Clarkton (3 page)

“It's very nice,” she said. “Thank you. Was the trip a success?”

“If you call those things a success. I saw the man I wanted to see, and I spoke to him.”

Glancing sidewise, she saw his head bent, the flare of a match, and the quality of him came home, the thought that she was fortunate to be in love at her age. Dusk was falling-over the scrubby New England landscape. She flicked on her headlights, swallowed, and said deliberately:

“I don't like the word, George. It's a nasty, dirty word—and it's what people call us and say about us; but were those men you went to see in town strikebreakers?”

“Why?”

“Why am I asking you, George? Or why am I thinking that way?”

“I just wondered—”

“I think of things,” she said impatiently. “It wasn't Elliott, George. Ever since this thing started, you let it get into you. It's not for us. It's not our kind of thing.”

“I suppose it's not my kind of thing.” He made lines with a finger on the windshield. “My father's kind of thing—is that what you mean? But not mine.”

“George!”

“Not strikebreakers,” he said, a note of weariness creeping into his voice. “Where do you get those things, Lois? I suppose it happened once, but it doesn't happen that way now. I felt out of my depth, just as you say. We're not Morgans or Du Ponts or Tom Girdlers, and I don't particularly care to study any of them. I was out of my depth, that's all, and I talked to Tom Wilson at the plant about it, and he thought I ought to see these people, if only because of the property—in the way of taking some adequate steps in advance and preventing trouble later.”

“But what are they, these people you saw?”

It oppressed him that he didn't really know, that he had to make shift for an answer. “Industrial consultants, which, I suppose, could cover anything. I suppose it does cover anything. These people specialize in labor problems. They understand the question a strike poses in terms of protection, protecting the strikers as well as the plant. The two go together, you know. I wouldn't call them strikebreakers, Lois. They're sending up two men—”

“Only two men?”

“That's all. Not an army.” He turned to her, angry for the moment, realizing that he had wanted all day to be respectably angry at someone. “What am I becoming to you? You know how I feel about this damned plant! You know how I've always felt about it!”

“I know, George.”

“Whatever my father did, that was another time, another age. He wasn't the only one. When they built this country, they didn't do it delicately.”

“I know, George,” she said. “I'm sorry I raised it at all.”

He lit another cigarette and retreated into silence. He could be childish enough at a moment like that to tell himself that he would not speak until she spoke first, and it only rubbed his irritation to realize that she knew. It was quite dark now; the rubble of foothills, stone walls, and sparse fields blended into the Massachusetts evening, and above the hard beam of car lights there showed one plaintive band of pink that the setting sun had left. In regular succession, they drove through the small towns, beads on a concrete necklace, following the winding road up into the foothills, almost home before Lois said:

“George, did Clark have a girl?”

He had dozed a little; he came awake with his hurt gone and tried to think in this new direction.

“A girl? I suppose so—I suppose a good many.”

“I mean—was there a special girl? Was there someone we didn't know about?” They were coming to the cutoff, where she could go straight ahead, into the town, past the plant, or turn right and go directly out to their house. “You don't mind if I go straight home?”

“I wish you would,” he said. “What about tonight?”

“I asked Elliott and Ruth for dinner.”

“Will Fern be there?”

“She said she would. I meant a girl in town, George.”

“I don't know. What difference could it possibly make?”

“No great difference, I guess, but it would mean something to me. I would want to know about it. I would want to know who she was and what she was like. Wouldn't you want to know?”

“Not particularly,” Lowell said.

“Mrs. Delara was in to sew on a dress for Fern, and she began to talk about an Italian girl, here in town, who was going around with Clark. It seems that a good many of the people in town knew about it, and I thought I would want to see the girl and talk to her.…”

She kept glancing sidewise at him, and Lowell could see that she was uncertain of her ground, indulging sentiment, indulging memory, picking in the past for something where actually there was nothing.

“Why not, if you want to,” he said.

