The telephone rang. Cliffie, she thought – maybe – wanting to tell her they were safe in Princeton, to thank her for yesterday.
No. An ache in Edith’s knees as she stood up brought her back to reality. She entered the house through the back door and walked quickly down the hall.
‘Hello, Edith, it’s Brett. How are things?’
‘Quite all right, thank you. And how are you?’
‘You saw Carstairs yesterday – he said.’
‘Yes.’
‘Yes. Well, look, Edie, I just spoke with Carstairs, and he and his friend Philip McElroy want to pay you a visit tomorrow morning around 11. Is that all right?’
Edith was instantly annoyed, but tried to dredge up her patience. ‘I don’t know why. – I’m not going to bar the door to them, I suppose, much as I’d like to. Brett, what is this conspiracy?’ Edith went on through something Brett was saying. ‘Gert’s in on it, and you…’
‘… not a conspiracy!’ Brett yelled. ‘Just to talk with you for, say, ten minutes! All right, Edie – as long as you’re willing to see them —’
Edith had a vision of herself banging the telephone down, which she much wished to do, but found herself gripping it with all her strength. ‘All right. I never said I was disagreeable, did I? No, I’m just a sitting duck here, just a target for everyone!’ Her heart beat fast.
‘Just take it easy. Everyone’s on your side, whatever you may think.’
She gave a snort of laughter. ‘But I haven’t any side. I’m not against the others. Maybe that’s news to you!’
Brett hung up.
And Edith hung up almost simultaneously. At once, she wished she had asked Brett if he was coming also. It wouldn’t surprise her if he did. Tomorrow at 11. They hadn’t asked her if she was going to be doing anything at 11 tomorrow. Edith had an impulse to ring Brett back and ask him if he intended coming, but repressed it out of pride.
She thought first of tidying her workroom for them. The snoops always wanted to see that. Then she thought, her workroom was not a mess, and why should she care what they thought about it? She had two new heads, one finished but not cast in the simulated bronze like Cliffie’s, and the second she was still working on. These were Cliffie’s and Debbie’s two children. They had wavier hair than Cliffie’s, having taken it from their mother. Josephine and Mark, one girl, one boy. The plastic sheet was worn out in a good many spots, but it served her well still. Since when was she housekeeper to a bunch of psychiatrists, strangers?
And her diary? Well, they weren’t going to touch that, and there was no time like the present to do something about it. Edith went up the stairs, entered her workroom, and closed her diary, which had been open on her table with her closed fountain pen lying on it. Her first thought was to put it in the bookshelf under the window bench, on which Nelson was sleeping, to conceal it among the other books there, then she felt her workroom itself a vulnerable place. She walked to the door with the diary in her two hands (it was rather heavy), then thought that a place other than her workroom would be even more vulnerable, somehow. She’d damn well keep it in her workroom, where it had always been.
It was all very well for Brett to say people were not ‘against’ her, but Edith sensed that they were, and she trusted her instincts.
After a few minutes’ hesitation, Edith decided to put her diary where it often was, at the bottom of a stack of stuff on the left side of her table, a stack that included a few back issues of the Bugle, Webster’s New International, and a few old magazines she had not thrown away. Her diary had the look of an old family Bible, not something one was going to reach for, she thought, thinking of a stranger entering her workroom.
Then the doorbell rang. She wasn’t expecting anyone. What time was it? Not quite 1, she saw by her watch.
Gert and Norm were at the door downstairs.
‘Hello, Edie!’ Gert said with a big smile. ‘Can we invite ourselves for a pre-lunch nip? We brought the booze!’
Norm lifted a brown sack with a sleepy air, though his hands looked as if he held a short rifle.
‘Come in!’ Edith said, but she put on a cool air which she maintained.
Ice, glasses, drinks. And platitudes. Edith cut through it by asking:
‘Did Brett speak to you today? By any chance?’
‘No,’ Gert said, and Edith felt she was lying.
‘No,’ Norm said, sitting spraddle-legged in the armchair, wobbling his glass on his thigh.
‘Why?’ asked Gert.
‘Oh – nothing. Just wondered,’ Edith said.
There was conversation, of a sort, but the talk and the atmosphere was phony and dreadful, Edith felt. They asked about Cliffie. Well, Cliffie was still asleep. And so what? She and Gert had had their showdown on the telephone, a couple of times, Edith thought. She knew that Gert knew that she considered Gert her enemy, so why any pretense any longer? Edith also knew that Gert knew about tomorrow’s appointment at 11, but hadn’t the guts to mention it or admit it. Oh, no, not Gert! Were they checking to see if she looked as if she would run out on the appointment? Out of fear? Or boredom? Edith sat up straighter, and asked if anyone wanted a dividend.
‘I think we’d better be pushing on,’ Gert said.
Edith couldn’t recall a time when Gert had refused a second drink.
‘You’re looking well, Edie,’ Gert said with another smile.
