Clemmie (5 page)

How she became grouchy and miserable with a cold, as
sorry for herself as a wet cat. How she had read aloud to him as he lay stretched on the floor, her voice rising and the words coming faster as she came to the exciting parts.

And she had known him as well as he had known her. All hopes, fears, desires, irritations, affectations. She had known him physically. He had felt ashamed of the burn scars, felt uncomfortable about the shiny redness and the puckered places. She had noticed his rather clumsy efforts to keep them out of sight. Finally she had made him tell her precisely how he had gotten them. He told her in all detail and tried to explain to her just how he had changed during the weeks in hospital. From the look of her eyes, tears had been close when she told him to stretch out on the bed, face down. The light was strong enough. She had run her finger-tips lightly, caressingly, over the tight hairless reddened skin, and said, “And you thought this would put me off. This! Actually, Craig, you are sometimes such a fool.”

Now he walked, looking for what might be left of her, and he walked with an almost imperceptible limp. The rescue people arrived, and one of them superintended the search through the fallen masonry. He went over to the helmeted man and said, “What did this?”

“A new bit of nastiness, Yank. A new great beast of a bomb with wings and a sputter. Bloody good thing the swine didn’t have it two years ago.”

He was standing looking dully at where the men worked when she came flying against him, nearly bowling him over, eyes adrift, mouth working, hands and arms unable to hold him tightly enough. They moved away from it, down a street, around a corner. And, in the boarded entrance to a building ruined long ago, they kissed.

When she could talk, she said, “I knew it killed you. And all I could think of was what I hadn’t told you yet.”

“What is that?”

“That nonsense about Jeff. My mealy mouth saying I’d never love again. I did not know what love was then. And I know now. I love you.”

He had his hands on her shoulders. “We’re going to marry.”

“I know.”

“I have to go now.”

“Be dreadfully careful, darling.”

“I’ll find the deepest holes.”

They kissed and he walked away and did not look back. The truck was waiting; the driver was cross. Late that afternoon he was in France.

During the next year he managed to wangle three trips to London and saw her each time and they managed, each time, to find a place where they could be together. He put in motion the red tape for permission to marry. At last it came through, but by then the war was over and staff details were so botched up he could not get orders to London. So he hitched a ride in a cargo plane, waited two days for Maura to get her release from duty, then went with her to Long Melford and met her people. They were pleasant and seemed neither terribly pleased nor particularly distressed that their third and youngest daughter should marry an American. It was a Church of England marriage and, after it was over, Craig and Maura went to Peterhead in the North of Scotland for a month. They walked the wild beaches and slept close and warm in a great bed as big as a lorry.

Back in London he did not run into the trouble he expected. Pre-dated orders were made out to cover his defection, and he was given new orders that provided for transportation by ship for Captain and Mrs. Fitz, and an honorable discharge at Fort Dix.

There was a life ahead, and Craig felt that this land was as strange to him as it was to Maura. That October, on the day Laval was executed, they learned that Maura was pregnant.

There, in the summer darkness of the small square bedroom of the ugly house on Federal Street, Craig turned restlessly, body weary, but his mind roving the backyards of memory, looking into corners, peering under things, searching for some unknown thing, thinking he would recognize it when once he saw it. His whole life seemed like a journey that could never be relaxing to him because
there was constantly in the back of his mind the certainty that he had left something undone. There was some essential he had forgotten to bring, or there was something he had neglected to turn off, or on, or something he had forgotten to lock.

He knew that this feeling had been with him for the last few years, but it had been far back, barely on the fringe of awareness. With Maura and the girls around, life was sufficiently full, with little time for the loneliness of subjective thought. He wished they were back. They were his cushion, a padding to blunt the sharp edges of this curious feeling of futility. He could close his eyes and imagine them in the house, imagine it so vividly he could almost hear her soft breathing in the neighboring bed, scent the faint perfume of her, think that if he opened his eyes, turned his head, he would see the mound of her hip in the faint light.

