The Winter of Our Discontent

  "He had no money."

  "He had Taylor Meadow, free and clear."

  "Did he? Well, a meadow and a cellar hole--"

  "Ethan, I told you we planned an airfield to service the whole district. The meadow is level. If we can't use it, it will cost millions to bulldoze runways in the hills. And now, even if he has no heirs, it will have to go through the courts. Take months."

  "I see."

  His ire fissured. "I wonder if you do see! With your good intentions you've thrown the thing sky high. Sometimes I think a do-gooder is the most dangerous thing in the world."

  "Perhaps you're right. I ought to get back to the store."

  "It's your store."

  "It is, isn't it? I can't get used to it. I forget."

  "Yes, you forget. The money you gave him was Mary's money. She'll never see it now. You threw it away."

  "Danny was fond of my Mary. He knew it was her money."

  "Fat lot of good that will do her."

  "I thought he was making a joke. He gave me these." I pulled the two pieces of ruled paper from my inside pocket, where I had put them, knowing I would have to draw them out like this.

  Mr. Baker straightened them on his glass-topped desk. As he read them a muscle beside his right ear twitched so that his ear bobbed. His eyes went back over them, this time looking for a hole.

  When the son of a bitch looked at me there was fear in him. He saw someone he hadn't known existed. It took him a moment to adjust to the stranger, but he was good. He adjusted.

  "What is your asking price?"

  "Fifty-one per cent."

  "Of what?"

  "Of the corporation or partnership or whatever."

  "That's ridiculous."

  "You want an airfield. I have the only one available."

  He wiped his glasses carefully on a piece of pocket Kleenex, then put them on. But he didn't look at me. He looked a circle all around me and left me out. Finally he asked, "Did you know what you were doing, Ethan?"

  "Yes."

  "Do you feel good about it?"

  "I guess I feel as the man felt who took him a bottle of whisky and tried to get him to sign a paper."

  "Did he tell you that?"

  "Yes."

  "He was a liar."

  "He told me he was. He warned me he was. Maybe there's some trick in these papers." I swept them gently from in front of him and folded the two soiled pencil-written sheets.

  "There's a trick all right, Ethan. Those documents are without a flaw, dated, witnessed, clear. Maybe he hated you. Maybe his trick was the disintegration of a man."

  "Mr. Baker, no one in my family ever burned a ship."

  "We'll talk, Ethan, we'll do business. We'll make money. A little town will spring up on the hills around the meadow. I guess you'll have to be Town Manager now."

  "I can't, sir. That would constitute a conflict of interest. Some pretty sad men are finding that out right now."

  He sighed--a cautious sigh as though he feared to awaken something in his throat.

  I stood up and rested my hand on the curved and padded leather back of the supplicant's chair. "You'll feel better, sir, when you have got used to the fact that I am not a pleasant fool."

  "Why couldn't you have taken me into your confidence?"

  "An accomplice is dangerous."

  "Then you do feel you have committed a crime."

  "No. A crime is something someone else commits. I've got to open the store, even if it is my own store."

  My hand was on the doorknob when he asked quietly, "Who turned Marullo in?"

  "I think you did, sir." He leaped to his feet, but I closed the door after me and went back to my store.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  No one in the world can rise to a party or a plateau of celebration like my Mary. It isn't what she contributes but what she receives that makes her glow like a jewel. Her eyes shine, her smiling mouth underlines, her quick laughter builds strength into a sickly joke. With Mary in the doorway of a party everyone feels more attractive and clever than he was, and so he actually becomes. Beyond this Mary does not and need not contribute.

  The whole Hawley house glowed with celebration when I came home. Bright-colored plastic flags were strung in canopies from center light to picture molding, and lines of colored plastic bannerets hung from the banisters.

  "You wouldn't believe it," Mary cried. "Ellen got them from the Esso Service Station. George Sandow loaned them."

  "What's it about?"

  "About everything. It's a glory thing."

  I don't know whether she had heard of Danny Taylor or had heard and retired him. Certainly I didn't invite him to the feast, but he paced about outside. I knew I would have to go out to meet him later but I did not ask him in.

