I handed the clipping back to Mrs. Hambro and she returned it to her envelope. “That was in the San Rafael Journal,” she said. “It also appeared in Petaluma newspapers and Sacramento newspapers. They didn't give a fair impression of what I said.”
“I see,” I said, feeling odd and weak. The strength of her gaze made my head hum. I have never met another person to this day who affected me as much as Claudia Hambro. The sunlight, when it reached her eyes, didn't reflect in the usual way but was broken up into splinters. That fascinated me. Sitting across from her, not very far from her, I saw a portion of the room reflected in her eyes, and it was not the same; it became bits instead of a single plane of reality. As she talked I kept watching that fragmented light. And never once, in all the time that she talked, did she blink.
“Have you had queer sensations recently, like silk being drawn across your stomach?” she asked me. “Or heard loud whistles, or people talking? I hear them saying, ‘Don't wake Claudia. It's not time for her to awake.’ ”
“I have had some sensations,” I said. For the past month I had a terrible tight feeling around my head, as if my forehead were about to burst. And my nose had been so constricted that I had been almost unable to breathe. Fay had said it was the usual sinus inflammation that people felt so near the ocean, with the strong winds, plus the pollen from all the flowers and trees, but I had never been convinced.
“Are they getting stronger?” Mrs. Hambro asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“Will you be over Friday afternoon?” she said. “To the group? When it meets?”
I nodded.
At that, she arose and put out her cigarette. “If Fay wants to come,” she said, “she's welcome. Tell her she's always welcome.” Without another word she left.
Completely overwhelmed, I remained seated where I was.
That evening, when Fay found out that Claudia Hambro had come by, she had a terrible fit.
“That woman's a nut!” she cried. She was in the bathroom washing her hair at the bowl; I was holding the spray for her and she was rubbing the shampoo out. The girls had gone to their rooms to watch tv. “She's really out of her mind. My god, she had shock treatment a couple of years ago and she tried to kill herself once. She believes Martians are in touch with us—she has that nutty group that meets over in Inverness Park—they hypnotize people. Her father's one of the most arch-reactionaries in Marin County, one of the big dairy ranchers out on the Point that's responsible for our having the worst high school in the fourteen western states.”
I said, “She asked me to come over on Friday and take part in a meeting of their group.”
“Of course she did,” Fay said. “She tracks down everybody who moves up here. I'll bet she told you it was ‘destiny that brought you up here.’ Right?”
I nodded.
“They think they're pawns in the hands of superior beings,” she said, “when actually they're pawns in the hands of their own subconsciouses, which have run amok. She ought to be in an institution.” Grabbing a towel she pushed rudely past me, and out of the bathroom, down the hall to the living room. Following after her I found her kneeling down in front of the fireplace, drying her hair. “I suppose they're harmless,” she said. “Maybe it's better for their sys-temized schizophrenia to take the form of delusions about superior beings than to go into overt paranoia of a persecution type and imagine people are trying to kill them.”
Hearing Fay say all this, I had to admit that there was a good deal of truth in it. A lot of what Mrs. Hambro had said hadn't rung right to me; it did have the sound of mental derangement.
But on the other hand, every prophet and saint had been called “insane” by his times. Naturally a prophet would appear insane, because he would hear and see and understand things that no one else could. They would be stoned and derided during their lifetimes, exactly as Christ had been. I could see what Fay meant, but also I could see not a little logic in what Claudia Hambro said.
“Are you going?” Fay said.
“Maybe so,” I said, feeling embarrassed to admit it.
“I knew this would happen,” was all she would say. For the rest of the evening she refused to say another word to me; in fact it wasn't until the next morning, when she wanted me to go down to the Mayfair and shop for her, that she said anything to me.
“Her whole family's that way,” Fay said. At the closet she was putting on her suede leather jacket. “Her sister, her father, her aunt—it's in their blood. Listen, insanity is an infection. Look how it's infected this whole area, all around Tómales Bay, here. A whole group of people being influenced by that nut. When I first met her three years ago I thought, My god, what an attractive woman. She really is beautiful. She looks like some jungle princess or something. But she impressed me as cold. She has no emotions. She has no capacity to feel normal human emotions. Here she's got six kids and yet she hates kids; she has no love for them or for Ed. And she's always pregnant. She's nuts. It's the two-year-old mind that controls the world.”
I said nothing.
“She looks like some successful Marin County upper middle class suburban housewife that gives barbecue parties,” Fay said. “And instead she's a grade A nut.”
Opening the front door she started out.
“I'm going down to San Francisco,” she said. “And visit Charley. You be sure and be here when the girls get home. You know how scared they are to get home and find nobody here.”
“Right,” I said. Since their father's heart attack, both children had had a lot of anxiety during the night, had dreams for instance, and spells of unmanageability. And Elsie had begun to wet her bed again. Both girls now asked for a bottle each night before going to bed. That probably had a good deal to do with the bed wetting.
