The Winter of Our Discontent (22 page)

The glass case had a brass lock from colonial times and a square brass key, always in the lock.

My sleeping daughter had the magic mound in her hands, caressing it with her fingers, petting it as though it were alive. She pressed it against her unformed breast, placed it on her cheek below her ear, nuzzled it like a suckling puppy, and she hummed a low song like a moan of pleasure and of longing. There was destruction in her. I had been afraid at first that she might want to crash it to bits or hide it away, but now I saw that it was mother, lover, child, in her hands.

I wondered how I might awaken her without fright. But why are sleepwalkers awakened? Is it for fear that they may hurt themselves? I’ve never heard of injury in this state, except through awakening. Why should I interfere? This was no nightmare full of pain or fear but rather pleasure and association beyond waking understanding. What call had I to spoil it? I moved quietly back and sat down in my big chair to wait.

The dim room seemed swarming with particles of brilliant light moving and whirling like clouds of gnats. I guess they were not really there but only prickles of weariness swimming in the fluid of my eyes, but they were very convincing. And it did seem true that a glow came from my daughter Ellen, not only from the white of her gown but from her skin as well. I could see her face and I should not have been able to in the darkened room. It seemed to me that it was not a little girl’s face at all—nor was it old, but it was mature and complete and formed. Her lips closed firmly, which they did not normally do.

After a time Ellen put the talisman firmly and precisely back in its place and she closed the glass-fronted case and twisted the brass key that kept it closed. Then she turned and walked past my chair and up the stairs. Two things I may have imagined— one, that she did not walk like a child but like a fulfilled woman, and second, that as she went the luminescence drained away from her. These may be impressions, children of my mind, but a third thing is not. As she ascended the stairs, there was no creak of wood. She must have been walking near to the wall, where the treads do not complain.

In a few moments I followed her and found her in her bed, asleep and properly covered. She breathed through her mouth and her face was a sleeping child’s face.

On compulsion I went down the stairs again and opened the glass case. I took the mound in my hands. It was warm from Ellen’s body. As I had done in childhood, I traced the endless flowing form with my forefingertip and I took comfort in it. I felt close to Ellen because of it.

I wonder, did the stone bring her somehow close to me—to the Hawleys?

CHAPTER NINE

On Monday perfidious spring dodged back toward winter with cold rain and raw gusty wind that shredded the tender leaves of too trusting trees. The bold and concupiscent bull sparrows on the lawns, intent on lechery, got blown about like rags, off course and off target, and they chattered wrathfully against the inconstant weather.

I greeted Mr. Red Baker on his tour, his tail blown sideways like a battle flag. He was an old acquaintance, squinting his eyes against the rain. I said, “From now on you and I can be friends on the surface, but I feel it only right to tell you that our smiles conceal a savage contest, a conflict of interests.” I could have said more but he was anxious to finish his chores and get under cover.

The Morph was on time. He may have been waiting for me— probably was. “Hell of a day,” he said, and his oiled-silk raincoat flapped and billowed around his legs. “I hear you did a social turn with my boss.”

“I needed some advice. He gave me tea too.”

“He’ll do that.”

“You know how advice is. You only want it if it agrees with what you wanted to do anyway.”

“Sounds like investment.”

“My Mary wants some new furniture. When a woman wants something she first dresses it up as a good investment.”

“Not only women, either,” said Morph. “I do it myself.”

“Well, it’s her money. She wants to shop around for bargains.”

At the corner of High Street we watched a tin sign tear loose from Rapp’s Toy Store and go skidding and screeching along, sounding like a traffic accident.

“Say, I heard your boss is going to make a trip home to Italy.”

“I don’t know. Seems odd to me he never went before. Those families are awful close.”

“Got time for a cup of coffee?”

“I ought to get swept out. Should be a busy morning after the holiday.”

“Oh, come on! Live big. The personal friend of Mr. Baker can afford time for a cup of coffee.” He didn’t say it meanly the way it looks in print. He could make anything sound innocent and well-intentioned.

