The Winter of Our Discontent (25 page)

“I guess you’re just impossible,” she said.

“If you plan to join the others, you might tell your blinking brother that I brought him his bleeding Mickey Mouse mask and shame on him.”

“You never listen, really listen.”

“I do too.”

“No, you don’t. You’ll be sorry.”

“Good-by, Leda. Say hello to the swan.”

She lounged away, a baby-fatted volupt. Girls kill me. They turn out to be girls.

My Mary was just beautiful, just beautiful and shining. A light from inside her oozed out of her pores. She took my arm as we walked down Elm Street under the arching trees with the street lights playing on us and I swear our legs moved with the proud and tender steps of thoroughbreds coming to the barrier.

“You must come to Rome! Egypt isn’t big enough for you. The great world calls.”

She giggled. I swear she giggled as would have done honor to our daughter.

“We’re going to go out more often, my darling.”

“When?”

“When we are rich.”

“When is that?”

“Soon. I’m going to teach you to wear shoes.”

“Will you light your cigars with ten-dollar bills?”

“Twenties.”

“I like you.”

“Shucks, ma’am. You oughten to say that. You plumb embarrass me.”

Not long ago the owners of the Foremaster installed bow windows on the street, with small square panes of bottle glass, designed to make the place look old and authentic—and it did so look—but people sitting inside at the tables had their faces altered by the warping glass. One face would be all jaw, another one big vacant eye, but it all added to the age and the authenticity of the old Foremaster and so did the geraniums and lobelias in the window boxes.

Margie was waiting for us, hostess to her fingertips. She introduced her companion, a Mr. Hartog of New York, sun-lamp tanned and set with teeth like an ear of Country Gentleman. Mr. Hartog looked wrapped and shellacked, but he answered all sentences with an appreciative laugh. That was his contribution and it wasn’t a bad one.

“How d’you do?” said Mary.

Mr. Hartog laughed.

I said, “I hope you know your companion is a witch.”

Mr. Hartog laughed. We all felt good.

Margie said, “I’ve asked for a table by the window. That one there.”

“You also had them put special flowers, Margie.”

“Mary, I have to do something to repay all your kindness.”

They went on like this during and after Margie had seated us, and Mr. Hartog laughed at every period, clearly a brilliant man. I made a plan to get a word from him, but later.

The set table seemed fine and very white and the silver which wasn’t silver looked extra silvery.

Margie said, “I’m the hostess and that means I’m the boss and I say martinis whether you want them or not.” Mr. Hartog laughed.

The martinis came, not in little glasses but big as bird baths with twists of lemon peel. The first taste bit like a vampire bat, made its little anesthesia, and after that the drink mellowed and toward the bottom turned downright good.

“We’re going to have two,” said Margie. “The food’s pretty good here but not that good.”

Then I told how I had always planned to open a bar where you could only get your second martini. I would make a fortune.

Mr. Hartog laughed and four more bird baths appeared at our table while I was still chewing the first lemon peel.

With the first taste of his second drink, Mr. Hartog developed the power of speech. He had a low, vibrant voice, like that of an actor or a singer or a salesman of some product people don’t want. You might even call it a bedside voice.

“Mrs. Young-Hunt tells me you’re in business here,” he said. “It’s a fascinating town—unspoiled.”

I was about to tell him exactly what my business consisted in when Margie took the ball. “Mr. Hawley is the coming power of this county,” she said.

“So? What line are you in, Mr. Hawley?”

“Everything,” said Margie. “Absolutely everything, but not openly, you understand.” Her eyes had a liquor shine. I looked at Mary’s eyes and they were just beginning to surface, so I judged the others had had a couple before we came, or at least Margie had.

“Well, that saves me from denying it,” I said.

Mr. Hartog came back to his laugh. “You have a lovely wife. That’s half the battle.”

“That’s the whole battle.”

“Ethan, you’ll make him think we fight.”