I knew that in actuality she was not going down to San Francisco to see Charley but was going to meet Nat Anteil, probably somewhere between Point Reyes and Mill Valley, possibly in Fairfax, and have lunch with him. They had been having trouble meeting each other, since his wife Gwen had become suspicious of the time they spent together and had insisted on accompanying him over in the evenings. Since his wife no longer permitted him to visit Fay by himself, he and Fay were up against it.
And in a small town where everybody knows everybody, it is very hard, if not impossible, to have a secret relationship. If you go into a bar with somebody else's wife, you are recognized by everyone who is there, and the next day it's written up in the Baywood Press. If you stop to buy gas, Earl Fankis, who owns the Standard Station, recognizes your car and you. If you go into the post office, you are recognized because the postmaster knows everyone in the area; it's his job. The barber notices you as you walk by his window. The man in the feed store sits at his desk watching the street all day long. All the clerks at the Mayfair Market know everyone, since everyone charges there. So Fay and Nat had to meet outside the area if they were going to meet at all. And if their relationship became a matter of public knowledge, it was not my fault.
However, they had done fairly well in keeping it under cover. When I was downtown shopping, I didn't hear anybody discussing it, either at the Mayfair or the post office or the drug store. Several people asked me how Charley was. So they had been discreet. After all, even Nat's wife was ignorant. All she knew for sure was that he and Fay had been together at Fay's house several times, and no doubt Nat had told her that I was present, and possibly the two girls. Possibly he and Fay had even concocted a story to explain it—Fay had a set of the Britannica, for instance, and the big Webster's dictionary, and Nat could always say that he was over using her various reference books. And she had already given the pretext that she needed help with her checkbook. And everybody in north west Marin County knew that Fay called up everyone and asked them for favors; she made use of everybody she met, and the sign of Nat Anteil driving over to her house or being driven over might stir no comment, as such, because he simply became another person ensnared, doing her work for her while she sat out on the pa
tio and smoked and read the New Yorker.
The real fact was that for all her energetic bouncing around, her scaling cliffs and gardening and badminton playing, my sister had always been lazy. If she could she would sleep until noon. Her idea of work is to spend two evenings a week—four hours—shaping clay pots, something that the Bluebirds did in the afternoon with about as much effort— and to them it was considered fun. The house had six or seven statues that Fay had made, and to me they looked like nothing on earth. Building a trf tuner, in my high school days, I used to spend whole days, ten hours without interruption. I never saw Fay spend more than an hour at any one thing; after that she became bored, stopped, did something else. For instance, she could not bear to iron clothes. It was too tedious for her. She wanted me to try my hand, but I simply couldn't get the hang of it, and so it had to be taken down to San Rafael to a laundry there. Her idea of work, of creative work, was derived from the progressive nursery schools that she had gone to as a child in the 'thirties. She had never had to work, as I had done and still do.
But I did not object to doing her work for her, as Charley did and, to some extent, Nat did. I could not be sure how Nat felt, or if he understood that in addition to her having an emotional relationship with him she was also employing him as she employed everyone else around her. In fact, she employed her children. She had persuaded them that it was their job to fix their breakfasts on Saturday and Sunday morning, and until I came she simply refused to cook breakfast for them on the weekends, no matter how hungry they got. Usually they had fixed themselves cocoa and jelly sandwiches and gone off to watch tv until afternoon. I put an end to that, of course, preparing for them an even heartier breakfast than I did on weekdays. It seemed to me that on Sundays especially they should have a really important breakfast, and so I fixed waffles for them, with bacon; sometimes nut waffies, or strawberry waffles—in other words, something that constituted a genuine Sunday breakfast. Charley, too, before his heart attack, appreciated this. Fay, however, complained that I was fixing so much food that she was becoming fat. She actually became irritable when she appeared at the breakfast table and found that instead of grape juice and toast and coffee and applesauce I had prepared bacon and eggs or hash and eggs and cereal and rolls. It made her angry because she wanted to eat it, and having no capacity to deny herself anything, she sooner or later ate what I had fixed her, her lower lip stuck out with petulance throughout the meal.
One morning when I got up as usual before anyone else— about seven o'clock—and walked from my bedroom into the kitchen to open the drapes and put on water for Fay's coffee and generally begin fixing breakfast, I saw that the door to the study had been shut and locked from the other side. I knew that it had been locked, just to see it, because unless the lock is thrown the door hangs open slightly. Somebody had to be in there, and I suspected that it was Nat Anteil. Sure enough, about seven-thirty when the girls had gotten up and Fay was combing her hair, Nat appeared from the front part of the house.
“Hi,” he said to us.
The girls stared at him, and then Elsie said, “Where did you come from? Did you sleep here last night?”
Nat said, “No, I just walked in the front door. Nobody heard me.” He seated himself at the breakfast table and said, “Could I have some breakfast?”
“Of course,” Fay said, showing no surprise at seeing him. Why should she? But she did not even go through the motions of pretending, of asking him why he had come over so early … after all, nobody comes calling at seven-thirty in the morning.