The night was sticky and the sheet clung to his legs when he tried to turn over. He kicked it free and lay naked. This would be another Stoddard summer, long and brutal. Maura was lucky to be out of it. The sun would hammer the city all day, and the stone and asphalt would absorb the sun. Then, in the airless night, the captive heat would radiate its misery.

Up at Riverwood there would be the illusion of coolness. Cooler air would move down the slope and across the patios where ice tinkled in tall glasses and women in shorts lazily batted the mosquitoes that landed on their thighs and said, “Bet it’s grim down in town tonight.”

He went downstairs and made a tall, stiff drink of bourbon and carried it into the living room and sat in the dark room in the chair known in the household as ‘his’ chair. The sodium vapor lights on Federal Street made a yellow light in the room, enough for him to see the level of his drink, the hairiness of his lean knees, the golden glint of his wedding ring.

He remembered that eleven years ago he had sat this way in a furnished room in this same city not more than eight blocks away. A brittle Sunday afternoon in March, sleet lashing at the west window. They had decided, solemnly, to get drunk, as an antidote to their feeling of depression over never being able to find a suitable house.
She was seven months heavy with child then. They were gay for a time, and then she went, slurred and heavy and slow-moving, to bed. In those final months she slept on her back. He had gotten owlishly drunk, listening to the sleet, to the hiss of the gilt radiator and to her surprisingly loud snoring, looking at the mound of the belly—and thinking—what am I doing here?

And wanting to run and never come back.

The next day when he had remembered how strong the impulse had been, it had shamed him. He loved her. She was his wife. She was carrying his child in a strange county.

But tonight he could feel that way again. What am I doing here? What has happened to everything? What has happened to us?

Something had gone out of it the last few years. Something had gone out of the marriage. You weren’t such a great fool you expected the magic to last forever, but you wanted a little more than was left. More than just the stylized responses. Though they had retained all of the habits and devices of ultimate intimacy, she had become something of a stranger to him. Once upon a time there had been a shy girl in a blue gown glancing at him across a restaurant table. Now there was, in her place, an American housewife, fifteen pounds heavier, waist thickened by childbirth—with a puffiness under her chin, a slight sagging of her cheeks, a tiny withering of the flesh under her gray eyes. The coronet braids were gone and her hair was cut short in current fashion, and it had lost its gloss.

Yet, where did the lean, brown lieutenant go? She is a mature and handsome woman, fastidious and warm. A good wife. Intelligent and ornamental—yet rather staid and conventional. And deeply passionate. And she’s done a good job with the girls. They are solemn, thoughtful, blonde little girls. They have Maura’s coloring, and they are neat and they do not whine, and they both adore me utterly. Penelope and Priscilla, almost as alike as twins despite the two years between them.

He was sure that Maura had sensed the way he felt about the trip. And he wondered if she felt the same way. Of late there had been a staleness. He did not want her to go, and yet he did want her to go away. It was not that
they had quarreled. It was just … a certain indescribable staleness in their relationship, a weariness that he could not account for.

He sat in the darkness and drank a bit more than enough of the bourbon and went solemnly to bed at midnight, to a sleep that came moments after he had stretched out and pulled the sheet across him.

The Quality Metal Products Division was located in a heavy industry area on the other side of the river from the main part of the city of Stoddard. The original buildings, still in use, were quite old, and unsuited to modern methods of material handling and production flow. There had been many expansion programs, each adding new production areas of greater efficiency. The result was a great confusing sprawl of buildings, bewildering to new administrative personnel. Factory cost accounting indicated that an entirely new plant should be built, but the potential savings could not yet offset the losses that would be incurred by the interruption of production. In this jumble of buildings two thousand employees produced die castings, small forgings and stamped metal products for the automobile industry, for household appliances, for outboard motors, for chains of auto parts stores. The diversity of product lines was as much a headache as the awkwardness of the arrangement of the production areas. Inventory was in a chronic state of crisis.

