The Winter of Our Discontent

"I'm going to bring my boy in."

  Customers always come in coveys, never in evenly spaced singles. A clerk gets set in the interval to meet the next flight. Another thing, when two men do something together they become alike, differences of mind become less ragged. The Army discovered that black and white no longer fight each other when they have something else to fight in company. My subcutaneous fear of a cop dissipated when Walder weighed out a pound of tomatoes and totted up a list of figures on a bag.

  Our first flight took off.

  "Better tell me quick what you want," I said.

  "I promised Marullo I'd come out here. He wants to give you the store."

  "You're nuts. I beg your pardon, ma'am. I was speaking to my friend."

  "Oh, yes. Of course. Well, there are five of us--three children. How many frankfurters will I need?"

  "Five apiece for the children, three for your husband, two for you. That's twenty."

  "You think they'll eat five?"

  "They think they will. Is it a picnic?"

  "Uh-huh."

  "Then get five extra for dropping in the fire."

  "Where do you keep the Plug-O for sinks?"

  "Back there with the cleansers and ammonia."

  It was broken up like that and was bound to be. Edited of customers, it was like this: "I guess I'm in a state of shock. I just do my job and it's with mugs for the most part. If you get conditioned by crooks and liars and cheats, why, an honest man can shock the hell out of you."

  "What do you mean, honest? My boss never gave away anything. He's a tough monkey."

  "I know he is. We made him that way. He told me and I believe him. Before he came over he knew the words on the bottom of the Statue of Liberty. He'd memorized the Declaration of Independence in dialect. The Bill of Rights was words of fire. And then he couldn't get in. So he came anyway. A nice man helped him--took everything he had and dropped him in the surf to wade ashore. It was quite a while before he understood the American way, but he learned--he learned. 'A guy got to make a buck! Look out for number one!' But he learned. He's not dumb. He took care of number one."

  This was interspersed with customers so it didn't build to a dramatic climax--just a series of short statements.

  "That's why he wasn't hurt when somebody turned him in."

  "Turned him in?"

  "Sure. All it takes is a telephone call."

  "Who did that?"

  "Who knows? The department's a machine. You set the dials and it follows through all the steps like an automatic washer."

  "Why didn't he run for it?"

  "He's tired, right to his bones he's tired. And he's disgusted. He's got some money. He wants to go back to Sicily."

  "I still don't get it about the store."

  "He's like me. I can take care of chiselers. That's my job. An honest man gums up my works, throws me sky high. That's what happened to him. One guy didn't try to cheat him, didn't steal, didn't whine, didn't chisel. He tried to teach the sucker to take care of himself in the land of the free but the boob couldn't learn. For a long time you scared him. He tried to figure out your racket, and he discovered your racket was honesty."

  "Suppose he was wrong?"

  "He doesn't think he was. He wants to make you a kind of monument to something he believed in once. I've got the conveyance out in the car. All you have to do is file it."

  "I don't understand it."

  "I don't know whether I do or not. You know how he talks-- like corn popping. I'm trying to translate what he tried to explain. It's like a man is made a certain way with a certain direction. If he changes that, something blows, he strips a gear, he gets sick. It's like a--well, like a do-it-yourself police court. You have to pay for a violation. You're his down payment, kind of, so the light won't go out."

  "Why did you drive out here?"

  "Don't know exactly. Had to--maybe--so the light won't go out."

  "Oh, God!"

  The store clouded up with clamoring kids and damp women. There wouldn't be any more uncluttered moments until noon at least.

  Walder went out to his car, and came back and parted a wave of frantic summer wives to get to the counter. He laid down one of those hard board bellows envelopes tied with a tape.

  "Got to go. Four hours' drive with this traffic. My wife's mad. She said it could wait. But it couldn't wait."

  "Mister, I been waiting ten minutes to get waited on."

  "Be right with you, ma'am."

  "I asked him if he had any message and he said, 'Tell him good-by.' You got any message?"

  "Tell him good-by."

