Then, very clearly, they heard the words: What are you fiddling with, there inside your shirt?
“Jesus,” Miller whispered.
“What?” she said.
I might have known. Very well, just as you please. Then a laugh.
Miller switched off the tape.
“What is it?” she said.
“Nothing,” he said. She could hear him unwinding the tape, taking it off.
“What is it?” she asked again, sharply this time.
When he spoke his voice was too even, and she knew that, whatever it was she’d done, she had ruined her husband and had made it impossible for even Miller to help him now. “It’s the Sunlight Man, Esther,” Miller said. “The man we’re after.”
“Then Fred’s found him,” she said desperately. “He’s talked to him.”
“That’s right,” Miller said. “But he hasn’t talked to us.” He put the spool of tape very gently in her hand. “Here,” he said. “Put it where you found it. Or burn it. Do what you want with it. I don’t want to know it exists.”
“Is it so bad?” she said, knowing.
“I’ll drive you home,” he said.
She stood up, listening with the back of her mind to the crackling of the radio in the other room. “I’d rather walk,” she said. “Thank you.”
“Whatever you like.” He put his hand on her arm, thinking of saying more perhaps, but nothing more came. The hand went away, and a moment later she heard the door come open behind her.
“I’m sorry,” she said. She pressed the hanky to her mouth.
Miller was silent.
Mr. Uphill, the Fire Chief, said, “What is all this?”
Esther jumped.
“Nothing,” Miller said.
“Nothing my hat!” Uphill said.
She backed away, her hand over the tapes in her sewing bag.
“Now hold on, Miller,” Uphill said. “You listen here.”
Miller touched her arm. “It’s all right,” he said.
And so, at midnight, after walking the city streets restlessly the whole day, she stood alone in the bare third-floor room of the empty house, not crying now, only her chest crying, one hand lightly resting on the side of the window that stood open before her, tall blind eye looking at the darkness of the city (she could hear traffic, far away, an occasional whisper from the leaves of the trees around the house), her lips moving, not making a sound, not even making any sense any more, a movement independent of what thoughts passed through her head, it seemed; and she remembered years from some other life, far away and trivial and sweet as a fairytale, a young girl’s sorrows over trifling things, a mother’s sweet and touching madness, a sailorboy walking through a wood with her, holding her hand with a sweet and ridiculous tenderness, and they made pictures with stones and he talked of the weather and she said with, oh, infinite righteousness, that she did not believe in indiscriminate kissing (but she was going to have an operation, and afterward, who knew? perhaps she would see as well as anyone, and then it would be she who talked of the weather—ah, how eagerly! how little he saw, really saw!—and, tenderly pressing her mouth to his, she would teach him that all his life he had been blind); but it had failed. “Sorry,” she whispered. The dark street heard her—or so it seemed to her momentary fancy—and the earth, cooling from the heat of the day—and a wind came, warm and comforting, and some neighbor coughed, struggling futilely to clear the grit and sludge of his long day of smoking, and she thought of Clumly coming home from his concubine, finding her there on the lawn—or dangling, it might be, from the roof of the porch—and, in short, for better or worse, she could not act. She had meant to be his comfort, his intercessor, but she had destroyed him. She bowed her head. “Sorry,” she whispered again, unable to weep. “I too have a life, don’t I?”
Then Esther Clumly went down to her bed and lay there, with all her clothes on, even her shoes, nose pointing at the ceiling, arms at her sides, inert and absurd as … She furrowed her forehead, trying to think what it was that she looked like, lying there, and suddenly she knew, and the insight was almost pleasing because it was so right. “Like a chicken,” she said, and sobbed. “In this house of tragedy, lying here like a horrible, stiff chicken.”
XVII
Benson versus
Boyle
Yet thanks I must you con,
That you are thieves profess’d; that you work not
In holier shapes: for there is boundless theft
In limited professions. Rascal thieves,
Here’s gold.
