“How does an onion lead a girl on?”

“With all those flowers and music and wine.”

“Thought you
liked
flowers and music and wine.”

“Oh I do, any woman does.
But
for what they pledge, not for what they are. And in your case, they were just a false front, a way of imitating masculinity while lacking the thing itself.”

“You sure?”

“Well I certainly am
now!”

“Now?
What’s now?”

“Since the truth was revealed unto me.”

“Yeah? By whom?”

Of course, by now I knew by whom, but wanted to make her name him. However, once more she crossed me up.

“By you!” she quavered, almost in tears. “Oh you made it plain, that I have to say—with no beating around the bush, in any way, shape or form. ‘Jane, I got married’—if that didn’t say it, it can’t be said in words.”

“That I’m an onion.”

“If not, why did you marry this girl?”

“I wanted to—that’s why.”

“You had to! She’s pregnant by your brother!”

“
Was
pregnant by my brother.”

“She still is! What kind of cock-and-bull story was that? You take her to the beach, and—lo and behold—she aborts. Could anyone, any grown-up, adult person, actually believe that?”

“God could—He did it.”

“Ah, God.
God!”
And then: “You should be asking for God’s forgiveness, that you would pretend He’s responsible. Of course, I find it in me, even so, to pity this poor girl, the life you’ve invited her to—having all a woman’s desires, and none of her satisfactions.”

“She gets satisfied every night.”

“I
never got satisfied!”

“You know why?”

“Tell me why!”

My mouth was primed to let her have it, to tell her she was too old for such satisfactions, at least as supplied by me, but somehow the words didn’t come. I heard myself say, in a moment, “You’re so beautiful I didn’t have the heart.”

Her answer to that was to sneer, and then, sitting primly on the edge of a chair, she proceeded to tell me off, speaking slow and going into details—how my whole life had been a pretense of being something which I was not, of desperate playacting, with my athletic career at Yale, my jumping my arm muscles up, when we’d go swimming at Chesapeake Beach, my picking brawls with people, “though sometimes you meet your match.” She pointed to my hand, which was still scabbed up, and went on and on and on. It was all part of the same old record I’d heard a few times before, so it was no trouble to know where it came from, or why it appealed to her: It put a totally different light on those years of not being passed-at by me.

So sometimes my attention wandered, and I had a chance to think. One of those times I woke up to the bacon smell in the air, and the thing of it was what I hadn’t remembered before: She didn’t like bacon, so who’d she been cooking it for? Why did she duck upstairs before bringing me in?

“Okay,” I said, “if that’s how I prove masculinity, what are we waiting for? Why not prove it here and now, by beating you up, Mrs. Sibert? You have a pretty cute backside—come on, I’ll blister it for you!” With that I grabbed her hand and yanked her out of her chair.
“No!”
she screamed.
“No! No! No!”

Vloomp, vloomp, vloomp!

When I looked he was on the stairs, piling down fast, a hammer in his hand, one she kept on her dressing table, don’t ask me why. “Why!” I said. “Burl! I thought that would smoke you out!”

“Gramie, leave her alone.”

“Hand me the hammer or I’m taking it off you.”

He was still in the hall, and I marched myself out there, slow. Now there’s something about a big guy, walking toward you step by step, that somewhat dampens courage, and that’s how it was with him. I held out my hand and he gave me the hammer, handle first, though giving the head a flip to indicate his contempt. I motioned him into the parlor. “Sit down,” I said. “The both of you, sit down.”

They sat, and I asked him: “You spent the night in this house?”

“What’s it to you where I spent the night?”

“Answer me!”

“Yes!” she whined. “With me! In my bed!”

“Having intimacies with you?”

“Oh! And how! More than you ever did!”

“It would appear I’ve been missing something.”

“It certainly would, Mr. Graham!”

“Okay, let’s get on.”

“Let’s not! You may give me my check and go!”

“Honey, you’re not taking his check.”

He went over, knelt by her chair, put his arms around her, and kissed her. She inhaled him, and it crossed my mind, he may have smelled like feet to Sonya, but apparently smelled different to her.

She kissed him, and said, “When I take money off a crumb, I figure he’s still a crumb, but I’ve got the money.”

“But Honey,
I
have money.”

“Oh Burl, my little Burl—that’s the sweetest thing that ever was said to me, that ever was said to me in my whole life.”

“The reason is, I love you.”

“Now you’re making me cry.”

She mumbled kisses all over his cheek, and then he turned to me. “So, brother-o’-mine, we’re done. Beat it.”

“Just a moment,” she said.

“You taking this check or not.”

“I’ve been forbidden to take it, so
no.
But there’s one more thing, Gramie. Did you bring my will too?”

“Your will’s at the bank, in my box.”

“I want it. I want it today.”

“You’ll get it, when I find it convenient to open my box at the bank, get it out, and bring it to you.”

“Mail it over, you mean.”

“I’ll
say what I mean, Mrs. Sibert.”

“I want my will!”

“I bid you good day.”

“And a good day to you, Gramie, boy—and it is a good day for you, come to think if it, isn’t it? Here I get the girl with the looks and the shape and the million-dollar farm, but look what you get, Gramie. The girl with the bastard inside—and my little bastard at that, which guarantees he’s really good stock. You lucky dog!”

“How’d you like to go to hell?”

“If this be hell, they ought to charge me for it!”

As I left, she burst into silvery laughter.

I went home to make my report, and found Mother waiting for me, with Sonya, over
café au lait
in the living room. They both listened, and all Sonya said was: “At least you know where you stand.”

“Poor thing, she’s not old—Jane is fifty-eight, still in rosy middle age, and she was forty-three when she took you, Gramie, widowed, wet, and willing. So you let her down—I’m still amazed at that, as I had taken for granted, all this time ever since, that she had an arrangement with you. But if that’s how it was, that’s how it was.