‘But what did we do last night – after all?’ Cliffie said. The cop had drifted off, that he remembered.
‘Nothing. But did you have to sock the guy? Buddy-o, I ain’t sure you heard the last of this yet!’
Cliffie let the good music which seemed elegant, refined, expert, flood through him and soothe him. ‘Okay, Mel, but the guy drove off. He didn’t stay to talk to the cop there. I didn’t hurt him much – a punch on the cheek.’
‘How do we know what he did today?’ Mel pushed his fingers through his curly black hair. He had a short beard and a droopy moustache like a nineteenth-century villain, long slender legs, and a couple of interesting scars on his knuckles.
Mel earned his living, paid his rent and ate, partly from carefully wangled unemployment insurance which he collected at different addresses in the vicinity (not in Lambertville, but in other towns in New Jersey and Pennsylvania), and also from part-time bar-tending here and there. A thirty-mile drive to a restaurant was nothing to Mel on his motorcycle. He also sold LSD and harder stuff, Cliffie knew. Cliffie was aware that Mel kept this drug part of his life secret from him, though maybe not from Mel’s older, sometimes not older but more reliable chums, whom Mel had to use in the business. Cliffie knew Mel looked on him as a kid, a kind of apprentice maybe (Cliffie hoped that), someone Mel could ask to run out and buy cigarettes or beer at the local tavern.
The telephone rang, and Mel clumped across the wooden floor and answered.
Cliffie listened, thinking maybe it was the police, since they had just been talking about police action, but Mel laughed in a happy way. Cliffie stole a glance at his watch. 8:47, and his mother would already have had dinner. He dreaded going home, and knew Mel was going to nudge him out in a few minutes. There was nothing to eat in Mel’s fridge, as they had finished the franks and a steak several hours ago, a steak Mel said he had taken from a restaurant. Cliffie heard Mel making a date to meet someone at Hopewell. Cliffie’s unhappiness at having to leave coalesced, solidified somehow and he saw George Howland – the white corpse in the upstairs bedroom of his house. Revolting, stinking creature! In the last months, Cliffie had noticed that his mother also had started to loathe the old creep. His mother’s voice was tense and sharp, not merely loud. His mother didn’t even meet his eyes after the sick-making scenes with George, after the shitty bedpans and the disgusting snotrags.
Cliffie forced himself to his feet as Mel hung up. ‘I ought to be going home. Gotta face it.’ Better that he left on his own, rather than wait for Mel to ask him to push off.
‘Cliffie, you better clean up a little. Wash your face. Y’know?’
From Mel Cliffie didn’t mind this. He went into Mel’s tiny john, and bent to wash his face without looking at himself first in the mirror. Cliffie scrubbed with reasonable diligence at his nails, too drunk to notice pain from a rather nastily broken nail. He took Mel’s comb and combed his hair, touched his beard a little. He glanced with no interest at a photograph, double-page spread, of some male in full glory, then opened the door and went out. On second thought, he had to pee, so he went back. His pee was colorless. He’d had quite a lot of gin today.
Mel was tidying, hurling boots and books under his bed, even had a broom in his hand. Cliffie supposed a girl was coming.
‘Don’t forget, Cliffie, don’t say anything about my being with you last night, in case they get onto you, will you? They just might overlook me.’
‘Sure, Mel. I understand.’
‘You do? Good.’ Mel smiled a little. He had smallish teeth, the left front one broken at a corner. ‘See you soon, Cliffie.’
Cliffie had his Volks parked round the corner. He got in and drove homeward, across the bridge into New Hope, then left along the Delaware, past Odette’s. The road was good but narrowish, and Cliffie was careful, because his eyes refused to focus. The light was on in the living room, he saw as he went up the driveway. The Ford was ahead of him, parked where there might have been a garage, if his family had ever built one. Cliffie took his car keys, and when he went in the front door, put the keys on the hall table, as he usually did or should do, in case his mother had to get out with the Ford.