“I asked Mrs. Delara to ask her to come to the house tomorrow for tea.”

They turned into the gates of the house then, the car lights picking out the bluestone drive, the shrubbery of the grounds, and then one wing of the big, rambling colonial house where Lowells had lived for well over half a century.

7.
F
ern, who had come home an hour or so be
fore, greeted Lowell as he came into the house, threw her arms around him and kissed him. Actually, it was four days since he had seen her; sometimes, their paths just didn't happen to cross, and this was one of those times, as Lowell knew from the careful lack of reference his wife made to his daughter. Ever since the spring before, when Lowell was advised by the people who conducted Bennington College that it would be better for all concerned if his daughter were to go elsewhere, advised most diplomatically yet firmly, he had refused to face the reality of the slim, pretty nineteen-year-old girl. She was necessary to him, and he let it pause there; since Clark died, she was more than ever necessary to him—Lois knew that as well as he did. If there was a part of her that had an objective reality, he could brush it aside with the personal observation that he could vouch only for what he saw; and he saw what he wanted to see. Fern was medium size, slim, with a very good bust, a shock of very dark hair that she cut short, good legs, a convertible roadster that he had given her on her eighteenth birthday, blue eyes, a membership at the Revere Country Club, a soft voice, and stocks, bonds, and tangible assets to the extent of a million and a half dollars, which would be hers when she was twenty-one years old. She was also someone George Clark Lowell felt he loved a great deal.

Arm in arm, they walked upstairs to his room. “I went skiing today,” she said, “believe it or not—because there's snow fifty miles from here. Why didn't you come with me instead of going to New York?”

“Because I wasn't asked,” he smiled. “Did you go alone?”

“I picked Dave up at the club—and for a hundred miles he pawed me while I drove. That's nice. That's your sex in this generation.”

He didn't know who Dave was; when she spoke like that, he had no retort, no answer, no connection even, and he said instead: “Get dressed now, Fern, because Elliott's coming for dinner.”

“I've got a date afterward,” she said. “Why didn't you tell me that Elliott was coming?”

8.
A
t precisely seven minutes after six, provid
ing that there was no interference from the weather and no unexpected change in schedule, the westbound plane from Boston could be heard from the main street of Clarkton. At twelve minutes to six, the evening train from Worcester arrived, and at fourteen minutes after six, usually, the tower of the Catholic church would sound a short passage of bells—this last the only individual, special local custom, and one that dated back to the War Between the States. Somewhere in the general time given—a full hour and a half before the same custom was observed at the Lowell house—most of the twenty-two-thousand-and-odd folk of Clarkton sat down to their evening meal, called by most supper, by a minority dinner, but however called eaten at the same time by almost all. At that time, on this evening of the sixth of December in 1945, the streets were almost deserted, the main street which dipped through the valley, bisecting it from the old millpond at one end to the big iron bridge at the other, the side streets that were to the main street what the bones of a fish are to the spinal cord, and the four streets—or avenues, as they were called—which ran parallel to the main street. With some initial attempt at historical recollection, the main street was called Concord Way, but practicality came with the big plant, and the avenues that paralleled it were simply known as First and Second and Third and Fourth Avenues, while the cross streets were impersonally named after trees, Linden and Chestnut and Maple and so forth. A sharp, cold wind from the Berkshires had blown away the threat of snow, bringing cold instead, the biting winter cold that seems to freeze the stars into a stage-setting of a sky. Most of the merchants closed up early this night, realizing that it was not and could not very well become a night for shopping, and as they dimmed their lights, the glow of red-hot salamanders at the end of Concord Way, where the main gate of the plant was, became more apparent, as if troops of some sort were camped down there in the valley alongside the millpond—giving that sort of fanciful suggestion added reality in the fine frame of stars and tumbled hills.