“Oh, we do!” I gulped half the glass and felt the warmth spring up behind my eyes. And I was looking at the bottle end of one of the tiny window panes. It caught the candlelight and seemed to revolve slowly. Maybe it was self-hypnosis, for I heard my own voice go on, listened to myself from outside myself. “Mrs. Margie is the Witch of the East. A martini is not a drink. It’s a potion.” The gleaming glass still held me.

“Oh, dear! I always thought of myself as Ozma. Wasn’t the Witch of the East a wicked witch?”

“She was indeed.”

“And didn’t she melt?”

Through the crooked glass I saw a man’s figure walking past on the sidewalk. He was all misshaped by the distortion, but he carried his head a little to the left and walked curiously on the outsides of his feet. Danny did that. I saw myself leap up and run after him. I saw myself run to the corner of Elm Street but he had disappeared, perhaps in the back garden of the second house. I called, “Danny! Danny! Give me back the money. Please, Danny, give it to me. Don’t take it. It’s poisoned. I poisoned it!”

I heard a laugh. It was Mr. Hartog’s laugh. Margie said, “Well, I would rather be Ozma.”

I wiped the tears from my eyes with my napkin and explained, “I should drink it, not bathe my eyes in it. It burns.”

“Your eyes are all red,” Mary said.

I couldn’t get back to the party but I heard myself talk and tell stories and I heard my Mary laugh like golden glory so I guess I was funny, and even charming, but I couldn’t ever get back to the table. And I think Margie knew it. She kept looking at me with a concealed question, damn her. She was a witch.

I don’t know what we had to eat. I remember white wine so perhaps it was fish. The brittle glass revolved like a propeller. And there was brandy, so I must have had coffee—and then it was over.

Going out, when Mary and Mr. Hartog had gone ahead, Margie asked, “Where did you go?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“You went away. You were only part here.”

“Aroint ye, witch!”

“Okay, bud,” she said.

On our way home I searched the shadows of the gardens. Mary clung to my arm and her footsteps were a little jerky. “What a nice time,” she said. “I never had a better time.”

“It was nice.”

“Margie’s a perfect hostess. I don’t know how I’ll match that dinner.”

“She surely is.”

“And you, Ethan. I knew you could be funny but you had us laughing all the time. Mr. Hartog said he was weak from laughing about Mr. Red Baker.”

Had I told that? Which one? I must have. Oh, Danny—give back the money! Please!

“You’re better than a show,” my Mary said. And in our own doorway I grabbed her so tight that she whimpered. “You’re tipped, darling. You’re hurting. Please don’t let’s wake the children.”

It was my intention to wait until she slept and then to creep out, to go to his shack, to look for him, even to put the police on him. But I knew better. Danny was gone. I knew Danny was gone. And I lay in the darkness and watched the little red and yellow spots swimming in the water of my eyes. I knew what I had done, and Danny knew it too. I thought of my small rabbit slaughter. Maybe it’s only the first time that’s miserable. It has to be faced. In business and in politics a man must carve and maul his way through men to get to be King of the Mountain. Once there, he can be great and kind—but he must get there first.

CHAPTER TEN

The Templeton Airfield is only about forty miles from New Baytown, and that’s about five minutes’ flying time for the jets. They come over with increasing regularity, swarms of deadly gnats. I wish I could admire them, even love them the way my son Allen does. If they had more than one purpose, maybe I could, but their only function is killing and I’ve had a bellyful of that. I haven’t learned, as Allen has, to locate them by looking ahead of the sound they make. They go through the sound barrier with a boom that makes me think the furnace has exploded. When they go over at night they get into my dreams and I awaken with a sad sick feeling as though my soul had an ulcer.

Early in the morning a flight of them boomed through and I jumped awake, a little trembly. They must have made me dream of those German 88-millimeter all-purpose rifles we used to admire and fear so much.

My body was prickly with fear sweat as I lay in the gathering morning light and listened to the slender spindles of malice whining away in the distance. I thought how that shudder was under the skin of everybody in the world, not in the mind, deep under the skin. It’s not the jets so much as what their purpose is.

