Clarkton (2 page)

“You come highly recommended,” Lowell said.

The small man smiled and nodded; that was the only time he smiled.

“It's a new situation for me,” Lowell said. “It seems enormously complicated to me. I suppose it's not complicated to you.”

“I never consider anything to be simple.”

“I don't know how much you know about me,” Lowell said. “I suppose you looked me up. You have a reputation for being very thorough.”

“In our business, you have to be very thorough. That is your only asset when you come down to it. It is not an art, it is a method.”

“I suppose so,” Lowell said.”

“Methodology is basic. You have the plant five years now?”

“About that,” Lowell answered. “My father died in 1940. My father was an old-fashioned man; he did things himself. I don't pretend to understand him, but I don't think he would have required your services.”

“You didn't get along with him?” James inquired.

“I got along with him,” Lowell answered flatly. “I didn't like the business. I still don't. It wasn't necessary that I should like it. I was well enough off, independently. So was my wife.”

“But now you feel an obligation, a sincere obligation—to your dead father, let us say?” There was no sentimentality in the small man's voice; he chose his words, spaced them, and the tone rasped like a rusty file.

“Let us
not
say!” Lowell snapped. “The war came, and things were needed.” He did not add that he himself was not needed, that his half-hearted efforts to enlist could only have resulted in a desk at the Pentagon building, as such efforts did for so many of his friends. “I am saddled with a very large enterprise,” Lowell explained carefully, “and I am in an unfamiliar situation. I thought all of that was explained to you. In such a situation, my father would have known exactly what to do; he was that sort of a man. I sought the advice of others, and they referred me to you.”

The small man nodded seriously.

“Specifically, I want the property protected,” Lowell went on. “I don't want the strike broken, you understand—?” He peered at James, realized with astonishment that he was afraid of the other, and forced himself to a deliberate, almost insolent action: “Put on the light, please,” nodding at the lamp on James's desk. After just one long moment of silence, the small man lit up his features with a click of the switch, became commonplace, sharp-featured, shrewd. “You broke strikes in the 'thirties, as I understand it,” Lowell continued smoothly. “These are not the 'thirties.”

“I am aware of that.”

They didn't like each other, and that was in the open now, and neither of them would forget it.

“I'll send two men up there—two very good men,” James said. “The police will cooperate with them?” Then he added, a studied afterthought: “Your father brought in three men to head up the force from Anaconda.” He knew that Lowell didn't know, and he couldn't resist the impulse to squeeze the small triumph. “That was in 'thirty-two.” Let Lowell wonder whether his father and this man had ever any dealings. “Jack Curzon—he's still chief of police, isn't he?”

“He is,” Lowell said.

Soon after that, he finished what details remained and left. He went to the Astor Bar, a place he hated, had three martinis and got drunk on them. That was where he picked up the dark-haired girl. He took her out to dinner, and afterward he checked out of the St. Regis and registered with her at the Bradly.

4.
I
t was a quarter to nine when he reached the
University Club, and on the elevator, going up to the dining room, he recognized Francis Simpson, whom he had not seen since 1934, in Paris. It was slow recognition, floor by floor, since they had never been particularly good friends, but had known each other in college and had met abroad afterward. Simpson looked old, a big fold of flesh under his chin, a moonface behind glasses, and Lowell's reaction to it, a sense of sorrow mixed with contempt, was part of the larger reaction he had had at the one and only alumni dinner he had attended, some four years past. Simpson was with a tall, thin man, whom he introduced to Lowell as a Mr. Bernstien, and then they invited Lowell to have breakfast with them. There was no earnest in their request, and Lowell would have refused, except that he hated so to eat alone. He sat down with them, ordered coffee and toast, and for the next fifteen minutes listened mostly to their talk. He found himself unreasonably envying Simpson, who had been overseas with the OWI for two years and was now a radio executive at Columbia Broadcasting. Bernstien, Lowell gathered, was a former Hollywood writer now doing radio work—some sort of radio writing, exactly what he could not tell—and from a word or two let drop, a colonel in the Signal Corps only the year before. They were discussing a particular program, and Lowell, who almost never listened to the radio, except to hear the news and some music occasionally, found himself projected into a world more or less foreign to him. He recalled a book Lois had read only the week before and passed on to him for his casual going-over; he read it the way he read most modern novels, superficially, disengaged, and the end result of it was almost no impression sustained. But now some of it came back, and when Simpson broke off abruptly to ask him what he was doing, he simply said:

