The Winter of Our Discontent

  She went to her little kitchen and brought three ice cubes in her hand, dumped them into her glass, and sloshed gin over them. The muttering fan brought in the smell of sea flats exposed by the dropping tide. She said softly, "You're going to make a lot of money, Ethan."

  "You know about the deal?"

  "Some of the noblest Romans of them all are creepers."

  "Go on."

  She made a sweeping gesture with her hand and her glass went flying; the ice cubes bounced back from the wall like dice.

  "Lover boy had a stroke last week. When he cools, the checks stop. I'm old and lazy and I'm scared. I set you up as a backlog, but I don't trust you. You might break the rules. You might turn honest. I tell you I'm scared."

  I stood up and found my legs were heavy, not wavery--just heavy and remote.

  "What have you got to work with?"

  "Marullo was my friend too."

  "I see."

  "Don't you want to go to bed with me? I'm good. That's what they tell me."

  "I don't hate you."

  "That's why I don't trust you."

  "We'll try to work something out. I hate Baker. Maybe you can clip him."

  "What language. You're not working on your drink."

  "Drink's for happy times with me."

  "Does Baker know what you did to Danny?"

  "Yes."

  "How'd he take it?"

  "All right. But I wouldn't like to turn my back."

  "Alfio should have turned his back to you."

  "What do you mean by that?"

  "Only what I guess. But I'd make book on my guess. Don't worry, I won't tell him. Marullo is my friend."

  "I think I understand; you're building up a hate so you can use the sword. Margie, you've got a rubber sword."

  "Think I don't know it, Eth? But I've got my money on a hunch."

  "Do you want to tell me?"

  "Might as well. I'm betting ten generations of Hawleys are going to kick your ass around the block, and when they leave off you'll have your own wet rope and salt to rub in the wounds."

  "If that were so--where does it leave you?"

  "You're going to need a friend to talk to and I'm the only person in the world who fills the bill. A secret's a terribly lonesome thing, Ethan. And it won't cost you much, maybe only a small percentage."

  "I think I'll go now."

  "Drink your drink."

  "I don't want it."

  "Don't bump your head going downstairs, Ethan."

  I was halfway down when she followed me. "Did you mean to leave your stick?"

  "Lord, no."

  "Here it is. I thought it might be a kind of--sacrifice."

  It was raining and that makes honeysuckle smell sweet in the night. My legs were so wobbly that I really needed the narwhal stick.

  Fat Willie had a roll of paper towels on the seat beside him to mop the sweat from his head.

  "I'll give you odds I know who she is."

  "You'd win."

  "Say, Eth, there's been a guy looking for you--guy in a big Chrysler, with a chauffeur."

  "What'd he want?"

  "I don't know. Wanted to know if I seen you. I didn't give a peep."

  "You'll get a Christmas present, Willie."

  "Say, Eth, what's the matter with your feet?"

  "Been playing poker. They went to sleep."

  "Yeah! they'll do that. If I see the guy, shall I tell him you've went home?"

  "Tell him to come to the store tomorrow."

  "Chrysler Imperial. Big son of a bitch, long as a freight car."

  Joey-boy was standing on the sidewalk in front of the Foremaster, looking limp and humid.

  "Thought you were going into New York for a cold bottle."

  "Too hot. Couldn't put my heart in it. Come in and have a drink, Ethan. I'm feeling low."

  "Too hot for a drink, Morph."

  "Even a beer?"

  "Beer heats me up."

  "Story of my life. When the cards are down--no place to go. Nobody to talk to."

  "You should get married."

  "That's nobody to talk to in spades."

  "Maybe you're right."

  "Damn right I am. There's nobody as lonely as an all-married man."

  "How do you know?"

  "I see 'em. I'm looking at one. Guess I'll get a bag of cold beer and see if Margie Young-Hunt will play. She don't keep hours."

  "I don't think she's in town, Morph. She told my wife--at least I think she did--that she was going up to Maine till the heat is over."

  "Goddam her. Well--her loss is the barkeep's gain. I'll tell him the sad episodes of a misspent life. He don't listen either. So long, Eth. Walk with God! That's what they say in Mexico."

