Melanie was standing with them, and she said, ‘Oh, Edith, I am sorry.’
Edith was shocked. The next seconds passed, the next minute, and she talked, replied to the vet’s statements and questions, but she felt miles away, as if she were going to faint. The vet was suggesting that she should have Mildew put away now, painlessly with a needle. And Edith had to acquiesce. There was nothing else she could do. She didn’t want Mildew to suffer. Yet the verdict had been so sudden.
Then Edith was sitting with Melanie in the waiting room, along with another woman who had a squirming beagle puppy, and Edith smoked a cigarette. She got up with Melanie when the vet summoned them. Mildew was wrapped in a white paper, tucked in at the ends like a package, and Edith watched him deposit the still limp body gently in the basket.
‘I am sorry, Mrs Howland. But your cat had a long life and a happy one. You must think of that.’
On the street, Melanie said, ‘Do you feel all right to drive home, dear? I’m sure we could get a taxi and arrange to get the car home some other way.’
‘No, I’m all right.’ Edith pulled herself together and drove. Melanie was wonderfully comforting, saying just the right things. Melanie made tea in the kitchen and insisted on Edith’s drinking a cup before they buried the cat in the garden, as Edith had said she wanted to do.
Cliffie was home, his radio was on, and he came into the kitchen while Edith was drinking her tea. ‘What’s up?’ he asked.
‘Poor Mildew just had to be put away,’ Melanie said.
The cat’s basket was on the floor.
Cliffie looked at it. ‘Really? She’s in there – dead, you mean?’
‘Maybe you can help us,’ Melanie said. ‘We’re going to bury her in the garden.’
‘Oh.’ Cliffie glanced at his mother and their eyes met.
Cliffie went back to his room, and Edith knew Melanie supposed he would come back in a minute, but Edith knew he wouldn’t. Edith picked up the basket and said:
‘Let’s go ahead. The sooner the better.’ With her free hand, Edith took a clean white dishtowel from a kitchen shelf, jiggling it free from the stack, an old linen cloth from a Pennsylvania antique sale.
Edith dug with the fork, Melanie helped with the spade, and they lowered the paper-wrapped, towel-wrapped form into a grave more than two feet deep.
‘I’ll put a stone over it,’ Edith said, and went off to get a stone – she’d get several – from a border in the garden. She got the wheelbarrow so she could take the stones at the same time.
‘Funny Cliffie wouldn’t help us,’ Melanie said.
‘Oh, death frightens him, I think,’ Edith said. When she had placed the stones, she added, ‘Besides he’s always been jealous of Mildew – knew I loved the cat, you know.’
‘But still —’ Melanie was plainly surprised.
At lunch, Cliffie said rather boldly, ‘I don’t see why it should mean so much to me – that cat. I mean, once she’s dead anyway – once anything’s dead —’
Neither Edith nor Melanie replied to that. Edith had rung Brett up that morning to tell him, after debating whether to ring him or not. But she felt better having told him, rather than waiting until he got home that evening.
George was awake when Edith went up after lunch to get his tray. He again said how sorry he was to hear about Mildew. ‘I’m sure it was a shock, dear Edith,’ he said in a soft, husky voice, and his pink eyelids hung down, full of their usual water, not tears.
‘Well – that’s life,’ Edith said.
She knew George meant well, but she detested George at that moment, more than she had detested him on bringing the lunch tray, when she had told him about her cat, though George had been equally nice then. She detested the vaguely gray-looking sheets (though she changed them often enough), the inevitable sloppiness of the room, the fact that she and Brett were stuck with George, that this room would be occupied, apparently, forever – while nice things that she loved like Mildew would die, disappear, be taken from her.
Brett was a darling, put his arm around Edith and comforted her that evening, long after dinner when the others had gone to bed. They had a nightcap, sitting on the leather sofa.
‘Old Mildew did have a happy life – with her back garden,’ Brett said. ‘The thing to do is get another kitten, don’t you think?’
‘Of course. Of course.’
On the third day of Melanie’s stay, Cliffie invited her for a drive in the Fiat. Edith was a little surprised by his attention, or politeness, but, pleased also.