  The wave of ill-disguised stomachs closed in again and it was just as well for me. I dropped the envelope in the drawer below the cash register and with it--desolation.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The day went quickly and yet was endless. Closing time had no relation to opening time, so long ago it was that I could hardly remember it. Joey came in as I was about to close the front doors and without asking him I punched a beer can and handed it to him, and then I opened one for myself and I have never done that before. I tried to tell him about Marullo and the store, and found I could not, not even the story I had accepted in exchange for the truth.

  "You look tired," he said.

  "I guess I am. Look at those shelves--stripped. They bought things they didn't want and didn't need." I unloaded the cash register into the gray canvas bag, added the money Mr. Baker had brought, and on top I put the bellows envelope and tied up the bag with a piece of string.

  "You oughtn't to leave that around."

  "Maybe not. I hide it. Want another beer?"

  "Sure."

  "Me too."

  "You're too good an audience," he said. "I get to believing my own stories."

  "Like what?"

  "Like my triple-deck instincts. I had one this morning. Woke up with it. Guess I dreamed it, but it was real strong, hair on the back of my neck and everything. I didn't think the bank was going to get stuck up today. I knew it. I knew it, lying in bed. We keep little wedges under the foot alarms so we won't tramp them by mistake. First thing this morning I took them out. I was that sure of it, braced for it. Now how do you explain that?"

  "Maybe somebody planned it and you read his mind and he gave it up."

  "You make it easy for a guy to guess wrong with honor."

  "How do you figure it?"

  "God knows. I think I've been Mr. Know-It-All to you so much I got to believe it. But it sure shook me up."

  "You know, Morph, I'm too tired even to sweep out."

  "Don't leave that dough here tonight. Take it home."

  "Okay, if you say so."

  "I still got the feeling something's screwy."

  I opened the leather box and put the money sack in with my plumed hat and strapped it closed. Joey, watching me, said, "I'm going in to New York and get a room at a hotel and I'm going to watch the waterfall across Times Square for two solid days with my shoes off."

  "With your date?"

  "I called that off. I'll order up a bottle of whisky and a dame. Don't have to talk to either of them."

  "I told you--maybe we're going on a little trip."

  "Hope so. You need it. Ready to go?"

  "Couple of things to do. You go on, Joey. Get your shoes off."

  First thing to do was to call Mary and tell her I had to be a little late.

  "Yes, but hurry, hurry, hurry. News, news, news."

  "Can't you tell me now, sweetheart?"

  "No. I want to see your face."

  I hung the Mickey Mouse mask on the cash register by its rubber band so that it covered the little window where the numbers show. Then I put on my coat and hat and turned out the lights and sat on the counter with my legs dangling. A naked black banana stalk nudged me on one side and the cash register fitted against my left shoulder like a bookend. The shades were up so that the summer late light strained through the crossed-wire grating, and it was very quiet, a quiet like a rushing sound, and tha
t's what I needed. I felt in my left side pocket for the lump the cash register pushed against me. The talisman--I held it in my two hands and stared down at it. I had thought I needed it yesterday. Had I forgot to put it back or was my keeping it with me no accident? I don't know.

  As always it put its power on me as I traced its design with my finger. At midday it was the pink of a rose, but in the evening it picked up a darker tone, a purplish blush as though a little blood had got in it.

  It wasn't thought I needed but rearrangement, change of design, as though I were in a garden from which the house had been moved in the night. Some kind of makeshift had to be set up to shelter me until I could rebuild. I had retired into busyness until I could let new things enter slowly and count and identify them as they came. The shelves, all day assaulted, showed many gaps where their defenses had been breeched by the hungry horde, a snaggle-toothed effect, a walled town after artillery fire.

  "Let us pray for our departed friends," I said. "The thin red line of catsup, the gallant pickles and condiments down to the small bald capers of vinegar. We cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate--no not that. It is rather to us the living--no not that. Alfio--I wish you luck and surcease from pain. You are wrong, of course, but wrongness can be a poultice to you. You made a sacrifice for having been a sacrifice."

