Clarkton (11 page)

Still watching her, he said, “Let's go inside and look at you, Fern, and then we'll talk about the other things.”

10.
“Y
ou don't believe me,” Fern said. “Moth
er's mind runs on a pattern, and you think the same way. I thought up a story to be alone with you.”

“I believe you. I tell you the pain is real. I don't think you're imagining the pain. It hurts you and it's there. But it's not produced because anything is organically wrong with you. And I think it will go away.”

“Then why is it there?”

“Why does your mother get her headaches, Fern?”

The girl looked at him hopelessly. He told her to put on her clothes, and then he went back to his office and sat at his desk, staring at a calendar. He had a habit of playing with smooth-surfaced things, as if tactile sensation was a need, and he picked up his pen, handled it, and then made marks on the pad in front of him, and was like that, doing that when Fern came out.

“What's wrong with me, Elliott?”

“Why do you say wrong, Ferney?” he answered without looking up. “I told you before that you weren't sick.”

She stood in front of his desk and told him, in that flat voice that was becoming more and more a part of her these days, “You're the only good thing that ever happened to me, Elliott, and I tell you that I love you, and you look at me as if I'm a fool kid, and you think I invent things—”

“I don't think you're a fool kid, Ferney. If I had a daughter, I would want her to be like you.”

“That's a lie,” Fern said. “But it's the nicest lie I ever heard. I don't hear anything nice any more.”

He had long ago stopped being sorry for people, out of a full-blown realization of the purposelessness of sorrow; but his friend's daughter, standing in front of his desk, wholly impotent and childlike, moved him. It gave him a strange feeling to think of her loving him. He didn't want to react to it now, but talk about it to Ruth; he would say to Ruth, in the calm acceptance of facts that underlay their relationship, that this was in all actuality as sincere and real as anything called love was in these United States in this year of 1945, where Katharine Hepburn or Ingrid Bergman defined the highest relationship that the ethics of civilization had produced, or Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart. Dreams came out of the dream factory, and what else was to be expected in any case! He began to feel old, a common feeling of late, hardly hearing Fern say to him:

“Isn't it important for you to believe me? Why do you think they threw me out of Bennington?”

“Sit down,” he said, motioning at the chair alongside his desk. “Do you want a cigarette, Fern?” She nodded, and he lit one for her and another for himself. “I don't care why they threw you out of Bennington,” he said. “It doesn't matter.”

“It matters to me what you think,” she insisted. “I did nothing. Do you know what they say about me here? Do you know what they think of me, and my own father and mother too? Do you know what it was—we picked up a boy, a soldier with leave and with no money and no place to go, and we thought it would be smart and like movies we had seen to sneak him up to our room, and when we got him up there we had to fight him off for a while, but finally he agreed to get into one of the beds and the two of us, my roommate and I, got into the other, but during the night he started in again, stark naked, and it made such a fuss the whole school came in—and he lied. He was just rotten, filthy rotten, and he lied.…”

It didn't occur to him that she was not telling the truth. There was all of the forlorn conviction that comes with the truth and from nowhere else. He asked her why she hadn't told her father or her mother.

“Because I hate them,” she said simply.

“You shouldn't hate them, Fern. It's pointless to hate them.”

“That's what Clark used to say, and he hated them too. In a different way. He felt sorry for them. I don't. When Clark died, I wanted to die, but they didn't care.”

“They cared, Fern.”

“Do you think so? You don't know much about them, do you, Elliott? It was their best possession, and they lost it. People couldn't look at Mother walking with Clark and think that they were brother and sister any more. They can't love anything, Elliott—they can't. They can't love and they can't hate. And I hate them for that. I hate them because Clark died, and they didn't even know that it hurt him or how it hurt him. And all I could think of was how it hurt him. You don't even think I'm talking sense, do you, Elliott?”

“I think you're talking sense, Ferney.”

“What should I do?”

