The Blunderer (6 page)

“Would anybody like a drink?” Walter asked. “Or a beer? There's beer in the refrigerator, Pete. Why don't you go down and fix what you want?”

They all wanted beer. Peter went out.

Ellie sat across the room in the armless chair that Clara used in front of her dressing table. She wore a white blouse with the sleeves rolled up, a tweed skirt and moccasins. “How long have you lived here?” she asked.

“About three years.”

“It's a lovely house. I like the country.”

“Country!” Walter laughed.

“After New York this is country to me.”

“It's hard for people to get out here unless they have a car, all right.”

She smiled and her bluish brown eyes lighted. “Isn't that an advantage?”

“No. I like people to drop in. I hope you'll come again—since you have a car.”

“Thanks. You haven't seen my car. It's a banged-up convertible that doesn't convert very well any more, so I drive it open—unless it's really pouring rain. Then it leaks. I always had my family's car at home, and when I came to New York I had to have one, in spite of being broke, so I bought Boadicea. That's her name.”

“Where's your home?”

“Upstate. Corning. It's a pretty dull town.”

Walter had been through it once on a train. He remembered it as utterly gray, like a mining town. He couldn't imagine Ellie there.

Peter came back with the beer, and poured the glasses carefully.

“Does smoke bother you?” Ellie asked. “I don't have to smoke.”

“Not a bit,” Walter said. “I only wish I could join you.”

She lighted her cigarette. “When I had the flu, my nose was so sore I could hardly get to sleep for the pain of breathing, much less smoke.”

Walter smiled. It struck him as the most sympathetic thing anyone had said to him since he had been ill. “How's the office going, Pete?”

“The Parsons and Sullivan thing is giving Mr. Jensen trouble,” Peter said. “There're two representatives. One is fine. The other—well, he lies, I think. He's the older one.”

Walter looked at Peter's frank young face and thought: in another two or three years, Peter won't raise an eyebrow at the most blatant lies in the world. “They often lie,” Walter said.

“I hope your wife isn't displeased with us for not calling first,” Peter said.

“Of course not.” Walter heard Clara's footsteps in the hall, coming close, going away. She had said she was going to make an inventory of the linens this evening, and Walter knew that was exactly what she was doing. He wondered what Ellie thought of Clara, of Clara's obvious indifference to her and Pete? Ellie, just beyond the circle of light thrown by his table lamp, was gazing at him steadily Walter didn't mind. Because it was not a critical stare, he thought, not like Clara's or some other women's stares that he felt tore him slowly to pieces. “Have you had any luck about a job, Ellie?” Walter asked.

“Yes, there's a chance of something at Harridge School. They're supposed to let me know next week.”

“Harridge? In Long Island?”

“Yes, in Lennert. South of here.”

“That's not far away at all,” Walter said.

“No, but I haven't got it yet. They don't need me there. I'm just trying to push my way in.” She smiled and suddenly stood up. “We'd better be going.”

Walter asked them to stay longer, but they insisted on going.

Ellie held out her hand.

“Aren't you afraid you'll catch the flu?”

“No,” she laughed.

He took her outstretched hand then. Her hand felt exactly as he had known it would, very solid, and with a quick, firm pressure. Her shining eyes looked wonderfully kind. He wondered if she looked at everyone the way she looked at him.

“I hope you're better soon,” she said.

Then they went out, and the room was empty. Walter heard the tones of their polite exchanges with Clara downstairs, then the sound of the car motor, fading away.

Clara came into the room. “So Miss Briess is going to take a job near here?”

“She might. Did you overhear that?”

“No. I asked her. Just now.” Clara laid some bath towels in a drawer of the chest. “I wonder what she's up to, going around with that naïve Pete?”

“I suppose she likes him, that's simple.”

Clara gave him a slurring look. “She likes any man around better, I can tell you that.”

6

W
alter got up Saturday, and on Sunday they went to the Iretons' for lunch.

