“Good evening.”
He could not recognize the voice. After a moment:
“This is a friend of yours. You’ll realize who in a moment. We have things to talk over. Problems. I should like to arrange—”
“You!” Clumly whispered. He felt again throughout his body the half-superstitious alarm he’d felt in the waiting room at the hospital as the man held out toward him his own wallet, his whistle, the bullets, the keys. …
“That’s right. Your friend. I should like to arrange a meeting.”
“Where are you?”
“Always the wrong questions.” For an instant the voice itself was recognizable, but then it was once more a voice he had never heard before, not a disguised voice, he would have sworn, but the voice of some other man. The Sunlight Man said, “We have problems, both of us, which we must reason out. Your world is tumbling around your ears, and as for me—”
“How’d you get into Will Hodge’s apartment?”
“As for me, my situation is as difficult as your own. I propose that we talk. Negotiate, so to speak.”
“Tell me where you are.”
“Sorry. Come to the sanctuary of the Presbyterian church at midnight tomorrow night. Be alone.”
“Why there?” Clumly said, “—why midnight?”
“Because it amuses me.”
“All right, all right. Tell me just one thing. …”
The line went dead.
He dialed the operator on the absurd chance the call could be traced. As he hung up he remembered the car and crossed quickly to the window. The car was pulling away just as he looked out. He drew his revolver, on some impulse, but hesitated and slipped it back into its holster. “What the devil?” he said. He rubbed his head. Had the person in the car made the phonecall?—tapped in from right outside his house?
Behind him the door to the stairway opened, and when he turned Esther was standing there, listening in his direction. She had her eyes out. “What’s wrong?” she said.
“Nothing,” he said gruffly. “Everything’s all right. Go to bed.”
“You had your gun out,” she said.
He shivered. “It’s all right,” he said. Then, gently: “Everything’s all right.”
Very well then, I’ll meet with you, my “friend.” And yes, I’ll come alone. It’s irregular, I’m cognizant of that. But I’ll find you out, and sooner or later I’ll nail you. I give you my word.
Chief Clumly felt mysteriously calm. Also, he felt ravenously hungry. This time he did nothing to resist the urge. He made himself ham and tomato sandwiches in the kitchen, then carried them down cellar with him. There he sat in the half-dark, silent as a huge block of ice, chewing solemnly, and drank two bottles of beer.
VI
Esther
1
of release. Sometimes she can hardly remember, and she is confused by dreams. It was very much like a dream, and now it has been a long time since the operation failed. There was a round greenish light and the shape of a head (perhaps) bending toward her, the doctor’s head it must have been, but she couldn’t see his features, perhaps she had never been able to see people’s features, she was confused about that—saw only light with colors in it, and shapes of people and forms like objects in a fire—but after the operation she would see things clearly: “We can never know for sure about these things,” they said; “there’s a very good chance.” So she fell from the round greenish light into darkness and the operation that was going to make her well at last, released from all bungling and stumbling and confusion and released from pain—the operation began, and failed. “Esther,” he said, “my dear, dear Esther,” and she understood that it was even harder for him than for her: they must live out their lives like two people in a dungeon, and for her the dungeon was blindness, and she could rail against it and hate it and scorn it and eventually learn to tolerate it, but for him the dungeon was his wife. “I’m so sorry,” she said. He said, “No no no. Don’t say that. You act as if it was your fault.” It was not, that was true. But just the same she was his dungeon and he would not be free till she was dead, and since she was younger than he was, and since women live longer, he would not be released until the day he stepped into his grave. “I’m sorry,” she said. Well, she’d loved him. She’d wanted to die, and one night when he’d been kinder than ever before to her, more gentle than anyone had ever been, so that the moment when the climax came was like fire exploding through all the room (it was September; she smelled burning leaves and there was a taste of winter in everything: the time of year when her mother would sit at the window, depressed, looking out without hope as though winter were all that remained for her—and rightly, yes, because all her life she must live in September or the memory of it or the fear of September) she, Esther, got up quietly when he was asleep, and put her clothes on, full of sweet pity for herself, and walked out on the lawn of the house they had lived in then, by the creek, and walked quiet and unseen as a druid to the footbridge and stood there believing she would drown herself, free him, but not yet, in a minute or two, not yet. The wooden railing was cold and damp and she could smell the water below her, and she could hear it, though it moved quietly, a sound as sweet and gentle as the pity for herself that filled her heart. In a minute, she thought. She could not tell how it was or how far below her. The air was warm but it had the smell of winter and burning leaves in it and …
Who listens to such stuff? I will not think. Won’t think …
Words. Will not. Won’t.