  The narwhal stick tapped on the pavement and punctuated my wondering about why I told Joey that. She wouldn't talk. That would spoil her game. She had to keep the pin in her hand grenade. I don't know why.

  I could see the Chrysler standing at the curb by the old Hawley house when I turned into Elm Street from the High, but it was more like a hearse than a freight car, black but not gleaming by reason of the droplets of rain and the greasy splash that rises from the highways. It carried frosted parking lights.

  It must have been very late. No lights shone from the sleeping houses on Elm Street. I was wet and I must somewhere have stepped in a puddle. My shoes made a juicy squidging sound as I walked.

  I saw a man in a chauffeur's cap through the musty windshield. I stopped beside the monster car and rapped with my knuckles on the glass and the window slid down with an electric whine. I felt the unnatural climate of air-conditioning on my face.

  "I'm Ethan Hawley. Are you looking for me?" I saw teeth in the dimness--gleaming teeth picked out by our street light.

  The door sprang open of itself and a lean, well-tailored man stepped out. "I'm Dunscombe, Brock and Schwin, television branch. I have to talk to you." He looked toward the driver. "Not here. Can we go inside?"

  "I guess so. I think everyone's asleep. If you talk quietly . . ."

  He followed me up our walk of flagstones set in the spongy lawn. The night light was burning in the hall. As we went in I put the narwhal stick in the elephant's foot.

  I turned on the reading light over my big sprung-bottomed chair.

  The house was quiet, but it seemed to me the wrong kind of quiet--a nervous quiet. I glanced up the stairwell at the bedroom doors above.

  "Must be important to come this late."

  "It is."

  I could see him now. His teeth were his ambassadors, un-helped by his weary but wary eyes.

  "We want to keep this private. It's been a bad year, as you well know. The bottom fell out with the quiz scandals and then the payola fuss and the Congressional committees. We have to watch everything. It's a dangerous time."

  "I wish you'd tell me what you want."

  "You've read your boy's I Love America essay?"

  "No, I haven't. He wanted to surprise me."

  "He has. I don't know why we didn't catch it, but we didn't." He held out a folded blue cover to me. "Read the underlining."

  I sank into my chair and opened it. It was either printed or typed by one of those new machines that looks like type, but it was marred with harsh black pencil lines down both margins.

  I LOVE AMERICA

  by

  ETHAN ALLEN HAWLEY II

  "What is an individual man? An atom, almost invisible without a magnifying glass--a mere speck upon the surface of the universe; not a second in time compared to immeasurable, never-beginning and never-ending eternity, a drop of water in the great deep which evaporates and is borne off by the winds, a grain of sand, which is soon gathered to the dust from which it sprung. Shall a being so small, so petty, so fleeting, so evanescent oppose itself to the onward march of a great nation which is to subsist for ages and ages to come, oppose itself to that long line of posterity which springing from our loins will endure during the existence of the world? Let us look to our c
ountry, elevate ourselves to the dignity of pure and disinterested patriots, and save our country from all impending dangers. What are we--what is any man--worth who is not ready and willing to sacrifice himself for his country?"

  I riffled through the pages and saw the black marks everywhere.

  "Do you recognize it?"

  "No. It sounds familiar--sounds like maybe somewhere in the last century."

  "It is. It's Henry Clay, delivered in 1850."

  "And the rest? All Clay?"

  "No--bits and pieces, some Daniel Webster, some Jefferson, and, God help me, a swatch from Lincoln's Second Inaugural. I don't know how that got past. I guess because there were thousands of them. Thank Christ we caught it in time--after all the quiz troubles and Van Doren and all."

  "It doesn't sound like the prose style of a boy."

  "I don't know how it happened. And it might have gone through if we hadn't got the postcard."

  "Postcard?"

  "Picture postcard, picture of the Empire State Building."

  "Who sent it?"

  "Anonymous."

  "Where was it mailed from?"

  "New York."

  "Let me see it."

  "It's under lock and key in case there's any trouble. You don't want to make trouble, do you?"

  "What is it you want?"