Joe Santana, whose barber shop on the corner of Concord and Linden was probably the best in town—considering that he only cut hair and shaved—had already pulled down the shades in the window, and locked the front door. A thin, hard-featured boy sat in the chair, and Joe, having already trimmed with the razor, was giving those few random final touches, the mystery of haircutting that seems in some way to mark the ultimate skill of the barber. The boy in the chair wore a uniform, the discharge insignia sewn on, and enough overseas bars to make for three years. It was warm in the barber shop, and from the apartment in back, where the Santana family lived, came the good odor of a veal saute and a bubbling tomato sauce. Joe was talking—with some customers he always talked, and with others not at all—when the boy interrupted him to mention the food, commend the smell, and remark what a stinking cold night it was turning out to be.

“Stay for supper,” Joe said.

“No—I got a date over at Midland.”

“Johnny,” Joe said seriously, “you got ants, you got needles in you, you got yourself all hopped up and you can't climb off.”

The boy shrugged.

“You know what's the essence of this, the core of your problem,” Joe went on. “I been trying to tell you. I seen maybe fifty cases like you, right here in town. If it was one, it would be a puzzle, but with fifty I put the pieces together and make a generalization.”

“And what do you get?”

Joe took off the towel and shook out the big apron. “All done. I get aimlessness, apathy, indifference. You don't know where you're going, which is all right—not all right, but understandable. But what is worse, you don't know where you been. You been in the greatest experience mankind ever underwent, but what's it to you?”

“Bad dreams,” the boy grinned.

“Exactly——” Someone knocked at the door, and Joe said: “Exactly—just one minute. I'll finish that. You say a thing offhand and it can become of great importance.” He opened the door. A huge man, wrapped in a black coat, entered; Joe locked the door and said, without taking a breath: “Hello, Doc. A man asks for a doctor, not your kind of a doctor, a head doctor, let us say. He's got bad dreams and needles in him, but what he needs is not a doctor but a little understanding. Am I right?”

“I've known you to be right,” the man said. He was at least six feet and four inches, built to proportion, a big head, a jutting nose, and a shock of iron-gray hair. People said of Dr. Elliott Abbott that he looked like Winant, the Ambassador to the Court of St. James, but that was a superficial resemblance, and his own wife thought of him somewhat more romantically as resembling Ernest, in Hawthorne's tale about the old man of the mountain. However that may have been, he was a big and impressive looking man, large of feature and frame, dark eyed, with shaggy brows, bearlike in his gait and surprisingly gentle in voice. Now he put down bag and hat, hung up coat and jacket, loosened his tie, and climbed into the chair with a sigh of relief, sniffing deeply and then yawning widely.

“Where I'm going, wherever it be, I will not get food like I smell. I've known you to be right, Joe.”

“There! Do I want a better co-signer? You stay for dinner, Doc. Johnny, did you read that literature I gave you?”

“I can't read anything outside the funnies. Joe, if Father O'Malley can't convert me, how far you think you're going to get?”

“We got different points of view. Just read that stuff. That's all, Johnny, I ask a small favor.” He let him out of the store, locked the door behind him, and turned to the doctor.

“Dinner?”

“Not tonight,” Abbott said. “That boy needs more than you can give him, Joe. He's sick, physically sick.”

“All right. But he also needs something to put his hands on—anything.” He enveloped the doctor in the apron. “Shave you?”

“Shave, yes. I've got fifteen minutes before Ruth picks me up here. What do you know?”

“Indications—just indications. This is a peculiar strike—but from what I read, all over the country it is a peculiar strike. It has strange features, like they want the men to go out. Six days of strike, and nothing happens. Everybody is sweet. Even Lowell is sweet like a lump of sugar, from what I hear.”

“Do you think Lowell has horns, Joe?”

“I don't know. I got one attitude toward a boss, Doc. Only one. I make a generalization from a multitude. The other night, I'm sitting with Hannah, and we figured I worked on forty-three jobs—twenty-one states. That makes me a repository of experience, no?”

“I envy you,” the doctor said.