Sometimes a Great Notion (74 page)

And Jonathan Draeger, seemingly doing nothing but chat pleasantly during those days of crisis and insomnia, skillfully helped all the folks get solidly together, and gently aimed them toward the
doing
of that bold something.

All except Willard Eggleston. Willard was too deeply involved in the preparations toward the doing of his own bold something to be expected to pick up on Draeger’s subtle, tossed-off hints aimed at putting the pressure on Hank; Willard just had too much of his own aims to see to during those first weeks of November, too many documents to prepare in private and too many last-minute papers to sign in secret, to have time for writing nasty letters or going out of his way to snub Hank’s wife on her visit to town. No; as much as he might have liked to join in the campaign, Willard would have to shirk his civic responsibility. He felt his time too dear, too personal and precious; at the most he couldn’t have devoted more than a few paltry seconds to the Common Good, though he knew the cause just and worthy. A pity, a real pity . . . He would have liked to help.

Yet Willard, in a few seconds, unknowingly did more for that good than all the dedicated hours of the rest of the citizens put together.

When he reached his house the geese were still confiding with one another louder than ever in the dark overhead. The rain had grown heavier. The wind had become bolder, stronger, rushing at him from side streets with such ferocity that he had been forced to fold up his umbrella to keep from losing it completely.

He closed the picket gate behind him and cut across the yard to the garage, going in the side door and sliding around the hushed black form of the car and into the house through the kitchen to keep from waking his wife. He tiptoed through the dark kitchen to the utility room that served as his office and pulled the door carefully closed. After listening a moment and hearing nothing in the house but the dripping of water from his coat onto the linoleum, he flicked on the light and walked to put the umbrella in the laundry tray. He sat down at the desk and waited until his heart ceased banging at his temples. He was glad he’d made it without waking her. Not that his wife would have spoiled things if she had awakened—he often came in this late; nothing strange—but she sometimes got up and came out to sit in that awful old ratty red housecoat on the stool in front of the heater, her hands laced about her knees and all bent forward like a shabby flamingo, to watch down her nose as he figured the profit and overhead in the ledger, sniffing and scowling and demanding to know what his plans were for keeping them out of the poorhouse.

That was what he was afraid of tonight, how he might respond to her inevitable demand to know what he intended to do. Generally he would only shrug in henpecked silence and wait for her to provide an answer for him, but tonight he had something he could tell her—and he was afraid, for want of someone to listen, he might do just that.

He opened the desk drawer, removed the ledger, and noted the night’s meager take, being sure to keep the tickets and concession separate. He closed the ledger and exchanged it for a brown manila envelope full of policies and legal documents; he pored over these for nearly a half-hour, then returned them to the envelope and pushed it far back in a bottom drawer and piled other papers on top of it. He took a sheet of paper from a tablet and wrote a short letter to Jelly, explaining that he would see her and the boy after Thanksgiving instead of the day after tomorrow, because he’d made a mistake about the meeting of Independent Theatre Owners and it was to be in Astoria in the morning instead of in Portland. He folded the letter and put it in an envelope and addressed it. He stamped it and sealed it and closed it inside the ledger so it would look as though he had forgotten to mail it (that letter was going to do some toward showing the old flamingo her husband wasn’t quite the spineless rock-oyster she’d always called him); then he took out another sheet of paper and advised his wife his cold was much improved and that he thought he would drive on to Astoria tonight instead of sleeping a few hours and getting up early in the morning. Would have phoned about meeting change but hate to wake you. Weather might be worse in the morning the way it looks. So think it best to leave now. Will phone all the news tomorrow. Everything changing for better I am positive. Love, etc.

He propped the note against the inkwell and returned the tablet to its drawer. Sighed loudly. Folded his hands in his lap. Then, listening to the solitary peck of water dripping from his coat onto the linoleum, began to weep. In complete silence. His little chin fluttered and his shoulders jerked with the violence of his sobbing, but he made not the slightest sound. This silence made him weep harder than ever—it seemed he’d been crying in secret for
years
—but he knew he wouldn’t let himself be heard. Especially now, no matter how it hurt to keep still. He was too practiced at keeping hidden within the black india-ink outline of his looks to ever destroy the effect of letting anyone know he could cry. It was arranged that he keep still. In fact
everything
—he looked at the neat note, the tidy desk, the umbrella in the laundry tray—everything was always so arranged, so worked out. He wished he’d been either a bit less thorough, or a bit more. He wished he’d arranged it so there had been at least one person available to cry out loud to,
one person
to share his secrets with. But there just hadn’t been time. If he had just been allowed to take his time and work things out more carefully, he might have devised a scheme capable of doing all that this one would and still let people know what he was doing! let
someone
know what he was really like. . . . But this strike, coming when it did, and that Stamper making it go on and on until the money was all gone . . . there just hadn’t been time to work out something so fancy. All he could do was use his natural resources, his weak-kneed look, his wife’s belief in his cowardice, and especially the image of him held by the whole town: a rock-oyster, a creature soft and white living inside live rock and the rock more alive than its tenant . . . all he’d had time to use was this image, and never let a soul know what he was truly—