—Timon of Athens
1
Walter Benson had a bad cold. His nose dripped and his chest ached and his eyes ran so badly he could hardly see. It made him cynical and cross, and in a hundred ways it interfered with the resolve he’d made the night before last, the night of the thunderstorm. He’d thought then, oh yes, of throwing all caution to the winds: he would call the Batavia police and tell them all he knew, and if by involving himself he ended up exposing himself, then so be it. The Lord is Just! It had been an exhilarating idea, at the time. But when one thought about it, really thought about it, it was nonsense. And another thing which contributed to his change—or rather, relapse—of heart was this: whenever he had a cold his wife Marguerite was always unusually kind and solicitous, forever bringing him sweets, offering him orange or grapefruit juice, plying him with candied pills and sugary syrups freighted with aspirin and codeine and milk of magnesia and heaven knew what; or she would read to him out of the Saturday Evening Post or Field and Stream (which he did not like but which it flattered him to have people think he would be the type to like); and she would ask him if he wanted the Venetian blinds adjusted or if he needed the hotpad turned up or wanted more Vicks on his chest. He liked all this, especially now, when he knew it was pure hypocrisy, and the more he growled and fretted and whined, the harder she struggled to please him. He revelled in his illness and his jealousy both, and pretended to himself that both were considerably worse than they were, and he said to himself, with a testy curl of the lip, that he would think about “that other” sometime when he was better, his heart not breaking in two, as it was just now, and his nose not plugged.
Also, his wet trudge home had abruptly brought the house back to normal. Marguerite and Ollie Nuper were behaving as if nothing had happened between them, and actually, of course, when you really thought about it (he began to confess to himself, little by little), nothing had. It had been, of course, a blow to Walter Benson’s self-esteem. Of course. And a terrible shock, terrible! But that was the world, you know, you read about such things every day; they were all, after all, adults. The thought made him weep and blow his nose.
And so he padded around the house in his slippers and robe, with a turkish towel wrapped around his neck and Vicks on his chest and pushed up into his nostrils, or he sat with the electric blanket around him, in front of the television, or lay in bed with the hotpad under his hump and read the paper.
Today Ollie Nuper was all polite respect and thoughtfulness. He came into the livingroom with a bundle of dowel pins under his arms (he used them for signs) and he paused, seeing Walter Benson sitting unshaven and red-eyed and crotchety in front of the television, and he leaned the bundle on one hip, tipped his head-like-a-sheep’s and put on his sad look. He said, “Feeling better this morning, sir?”
“Doh,” Walter Benson said and fiercely rubbed his nose. His eyes filled with tears again.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Nuper said with great sincerity. “Well though, time heals all.”
Just then Marguerite came in from the kitchen with a plate of crackers and some Limburger cheese. She set them on the wide, flat arm of his chair and then, seeing his expression, tried to help him by changing the television channel, but it did no good. The only half-interesting program all morning was “Captain Kangaroo.” What she got this time, to Walter Benson’s horror, was the news. They were showing, again, the picture of the Sunlight Man.
“Still loose,” Marguerite said, alarmed. “It’s terrible!”
Nuper scratched his chin.
“Do we have do watch the dnews?” Benson said, angrily starting to get up.
She meekly changed the channel, giving him a smile. It was a quiz program. He settled in his chair again grumpily and blew his nose. After a moment he glanced over his shoulder at Nuper, and Nuper gave a little jerk, glanced at his dowel pins, remembering himself, and slouched, studiously indifferent, to his room. Benson concentrated on watching the program, thinking nothing whatever, but it was difficult. East Bethany, he thought, suddenly panicky for no reason. Attica. Alexander. Leroy. Medina.
Just after lunch something very unsettling happened. The new mailman came to the door, and when Benson answered, the mailman asked him who he was. For a moment—it was this that was so upsetting—Walter Benson (or Boyle) could not remember. As sometimes happens in such cases, the whole thing got out of all proportion, and he stood hemming and hawing, evading the question, for a full minute. He clutched the collar of his bathrobe in his two fists and shook it up and down and said, “Why, why, I dlive here! Can’d you see dthat?”