In all the years I had never gone into the Foremaster Grill for a cup of coffee in the morning and I was probably the only man in town who didn’t. It was a custom, a habit, and a club. We climbed on stools at the counter and Miss Lynch, I went to school with her, slid coffee to us without spilling any in the saucer. A tiny bottle of cream leaned against the cup but she rolled two paper-wrapped cubes of sugar like dice so that Morph cried out, “Snake eyes.”

Miss Lynch—Miss Lynch. The “miss” was part of her name by now, and part of herself. I guess she will never be able to excise it. Her nose gets redder every year, but it’s sinus, not booze.

“Morning, Ethan,” she said. “You celebrating something?”

“He dragged me in,” I said, and then as an experiment in kindness, “Annie.”

Her head snapped around as though at a pistol shot and then, as the idea got through, she smiled and, do you know, she looked exactly as she had in the fifth grade, red nose and all.

“It’s good to see you, Ethan,” she said and wiped her nose on a paper napkin.

“When I heard it, I was surprised,” Morph said. He picked at the paper on the sugar cube. His nails were polished. “You get an idea and then it’s fixed and you think it’s true. Gives you a turn when it’s not.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I guess I don’t either. Goddam these wrappers. Why can’t they just put it loose in a bowl?”

“Maybe because people might use more.”

“I guess so. I knew a guy once lived on sugar for a while. He’d go in the Automat. Ten cents for a cup of coffee, drink half, fill it up with sugar. At least he didn’t starve to death.”

As usual, I wondered if that guy wasn’t Morph—a strange one, tough, ageless man with a manicure. I think he was a fairly well-educated man, but only because of his processes, his technique of thinking. His erudition hid in a demi-world dialect, a language of the bright, hard, brassy illiterate. “Is that why you use one lump of sugar?” I asked.

He grinned. “Everybody’s got a theory,” he said. “I don’t care how beat a guy is, he’ll have a theory why he’s beat. A theory can lead you down the garden path ’cause you’ll follow it in spite of road signs. I guess that’s what fooled me about your boss.”

I hadn’t had coffee away from home in a long time. It wasn’t very good. It didn’t taste like coffee at all but it was hot, and I spilled some on my shirt, so I know it was also brown.

“I guess I don’t know what you mean.”

“I been trying to track where I got the idea. I guess it’s because he says he’s been here forty years. Thirty-five years or thirty-seven years, okay, but not forty years.”

“I guess I’m not too bright.”

“That would make it 1920. You still don’t dig it? Well, in a bank you’ve got to case people quick, check hustlers, you know. Pretty soon you get a built-in set of rules. You don’t even think about it. It just clicks into place—and you can be wrong. Maybe he did come in 1920. I could be wrong.”

I finished my coffee. “Time to sweep out,” I said.

“You fool me too,” Morph said. “If you asked questions I’d be hard to get. But you don’t, so I got to tell you. Nineteen twenty-one was the first emergency immigration law.”

“And?”

“In 1920 he could come in. In 1921 he probably couldn’t.”

“And?”

“So—anyway my weasel brain says—he came in after 1921 by the back door. So he can’t go home because he can’t get a passport to get back.”

“God, I’m glad I’m not a banker.”

“You’d probably be better than I am. I talk too much. If he’s going back, I’m real wrong. Wait up—I’m coming. Coffee’s on me.”

“’By, Annie,” I said.

“Come in again, Eth. You never come in.”

“I will.”

As we crossed the street Morph said, “Don’t let on to his guinea eminence that I pulled a blooper about him being deportation bait, will you?”

“Why should I?”

“Why did I? What’s in that jewel case?”

“Knight Templar’s hat. Feather’s yellow. Going to see if it can be whited up.”

“You belong to that?”

“It’s in the family. We been Masons since before George Washington was Grand Master.”

“He was? Does Mr. Baker belong?”

“It’s in his family too.”

We were in the alley now. Morph fished for the key to the bank’s back door. “Maybe that’s why we open the safe like a lodge meeting. Might as well be holding candles. It’s kind of holy.”

“Morph,” I said, “you’re full of bull this morning. Easter didn’t clean you up at all.”

