Edith’s Diary (17 page)

When Edith got up from her desk, she felt happy. She felt in another world – but a real world – in which Cliffie went from strength to strength, with his nice wife, a good job to look forward to in June, when he graduated, aged twenty-three, with a masters degree. Perhaps by next autumn, Edith could even look forward to a grand-child, but that of course was up to the young people. In her mind, Edith had already given Debbie a few family things, like the silver candelabra, which were however still downstairs on the sideboard.

Edith stared wide-eyed toward her door, and slowly realized that George was calling for something. In a flash of anger, Edith thought that in her diary she would damn well send George packing. Yes! A long car, practically an ambulance, would come from Sunset Pines and two no-nonsense young men would bundle him and his possessions up and whisk him away. Edith moved to answer George’s wail.

Christmas came and went. Edith did all the right things, but she felt in a daze. She decorated a tree, entertained and was entertained, did overtime at the Thatchery and got a hundred-dollar bonus for it. The cork mats, straw place mats, Swedish candlesticks, bamboo screens disappeared, borne out the door, purchased. Elinor Hutchinson was pleased with business.

And Brett and Carol were married on the 3rd of January.

‘We’d both love you to come,’ Brett said on the telephone. ‘There’ll be people you know – like Ham Hamilton. You remember him!’ Brett laughed a little. Ham was a boozy left-wing reporter whom Edith hadn’t thought of in years, an acquaintance of the Grove Street era in New York.

Since Edith had been at that moment wordless, Brett continued:

‘I don’t want you to think Carol and I are unfriendly or – embarrassed. Why can’t we have a nice evening in New York together? Doesn’t have to be a late evening for you, so you could drive back if —’

‘I don’t – really feel like it.’ Edith’s ire had risen briefly at the word ‘embarrassed’ from Brett. Well,
he
certainly wasn’t embarrassed, by anything. Carol was giving a celebratory party (another party) in February, because a book by her was being published with a silly-sounding title like ‘How Not to Step on the Cracks’ or something like that, a facetious guide for avoiding faux-pas in personal and business life. That from a woman who presumably had a brain! Edith was revolted by the idea of attending a party at the apartment of her ex-husband and his new wife, and in a vague but furious way angry with Brett for inviting her. Edith declined both invitations.

‘How is George?’ Brett asked.

Why don’t you find out
,
Edith wanted to say. Suddenly she found her cool, and in a voice worthy of her great-aunt Melanie said, ‘I frankly don’t give a damn how George is,’ and hung up.

That was true. Edith realized that her attitude had changed in the last couple of months. Brett was sitting on his duff, and had done damn-all about George. Now Edith actively detested George, or at least admitted to herself that she detested him, whereas all the years past she had not admitted it. She had to admit now that she had begun to be as subtly unpleasant and rude to him as possible.

She was happy only when she wrote in her diary of Cliffie’s progress (Brett and George figured less and less in it), and when she wrote pieces for the
Bugle
.
By mid-January she was working on a thousand-word article (at least that long, and not for the
Bugle
,
she was going to try to sell it elsewhere) for which she hadn’t a title, but her notes were headed
Pro the Third World.
It had to do with First and Second World countries supervising all aid that went to Third World countries, and her notes ran:

Counsellors, Edith thought, might be a better word than advisors, the latter having been hopelessly tainted by Viet Nam.

Cliffie lay on a low couch at Mel’s with an almost empty beer can in his hand. He had been up all last night and today, except for a bit of sleep around 5 a.m. and around 4 that afternoon. He knew he looked and felt a mess, but just now he enjoyed the feeling. Mel was playing records.

‘Hey! – Other side? Why not?’ Mel got up and turned his stack of records. He wore motorcycle gear, maybe hadn’t had his boots off in twenty-four hours, Cliffie was thinking.

