Edith’s Diary (26 page)

Edith had in the last month decided that Brett should be dead since about three years now. It didn’t matter that this conflicted with George’s demise and funeral service at which Brett had been present. Edith was writing her diary for pleasure, and was taking poetic licence, as she put it to herself.

She could also have mentioned her gratitude for twenty thousand dollars, in the form of two Treasury Bonds, which Melanie had left her, generous enough considering that Melanie, though childless, had nieces and nephews and grand-nieces and so on almost beyond count, but Edith didn’t like writing about money in her diary. Brett had cut his contribution from a hundred and fifty to a hundred dollars a month. What was she to deduce from this? That he thought Cliffie ought to be taking care of her? A tapering off toward zero? A gesture to ease his conscience? Edith believed it was the latter.

‘Beer, please,’ Cliffie said to the Cartwheel barman. ‘Sure, Miller’s is fine.’ Cliffie was feeling cool that evening, standing with one leg over a bar stool, wearing a new dubonnet blazer, now unbuttoned. He hadn’t even glanced around for Luce, as he usually did, for which he congratulated himself.

Tok!
His beer arrived, and Cliffie’s dollar bill was already on the counter. Cliffie did glance at the door, twice, as people came in. The old plump proprietor sometimes hovered near the door, greeting people. He was there tonight.

‘Oh, by the way, Cliffie!’ said the skinny pansy barman. ‘Something in the paper today.’ He pulled up a folded newspaper from somewhere. ‘Here it is, yeah. Isn’t this the girl you were asking about? Long time ago?’ He pointed to a small item on a page Cliffie instantly recognized as the society page of the
Philadelphia Inquirer
.

Cliffie read it.
Lucy G. Beckman to Wed Kenneth L. Forbes
,
said the one-column headline. Cliffie jumped slightly, but remained on the stool, ‘Oh, yeah. Yeah,’ he said.

‘Lucy Beckman. Wasn’t that the girl you were asking about?’

‘Yeah, but that was a couple of
years
ago,’ Cliffie said. ‘Sure, I know all about this.’ Cliffie pushed the paper aside.

‘See-ee?’ said the barman, smiling, dumping an avalanche of ice cubes into a tub with a gelid crash. ‘Pretty good detective I am, eh?’

Cliffie retreated within himself, like a whole army defeated, covering its wounds, wary of the outside, the enemy on the periphery. Of course it had been a long time since he had seen Luce – two years now, a little more. Cliffie didn’t like to think of the word
years
.
It scared him. In a way, of course, he had given up Luce, and in a way he hadn’t, because love didn’t give up, according to all the songs, the poetry. He thought of the many times, beyond count, when he had imagined making love to Luce. And now he had to imagine her busy all those months, years, seeing people, meeting men, maybe making love with
them
,
and finally choosing one of them to marry! Cliffie had put on a faint, casual smile, and now he lit a cigarette, shaking. He was of course paying no further attention to the barman, who hadn’t a glimmer of what the news meant to him, who couldn’t care less, and anyway the guy was queer, so what the hell could he know about anything? Kenneth – something – Forbes. Was he some good-looking or rich swine who had been hanging around for some time, maybe the one Luce had had a quarrel with? She had implied a quarrel somewhere, either with her parents or with a man. And now the bastard had made it – maybe. Cliffie had an impulse to look up the son of a bitch and kill him! A man to man fight. Reduce his face to a pulp. Beat him until it was impossible for him to breathe through his broken nose. Cliffie ordered a scotch.

Nothing happened that evening, absolutely nothing. Cliffie had brought his Volks, and was quite pissed by the time he drove home a little after 11 p.m., but he drove carefully and made it. When he entered the house, he heard his mother’s typewriter clicking upstairs. The house felt warm. What month was it? April. Yes, of course, April. Almost three years since he had met, or seen, Luce. Cliffie had a drink on that. After all, a nightcap, no harm in a nightcap if it was safely back home.

Clickety-click
.
A pause. Then the spurt of clicks again. Sometimes his mother worked till nearly 2 in the morning. Cliffie shook his head indulgently. If she wasn’t clicking away, she was
picking
away at the clay stuff, sculpting. Cliffie laughed a little. What was she working on now? It was an abstract-looking thing, about two feet square. Cliffie had seen his own head (though his mother didn’t much like his going into her room), and had been quite startled and pleased, because he looked so handsome. Maybe his mother
did
like him, had been Cliffie’s first reaction, but of course he had merely smiled, and made some comment about its being a good job. Then his mother had sold that crazy piece to
Ramparts
or
Shove It
or some such, and had been proud of it, telling him, telling the Quickmen, though Cliffie knew damn well these were kinky-kooky publications, full of sordid exaggerations, things that could be libelous, Cliffie would have thought.

