Clarkton (6 page)

“I was in Spain,” she said, glancing at her husband. “Anyway, I don't have a good memory for names. That keeps me out of politics. It sounds familiar …”

“All right, I'll give you Citizen Gelb's history, quick. He broke the strike at Rahway Mines in 'thirty-six. He dreamed up and managed the Commonwealth Steel massacre. He was going to take over with a unified plan for Auto, but the CIO got there first. So he went out to California and managed the big deal for the fruit growers in 'thirty-eight. Then he did six or seven smaller jobs, and altogether he's got a big name. He's the real big-time. Where he was during the war, I don't know. It wasn't only him, but Stevens and Alec Cornwall and Von Sturmer all dropped out of sight. But what in hell is he doing here? This ain't his kind of a job and it ain't his kind of an industry.”

“I think you're making a large-sized mountain out of a molehill,” the doctor said.

“And sometimes that doesn't hurt,” Ruth said. “I think the coffee's all right. Do you want to come into the kitchen?”

They went into the kitchen and sat down around the white enamel table. There was a big platter of ham-and liverwurst sandwiches, and a plate of cake. Sawyer, hungry and appreciative, wondered whether Ruth Abbott had made the sandwiches in the short time she was gone. She pointed, and he began to eat; when Abbott asked him where he was staying, he nodded at Danny Ryan. A strange expression came over the doctor's face, and Ruth Abbott explained:

“Elliott balks at hospitality, that's all. I mean Ryan's hospitality. He has five kids and a pregnant wife in a four-room house. You'd better stay here.”

“When I broke with the church,” Ryan told Ruth apologetically, “I broke wide and clean. But so help me God and the Mother of God, I got more children than any Irishman who ever lived.”

“That can be controlled,” the doctor laughed.

“But I can't. I get a load on and come home, and afterward I want to rub my face in the mud.”

“That's neither here nor there,” Ruth said. “We'll talk about your psychopathic sex life some other time, Danny. What about this Gelb? Why couldn't Joey Raye be mistaken?”

“He's got a mind like a camera. I was in Boston with him is couple of years ago to a convention, and it was like having a book with you. He makes no mistakes. He never forgets a name or a face.”

“What does he think it means?”

“What it means here is one thing,” Ryan said, his mouth full of food. “What it means in general is something else. In general, Hamilton. Gelb means trouble.”

“I don't know,” Mike Sawyer said. “I don't see that. I'm willing to hang around on Ryan's say-so, but I don't see that.”

“We can handle it,” Ryan shot at him suddenly.

Ruth told him, quietly, “Shut up, Danny.”

“I'm sorry. The Irish.”

“Everything you've done in the past twenty years,” Ruth said to him, “that was pig-headed, wrong, stupid, and just plain ordinary, you've blamed on the accident of birth that made you Irish.”

“It's true,” Ryan whispered.

“Like hell it's true,” Ruth Abbott said evenly, and now Mike Sawyer was lost and the woman in Ruth Abbott was gone. “You'll go out of here tonight and over to McCormick's bar and make a lush out of yourself because this Gelb is here in town and because you haven't got enough guts to think it through after living off the fat of the land for so long, and you'll tell yourself it's because you're Irish.”

“Rub it in,” Ryan said sadly. “I got it coming. Only, I tell you, this isn't a town for trouble, and this isn't a time to have trouble. That ain't my doing; that's an objective fact, unfortunately. Everything's been too good in this town. For five years everything's been good. It's going to be awful bad if we have trouble. I don't know what the people'll do.”

13.
E
lliott Abbott sat on the edge of their bed
, one shoe in his hand, playing with it, pulling at the strings, trying to frame something he wanted to say to his wife, and telling her finally:

“What it builds up to is the same damn thing, only I don't buy it now. I know George Lowell. I like him. There is the essential decency of a human being. I know his faults and I know his weaknesses.”