Sergeant Pepper
roared out again. Cliffie squirmed comfortably on the couch, realizing it was dark outside (Mel’s shades had been pulled down all day), and that he didn’t care what time it was. Cliffie loved Mel’s apartment. It was exactly what he would have liked for himself. You climbed a wooden stairway from street level, just like in an old-fashioned house (or a good film), and then you opened a door on Mel’s one room which was fantastic: big posters on the walls, guys in motorcycle gear pointing pistols, naked girls. An old straw armchair hung from the ceiling for no reason, swinging when people bumped into it. Paperbacks and clothes were scattered on the floor in a way Cliffie could never achieve at home, because his mother was always straightening things a little. Mel’s apartment symbolized: ‘Screw everything!’

Mel was sitting on his unmade bed, working alternately with a knife and pliers, trying to get out pieces of glass imbedded in the soles of a pair of low brown boots. The boot soles were of rubber with a tread in them like that of a tire, which was why the glass had stuck.

‘God damn!’ Mel said. ‘Musta been runnin’ hard
that
night! Bugger’s really in here.’

‘But you got away,’ Cliffie said, a little loudly because of the music.

‘Sure, boy.’

Mel hadn’t been wearing these boots last night. The glass was from another occasion. ‘Wasn’t it great last night?’ Cliffie said, laughing lazily. ‘Hee-haw!’

‘Yeah, boy – but don’t say it again, huh?’ Mel gave him a glance. ‘They could make it tough for me in this town. You’re all right – with your mother and all that.’

Cliffie took the reprimand to heart, and at once sobered and sat up. Cliffie thought he would kill himself before he did anything to incur Mel’s displeasure. Last night there had been a sudden quarrel between Mel and a fellow with a girl outside the Cascade Bar north of Brunswick Corner. Mel had swung a fist, maybe half joking, but Cliffie had plunged in and socked the fellow. The proprietor of the Cascade had suddenly appeared, then of all things one of the Keystone Kops of Brunswick C. in plainclothes. ‘
Cliffie! Pissed again! You’re not driving, I hope?
’
He hadn’t been driving, because they were both on Mel’s motorcycle. The fellow with the girl had been lifting Mel’s motorcycle – in order to get it out of the way of his car, he said – and it had been Mel, really, who had lost his temper. But as Mel later said, the fellow could have stowed his motorcycle away in the back of his station wagon, and Mel said he had had a feeling the guy had meant to do this.

‘But what did we do last night – after all?’ Cliffie said. The cop had drifted off, that he remembered.

‘Nothing. But did you have to
sock
the guy? Buddy-o, I ain’t sure you heard the last of this yet!’

Cliffie let the good music which seemed elegant, refined, expert, flood through him and soothe him. ‘Okay, Mel, but the guy drove off. He didn’t stay to talk to the cop there. I didn’t hurt him much – a punch on the cheek.’

‘How do we know what he did today?’ Mel pushed his fingers through his curly black hair. He had a short beard and a droopy moustache like a nineteenth-century villain, long slender legs, and a couple of interesting scars on his knuckles.

Mel earned his living, paid his rent and ate, partly from carefully wangled unemployment insurance which he collected at different addresses in the vicinity (not in Lambertville, but in other towns in New Jersey and Pennsylvania), and also from part-time bar-tending here and there. A thirty-mile drive to a restaurant was nothing to Mel on his motorcycle. He also sold LSD and harder stuff, Cliffie knew. Cliffie was aware that Mel kept this drug part of his life secret from him, though maybe not from Mel’s older, sometimes not older but more reliable chums, whom Mel had to use in the business. Cliffie knew Mel looked on him as a kid, a kind of apprentice maybe (Cliffie hoped that), someone Mel could ask to run out and buy cigarettes or beer at the local tavern.

The telephone rang, and Mel clumped across the wooden floor and answered.