He found himself leaning heavily against the sideboard, the end of his second nightcap in his hand, staring at the tarnished silver tray with its silver teapot, sugar bowl, creamer. He had noticed before, months ago, that his mother wasn’t polishing silver stuff the way she had used to, and the cleaning woman had too much to do, coming just once a week, to do it, Cliffie supposed.

Then he realized he was thinking all this crap, dreaming around like this, so that he wouldn’t think of Luce.
Luce
.
Gone now. Not married as yet, but just think of the people, relatives, family he would have to buck if he tried to interfere with the marriage, which was supposed to take place in mid-May, he recalled. Cliffie staggered into his own room, and once he had closed the door, gave way to tears, with hands over his eyes. He nearly fell, losing his balance, and threw himself on his bed and continued weeping.

Edith noticed the change in Cliffie, and the first indication to her was a tension which meant he was anxious about something or concealing something. ‘Anything the matter?’ Edith asked, not expecting Cliffie to answer frankly, and he hadn’t. Nothing was the matter, he said. Edith wondered if the police had given him a warning about something.

It was Gert Johnson who enlightened Edith at the end of a telephone conversation which had begun about something else. ‘That girl Luce Beckman – Remember a long time ago you asked if I knew her? I just happened to see she just got married in Philly.
Must
be the same one Cliffie was hung up on.’

‘Oh. Oh.’ Edith suddenly understood everything. ‘Cliffie didn’t mention it. Maybe he doesn’t even know! Anyway – he doesn’t talk about her any more.’

‘Her father’s a big-shot president, it seems – I forgot of what.’

‘I think she’s gone out of Cliffie’s mind, thank goodness. Well, about Saturday elevenish, Gert, that’s fine.’ Gert was coming to see Edith in regard to a
Bugle
editorial Edith had written which was due to go to press next Tuesday.

Now Edith understood. Cliffie had regained long ago the pounds he had lost, had perhaps put on more, and more were due if he kept up the beer and the drink, which in fact had been upped in the last days. Gone also was the sacred matchbook that had lain on his table for years. Had Cliffie thrown it away in a pet? Or was he guarding it in the back corner of a drawer? Edith thought of mentioning Luce, to offer Cliffie a word of sympathy, to show she took an interest in his life, then decided not to, as Cliffie might be more wounded if she did.

Gert was up in the air about a four-hundred-word editorial Edith had written in regard to student behavior and demonstrations at the local Brunswick School. Since Edith had backed up her article with quotes from a Brunswick Corner parent and one of the school teachers, she was sure she was not alone in her attitude. Edith sensed the old battle of tear-it-down, which was Gert, versus change-it-and-improve-it, which was Edith. Gert was on the side of the kids. Curious that Gert thought her far-out lately, while Edith felt herself ever more conservative.

The comparative calm of that week in May was broken by a telephone call at 1:30 a.m. one night at a moment when Edith was standing in her workroom pushing Plasticine into her abstract called ‘City.’ She had not been aware of the time until she glanced at her wrist-watch on hearing the telephone. The downstairs hall light was still on, meaning Cliffie had not yet come in.

A voice ascertained that she was Mrs Howland, then told her that her son had a broken jaw and would be in the Doylestown hospital overnight and part of tomorrow.

‘A car accident?’ Edith asked.

‘No, Mrs Howland,’ the voice drawled. ‘Seems to have been a fistfight.’

‘Can I reach him by telephone? Is he all right?’

‘Oh, he’s all right. No danger. But he can’t talk very well, ma’am.’

Cliffie was brought home the next day around 7:30 p.m. by prearrangement with the hospital, which had again rung Edith. Edith had said she worked until 7. A hospital car came behind Cliffie’s Volks, which was driven by an intern. Cliffie’s entire head was swathed in a white bandage. He was dressed and walking, but could talk only with difficulty. One intern spoke to Edith about a liquid diet, the extraction of a tooth or two in lower left jaw (already done), and left her some pain-killing pills. Cliffie should see a local doctor for another penicillin shot tomorrow. Then the interns left.

Cliffie wanted a drink. Edith got a scotch for him. He didn’t know what happened, he told his mother, and he was telling the truth, he said.

‘Ho
bwok-
ko,’
Cliffie said, frowning with pain, which Edith translated as ‘black-out.’ He did remember three or four fellows, some mysterious argument outside a bar or a restaurant in the parking lot, and then
whammo!
Cliffie waved a hand, meaning he didn’t want to say any more tonight.

