The table was covered with scraps of paper mostly written on by Cliffie, names and telephone numbers, Edith saw at a glance, and she had no intention of trying to sort or stack those. I HATE caught her eye, because it was in block letters, and Edith deliberately didn’t read further. Had it said GEORGE, or one of the boys in town or even – herself? Cliffie blew hot and cold toward her and everyone else, Edith was well aware. She couldn’t say, in fact, that she had ever had the feeling that he loved or liked her in the filial sense. She occasionally felt that he resented her, even disliked her. Edith couldn’t make out Cliffie’s emotions, never had been able to. She left his room with some dirty socks in her hands, with the usual feeling of being glad to leave the room, glad to close the door and pretend the room wasn’t in the house.
A busty pin-up girl on a calendar in Cliffie’s room (dated November 1964) stayed in Edith’s mind. Was she thinking of Carol? Probably. Edith dropped the socks in the wicker basket in the kitchen, which held things for the launderette.
Edith went upstairs and had a quick bath, then dressed in a long wrap-around madras skirt of green and white floral pattern. It was not a cold day and it was sunny. She topped the skirt with a white sweater, a gold chain which bore her grandfather’s signet and a couple of gold trifles including her tiny Phi Beta Kappa key. She took a little more care than usual with her makeup. Now that it was too late, she thought.
She was just bringing a plate of canapés into the living room, when the first car came up the driveway. Edith went back to the kitchen for the ice bucket, a black plastic thing. She heard Brett’s voice, thought he had brought Carol, then Brett and Cliffie came in.
‘Picked up our son on the —’ Brett stopped, because a blue Volkswagen was turning into the drive.
‘Hi, Mom,’ Cliffie said.
‘Hello, Cliffie. And what’ve you been doing?’
‘Taking a walk.’ Cliffie looked at his mother sharply, knowingly, and unzipped his waist-length jacket.
Carol came in the front door, which was opened by Brett. She was blonde and smiling, with a bright lavender scarf at her neck, a blue suede jacket, tweed skirt, and the kind of shoes called sensible. ‘Hello, Mrs Howland,’ Carol said.
‘Hello, good evening,’ Edith replied.
‘How are you, darling?’ Brett said. ‘I’ll just go and wash – for a second.’ He disappeared.
Edith offered to take Carol’s jacket, but Carol kept it over her arm.
‘What a lovely house!’ Carol said. ‘And the garden. I’m living in a cramped place in Trenton.’
‘Won’t you sit down? What would you like to drink? I think we’ve got just about everything.’
Scotch, Carol wanted. Edith was thinking that Carol’s parents’ house was no doubt a lot grander than theirs. The girl did have a seriousness about her eyes and brows. She wasn’t silly, she had nice hands, and a general look of good family. Brett came back, smiling and pleasant, and soon they were all sitting around talking rubbish and platitudes with drinks in their hands. Edith thought, what if she should burst out with, ‘You’ve been to bed a few times with my husband, I take it, so why the hell are we all so pleasant and smirking now?’ Then Cliffie joined them, frankly smirking, which to Edith at that moment was a kind of relief.
‘Have a scotch, Cliffie,’ Edith said.
‘Don’t moind if I do,’ Cliffie said with a mock English accent. ‘Thenk you.’ He made his own.
Edith was waiting for Carol to say, ‘What a big boy you have,’ from the way she was appraising him, or did she have designs on him too? Edith stifled a genuine smile.
‘Carol’s moving soon to New York,’ Brett remarked. ‘To bigger things.’
‘Oh, bigger?’ Carol said. ‘With newspapers dying like flies there? I’ve got hopes for the Post. For a job,’ Carol said to Edith. ‘But frankly it’s more because of a connection through my father than – my qualifications. And my father’s not even in the newspaper business, he’s in electronics, but somehow – too difficult to explain, he knows someone who knows someone.’
‘You don’t have to be so modest,’ Brett said.
‘Yuck-yuck,’ said Cliffie, half a laugh, half mocking the absurd antics of the middle-aged trying to be polite.
Carol recrossed her legs and dangled a walking shoe. She had lovely dark blonde hair, cut shortish, with natural waves as Edith’s had, though Carol’s had not a bit of gray.
Carol accepted a second scotch, which Brett would have liked to make, but Edith was up first. Edith made a generous one. Carol looked the type that could hold it. Carol said she was going to be an assistant editor in the foreign news department, a nobody hanging on at first, she assured Edith, but she preferred that department to a better-paying job she could have got in the film and drama critics department.
‘Carol will be leaving us early January,’ Brett said.
Methinks they both protest too much, Edith thought. Was New York so far away? Hardly two hours in a fast car.
Five minutes later, Edith was reproaching herself for her bitchy thoughts. Carol was talking knowledgeably on the care of camellias as she stood by the front window, admiring the plant which Edith had brought in from the garden for the winter, and which now had eight buds that were going to open in January or February. Edith saw from the way Carol gently touched the sturdy leaf points that she cared about plants. Cliffie was no longer smirking, but regarded Carol with his straightforward neutral expression – observant, maybe, but maybe his mind was miles away, Edith could never tell. Edith was thinking that Carol was young, and knew little about Brett. Why fear Carol? Why worry? Brett wasn’t the type to sweep a girl off her feet and never had been. He was incapable even of putting on a temporary act. And – happy thought – maybe Carol had called it off herself, and not Brett.
‘She’s pretty,’ Cliffie said, when Carol had gone.
Carol’s car had just turned to the right in the street, toward Trenton.
Brett had heaved a great sigh, and was draining his ice-watery drink. ‘You look nice. I like you in that skirt.’
‘Want a dividend?’ Edith asked, standing by the bar cart.
Brett did. Edith made herself a short one too. Cliffie lingered, chomping ice cubes noisily. Because of Cliffie’s presence, Edith couldn’t talk, and yet, what would she have said anyway? She didn’t feel like paying Carol a compliment, and would never have said under any circumstances, ‘Well, are you sure it’s really over?’ So silence was inevitable.
‘Am I supposed to phone Carstairs again? This week, wasn’t it?’ Brett asked.
Dr Francis X. Carstairs was George’s doctor, who came once a month to have a look at George. Carstairs lived in Washington Crossing, and Brett usually telephoned him from Trenton to remind him, otherwise the doctor could forget.
‘I don’t know,’ Edith said. ‘It seems like a month. Phone tomorrow and ask. Or phone now.’
‘I’d like to try some of that codeine,’ Cliffie put in, smiling. ‘Opium derivative, I see from my trusty dictionary.’
‘Well, don’t,’ Brett said. He was walking about with his drink, and suddenly he scratched his head, which left his black and gray hair standing up in a silly way on top. ‘If I catch you sampling that stuff, I’ll present you with the bill for it.’
‘Is it expensive?’ Cliffie asked. ‘Must be. Opium. Look what the junkies have to pay for it.’
‘Cliffie, get off the subject,’ Brett said.
‘You’ve got to have a very careful prescription for that, haven’t you?’ Cliffie went on.
Brett nearly blew a gasket. He gasped, swung a fist in the air, but it was over in a couple of seconds. Brett became livid at what he considered Cliffie’s stupid, driveling questions, his hanging onto a subject that everyone else had dropped. Edith glanced calmly at her son who was slumped in an armchair. We’re all crackers, Edith thought, all insane, including old George, doped on his pain-killers. She went into the kitchen to prepare dinner.
11
It was a particularly glorious spring in 1966, not merely because of people’s gardens and trees bursting into blossom (Brunswick Corner looked prettier to Edith every year), but she and Gert got the Bugle launched again as a semi-monthly. This was due to increased advertising, and the new price of twenty-five cents a copy. Lots of weekend tourists bought it as a souvenir. Ten or more new shops had opened in town, gift shops, two more antique shops, a pottery shop, and all these advertised. The Bugle now had eight pages, and was on sale in a few Philadelphia stores such as Strawbridge and Clothier. As for Edith’s duties, there was always something to report about the local fire department, the police force – the latter well-meaning boobs whom everyone laughed at and called the Keystone Kops. The local cops (two or three) often ran out of gas on a chase, lost their direction for want of a map, or were hopelessly late for emergency calls. Some Brunswick Corner residents were musicians, actors, or painters, and Edith did profiles of them. She wrote most of the editorials on such subjects as the size of shop signs, preservation of local scenery, building permits. She had written one piece in praise of the Lyndon Johnson Head-Start program, and another on LBJ’s remark that the nation was not going to solve its problems by pouring money down a hole, meaning handouts to the poor.
On the Peace Corps, Edith wrote an editorial which never got printed in the Bugle, because Gert thought it too far out, or unrealistic.
The American Peace Corps might take with them children aged eight to ten, since children of this age mix so well with children in any country, have no racial prejudice (at least not entrenched), and pick up languages quickly. Orphanages could be solicited for willing recruits, and perhaps there would be many. The Peace Corps activities involve camping and adventure. Seeds of friendship would be planted, memories formed that will not die even at the death of those who have them, because they will pass them on to others. Lonely children, the abandoned, the illegitimate, the discouraged, will find a place in society, and instead of being the pitied, they will become the heroes, the young pioneers, if they can be adopted as junior members of the Peace Corps.
That was the way Edith’s first draft went, and she showed it to Gert. Edith was briefly annoyed, out of patience with Gert for saying so emphatically, ‘No. No one would ever let minors go.’ But Edith didn’t quarrel with Gert, and the incident was forgotten. Edith had plenty of editorial ideas in reserve. Every month, two or three people, sometimes more, whom Edith encountered on the street or in shops, stopped her and told her how much they enjoyed the Bugle’s editorials. Some even wrote congratulatory letters. The disapprovers were few.
And Brett was making progress on his book which he had talked about for years, Pothole Road, an analysis of American foreign policy since the end of the Second World War. He had re-written his outline, broken it down into chapters and given the chapters working titles, a method of structure which Edith had suggested to him. He went a couple of times to New York on Saturdays to look up things in the main Public Library and in newspaper articles.
In June Aunt Melanie paid another visit, and Edith was grateful that Cliffie had a job at that time (clerk in one of the town’s haberdasheries called the Stud Box), and that he curbed his drinking during Melanie’s stay. Edith had gently remarked to Cliffie that he seemed to be making inroads into the living room bar cart, and the result of this was that Cliffie cut down a bit on what he took from the living room, but kept a bottle of scotch or gin in his own room in a corner of his closet, Edith had noticed. He wasn’t ever drunk, just a bit oiled all day long. She wished the Stud Box boys would call him down about it, but since the two of them were famous for being oiled themselves, it was rather vain to hope Cliffie would get a reprimand, Edith supposed.
‘Let’s be thankful it isn’t dope,’ Edith said to Brett. ‘The stories Gert tells are appalling – right here in Brunswick Corner High School!’ Kevin, their fourteen-year-old, had been recruited somehow by the police and had been on the police payroll as an informer on his schoolmates’ drug purchases, a job, Gert said, that couldn’t last more than a month or so, because the kids would find out who was informing and beat him up. Kevin had escaped that fate, and of course school had closed in June for summer holidays.
Then in mid-September, when the leaves had begun to fall, though it was too early for them to have changed color – Edith’s favorite season, the autumn – Brett made his big speech. Edith always thought of it as his big speech (maybe because she was sure Brett did too), though she didn’t write that flippant-sounding phrase in her diary. He said he was deeply in love with Carol Junkin, that she loved him too, and that neither he nor she could repress it or hide it any longer.
‘I am – bitterly sorry,’ Brett said gently, firmly, and with a kind of clenched teeth desperation, ‘but I don’t see anything honest to do but tell you – and to hope somehow that you’ll agree to a separation.’
Edith’s first surprise, which was total, gave way almost instantly to a sense of impatience. She felt annoyed, as if someone had lit a firecracker under her nose. ‘Are you serious?’
This conversation of a week ago, whenever she recalled it, seemed ludicrous. Brett had assured her he was serious. Then he had launched into the longer part of his speech with the same earnest, dry-mouthed determination.
‘I have a right before it’s too late, or at least that’s the way I feel about it. Our son’s grown up – for better or for worse.’ A shake of his head here. ‘And of course I’ll see about things financially. That’s my responsibility. But I have a right to be happy.’
Edith never said that he hadn’t. She hadn’t bothered asking if he was unhappy with her, and now it was evident that he was unhappy. Or perhaps not happy enough. Not as happy as he considered he deserved to be.
‘I do want to marry Carol. It’s that serious,’ Brett had continued.
This conversation had taken place in their bedroom upstairs, where Brett had asked her to come, Edith knew because Cliffie might have come into the house and the living room at any moment. It had been just past 6 p.m., and Cliffie was lately usually home for dinner.
‘I suppose it’s a shock,’ Brett said. ‘But I just couldn’t go on like this, pretending – or seeing Carol on the sly. It’s not my nature.’
Then Edith had remembered the New York research expeditions since January. He had of course been seeing Carol those Saturday afternoons. And maybe it had been three months since she and Brett had made love? Edith hadn’t the faintest idea or memory, because the act of making love didn’t seem terribly important. Yet, she reminded herself, what else was Brett talking about now in regard to Carol? As Cliffie would have put it, he wanted to screw a younger woman while he still could, while a younger woman would still have him. And in the midst of her confusion or speechlessness, Edith had still been able to think, she remembered, that she wasn’t the first woman in the world to whom such a thing had happened, who had had to listen to the same earnest speech from an honest man who really meant what he was saying.
And now a week later, Edith hadn’t been able to write a word about it in her diary. Who cared anyway whether she noted it in her diary? Certainly she didn’t.
The atmosphere in the house has suffered a sea-change, Edith thought she might write, and laughed briefly and hysterically at the idea. Brett went about his usual routine like a little soldier, giving the grass what he hoped might be a final cut but probably wouldn’t be, not daring to put the power mower away for the winter yet, corralling his dirty shirts for the laundry as usual.
How was he going to pay for this house as well as the establishment he and Carol would have, Edith wondered. Of course Carol’s family had money. Brett said he was sure of a job on the Post, he’d been making efforts there. But what if it fell through, Edith thought. Would she have to get a job? She was forty-six. She wouldn’t have to get a job, legally speaking. The noose was around Brett’s neck, but to be decent she might get a job, clerking in a local shop, something like that, because otherwise she didn’t see where eno
ugh money would be coming from. Cliffie could get a regular job or get out, Edith thought with a surge of intent, because God knew he’d never paid his keep here.
George might be asked to contribute a bit more. What was old George going to do with his capital anyway, except pass it on to Brett? Edith gathered that he and Carol wanted to move into a bigger apartment in New York than the one Carol had at the moment. They would live together for a few months, then if Edith agreed to the divorce, they would be married.
But Edith had already agreed to the separation, she remembered. She had said, ‘Yes,’ a word like ‘I will,’ when one got married, she thought. It seemed strange. Edith had sometimes the feeling she was dreaming, and when she woke up in the mornings, she would think first that it was a dream, then realize that it wasn’t, because she could see at once the change in Brett, could feel that most of his mind wasn’t present. Not to mention the fact that they didn’t share the same bed any longer. Whose idea had that been, hers or Brett’s? Maybe Edith had suggested that she sleep in her workroom, which she didn’t mind at all as a sleeping place, and Brett to be courteous had said he would, and Edith had insisted that she sleep in her workroom, really because she didn’t want the recollection of Brett’s having been there, sleeping, so close to her desk and her typewriter, her manuscripts, notes and all the rest of it.