“I’ll know in eight days,” he said. “No, I mean it. Comes nine o’clock on the nose we stand uncovered in front of the holy of holies. Then the time lock springs and Father Baker genuflects and opens the safe and we all bow down to the Great God Currency.”

“You’re nuts, Morph.”

“Maybe so. Goddam this old lock. You could open it with an ice pick but not with the key.” He jiggled the key and kicked at the door until it finally burst open. He took a piece of Kleenex from his pocket and jammed it into the spring lock’s seat.

I caught myself about to ask, Isn’t that dangerous?

He answered without the question. “Damn thing won’t lock itself open. Course Baker checks to see it’s locked after the safe’s open. Don’t blow my dirty suspicions to Marullo, will you? He’s too solvent.”

“Okay, Morph,” I said and turned to my own door on my own side of the alley, and looked around for the cat that always tried to get in, but he wasn’t there.

Inside, the store looked changed and new to me. I saw things I had never seen before and didn’t see things that had worried and irritated me. And why not? Bring new eyes to a world or even new lenses, and presto—new world.

The leaky valve of the old box toilet hissed softly. Marullo wouldn’t get a new valve because the water wasn’t metered and who cared. I went to the front of the store and lifted a slotted two-pound weight from the old-fashioned balance scale. In the toilet I hung the weight on the chain above the oaken tassel. The toilet flushed and kept on flushing. I went back to the front of the store to listen and could hear it bubbling and scolding in the bowl. It’s a sound you can’t mistake for anything else. Then I returned the weight to its bar on the scale and took my place in my pulpit behind the counter. My congregation in the shelves stood waiting. Poor devils, they couldn’t get away. I particularly noticed the Mickey Mouse mask smiling down from its box in the pew of breakfast foods. That reminded me of my promise to Allen. I found the extension hand for grabbing things from top shelves and took a box down and stood it under my coat in the storeroom. When I was back in the pulpit, the next Mickey Mouse in line smiled down at me.

I reached behind the canned goods and brought out the gray linen sack of small change for the cash register, then, remembering something, reached farther until my hand found the old greasy .38-caliber revolver that had been there ever since I can remember. It was a silvered Iver Johnson with most of the silver peeled off. I broke it and saw the cartridges green with verdigris. The cylinder was so sluggish with ancient grease that it turned with difficulty. I put the disreputable and probably dangerous piece in the drawer below the cash register, pulled out a clean apron, and wrapped it around my middle, folding the top over neatly to conceal the strings.

Is there anyone who has not wondered about the decisions and acts and campaigns of the mighty of the earth? Are they born in reasoning and dictated by virtue or can some of them be the products of accidents, of daydreaming, of imagining, of the stories we tell ourselves? I know exactly how long I had been playing a game of imagining because I know it started with the Morph’s rules for successful bank robbery. I had gone over his words with a childish pleasure adults ordinarily will not admit. It was a play game that ran parallel with the store’s life and everything that happened seemed to fall into place in the game. The leaking toilet, the Mickey Mouse mask Allen wanted, the account of the opening of the safe. New curves and angles dropped into place, the Kleenex nudged in the door lock in the alley. Little by little the game grew, but entirely in the mind until this morning. Putting the scale weight on the toilet chain was the first physical contribution I had made to the mental ballet. Getting the old pistol out was the second. And now I began to wonder about the timing. The game was growing in precision.

I still carry my father’s big silver Hamilton railroad watch with thick hands and big black numbers, a wonderful watch for time-telling, if not for beauty. This morning I put it in my shirt pocket before I swept out the store. And I checked the time so that at five minutes to nine I had the front doors open and had just taken the first deliberate broom strokes at the sidewalk. It’s amazing how much dirt accumulates over a weekend, and what with the rain, the dirt was slush.

What a wonderful precision instrument is our bank—like my father’s railroad watch. At five minutes of nine Mr. Baker came into the wind from Elm Street. Harry Robbit and Edith Alden must have been watching. They backed out of the Foremaster Grill and joined him midstreet.

“Morning, Mr. Baker,” I called. “Morning, Edith. Morning, Harry.”

“Good morning, Ethan. You’re going to need a hose for that!” They entered the bank.