  "You'd think it was Ellen had won honorable mention," Mary said. "She's even prouder than if she was the celebrity. Look at the cake she baked." It was a tall white cake with HERO written on its top in red, green, yellow, and blue letters. "We're having roast chicken and dressing and giblet gravy and mashed potatoes, even if it is summer."

  "Good, darling, good. And where's the young celebrity?"

  "Well, it's changed him too. He's taking a bath and changing for dinner."

  "It's a day of portent, sibyl. Somewhere you will find a mule has foaled and a new comet come into the sky. A bath before dinner. Imagine!"

  "I thought you might like to change too. I have a bottle of wine and I thought maybe a speech or a toast or something like that, even if it's just the family." She fairly flooded the house with party. I found myself rushing up the stairs to bathe and be a part of it.

  Passing Allen's door, I knocked, heard a grunt, and went in.

  He was standing in front of his mirror, holding a handglass so he could see his profile. With some dark stuff, maybe Mary's mascara, he had painted on a narrow black mustache, had darkened his brows and raised the outer ends to satanic tips. He was smiling a world-wise, cynical charm into the mirror when I entered. And he was wearing my blue polka-dot bow tie. He did not seem embarrassed at being caught.

  "Rehearsing for a turn," he said and put the hand-mirror down.

  "Son, in all the excitement I don't think I've told you how proud I am."

  "It's--well, it's only a start."

  "Frankly, I didn't think you were even as good a writer as the President. I'm as much surprised as I am pleased. When are you going to read your essay to the world?"

  "Sunday, four-thirty and a national hookup. I have to go into New York. Special plane flying me."

  "Are you well rehearsed?"

  "Oh, I'll do all right. It's just a start."

  "Well, it's more like a jump to be one of five in the whole country."

  "National hookup," he said. He began to remove the mustache with a cotton pad and I saw with amazement that he had a make-up kit, eye-shadow, grease paint, cold cream.

  "Everything's happened at once to all of us. Do you know I've bought the store?"

  "Yeah! I heard."

  "Well, when the bunting and the tinsel come down, I'm going to need your help."

  "How do you mean?"

  "I told you before, to help me in the store."

  "I couldn't do that," he said, and he inspected his teeth in the hand-mirror.

  "You couldn't do what?"

  "I've got a couple of guest shots and then 'What's My Line?' and 'Mystery Guest.' Then there's a new quiz coming up called 'Teen Twisters.' I might even get to M.C. that. So you see I won't have time." He sprayed something sticky on his hair from a pressure can.

  "So your career is all set, is it?"

  "Like I told you, it's just a start."

  "I'll not let loose the dogs of war tonight. We'll discuss it later."

  "There's a guy from N.B.C. been trying to get you on the phone. Maybe it's a contract because like I'm not of age."

  "Have you thought of school, my son?"

  "Who needs it if you got a contract?"

  I got out f
ast and closed the door and in my bathroom I ran the water cold and iced my skin and let the cold penetrate deep to control my shaking rage. And when I emerged clean and shining and smelling of Mary's perfume, my control was back. In the few moments before dinner, Ellen sat on the arm of my chair and then rolled over in my lap and put her arms around me.

  "I do love you," she said. "Isn't it exciting? And isn't Allen wonderful? It's like he's born to it." And this was the girl I had thought very selfish and a little mean.

  Just before the cake I toasted the young hero and wished him luck and I finished, " 'Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of York.' "

  "That's Shakespeare," Ellen said.

  "Yes, muggins, but what play, who says it, and where?"

  "I wouldn't know," said Allen. "That's for squares."

  I helped carry the dishes to the kitchen. Mary still carried her glow. "Don't fret," she said. "He'll find his line. He'll be all right. Please be patient with him."

  "I will, my holy quail."

  "There was a man calling from New York. I guess about Allen. Isn't it exciting, their sending a plane for him? I can't get used to you owning the store. I know--it's all over town you're going to be Town Manager."

  "I'm not."

  "Well, I heard it a dozen times."

  "I have a business deal that makes it impossible. I have to go out for a while, my darling. I have a meeting."

