The Blunderer (28 page)

His hands were sweaty on the steering wheel. He drove for the tunnel. He wondered what excuse he would make to Ellie for not coming to the show. Well, this one, of course. The truth for once!

32

E
llie was not home by eleven, though Walter knew the show got out at ten. Walter drove to Lennert and sat in his car across the street from her house, waiting. He became terribly sleepy, and had to fight against falling asleep in the car.

Ellie's car turned into the street at about a quarter to twelve, and Walter got out and walked towards the parking lot where she always put Boadicea.

“What happened to you?” Ellie asked.

“I'll explain it upstairs. Can we go up?”

“Corby again?”

He nodded.

She gave him a look, a look of exasperation, nothing else, then she unlocked her door and they went upstairs. Walter was carrying the box from Mark Cross, the alligator bag he had had initialed for her and had picked up that morning before he went to the office. He handed it to her when they were in her apartment.

“This is for Thanksgiving,” he said. “I'm sorry I wasn't there tonight, Ellie. How'd it go?”

“All right. I've just been with Virginia and Mrs. Pierson. They liked it better than last year's.” She looked at him, smiled a little, then began to open the box.

It was in a big square box and under tissue. Ellie gasped when she saw it: shining brown alligator with a gilt clasp and a strap.

“Big enough?” he asked.

Ellie laughed. “Like a suitcase.”

“I ordered the largest. Otherwise you'd have had it a couple of weeks ago.”

“Tell me about Corby,” she said.

“I had to go to Newark,” Walter said and stopped. He began to feel he couldn't tell her. “Really nothing happened,” he said. “I—I met Kimmel.”

“Kimmel! What is he like?”

There was only curiosity in Ellie's face, Walter thought, simple curiosity. “He's a big fat fellow, about forty, intelligent, cold-looking—”

“Do you think he's guilty?”

“I don't know.”

“Well, what happened? Were you in a police station?”

“Yes. Kimmel's not under arrest. He may not be guilty. Corby's hipped, you know. Corby's a zealot out for a promotion at anybody's expense.”

“But what
happened
?”

Walter looked at her. “He wanted to know if there was any connection between Kimmel and me—other than the clipping I had. Of course, there wasn't.” Walter spoke in a tone of desperate conviction that actually fooled himself. This may be the last time you'll ever talk to her, he thought, the last time you'll stand in this room, after she finds out you've lied. If it weren't in the papers Friday, Corby would get around to telling everybody he knew. Walter went on, “He didn't third-degree us or anything, just asked questions.”

“You look exhausted.”

He sat down on the sofa. “I am.”

“And what else?” she asked, folding the tissue that had come in the box.

Walter knew she was going to save the tissue for something. Clara would have saved it, too, he thought. “That's all,” he said. “I had to go. I was just sorry to have missed the show tonight.”

She looked at him a moment, and Walter wondered if she believed that was all, though there was really not the least doubt in her face now. “Have you had anything to eat?” she asked.

Walter couldn't remember. He didn't answer, only looked at her. A lump was growing in his throat, like panic, like terror. He didn't know what it was. He suddenly wished he was married to Ellie, had married her right after Clara's death, and in the next moment was ashamed of wishing it.

“I'll fix you some scrambled eggs. There's nothing here but eggs.” She went into the kitchen. “Why don't you take a nap? We'll have coffee and eggs in fifteen minutes.”

Walter continued to sit upright on the sofa. It was unreal to him, the way she took it. Even his not being at the show tonight. An idea that she might be pretending, before she cut him off from her with one fell swoop, made the atmosphere even more unreal.

“Do you know you're getting too thin?” Ellie asked as she worked in the kitchen. “Can't you remember to eat occasionally?”

He said nothing. He put his head back and closed his eyes, but sleep was far from him now. After a few minutes he got up to help her put dishes on the coffee table by the sofa. They ate scrambled eggs with toast and marmalade.

“We'll have a nice day tomorrow,” Ellie said. “Let's not let anything spoil that.”

