The Clock Winder (14 page)

It used to be Elizabeth who managed this family. Matthew had never realized that till now. She was the one they had leaned on—he and his mother and Timothy, and the house itself, whose rooms had taken on her clear sunny calmness and her smell of fresh wood chips. Only now, when she was needed most, Elizabeth had changed. With the others present she looked bewildered and out of place, like any ordinary stranger who had stumbled into the midst of a family in mourning. Mrs. Emerson called on her continually, but she answered with her mind on something else. Her care-taking had descended to the most literal kind: errand-running, lawn-sprinkling, lugging down more toys for Mary’s Billy. At twelve o’clock one night Matthew found her on a stepladder in the pantry, changing lightbulbs. She wandered through crowded rooms winding clocks or carrying table-leaves, her face set and distant, and while Father Lewis was in the parlor offering his condolences she stayed on the sunporch, yanking weather-stripping from all the windows.

“Why are you working so hard?” Matthew asked her.

“This is my job,” she said, and dumped tangles of
cracked stripping into a garbage can that she had brought in from outside.

“So that’s Mother’s famous handyman,” said Mary. “Is she always so grim?”

“No, not ever,” Matthew said.

Then he removed his glasses and rubbed the inner corners of his eyes. Mary looked at him a moment but said nothing more.

Late Friday afternoon, Elizabeth came into the kitchen while Matthew was making a sandwich. She was in her oldest jeans, carrying a curved pruning saw that she set on a counter. “I thought you would be the one to tell,” she said. “After the funeral I’m going home for good.”

Matthew spread jam over peanut butter and patted another slice of bread down on top of it. Then he said, “I don’t know what I’d do if you left.”

“I think I’d better.”

“Is it because of the trouble with the police?” “No.”

“Mother’s going to rely on you to keep her going, these next few months.”

“I don’t want to be relied on,” Elizabeth said.

Matthew laid the sandwich carefully on a plate and offered it to her. She shook her head. He set the plate on the drainboard. “If you would just give it a little more thought,” he said.

“I have.”

“Or if you held off till things here were settled. Then I could come with you. I’m still planning on it.” “No,” she said.

“Well, all right. Not now. But as soon as you want me to.”

She said nothing. He laid a hand over hers, over cool
rough knuckles, and she kept still until he removed it. Then she picked up her saw and left.

“Where is Elizabeth?” Mrs. Emerson said. “Why don’t I see her around any more?”

“She’s out cutting that hanging branch, Mother.”

“That’s
not what I need her for.”

“Shall I call her?”

“No, no, never mind.”

He set a tray on her nightstand, tea and a perfectly sectioned orange, and then straightened to watch his mother pace between the bed and the window. There was nothing broken about her, even now. She continued to wear her matched skirts and sweaters and her string of pearls, her high-heeled shoes, her bracelet with the names of all her children dangling on gold discs. She spoke when spoken to, in her thin, bright voice, and she kept in touch with the arrivals and the sympathy cards and the funeral arrangements. It was true that she spent more time alone in her room, and there were sometimes traces of tears when she came downstairs, but she was one of those women who look younger after crying. The tears puffed her eyes slightly, erasing lines and shadows. Her skin was flushed and shining. She moved with the proud, deliberate dignity she had had when her husband died. Once, months ago, Matthew had asked Elizabeth if she found his mother hard to put up with. “No, I like her,” she said. “Think what a small life she has, but she still dresses up every day and holds her stomach in. Isn’t that something?” Now that Elizabeth seemed so removed, Matthew tried to take over for her. He shielded his mother from visitors, and answered her telephone, and brought her food that she never ate. When she paced the room he watched with his hands slightly flexed, as if he were preparing to leap forward any minute
and catch her if she stumbled, or prevent her from ricocheting from wall to wall.