Dear God prevent
(She stood in the darkness and smell of winter and burning leaves, her long blind hands clenching the splintering and yet soft wood of the railing, blind eyes looking down at the brown-green sluggish Tonawanda that she did not know then must be brown-green and sluggish as witches’ brew, for in her mind at least there was dignity yet, and romance and poetry and revenge: she would slip into the moonlit water as silently as a mossy stone and be carried away without grief or remorse and without even fear except for, of course, the first shock, like the shock of the ice-cold water around her body, biting at the white of her thighs and invading the funereal and elegant black dress, transforming cloth to the indifferent murderous lead that would drag her downward and soon, before she knew what was happening (she who had planned it) swallow her alive. Not yet, she thought. Her blind hands clung like roots to the damp-softened wood of the railing, and she thought, clinging, Let me die. Her life was, she thought, an indignity, and it made his life an indignity as well: and though she could not change it, neither by urgent smiling and cheerfulness nor by flight from him, because she knew he would pursue her, not from need or love or even duty but from his lack of any reasonable argument against it, she could end it: she could raise her fists to the sun and say: It’s not good enough. But not yet. Her life was a fall from light to darkness and a brainless hope for light that would never come, but she had at least this: she knew that her hope was brainless, she could refuse to be deluded, refuse to hope. That much at least. She was moved by the beauty of the idea of dying, the clear moonlight water closing above her, her pale corpse drifting through enchanted groves by the Tonawanda Creek to the Genesee River and in time the Atlantic, possibly, and behind her the healthy sorrow of release. (But the water was green, she was able to suspect, and she would be found, black, bloated, absurd, in the slime at the edge of some farmer’s pasture; and perhaps there was no moon that night after all.) Not yet, she thought, and waited a fraction of a second too long and discovered that the thing was impossible. And years afterward, sitting at the supper table, her husband reading aloud to her a piece from the paper about a girl who had thrown herself into the creek and been found two days later on the Cole farm, she would understand what dignity she had missed. But she had returned to the house, with her jaw set, and had found him asleep as if nothing had happened, and two or three days later she’d said with half-conscious malevolence that she would kill herself, she was a burden on him, and he had said “No! Ple
ase! Please!” She had felt like a whore, or like some medieval saint split down the middle between lust for evil and the longing for good. She wanted to sacrifice, be crucified for him, for in a part of her heart she was innocent and childlike and pure as beryl, but the other part of her laughed at that and said Esther, you stick with me and we’ll make us a life. Well, what could she do? She had given in.)
I did what I could, I was a better wife than some. There were times when it seemed to her that they were happy, more happy than anyone she knew. She would sit in the truck at the Indian Reservation and smile fondly to herself while he talked his ridiculous pidgin English to some fat drunken Indian she could smell from fifteen feet away. “Buyum vanillum,” he would say—selling Watkins products then—and the Indian would say “What the hell is ‘vanillum’?” But my dear good Clumly would not understand, for, whatever his other virtues, his greatest virtue was tenacity, especially when the idea he was clinging to was wrong. But they liked him, understood him, by some clear and infallible instinct knew that he was not looking down or milking them of whatever he could get but merely bungling: “N’yas-kah-weh-noh-gah-gweh-goh,” he would say at the door, and they would answer in ancient Seneca and not laugh in his face, and when his truck mired up to the axles in some yard set deep in the woods they would take off their shirts and come grunt him and hoist him up to hard ground again, and they’d laugh and they’d slap each other’s shoulders and they would shake her hand and, if they were drunk, would kiss her. She was young, still able to charm without intention. Then old Mrs. Blue-eyes.
