Edith’s Diary (16 page)

‘
Yes
,
Uncle George, I did go to see him. You mustn’t think I’m trying to cheat you – how could I? I just wanted to know how things stood, and he says you’re
making
money. If you paid two hundred dollars a week somewhere, you’d
still
be ahead of the game.’

‘Is that true?’ Edith said to Brett.

‘Dunno,’ Brett said, ‘but he sure as hell won’t feel any dent. He can’t take it with him, can he?’

‘I’ll pay more
here
,
if that’s what it’s all about!’ George retorted with an air of affront, and he even looked near tears.

‘That is
not
what it’s all about, Uncle George!’ Brett went on. ‘It’s that Edith is going to take a part-time job. She won’t be here to make your lunch tray – or your
tea
or —’

Brett looked exhausted. His voice had gone hoarse.

‘Bye-bye, George,’ Brett said. And to Edith, ‘I’ve damned well got to shove off. I’ll write to him. Maybe that’ll help. Meanwhile get somebody —’ Brett was walking out of the room. ‘Get a real nurse. George can afford it. I’ll see that he pays it, and you can count on a real nurse not – not stealing stuff out of the house.’

The time had flown. It was ten past 4. They would have to hurry if they made the 5 o’clock train from Trenton, which Brett wanted to do, but Edith pulled him into her workroom for a minute to show him the last issue of the
Bugle
.
It was a good issue, Edith had written an especially good editorial, she thought, on the habit of equating socialism with communism. Edith always sent Brett a copy of the
Bugle
,
but somehow she had wanted him to hold this latest issue in his hands, if only for a moment. He hadn’t a minute to look at it, but he smiled and made a polite remark, and folded it to take with him.

‘Mind driving me to Trenton?’ Brett asked. ‘Otherwise I’ll take a taxi, for gosh sake.’

‘Of course I can drive you.’

They set out. Brett had taken two more books from the living room shelves. Edith found it hard to talk and drive, and they hardly talked at all until she saw the lights of Trenton, and entered the road to the railway station.

‘I have the feeling sometimes that something’s – sort of cracking in me,’ Edith said.

‘I’m sorry, really sorry. Believe me, my dear, if it’s money – I don’t want to see you even taking a part-time job.
I
can see you through. It’s my responsibility.’

‘Oh, a job might be good for me. It’s not money.’

‘Then it’s Cliffie.’

‘Oh, he hasn’t changed. Probably never will. And – as I’ve said, he kicks in fifteen or twenty dollars a week.’

‘Big deal.’

Edith negotiated a difficult crossing, and wished she had brought her cigarettes. They had arrived. Brett got out, and said he would buy his ticket on the train. There wasn’t time for Edith to park and then go with Brett to the train. She asked him for a cigarette. He gave her three. The car had a cigarette lighter.

‘What do you mean by cracking?’ Brett asked.

‘Mentally. Oh, there’s no time to talk now. Run.’

‘You have inner fortitude. Even you’ve said that. You have more than I have.’ His hand was hardly touching the car’s window-sill, and suddenly he dashed away. ‘I’ll write! Thanks, Edith!’

When Edith got home from Trenton that afternoon, she prepared George’s tea tray and took it in to him (he was asleep with a book in his hands, but wakened easily, and Edith fled), made instant coffee for herself, as they had drunk the whole pot at lunch, then went to her workroom and opened her diary. Cliffie was out somewhere. She wrote after the October date:

Here Edith paused for a moment’s thought. Debbie Bowden’s parents lived in a suburb of Princeton, and Edith pictured them in a house she had once visited near Princeton, a big two- or three-story house on generous grounds with garages, green-houses, handsome trees, an estate that had a gate with stone pillars. She was trying to see the parents more clearly (he might be a professor on sabbatical), when she heard a call from George.

It was a familiar muffled ‘
Whomp! Whah!
Uh
– Edith!’ which sounded like remote thunder or maybe a faraway car in trouble. He needed the bedpan.

‘One minute, George!’ Edith got it from the floor by the side window.

‘All this up and down stuff today sort of – got me in the back again,’ George said.

Edith assumed he meant up and down on his elbow.

‘I said the
bottle
– please,’ George said on seeing the bedpan.

‘You said nothing,’ Edith said, setting the bedpan down again and getting from underneath the bed the gadget known as a male urinal which Cliffie was always suggesting that they use as a wine carafe on the table. This, Edith recalled, as she handed it to George and tactfully left the room, she had tried leaving on the bedtable shelf within George’s reach, but twice he’d split it, full, which was a hell of a lot more annoying than having to hand it to him and take it away again. ‘Finished?’ Edith called.

He wasn’t.

When she had at last flushed this away and rinsed the urinal and brought it back, she was nowhere near being able to imagine Debbie’s parents properly, so she left the sentence unfinished and put her diary away.

