Brett’s promised ten-thousand-dollar check came just before Christmas that year. Brett, in a letter Edith knew he had spent some time drafting, affected a polite warmth and concern for her and Cliffie, and said that though the probate had not yet been completed (it took a year, Edith supposed), he was sending this on now, since it might be welcome at Christmas time. The check roused Edith’s ire. Then she laughed a little. She had been alone when she opened Brett’s letter, Cliffie being out in the driveway messing around with his Volks.
That day she had said nothing to Cliffie about the check, which she had folded and stuck under the saucer of an African violet plant in the kitchen. The cleaning woman wasn’t coming that day – a new one now, Rosalie, Friday mornings – and Edith didn’t care if Cliffie saw it or not. Edith had a usual day, morning at a typewriter revamping an article with Ramparts in mind, because the article had been rejected elsewhere. For Ramparts she would have to make it considerably wilder, go into fantasy really, and Brett’s letter and check had put Edith just in the mood.
‘You’re in a good mood today,’ Cliffie remarked, as they sat down to an early lunch. Cliffie had to start at the Chop House as ‘extra staff’ by 1 o’clock for a birthday group, one of those things that went on until 4 p.m. and meant good tips.
‘Yes. And why not?’ Edith said.
Her afternoon at the Thatchery went well too. She felt full of energy, intended to finish her article (which needed just a final paragraph), and go over it tonight for word changes. Tomorrow morning she would type it in triplicate, send it off to Ramparts, send a copy to Gert to make her laugh, and keep one copy at home.
Cliffie was home when Edith arrived at 7:15 p.m. He looked weary but content, nursing a beer can as he watched television.
‘How was it?’ Edith asked.
Cliffie hauled himself up and went into the kitchen, following his mother. ‘Forty-eight bucks in tips.’ He had not been able to refrain from saying that.
‘Not – bad!’ said Edith.
Nelson miaowed also, as if astonished, though his face had its usual calm, and Edith knew his mind was on his supper. He was always fed just before she and Cliffie ate.
Edith asked Cliffie to bring her a scotch and soda, and when he returned with it, she said, ‘Did you see this?’ and picked up Brett’s check.
‘No. A check?’
‘Present from Brett.’
‘Yeah? How much?’
‘Ten thousand dollars.’
‘Jee-pers! Do you mean it?’ Cliffie reached for the check, which his mother had dropped on the kitchen table. ‘Holy smoke! – I never saw a check for ten thousand dollars before!’
‘You probably would if you ever bought a house,’ Edith replied, and began cutting Nelson’s food, which was kidney tonight, raw. ‘Presumably from George. But Brett might’ve said so.’
‘Oh-Gee-owge! I don’t believe it. Old tightwad wouldn’t leave – I bet he never left a quarter tip in his life! He’d leave a nickel!’
The clock in the living room pinged for 7:30. Somehow Edith heard it more acutely than usual.
‘What I meant was,’ she went on, busy preparing her and Cliffie’s meal now, ‘that he might have said it was from George, just to be nice – or courteous.’ Edith laughed loudly, briefly. ‘No, this presumably comes from Brett. Big present. Especially since the will isn’t probated yet.’
‘Oh. You mean George left us even more, maybe.’
Edith laughed again, so hard that tears came to her eyes, and she couldn’t speak.
Cliffie grinned. ‘No. Okay. I get it. Buying us off, sort of, in case George did leave more?’
The idea of George leaving anybody anything – least of all to her – sent Edith into near hysterics, and she bent double. ‘Who knows?’ she said, gasping.
‘Well, hell, Brett must’ve seen the will. No? He’s the main – He gets it all, doesn’t he?’
‘Yes. I think so.’
‘Well —’ Cliffie gestured, looking at the check on the table. ‘If I were you, I’d ask to see the will myself.’
Edith went suddenly to the check, picked it up and tore it in half. ‘That’s what I think of Brett’s check. And of George.’
‘Hey, Mom, you’re crazy – doing that!’