“Ah,” said the mailman, all apologies.
But Benson, crazily, was still trying to remember which was his thief-name, which his other one. He spluttered, “Do I look like some kide of a prowler, standding here id my bathrobe? Hah?” He leaned closer, winking obscenely. “Do I look lige the milgman or subthing?”
“I’m sorry,” the mailman said. “I beg your pardon.”
It was astounding! The name absolutely refused to come clear in his mind! He rolled his eyes up for divine assistance, and that made him remember the night of the thunderstorm, his hour of conversion, and he tried to think which of them the conversion had come to, as though only one of them, the citizen, presumably, could have undergone a conversion. But it was no use.
The mailman said, “I have this letter that needs postage, is all. And if your name happens to be Walter Benson—”
Benson’s eyes lit up and he pounced with joy. “Well what else would id be?” He folded his arms, triumphant.
It cost him five cents.
After the mailman delivered the letter up to him and went away somewhat nervously down the street (frowning and pursing his lips and pushing his cart with exaggerated care, as though he thought the packages all had bombs in them and he mustn’t hit a gopher hole or a stick or a bump in the sidewalk), Benson went back into the livingroom and tore open the letter, pacing back and forth in front of the television (hundreds of cowboys were shooting at each other from behind huge rocks), and tried to blow his nose and read the letter at the same time. His eyes ran, and even what he could make out of the scrawled words on the page made no sense to him, that is to say, though he stated the words to himself one by one, they fell into no meaningful order, for he was thinking of other things. He thrust the letter in front of Marguerite, who was sitting with a root beer in front of the television watching meekly (aware of his violent pacing behind her and aware, no doubt, of her sin), and he said, “Whad’s this say? My confoudded eyes …” She took it from him, lowered her glasses on her nose a little (he looked at the great bulge of lilywhite fat on the back of her neck) and read it aloud, but even now he caught none of it—a word or two: “as a priest,” “would be so pleased,” “among us all,” “heaven’s love”—and when she finished he blew his nose violently and nodded and said “I zee” and went up to his room.
It was, in plain truth, a dangerous situation. Walter Benson—or rather—that is—Walter Boyle?—was no psychologist, but he knew there was something wrong with him. The violent ups and downs alone were an indication. It was Marguerite’s fault, no question about it, and Nuper’s, and the Sunlight Man’s (in some obscure way), but the problem was not so much whose fault it was as what he was going to do about it.
He was trying to pace back and forth in the bedroom now, and it was difficult. The room was small, the double bed enormous. On one side the bed pressed up against the wall, on the other it stood only a foot and a half from the dresser. At the foot of the bed the highboy began, and it went halfway across the foot, then gave way to a four-by-six empty space, or a space that would have been empty except for the chair and the sewing machine. If he were more conscious of his surroundings just now, Benson would have moved something. But he was lost in anguished thought, so he merely squeezed between the dresser and the bed, went as far as the window, turned around and squeezed back toward the sewing machine, squeezed around behind it to the closet door, then turned back toward the sewing machine, the dresser and bed, the window.
He remembered very clearly the sense of wholeness and purity he had felt the night of the thunderstorm, sitting in the abandoned house and swearing he would change his life, but he also saw now, as he had not seen then, the other side of the nickel, so to speak. Shame, the loss of his worldly possessions, perhaps even prison. He shuddered.
He sat down on the bed abruptly and hunted through his bathrobe pockets for a Kleenex. He could find only one which had to be carefully unfolded and hadn’t a dry place anywhere. He blew his nose. He saw the corner of a Parade Magazine peeking out from under the bed and he reached for it and opened it up and sat perfectly motionless, as though he were back in jail, pretending to read it. Now his mind was a blank. He couldn’t read a word, but the pinked edge of the paper, the blurry, luminously red black print, the colored pictures steadied him. And then, for no reason, he was seeing once again the Indian boy and the Batavia Chief of Police, the pistol going crack! against the boy’s fat brown jaw. Benson’s hands shook. He remembered the guard with his head blown half off, slumping to the floor and reaching out slowly, out of all control, with the involuntary-looking movement of a penis or a snake. The opposition came suddenly clear to him—the violent, lawless bearded man, the violent policeman. It was, he saw with unspeakable clarity, a picture of his life. He, in the shape of Walter Benson, had been about to murder in cold blood the young man who had been toying with his wife’s affections!