I put out an extra plate and silverware and cup for him, and presently there he was eating with us, having his grapefruit and cereal and toast and bacon and eggs. He had quite an appetite, as always; he really enjoyed the food that he got to eat, the food that Charley Hume sick in the hospital provided.
As soon as I had cleared the table and done the dishes I went off into my room and sat down on my bed to record, in my notebook, the fact that Nathan Anteil had spent the night.
Later in the morning, after Nat had departed and I was busy sweeping the patio, Fay approached me. “Did it bother you,” she said, “fixing breakfast for him?”
“No,” I said.
With ill-concealed agitation, she hung around me as I worked. Suddenly she burst out in her impatient manner, “You're no doubt conscious that he spent the night in the study. He was working on a paper last night and he couldn't make it home he was so tired, so I said, you can sleep in the study. It's perfectly all right, but when you go down to visit Charley don't say anything to him; it might get him all upset for nothing.”
I nodded as I worked.
“Okay?” she said.
“It's none of my business,” I said. “It's not my house.”
“True,” she said. “But you're such a horse's ass there's no telling what you might do.”
To that, I said nothing. But as I worked I was busy constructing in my head, a more vivid method of presenting the true facts to Charley. A dramatization, such as you see on tv when they are showing the effects of, say, Anacin or aspirin. Something to really drive the message home to him.
11
In Nat Anteil's mind a suspicion had appeared, and he could do nothing to get rid of it. It seemed to him that Fay Hume had gotten herself involved with him because her husband was dying and she wanted to be sure that, when he did die, she would have another man to take his place.
But, he thought, what's so bad about that? Is it unnatural for a woman who has two children to take care of, plus a big house, plus all those animals and all that land, to want a man to take the responsibility off her shoulders?
It was the deliberateness of it that bothered him. She had seen him, selected him, and set about getting him despite the fact that he was married and had a life already planned for himself. It did not matter to her that he wanted to get his degree and support himself and his wife in the modest fashion that he now engaged in; she saw him only as a support to her life. Or at least that was his suspicion. He could not pin her down; she appeared genuinely emotionally involved with him, possibly even against her will. After all, she was taking a terrible risk, jeopardizing her house and home, her whole life, by her meetings with him.
He thought, When it comes down to it, I don't fully understand her. I have no way of knowing how deliberately she acts, how conscious she is of the consequences of her actions. On the surface she seems impatient, childish, wanting something in the immediate present, with no concern for the future. She plays for the short haul. Admittedly, she saw me and Gwen and wanted to meet us; there's never been any doubt of that. And she herself admits that she's selfish, that she's used to having her own way. That if she's denied something she has a tantrum. Her having an affair with me—when she's a social pillar of the community, owns such a large and important home, here, knows everyone, has two children in school—proves how shortsighted she is. Is this the action of a woman thinking about long-term consequences?
And yet, he thought, I consider myself a mature and responsible person, and I'm involved with her. I have a wife, a family, a career to think about, yet I'm jeopardizing everything in this involvement; I'm throwing away the future— possibly—for something in the present.
Can we know our own motives?
He thought, Actually a human being is an unfolding biological organism that's every so often gripped by instinctive forces. He can't perceive the purpose of those forces, what their goal is. All he's conscious of is the stress they put on him, the pressure. They force him to do something. But why … he can't tell that at the time. Perhaps later. Someday I may look back and see exactly why I got involved with Fay Hume, and why she risked everything to get involved with me.
Anyhow, he thought, I have this conviction that whatever the reason, it's some deeply serious, deeply responsible, calculated matter, and not the caprice of the moment. She knows what she's doing, better than I.
And, he thought, she's using me; she's the prime mover in this, has always be
en, and I'm nothing but her instrument. So what does that make me? Where does that put me? Is my life to be turned to the serving of another person, a woman who is determined to keep her family on a sound operating basis and doesn't mind breaking up somebody else's marriage, future, dreams, so that she can accomplish it?
But if she's not conscious of this, if she's acting instinctively, can I hold her morally responsible?
Am I thinking like the college boy that I am?
For days now he had tormented himself with such notions. And he seemed to be getting himself deeper into the circular swamp of pure reasoning. It was his philosophy class all over again, where debate led not to solution or insight but to further and further debate. Words begat words. Thoughts begat a feverish preoccupation with thinking, with logic as such.
Who would know? Fay? Her brother? Charley?
Surely if anybody knows, it would be Charley Hume, lying there in his hospital bed.
Or, Nat thought, maybe he never worked it out either. From what Fay had said, apparently Charley had been ambivalent toward her, sometimes loving her with hopeless devotion, sometimes feeling so trapped, so victimized and degraded, so turned into a thing, that he had bounced one thing after another off her head. Charley, lying in the hospital, knew more than he ever had; he had a dim intuition— at times—that his wife had used him to build a grand new house for her own purposes, that she used her children, too, and everyone else, but then that intuition faded out and he was left with his frantic love for her. Wasn't this a historic pattern between men and women? Women got the upper hand indirectly, through cunning.