“What? I didn't hear you, Francis.”

“George is a
rentier
,” Simpson explained to his friend. “He's a millionaire. He's one of the few authentic millionaires I have ever known.”

Bernstien smiled embarrassedly, and Lowell was conscious of an overwhelming impulse to lean across the table and slap one of Simpson's plump cheeks, an impulse which he conquered, grinning feebly at Simpson instead, regretting the whisky sour he was going to have but had instead forgotten. He mumbled something about reds and the OWI and what he supposed had happened to Simpson, and Simpson grinned and said to Bernstien:

“I told you. He's a dyed-in-the-wool reactionary—always was.”

“Francis isn't a red,” Bernstien said. “By no means. He's a good liberal and he feels strongly about a lot of things.”

Lowell waited only long enough, and then signed his check and left. When he reached the street, he was trembling with fury, something that had not happened to him in a long, long time.

5.
B
y train time, by the time he had settled
himself in the chair car with a book, the papers, an extra pack of cigarettes and a present for Lois—all of it and himself as well blending into the perspective of the long, somewhat tedious ride ahead of him, his anger had passed, and he was ready to tell himself that unpleasant people existed everywhere and could be easily met; but afterward, when he came to think about it—as he surely would—he would realize that these two were no more unpleasant than those he knew generally, and he would ask himself, as he had done before, whether or not he was developing a distaste for all people in his circle of acquaintance. That point came while the train was still clattering over the elevated structure that took it through Harlem. He watched the buildings with the empty curiosity of the thousands who ride past them daily, and he asked himself the question, answering it with the more or less objective realization that Berństien seemed a pleasant enough, harmless enough man, and Simpson was the kind the years obviously leave in bereavement, obtaining nothing from nothing and always surrounded by people like George Clark Lowell, surrounded by them but coming no closer to them than envy. So if it had not been these two, but two others instead, he still would have reacted in much the same way; and he fell into the fleeting consolation that if the boy had lived, he would have felt different about this sort of thing.

But he didn't want to think of the boy; ever since Elliott Abbott had remarked that thinking about that could become worse than a drug, in reference to Lois more than to himself, he attempted to control his thoughts carefully. Lois would be pleased, he thought, with his present, which was a snakelike choker of flexible gold, very simple and not too expensive. He would give it to her in the car, and she would wear it at dinner that night and probably not again for at least six months; but still she would be pleased with it.

The chair car was almost empty, half a dozen besides himself—circumstances of railway travel had changed so rapidly since the war ended! After he had looked around once or twice and met the peculiarly empty stare that Americans reserve for railway cars and public elevators, he lost interest, just as he had lost interest in the tenement houses alongside the track. He opened the book he had bought, the Modern Library edition of the short stories of Ernest Hèmingway, and ruffled through it, trying to recall the name of a story he had read once, a long time back, of a couple who went to hunt lions in Africa, and how the wife, a thoroughgoing bitch, had murdered her own husband in a peculiarly horrible way; just what way, he couldn't recall, but he did recall a line to the effect of American men remaining adolescent until suddenly they were plunged into middle age. He didn't find the story he was looking for, but that line remained in his head, and when he started to read a story his thoughts were elsewhere, and three pages of words marched by without any meaning whatsoever.