  "I want you to forget the whole thing. We'll just drop the whole thing and forget it--if you will."

  "It's not a thing easy to forget."

  "Hell, I mean just keep your lip buttoned--don't give us any trouble. It's been a bad year. Election year anybody will dig up anything."

  I closed the rich blue covers and handed it back to him. "I won't give you any trouble."

  His teeth showed like matched pearls. "I knew it. I told them. I looked you up. You have a good record--good family."

  "Will you go away now?"

  "You've got to know I understand how you feel."

  "Thank you. And I know how you feel. What you can cover up doesn't exist."

  "I don't want to go away leaving you angry. Public relations is my line. We could work something out. Scholarship or like that--something dignified."

  "Has sin gone on strike for a wage raise? No, just go away now--please!"

  "We'll work something out."

  "I'm sure you will."

  I let him out and sat down again and turned out the light and sat listening to my house. It thudded like a heart, and maybe it was my heart and a rustling old house. I thought to go to the cabinet and take the talisman in my hand--had stood up to get it.

  I heard a crunching sound and a whinny like a frightened colt, and quick steps in the hall and silence. My shoes squidged on the stairs. I went in to Ellen's room and switched on the light. She was balled up under a sheet, her head under her pillow. When I tried to lift the pillow she clung to it and I had to yank it away. A line of blood ran from the corner of her mouth.

  "I slipped in the bathroom."

  "I see. Are you badly hurt?"

  "I don't think so."

  "In other words, it's none of my business."

  "I didn't want him to go to jail."

  Allen was sitting on the edge of his bed, naked except for jockey shorts. His eyes--they made me think of a mouse in a corner, ready at last to fight a broom.

  "The stinking sneak!"

  "Did you hear it all?"

  "I heard what that stinking sneak did."

  "Did you hear what you did?"

  The driven mouse attacked. "Who cares? Everybody does it. It's the way the cooky crumbles."

  "You believe that?"

  "Don't you read the papers? Everybody right up to the top-- just read the papers. You get to feeling holy, just read the papers. I bet you took some in your time, because they all do. I'm not going to take the rap for everybody. I don't care about anything. Except that stinking sneak."

  Mary awakens slowly, but she was awake. Perhaps she hadn't been asleep. She was in Ellen's room, sitting on the edge of the bed. The street light made her plain enough with shadows of leaves moving on her face. She was a rock, a great granite rock set in a tide race. It was true. She was tough as a boot, unmoving, unyielding, and safe.

  "Will you be coming to bed, Ethan?"

  So she had been listening too.

  "Not now, my darling dear."

  "Are you going out again?"

  "Yes--to walk."

  "You need your sleep. It's still raining. Do you have to go?"

  "Yes. There's a place. I have to go there."

  "Take your raincoat. You forgot it before."

  "Yes, my darling."

  I didn't kiss her then. I couldn't with the balled and covered figure beside her. But I touched her shoulder and I touched her face and she was tough as a boot.

  I went to the bathroom for a moment for a package of razor blades.

  I was in the hall, reaching in the closet for a raincoat as Mary wished, when I heard a scuffle and a scramble and a rush and Ellen flung herself at me, grunting and snuffling. She buried her bleeding nose against my breast and pinned my elbows down with encircling arms. And her whole little body shook.

  I took her by the forelock and pulled her head up under the hall night light.

  "Take me with you."

  "Silly, I can't. But if you'll come in the kitchen, I'll wash your face."

  "Take me with you. You're not coming back."

  "What do you mean, skookum? Of course I'm coming back. I'm always coming back. You go up to bed and rest. Then you'll feel better."

  "You won't take me?"

  "Where I'm going they wouldn't let you in. Do you want to stand outside in your nightgown?"

  "You can't."

  She grappled me again and her hands caressed and stroked my arms, my sides, dug her balled fists into my side pockets so that I was afraid she might find the razor blades. She was always a caressing girl, a stroking girl, and a surprising girl. Suddenly she released me and stood back with her head raised and her eyes level and without tears. I kissed her dirty little cheek and felt the dried blood against my mouth. And then I turned to the door.

  "Don't you want your stick?"