Cliffie listened, thinking maybe it
was
the police, since they had just been talking about police action, but Mel laughed in a happy way. Cliffie stole a glance at his watch. 8:47, and his mother would already have had dinner. He dreaded going home, and knew Mel was going to nudge him out in a few minutes. There was nothing to eat in Mel’s fridge, as they had finished the franks and a steak several hours ago, a steak Mel said he had taken from a restaurant. Cliffie heard Mel making a date to meet someone at Hopewell. Cliffie’s unhappiness at having to leave coalesced, solidified somehow and he saw George Howland – the white corpse in the upstairs bedroom of his house. Revolting, stinking creature! In the last months, Cliffie had noticed that his mother also had started to loathe the old creep. His mother’s voice was tense and sharp, not merely loud. His mother didn’t even meet his eyes after the sick-making scenes with George, after the shitty bedpans and the disgusting snotrags.

Cliffie forced himself to his feet as Mel hung up. ‘I ought to be going home. Gotta face it.’ Better that he left on his own, rather than wait for Mel to ask him to push off.

‘Cliffie, you better clean up a little. Wash your face. Y’know?’

From Mel Cliffie didn’t mind this. He went into Mel’s tiny john, and bent to wash his face without looking at himself first in the mirror. Cliffie scrubbed with reasonable diligence at his nails, too drunk to notice pain from a rather nastily broken nail. He took Mel’s comb and combed his hair, touched his beard a little. He glanced with no interest at a photograph, double-page spread, of some male in full glory, then opened the door and went out. On second thought, he had to pee, so he went back. His pee was colorless. He’d had quite a lot of gin today.

Mel was tidying, hurling boots and books under his bed, even had a broom in his hand. Cliffie supposed a girl was coming.

‘Don’t forget, Cliffie, don’t say anything about my being with you last night, in case they get onto you, will you? They just might overlook me.’

‘Sure, Mel. I understand.’

‘You do? Good.’ Mel smiled a little. He had smallish teeth, the left front one broken at a corner. ‘See you soon, Cliffie.’

Cliffie had his Volks parked round the corner. He got in and drove homeward, across the bridge into New Hope, then left along the Delaware, past Odette’s. The road was good but narrowish, and Cliffie was careful, because his eyes refused to focus. The light was on in the living room, he saw as he went up the driveway. The Ford was ahead of him, parked where there might have been a garage, if his family had ever built one. Cliffie took his car keys, and when he went in the front door, put the keys on the hall table, as he usually did or should do, in case his mother had to get out with the Ford.

‘That you, Cliffie?’ called his mother from the kitchen.

‘Yep, Mom.’

‘Well –
well.
Had a big day?’ Edith was nearly finished the washing up.

‘Nice day,’ Cliffie replied, suddenly realizing he looked sloppy, suddenly ashamed. He lifted his head higher and asked, ‘Did I have any phone calls?’

‘No. Sorry.’ Edith swung the dishtowel over her thumbs, folding it, and laid it over the towel rack. ‘Cliffie, have something to eat and go to bed. Nothing more to drink. Promise?’

‘Sure I promise. I don’t even feel like a drink. What’s for dinner? What was for dinner?’

‘Pork chops. I stuck them in the oven. I thought you’d be home.’ Edith went out.

The oven wasn’t on, but the pork chops were still warm. Cliffie ate them standing, leaning against the sink, drinking the rest of a container of milk from the container. Suddenly his plate was empty, even the mashed potatoes gone. He put his plate in the sink, too tired to wash it. He heard his mother’s typewriter faintly clicking upstairs.

Cliffie took a bath, moving more steadily now. His mother’s door at the front of the house was closed, but a thread of light showed at the bottom, a dot at the keyhole. From George’s room came snores, old reliable scraping sounds that showed the vegetable was still alive. Cliffie pushed the door wider, walked in and switched on the light, not in the least afraid the corpse would wake up – oh, no! You fairly had to kick him, stick a pin in him to wake him up! Cliffie strolled to the low chest of drawers whose top bore a white towel, and on this stood bottles of clear glass and brown glass, little jars with glass tops and plastic tops. There was also a plastic thing that was some kind of kit. Eyedroppers. Jesus! Cliffie turned around and said in a normal, normally loud voice:

‘Georgie boy, what you need is exercise.’