‘I don’t want it. It’s really distasteful.’ She looked at the astonished face of her son, realizing that she wanted an audience for what she had just done, vaguely ashamed that her son was her only audience, because he didn’t fully understand the way she felt. She knew how she felt, could have put it into words. But it wasn’t worth it with Cliffie.
‘Well —’ Cliffie had gone a bit pale. ‘Brett can always sign you another check.’
‘I don’t want another check.’
‘Why the hell not, if he’s getting a lot from that old geezer? Why the hell not after all we – all you did for him? Mom, you’re not thinking straight now. We can always patch that check up, can’t we? Put some scotch tape on it, the way they do dollar bills.’
Edith set her teeth. You are not my son, she wanted to say. Wrong. He was her son. She wasn’t going to repeat what she had said. They decided to eat in the living room, because there was something on television tonight that wasn’t bad, Cliffie reminded her. He had mentioned it that morning. Cliffie said something else about the check, which Edith did not reply to, and indeed she had managed to switch off Cliffie’s comments, as she might have switched off the radio or the television.
How could she really include Cliffie in her thoughts, in her reasoning, Edith thought as she ate her food (looking sightlessly at the television screen), a man of twenty-five who kept a matchbook, a matchbook, like a sacred relic of Luce Beckman, whom he hadn’t seen in five or six months now? This sacred matchbook from Conti’s Cross-Keys Inn now lay on Cliffie’s cluttered table in his room, with a little circle of space around it. Once she had reached for it to light a cigarette when she had been in his room, talking to him, and he had shouted, ‘Don’t touch that! – I mean, I’m saving it – want to keep the matches in it.’ Cliffie knew that she knew they had gone to dinner at the Cross-Keys that night. Cliffie had gone back to the Cross-Keys to ask if Luce might have come in again. Cliffie had told Edith this in his cups and nearly weeping. In his way, Cliffie depressed Edith as much as George ever had. Edith was glad to finish her meal, pour her coffee and Cliffie’s and excuse herself to go up to her workroom.
She wanted to make an entry in her diary. Edith uncapped her fountain pen and wrote:
20/Dec./69
Splendid day. Long letter from Cliffie, with some snaps of near-by village where he goes looking around (he says) on Sundays which is one of the market days. Camels, heaps of oranges, women in the veil. D. phoned. She considers going out to join C. when the baby is a few months older. I really think she should. C.’s every-two-months trips home are not enough. I used to think it a good idea, to keep their love fresh and all that. Now I am not so sure. They are so happy together – and who knows how long that can last? It will of course last, but accidents can happen, even such as death, & it would be cruel to think that they were deprived of even a week’s joy and happiness together that they might have had. C. hints at another ‘promotion’ of some kind, says he will be home about as soon as his letter, meaning day after tomorrow latest. He will go to New Jersey first, of course, and how good it will be to hear his voice on the phone! A pity B. did not live to see C. make such a success of himself!
Edith had in the last month decided that Brett should be dead since about three years now. It didn’t matter that this conflicted with George’s demise and funeral service at which Brett had been present. Edith was writing her diary for pleasure, and was taking poetic licence, as she put it to herself.
Am enjoying still the lovely things, little and big, which dear Aunt M. passed on to me. The old serviettes (as she often called them), big oval tablecloth and the round one, the settee and armchair, the two quilts. How to describe a quilt made by someone you know? Every stitc
h taken with loving care (I like to imagine) by someone who loved you: that is what it means.
She could also have mentioned her gratitude for twenty thousand dollars, in the form of two Treasury Bonds, which Melanie had left her, generous enough considering that Melanie, though childless, had nieces and nephews and grand-nieces and so on almost beyond count, but Edith didn’t like writing about money in her diary. Brett had cut his contribution from a hundred and fifty to a hundred dollars a month. What was she to deduce from this? That he thought Cliffie ought to be taking care of her? A tapering off toward zero? A gesture to ease his conscience? Edith believed it was the latter.
27
‘Beer, please,’ Cliffie said to the Cartwheel barman. ‘Sure, Miller’s is fine.’ Cliffie was feeling cool that evening, standing with one leg over a bar stool, wearing a new dubonnet blazer, now unbuttoned. He hadn’t even glanced around for Luce, as he usually did, for which he congratulated himself.
Tok! His beer arrived, and Cliffie’s dollar bill was already on the counter. Cliffie did glance at the door, twice, as people came in. The old plump proprietor sometimes hovered near the door, greeting people. He was there tonight.
‘Oh, by the way, Cliffie!’ said the skinny pansy barman. ‘Something in the paper today.’ He pulled up a folded newspaper from somewhere. ‘Here it is, yeah. Isn’t this the girl you were asking about? Long time ago?’ He pointed to a small item on a page Cliffie instantly recognized as the society page of the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Cliffie read it. Lucy G. Beckman to Wed Kenneth L. Forbes, said the one-column headline. Cliffie jumped slightly, but remained on the stool, ‘Oh, yeah. Yeah,’ he said.
‘Lucy Beckman. Wasn’t that the girl you were asking about?’
‘Yeah, but that was a couple of years ago,’ Cliffie said. ‘Sure, I know all about this.’ Cliffie pushed the paper aside.
‘See-ee?’ said the barman, smiling, dumping an avalanche of ice cubes into a tub with a gelid crash. ‘Pretty good detective I am, eh?’
Cliffie retreated within himself, like a whole army defeated, covering its wounds, wary of the outside, the enemy on the periphery. Of course it had been a long time since he had seen Luce – two years now, a little more. Cliffie didn’t like to think of the word years. It scared him. In a way, of course, he had given up Luce, and in a way he hadn’t, because love didn’t give up, according to all the songs, the poetry. He thought of the many times, beyond count, when he had imagined making love to Luce. And now he had to imagine her busy all those months, years, seeing people, meeting men, maybe making love with them, and finally choosing one of them to marry! Cliffie had put on a faint, casual smile, and now he lit a cigarette, shaking. He was of course paying no further attention to the barman, who hadn’t a glimmer of what the news meant to him, who couldn’t care less, and anyway the guy was queer, so what the hell could he know about anything? Kenneth – something – Forbes. Was he some good-looking or rich swine who had been hanging around for some time, maybe the one Luce had had a quarrel with? She had implied a quarrel somewhere, either with her parents or with a man. And now the bastard had made it – maybe. Cliffie had an impulse to look up the son of a bitch and kill him! A man to man fight. Reduce his face to a pulp. Beat him until it was impossible for him to breathe through his broken nose. Cliffie ordered a scotch.
Nothing happened that evening, absolutely nothing. Cliffie had brought his Volks, and was quite pissed by the time he drove home a little after 11 p.m., but he drove carefully and made it. When he entered the house, he heard his mother’s typewriter clicking upstairs. The house felt warm. What month was it? April. Yes, of course, April. Almost three years since he had met, or seen, Luce. Cliffie had a drink on that. After all, a nightcap, no harm in a nightcap if it was safely back home.
Clickety-click. A pause. Then the spurt of clicks again. Sometimes his mother worked till nearly 2 in the morning. Cliffie shook his head indulgently. If she wasn’t clicking away, she was picking away at the clay stuff, sculpting. Cliffie laughed a little. What was she working on now? It was an abstract-looking thing, about two feet square. Cliffie had seen his own head (though his mother didn’t much like his going into her room), and had been quite startled and pleased, because he looked so handsome. Maybe his mother did like him, had been Cliffie’s first reaction, but of course he had merely smiled, and made some comment about its being a good job. Then his mother had sold that crazy piece to Ramparts or Shove It or some such, and had been proud of it, telling him, telling the Quickmen, though Cliffie knew damn well these were kinky-kooky publications, full of sordid exaggerations, things that could be libelous, Cliffie would have thought.