“No.” They were going to have Thanksgiving dinner at a restaurant near Montauk and then drive around, probably walk along a beach somewhere, which Ellie loved to do.

After he had eaten, Walter felt too tired even to smoke a cigarette. His arms and legs were heavy, as if he had been drugged. He could hardly feel Ellie's fingers pressing his hand as they sat on the sofa.

“Can I stay here with you tonight?”

“Yes,” she said quietly, as if he had asked her many times before.

But they sat there for a long while before they moved to put dishes away and to open the sofa which made a double bed.

Coward, Walter said to himself. Walter Stackhouse, a coward and a bastard.

Walter only lay in her arms and she held him as if she did not expect him to make love to her. But towards dawn, after he had slept for a while, he did. And it seemed more than the first time, better than the first time, and more desperate also, because Walter was afraid it was the last time, and Ellie's intensity made him imagine that she knew it, too. Walter had a vision of a little window. It was a beautiful little square window, just out of his reach, filled with light blue sky with a suggestion of green earth below.

33

D
ick and Pete jumped up to help him, but there was nothing they could do except stand there while he bent over the basin, retching.There was not even anything in his stomach except the coffee he had drunk for breakfast, but the retching lasted ten minutes or so, and it was too constricting for him even to tell Dick and Pete to go back to Cross and forget him. And as he bent there, staring at the pale green porcelain of the little basin, listening to the symphonic ringing in his ears, Walter told himself he was sick of the job Cross had for him and Dick to do, bored and sick of it, and that it was one of the last jobs they'd ever do at the office and what was the use in reacting like this? But Walter knew he was sick because he was expecting the call from Kimmel at 11:30, when the forty-eight hours would be up.

“Where'd you have that turkey yesterday?” Dick asked him, trying to sound cheerful, patting him on the back.

Walter did not try to answer. He'd been going to tell Kimmel to go to hell, to do his worst. Now he hadn't the guts to stand up. His clothes stuck to him with sweat. Dick had to help him to the leather sofa in the corner, and if not for the cold towel over his face, he thought he might have fainted.

“Think you've got a touch of ptomaine?” Dick asked.

Walter shook his head. He was aware of Cross's swarthy, pouchy face looking over his shoulder from his desk, looking annoyed. You go to hell, too, Walter thought. Walter finally stood up and said he would try to pull himself together in his own office.

“I'm very sorry,” Walter said to Cross.

“
I'm
sorry,” Cross said crisply. “Go home if you're not feeling well.”

Walter got the bottle of Scotch from a lower drawer of his desk and took a pull on it. It made him feel slightly better.

He left the office around 10:30.

It was five to twelve when he got home. The house was empty. Claudia would have left at eleven. Walter wondered if Kimmel had called before eleven and spoken to Claudia.

Walter went directly to his study and got out his portable typewriter. He tried to move briskly, though he was still weak and shaking. He addressed a letter to the Administration Department of Columbia Law School, and wrote that he was opening a law office for small claims clients in Manhattan, and that he would like two or three senior students to work as his assistants on various day shifts. He asked that a notice be posted on the bulletin board of the school, so that any students interested could get in touch with him. His thoughts did not come out smoothly, and he had to retype the letter.

In the middle of the typing the telephone rang.

Walter answered it in the hall.

“Hello, Mr. Stackhouse,” Kimmel's voice said.

“The answer is still no.”

“You are making a great mistake.”

“I've talked to Corby,” Walter said. “If you add anything to what I told him, Corby's not going to believe you.”

“I'm not interested in what you told Corby. I'm interested in what I tell the newspapers.You should be, too.”

Through Kimmel's dead calm Walter heard his resentment because his game had been spoiled. “They won't believe you. They won't print it.”

Kimmel gave a hooting laugh. “They'll print everything I tell them, as long as I hold myself responsible for it—which I shall do with pleasure. Don't you want to change your mind for a mere fifty thousand dollars?”

“No.”

Kimmel was silent, but Walter kept holding the phone, waiting. It was Kimmel who finally hung up.