  "Maybe I'll get to wish you were back a clerk. You were home nights then. What if the man calls back?"

  "He can wait."

  "He didn't want to. Will you be late?"

  "Can't tell. Depends on how it goes."

  "Wasn't it sad about Danny Taylor? Take a raincoat."

  "Sure was."

  In the hall I put on my hat and on an impulse picked old Cap'n's narwhal cane from the elephant foot. Ellen materialized beside me.

  "Can I go with you?"

  "Not tonight."

  "I do love you."

  I stared deep into my daughter for a moment. "I love you too," I said. "I'll bring you jewels--any favorites?"

  She giggled. "You going to carry a cane?"

  "For self-protection." I held the spiraled ivory at parry, like a broadsword.

  "You going to be gone long?"

  "Not long."

  "Why do you take the cane?"

  "Pure decoration, a boast, a threat, a fear, a vestigial need to bear arms."

  "I'll wait up for you. Can I hold the pink thing?"

  "Oh, no you won't, my little dung-flower. Pink thing? You mean the talisman? Sure you may."

  "What's a talisman?"

  "Look it up in the dictionary. Know how to spell it?"

  "T-a-l-e-s-m-a-n."

  "No, t-a-l-i-s-m-a-n."

  "Why don't you tell me?"

  "You'll know it better if you look it up."

  She locked her arms around me and squeezed and as quickly let me go.

  The night closed thick and damp about me, humid air about the consistency of chicken broth. The street lights hiding among the fat leaves of Elm Street sprouted damp, hairy halos of moisture.

  A man with a job sees so little of the normal daylight world. No wonder he must get his news and his attitudes from his wife. She knows what happened and who said what about it, but it is strained through her womanness, wherefore most working men see the daylight world through women's eyes. But in the night, when his store or his job is closed, then is a man's world risen-- for a time.

  The twisted staff of narwhal ivory felt good in my hand, its heavy silver knob polished by old Cap'n's palm.

  Once long ago when I lived in a daylight world, the world being too much with me, I would have gone to grass. Face downward and very close to the green stems, I became one with ants and aphids and sow bugs, no longer a colossus. And in a ferocious jungle of the grass I found the distraction that meant peace.

  Now in the night I wanted Old Harbor and the Place, where an inevitable world of cycles of life and time and of tide could smooth my raggedness.

  I walked quickly to the High Street, and only glanced across at my green-curtained store as I passed the Foremaster. In front of the fire station fat Willie sat in the police car, red of face and sweating like a pig.

  "You on the prowl again, Eth?"

  "Yep."

  "Terrible sad about Danny Taylor. Nice fella."

  "Terrible," I said and hurried on.

  A few cars cruised about, building a breeze, but there were no strollers. No one risked the sweat of walking.

  I turned at the monument and walked toward Old Harbor and saw the anchor lights of a few yachts and offshore fishing craft. Then I saw a figure turn out of Porlock Street and come toward me and I knew by walk and posture it was Margie Young-Hunt.

  She stopped in front of me, gave me no chance of passing. Some women can look cool on a hot night. Perhaps it was the breezy movement of her cotton skirt.

  She said, "I guess you're looking for me." She replaced a strand of hair that wasn't out of place.

  "Why do you say that?"

  She turned and took my arm and with her fingers urged me to walk on. "That's the kind I get. I was in the Foremaster. I saw you go by and I thought you might be looking for me, so I whipped around the block and intercepted you."

  "How'd you know which way I would turn?"

  "I don't know. I knew. Listen to the cicadas--that's more hot weather and no wind. Don't worry, Ethan, we'll be out of the light in a moment. You can come to my place if you want. I'll give you a drink--a tall cold drink, from a tall hot woman."

  I let her fingers guide me into the shadows of a grove of outgrown privet. Some kind of yellow blossoms near the ground burned the darkness.

  "This is my house--a garage with a pleasure dome over it."

  "What makes you think I was looking for you?"

  "Me or someone like me. Ever see a bullfight, Ethan?"

  "Once at Arles just after the war."