He ceased the noiseless crying, raising his head: Stamper! He could tell Stamper! And because Hank Stamper was somewhat to blame for what had—was
very much
to blame! Yes! Whose fault was it that things were getting too tight for people to spend money on dry-cleaning or movie pictures? Yes;
very much to blame!
enough so he
deserves
to be told just what
extremes
his hardnosed obstinance can drive a man to! enough so he
can be told
and be trusted to keep the secret! because Stamper
can’t tell
anybody else what really happened! because what happened is
his fault
! Yes! Hank Stamper! He’s the one!—because he was to blame, and others would know this if he told, Hank Stamper could be trusted to keep the secret . . .
compelled
to keep it.

Willard leaped from the chair, already composing the phone call, and headed back to the garage, leaving that coat dripping behind him. No longer concerned with silence, he heaved up the door of the garage and slammed the car door shut loudly as soon as he was behind the wheel. His hands shook so with excitement he broke the key chain starting the car and backed over his wife’s pyracantha bush on the way out. He was burning with excitement at the prospect of telling someone, bursting with enthusiasm for his plans. He saw the light blaze on in the bedroom window as he stopped in the street—good thing he’d decided to make his call from a booth instead of from his own phone—and, as he turned his headlights on bright and put the car into forward, swinging past his wife’s startled bedroom window and into the street’s double-barreled rifling of rain, he couldn’t help giving the old flamingo an impudent parting volley of horn blasts . . . “Shave and a haircut . . .” Perhaps not the all-illuminating farewell he would have preferred to leave her with, but enough, along with the letter in the ledger, to leave her wondering, enough to leave her forever with a bulge of doubt troubling her newspaper-flat picture of the man she thought she had known for nineteen comic-strip years, and perhaps even enough to give her an inkling of what that man in turn actually thought of her.

 

“. . . six bits.”

 

In his own letter in his own ledger, up in the woods, Lee struggles with a stubby pencil to illuminate his own particular reality to someone else—“Before moving on to farther-out explanations, Peters . . .”—secretly hoping in this way to throw a little light on the dim puzzle of his life for his own benefit:

 

The pencil lead had dimmed almost completely into the chewed wood; I stopped and reread the last few lines of the letter, then penciled through them with anger and shame and the very last of the protruding lead, telling myself that even Peters—as emancipated as he claimed to be from caring about cracks to do with color—still didn’t deserve to be subjected to such tasteless tar-colored metaphors: “No reason to risk hurting a friend’s feelings,” I told myself, but I knew that I had crossed out the statement in the interest more of honesty than of diplomacy. In the first place I knew that there was nothing farther from the truth than a description presenting Viv as a sort of glue-ball female, and that there was even reason to suspect that any attachment occurring between us, be it black or be it unbreakable, would have made me feel quite the opposite of horrible.

I gnawed a bit more lead into view on the stub of pencil, turned to the next page in my musty-smelling ledger, and tried again:

 

Again I stopped, snapping the ledger shut on the pencil in my disgust and breaking its lead; while this statement about her parents was at least accurate, it still seemed a long way from telling any sort of truth about the girl I had come to know. It was still part of the intellectual smoke-screen put up to shroud the true scene, and the true emotions I had felt growing since the night that circumstances—and an SOS from some hapless saboteurs up the river—gave Viv and me the first chance since the fox-hunt to be alone together.

I had perhaps been the only one still awake in the rain-battered old house when the phone rang. Unable to sleep as a result of too much hot lemon-tea sloshed to soothe an irritated throat, I was passing the caffeined hours propped up under the covers beside my bedside lamp, trying to collect some new meanings from the depths of some old Wallace Stevens poetry (as we grow more literate it seems we mature mentally in our collecting, passing from the kid stuff of stamps and bubble-gum cards and butterflies to the more adult items such as “deep meanings”), when I heard the ringing start downstairs. After a dozen or so nail-loosening rings, I heard the unmistakable hard-heeled thudding of Hank’s barefoot tread as he worked his way along the hall and down the steps. In a moment the tread came back up the steps and past my door to Joe and Jan’s room, then returned, accompanied by the erratic hop-step-and-stumble of Joe Ben’s walk. The feet hurried downstairs and donned boots; I listened, wondering what strange midnight doings were afoot and—after I heard the boat start outside and roar off up river—afloat.