‘Take her toward Centerbridge – the waterfall’s so pretty,’ Edith whispered in the kitchen, as Cliffie fortified himself with a mid-morning beer. ‘And you might invite her for a Cinzano or something at Cross-Keys. Have you got some money?’
‘I could use a fiver. Might have to buy some gas.’
Edith gave it to him.
Around noon, Cliffie rang up and said Melanie had invited him for lunch.
It was a Friday. Edith relaxed, prepared lunch for George, made a sandwich for herself. She took a last glance at Sunday’s papers so they could be got out of the way, tidied a little in the living room, cut some fresh roses for Melanie’s room, and in her workroom made sure she could put her hands on two articles she wanted to show Melanie which she had written in the last weeks. One was on the need for socialized medicine and its eventual advantages to the public and the whole economy, which – if Harper’s declined – Edith was optimistic that she could sell somewhere.
In the silent house, George’s snores came with unusual clarity down the hall. Edith went and gently closed his door, getting a glimpse as she did so of the framed photograph of the young-looking dark-haired man called Paul, who was another nephew of George’s and who lived in San Francisco, an engineer of some kind, with wife and a couple of kids. Why didn’t that one take George on for a while, Edith thought to herself.
Edith also found a good color photograph of dear old Mildew, white-breasted, brindle-nosed, dozing with her feet tucked in on a pillow under a back garden apple tree. Mildew was in dappling sunlight, her eyes half-closed. Edith smiled, and felt better for smiling.
She was taking a swat at the garden when Cliffie and Melanie got back a little after 3.
‘Had a marvelous time,’ Melanie said. ‘I was really squired around in fine style. But now I’m ready for my post-prandial nap.’
‘I’m very pleased.’ She had the feeling Melanie wanted to talk to her, but perhaps not now, and maybe Melanie really was tired. At any rate, Melanie went upstairs.
That evening, the Johnsons were coming to dinner, though not with either of their teen-aged kids. Derek had been drafted, much to Gert’s and Norm’s fury, a few months after he had graduated from Penn State, and had been in Viet Nam now more than six months. Edith started organizing her dinner. Melanie knew the Johnsons quite well by now, and they had got on from the start. Edith looked forward to a happy evening.
And it did go well. Edith had rung Gert up that morning to tell her about Mildew, so the only talk of that was a word of sympathy from them both when they arrived. They talked about Viet Nam. It had become a din in Edith’s ears, or a drone, a record repeated, and yet she knew it was important, because it seemed that the Pentagon, which Edith considered a war-making and war-loving machine, had greater influence than Congress on the President. We are reaping the fruit, Edith thought, of blind anti-Communist, anti-social brainwashing. But since she had said it before, and would be preaching to the converted anyway, she said next to nothing.
‘You’re so lucky, playing it like a clown, Cliffie ol’ boy,’ Gert said in her slightly rowdy way. Gert loved her drink and had had three generous ryes before dinner.
Cliffie didn’t rise to the remark, but looked a bit affronted, and glanced at Melanie to see how she was taking it.
Melanie let it pass, having heard about Cliffie’s interview with the military examiner in Harrisburg.
‘Our boy Derek’s in Viet Nam,’ Norm explained to M
elanie. ‘We tried to get him into the Navy instead of the Army, because – you serve four year-rs in the Navy instead of two in the Army, but at least the Navy’s safer.’
‘People say, thank goodness Derek isn’t wounded yet,’ Gert added, leaning forward over her fruit plate on which she was eating tangerines, ‘but they’re not wounded there so often as they’re just blown up by – by —’
‘Booby traps,’ Norm said. ‘Oh, honey, talking won’t do any good. – He’s got a year more. Well, a little more than a year,’ Norman informed Melanie.
Gert smiled and shook her head. ‘And there’s old clever Cliffie —’
‘Oh, Gertie,’ Norm said. ‘Come on!’
Late that night, when Edith and Melanie were stacking dishes in the kitchen, putting things away in the larder and fridge, Melanie said:
‘Cliffie invited me to lunch today, insisted on paying. I thought that was really sweet of him.’
Had Melanie said it to make her feel better after the remarks at dinner? Was it true? But Edith knew it was true, if Melanie said it. ‘It does surprise me,’ Edith said.