“I'm sure you do,” his wife answered, under the blankets, lying on her stomach, her face buried in the pillow, already drifting into sleep with that ease he could never comprehend, an ease that angered him sometimes and brought him up with an envious sort of wonder at other times.

“Why don't you say what you think?” Abbott asked.

“Because I don't think it yet. I don't want to think about it until I know more. I want to go to sleep.”

“You know as much as they do,” Abbott insisted.

“I know that Danny Ryan likes to see things in a big way. I also know that nobody has a mind like a camera. A camera is one thing and a mind is another. I'm tired, and I'm not going to stay awake all night arguing because someone drove into the plant.”

“But you think George is capable—”

“For God's sake, Elliott, what do you want me to say?”

“I don't know,” he said miserably.

“Come to sleep.”

By the time he got into bed, she was sleeping, the soft, even cadence of her breathing like a signature on all that had happened. He lay on one elbow, watching her, seeing her more and more clearly as his eyes accommodated themselves to the darkness. Right now, he felt very close to George Clark Lowell; otherwise, he was alone, a middle-aged New England doctor who had once had an unforgettable experience in Spain

14.
A
fter the Abbotts had left, Lowell went back
into the library and sat down at the chessboard, a reflex to the single game man has invented that attempts to make, in black and white squares, a pattern and a duplication of life, a sane and understandable universe of the microcosmic. He stared at the board and considered that it was not the words between Elliott and himself, but the many things unspoken that rose in front of him now, large and demanding. His anger against Elliott died away, and he sat there finally with a quality so wretched that Lois could not fail to notice it when she came to call him.

“We'll go to bed, George,” she said.

He nodded and rose and went upstairs with her; and she, as a reflection of the tension, perhaps, or as an instinctive reaction to this new factor—more disturbing in some strange way than the death of a child, or an adulterous practice, or a scene of one kind or another—found herself wanting him as she had not wanted him for months, an ebbtide and flow in her that made her finger his clothes as he took them off: but afterward, when they were in bed, he was impotent, a shocking impotence and unwillingness that made him sick with himself.

Friday, December 7, 1945

Y
ear by year, Jack Curzon's wife
grew just a little fatter, not grossly fat, not unevenly fat, but filling out ripely, until, like one of Renoir's nudes, she was as matronly as a woman can become without instantly being set down as an obese person. It cannot be said that Curzon was particularly conscious of this change in his wife over a period of twenty-two years of married existence, but he was aware that in some ways she became more attractive and that his pleasure in her did not dwindle, but rather the reverse. As a matter of fact, in his youth he had been something of a tomcat, randying around all over the place, a practice that continued without apparent letup even after his marriage, until he was able to say, at the age of forty, that it seemed to him that he had banged everything worth banging. In the ten years between forty and fifty, he gradually became accustomed to and practically accepted monogamous marriage, partly because his standing in the community made it preferable, partly because at the age of forty-seven he was brought back into the fold, to the tears and rejoicing of his wife, and partly because, as he put it himself, he was just damned sick and tired of chasing around.

Whether if was because of this, or simply concurrent with this, he discovered his wife anew, a renaissance both pleasant and gratifying to Sally Curzon, who in the slow process of a generation had painlessly discovered that not all of her early notions concerning the relationships of men and women were correct.

In Jack Curzon, this consciousness of his wife's possibilities more or less rapidly developed into a habit. He was a man of habit, not concerned particularly—unless he had an attack of indigestion—with what was within himself or his fellow human beings. At night, he fell asleep with the warm aroma of flesh; in the morning he woke with it, as on this Friday morning, when he turned in the restless preparation for consciousness, came in contact with his wife's body, measured it, recognized it, opened his eyes and reacted to the sickly gray light of dawn, the cold air, the crowing of a cock somewhere in the distance, retreated mentally back under the covers, thought a few vagrant thoughts, and then examined Sally with normal, unhurried interest, a process that tuned her waking comfortably and happily.