George snored on, head awry, nose pointed at an upper corner of the room.

Edith’s typewriter paused, then clicked on.

Cliffie bent and laughed silently. ‘Ought to get out more!’ Quite suddenly a light sweat broke over Cliffie’s body. He had taken an extra hot bath. How much codeine and sleeping pills and all that would it take to kill old George? And how could he get them down him? In tea? Maybe. If the tea was sweet enough. Cliffie imagined those snores growing slower, fainter – stopping. What a blessing!

Abruptly Cliffie’s daydream ended, as if he had switched off a program on TV. He detested the room, and what was he doing here? Well, there was the codeine made from opium. Cliffie liked the word opium. It sounded evil, like a Chinese den. Opium-eaters and – something was the opium of the people, an old saying. And since he was here, why not? Cliffie went to the brown bottle, pulled the rubber stopper out, and took a swig. A little second swig for good measure, to prove he could hold it. Cliffie took a swig at least every four or five days. His mother had not noticed that the tincture – another nice word – was disappearing any faster, or she would certainly have mentioned it. But he had just now drunk out of George’s reserve, he realized, a new bottle. Generally Cliffie took it from the bedside bottle. Now he took the bedside bottle and poured a bit from it into the reserve, so the reserve wouldn’t look as if it had been gone into, though he did not fill it quite as full as it had been, or the bedside bottle would have looked, perhaps, emptier than it should have looked. What the hell, if the bottle was by George’s bedside, wasn’t it conceivable that George could have taken a dose on his own?

‘You’re nothing but a —’ Cliffie stopped, having heard a floorboard squeak in the hall.

‘Cliffie, what’re you doing here?’ His mother stood in the hall.

‘Nothing! Just —’ Cliffie lifted his empty hands. ‘Just taking a look before I went to bed.’

Edith drew a breath in through her teeth. ‘Well, you’d better get out,’ she said, still softly, as if afraid to awaken George. She turned and walked back toward her workroom, glanced once behind her and saw that Cliffie was putting out the light in George’s room. Then Cliffie went down the stairs.

She knew Cliffie was sampling the codeine, but she thought if she mentioned it, it would make things worse. Cliffie would at first deny it, then having been detected would stop for a while then pilfer even more. It was a bore, one more chore, to keep fetching the stuff from the pharmacy. Dr Carstairs hadn’t remarked the extra consumption, hadn’t asked her if George was needing more. Edith thought Carstairs simply hadn’t noticed. His visits were too brief to take in details. What did he do? He took George’s blood pressure, to be sure, and his temperature. Sometimes he used his stethoscope. Edith didn’t always stand in the room watching him.

Edith gasped slightly, realized she had been holding her breath, staring at her typewriter, half her mind on getting back to where she was in her ‘letter’ which would have to be written again for smoothness and the ordinariness she wanted.

Where had Cliffie been last night? Mel’s probably.

Edith knew Mel had a telephone, because she had once looked it up, but she wasn’t ever going to try to reach Cliffie there. Orgies, maybe, pop music and LSD, maybe girls. Edith imagined Cliffie chuckling on the sidelines, if there were girls.
Stop it
,
she told herself. She meant to finish her final draft tonight.

Like a boat (she thought) gliding smoothly to a shore, she moved closer to her worktable and sat down. But it wasn’t like that. If she wanted to think of boats, she was like a ship without a rudder now, without an anchor, turning on a dark sea, not knowing direction, unable to maneuver if it knew. It was Brett’s marriage three weeks ago that had forced her to turn loose. Before that, she had had some hope that Brett would change his mind, break with the girl, come back. But he had known Carol two years now, and if he married, he meant it. It had forced a movement on Edith’s part, which had been unconscious, yet still accomplished: she had turned loose of her dependence on Brett. She was alone.

She pulled her page and a half toward her and started reading through, correcting.