Cliffie’s transistor was on, playing pop music on the other side of the kitchen, music interspersed by voices now and then, interviews with pop stars. Sometimes Cliffie fell asleep with his radio on.
‘Has he got a girl friend now?’ Melanie asked.
‘We wish he had,’ Edith said. ‘It might pull him together.’
‘He’s quite a good-looking boy. He’s just not interested?’
‘Oh-h,’ Edith began, ‘he hangs around a couple of successful boys here. Successful with the girls, I mean. In the bar called Mickey’s – up Main Street. But it doesn’t mean their girls go for Cliffie.’ It sounded as if the other boys had harems, which was perhaps true, Edith thought. ‘Yes, well.’ Edith turned, smiling, from the sink, and dropped a squeezed out sponge on the drainboard. ‘God knows Brett and I would make his girl friends welcome, but he doesn’t bring any home. I don’t think he sees them anywhere else, or they’d be telephoning – or he would.’
9
Cliffie just then had an ear to the door in the hall, not far from the kitchen. A finger of his right hand pushed against his right ear, cutting out much of the noise from his radio. So his mother was yacketing about girls again, and even his old great-great-aunt! Cliffie had decided he could take girls or leave them, so what was the problem? Vulgar prying, Cliffie considered it. Cliffie thought he had done pretty handsomely by Aunt Melanie that day.
He slipped back into his room and left his door open a little, so he could see when the light went out in the kitchen.
And that yack tonight about his not being drafted for Viet Nam! Who wanted to be drafted for that place? As his parents would be the first to say, some of the best brains in the country were against fellows going there, advised fellows to resort to any kind of trick to keep out, so Cliffie considered himself a bit cleverer than Derek, because Derek certainly hadn’t wanted to go.
When the kitchen light was out and various doors had shut upstairs, Cliffie tiptoed down the hall and out the front door. He simply had to get some fresh air and stretch his legs after a day like today. Cliffie whistled a tune in the June moonlight, and walked with a slightly rolling gait, heading for Mickey’s which didn’t close till around 3. He recognized Billy Watts coming toward him on the sidewalk. Billy lived beyond the Howlands on Main.
‘Hi, Cliffie,’ said Billy, passing.
‘Hi,’ Cliffie replied. He had waited for Billy to greet him, not being sure he would, because they’d had a slight argument – Cliffie had forgotten about what, maybe juke box tunes and who had played what – at Mickey’s not long ago.
Cliffie got to Mickey’s, walked up the sidewalk and the couple of steps to the door, under the little pink sign saying Budweiser, and into the familiar, dimly lit room with its counter on the left where Mickey sold take-away beer, and the long bar beyond. The juke box was playing Elvis Presley now. Cliffie knew at least three of the fellows hunched over their drinks at the bar, but went to an empty space, said hello to Mickey – a skinny guy about forty-five – and gave his order for a rum and coke.
‘How you doin’, boy?’ Mickey asked, as he set the jigger down for Cliffie to pour.
‘Pretty good, and you?’ Cliffie replied, fixed his drink and straightened up before he tasted it. He was feeling good tonight, thinking he’d behaved in exemplary fashion today, taking his old aunt out on his own money, not a cheap lunch, either. Cliffie had a vague – extremely vague – idea that he might inherit something from her one day, something not too big, but solid, like ten thousand dollars. Therefore he cared about the impression he made on Melanie. He peered at himself in the mirror behind the bar, not that Cliffie cared how he looked now, but he liked to feel he was here, real, his longish and rather wavy hair making his head look bigger, he thought, covering the top part of his ears lately. At thirteen or fourteen, Cliffie remembered, he had pilfered Melanie’s handbag in her room – twice during her same visit, and the second time she had unfortunately walked in and caught him in the act. Cliffie recalled this with embarrassment, remembered the hot shame in his face, but Melanie had spoken softly to him (not like his father would have done!) and had given him a couple of dollars from her handbag, and said she would not say a word to his mother, if he promised not to do it again. ‘Always ask if you want money,’ Melanie had said.
At the bar, Cliffie laughed with sudden nervousness, and tried to hide it by ducking his head and coughing. His heart beat faster than usual.