He found himself leaning heavily against the sideboard, the end of his second nightcap in his hand, staring at the tarnished silver tray with its silver teapot, sugar bowl, creamer. He had noticed before, months ago, that his mother wasn’t polishing silver stuff the way she had used to, and the cleaning woman had too much to do, coming just once a week, to do it, Cliffie supposed.
Then he realized he was thinking all this crap, dreaming around like this, so that he wouldn’t think of Luce. Luce. Gone now. Not married as yet, but just think of the people, relatives, family he would have to buck if he tried to interfere with the marriage, which was supposed to take place in mid-May, he recalled. Cliffie staggered into his own room, and once he had closed the door, gave way to tears, with hands over his eyes. He nearly fell, losing his balance, and threw himself on his bed and continued weeping.
Edith noticed the change in Cliffie, and the first indication to her was a tension which meant he was anxious about something or concealing something. ‘Anything the matter?’ Edith asked, not expecting Cliffie to answer frankly, and he hadn’t. Nothing was the matter, he said. Edith wondered if the police had given him a warning about something.
It was Gert Johnson who enlightened Edith at the end of a telephone conversation which had begun about something else. ‘That girl Luce Beckman – Remember a long time ago you asked if I knew her? I just happened to see she just got married in Philly. Must be the same one Cliffie was hung up on.’
‘Oh. Oh.’ Edith suddenly understood everything. ‘Cliffie didn’t mention it. Maybe he doesn’t even know! Anyway – he doesn’t talk about her any more.’
‘Her father’s a big-shot president, it seems – I forgot of what.’
‘I think she’s gone out of Cliffie’s mind, thank goodness. Well, about Saturday elevenish, Gert, that’s fine.’ Gert was coming to see Edith in regard to a Bugle editorial Edith had written which was due to go to press next Tuesday.
Now Edith understood. Cliffie had regained long ago the pounds he had lost, had perhaps put on more, and more were due if he kept up the beer and the drink, which in fact had been upped in the last days. Gone also was the sacred matchbook that had lain on his table for years. Had Cliffie thrown it away in a pet? Or was he guarding it in the back corner of a drawer? Edith thought of mentioning Luce, to offer Cliffie a word of sympathy, to show she took an interest in his life, then decided not to, as Cliffie might be more wounded if she did.
Gert was up in the air about a four-hundred-word editorial Edith had written in regard to student behavior and demonstrations at the local Brunswick School. Since Edith had backed up her article with quotes from a Brunswick Corner parent and one of the school teachers, she was sure she was not alone in her attitude. Edith sensed the old battle of tear-it-down, which was Gert, versus change-it-and-improve-it, which was Edith. Gert was on the side of the kids. Curious that Gert thought her far-out lately, while Edith felt herself ever more conservative.
The comparative calm of that week in May was broken by a telephone call at 1:30 a.m. one night at a moment when Edith was standing in her workroom pushing Plasticine into her abstract called ‘City.’ She had not been aware of the time until she glanced at her wrist-watch on hearing the telephone. The downstairs hall light was still on, meaning Cliffie had not yet come in.
A voice ascertaine
d that she was Mrs Howland, then told her that her son had a broken jaw and would be in the Doylestown hospital overnight and part of tomorrow.
‘A car accident?’ Edith asked.
‘No, Mrs Howland,’ the voice drawled. ‘Seems to have been a fistfight.’
‘Can I reach him by telephone? Is he all right?’
‘Oh, he’s all right. No danger. But he can’t talk very well, ma’am.’
Cliffie was brought home the next day around 7:30 p.m. by prearrangement with the hospital, which had again rung Edith. Edith had said she worked until 7. A hospital car came behind Cliffie’s Volks, which was driven by an intern. Cliffie’s entire head was swathed in a white bandage. He was dressed and walking, but could talk only with difficulty. One intern spoke to Edith about a liquid diet, the extraction of a tooth or two in lower left jaw (already done), and left her some pain-killing pills. Cliffie should see a local doctor for another penicillin shot tomorrow. Then the interns left.