But it made no sense for her to ask the question, or for him to try to answer it. He had at least ten answers; he could lay them out, blueprint them, itemize them, and extend them into an indefinite future. He recalled Ruth telling him once that the worst sin of a radical was glibness, but you didn't change people as easily as you changed a sentence you could say but wouldn't. Change was a process basic to all others, but you couldn't play it as you played a musical instrument. His own daughter, if she had lived, would be a little more than eleven years old today, not too much younger than the girl who sat there now, telling him that she was in love with him. When his own little girl had died that night, in Barcelona, her face mashed to a pulp by a piece of five-hundred-pound demolition bomb, he had walked all night with the body in his arms, looking for Ruth, not defining paths of action for his future, but sitting down more and more often to weep over the small corpse as the night wore into morning, mingling his sorrow with despair. Then it had shocked him, when he found Ruth, to realize her cold and murderous anger; it was a shock he needed. It brought him back to life at a moment when the heart was flowing out of him, when he called into question and found unanswered all the motives and reasons that had taken him where he was. The difference between himself and his wife came into focus then; he had gone to Spain because it was logical and rational and idealistic—and eminently correct in terms of his need to sleep easily at night, and then the little girl died and he realized he would not sleep well any more. But in Ruth, hatred hardly left space for sorrow.

Now, later, when Fern had gone, he told Ruth about it, she all the while watching him curiously, something birdlike in the way her head was cocked.

“It must have been very flattering,” Ruth said.

“Why?”

“I think I'd be flattered if a little boy fell in love with me.”

“That's a hell of a thing to say!” His anger was a slow thing, never really emerging, like the repressed sex urge of an adolescent.

“I'm sorry. Elliott, why didn't you try to help her?”

“Would you?”

“It wouldn't matter to me,” Ruth shrugged.

“That's really the way you feel, isn't it?” Abbott said.

“But you didn't help her.”

“What in hell could I do?”

“Maybe you should have gone to bed with her,” Ruth said flatly, turning away and leaving his anger like a live thing fixed in his throat, a hopeless anger that dissolved as quickly as it had gathered. He was a rational creature, and he was able to reflect that, whatever she said, Ruth would have done something. He had done nothing; but the more he probed and considered the thing, the more certain he became that there was nothing he could have done.

11.
H
amilton Gelb sent Frank Norman to take
a walk around the town. He had a certain respect and liking for Norman, but because he did not believe that sincerity and a sense of duty were sufficient substitutes for brains and objectivity, he had no particularly high hopes or plans for the boy. As a matter of fact, in those moments when Gelb was irritated with Frank Norman, he mentally classified him as a tout with the soul of a bookkeeper; but afterward he would feel sorry for such an attitude and ascribe it to his long-ago past, to a certain obstinate and foreign reluctance to recognize a clean-cut and forthright type of American. Yet Gelb could not help being annoyed at the way Norman reacted toward any deviation from the pattern, his almost frenetic resistance to change, his attitude toward Negroes, Jews, foreigners, and anything else he considered subversive. Gelb, who had some understanding of radicals, did not hate them; Frank Norman hated them and did not understand them or want to understand them, nor was this hatred appreciably lessened by the patient efforts of Gelb to make him realize that an enemy worth fighting is an enemy worth respecting. He had told Norman, when they first began to work together, “You must get certain things out of your head. You must get it out of your head that these people are part of an international plot, controlled by Moscow, and you must get it out of your head that they are planning a revolution where they will seize the post offices and the state capitols and take over. That is a kid's notion, all right for senators and congressmen, but not for the kind of work we do.”

“But they do take orders from Moscow—”

“My own opinion,” Gelb had said, “is that they don't give two damns for Moscow. If they were that kind of an organization, they would give us no trouble. What kind of an idiot would join an organization like that? I've had twenty years of experience with these babies, and most of them don't know that the Kremlin exists and don't care either. Also, if you get to think of them as the mainspring of everything, you'll get off the track. They're a very small organization, and at best they're a catalyst. You get to thinking that they make unions and strikes and the rest of it, and you go off the beam. The opposite is more like the truth.”