It was a fine sunny day, and about twenty people were drinking cocktails on the lawn when Walter and Clara arrived.

Clara stopped at a group that included Ernestine McClintock and the McClintocks' friend Greta Roda, the painter. Walter walked on. Bill Ireton was telling a joke to the men gathered around the portable bar.

“Same old dope,” Bill was saying. “Always barking up the wrong girl!” The clap of laughter that followed was painful to Walter's ears. He was at that stage, after the flu, when noises were like physical blows, and it hurt even to comb his hair.

Bill Ireton squeezed Walter's hand with a hand wet and cold from ice cubes. “I'm sure glad you could make it! Feeling better?”

“Fine now,” Walter said. “Thanks for all your inquiries.”

Betty Ireton came up and welcomed him, too, took him over to meet a week-end guest of theirs, a woman, and from there on Walter circulated by himself, enjoying the springy grass under his feet, and the soothing effect of the alcohol that was going straight to his head.

Bill came over, took Walter's glass to replenish it, and gave Walter a sign to follow him. “What's the matter with Clara?” Bill asked as they walked. “She just took Betty's head off.”

Walter tensed. “About what?”

“About the whole party, I gather. Clara said she didn't want a drink, and when Betty offered to get her a coke she let Betty know it wasn't necessary for
her
to drink anything at all to enjoy herself perfectly well.” Bill minced his voice a little and lifted his eyebrows as Clara did. “Anyway, Betty got the idea she'd have been much happier if she'd stayed at home.”

Walter could imagine the scene exactly. “I'm sorry, Bill. I wouldn't take it seriously. You know, with me sick all week and Clara working the way she does, she gets edgy once in a while.”

Bill looked doubtful. “If she ever doesn't want to come, fellow, we'll understand. We're always glad to see you, and don't forget it!”

Walter said nothing. He was thinking that Bill's words were actually an insult to Clara, if he chose to take them that way, and that he didn't choose to take them that way, because he understood Bill's reaction to her completely. Walter moved away across the lawn, looking over the people, the women in bright summer skirts. He realized suddenly that he was looking for Ellie, and there wasn't a chance that she would be here today. Ellie Briess. Ellie Briess. At least he could remember her name now. The name suited her perfectly, he thought, simple but not ordinary, and a little Germanic. Walter felt himself getting pleasantly high on his second drink. He ate lunch with the McClintocks and Greta Roda on one of the long gliders, assembling his meal from the trays of delicious barbecue and French fried potatoes that the Ireton maid and the two little Ireton girls passed around. When he got up to leave, he staggered, and Bill and Clara came up to walk on either side of him.

“I don't feel drunk, just awfully tired suddenly,” Walter said.

“You just got out of bed, old man,” Bill said. “You didn't have much to drink.”

“You're a good egg,” Walter told him.

But Clara was furious. Walter sat beside her in silence while she drove home—she insisted he wasn't able to drive—reviling him all the way for his stupidity, his sloth in getting drunk at noon.

“Just because the liquor's there and nobody stops you from drinking yourself into a stupor!”

He had had only two drinks, and after a cup of coffee at home he felt thoroughly sober and he acted thoroughly sober, sitting in the big armchair in the living-room, reading the Sunday paper. But Clara continued to harangue him, intermittently. She sat across the room from him, sewing buttons on a white dress.

“You're supposed to be a lawyer, an intellectual. I should think you'd find better things to do with your intellect than soak it in alcohol! A few more episodes like today and we'll be blacklisted by all our friends.”

Walter looked up at that. “Clara, what
is
this?” he asked good naturedly. He was debating going up to his study and shutting the door, but often she followed him, accusing him of not being able to take criticism.

“I saw Betty Ireton's face when you staggered across the lawn. She was disgusted with you!”

“If you think Betty would be disgusted at seeing somebody a little high you must be out of your mind.”

“You couldn't have seen it, anyway, you were drunk!”