  People passing in the street flickered the light inside the store. I dug back in the debris of the day for Walder's words and for his face when he said them: "A do-it-yourself police court. You have to pay for a violation. You're his down payment, kind of, so the light won't go out." That's what the man said. Walder in his safe world of crooks shaken by one gleaming shaft of honesty.

  So the light won't go out. Did Alfio say it that way? Walder didn't know, but he did know that's what Marullo meant.

  I traced the serpent on the talisman and came back to the beginning, which was the end. That was an old light--Marulli three thousand years ago found their way through the lupariae to the Lupercal on the Palatine to offer a votive to Lycean Pan, protector of the flocks from wolves. And that light had not gone out. Marullo, the dago, the wop, the guinea, sacrificed to the same god for the same reason. I saw him again raise his head out of the welter of fat neck and aching shoulders, I saw the noble head, the hot eyes--and the light. I wondered what my payment would be and when demanded. If I took my talisman down to the Old Harbor and threw it in the sea--would that be acceptable?

  I did not draw the shades. On long holidays we left them up so the cops could look in. The storeroom was dark. I locked the alley door and was halfway across the street when I remembered the hatbox behind the counter. I did not go back for it. It would be a kind of question asked. The wind was rising that Saturday evening, blowing shrill and eagerly from the southeast as it must to bring the rain to soak the vacationers. I thought to put out the milk for that gray cat on Tuesday and invite it in to be a guest in my store.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  I don't know for sure how other people are inside--all different and all alike at the same time. I can only guess. But I do know how I will squirm and wriggle to avoid a hurtful truth and, when finally there is no choice, will put it off, hoping it will go away. Do other people say primly, "I'll think about that tomorrow when I am rested," and then draw on a hoped-for future or an edited past like a child playing with violence against the inevitability of bedtime?

  My dawdled steps toward home led through a minefield of the truth. The future was sowed with fertile dragon's teeth. It was not unnatural to run for a safe anchorage in the past. But on that course, set square across it was Aunt Deborah, a great wing shot on a covey of lies, her eyes gleaming question marks.

  I had looked in the window of the jewelry store at expanding watch bands and glasses frames as long as was decent. The humid, windy evening was breeding a thunderstorm.

  There were many like Great-Aunt Deborah early in the last century, islands of curiosity and knowledge. Maybe it was being cut off from a world of peers that drove the few into books or perhaps it was the endless waiting, sometimes three years, sometimes forever, for the ships to come home, that pushed them into the kind of books that filled our attic. She was the greatest of great-aunts, a sibyl and a pythoness in one, said magic nonsense words to me, which kept their magic but not their nonsense when I tracked them down.

  "Me beswac fah wyrm thurh faegir word," she said and the tone was doom. And, "Seo leo gif heo blades onbirigth abit aerest hire ladteow." Wonder-words they must be, since I still remember them.

  The Town Manager of New Baytown went crab-scuttling by me, head down, and only gave me good evening in return for mine first offered.

  I could feel my house, the old Hawley house, from half a block away. Last night it huddled in a web of gloom but this thunder-bordered eve it radiated excitement. A house, like an opal, takes on the colors of the day. Antic Mary heard my footsteps on the walk and she flickered out the screen door like a flame.

  "You'll never guess!" she said, and her hands were out, palms in, as though she carried a package.

  It was in my mind so I replied "Seo leo gif heo blades onbirigth abit aerest hire ladteow."

  "Well, that's a pretty good guess but it's not right."

  "Some secret admirer has given us a dinosaur."

  "Wrong, but it's just as wonderful. And I won't tell till you wash up, because you'll have to be clean to hear it."

  "What I hear is the love music of a blue-bottom baboon." And I did--it blatted from the living room, where Allen importuned his soul in a phlegm of revolt. "Just when I was ready, to ask you to go steady, they said I didn't know my mind. Your glance gives me ants whenever we romance, and they say I couldn't know my mind."

  "I think I'll burn him up, heaven wife."

  "No, you won't. Not when you hear."

  "Can't you tell me dirty?"

