This Sweet Sickness (4 page)

David wondered what his mother would have thought of Annabelle, whether her own willfulness would have prompted her to say, “Go ahead and get her,” or if the financial and social considerations would have made her against a marriage. David was a little afraid of his mother: in the memories he had of her, he was never more than fourteen, shorter than she, more shy than she, and hampered by schools, infinitely less free. His mother would charter a plane to go to Minnesota or to Florida, would telephone long distance to settle a business matter of his father's. And from another room where they talked together, David would hear his father's contented, adoring laughter as she told him what she had done. Only once in a while, certainly not more than once a month, his mother would sit on his bedside and kiss him good night. David could not even imagine what his mother would have thought if she had known he would be a scientist. “Go in for science,” she would have called it, and though she might have been excited about it at first, she probably would soon have decided it was too quiet a pursuit for a man. David preferred, however, to think that his mother would have approved of Annabelle Stanton.

In that first sweet fire of his love, David had stopped smoking and drinking, though he had never done either to excess. He had not needed those pale little pleasures any longer. Once at Cheswick he had taken a cigarette with his mid-morning coffee, and it had seemed sacrilegious somehow, a breach of a promise, and he had put the cigarette out. Now he had no taste for tobacco and little for alcohol, except on his celebratory weekends when he imagined that, if Annabelle were with him, they might have taken a cocktail or two before dinner. The wine with his meals was for taste. Once he had written to Annabelle, “Do you like crème de menthe? Brandy? Chartreuse?” She had forgotten to answer. But then, that question had been put after her marriage to Gerald. Annabelle, David supposed, had little time now for pleasures, and certainly Gerald had no money for brandy.

4

T
he leaves fell, brown and yellow, and others turned red and clung for weeks longer. It was the first of November, and still Annabelle had not answered his letter. Should he send her another letter, or had she gotten into trouble with the one letter and was Gerald now pouncing on all the mail that came in?

He thought of telephoning her, but he did not want to surprise her and perhaps get a negative answer that she wouldn't want to change later. It was essentially for the same reason that he had never tried to telephone her. He could not have borne her saying, “I always like hearing from you, Dave, but you
really
mustn't telephone again. Promise me you won't.” And of course he would promise, if she asked him to. This way, not telephoning, the telephone was always open, as a last resort.

In Mrs. McCartney's house the girl Effie stared at him and frequently smiled, and always spoke an articulate, complete sentence, such as “Hello! Why, you're as regular as a clock!” if they met coming back to the house at five-thirty. She now sat at his table, a table for four, at breakfast and dinner, and invariably tried to engage him in conversation before he got his book propped up at breakfast (he did not read at dinner, as it seemed to him more rude to read at dinner than at breakfast), and at dinner her efforts brought knowing smiles to the faces of Mr. Harris and Mr. Muldaven, with whom she shared the table. Her chatter was no worse than Mr. Harris's and Mr. Muldaven's grunted comments on baseball and the food. There was at least a warmth in Effie's good humor that made David feel it was genuine. It was the amusement he saw in the faces of the two elderly men that irritated and embarrassed David, their imbecilic enjoyment of what they thought was a boy-meets-girl adventure. He imagined that Mrs. McCartney had her prurient eye on them too.

Wes Carmichael, who visited David at least twice a week in the evening, asked David about the girl. He had never forgotten seeing David with her the night he had waited on the front steps, because it was the first time he had ever seen David with a girl.

“I don't know anything about her,” David told him.

“Well, didn't she tell you where she worked?”

“Yes, but I've forgotten.”

Wes greeted this with a mocking laugh that made David stare at him. “She sure knows about you. Every little thing,” Wes said, grinning.

David watched Wes roll the copper-colored beer can between his palms. Fear had crept over his scalp. Had the girl possibly followed him to the house? But she had no car. “What do you mean?” David asked.

“I mean, she asks me all about you, and boy, she doesn't forget what I tell her!”

“You've talked to her?”

“I've had a cup of coffee with her, that's all,” Wes said in a calm, placating tone, drank some of his beer, and looked down at the yellow carpet. “Twice, in fact. I ran into her near the diner. Once
in
the diner.”

David did not quite believe that was all. He could see Wes's guilt.

“It was funny, I'd try to ask her about herself, and she'd steer the conversation right back to you. I told her we worked at the same place, you know, and boy, questions, questions. You've certainly made a conquest.”

“Don't make me laugh.” David closed his eyes and leaned his head back against his locked fingers.

“I'm not joking. She's very sad that you have to be away every weekend. She told me so. Anyway, I certainly couldn't get to first base with her, even if I wanted to.”