  "My second husband used to take me. He loved them. I think bullfights are for men who aren't very brave and wish they were. If you saw one you'll know what I mean. Remember after all the cape work when the bull tries to kill something that isn't there?"

  "Yes."

  "Remember how he gets confused and uneasy, sometimes just stands and looks for an answer? Well, then they have to give him a horse or his heart will break. He has to get his horns into something solid or his spirit dies. Well, I'm that horse. And that's the kind of men I get, confused and puzzled. If they can get a horn into me, that's a little triumph. Then they can go back to muleta and espada."

  "Margie!"

  "Just a moment. I'm trying to find my key. Smell the honeysuckle!"

  "But I've just had a triumph."

  "You have? Hooked a cape--trampled it?"

  "How do you know?"

  "I just know when a man is looking for me, or some other Margie. Watch the stairs, they're narrow. Don't hit your head at the top. Now, here's the switch--you see? A pleasure dome, soft lights, smell of musk--down to a sunless sea!"

  "I guess you're a witch all right."

  "You know goddam well I am. A poor, pitiful small-town witch. Sit there, near the window. I'll turn on the fake breeze. I'm going to what they call 'slip into something comfortable,' then I'll get you a tall cool skull-buster."

  "Where'd you hear that word?"

  "You know where I heard it."

  "Did you know him well?"

  "Part of him. The part of a man a woman can know. Sometimes that's the best part, but not often. It was with Danny. He trusted me."

  The room was a memory album of other rooms, bits and pieces of other lives like footnotes. The fan at the window made a small whispering roar.

  She came back soon in long, loose, billowing blue and brought a cloud of scent. When I breathed it in she said, "Don't worry. It's a cologne Mary has never smelled on me. Here's a drink--gin and tonic. I rubbed the glass with tonic. It's gin, just gin. If you rattle th
e ice, you'll think it's cool."

  I drank it down like beer and felt its dry heat reach out over my shoulders and down my arms so that my skin shimmered.

  "I guess you needed that," she said.

  "I guess so."

  "I'll make a brave bull of you--enough resistance so you'll think you have a triumph. That's what a bull needs."

  I stared at my hands, crisscrossed with scratches and tiny cuts from opening boxes, and my nails, not too clean.

  She took the ivory stick from the couch where I had dropped it. "I hope you don't need this for your drooping passion."

  "Are you my enemy, now?"

  "Me, New Baytown's playmate, your enemy?"

  I was silent so long that I could feel her growing restless. "Take your time," she said. "You've got all your life to answer. I'll get you a drink."

  I took the full glass from her and my lips and mouth were so dry I had to sip from it before I could speak, and when I did my throat wore a husk.

  "What do you want?"

  "I might have settled for love."

  "From a man who loves his wife?"

  "Mary? You don't even know her."

  "I know she's tender and sweet and kind of helpless."

  "Helpless? She's tough as a boot. She'll go right on long after you've rattled your engine to pieces. She's like a gull that uses the wind to stay aloft and never beats a wing."

  "That's not true."

  "Comes a big trouble, she'll breeze through while you burn up."

  "What do you want?"

  "Aren't you going to make a pass? Aren't you going to beat out your hatred with your hips on good old Margie?"

  I set my half-emptied glass down on a side table, and quick as a snake she lifted it and put an ash tray under it, and dried the ring of moisture with her hand.

  "Margie--I want to know about you."

  "No kidding. You want to know what I thought of your performance."

  "I can't figure what you want until I know who you are."

  "I believe the man means it--the dollar tour. Through Margie Young-Hunt with gun and camera. I was a good little kid, a smart little kid and a medium lousy dancer. Met what they call an older man and married him. He didn't love me--he was in love with me. That's on a silver platter for a good smart little kid. I didn't like to dance much and I sure as hell didn't like to work. When I dumped him he was so mixed up he didn't even put a remarriage clause in the settlement. Married another guy and led a big world whirl that killed him. For twenty years that check has zeroed in on the first of every month. For twenty years I haven't done a lick of work, except pick up a few presents from admirers. Doesn't seem like twenty years, but it is. I'm not a good little kid any more."