On the next Tuesday Edith received a letter from Brett dated Sunday. In the envelope besides Brett’s letter was a carbon copy of his letter to George, which had come in the same post and which Edith had delivered to George before opening her own. Brett’s letter to George eloquently pled for him to see his and Edith’s point of view. It made more sense, Brett said, for George to go to Sunset Pines than for them to get a five-hour-a-day nurse in to look after him.

While Edith was reading Brett’s letters in the living room, Cliffie came in. He had been out all night, and he looked tired and in need of a bath. Edith’s first thought was that the police might have picked him up for something – he’d had his car – but she said calmly, ‘Well, Cliffie. Where’ve you been?’

‘Mel’s. We were playing cards pretty late, so I thought I’d sleep there.’

Edith was relieved. ‘What’re your plans for today?’

‘Going to have a bath and sleep some more.’ Cliffie crossed the living room, coat over one shoulder, and disappeared into the dining room.

Edith heard the fridge door. She went up the stairs to speak with George. She was sure he had read the letter, because he had been awake when she brought it. She rapped on the partly open door. ‘George?’

‘Come in, Edith.’

‘I had a letter from Brett too,’ she said loudly and clearly. ‘So I know what he wrote to you.’

‘I don’t want to go to any blasted nursing home!’ George said. He had evidently gathered himself for a battle upon reading the letter. ‘If it comes to a nurse living here, I’ll pay for it!’

‘Living here?
Where?
’
Edith’s face was suddenly warm. ‘In my guestroom? I think not!’

‘All right, a part-time nurse. Afternoons.’

‘Quite frankly, I don’t want any stranger prowling around my house!’ Edith hated having to talk so loudly. She shut the door. ‘Just for instance, the
Zylstras
are coming Thanksgiving weekend. Do you think I want people standing over each other in the —’ She had been going to say the single bathroom they had. Granted there was a john downstairs. She seized the doorknob and opened the door.

‘Won’t
do
it!’ George threw at her.

Edith slammed the door shut.

Downstairs in the living room, Cliffie chuckled richly. He had just ducked in from the foot of the stairs, whence he’d heard every word. A running soap opera, he thought.

He could hear his mother now pounding on the typewriter, so Cliffie poured himself a generous scotch, and sipped it neat. Yummy good! Dewar’s. Just what he needed along with a bath and a nap. And a little fun with a sock, maybe. Hangovers made him feel sexy.

Edith was writing to Brett. She would have preferred to telephone him, and she had his office number but was reluctant as always to ring him at work. Brett had said he and Carol were moving to a larger apartment on the 15th of November. Edith wrote in no uncertain terms that Brett must take care of his uncle himself, because his letter today had accomplished nothing.

Brett wrote by return post that he was up to his neck in work at the office, plus their moving, so could he postpone the George business for about three weeks? Edith was a bit annoyed by that. She knew he was busy, but he still had three or four hours for a New Year party here and there, so why couldn’t he spend those hours in Brunswick Corner, moving George into Sunset Pines?

The following weeks passed so rapidly or so vaguely that Edith was later unable to recall details. Her job at the Thatchery went well from the start. She had known Elinor Hutchinson (a widow, a bit older than Edith) slightly since years. Edith was just the kind of person the shop needed, Elinor said, someone dependable who could learn the stock quickly, find what the customer wanted, and keep out of the way while people made up their minds. Edith could wear what she pleased – a skirt or slacks. Edith was punctual, and didn’t mind a little overtime at the end of the day if it was necessary. The shop sold place mats, candlesticks, leather chairs and wastebaskets and tinkling mobiles. Edith got eighty dollars a week, no commission. An eighteen-year-old girl named Norma, and another older woman, Mrs Martin (Becky), were the salespeople, and all three rang up sales on the same cash register.

The Zylstras came at Thanksgiving. Edith had decorated the living room with autumn leaves, a couple of pumpkins on the floor, and dried corn ears that hung from the lintel. This traditional decor was, after all, what visiting New Yorkers expected of rural Pennsylvania. Marion, for old times’ sake, brought a meringue pie, which always reminded her, she said, of the time the Howlands had departed Manhattan. Besides the pie, the Zylstras contributed a two-quart bottle of Four Roses.

‘Never saw you looking better,’ Ed Zylstra said to Edith.

Marion asked about Brett, and Edith told her that he was going to marry Carol.

‘Maybe this minute,’ Edith said, raising her eyebrows. ‘Brett said around Thanksgiving, I think.’

‘Maybe —’ Ed stopped.

In fact, no one said anything for a moment, not even Cliffie. Edith wondered what Ed had been about to say.