‘That you, Cliffie?’ called his mother from the kitchen.
‘Yep, Mom.’
‘Well – well. Had a big day?’ Edith was nearly finished the washing up.
‘Nice day,’ Cliffie replied, suddenly realizing he looked sloppy, suddenly ashamed. He lifted his head higher and asked, ‘Did I have any phone calls?’
‘No. Sorry.’ Edith swung the dishtowel over her thumbs, folding it, and laid it over the towel rack. ‘Cliffie, have something to eat and go to bed. Nothing more to drink. Promise?’
‘Sure I promise. I don’t even feel like a drink. What’s for dinner? What was for dinner?’
‘Pork chops. I stuck them in the oven. I thought you’d be home.’ Edith went out.
The oven wasn’t on, but the pork chops were still warm. Cliffie ate them standing, leaning against the sink, drinking the rest of a container of milk from the container. Suddenly his plate was empty, even the mashed potatoes gone. He put his plate in the sink, too tired to wash it. He heard his mother’s typewriter faintly clicking upstairs.
Cliffie took a bath, moving more steadily now. His mother’s door at the front of the house was closed, but a thread of light showed at the bottom, a dot at the keyhole. From George’s room came snores, old reliable scraping sounds that showed the vegetable was still alive. Cliffie pushed the door wider, walked in and switched on the light, not in the least afraid the corpse would wake up – oh, no! You fairly had to kick him, stick a pin in him to wake him up! Cliffie strolled to the low chest of drawers whose top bore a white towel, and on this stood bottles of clear glass and brown glass, little jars with glass tops and plastic tops. There was also a plastic thing that was some kind of kit. Eyedroppers. Jesus! Cliffie turned around and said in a normal, normally loud voice:
‘Georgie boy, what you need is exercise.’
George snored on, head awry, nose pointed at an upper corner of the room.
Edith’s typewriter paused, then clicked on.
Cliffie bent and laughed silently. ‘Ought to get out more!’ Quite suddenly a light sweat broke over Cliffie’s body. He had taken an extra hot bath. How much codeine and sleeping pills and all that would it take to kill old George? And how could he get them down him? In tea? Maybe. If the tea was sweet enough. Cliffie imagined those snores growing slower, fainter – stopping. What a blessing!
Abruptly Cliffie’s daydream ended, as if he had switched off a program on TV. He detested the room, and what was he doing here? Well, there was the codeine made from opium. Cliffie liked the word opium. It sounded evil, like a Chinese den. Opium-eaters and – something was the opium of the people, an old saying. And since he was here, why not? Cliffie went to the brown bottle, pulled the rubber stopper out, and took a swig. A little second swig for good measure, to prove he could hold it. Cliffie took a swig at least every four or five days. His mother had not noticed that the tincture – another nice word – was disappearing any faster, or she would certainly have mentioned it. But he had just now drunk out of George’s reserve, he realized, a new bottle. Generally Cliffie took it from the bedside bottle. Now he took the bedside bottle and poured a bit from it into the reserve, so the reserve wouldn’t look as if it had been gone into, though he did not fill it quite as full as it had been, or the bedside bottle would have looked, perhaps, emptier than it should have looked. What the hell, if the bottle was by George’s bedside, wasn’t it conceivable that George could have taken a dose on his own?
‘You’re nothing but a —’ Cliffie stopped, having heard a floorboard squeak in the hall.
‘Cliffie, what’re you doing here?’ His mother stood in the hall.
‘Nothing! Just —’ Cliffie lifted his empty hands. ‘Just taking a look before I went to bed.’
Edith drew a breath in through her teeth. ‘Well, you’d better get out,??
? she said, still softly, as if afraid to awaken George. She turned and walked back toward her workroom, glanced once behind her and saw that Cliffie was putting out the light in George’s room. Then Cliffie went down the stairs.