Craig’s office was in one of the older buildings, close to the clatter-bang of the stamping machines, the reek of the plating department, far from the air-conditioned orderliness of the accounting division and the design division. There were six assistant plant managers of which he was one. His office was small and high-ceilinged. The two windows faced the west. One door opened onto the corridor. The other opened into a large room where his immediate assistants worked at desks and drawing tables. There were two females, a secretary and a typist, and six males. On one wall was a huge board with multi-colored pegs to indicate production progress on the orders in the plant. Craig knew well that in spite of his impressive title, he was merely a glorified production chaser, with but one additional responsibility, that of feeding new orders
in on a schedule that would promote the most effective utilization of machines and man power. The job required a man who could keep the maximum number of details in his head, and make half a hundred minor decisions a day.

He had realized one day, while sitting at the counter in a bean wagon, that his job was very similar to that of a short-order cook. Remember the orders, feed them in with the minimum of waste motion, send them out on schedule.

On Friday morning he took a cab to the garage, picked up his car and drove to the plant. He was standing in the large room studying the board as his people came in. The board was the responsibility of Bucky Howell. It was his control center, backed up by the production report file. Bucky was young and alert and too inclined to fly off the handle. He stood beside Craig and said, “122D is stalled on account of a breakdown in stamping.”

“Can’t they put it on something else? No, there won’t be much over there that can handle those dimensions.”

“Three units, and it wouldn’t be worthwhile changing the dies.”

“How long?”

“I stopped by. Maintenance has been working most of the night. Charlie says by noon they’ll be rolling. So we lose maybe twenty-five-hundred units. Is it worth having another set of dies made?”

“No. But keep on top of it.”

Bucky took off. He would go through the whole plant picking up departmental production reports, then get the consolidated report from shipping. Before noon the board would be posted and current.

Betty James, his secretary, followed Craig into his office, closing the door behind her. She had been with him a year and a half. She was close to thirty, a sandy woman with a broad-shouldered, sturdy body, weak blue eyes, a crisply positive manner. She was loyal and intelligent and worked very hard. If she had a flaw it was that she had a need to dominate. She often presumed to give him advice. But he had made clear to her the line beyond which she could not go. They worked well together. He was not attracted to her physically.

She placed the pile of inter-office and intra-office memoranda
in front of him, sorted according to her guess as to priority, and sat with book in hand to record his instructions.

It took him an hour and a half to go through the memos and new orders, make phone calls, dictate new memos. When he was quite obviously through and ready to go out to the production areas, Betty still sat there.

“Well?” he asked, somewhat impatiently.

“A new latrine-o-gram, Mr. Fitz. Mr. Ober had Mr. McCabe in his office for over two hours yesterday. McCabe was in rough shape when he got back. Dorothy Bowman said he had the twitches. He went out for an hour and when he came back he was very jolly and slightly loaded. That has never happened before.”

“Maybe he’s been due.”

“That’s three so far. Mr. Ober seems to be working his way through the list. You ought to be about due.”

“Not for a chewing, Betty. I do my ugly little job with neatness and a certain amount of dispatch.”

“Maybe that’s the way he operates.”

“I hope he doesn’t try it.”

She looked concerned. “Please don’t—blow up if he does. I mean—we both just work here.”

The phone rang and she picked it up. “Mr. Fitz’s office, Miss James speaking. Yes? Just a moment, please.” She covered the mouthpiece. She looked slightly pale. Her freckles were more noticeable. “Can you see Mr. Ober at eleven-thirty?” He nodded. She said into the phone, “Mr. Fitz will be there at eleven-thirty. You’re welcome.” She hung up and said, “Speak of the devil.”

“Why do you act scared of him, Betty?”

“Well, everybody knows his reputation.”

“You aren’t flattering me. Run along and type that stuff up. I’ll be with Chernek and then I’ll go right from there to Ober’s office. Put what you’ve finished on my desk before you go to lunch.”