The following day, Robert Kennedy’s death was announced. Cliffie was asleep when Edith left for the Thatchery at a quarter to 2. Edith worked doggedly, with more of a head-down attitude than usual. ‘Don’t think, keep moving,’ was her frequent advice to herself, and she sometimes added, ‘Don’t look for a meaning,’ because if she did look for a meaning for even half a minute, she sensed that she was lost, that she had turned loose of her real anchor which was not Brett, but a kind of firm resignation. Edith didn’t know what to call it, but she knew what it was, knew the feeling. The feeling was one of security, the only security she knew now, or had now.
There was, of course, her diary. For two days after Cliffie’s mishap, and Bobby Kennedy’s death, Edith felt quite unsure of herself, unsure of the rails on which she moved – giving George his meals and taking sheets to the launderette and all that. So she wrote at greater length, voluptuously and voluminously, but still carefully in her big diary. As if to guard, somehow, against the future, she advanced time by four months or so, and gave Debbie and Cliffie a healthy, dark-haired baby girl (Debbie had dark-brown hair), weighing nearly eight pounds. Edith made Cliffie late (the baby having been born two hours before) in getting to the hospital in Princeton. Edith wrote:
… My parents are thrilled, telephoned Debbie, and want to come to see the new-born Josephine as soon as she is home…
Actually Edith’s parents were rather uncommunicative with her now, considering that she might be lonely and in need of morale-boosting, but Edith thought only fleetingly of that fact as she continued:
… In fact it was sheer luck that Cliffie was at home at all at the dramatic moment, because he has been based in Kuwait for two months now, since August. His company needed him in New York for consultation, he said, but I suspect he wangled a trip home…
19
Mel Linnell dropped Cliffie, socially speaking, that summer. It was a month or so after the car wreck that the drop became definite. Cliffie had rung Mel once or twice, and Mel had said he was not free because he had a date each time. The third time, Cliffie telephoned Mel around 3 p.m. of a Thursday, when a Lambertville electrician had just finished a job on the outside garden light at the back of the house, and Cliffie could have got a ride with him, because the electrician was going straight back to Lambertville.
‘Listen, Cliffie boy —’ Mel began. ‘I’m sorry about the car smash-up and all that. But I gotta be careful, y’know? I think you better stay clear of here for a while. No hard feelings, though.’
Cliffie mumbled something about understanding, feeling worse than he had felt when they had caught him cheating at the exams in Trenton, worse than when Aunt Melanie had caught him stealing from her purse when he was a kid. Cliffie was in a trembling tizzy of frustration, heartbreak, shock, and his first impulse was to head for the scotch bottle in the living room, but he suddenly remembered the electrician waiting in the kitchen, where Cliffie had offered him a beer.
‘Sorry. I mean, thanks,’ Cliffie said, ‘but I won’t be needing a lift after all.’
‘Oh. Okay. Well, I’ll push on.’ The young man clumped in heavy leather boots to the garbage container by the sink, dropped the empty can in and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘Tell your mother we’ll send the bill. Won’t be much – just rewiring.’ With a smile, the fellow was gone, climbing into his little truck in the driveway, whistling.
For an instant Cliffie wished he had a job like that, well paid (electricians always were), with a truck he could drive by himself, so he would be independent, able to fool around a little here and there if he felt like it, able to wear any old clothes. This fellow had been younger than Cliffie. Then just as suddenly Cliffie realized the fellow had smiled a little, almost sneered when he said ‘– just rewiring,’ as if it was funny Cliffie hadn’t been able to do it himself. Well, he didn’t like fooling with electrical stuff, because he’d once had a shock. His mother did a few little repairs since Brett went off, but for some reason she hadn’t wanted to tackle the garden light.
Anyway, he could now have his drink, and Cliffie veered away from the living room toward his own room, his own bottle. He drank an inch or so neat from a tumbler. The bottle was two-thirds empty. And his pocket money was low, maybe twelve dollars. He should see about working the Chop House soon, maybe this afternoon. And how the hell would he get there by 5:30 or 7, or whenever they wanted him? If they would agree to just after 7, his mother could drop him. It was more than a mile away. Or maybe someone there knew of a waiter or a waitress who could pick him up by arrangement.
Cliffie poured a bit more for himself, remembering with warm satisfaction that he had a bank account, savings, at the Brunswick First National with over two hundred dollars in it. His mother didn’t know that, Cliffie thought. She would consider it a mark in his favor, probably, if she knew he had put aside some of his earnings. However, Cliffie guarded his money jealously, didn’t want anyone to know he had a bank account, and certainly not how much. The money was important to his self-esteem, and he didn’t want to be asked to contribute fifty, if his mother was in some crisis, even if she promised to pay it back. He knew from the way she talked that the house was barely making it every month.
‘T-chuh!’ Cliffie said aloud, and set the bottle back in his closet corner. He was thinking that if his mother was half paid for the time she spent on articles that never sold, they’d be doing all right. Three or four evenings a week she spent typing away in her front room, making carbons, rewriting pages, a lot of them half-crumpled in her waste-basket. What a way to spend evenings! With no luck at it!
He knew he should ring the Chop House, but to delay the task, he went upstairs and strolled toward his mother’s front room, whose door was always slightly open, as Nelson liked to sleep there. Cliffie disliked entering his mother’s room, because even when she wasn’t there, he had the feeling she was watching him from all the walls, the way he remembered as a kid people telling him that God could see everything he did at all times, a statement he had never completely believed and certainly didn’t now. Cliffie moved stiffly. Nelson raised his head and gazed at Cliffie steadily from the bench under the windows.
‘Hyah, Nelson,’ Cliffie said.
The typewriter was more to one side than usual, and on the center of the worktable was his mother’s thick brown diary. It was a wonder it wasn’t filled after all these years, Cliffie thought, but on the other hand it was even thicker than a Manhattan telephone directory, though maybe not with so many pages, and it was inconceivable that anyone could fill it in a lifetime, at least with the events of one life, he thought.
Once, Cliffie remembered, years ago, he had come into this room when his mother had been out of the house, and had seen the diary open on the table, one page filled and the other half filled with his mother’s neat black handwriting, and Cliffie had been seized with curiosity, but a stronger feeling had prevented him from reading it: he had imagined that he would see some awful thing written about himself. His mother’s writing had suddenly looked like the little scribbles doctors made when they gave prescriptions, when he was sick with something, feeling awful. He didn’t want to be judged. That was it!
‘I will not be judged!’ Cliffie said firmly, but not too loudly, even though he knew George wasn’t going to hear him all the way down the hall.
Cliffie did bend and look at a newspaper clipping on his mother’s table. It looked as if it were from the Post, and Cliffie thought surely the Post wouldn’t have bothered printing anything about his silly car accident, and he was right because this item was headed Student Uproar in Paris: The Implications for De Gaulle. It was not of the least interest to Cliffie, indeed sent a soporific haze over his brain at once.
He turned and walked out of the room, leaving the door as he had found it. He walked down the hall toward George’s room, though he was still mindful that he might ring the Chop House, ought to. After all, he’d worked there twice since the car accident. They certainly weren’t boycotting
him.
‘Howdy, George!’ Cliffie said, putting on his western accent, and debating pinching a snort of codeine, deciding not to, because sometimes the stuff tasted like Southern Comfort, which Cliffie disliked. But some for George? Cliffie laughed, happily. By God, it was time for a laugh! Cliffie poured a goodly measure of the tincture into a tumbler with a hexagonal, heavy base, like the one he had in his own room – family’s best, present from Aunt Melanie – added a bit of water, added also a couple of aspirins from the bottle with cotton at the top, a bottle clearly marked ASPIRIN, then took two smaller pills from a little cardboard pillbox (red bottom, white top) with something written on it in handwriting which Cliffie could not decipher at all and didn’t care to.
‘Hey up, Georgie boy!’ Cliffie said in the tone in which Mel addressed him.
George awakened with elaborate slowness, risible to Cliffie as ever, and Cliffie put a hand behind his bony shoulders.
‘Have some tincture!’
‘Wh-what?’
‘Doctor’s orders! The cup that cheers! – Doctor’s orders, George, I swear!’
George was downing it. Cliffie held it carefully to his lips. George’s lower lip fell in horribly because there were no teeth there at the moment.
‘Good stuff, eh? Really good stuff!’ Cliffie said.
George did wince, drawing his gray eyebrows together, but he said, ‘Thanky, Cliff. Wha’ time – time is it?’
‘Ha’ past three, sir,’ said Cliffie, assuming his English accent. Fuck it, he’d better ring the Chop House. ‘Nighty night, George.’ Cliffie went out, before he could be asked to reach, maybe, the bottle George peed in.
Because Cliffie did not wish to be home that evening, in case of George’s unusual sleepiness, Cliffie did a good job on the telephone with Sol, the stocky, terribly-busy guy who really ran the Chop House though he was not the owner, and Sol told him to come on at 5:30 as waiter, and hung up, before Cliffie could explain that he had no transportation.
Cliffie put on black cotton trousers belonging to him – black trousers being required – and a white shirt. The Chop House offered black string ties and red and black striped vests free to their waiters. Cliffie walked three-quarters of the way, looking for a lift, getting one when he was only a hundred yards from the restaurant, but he accepted the lift anyway. He picked up thirty-two dollars in tips when the pot was divided after midnight among eight waiters and waitresses, plus his five-dollar wage. Another waiter named Phil dropped him home, right at his driveway.
‘How long they suspend you for, Cliff?’
The goddam car accident had been in the Bugle even. ‘Oh, just a year. Four months gone already.’ Cliffie was exaggerating. ‘I don’t care.’ He got out. ‘Thanks a lot, Phil.’
Cliffie saw the light in his mother’s front room. He had left a note that he was working at the Chop House.
‘Cliffie?’ his mother called as soon as he had come in the front door.
‘Yes, Mom!’
‘Can you come up for a moment?’
‘Sure.’ Cliffie climbed the stairs two at a time, hauling himself by the banister rail. Maybe old George was still asleep? Dead? Cliffie’s mind didn’t fathom this, refused to imagine it just now. Good. He could play it cooler that way.
Edith, in several moments of anger that evening, had thought to blast Cliffie, scare the daylights out of him by making him aware, in case he didn’t know it, that he could kill someone with an overdose of codeine. George was still asleep, and she had gone in at half-hour intervals to see if he was still breathing properly, or breathing at all. He was. She had been afraid to ring the doctor, afraid of what Carstairs might say – about Cliffie.
‘Well?’ Cliffie said, a bit defiantly.
Now with Cliffie before her, hands on his hips, Edith couldn’t say the words she had prepared when she had been alone, such as silly prank… criminal act… even possible murder.
‘Good evening at the Chop House?’ she asked.
‘Oh – nearly thirty bucks. Pretty good crowd for a Thursday night.’
Edith sponged an envelope and sealed it. Bugle work. ‘You know, Cliffie, I think it’s time you wrote a note again – or telephoned Richard Gerber’s house. After all —’
‘Oh, Mom!’ Cliffie raised a foot as if to stomp it, and swung his head in agony. This was the man he had hit with his car.
Edith rose to battle. She got up from her chair. ‘You refused to go to the hospital!’
‘Yes!’ He had hated the idea. Cliffie had refused with a determination he might have shown if he had been fighting for his life.
‘It’s cowardly enough that you didn’t face him —’
‘F’ Chrissake, I wrote him! You didn’t see the letter!’
‘I didn’t want to see the letter, I said write it on your own!’
‘Then how do you know what I said?’
‘That’s not the point!’
They were both talking at once, not caring how loud their voices were. Edith’s anxieties had focused on Richard Gerber and she was going to see it through.
‘He’s just home from the hospital, lives hardly eight miles from here, and you ought to go and see him. I’ll take you. I’ll wait in the car.’
‘The guy’s got insurance. Probably enjoying a few weeks off. What’s he lost?’
‘Would you like to have two legs broken by some drunken idiot?’
‘Sure!’ Cliffie laughed, suddenly imagining having six legs, so if two were broken, fine. Lie in bed and take it easy! This fellow had a wife to wait on him, the way George was waited on. How was George? In a coma? Cliffie hadn’t heard any snores, but the snores were not always noisy. Cliffie knew, however, that his mother was unusually angry because George must have seemed unusually sleepy, and the bottles unusually low.
Edith knew what was going on in Cliffie’s mind, knew from his faint smile. Cliffie wanted her to mention the nearly comatose state of old George, the plainly gone-into bottles, which Cliffie had not bothered to top up with water. She was not going to mention this. She had taken a walk, with a flashlight, around 10 p.m. that evening. She hadn’t been able to awaken George for his dinner. At the same time, his breathing had been steady and strong enough to make her believe that he was not in danger of dying. And if he had been in danger? In her opinion? She would have rung Carstairs. If Carstairs hadn’t been available, she might have tried to get some strong coffee down George. She supposed that would have been the correct thing to do. And yet she had taken a walk of perhaps half an hour, had come back to see if all was still well, if George had been still breathing. In her nervousness, Edith had telephoned the hospital in Trenton and inquired about Richard Gerber. That was how she had learned that he had gone home. ‘I know Richard Gerber’s address,’ Edith said, ‘and you’re going to pay him a visit.’
‘I will not!’
‘You will! I’ll see to that!’
Now it was like a flexing of muscles, a shouting bout again. Cliffie was an obdurate mountain before her – not very tall to be sure, but stubborn enough.
‘You will go to see him or leave this house!’ Edith said with lowered head.
That had some effect, Edith saw.
‘If you refuse to see Mr Gerber, you can just ask Mel to take you in,’ Edith went on. ‘By the way, here’s Mr Gerber’s address and the phone number. If you want to call, fine. Otherwise I’ll phone them tomorrow morning. All right? I’ll take you in the morning, because I’m working in the afternoon.’
She was hammering the point again that he was grounded, Cliffie realized, and that he couldn’t call on Mel to take him, because Mel had dropped him, a fact that his mother somehow knew, maybe through Gert Johnson, even, because that old gossip-bag managed to know everything. ‘Okay,’ Cliffie said, taking the paper from her hand. ‘Sure, if you insist.’ He turned and left the room.
What the hell could he expect from Gerber, Cliffie wondered. Anger? A cold silence? Cliffie dreaded the chore like – like what some people sai
d about going to the dentist. He absolutely hated the idea of facing the guy, looking at him. He picked up a comic book from his room floor, with an idea of changing his state of mind by looking at it for a minute or two, found even this distasteful and hurled the magazine at a wall.
The next morning, just before 8, Edith took George’s breakfast tray – boiled egg, two pieces of toast, butter, marmalade and tea – up to his room. It was perhaps twenty minutes earlier than his usual breakfast time.
‘George?’
He awakened in small fits, stirring hands first, then his head, finally opening his eyes, emitting from his lips the fragmented words Edith knew so well. He was exactly as usual. He made no remark about the missed supper last evening. He hauled himself up a little with Edith’s help, let her settle his tray. Old ship rising up, Edith thought. Old gray bones, masts, tattered sails flying, unsinkable.