“And do you want to?” David asked, opening his eyes.

Wes looked at him with his head on one side. “No, my friend, I really don't. But there's such a thing as enjoying female company, you know, a beer in the evening, a little gab and a laugh or two and then home again, back to the hellhole. You wouldn't know about that, I guess.”

David was silent.

“While I was talking with her, something funny crossed my mind. I thought, what if old Dave's—” He stopped, his eyes on David's face.

“Go ahead,” David said casually.

“I shouldn't say it, considering your mother.” When David said nothing, Wes went on in a rush, “I was thinking, wouldn't it be funny if you had a girl somewhere that you went to see on weekends, and all the rest of us thought you didn't care a damn for them—or you couldn't ever look at a girl because of that girl you told me about—” He smiled at David, though he looked a little ashamed. “It's a bad joke.”

At the word “joke,” David obediently gave a laugh. “Yes, it would be funny.”

Wes carried his empty beer can to David's wastebasket, and got a fresh can from the paper bag he had brought. He extended it politely to David, who shook his head. David had drunk one. Wes drank beer more or less on the sly at the factory, but it put no weight on him. Wes was five feet nine, but so slender and small-boned he seemed taller. His fine brown hair was inclined to rise up over his forehead. Most of the time, he looked like a happy, intellectual seventeen-year-old boy, a boy who had had to wear glasses always.

“Speaking of going away places,” Wes said, “I'd certainly like to have some place to go weekends.” He tipped up his beer can and looked at the light fixture on the ceiling—splayed, tortured metal, two light bulbs and two empty sockets. “There are times when I envy you this simple dwelling, even if you do have to share the john. At least this
room
is yours. Nobody's going to barge in and demand that you share it with them—unless it's Effie!” Wes finished with a laugh that transformed his face.

“Not with Mrs. McCartney on patrol, she won't.”

“Ah-h, all landladies patrol. Things happen anyway.” With an incongruously scholarlike gesture, Wes pushed his glasses back with a forefinger.

Three days later Wes rented a small room on the ground floor of Mrs. McCartney's, which had just been vacated by a thin, fiftyish woman who had not been there long and whose name David had never learned. David heard about it through Effie Brennan. He met her on the front sidewalk one night when he was going out for a walk.

“Good evening, Mr. Kelsey!” she sang out. “Did you know your friend Mr. Carmichael's going to move in with us?”

David's first thought was that Wes and Laura had really decided to part. Then he remembered Wes's words of the other evening. “He is? When?”

“Tomorrow evening, he says, if it's okay with Mrs. Mac. I just spoke to Mr. Carmichael. He was—Well, I ran into him on Main, and you see he'd asked me to tell him when there was a vacancy. He's going to call her first thing tomorrow.”

“I see.” David could smell some scent that she wore, a pleasant scent, more interesting than he would have expected her to use.

She lingered, her smiling face turned up to his. “He says he won't be bringing much stuff with him. He says it's just going to be an annex to his house. Like a den. He says funny things sometimes.”

David nodded, smiling slightly. “It'll be nice to have him around.” He waved a hand as he walked away.

He had had no objective when he went out, but now he walked in the direction of Main Street.
It's none of your business
, he told himself, before any of his jumbled thoughts became defined. And maybe he was suspecting things. But he knew he wasn't. He had seen the way Wes looked at women on the street, in Michael's Tavern where he and Wes sometimes went for a beer, even in the factory. Wes bragged of his success with women, any kind of women, he said. “Act relaxed, as if you're not anxious about anything, but approach them directly,” Wes had said. “It's a mistake to think women like a subtle approach. Bowl 'em over with a shocking request!” That night David had laughed, amused. Now David realized that what upset him, what depressed him, was that Wes wasn't
better
than he was, that he would fool around with other women, be false to his wife, just like all the other second-rate people who made up the bulk of the human race. David remembered that his respect for Wes had risen when Wes showed him a paper on inert gases he had written just after school. Wes could still do some brilliant work in chemistry, if he didn't waste the next few years at Cheswick. But there would be that blotch, perhaps with Effie Brennan, perhaps with some other woman or women. It seemed inevitable to David that Wes would lose his self-respect, and that this would affect his work, if only because guilt would interfere with his imagination. Or did that make sense? Did anything?

It's none of your business
, an inner voice said again, and David stopped a few yards away from the pink-yellow lights of Michael's Tavern. Then he turned around and started back in the direction of his room. He would read a geology book tonight, he thought, and forget about the lot of them.