She knew Cliffie was sampling the codeine, but she thought if she mentioned it, it would make things worse. Cliffie would at first deny it, then having been detected would stop for a while then pilfer even more. It was a bore, one more chore, to keep fetching the stuff from the pharmacy. Dr Carstairs hadn’t remarked the extra consumption, hadn’t asked her if George was needing more. Edith thought Carstairs simply hadn’t noticed. His visits were too brief to take in details. What did he do? He took George’s blood pressure, to be sure, and his temperature. Sometimes he used his stethoscope. Edith didn’t always stand in the room watching him.
Edith gasped slightly, realized she had been holding her breath, staring at her typewriter, half her mind on getting back to where she was in her ‘letter’ which would have to be written again for smoothness and the ordinariness she wanted.
Where had Cliffie been last night? Mel’s probably.
Edith knew Mel had a telephone, because she had once looked it up, but she wasn’t ever going to try to reach Cliffie there. Orgies, maybe, pop music and LSD, maybe girls. Edith imagined Cliffie chuckling on the sidelines, if there were girls. Stop it, she told herself. She meant to finish her final draft tonight.
Like a boat (she thought) gliding smoothly to a shore, she moved closer to her worktable and sat down. But it wasn’t like that. If she wanted to think of boats, she was like a ship without a rudder now, without an anchor, turning on a dark sea, not knowing direction, unable to maneuver if it knew. It was Brett’s marriage three weeks ago that had forced her to turn loose. Before that, she had had some hope that Brett would change his mind, break with the girl, come back. But he had known Carol two years now, and if he married, he meant it. It had forced a movement on Edith’s part, which had been unconscious, yet still accomplished: she had turned loose of her dependence on Brett. She was alone.
She pulled her page and a half toward her and started reading through, correcting.
18
On 6th May, Edith copied into her diary a poem she had written that morning while still in bed, at dawn, with the pencil and scribbling pad she kept on the bedtable.
At dawn, after my death hours before,
The sunlight will spread at seven o’clock as usual
On these trees which I know.
Greenness will burst, dark green shadows yield
To the cruel-benign, indifferent sun.
Indifferent will stand the trees in my own garden,
Unweeping for me on the morning of my death.
Same as ever, roots athirst,
The trees will rest in breezeless dawn,
Blind and uncaring,
The trees that I knew,
That I tended.
In June, Robert Kennedy was shot in Los Angeles at the Democratic Nomination Convention. Edith learned this when Cliffie knocked on her bedroom door and wakened her to tell her. He had heard it on his transistor. Edith got up and put her dressing gown on. Then the telephone rang, and it was Gert Johnson, who had also just heard the news.
‘They’re not sure he’ll live,’ Gert said. She wanted to come over.
Edith said, ‘Sure. Come over!’ Suddenly nothing mattered, the Bugle mailing labels she had been typing that night, the lateness of the hour. Edith absently lit the burner under the coffee pot, which still held some coffee, though Gert would probably prefer a drink. Cliffie was smiling faintly, standing in the dining room.
‘Those Kennedys haven’t any luck,’ Cliffie said.
Edith felt jangled. She turned off the coffee, got out ice for Gert and herself. When Gert arrived, full of talk, telling Edith (who hadn’t had her radio or television on) the latest news she had heard, Edith had the feeling she was hearing it through a fog, or from a distance. Cliffie lingered, fascinated, for a drink with them, saying nothing.
‘It’s the CIA – or it’s the Mafia,’ Gert said with conviction. ‘Bobby had the guts, y’know, Edie, to say he was going after the Mob, d’y’know that?’ (Of course Edith did.) ‘And he’d already started as Attorney General – going after ’em, I mean.’
On the next hourly bulletin, Bobby Kennedy’s condition was described as critical. They had got the assassin at once, and he had an Arab-sounding name, Sirhan. And who had paid him, Edith wondered. Like Brett, she was sure Lee Harvey Oswald had not fired any of the shots that had killed John Kennedy, that Oswald had been a fall guy, not even paid for his role, that Ruby had been a fringe employé of the CIA and had got rid of Oswald, just in case Oswald might have been able to prove his innocence.