  "No."

  I went through the living room. My son responded to my greeting with the sharp expression of a piece of chewed gum.

  "I hope you got your lonely lovin' heart swept up."

  "Huh?"

  "Huh, sir! Last I heard, somebody had took and threw it on the floor."

  "Number one," he said, "number one in the whole country. Sold a million copies in two weeks."

  "Great! I'm glad the future is in your hands." I joined the next chorus as I went up the stairs. " 'Your glance gives me ants whenever we romance, and they say I couldn't know my mind.' "

  Ellen was stalking me with a book in her hand, one finger between the pages. I know her method. She would ask me what she thought I might think an interesting question and then let slip whatever it was Mary wanted to tell me. It's a kind of triumph for Ellen to tell first. I wouldn't say she is a tattletale, but she is. I waved crossed fingers at her.

  "King's X."

  "But, Daddy--"

  "I said King's X, Miss Hothouse Rhubarb, and I meant King's X." I slammed the door and shouted, "A man's bathroom is his castle." And I heard her laugh. I don't trust children when they laugh at my jokes. I scrubbed my face raw and brushed my teeth until my gums bled. I shaved, put on a clean shirt and the bow tie my daughter hated, as a declaration of revolt.

  My Mary was flittered with impatience when I faced her.

  "You won't believe it."

  "Seo leo gif heo blades onbirigth. Speak."

  "Margie is the nicest friend I ever had."

  "I quote--'The man who invented the cuckoo clock is dead. This is old news but good!' "

  "You'll never guess--she's going to keep the children so we can have our trip."

  "Is this a trick?"

  "I didn't ask. She offered."

  "They'll eat her alive."

  "They're crazy about her. She's going to take them to New York on the train Sunday, stay all night in a friend's apartment, and Monday see the new fifty-star flag-raising in Rockefeller Center and the parade and--everything."

  "I can't believe it."

  "Isn't that the nicest thing?"

  "The very nicest
. And we will flee to the Montauk moors, Miss Mousie?"

  "I've already called and reserved a room."

  "It's delirium. I shall burst. I feel myself swelling up."

  I had thought to tell her about the store, but too much news is constipating. Better to wait and tell her on the moor.

  Ellen came slithering into the kitchen. "Daddy, that pink thing's gone from the cabinet."

  "I have it. I have it here in my pocket. Here, you may put it back."

  "You told us never to take it away."

  "I still tell you that, on pain of death."

  She snatched it almost greedily and carried it in both hands to the living room.

  Mary's eyes were on me strangely, somberly. "Why did you take it, Ethan?"

  "For luck, my love. And it worked."

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  It rained on Sunday, July third, as it must, fat drops more wet than usual. We nudged our way in the damp segmented worms of traffic, feeling a little grand and helpless and lost, like cage-bred birds set free, and frightened as freedom shows its teeth. Mary sat straight, smelling of fresh-ironed cotton.

  "Are you happy--are you gay?"

  "I keep listening for the children."

  "I know. Aunt Deborah called it happy-lonesome. Take flight, my bird! Those long flaps on your shoulders are wings, you juggins."

  She smiled and nuzzled close. "It's good, but I still listen for the children. I wonder what they are doing now?"

  "Almost anything you can guess except wondering what we are doing."

  "I guess that's right. They aren't really interested."

  "Let us emulate them, then. When I saw your barge slide near, O Nile serpent, I knew it was our day. Octavian will beg his bread tonight from some Greek goatherd."

  "You're crazy. Allen never looks where he's going. He might step right out in traffic against a light."

  "I know. And poor little Ellen with her club foot. Well, she has a good heart and a pretty face. Perhaps someone will love her and amputate her feet."

  "Oh! let me worry a little. I'll feel better if I do."

  "I never heard it better put. Shall we together go over all the horrid possibilities?"

  "You know what I mean."

  "I do. But you, highness, brought it to the family. It only travels in the female line. The little bleeders."

  "No one loves his children more than you."

  "My guilt is as the guilt of ten because I am a skunk."