He was not one of those men who wake up surly. He was full of old-fashioned habits, like wearing a long flannel night-gown in preference to pajamas, and shaving with a carefully prepared lather in a big mug, and with a straight-edged razor too, and he liked to have his three kids scurrying in and out of the bathroom while he shaved. He liked the smell of fresh coffee and the smell of breakfast cooking while he shaved, and he always ate a big breakfast, fruit, cereal, eggs, ham or bacon, toast, and sometimes coffee cake too. In the rare moments when it occurred to him to think about it, he considered himself a goodhearted man, who, by the dint of certain additional virtues, had become about as successful as one ever did in his line.

This morning, there were hotcakes instead of eggs on the Curzon table, a special treat for everyone in the family. They all had breakfast together, Sally in a pink housecoat, her yellow hair already combed, Curzon dressed except for his shirt, revealing the heavy woolen underwear he wore, and the three children, aged eleven, eight, and six respectively, the oldest a girl, the two youngest boys—all sitting around the kitchen table. Curzon prepared his hotcakes carefully and scientifically, preferring a stack of four, giving each an even layer of butter, then pouring honey on each one separately, then molding the four together, and pouring honey over the whole thing, like icing on a layer cake. This was always interesting to his wife and children, who lacked his precise approach to small matters, and they almost always paused in their own eating to watch him complete the process and take the first bite. When the first bite was down, they relaxed and joined with him, but somehow never completely divorced themselves from his particular gusto in the food, retaining at least a vicarious appreciation.

It was while Curzon was at breakfast that the phone rang. One of Curzon's few material concessions to success was that he had three telephone extensions in the house, one in the hallway, one next to his bed, and one in the kitchen; so that now he was able to reach out an arm and say “Hello” through a gratifying mixture of pancakes and coffee.

It was Tom Wilson at the other end, his hearty, malleable voice booming loud enough for everyone in the kitchen to hear:

“Hello, Jack, did I catch you at breakfast?”

“Not at all,” but with the unhappy realization that a break in the consumption of food ruins the delicious continuity of it, and letting some of that impatience creep in. Jack Curzon hαated any interruption that took him from the table before he had finished eating.

“I won't keep you a minute,” Wilson said. “I just thought I'd let you know that Ham Gelb is in town, and if everything's clear I'll be over with him and maybe Mr. Lowell round about ten or ten-thirty.”

“Well, I'll be damned,” Curzon said thoughtfully. “Ham Gelb.”

“The time all right?”

“I'll look for you,” Curzon said. Then he replaced the phone and said, to his family and to no one in particular, “Ham Gelb—now what do you know!”

2.
L
owell and his wife were finishing their
breakfast, a silent affair for the most part, when Fern came down. As a rule, the Lowells had their breakfast, and very often their lunch, in a little room adjoining the dining room, which was called the gun room but which contained, in the way of firearms, only an old flintlock musket, which hung over the Dutch oven. Lois had papered the room in a small-figured, dark-green pattern, and had hung the high, small windows with white chintz curtains. The trestle board and the reed-seat, ladder-back chairs were all the furniture it contained outside of a small pine sideboard, and when a door had been cut through to the pantry, Lois found the room admirably suited to its new purpose. In the five years they had lived there, she had changed not only this room, but the whole aspect of the house, removing bit by bit, slowly, without ever giving George reason for protest, the presence of a man who had made his home there for half a century and more. The older George Lowell, her father-in-law, was not easily eliminated, but Lois was patient. Just as patiently, just as undisturbed, she had waited something less than twenty years for his death, and she saw no reason why her patience should be less durable now that he was gone.

Patience was a quality of hers, and very often she used it the way her grandmother had used a favorite patent medicine. When her understanding of something was limited, she resigned herself to waiting for the problem to remove itself and because her knowledge of men was more limited than she and most of those who knew her supposed, she considered that the same treatment would be most advisable for what had happened the night before. The result was a calm but rather silent breakfast until Fern appeared, and said:

“I've been having bellyaches, although I'm not pregnant, if that's what you're thinking, Mother, and I've decided to see Elliott about it. How long did he stay last night?”