He leaped to his feet and began to pace again, rubbing his nose painfully and gnashing his teeth and gesturing with his left hand. A man could not be both Benson and Boyle. It was more than confusing, it was immoral! He stopped in his tracks, struck by a thought even more telling. What had he ever gotten out of life anyhow, as Boyle? The men who cleaned the sewers got more money than Boyle, and got retirement pay when they were old. Even the Chief of Police would get retirement pay! His knees were suddenly weak and he had to sit down.
That moment Marguerite peeked in and said timidly, “Would you care for some tea, Walter?”
Instantly, his face squeezed shut and tears ran down his cheeks and he held out his arms to her. “Marguereed!” He wailed.
Her eyes grew round and she came in hurriedly with the tray. “My poor baby!” she exclaimed.
But he could not tell her what was troubling him. He hardly knew himself. Old age. Poverty. His terrible jealousy and something more than that, too, his awful sense of something wasted—a misspent youth, a betrayal of ideals. Waste.
“I don’d wan’ any tea,” he said. His mouth and eyes turned down and he sobbed and sobbed and clung to her hand. Afterward, he slept and she slipped downstairs to clean up a little bit.
When he awakened at suppertime he felt no better. He got out of bed, however, and put on his checkered light blue suit. He had a vague intention of drowning his miseries at a movie or walking in the park or looking through the bars of the locked-up Buffalo Zoo. Marguerite said nothing when he came out all shaved and dressed up. It was as if she’d expected it, more or less, and he tried to think if there was somewhere they usually went on whatever night this was (Wednesday? Friday?). But that was nonsense. Where did they ever go, he and Marguerite?
He stood in the kitchen with his head tipped back almost to his hump, taking nosedrops while Marguerite finished the cooking, then followed her in to the dining room while she set the table and
laid out the napkins, looking up at him and smiling meekly from time to time. He carried in the food. When everything was ready she went to the foot of the stairs and called, “Oh Mr. Nuper! Dinner is served.”
There was some bumping and scuffing, and then he came bounding down the stairs, agile as a tiger, his curly long hair flopping around his ears, a cigarette in his mouth. He had an armload of signs with him, and the one on top said BLACK POWER. Benson frowned.
“You’re going out tonight, Mr. Nuper?” Marguerite said.
He nodded, almost bowed. “A meeting, yes.” He rubbed his hands. “Scalped potatoes!” he said.
“And Spam,” Benson said.
Marguerite looked at him, wounded. Just the same, it was Spam. Truth is truth.
2
Dinner was eventful.
Marguerite said, “What kind of meeting is it you’re going to, Mr. Nuper?”
“A demonstration, sort of,” Mr. Nuper said. He was leaning down way over his plate, sliding the scalloped potatoes in with his fork.
Benson pursed his lips and looked at him, and the paperback book that had been on the table came back into his mind. “Against what?” he said.
Something in his tone gave him away, so that Nuper said only, in a clipped sort of way, “For, not against.”
Benson squinted and wrinkled his nose. “For overthrowing the Goverdment, maybe? Throwing bombs into rich beople’s houses?”
“Not a bad idea,” Nuper said, grinning an instant, then scooping in potatoes and staring straight ahead of him at the wall between Walter and Marguerite.
Marguerite said, “Boys.”
“I dode believe in demonstrations, myself,” Benson said. He meant to leave it at that. He could feel the blood rising in his neck. He cut himself a small bite of Spam.
“I thought not,” Nuper said.