They were gone. Their voices kept on in Edith’s ears like echoes. Edith had asked about their kids, how they were doing, all the usual questions. Something about the Bugle. Had Edith reminded the Lambertville Cinema (a struggling movie house) that their advertising rates had to go up fifteen percent this year? Edith said she had reminded them, which was true.
She made a late lunch for Cliffie and herself, then awakened him. He was unusually jolly and talkative, but Edith barely listened.
‘… Then we shot some pool in Trenton,’ Cliffie said, grinning, winding up his account of the night until 3 or 4 a.m. He had mentioned Mel, seeing Mel, who Edith thought had long ago dropped out of the picture. Cliffie was cheerful because Mel had taken him up again, it seemed.
Edith was thinking of Marion and Ed Zylstra, wishing they were around, as in the old days. But they had moved to Dallas five, maybe seven years ago, and Ed had been killed in a terrible car crash. Marion had remarried, and was living in New Orleans – wasn’t it? No, of course not, Houston. She had married an electronics scientist or engineer.
‘Houston? What about Houston?’ Cliffie asked, sopping up gravy with a corner of bread.
Edith had not realized that she was thinking out loud, day-dreaming. ‘Oh, I was thinking of – Marion. You know. You remember Marion and Ed Zylstra.’
Cliffie shook his head, not because he didn’t remember, but because his mother was in such a fog lately. ‘Sure, I remember. – Mom, what’s the matter today?’
‘Nothing,’ she said in a cheerful voice, shaking her head also.
Then she was in the kitchen, and thinking of the afternoon concert (it was just after 3) which she would switch on in a couple of minutes, after she had given the kitchen a lick and a promise, as Aunt Melanie had used to say. She put the butter back in the fridge, and Nelson stuck his head in, pale head and dark ears, and Edith almost closed the door but didn’t, thinking of old Mildew – poor creature! But that of course hadn’t happened, Mildew’s neck severed, her head in the fridge, eating. That had been a dream, really only a dream.
Edith bent toward Nelson, smiling. ‘Nelse, old pal! Didn’t I feed you this morning?’
Anyway, she fed him now, and Nelson was in no danger of starving. Nor was he fat. He looked perfect.
That afternoon, listening to César Franck and Bartók on her radio, Edith worked on Mark’s head. She felt secure standing on her feet, metaphorically and literally.
Cliffie, in his room, felt restless, though he flopped again on his unmade bed. What the hell was the matter with his mother? She was a bit cracked, he had realized since
a long time, but today she seemed worse. Had some people come in this morning while he was asleep? Cliffie was not sure. Lately his mother talked to herself, and if he had been asleep, hearing or imagining voices —
‘… Danang since…’ said the voice on Cliffie’s transistor, ‘is in chaos as South Vietnamese soldiers and civilians flee southwards, deserting their p —’
Cliffie switched off. He had a dark blue sock in his hand. His room door was locked. Now he could faintly hear music from the upstairs. The news every hour on the hour lasted only two minutes or so, but because his mother talked so much about the collapse of Saigon, Kwan Tuck, Muck Tuck or whatever the hell it was, Cliffie was sick of it, and couldn’t even endure the news until the music came back on again. Cliffie turned over on his stomach and thought of Luce, remembered Luce with her tantalizing, joking smile, her slim dark trousers which he would soon take off, her scream of pleasure and laughter as her eyes looked upward. Luce! Her bastard husband could never give her the pleasure that he could. And Luce knew that.
31
Dawn and the chirps of birds, sparrows, the wanted and the unwanted birds. April! And Monday. As soon as Edith was out of bed, Nelson appeared – where from? – and addressed her with a firm, questioning ‘Mi-wow-ow-ow?’ as if his brows frowned, as if his query were too important for him to waste time with a ‘Good morning.’
‘I know,’ Edith said. Nelson wanted his breakfast.
She put the coffee on, fed Nelson, went to see if Cliffie was awake at a quarter to 9, knocked on his door. No answer, and she opened the door gently. Cliffie looked sound asleep, face to the wall. She closed the door again.
The post brought a telephone bill of nearly a hundred dollars, and Edith signed a check for it. She had already had a bath and was dressed, and now she went out to drop the envelope with the check in the corner box, and to buy milk and eggs at the Cracker Barrel – certainly an expensive store compared to the supermarket, but after all they employed Cliffie part-time, and it behooved her to patronize them now and then. They also carried an especially good brand of tomato juice, of which Edith bought a bottle.
‘Hi-i, Mrs Howland – Edith! How’re you today?’ asked the skinny fellow with Rudyard Kipling mustache (except that this rather young man was blond) at the check-out counter.
‘All right, thank you,’ Edith said with a smile. She had forgotten his name. Sam? ‘And so should you be with these atrocious prices!’
The mouth under the mustache chuckled richly. ‘And how’s Cliffie?’ Bing-bing went the cash register, clunk went the tomato juice into a sturdy brown bag. ‘Our star boy, y’know. People like him. People say he ought to go on the stage!’
Was he joking? Pulling her leg? All the world’s a stage, Edith thought, and hated herself for thinking of it. ‘A born entertainer,’ Edith said with gentle scorn, and took her leave with the brown bag, smoothly, swiftly.