  "No, Ellen. Not tonight. Go to bed, darling. Go to bed."

  I ran away fast. I guess I ran away from her and from Mary. I could hear Mary coming down the stairs with measured steps.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  The tide was on the rise. I waded into the warm bay water and clambered into the Place. A slow ground swell moved in and out of the entrance, flowed through my trousers. The fat billfold in my hip pocket swelled against my hip and then grew thinner under my weight as it water-soaked. The summer sea was crowded with little jellyfish the size of gooseberries, dangling their tendrils and their nettle cells. As they washed in against my legs and belly I felt them sting like small bitter fires, and the slow wave breathed in and out of the Place. The rain was only a thin mist now and it accumulated all the stars and town lamps and spread them evenly--a dark, pewter-colored sheen. I could see the third rock, but from the Place it did not line up with the point over the sunken keel of the Belle-Adair. A stronger wave lifted my legs and made them feel free and separate from me, and an eager wind sprang from nowhere and drove the mist like sheep. Then I could see a star--late rising, too late rising over the edge. Some kind of craft came chugging in, a craft with sail, by the slow, solemn sound of her engine. I saw her mast light over the toothy tumble of the breakwater but her red and green were below my range of sight.

  My skin blazed under the lances of the jellyfish. I heard an anchor plunge, and the mast light went out.

  Marullo's light still burned, and old Cap'n's light and Aunt Deborah's light.

  It isn't true that there's a community of light, a bonfire of the world. Everyone carries his own, his lonely own.

  A rustling school of tiny feeding fish flicked along the shore.

  My light is out. There's nothing blacker than a wick.

  Inward I said, I want to go home--no not
home, to the other side of home where the lights are given.

  It's so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone. The world is full of dark derelicts. The better way--the Marulli of that old Rome would have known it--there comes a time for decent, honorable retirement, not dramatic, not punishment of self or family--just good-by, a warm bath and an opened vein, a warm sea and a razor blade.

  The ground swell on the rising tide whished into the Place and raised my legs and hips and swung them to the side and carried my wet folded raincoat out with it.

  I rolled on one hip and reached in my side pocket for my razor blades and I felt the lump. Then in wonder I remembered the caressing, stroking hands of the light-bearer. For a moment it resisted coming out of my wet pocket. Then in my hand it gathered every bit of light there was and seemed red--dark red.

  A surge of wave pushed me against the very back of the Place. And the tempo of the sea speeded up. I had to fight the water to get out, and I had to get out. I rolled and scrambled and splashed chest deep in the surf and the brisking waves pushed me against the old sea wall.

  I had to get back--had to return the talisman to its new owner.

  Else another light might go out.

  Explanatory Notes

  CHAPTER ONE

  6 spermaceti: Moby-Dick or The Whale (1851), by Herman Melville, was one of Steinbeck's two favorite novels, according to Elaine Steinbeck; Don Quixote was the other. Spermaceti is mentioned in chapter 77, "The Great Heidelburgh Tun."

  8 Admiral Halsey: William F. "Bull" Halsey (1882-1959). Fleet commander in the South Pacific during World War II, he took the title of five-star fleet admiral after the war. In the Winter manuscript, Halsey was Ethan's last name. When Morphy asks if he's related to Admiral Halsey, Ethan responds this way: " 'Not that I know of,' Ethan said pleased, 'But I guess all Halseys are related if you go way back.' "

  8 Ethan Allen: (1738-89) Hero of the American Revolution and leader of the Green Mountain Boys, dedicated to keeping Vermont free from New York control. But in 1778 he was charged with treason for negotiating with Canada to recognize Vermont as a British province. He wrote Reason: The Only Oracle of Man (1784), a tract outlining his deist ideas. Ethan Allen Hawley notes that his ancestors, the Hawleys, "got mixed up" with Vermont Allens (p. 39).

  10 Aroint!: Term of dismissal, "begone." "Aroint thee, witch," from Shakespeare's Macbeth. "Aroint" is inscribed in a cement slab outside Steinbeck's Sag Harbor retreat, an octagonal writing house he called "Joyous Garde."