When a condition or a problem becomes too great, humans have the protection of not thinking about it. But it goes inward and minces up with a lot of other things already there and what comes out is discontent and uneasiness, guilt and a compulsion to get something—anything—before it is all gone. Maybe the assembly-line psychoanalysts aren’t dealing with complexes at all but with those warheads that may one day be mushroom clouds. It does seem to me that nearly everyone I see is nervous and restless and a little loud and gaily crazy like people getting drunk on New Year’s Eve. Should auld acquaintance be forgot and kiss your neighbor’s wife.

I turned my head toward mine. She was not smiling in her sleep. Her mouth was drawn down and there were lines of weariness around her squinched-shut eyes and so she was sick, because that’s the way she looks when she is sick. She is the wellest wife in the world until she is sick, which isn’t often, and then she is the sickest wife in the world.

Another flight of jets exploded through sound. We had maybe a half-million years to get used to fire and less than fifteen to build thinking about this force so extravagantly more fierce than fire. Would we ever have the chance to make a tool of this? If the laws of thinking are the laws of things, can fission be happening in the soul? Is that what is happening to me, to us?

I remember a story Aunt Deborah told me long ago. Early in the last century some of my people were Cambellites. Aunt Deborah was a child then, but she remembered how the end of the world was coming at a certain time. Her parents gave everything away, everything they owned but the bed sheets. Those they put on and at the predicted time they went to the hills to meet the End of the World. Dressed in sheets, hundreds of people prayed and sang. The night came and they sang louder and danced and as it got near time there was a shooting star, she said, and everybody screamed. She could still remember the screaming. Like wolves, she said, like hyenas, although she had never heard a hyena. Then the moment came. White-dressed men and women and children held their breaths. The moment went on and on. The children got blue in the face—and then it passed. It was done and they were cheated out of their destruction. In the dawn they crept down the hill and tried to get back the clothes they had given away, and the pots and pans and their ox and their ass. And I remember knowing how bad they must have felt.

I think what brought that back was the jets—all that enormous effort and time and money to stockpile all that death. Would we feel cheated if we never used it? We can shoot rockets into space but we can’t cure anger or discontent.

My Mary opened her eyes. “Ethan,” she said, “you’re talking in your mind. I don’t know what it’s about but it’s loud. Stop thinking, Ethan.”

I was going to suggest that she give up drink but she looked too miserable. I don’t always know when not to joke, but this time I said, “Head?”

“Yes.”

“Stomach?”

“Yes.”

“All over?”

“All over.”

“I’ll get you something.”

“Get me a grave.”

“Stay down.”

“I can’t. I’ve got to get the children off to school.”

“I’ll do it.”

“You’ve got to go to work.”

“I’ll do it, I tell you.”

After a moment she said, “Ethan, I don’t think I can get up. I feel too bad.”

“Doctor?”

“No.”

“I can’t leave you alone. Can Ellen stay with you?”

“No, she has examinations.”

“Could I call up Margie Young-Hunt to come over?”

“Her phone is out. She’s getting a new thingamabob.”

“I can go by and ask her.”

“She’d kill anybody that waked her this early.”

“I could slip a note under her door.”

“No, I don’t want you to.”

“Nothing to it.”

“No, no. I don’t want you to. I don’t want you to.”

“I can’t leave you alone.”

“That’s funny. I feel better. I guess it was shouting at you that did it. Well, it’s true,” she said, and to prove it she got up and put on her dressing gown. She did look better.

“You’re wonderful, my darling.”

I cut myself shaving and went down to breakfast with a red tatter of toilet paper sticking to my face.

No Morph standing on the porch picking his teeth when I went by. I was glad. I didn’t want to see him. I hurried just in case he might try to catch up with me.

When I opened the alley door I saw the brown bank envelope that had been pushed under it. It was sealed and bank envelopes are tough. I had to get out my pocket knife to slit it open.

Three sheets of paper from a five-cent lined school pad, written on with a soft lead pencil. A will: “I, being in my right mind . . .” and “In consideration I . . .” A note of hand: “I agree to repay and pledge my . . .” Both papers signed, the writing neat and precise. “Dear Eth: This is what you want.”