Wes arrived at six the next evening at Mrs. McCartney's, with a suitcase, two strapped bundles of books, and a typewriter. He told David he had left the car with Laura, on the assumption he could ride to and from work with David, and David said of course he could. To avoid disturbing Mr. Harris and Mr. Muldaven at the dinner hour, David had asked Mrs. McCartney if she would mind asking the two men to move to another table, because he knew Mr. Carmichael would prefer to eat at his table. Mrs. McCartney said she would be glad to. She was already prepared to like Mr. Carmichael, simply because he was a friend of David Kelsey, her best roomer.

Effie Brennan was a little nervous at the table that evening, flanked by David and Wes, but she looked happy. She wore a blue and black striped blouse of satiny material that David had heard her say was her best. And she wore her pink coral earrings.

“I don't think this is bad at all,” Wes said cheerfully as he poured ketchup on his meat loaf.

“I don't think you'll get fat here,” Effie said. “Except maybe at breakfast. There's lots of oatmeal. Bacon Sunday mornings, too, but she's pretty stingy with it.”

David, though he tried, could not think of a thing to say. Neither, he realized, was he curious as to what had happened between Wes and Laura, whether they intended to divorce, whether Laura knew or not where Wes was. And he was not at all interested in the fate of Effie Brennan, even though last night some absurd gallantry had been stirring in his breast, some impulse to protect her innocence. She looked virginal, but who could really tell? David stared at a dingy painting of a north woods landscape on the wall in front of him, looked at the corner cupboard with its hideous display of thick white mugs and a few plates, all from the dime store. The wallpaper was light blue, but not uniformly blue. Its pale sections showed the shapes of pictures and pieces of furniture that had blocked out the light for years.

“What d'you say there, David?” Wes asked in a facetious tone. “And what're you smiling at? What's funny about my housewarming?”

“Nothing!” David said, knowing he had missed what they had been talking about.

Effie was laughing into her napkin. “Oh, this one's so absentminded!” She turned her long-lashed eyes to David.

David ate a few small bites of his sponge cake on which sat a Lilliputian ball of vanilla ice cream. He put the ball of ice cream into his coffee and let it float, and Effie pretended to find this vastly amusing, and did the same with hers.

“Do you have a long drive to your mother's on weekends?” Effie asked him.

“Oh—about an hour,” David replied.

“Do they let you sleep in the building?”

David felt sure Mrs. Beecham had told her they did, or Wes had told her, because David had told them that. “Yes. They're very nice about it. I have a private room and bath. Then they let me take my meals with my mother too, of course.”

“What's the name of the place?”

David crossed his legs carefully under the low table. “Well, because of a request of my mother's—years ago—I'd rather not say. She's sorry she has to be there and—she has a few friends who see her, of course, besides me, but she made me promise not to mention it to anybody else.”

Effie looked at him. “I feel very sorry for her,” she said seriously, “but she ought to be thankful she's got a son as fine as you are.”

Irreverently Wes hummed “God Save the Queen.” David knew he had had a brace of scotches, maybe more, before dinner. Now he was all wound up for his evening with Effie.

“I do have a letter I ought to write,” Effie was saying to Wes.

“Write it now. It'll take me a few minutes too.” He winked at her, not slyly but in the straightforward manner that he said always worked. “I'll see you both about eight?” he asked as he stood up. “Excuse me.” He bowed. “I think you both know where I live.” He went out, nodding pleasantly to Mr. Harris, to Mrs. Starkie, the freelance nurse, to Sarah leaning tiredly in the doorway waiting for people to finish so she could clear up, finally to Mrs. McCartney, who was just coming in.

Mrs. McCartney had an announcement to make, David supposed about the heat or the hot water. She spread her thin arms as though silencing a din of happy banqueters, and said, “There would've been mashed potatoes tonight, children, but somehow—
somehow
they got burned!” She laughed. “We could've taken some out of the center, but it wouldn't've been enough,” she added, bringing her head down positively on the last word. “So I hope you'll forgive me and the cook and I hope you won't starve. Burned potatoes—well, they're just impossible.” With a flurry of her hands, a bowed head, she dismissed herself and continued across the dining room toward the storeroom that led into the kitchen.

“Mrs. McCartney,” Effie called out. “I've been told that if you put a little peanut butter in burned potatoes, you can't taste the burn.”

Mr. Harris chuckled appreciatively.

“Oh. Why, thank you, Effie. I'll tell the cook,” said Mrs. McCartney, her exit spoiled.

“Just keep some peanut butter on the stove at all times,” Mr. Harris said, and laughed loudly again.