Instead, he remembered the last time he had seen his son, and how completely pleasant things were between them. After the leave at home, they flew to New York together, and he said to the boy:

“If you have a date with a girl or if you are going to make a date with a girl or if you want to, or if you want to call some: one up, or if you want to walk around Central Park until you see one you like, then just say so, and I'll find my way back——”

No, the boy was genuinely glad to be with him. There was no mistaking it then. They were of a height and of a build, and they looked more like older brother and younger brother than like father and son. So they left the airport building together, walked up Fifth Avenue in the warm summer afternoon, and spent two lazy hours at the Zoo before lunch. And all the time, Lowell was so proud to be next to the handsome youngster in uniform that he glowed, as if he himself were in love and out with his girl in the sunshine.

That afternoon, his pride was frankly possessive, and he indulged it. When people turned to look again at his son, Clark, he found the corners of his lips twitching. At lunch, he noticed a girl across the restaurant from them staring boldly, and when Clark looked up at him, their eyes met with knowing guilt.

But now that he had come to think of that afternoon, he sank into it, like a frightened and pursued man who takes thoughtless refuge in a bog and then finds himself entrapped there. The conductor helped him to break out; and after his ticket was punched, he asked where the club car was.

“Three ahead,” the conductor said.

He clung to the conductor. “I don't remember trains like this a year ago.”

“Travel's light today,” the conductor agreed. “You'll see it pick up with the holidays.”

Then Lowell was able to leave. He walked ahead to the club car, found an empty chair, and ordered a scotch and soda, reflecting that these cars, at least, were a permanent factor in the life he knew and the society he inhabited. They never changed; the faces in them were always the same. He forced himself to look for security in the vacuous middle-aged countenances of traveling men, minor executives, lawyers, and commission men, gray sharkskin and brown worsted, women badly painted or not painted. He drew comfort from them, and when his drink came he was able to open a copy of
Life
bound in the black jacket of New York, New Haven & Hartford, look at the pictures and sip at his drink, as normally as anyone else in the car.

6.
L
ois was waitng for him with the car at
Northampton, and Lowell was genuinely pleased to see her, even eager for the forty-five-mile ride ahead of them. His first glimpse of his wife, standing beside the car, was reassuring; she was only two years younger than he, but she had kept her figure; it was the flesh that had held, not brassieres and girdles; and the sight of her—always the first sight, even if, as this time, he had seen her only a day and a half before—was youthful, surprisingly so. She was a long-limbed woman, with gray eyes, light-brown hair, and a very good complexion. The unusual width of her face, the long, straight line of her brows was a little disturbing at first; she was not pretty in any formal sense, and sometimes she appeared quite plain, but men looked at her again and again—and when the calm, almost bovine face lit up, became animated, she was a charming-woman in the fullest way. It was that intermittently regal quality that Lowell recalled from the first time he had ever seen-her, and it was the same quality which satisfied so urgent a need in him now.

They were on their way before either of them spoke more than a word or two. She liked to drive, drove fast without speeding, and was by the tacit admission of both of them a better driver than he. “Fern took the convertible,” she said, in the way of explaining the big four-door Buick, but he was glad for it, the size and warmth of it. “I thought it would snow,” she said. “It kept feeling like snow. Did it snow in New York?”

“No … no,” he said, thinking of the gift immediately and remarking that he had bought something for her. “Do you want to see it here or at home?”

“Here, of course.” And, laying a restraining hand on his arm, added, “Wait, I'll guess.”

“You wouldn't, I don't think. I just saw it and I bought it. I saw it and I thought that you would like it.”

“You have it in your pocket, so it's fairly small. It's not a book. Why did you buy Hemingway's stories to read, when you don't like them so?”

He took out the choker and laid it across her knee. With swift, regular glances, she saw it and estimated it, and did not, as some other woman might, protest at either the gift or the price. “Put it on my neck,” she said, and he did that, being careful not to throw her off her stride in the driving.