She was old, and her granddaughter was blonde, they said. We always went into her cabin when he sold to her, and that night the granddaughter was there. She was home from college. She moved as silently as any of them, but her smell was the smell of a white girl from the city. “I want you meet my granddaughter,” Mrs. Blue-eyes said, and the girl stood before me and I said, “Hello.” “Clara is her name,” Mrs. Blue-eyes said, and I said, “What a pretty name.” The old woman said, “Her eyes are blue, like all my children, so therefore she is white.” “Let me look at you,” I said, and she came a step closer. The instant my fingers touched her cheek I knew she was beautiful, and as I moved my fingertips over her forehead and down past her eyes and the wings of her nose to her mouth, I became afraid. “How do you like college?” I said. “I enjoy it very much,” she said. And I thought, Do you pity me? Do I disgust you? I had seen the line of her mouth, and though it was a gentle mouth there was pity in it, disgust. I said when we were driving home, “She’s a beautiful girl.” He said, “Oh, so-so.” It was the first time he’d lied to me, as far as I could tell.
Enough. That was not what she’d started out to say.
We were happy, much of the time, she’d meant to say.
Were we?
Well, we made do. She was glad to say, he was always a man who loved work. Jobs that would have bored another man were exciting to him. Even the bakery truck. He would calculate ways of speeding up the loading, ways of rearranging the bakery goods he carried so that everything was conveniently in reach. He would think about it nights, and when he solved some trifling problem, he was radiant. She thanked God. How lucky I was, I thought, to have a husband like him. There were times when I felt less than human, and studying my face with my fingertips in the dark, I knew I was no longer pretty—if I had ever been pretty. Uglier than ever then, to speak plain. But it was not as great a disaster for me as for many women: my husband was not that kind. He loved his work, sat fascinated beside the radio listening to Drew Pearson or Lowell Thomas or Gabriel Heatter, or sat with some magazine, grunting with surprise or interest or irritation, and it seemed to me that he was better than other men, more mature, a rock.
She would hear them in the evening, she sitting on the back step in a holy spell of peace and silence, when he was working in the garden, and some neighbor was telling him some dirty story. His laughter was merely polite, a little embarrassed, annoyed. On Saturday nights their neighbors to the left would sit up drinking late, and when she and Fred were in bed half-asleep the neighbors would begin to shout, and they would call each other such names it made your heart race, and sometimes he would beat her. “Dear God,” Esther would cry in her heart, “I thank you! Watch over my precious, good husband who hasn’t the sense to watch over himself, and make him happy.” He seemed to be happy. He was so wise, so considerate of others, it used to make her cry. “There’s a very good chance that if you have children,” the doctor said, “they’ll be afflicted.” Blind, he meant; half-blind at birth and, by twenty, blind as bats. They had wanted children. It had seemed a kind of payment life owed for what they’d suffered. She was ashamed. Once again it was all her fault; her weakness—some ugly burnt-out thing in her blood—was once again an invisible wall raised more around his life than hers. He accepted it, with such terrible kindness that she was robbed of any right to anger—the rage that had been building in her all day, since the doctor had told her—anger that for sanity’s sake she had to vent on him because there was no one else, had no possible outlet—and so she raged at him, unthinkably cruel, stark mad, in fact.
Why do I do this? Over and over and over the same old ground. So much love, so much happiness.