Cliffie was nearly as white as the bandage. Edith was surprised that he admitted to a black-out. What horrors! Yet curiously she felt cool and detached, rather like a professional nurse, and she behaved as one, turning Cliffie’s bed down, making sure he had swallowed the right pills, that he could take on a milk-and-egg drink, and this she prepared. There was also soup for the future, and Cliffie wouldn’t starve. Somehow Edith had an aversion to asking with whom he had fought, and maybe Cliffie didn’t even know. How long was the bandage going to last? Hadn’t the intern said a week?

When Gert Johnson came on Saturday morning, Edith had fresh coffee ready plus a delicious Sarah Lee cake – the round kind with white icing and pecans on top – and of course the bar was at hand too. Edith felt inspired to be cheerful, or perhaps she really felt cheerful. The cinnamon-and-butter smell of the warming cake roused Cliffie from his bed of pain (where he had been pleased to stay the last couple of days, reading and dozing), but the cake unfortunately couldn’t go down as yet.

‘Hey, I heard about Cliffie!’ Gert said even before she had sat down.

‘A broken jaw,’ Edith said. ‘Little brawl outside a – oh, I don’t know, a roadside place in Tinicum, I gather.’

‘Nothing with the police, I hope.’

‘Haven’t heard a word out of them.’

That subject was soon finished. Gert partook of coffee and cake, then she started in on the editorial which Edith had entitled
Some of Us Too
.

‘Again, Edith, you’re going to antagonize a lot of people.’

A few parents, of course. And ‘again’? Edith waited patiently.

‘Some of our readers are the parents of these kids.’

‘Sure, I know that,’ Edith said.

‘I’m not so sure you should say – oh, “vile and vituperative”, whatever it was.’

‘That was a quote from an old letter I kept from the
Times
,
a letter from a faculty member at Hunter.’

‘Yes, but you equated…’

Then they were off, though Edith did keep her calm. Brunswick School had just got a going over by the police for drug-pushing. At least fifty per cent of the kids aged thirteen to seventeen had admitted taking stuff ‘sometimes or all the time,’ according to a Bucks County survey, a clipping of which Edith had, because it had been in the
Trenton Standard
,
but Gert considered that a minor matter. She was more concerned with Edith’s saying that the kids were brainlessly imitating older college kids and making a game out of insubordination, insulting their elders, and demanding equal say in the running of the school.

‘If the young really know as much as teachers about administration or even what they ought to study,’ Edith said, ‘then perhaps they don’t need to go to school at all.’

‘Oh, Edith!’ Gert said, striking a palm gently against her hair, which had gone all salt-and-pepper in the last couple of years. ‘Where’d you get your other quote from?’

‘Penny Ditson. She —’

Gert interrupted, scoffing, as if Penny were brainless, but Penny was observant and articulate, had a sixteen-year-old son and a seventeen-year-old daughter at Brunswick School, the son taking so much LSD, his grades had gone to hell and his mother was worried. The daughter – Edith had talked with her. Edith told Gert all this.

‘It’s just that the piece is a little too alarmist. We’ve got to tone it down a little.’

Edith yielded, hating it, hating herself for yielding. But it was that or breaking, possibly, with Gert, because Edith knew her editorials had strained their relations enough already, especially the birth-control-abortion ones of a couple of years ago. Neither she nor Gert owned the
Bugle
,
and they needed each other to keep it going. Edith changed the subject finally by telling Gert about a sale she had made to
Shove It
,
an underground newspaper. Edith had simply distorted an article that other magazines had rejected, thrown in some vulgarity, and sold it. Gert seemed surprised, but did not congratulate Edith very warmly.

‘Oh, but that
Shove It
,’
Gert said with a shake of her head. She was now on a short rye, short on water. ‘They’re really screwed up.’

Edith laughed gaily. ‘Sure, or they wouldn’t print my stuff. I have another idea – a fantastic game that I’m going to —’

‘Hey! You’ve got the new Erich Fromm?’ Gert had espied a book, a library book, on the coffee table.

Edith was annoyed by Gert’s interruption. Gert had always interrupted, however, and always a bit more after a drink. How many more years, Edith wondered, would they go on meeting like this, talking, arguing, taking temporary and passing things so seriously? Maybe till they were seventy, eighty. People lived forever, these days, like old George, unless somebody put them out of their misery. Edith interrupted now with a certain defiance, ‘However – wait till you see my game idea in print one day. It’s called “Presidential Election”, unless I think of a sprightlier title. There are masks of the president- and vice-president-elect, you see, and the people in them are immediately shot at the inauguration ceremony, but they’re not the
real
president or vice-president.
They’re
still alive, thus giving the American public the pleasure of four assassinations, because the real ones come on – oh, an hour later.’