Walter went back to his letter. Even his hands were weak and damp with sweat, and he had to type very slowly. He added another paragraph, feeling a little insane, like the crackpots who put ads in newspapers to sell an estate they haven't got, or offering to buy a yacht they can't afford:

I am especially interested in securing a few serious students, young men who would otherwise not be able to acquire practical experience so early in their careers and who would prefer this kind of work to the more tedious and impersonal tasks they would be given if they took jobs as junior lawyers in bigger law firms.

I should appreciate an acknowledgment of this letter at your convenience.

Yours sincerely,

W
ALTER
P. S
TACKHOUSE

He gave the address and telephone of Cross, Martinson and Buchman as well as the address of the new office in Forty-fourth Street, where he and Dick were supposed to be by Tuesday. Walter had discussed with Dick the advisability of hiring a couple of law students to help out in the office, and Dick had thought it a good idea. Now it seemed to Walter that he had written the letter today in order to have anybody at all in the office with him, as if he knew that the next time he saw Dick, Dick was going to tell him he wasn't going into partnership with him.

Walter drank a straight Scotch, and felt better so quickly he knew that the therapeutic effect of the liquor was purely mental. Well, mentally, hadn't he decided he didn't care any more, Wednesday night sitting in his car outside Newark police station? That he felt so weak physically was an accident today, he thought. What the hell if Kimmel got his crazy story printed? It was one more lie, that was all. He'd already weathered so many lies:
why
he was at the bus stop,
why
he had the Kimmel clipping,
why
he had gone back to talk to Kimmel in his shop. Well, now he was going to hear
why
he had come to Kimmel's shop the first time, and he'd weather this one, too. When the crazy custodians of justice came to seize him—finally—they would find him hard at work in a law office on Forty-fourth Street. Maybe alone. He took a second large drink.

Then he went into the kitchen and found a can of tomato soup in the cupboard, opened it, and put it on to heat. The kitchen was silent except for the purring of the gas flame. Walter stood there, waiting, and finally began to walk up and down the floor to break the silence. Then he heard Clara's steps upstairs and he stopped abruptly. It was getting his brain, too. He'd actually
heard
her steps, as clearly as if they had been a little rill of music—six or seven steps.

Walter realized he was standing half way up the staircase, staring at the empty hall. Did he expect to see Clara? He didn't even remember starting up the steps. When he went back to the kitchen the tomato soup was boiling over. He poured some into a bowl and began to eat it at the kitchen table.

He heard Clara's voice, uttering little shadowy whispers. He cocked his head, listening, and the more he concentrated the more definite it seemed that he
did
hear them, though they were not distinct enough for him to be able to hear what she was saying. They were sibilant phrases, laughing phrases, as if he were overhearing her as she played with Jeff. Or as she really had talked to him a few times in the first months they had lived in this house. Jeff was curled up in the living-room in a chair, Walter knew. If there
were
anything to the sounds, Jeff would—

Walter stood up. Maybe he
was
going insane. Maybe it was the house. He ran his fingers through his hair, then quickly went to a window and threw it open.

He stood there, trying to make himself think, decide, remember, remember Clara here, and the times they had been happy here, before it was too late to remember, and after a few crazy, agonized seconds, realized that he wasn't thinking at all, wasn't even feeling anything except confusion.

He went to the telephone and dialed the Knightsbridge Brokerage number. Its familiarity to him was pleasant and terrifying. It was as if Clara were alive again. The phone rang and rang, and Walter knew it meant the Philpotts had not opened their office today, but he let it ring about fifteen times before he gave up.

He called Mrs. Philpott's home number. Mrs. Philpott was in, and he told her he wanted to sell the house right away. He said he could easily be out by Monday, and he would see about selling some of the furniture tomorrow. The transaction would be very simple, she said: the Knightsbridge Brokerage would buy the house for 25,000 dollars.

“It just happens,” she said, “that I've a man coming tomorrow to do some appraising—a furniture appraiser in particular. Suppose I come over with him tomorrow morning? Will you be home around noon?”