He was the one who broke the news to her. Elizabeth had called him from the police station and asked who should do it: he or she. “I should,” he told her. “I couldn’t decide,” she said. “I thought, you’re her son after all, she might prefer it. Then I thought no, it’s something I should do”—as if she saw herself as a culprit, duty-bound to face in person someone whose dish she had broken or whose message she had forgotten to deliver. He couldn’t understand that. Everyone knew she was not to blame. He had called for her at the police station, searching her out through long flaky corridors and finding her, finally, pale and stony-faced in a roomful of officials. “Wait in the hall,” they told him, but instead he crossed to stand behind her chair, one hand on the back of it. He had waited through the endless questions, the short, stark answers, the final re-reading of her statement. The policeman who read it stumbled woodenly over her words, so that it sounded as if she herself had stumbled although she hadn’t. His voice was bored and dismal; he was like someone reciting lists. Even her useless repetitions had been conscientiously recorded—“I don’t know. I don’t know,” which she must have said before Matthew came in, and surely not in such a despairing drone. She would have been quick with it, flicking it off her tongue like a dismissal, the way she always did when she felt cornered. The thought made Matthew want to move his hand from the chair to her shoulder, but he kept still.

On the telephone he had not even asked her the cause of death, but when it came out at the police station he wasn’t surprised. He had assumed it was suicide from the start. Now he wondered why. He had never known that he expected such a thing of Timothy. Why not a car accident? He was a short-tempered
driver. Why not a hold-up man, a hit-and-run, one of those senseless pieces of violence that happened in this city every day? He couldn’t answer. When he fixed an image of his brother in his mind, trying to understand, he found that Timothy had already grown flat and unreal. “He had a round face,” he told himself. “He had short blond hair, sticking out in tufts.” The round face and blond hair materialized, but without the spark that made them Timothy.

He had driven Elizabeth home and left her outside, sitting on the porch steps facing the street, while he went into the house. He found his mother writing letters in the bedroom. The little beige dictaphone was playing her voice back, as tinny and sharp as a talking doll’s: “Mary. Is Billy old enough for tricycles? Not the pedal kind, I know, but—”

“I have bad news,” Matthew said.

She spun around in her chair with her face already shocked. “It’s Andrew,” she said instantly.

“No, Timothy.”

“Timothy? It’s Timothy?” She had dropped the pen and was kneading her hands, which looked cold and white and shaky. “He’s dead,” she said.

“I’m afraid he is.”

“I thought it would be Andrew.”

Behind her the mechanical voice played on. “Does he have a wagon? A scooter? Ask Peter about his plans for the summer.”

“How did it happen?” she asked.

“He, it was—”

“How did it
happen?”

Timothy should have to be doing this; not Matthew. It was all Timothy’s fault, wasn’t it? Anger made him blunter than he had meant to be. “He shot himself,” he said
—flatly, like a child tattling on some dreadful piece of mischief that he himself had had no part in.

“Oh, no, that’s so
unfair!”
his mother said.

“Unfair?”

He paused. Nothing he had planned covered this turn in the conversation. Mrs. Emerson felt her face with her hands, sending off icy trembling sparkles from her rings. “Mother,” Matthew said, “I wish there was something I—”

“Did he suffer any pain?”

“No.”

“But how did it come about?” she said. “What was the cause? Where did he find a gun?”

“I’m not too sure. Elizabeth said—”

“Elizabeth!”
Her face had the stunned, grainy quality of a movie close-up, although she was across the room from him. She felt behind her on the desk and brought forth an inkbottle. Without looking at it she heaved it, overhand, in a swift, vicious arc—the last thing he had expected. He winced, but stood his ground. The inkbottle thudded against the curtain on the door, splashing it blue-black and cracking one of the panes behind it. In the silence that followed, the dictaphone said, “Would Margaret like Mr. Hughes to print her up more of those address labels?”

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” Mrs. Emerson said.

She flicked the dictaphone off, and then bent to pick up a sheet of stationery that had floated to the floor. “There was no excuse for that,” she said.

“It’s all right.”

“What were you saying?”

“Well—” He hesitated to mention Elizabeth’s name again, but his mother prompted him.

“Elizabeth said?”

“She said she went to eat lunch with him. She was just walking down the hall to his apartment when she heard the shot.”

“Oh, I see,” his mother said.