At 11, she was straightening her workroom a bit, sweeping (after having addressed a few envelopes in advance for Bugle subscriptions), and in fact she succeeded, as she had meant to do, in not being aware of the exact time, when the doorbell rang. She glanced at her wrist-watch and saw that it was 11:25. She went down the stairs and opened the front door.
Carstairs was with a tall man in a tweed jacket, sweater, a shirt open at the neck.
‘Morning, Edith,’ Carstairs said. ‘Sorry we’re a little late. This is Phil McElroy – doctor.’ He smiled. ‘Old friend of mine.’
‘How d’y’do?’ said McElroy with a broad smile.
McElroy reminded Edith a little of Jack Kennedy. ‘Brett not with you?’ she asked. ‘Come in.’
‘No, no. He’s working, I suppose,’ said Carstairs.
They went into the living room. ‘Nice house you’ve got here,’ said Philip McElroy. ‘I was admiring your roses – just now. All around the pillars like that.’
‘Thank you,’ said Edith, her voice frail suddenly. She waited for them to get on with it, and finally Carstairs said:
‘We were wondering, Edith, if you’d be willing to come to Doylestown to have a talk with Phil or for him to come here – I can take off in a few minutes – to have a talk about life, you know. Everything.’
‘I’m rather busy,’ Edith said, and shook her shoulders, almost shuddered with sudden impatience. ‘Why I command all this attention when – I’m sure you’ve heard the news, doctor,’ she went on, addressing Carstairs. ‘Not to mention Time magazine right there,’ and she pointed to an issue with a large photograph of a Vietnamese child, mouth open, wailing. The black band across the corner said COLLAPSE IN VIET NAM.
‘Of course I’ve heard it. It’s tragic,’ said Carstairs.
‘Yes, and the TV shots,’ McElroy put in, glancing at Carstairs. ‘Yes – the American pull-out.’ McElroy shook his head.
‘At least it shows the power of the people in the streets,’ Edith continued, ‘the ordinary protesters finally stopped Congress from voting more money for the war. But we might’ve made better provision for helping refugees out. That wasn’t right, on our part.’
‘No,’ McElroy agreed.
Edith’s heart beat as if she were arguing violently with someone who disagreed. But McElroy and Carstairs were not disagreeing, and Viet Nam would now go Communist, which Edith had never wished. She tried to say some of this, and found herself stammering. ‘It’s such a mess. I was for pulling out, but now look!’ Then for an awful few seconds Edith realized she did not know what side she was on in regard to the Viet Nam débâcle, and felt like someone who had just fallen backward on the ice. Ludicrous.
‘Well, Edith, what do you think?’ asked Carstairs. ‘Phil has helped an awful lot of people right around here, people you might even know. But of course they might not tell you – any more than Phil would ever tell you that he’s talked with them, helped them out of tough spots. You’ll feel worlds better after yacking away to —’
‘About what?’ Edith was pleased that her question seemed to silence them. ‘Sounds quite boring to me and for anyone else, I should think.’
‘How about showing Phil some of your nice sculpture, Edith?’ Carstairs stood up.
Edith had a sickening déjà-vu feeling. The same old rubbish! Were they all acting, like players on a stage? Her mind fastened on her diary upstairs, visible on the corner of the desk, under those papers. ‘I don’t – if you don’t mind, don’t like people I don’t know very well going into my workroom.’
‘I do understand,’ said McElroy. ‘So never mind that. It’s more important that you talk with me – about your daydreams, what’s on —’
‘If you think I’ve got time for daydreaming!’
McElroy laughed. ‘Who has? But you write short stories, I’ve heard. Bring one or two when you come to see me. Or read from them yourself, just the parts you want to read.’
‘That I would never do,’ Edith said with an effort at pleasantness. ‘Anyway, several are published.’
‘Exactly,’ said McElroy. ‘That’s why I propose that you read to me from them.’ He opened his hands with an air of innocence.
Edith shook her head.
‘Edith,’ Carstairs said, ‘if things get worse —’
‘What things?’ Edith interrupted, now with all her guards up. She was imagining little robot medical men-in-white invading her house, carrying her out, plus her diary – unless she burnt it.
‘Edith, do you realize that you’ve lost a few friends lately? You must have realized that people aren’t visiting as much as they used to.’
‘Oh – little neighborly tiffs now and then. If you mean my editorials – and published stories – Who reads around here, anyway?’ But she thought of the Quickmans. What had that been about? A little argument four months or so ago. Maybe she’d called them idiots. Something political, as Edith remembered. Now they were being a bit cool. So what?
‘If you don’t make an effort now on your own,’ Dr Carstairs said, ‘you may soon have to be under real surveillance, Edith.’ r />
‘What?’ Edith pretended an amused surprise. Without debating it, she decided to try a slight appeasement. ‘Listen, if you want to take a look at my workroom, come ahead.’ She stood up. ‘Just give me two minutes – one minute – to make sure it’s presentable. All right?’