“May I say a few words?” Walter asked, standing up. “You took the trouble to scowl disapproval on the whole gathering today, didn't you? And to your hostess at that. You're the one who's going to get us blacklisted. You're negative towards everything and everyone.”

“And you're so positive. Sweetness and light!”

Walter clenched his fists in his pockets and walked a few steps in the room, conscious of a desire to strike her. “I can tell you the Iretons weren't so fond of you today, and I don't think they have been for a long time. That goes for a lot of people we know.”

“What're you talking about? You're a paranoid! I think you're a psychopathic case, Walter, I really do!”

“I can enumerate them for you!” Walter said more loudly, advancing towards her. “There's Jon. You can't bear it if I go fishing with him. There's Chad who passed out once. There's the Whitneys before that. Whatever became of the Whitneys? They just drifted off, didn't they? Mysteriously. And before that Howard Graz. You certainly gave him a hell of a weekend after we invited him here!”

“All written down and labeled. You must have spent a lot of time preparing this devastating case.”

“What else've I got to do at night?” Walter said quickly.

“There we go again. You can't stay off the subject five minutes, can you?”

“I think I can stay off it permanently. Wouldn't you like that? Then you can be completely independent of me. You can devote your time exclusively to maneuvering me away from my friends.”

She began to sew again. “They concern you much more than I do, that's obvious.”

“I mean,” Walter said, his dry throat rasping. “I can't be a partner to a negative attitude that's eventually going to alienate me from every living creature in the world!”

“Oh, you're so concerned with yourself!”

“Clara, I want a divorce.”

She looked up from her sewing with her lips parted. She looked very much as she did whenever he asked her if she minded if he, or they, made an appointment with one of their friends. “I don't think you meant that,” she said.

“I know you don't, but I do. It's not like the time before. I'm not going to believe things can get any better, because obviously they can't.”

She looked stunned, and he wondered if she were remembering the time before. They had reached the same point exactly, and Clara had threatened to take the veronal she had upstairs. Walter had made a batch of martinis, and had forced her to drink one to pull herself together. He had sat down beside her on the sofa where she was now, and she had broken down and cried and told him that she adored him, and the evening had ended very differently from the way Walter had anticipated.

“It isn't enough any more to be in love with you—physically—because mentally I despise you,” Walter said quietly. He felt that he was uttering the accumulation of the thousand days and nights when he had never dared say these things, not from lack of courage, but because it was so horrible and so fatal for Clara. He watched her now as he would watch a still-alive thing to which he had just given a death blow, because he could see that she was believing him, gradually.

“But maybe I can change,” she said with a tremor of tears in her voice. “I can go to an analyst—”

“I don't think that'll change you, Clara.” He knew her contempt for psychiatry. He had tried to get her to go to a psychiatrist. She never had.

Her eyes were fixed on him, wide and empty-looking and wet with tears, and it seemed to Walter that even in this breakdown she was in the grip of a fit more frenzied than the times when she had shrieked at him like a harpy. Jeff, restive at their quareling voices, pranced about Clara, licking her hand, but Clara did not show by the movement of a finger that she knew he was there.

“It's that girl, isn't it?” Clara asked suddenly.

“What?”

“Don't pretend. I know. Why don't you admit it? You want to divorce me so you can have her. You're infatuated with her silly, cowlike smiles at you!”

Walter frowned. “
What
girl?”

“Ellie Briess!”

“Ellie Briess?” Walter repeated in an incredulous whisper. “Good God, Clara, you're out of your head!”

“Do you deny it?” Clara demanded.

“It's not worth denying!”

“It's true, isn't it? At least admit it. Tell the truth for once!”

Walter felt a shiver down his spine. His mind shifted, trying to adjust to quite a different situation, the handling of someone mentally deranged. “Clara, I've seen the girl only twice. She's got absolutely nothing to do with us.”

“I don't believe you. You've been seeing her on the sly—evenings when you don't come home at six-thirty.”

“What evenings? Last Monday? That's the only day I went to work since I've met her.”