Clarkton (13 page)

The cold of the burned-out fire and the sickly color of dawn awakened him. He moved and the girl moved closer to him, and he twisted his head, so that he could kiss her and let his tongue play over the down oh her upper lip.

15.
I
t was not until close to dinnertime that Lois
began to feel an edge-of uncertainty. She called the plant, and Tom Wilson, who was still there, said, “No—he left a little after three o'clock. He didn't come back.” Lois questioned the maid again, and received only the same simple facts, that Mr. Lowell said he would drive Miss Antonini home. Her headache was almost gone now, and she had not yet begun to worry, actually, and when she spoke to Fern about it, the girl said indifferently:

“He's all right. If he smashed up or anything of that sort, you would know about it right away, wouldn't you?”

“How can you talk like that?”

“How do you want me to talk? Why don't you call Miss Antonini's home and see if she's there?”

“What a foul thing to say!”

“But so is almost everything I say these days.”

Their dinner was silent and tasteless, and afterward Lois tried to read a mystery novel, but the words were meaningless and her thoughts, instead of following them, began to create a sentimental picture of her family. In a little while, she was recalling incidents that concerned herself and her son, prettified incidents in which the two of them were always together and no one else present. She remembered how, when he was very small and they lived in the south of France, she would take him down to the beach, and her memory turned the landscape into a Mediterranean Watteau, in which only the hoopskirt for the shepherdess was lacking. She brought herself to the point of tears, and Fern, who had been stalking about the house, looked into the room and saw her mother sitting and weeping. She went out, and a moment later Lois heard the motor of the roadster start. Lois dried her tears and accepted, with no sense of reality, the thought of George's death. Often enough, in the past, she had considered fleetingly the question of what she would do if her husband died; black was a good color for her; and she consistently felt more pity for herself than for George. Her thoughts were not in any sense planned, nor did they base themselves on any real belief in or conviction of George's death; they were simply cut loose, and they roamed as she indulged the picture of widowhood. She would take an apartment on Fifth or on Park, or perhaps buy one of those East Side houses, such as she and George had rented during the winters of 1937 and 1938, when they were ridiculously cheap, and live a quiet sort of a life—but this made for pity for George, who was not there. After weeping a little more, she called Elliott and told him.

“I wouldn't worry,” he said. “I'm sure nothing happened to George.”

“But he never did anything like this.”

“I still wouldn't worry,” Elliott said matter-of-factly.

“Do you know this Miss Antonini?”

“I know her,” Elliott said. “She's a girl who used to go around with Clark sometimes.”

“You knew about that too. And you never told me?”

“I thought Clark had told you,” Elliott lied.

Lois could find no way to ask him what she wanted to ask him. She replaced the phone, went back to her book, laid it aside after a while and walked restlessly through the house. The phone rang and her heart stood still, but it was only Tom Wilson to ask whether Lowell had come in yet. When she was through speaking to him, Lois went upstairs to Clark's room. She sat on her son's bed looking at his picture on the bureau, but she had no desire to cry any more. Her self-pity had nodulized itself into a lump of perverse satisfaction, and the initial germ of hatred had been born. She considered herself a fool now for having called Wilson and Abbott, and she began to consider the future in terms apart from widowhood.

It wasn't until she went to bed that a tenderness for George began to reassert itself, and that she was willing to accept the premise that she loved her husband a good deal. He became a child in the same terms that Clark was a child, and there came into her mind something he had once told her.…

He and Elliott Abbott, when they were very young, had once gotten into some sort of a scrape and been hauled off to the local police station. It never went much beyond that, and they were released the same day; but George's father, the old Mr. Lowell, had been furious. Lois remembered George's father very well indeed. Born in Taunton on the same day that Fort Sumter was fired upon, he bore the name Lowell in poverty, misery, and hatred—until on his thirty-first year he was able to write down in his diary:
I have made my first million dollars, and the taste is sweet.
The taste became sweeter. It cost the old man a cool fifty thousand dollars to prove that he was a Lowell in the Massachusetts. sense and that the village of Clarkton had been settled by his great-grandfather, and he took his own revenge on the sleepy hillside village. But what Lois remembered now was the story George had told her of that day when he got in the scrape, and how his father had beaten him afterward until his skin welted up and blood ran from the pores, until he lay face down on the carpet of the library, whimpering for mercy and being instructed meanwhile in the code of the Lowells, and precisely what it meant to be a Lowell.

16.
I
t was almost nine in the morning when Low
ell appeared. Fern, on her way out, greeted him with a smile and said, “You look done in,” but asked no questions and offered no other comment. The-maid told him that his wife was in the gun room, having her breakfast, but he only shrugged, went on upstairs, stripped down, showered, shaved, and dressed himself again. He was knotting his tie when Lois came into the room.

“Hello, George,” she said.

“Hello, Lois.”

“I suppose you missed a train—or something of the sort.”

“I was up at the lodge;” he said, “with Rose Antonini.”

“Just that?”

“Just that.”

“You don't want to talk about it, I suppose?” Lois asked.

“I don't particularly want to talk about it.”

“All right,” she said. “When you want to talk about it, George, suppose you tell me.” She was her old self now, her voice contained and even, her manner calm and assured, her widely spaced eyes filled with a balanced appraisal of the situation. “Whenever you want to talk about it, George. There were some calls for you,” she added. “If you can't get to the plant before eleven, Wilson asked for you to come over to police headquarters.”

“Thank you, Lois,” he said.