But the opposite was not a conception that Frank Norman could handle. For him, the essential complexity of that kind of thinking defeated itself. He was a simple and not unhealthy type of person, and all during his army experience he had kept the calm and matter-of-fact conviction that America was fighting the wrong nations. It pleased him that he could have a peacetime job on the right side instead of the wrong. Now, before he set out on his walk, Gelb gave him a few words of advice—to the effect of keeping his eyes open and feeling a mood rather than trying to overhear anything. “Whatever they taught you in the service about this kind of work,” Gelb said, “the best way to operate is to put yourself in the same mental state as the people you're observing. Try to become a part of them and to react as they are reacting. That requires sensitivity, and sensitivity is something you will never have enough of. Never get angry, because as soon as you become angry, you raise a wall between yourself and your subjects. You might drop into Joe Santana's barber shop and get a haircut. Don't ask questions, because there's nothing worth knowing that comes from questions. People want to talk, and if you have patience they'll tell you everything you care to know. That's the only factor that distinguishes them from animals.”

Norman would have been angry, had he not respected Gelb so much. Gelb was the type of man he admired, the type of man who, in Norman's opinion, made the best officers in the service. It made him want to do what Gelb asked him to do.

Now he sauntered down the main street of Clarkton, his hat tilted back on his head, his coat open, his hands in his pockets, looking for all the world like one of those college boys who sometimes came down from Williams to keep a date with a girl at the hotel, to get drunk, or maybe just to eat a steak dinner. It was not difficult to operate without anger on such a nice, sunny day, and he would have had to be far more insensate than he was not to collect some of the feeling that pervaded the town. His gaze wandered from store window to store window, and here and there he saw posters which expressed storekeepers' support of the strikers, a movement in which, as Gelb assured him, the reds had taken the lead, basing it on the more or less sound presumption that the workers in the town did most of the buying. Norman also noticed the girls, dark haired, most of them, and pretty, and he wished that he had a date for that evening. He went into the dusky, sour cave of a saloon and ordered a beer; and contrary to his expectations the talk of the dozen or so men at the bar, all of them workers, did not stop at his entrance. They gave him hardly more than a glance, and then went on talking, in that slow, deliberate way of theirs, about the atomic bomb, the Lowell family, the price of food, the late war, the President, the hockey matches, the Russians, and a number of other things. He went back into the daylight and sauntered on. He came presently to Joe Santana's barber shop and turned in. A man was being shaved, and a boy of about twelve was waiting. Norman seated himself, picked up a copy of the
New Masses;
and leafed through it, recalling the apt remark of a columnist about butcher-paper periodicals. His own regard for technical excellence was balanced by an opinion of those who did not and apparently could not do things well.

The barber was talking about evolution in a way that reminded him of his freshman days in college. He fell into a sort of a doze as he listened, content with himself and satisfied that he was doing an exciting job well.

12.
T
he maid, who opened the door of his house
for Lowell, stood there looking at him as he got out of his overcoat, until he asked her what it was.

“Miss Antonini has been waiting for half an hour inside, and I just want to know if I should ask her to keep on waiting?”

“Who is Miss Antonini?”

“I don't know,” the maid said. “She says she had an appointment with Mrs. Lowell.”

“And where is Mrs. Lowell?”

“She's upstairs with a sick headache since one o'clock, and now she's asleep. I think she ought to sleep.”

“All right,” Lowell said. “I'll talk to Miss Antonini. Where: is she—in the living, room?”

“In the living room,” the maid said.

Lowell was not curious; curiosity, interest even, was not a part of him at this point. The twenty-two hours since he had returned to Clarkton translated themselves, in terms of his body, into emptiness—a mental high colonic that left him indifferent and apathetic. The only thing he wanted at this moment was a drink, and however painful a human being Miss Antonini might be, she would be preferable to his wife with a sick headache. He went into the library first, and while he was mixing the martinis, he tried to engender in himself some enthusiasm for the rest of the day and the evening. He tried to think of something to do that he would want to do, some place to go where he would want to go, and he found himself agreeing with Lois' proposal that they go away from Clarkton. The only thing that held him, he realized now, was the strike itself. Only since the strike had his attitude toward the plant become anything more than casual; in a sense, only since the strike had he become aware of himself as a person with more than immediate needs. The strike was a calendar.