‘Any news from Brett?’ Gert asked when she had calmed down a little.
Cliffie had by then left the room.
‘Nothing much. He said he was going over his manuscript, retyping pages here and there.’
‘Does Cliffie ever see him?’
‘You mean in New York. Yes – once, I think. Cliffie went to New York to hear a pop concert and stayed the night with them. Brett invites —’
‘What does Cliffie say about Carol?’ Gert asked softly. Her drinks had warmed her.
Carol is pregnant, Edith thought at once. Cliffie had said that. The child was due in the autumn, either Cliffie had been told or he was venturing. ‘Oh, I think – Carol’s quite nice to him. So what could he say against her?’
‘But still working on the Post?’
‘Yes.’
‘Convenient. They can keep an eye on each other.’ Gert gave one of her big laughs.
A minute later, Gert was saying that she should get out more, see more people. Edith thought she did enough of that, all that she cared to. The Quickmans had introduced her to two couples in Tinicum. Gert sometimes played golf at a club in New Jersey. Gert had invited Edith once or twice, but Edith wasn’t keen on sports and preferred to spend her spare time, if any, in other ways.
One more inch of rye, straight, for Gert, then she departed, though Edith could have sat up the rest of the night chatting, waiting for news about Bobby. Maybe. She switched her workroom radio off. Only now was Bobby Kennedy’s possible death sinking in. And the insanity, the wrongness that had inspired that bullet! And Tricky Dick was the Republican candidate. What a world! What an America! California, the state with the most nuts, everyone said, full of cults, mostly destructive – they couldn’t even try to conserve trees without being maniacal about it. John Kennedy, however, had been shot in Dallas. Where was the enemy? Who was it? It was right here in the house, Edith thought. Cliffie was her enemy – perhaps. He mocked the work she was trying to do, the Bugle or whatever. She felt also that she had lost Cliffie’s respect because she had lost Brett without a fight, without protest. Cliffie, the passive observer. He was all right, of course, because he kept aloof from everything. If you didn’t try anything, how could you fail? She remembered telling Cliffie fifteen years ago (at least) that to fail was normal, that one simply tried again. She had tried to awaken in him the joy of challenge. What a laugh!
Still later that night, Edith was awakened by the telephone ringing. She groped for the light, saw it was ten past 5, and went downstairs barefoot. Something to do with Cliffie, she felt. Hadn’t he gone out? She wasn’t sure, but she thought so, and she hoped it was simply that his Volks had broken down, or that he was too tight to drive home, so that she had to go and fetch him.
‘Mrs Howland?’ said a man’s voice. ‘Hopewell Township police here. Your son’s had an accident.’
‘Oh – What happened?’
‘He’s all right, but the car’s wrecked. He hit a man walking along the edge of the road.’
‘Oh, my God! You mean the man’s badly hurt?’
‘Both legs broken. Well, it’s not a time for details. Long as you’re home, we’ll bring your son home…’
From that night onward, Edith had two on her hands, George a
nd Cliffie, because Cliffie’s licence was suspended for a year. He was grounded, as he put it. This Edith had learned the same early morning, when the Brunswick Corner police plus the Hopewell Township officer delivered Cliffie. He was plainly under the influence. Edith was ashamed, though she thought she had long ago lost the capacity for that, because Cliffie was a grown man, independent of her. Cliffie looked in fact half asleep, though the half of him that wasn’t asleep focused on her, as if he were trying to gauge, if he could, her reaction. Edith was concerned about the man who had been injured – a man of fifty-five, the Hopewell officer said, a plumber, married, now in a hospital in Trenton. His name was written down, at Edith’s request, and left along with other papers for Cliffie to sign tomorrow, because as the police said, he was not in a condition to sign anything.