Saturday, December 8,1945

W
aking, for Danny Ryan, was in
the nature of an explosion; he never woke peacefully—just as he never slept peacefully. If one of the five children woke during the night, it started the others up, and the line of demarcation between night and day was not markedly fixed in their minds. But generally, in the small hours before dawn, all five would dissolve into sleep, and there would be a degree of peace until seven o'clock or so; then the world exploded. If he was fortunate, movement would awaken him first; if he was less fortunate, he drove into consciousness on a screaming, rising crescendo of sound, which always brought him back to the time, years ago, when he drank too often and too much; and if he was unfortunate on some mornings, consciousness would come in the shape of his son, Sean, seated astride of him, prying back his eyelids with small, determined fingers, while the others wriggled under the covers and pulled at his feet.

He was both flattered; and grateful that he and not Jean, his wife, took the brunt of these morning attacks. Looking back over the years, it seemed to him that Jean was most often pregnant, and perhaps the consistency of that state had trained the kids to be a little gentler with her. Jean was enormously pregnant now, curled beside him, full of animal warmth, comfort, and a placid acceptance of the children. Nothing disturbed Jean; nothing ever had disturbed this big, handsome French-Canadian girl since the time, eleven years before, when Ryan had seen her, fallen madly in love with her, and married her. He was still in love with her; he still considered her the largest, strongest, most beautiful woman on the face of the earth.

Jean, in turn, regarded him as another one of the growing brood. She had a vast patience with men and children, sickness, hunger, childbirth, and politics. When she married Danny Ryan, her parents had warned her that politics was like cancer in two ways; it was incurable and it never became better, only worse; but since that seemed to be an attribute shared by most of life's manifestations, she was not particularly disturbed. She herself was rooted in the earth, where nothing falls and where change is least perceptible, and for her, Danny Ryan was poet, singer, and prophet. If the priest condemned what Danny did, she was French enough to have an age-old and instinctive knowledge of priests, and she parted company with neither the church nor Danny Ryan, conciliating the two in the same unreasonable yet workable fashion as her ancestors.

Nor did she ask from her husband the same practicality that she demanded from the broad aspects of life. When she was just a little girl, she already knew the story of Danny's grandfather, Kevin Ryan, who in the year 1869 had set out, with seventeen other Irishmen, to achieve the conquest of Canada and to liberate both the land and the God-fearing people who inhabited it from the yoke of British despotism. Certain people, even to this day, considered that a reckless scheme, and she had once heard even Danny—who had the highest regard and the deepest admiration for his grandfather—characterize it as a sort of adventurism; but Kevin Ryan himself, speaking to a mass meeting at Worcester before he set off on his expedition, admitted that this was high adventure for men of high hopes and lofty ideals, and while he admitted the possibility of failure, he also pointed out that John Brown, with only two more in his band, had rocked the earth and put crowbars under great empires—and that there was no telling, as the Irish well knew from a thousand years of history, what the people would do when once you ignited a little spark among them. But the French of southern Canada—and Jean considered it to their everlasting shame—failed to recognize a liberator in Kevin Ryan and, failed to join him by the hundreds and the thousands; and after fighting for nineteen hours against eight hundred police and militia, abandoned by the very people he would free, abandoned by his own government, Kevin Ryan and fourteen of his men lay dead, released at least from the shame of being hanged, as the other three were:

So, knowing this tale, Jean did not ask that her husband be like everyone else. When he stopped drinking, she knew that he was destined for greatness, as so many small men are, and she let no one speak a word against him, not even the priest.

And on this morning, lying in bed and watching him struggle with five children, she said, “Danny—maybe one more week. Like they kick you outside, he is kicking me inside.”

“He?”

“This one is a boy. By God, Danny, after this one I am going to take long, long rest. No more.”

“Heaven forbid that I should want more after I have six.”

“That's what you say—but you got no will power, Danny.”

“I got the will, but I got no faith in myself, and that's the truth, when I think of what a man calmly does to a woman in his egotistical greed.”

“That is nonsense,” she said, climbing out of bed. “You want buckwheat cakes?”

The children began to scream for them, and that settled it.

2.
A
t breakfast with the Abbotts, Mike Sawyer
said: “I was due to leave today, but I think I'll hang around for a while, maybe until Sunday night. I guess I'll find a hotel room.”

“Stay here,” Ruth said. “You're no trouble.”

“I'm trouble, but it's comfortable here. I'd like to stay here, if you want me to. You know—I got to reading last night, of all the damn things,
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
, just because you had it there. I stayed up reading it until two o'clock.”

“Was your outfit in Italy?” Abbott asked.

“North Africa and then Italy, that's what made it peculiar reading. It's three thousand pages, so I'll never finish it, but I'd like to get at it now and then. We worked out of Rome for a while, with the partisans. They knew I was a red. They pulled about sixty per cent reds into that outfit, most of us from Spain, because they couldn't get along with the partisans and they figured the partisans would trust us. Did you know Jim Curry?”

“I think he had scurvy once, and they brought him up to Barcelona to be hospitalized. That was the only time I met him. He worked in the South.”

“A heavy-set boy—short and wide,” Ruth said.

“That's him. He headed up our outfit. It was good work. I felt I had a break, being there instead of somewhere else. But it's not like having a job. It's almost four years since I held a job, and not for long, because I guess for ten years I been closer to being a professional soldier than anything else. It makes me worry. I don't want to mess this up—not until I know where I stand. It's a complicated thing to be full-time, even in a little district like this one.”

“Is there any special reason for hanging around?” the doctor asked him.

“Mostly Gelb. I can't figure why they send a big-time operator into a place like this.”

“He has to come back,” Ruth smiled. “It's a long time since he made his reputation.”

The phone rang, and Abbott went to answer it. It was Lowell, and he said, “I have to see you this morning, Elliott.”

“How would noon do, twelve?”

“It has to be now.”

“Well—I usually make the rounds——”

“Break into it for this. I tell you I have to see you, Elliott.”

“All right. Suppose you come straight over.”