Joey Costello came in, preceded by a giggling girl. What was her name? Joey was laying her these days, Cliffie knew. Cliffie felt a swift envy, very passing.
‘Hi, Joey! Ginger!’ Cliffie said, remembering the girl’s name suddenly. She was about sixteen, and Cliffie didn’t know where she lived, but it wasn’t Brunswick Corner.
Joey put in an order for two rums and cokes, and he and the girl went to a table.
Cliffie ordered more rum, a double. On top of the wine and stuff he’d had at dinner, the rum was making him feel fine and mellow, as the song said. He stood up straighter and slapped his solid ribs once or twice. He had pulled off his sweater, tied its arms around his neck, and rolled up the sleeves of his striped shirt. It was a warm night. He wanted to glance over his shoulder at Joey and Ginger, but didn’t.
Now as to girls, Cliffie thought, feeling philosophical as he began on his double rum, he took the attitude that it was safer for the time being to hold himself aloof. He could always jerk himself off and did, if he felt so inclined. No complications there. He used his socks to come in, which caused him to wash them rather often, which earned him a word of praise from his mother! Cliffie had to laugh again. Girls, for instance, had no sense of humor. They only laughed ‘Hee-hee-hee!’ or shrieked like police sirens to flatter the fellows they might be with, make them think they’d said something witty. Girls were also expensive. Then, suppose you got a girl pregnant? You had to pay for it or be labeled a cad, or blame somebody else which maybe wouldn’t be possible. Then the nice girls (Cliffie couldn’t imagine anything more boring than one of these) were traps, saying, ‘You’ve got to marry me before I will,’ just as they said in a lot of books and articles Cliffie was always reading about ‘the sexes’ or ‘the sex war’. Thank God the type was dying out with the Pill, but Cliffie knew some of the girls around B.C. couldn’t get the Pill, and so didn’t do it with anyone. Cliffie had heard fellows like Joey laughing about it. Why bother with girls like that, Cliffie thought, since he was only twenty? There was time.
‘Yee-hoo-oo!’
‘Yee-ow!’
A tipsy trio had burst through the door.
‘You people keep it quiet!’ Mickey warned them. ‘I don’t want the cops here tonight!’ Mickey was half joking, half not.
Cliffie had seen Mickey refuse to serve drinks to people already tight. But Cliffie was in a dream world of his own, not interested in the three whom Mickey might not serve and might
eject.
Girls, he’d been thinking about. Well, as with the Viet Nam thing, it was best to stay out of the rat-race as long as one could. A job, a wife, the inevitable kids – a wife who’d yell if he spent too much time out at night with chums – who wanted that?
One of the trio jolted Cliffie in the right elbow by accident, causing Cliffie to spill a bit of his drink. ‘Hey!’ Cliffie said, his eyes flashing sudden anger.
‘’Scuse us,’ said the tight guy, his arm around the girl’s waist.
‘Don’t do it again,’ Cliffie said.
‘Take it easy, all of you,’ said Mickey. He was rinsing out glasses in the aluminum sink.
Within seconds, Cliffie’s mind had drifted to another subject, George, that pain in the ass, that sponger, that mealy-mouthed hypocrite, simply using his parents, occupying a room for years that Cliffie would have preferred as his own, and which should have been his by right, instead of the stinking maid’s room or whatever it was that he had next to the kitchen. Cliffie knew George didn’t like him either, called him lazy and stupid. That parasite calling anybody lazy! And stupid? Just because he considered, he knew college was a bore? Why bother starting college, if you knew you were going to be flunked out in a year, incurring further disgrace, criticism, Cliffie supposed. Why let yourself in for one month after another of ‘failing’ something? That was what he hated, being criticized constantly, when he was at least honest enough to say he didn’t give a damn about passing or doing well or whatever they were talking about. As for success in life, or making money, Cliffie was pleased to say, ‘Look at all the rich people who never went to college, oil millionaires who started as roustabouts and ditch-diggers.’ Even New York had big-shots who’d just walked into some dead-on-its-ass firm and told them how to run things, how to cut the crap and be efficient, and they’d had their salaries upped, until finally they’d owned the fucking business, just ordinary guys like himself.