In a quieter moment, Edith told Marion about her trials with George. Edith tried to make it funny and brief, and she told Marion also about Brett’s procrastination.

‘Of course he should go to a nursing home!’ Marion said. ‘Believe me, I’ve seen scores of cases like this. I mean
in
nursing homes, where they belong.’ Marion’s healthy face gave Edith courage.

‘All right,’ Edith said calmly, ‘but just how does one do it?’

‘You force the situation via the doctor – to begin with. Doctors’ orders carry a lot of —’

‘Have you met Dr Carstairs? No. I’d love you to meet him.’ And Edith went at once to the telephone. To her surprise, the doctor was in. Edith asked if he could come over for a few minutes either today or tomorrow. She replied to the doctor’s question, with an honesty that she at once regretted, that it was not because of George, but she wanted him to meet a friend of hers who was a registered nurse. The doctor said he really hadn’t the time. ‘Then can my friend say a word now? Marion!’

Marion came. Marion had sized up the situation from Edith’s part of the conversation, and plunged right in. ‘It’s up to you, Dr Carstairs, to recommend and authorize George’s removal from this house…’

Marion talked well. Edith stayed in the living room, but she could hear most of it.

Cliffie, in a garish new plaid jacket, sat in an armchair, twisting an old-fashioned in a tumbler on his thigh.

Marion came back with a cynically amused smile. ‘Well, I know his type. I’d say either prod Brett again or get another doctor who
will
do something.’

‘Feel like taking a walk?’ Edith asked.

They put on coats and scarves and went out into the sharp air. This was better! Marion was like a tonic. A good old friend, and yet she knew all about medicine too, quite as much as Carstairs, Edith thought. Brunswick Corner looked its best with its white or redbrick houses backgrounded by red, deep browns, patches of yellow among the trees across the river and up the hills to the south, as if a painter had dropped the colors in the right places. The air in Edith’s nostrils reminded her of drinking cold water on a summer’s day. Delicious! If all life could be so delicious!

‘I sometimes think,’ Edith began, wanting to talk and not knowing where to begin, ‘maybe I’m focusing all my problems on George, and that it’s not fair to him.’

‘Oh, nonsense, Edith. If anybody had your problems at the moment – I mean the Brett business too —’

Edith waited for Marion to go on. They walked along Main Street westward, the river on their right. They had passed the Thatchery – open today – but Edith hadn’t bothered pointing it out. Edith had begged out of working today, without much difficulty, on the grounds of having guests.

‘And Cliffie. I can imagine he’s not much help to you,’ Marion went on. ‘I mean as to your morale.’

‘No. But that’s no news.’

‘What does he want to do with himself?’

The usual questions. Also about girl friends.

‘He’s not queer, is he?’ Marion asked. ‘Not that I care, you know. I mean – so what?’

‘I really don’t think so.’ Edith laughed. ‘Too many pin-ups in his room. Bosomy girls and all that. He just lacks – confidence, maybe. Brett’s fed up with him, so you mustn’t think Brett would get him into line if Brett were here. Not at all.’
I
sometimes think I’m going a bit nuts
,
Edith wanted to say.

Then suddenly – it seemed sudden to Edith – Marion and Ed were gone. The house was empty, despite the presence of Cliffie in his room with the transistor on and of George upstairs. And Edith felt ashamed – yes, ashamed of herself. Why? And for what? She couldn’t answer that. She’d been a good hostess, she thought, the food had definitely been a success, the guestroom had looked pretty. Edith sensed that Marion sensed something strange about her, and had been too polite to say so. Ed had worked on both the television set and Edith’s old radio in her workroom, and both were better, the television coming in with a clearer picture now. That was proof that the Zylstras had been here, Edith thought. Then she wondered why she had needed to think that. Edith had a clear memory of Marion’s rosy-cheeked, smiling face with her blue eyes and funny artificial eye-lashes which were rather becoming to her, and the only make-up (if one could call it that) she bothered with.

Brett informed Edith in a letter otherwise about their house insurance that his marriage was going to be postponed for a couple of weeks until Christmas or a few days before. She was supposed to check the house insurance sum, which ‘didn’t look right’ to Brett, as she had the records. Edith felt Brett would avoid the actual day of Christmas or the Eve for the wedding, and found herself imagining Cliffie’s wedding preceding Brett’s by a few days. Edith thought of Cliffie’s wedding while she washed dishes, or when she made George’s trays. It was pleasant and reassuring to imagine. But Edith did admit to herself that she was postponing acting on Marion’s advice: to find another doctor who would get George out. After the Christmas holidays, she would get down to it. She also nurtured a faint and probably fatuous hope that Brett would do something about it before Christmas.

Around 15th December, not having heard from Brett, she wrote the following in her diary, after a rather happy afternoon of work at the Thatchery: