‘What’s going on here?’ Cliffie asked, on noticing the new sleeping arrangements. This was at breakfast one morning.
‘People have a right to sleep where they please,’ Brett said, biting into toast.
‘Maybe it’s a new marital experiment,’ Cliffie said, also biting into toast, and looking from one to the other of his parents for a reaction.
Edith ignored the remark, out of old habit. If Brett glanced at her, sympathetically, Edith simply didn’t care. Brett would soon be out of it, she remembered.
Brett had begun his packing. Edith could see him hesitating over such things as a half dirty pair of Levis, deciding to leave them. He would drive to New York with his things, he said, and return the car later.
‘What do you want me to say to George?’ Edith asked.
‘Oh – I’ve already told him, tried to explain,’ Brett said. ‘I’m not even sure he grasped it. He’s really in his dotage, poor old guy.’
‘Well, it’s all those pills and medicines too,’ Edith said, ‘making him sleepy.’ She was inclined to feel sympathetic toward George just now, because George was at least polite and friendly, as civilized as he could be in his condition. Somehow Brett’s behavior wasn’t civilized. And yet intellectually she had to agree with Brett that he had the right. Brett had told Edith also that he had had a talk with Cliffie. Edith assumed this. Brett had asked Cliffie to come for a walk (or a beer) one evening, which Brett would never have done under ordinary circumstances.
One day that week, when Brett was at the office in Trenton, Cliffie remarked to Edith, ‘My father’s just an old shit like the others. An old letch – leaving you for a younger woman.’
Edith was in the kitchen then, making sandwiches for herself and Cliffie for lunch. ‘I think your father thinks of it as – maybe an experiment,’ Edith replied calmly. ‘You’re old enough to understand that. And if you want to be really grown up, don’t talk about it to your chums. Or anybody.’
Cliffie nodded, his lips slightly parted.
Was he thinking, Edith wondered, that everybody knew already? Gert Johnson knew. The news spread like an invisible gas. How? Yesterday Gert had asked Edith in an unusually worried tone how she was. Gert was coming over for a drink today at 5 p.m., bringing also some checks from Washington Crossing and Hopewell Township advertisers. Edith kept the books.
When Gert arrived, Edith asked about Derek, who had been reported wounded a week ago.
‘Oh, we had a letter from him yesterday!’ Gert said, smiling. ‘It’s just a flesh wound in the calf. To tell you the truth Norm and I are delighted – naturally – that he’s laid up. We wrote back telling him to make the most of it.’ Gert laughed with genuine glee. ‘Maybe the mail is censored, but I don’t give a damn. He’s my son and what the hell kind of war is this?’
Cliffie was vaguely watching television from an armchair and also listening to them, Edith knew. She and Gert could have gone up to her workroom, and sometimes they did with Bugle work, but it was time to offer Gert a rye and water, and Edith knew Gert wanted to talk to her.
‘Cliffie, would you mind terribly,’ Edith began. ‘That’s not an important program, is it?’
‘It’s a load of —’ Instead of the final word, Cliffie brush-banged his hands together, a recent gesture to censor a dirty word, and stood up. His belly projected like an older man’s, and part of his shirt was visible between trousers and the waist of his sweater.
Edith saw Gert give him a glance, as if to say, what a slob you’ve got hanging around the house. They took care of the Bugle business in a very few minutes, and Edith made a tidy heap of papers to take up to her room, then made drinks for both of them.
‘By the way, I heard about Brett,’ Gert said, following Edith into the kitchen. Gert wore bell-bottom pink slacks.
‘How, by the way?’ Edith was smiling a little.
‘Oh! A friend of Kevin’s. I don’t know how he knew.’
So even Brunswick Corner High School knew. It could hardly be of interest to kids, Edith thought.
‘He’s really leaving – for that Carol,’ Gert said in a whisper.
‘Tomorrow.’ Edith dropped ice cubes into their glasses, and left the rest of the ice tray on the drainboard. ‘He’s moving to New York tomorrow.’
‘I must say you’re bearing up pretty well.’
‘What else can one do? I certainly don’t care to make a scene. – And what good would a scene do?’
They went into the living room.
‘Well – do you think it’s going to last?’
Edith hesitated. ‘Maybe. Why not?’
Gert laughed in an embarrassed way. ‘I don’t know the answers! You know Brett better than I do.’
Edith had faced the fact that it might be permanent. It would be stupid not to face the possibility. ‘Brett doesn’t do things lightly. Not something like this. He may well want to marry her. Soon.’
Gert took a swallow of her drink. Wide-eyed, she shook her head, as if she were about to say, ‘The nerve of Brett!’ or something like that. ‘And you’re stuck with his uncle – George. That’s a fine thing.’
They did manage to talk of other things, until during the second drink (Gert always had two but never three in the afternoon) Gert said, ‘Can I ask you something, Edie, would you take Brett back if he wanted to come back?’
That was a leap into unreality, the future, that Edith couldn’t make. She shook her head with sudden impatience. ‘I can’t answer that now. It even bores me to think about it.’
Cliffie had drifted upstairs toward the bathroom, where in fact he didn’t need to go, but he made brief use of it anyway. The house felt emptier with his father’s things packed, his raincoats off the hall hooks and out on the porch, ready to be thrown into the car tomorrow. His father was coming back Sunday with the car, his mother had said, then she would drive him to the railway station in Trenton (or maybe Cliffie would do that, his mother had said), or maybe Brett would walk to the bus stop, Edith wasn’t sure what he would want to do.
It was real, Cliffie supposed, his father’s leaving, yet it made Cliffie want to laugh. Cliffie had the feeling his father might be acting, the way an actor acted in a play, not meaning it. Maybe his mother was acting, too, pretending to be unhappy – and then Brett would come back. Yet Cliffie had met Carol, and she was real, all right. She was pretty. And his father was laying her. Soon, starting tomorrow night, his father was going to be in bed with her every night in New York.
Cliffie found himself walking softly, almost on tiptoe, into George’s room, whence a gentle, wheezing snore came. George was on his back, one skinny arm flung up on the pillow as if he were warding off a blow, or maybe hailing somebody. George’s mouth was open. His lower teeth were in a glass on the bedside table. Disgusting! George wore faded pink and white striped pajamas. He looked like a crazy drawing in Mad, Cliffie thought, or maybe a character in a horror film. Cliffie liked horror films: they made him genuinely scared for a few seconds, then they made him laugh. He could laugh at them, and he liked that.
‘Well, what d’y’think about the news, George?’ Cliffie asked in a soft voice, smiling. Cliffie glanced at the door, which he had left half open.
George snored on, didn’t even twitch.
‘Bores you, I bet. Just imagine – your nephew – Brett – running off with another woman at his age. Cradle-robbing!’ Cliffie laughed out loud. ‘Opium, George?’ Cliffie sobered suddenly, and reached in his pocket for a cigarette and matches. He looked around at the half-neat, half-sloppy room, which always looked exactly the same: three or four library books stacked on the straight chair where nobody ever sat, and on the white-painted chest of drawers at least thirty little bottles of crap-pills and drops, sedatives, pain-killers, cough syrup.
‘Soo-oothing syrups,’ Cliffie said aloud in falsetto.
George stirred and snorted as he resettled his head on his pillow. His face was turned sideways now, and his skin was nearly as pale as the pillow except
for a few spots of bluish-pink.
‘What d’y’say, George, honestly?’ Cliffie bent closer, whispering. ‘Do you ever imagine —’ Cliffie couldn’t bring himself to utter the words. The idea, however, went through Cliffie’s mind quite clearly. He imagined old George doing it with a girl, now, and Cliffie compressed his lips, and nearly exploded with a fart-like sound. Then he did laugh, heartily, on seeing that his laughter hadn’t penetrated George’s ears in the least!
Cliffie recalled the celebrated gang-bang or rape (his kid chums had called it by both names) years ago when Cliffie had been thirteen or fourteen. A girl called Ruthie, living in Brunswick Corner, had an empty cellar in her house and a family who were out all day, and she had been more than willing. Eight and ten boys would line themselves up around the cellar watching, getting themselves ready, and then they’d all screw her in turn. Cliffie had been ready in the way he was ready alone in bed, the way he could always do it, but that time he had suddenly conked out, although he had gone through the motions. There had been laughter and applause, as for all the boys. He had tried to pretend to the girl that he had made it, fast. It had all happened so fast, the girl had been so silly and giggling, Cliffie didn’t give a damn what she had thought, anyway. Did the other guys know? Well, maybe. But now it didn’t much matter, because the guys had somehow got scattered, Cliffie couldn’t think even of one whom he knew now, and the girl had disappeared, family had moved or something. Cliffie had gone only one afternoon to the cellar, he remembered, though the cellar had continued in operation for weeks. When Cliffie saw a porn cartoon anywhere, in any magazine, he laughed, or at least smiled. As for real girls – what Cliffie saw as flesh and blood, five feet six and weighing a ton usually – he considered them a pain in the neck, demanding this, demanding that. Why did guys put up with it? Well, a lot didn’t, they laid a girl for a while, then got rid of her, like Mel.
Cliffie blinked, relaxed, brought himself back to where he was, flicked cigarette ash into George’s wastebasket, which was half full of revolting wadded Kleenexes. He listened for a moment to hear if his mother was possibly coming up the stairs, but he knew from past experience that Gert would stay till 6:15, the latest she could take off to get dinner at the usual time for her family. He went to the low chest of drawers, reached for the silver tablespoon that lay on a white napkin, rubbed its bowl vigorously with a corner of the napkin, stooped and made sure which of the bottles held the codeine syrup, then poured himself a tablespoonful. It tasted sweet and good, and had a base of alcohol. Cliffie liked to imagine that it gave his brain a take-off, like a rocket.
‘… four-three-two-one – Go!’ he whispered, and glanced again, unnecessarily, at George, who might have been knocked out by a sledge-hammer. ‘Whammo!’ Cliffie said for good measure. He thought it best to get out of the room while the coast was still clear, and went downstairs, back to the kitchen where he snared a beer from the fridge, then into his own room. He shut the door and switched on his transistor.
12
Edith had not made an entry in her diary for some four months. She wrote:
10/June/67. Awaiting a visit from dear Aunt Melanie – tomorrow. Bless her! She will do me a world of good.
The divorce is going through and would be done already but for what they call inevitable delays. I always thought people could get a divorce in a matter of days, but maybe that is only Mexico. Since we were married in N.Y. State, the only grounds are adultery and absence without tidings – first condition fulfilled, I presume. I must sue him, just to add to absurdities. I do know B. has had time (eight months or so since he left) to think things out & that he is serious.
She looked out her window at the waving tops of the willows, then wrote:
C. continues to do well and is an angel, a real bulwark, an arm to lean on. A man in my life, I might say, of the kind I need now. He is going to finish in ’68 and already has two offers from companies who want him to work for them, which he modestly says every graduate engineer gets these days. Salary prob. in the $15,000 range to start. I hope he won’t be sent away at once to Middle East to work. He comes home perhaps twice a month on weekends, sometimes brings Debbie. I think they are genuinely in love. That is one happy picture, at least, in my present life – Cliffie’s success, after all our doubts.
Edith closed her diary hastily, realizing that the ink was probably not quite dry. Cliffie’s pop music just now was driving her insane, as it often did in summer when the windows and doors were all open. Funny about jazz, when you were calm, it sounded great, and when you were disturbed, it made you more disturbed.
The guestroom was ready for Melanie, the bed made with Edith’s prettiest percale sheets under a striped red and blue spread. Nelson was lying on the spread now, curled for sleep, eyes half closed. He was an intelligent cat, thoughtful even, or he often looked as if he were thinking, whereas Mildew had been merely wonderfully tranquil and daydreaming. Nelson’s outstanding trait was his trust in her. When she got him down from trees, for instance, when he was younger, he relaxed completely in her hands and could slip through them like a piece of silk. She had learned to grip him firmly in emergencies. He did not much like Cliffie. Nelson’s cool blue eyes, for all they were slightly crossed, gazed at Cliffie sometimes like the eyes of a judge too discreet to make the comment that he might.
Edith’s heart gave a dip when she thought of what Melanie might say or think about Cliffie on this visit. Cliffie now had a scruffy beard, had put on a few more pounds, slept till noon often, stayed out till 3 a.m. at Mickey’s, or at the house of a boy called Mel something in Lambertville. Cliffie occasionally worked as barman or waiter at the Chop House, where he made rather good money due to tips, though his contributions to the household were irregular and just enough to keep her quiet, Edith knew. Cliffie would put on reasonably good behavior for Melanie (Edith felt he nurtured dreams of inheriting some money from her), but nothing could correct his appearance.
After Brett’s departure, Cliffie had felt a strain that Edith had foreseen. Now he was ‘the man of the house,’ a role he couldn’t possibly fill, one he would run from by nature, so Edith had been cheerful, had not given a hint that she couldn’t manage things herself, that she was in any way anxious. Cliffie had twice gotten rather drunk in the month after Brett had gone, got into one of his infantile tantrums and thrown a Chinese vase which had been on the mantel and which Edith had had all her life, and the pieces had been so small, Edith had at once despaired of having it mended, so had swept up the mess and tried to forget it.
Was there some hope to be taken, however, from the fact Cliffie was human enough to be disturbed by Brett’s leaving? Edith liked to think so.
Edith drove alone in the brown 1964 Ford to fetch Melanie at the Trenton railway station, though Melanie in her letter had offered to take a taxi. Once more the embrace on the platform, like last summer. Edith hadn’t told Melanie about Brett’s wanting a divorce, only that he was living with a younger woman in New York, and had been for three or four months at the time Edith wrote the letter.
‘You must tell me about everything,’ Melanie said in the car, ‘but maybe not when you’re driving. You’re looking quite well, my dear. – And how’s old George?’
Edith said George was the same, but taking more painkillers. ‘Naturally this codeine stuff – probably makes people addicts.’
‘Does it have to be codeine?’
‘He gets used to the other things, then the doctor – it’s still Carstairs – gets tired of switching them around, so he prescribes codeine–liquid. I have to sign for it at the drug-store. Then there’re the sleeping tablets. I always thought codeine was sort of sleep-inducing. It’s all opium, you know. In the arms of Morpheus.’
‘In the arms of Murphy we used to say when I was young!’ Melanie said, chuckling, ‘and I think we meant bourbon. – Poor old fellow! What does George say about Brett’s antics?’
‘Oh – a few sympathetic words. What can he say?’
E
dith made iced tea, with mint from the garden. Cliffie was not home. Edith explained that Cliffie was working in a restaurant part-time. He had said something about working lunch that day, a big birthday party with twenty people coming, but Edith didn’t know whether to believe him or not. Melanie wanted to see Nelson who was in Edith’s workroom now on the window seat.
Melanie bent and greeted him, not touching him. ‘Nelson! What a big boy! You don’t remember me, do you? – You were just – barely three month, I think.’