She never gave any explanation for throwing the inkbottle. She had Elizabeth replace the pane immediately, and Alvareen washed the stain from the curtain. And in restless moments, pacing the bedroom or waiting out some silence among her family, she still said, “Where is Elizabeth? Why isn’t she here with us?” Matthew watched closely, less concerned for his mother than for Elizabeth herself, but if anything she seemed closer to Elizabeth now than before. He saw her waiting at the kitchen window for Elizabeth to come in from staking roses; he saw her reach once for Elizabeth’s hand when they met in the hallway, and hold onto it tightly for a second before she gave a little laugh at herself and let it go. The inkbottle settled out of sight in the back of Matthew’s mind, joining all the other unexplainable things that women seemed to do from time to time.

He didn’t believe what Elizabeth had told the police. Too many parts of it failed to make sense. It came out very soon that she and Timothy must have driven downtown together, and then a neighbor of Timothy’s said she had heard people quarreling, and the police discovered a long distance call that had been made to Elizabeth’s family. “I was with him but left, and then came back,” Elizabeth said. Well, that was possible. If they had had an argument she might have stormed out and then changed her mind later and returned. But what would they argue about, she and Timothy? And when had she been known to leave in a huff? And if she did leave, was she the type to come back?

One of the things he had long ago accepted about Elizabeth was that she didn’t always tell the truth. She seemed to
view truth as a quality constantly shifting, continually reshaping itself the way a slant of light might during the course of a day. Her contradictions were tossed off gaily, as if she were laughing at her stories’ habit of altering without help from her. With the police, now, she confined herself to a single version, remodeled only once when they discovered her earlier visit. Yet there were points at which she simply shut up and refused to answer. “You apparently don’t realize that you could be in serious trouble over this,” the policemen said. But that was where they were wrong. She must have realized, to have stopped so short rather than spin whatever haphazard tale came to mind.

“Where did he get the gun?” they asked.

“I don’t know.”

“It just came out of nowhere? What were you two arguing about?” “Arguing?”

“Why were you shouting?”

“Shouting?”

“Miss.”

Elizabeth looked at them, her face expressionless.

“Why did you call home?”

“To say hello.”

“Was that during the earlier visit?”

“Of course.”

“Did the argument arise from that phone call in some way?”

“Argument?”

They gave up. There was no doubt it was a suicide—they had the powder burns, the fingerprints, the statement of his professor providing motivation. Elizabeth was only the last little untied thread, and although they would have liked her to finish wrapping things up they had never thought of her
as crucial. They layered death over with extraneous interviews and coroners’ reports and legal processes until Timothy himself was all but forgotten. Then, almost as an afterthought, they declared the case closed. The deceased could be buried, they said. That was the end of it.

“Mother,” Matthew said, “come drink this tea.”

“In a minute.”

She was standing by the window, moving a plant into a pool of sunlight.

“I’ve been talking with Elizabeth,” Matthew told her.

“Oh?”

“She wants to leave her job.”

Mrs. Emerson’s hands dropped from the flowerpot. She straightened her back, so that her sharp shoulderblades suddenly flattened.

“She’s going to wait till after the funeral, though,” he said.

“But leaving! Why? What did she say about me?”

“Well, nothing about you.”

“Did she say I was the cause?” “Of course not.”

“She must have given you a reason, though.”

“No. Not really,” Matthew said.

His mother turned. Her eyes, when she was disturbed, never could rest on one place; they darted back and forth, as if she were hoping to read her surroundings like a letter. “And why tell you?” she said. “I am her employer.”

“I guess she thought it was a bad time to bother you.”

“No, she blames me for something. But
now!
To leave now! Why, I’ve been thinking of her as one of the family. I took her right in.”

“Maybe you could talk to her,” Matthew said.

“Oh, no. I couldn’t.”

“If she knew how you felt about it—”

“If she wants to leave, let her go,” said his mother. “I’m not going to beg her to stay.”

Then she settled herself in a flowered armchair, arranging her skirt beneath her, and pushed her bracelet back on her wrist and leaned forward with perfect posture to pour herself a cup of tea.

Matthew went downstairs and into the kitchen, where he found Peter eating the sandwich that had been on the drainboard. “Oh, sorry,” Peter said. “Was this yours?”