(“But perhaps, in spite of all you say, he drove you to it,” Reverend Willby said. His voice seemed sly. Then is nothing good? Is nothing honest? “I don’t say that, my child, not at all. But isn’t it interesting, after all, that all his loyalty and patience and kindness should inspire in you no self-confidence! Think of the love of our Heavenly Father. As I said in my sermon, just the Sunday before last, what freedom, what confidence we feel when we know in our hearts that the Lord is our shepherd, He loves us and forgives us and cherishes us as we cherish our children! My child, my child, I believe you when you say that your husband is kind and patient and good, but I cannot believe you when you hint that he is beyond all the sticky unpleasantness of our common human nature. Surely we must not forget, dear lady, that there is pleasure in our self-sacrifice. Our kindness has been tainted with masochism since the world began, and it is not to our best interest to forget it. Think better of yourself, my dear Mrs. Clumly. No man was ever perfect but Jesus Christ. Do you think it doesn’t give you pleasure—if only a drop of pleasure—to tell me that you are unworthy of being alive? And, on the other hand, do you think I don’t find some touch of pleasure in suggesting that your husband is less than he seems—no better than yourself, in fact? Perhaps worse?” She had not believed him but she had felt better afterward, riding home in the taxi. Reverend Willby had no idea what human goodness was, and no more religion than a fly. She sat smiling to herself like a crafty witch, as though she had just avenged herself—though in fact she’d said nothing to the minister, of course: had nodded her thanks, as if thoughtfully, and had retired timidly, ashamed of herself for having turned to a man she had no reason to trust. And yet her anguish had been urgent, so terrible lately that she was afraid of the approach of September. She had been right to ask for help, merely wrong in imagining that anyone could give it. When the cab driver opened the door he reached in and caught her arm and threw her off balance a little, so that she bumped the door with the side of her head. Let go! she cried inside her mind, get your hands off! but she said nothing, paid him timidly and allowed him to lead her up on her porch, where she said, “Thank you, you’re very kind,” and gave him a quarter and hoped he would swallow it and choke. “No trouble, Ma’am,” the driver said. You don’t know, she said in her mind. You’ll never dream! Blindman’s tears seeped down her cheek, more horrible, she believed, than tears from the dead.)
I told him he smelled old, and it was true, but he should have defended himself. She told him that when he made love to her the stink of his breath made her sick. She had told him that he was like an animal and that when friends came to the house she was ashamed of him. She told him he was stupid and that all their friends knew it. “They mention it to me,” she said, “they ask how I sta
nd it.” “You’re angry and upset,” he said. “We mustn’t say harsh things and then tomorrow—” “I’ll say what I please,” she said. “For years I’ve said only what you please,” she said to him. “I’m sick of it. You stink. I don’t want to live with you. I just walk into a room where you’ve been sitting, filling the air with your stink … I don’t want to live at all!” Sobs. “Esther,” he said, “my poor, poor dear—” She locked the bedroom door that night and wouldn’t let him in, and he slept on the couch. But in the middle of the night she went down and asked him to come up where he belonged, but he was grieving and wouldn’t come—it had come to his poor slow wits, finally, that though all she had said she had said in rage, and the words had nothing to do with the rage, they were incidentally true. He had committed no crime, the crime was, as usual, life itself, the immemorial curse, and she had raged at him because life itself is impossible to seize in one’s two bare hands and choke. But though he was innocent, he smelled. That was true. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I love you, Freddy.” “Just go to bed,” he said. When she got up the next morning he had already fixed himself breakfast and washed the dishes and left the house, and she sat and wept. That time too she wanted to die, and she said to herself with conviction, I am going to kill myself, but she was afraid. She wanted to be even with him, balance the score once for all, but it was impossible, so impossible that she began to laugh as though her mind had slipped: “How can you balance the score with a policeman?—with the Law?” she said, and laughed and cried. It was he who had wanted children—both of them had, but he more than she—and because she could not give them to him she had turned on him in rage, and now to punish him for her rage she was thinking, like a maniac, of killing herself. It was life she wanted to settle with. She wanted to smash through this bungling idiotic darkness into peace, but the hope was pure madness. There is a moral to this: The operation inevitably fails.