Cliffie wanted a drink. Edith got a scotch for him. He didn’t know what happened, he told his mother, and he was telling the truth, he said.
‘Ho bwok-ko,’ Cliffie said, frowning with pain, which Edith translated as ‘black-out.’ He did remember three or four fellows, some mysterious argument outside a bar or a restaurant in the parking lot, and then whammo! Cliffie waved a hand, meaning he didn’t want to say any more tonight.
Cliffie was nearly as white as the bandage. Edith was surprised that he admitted to a black-out. What horrors! Yet curiously she felt cool and detached, rather like a professional nurse, and she behaved as one, turning Cliffie’s bed down, making sure he had swallowed the right pills, that he could take on a milk-and-egg drink, and this she prepared. There was also soup for the future, and Cliffie wouldn’t starve. Somehow Edith had an aversion to asking with whom he had fought, and maybe Cliffie didn’t even know. How long was the bandage going to last? Hadn’t the intern said a week?
When Gert Johnson came on Saturday morning, Edith had fresh coffee ready plus a delicious Sarah Lee cake – the round kind with white icing and pecans on top – and of course the bar was at hand too. Edith felt inspired to be cheerful, or perhaps she really felt cheerful. The cinnamon-and-butter smell of the warming cake roused Cliffie from his bed of pain (where he had been pleased to stay the last couple of days, reading and dozing), but the cake unfortunately couldn’t go down as yet.
‘Hey, I heard about Cliffie!’ Gert said even before she had sat down.
‘A broken jaw,’ Edith said. ‘Little brawl outside a – oh, I don’t know, a roadside place in Tinicum, I gather.’
‘Nothing with the police, I hope.’
‘Haven’t heard a word out of them.’
That subject was soon finished. Gert partook of coffee and cake, then she started in on the editorial which Edith had entitled Some of Us Too.
‘Again, Edith, you’re going to antagonize a lot of people.’
A few parents, of course. And ‘again’? Edith waited patiently.
‘Some of our readers are the parents of these kids.’
‘Sure, I know that,’ Edith said.
‘I’m not so sure you should say – oh, “vile and vituperative”, whatever it was.’
‘That was a quote from an old letter I kept from the Times, a letter from a faculty member at Hunter.’
‘Yes, but you equated…’
Then they were off, though Edith did keep her calm. Brunswick School had just got a going over by the police for drug-pushing. At least fifty per cent of the kids aged thirteen to seventeen had admitted taking stuff ‘sometimes or all the time,’ according to a Bucks County survey, a clipping of which Edith had, because it had been in the Trenton Standard, but Gert considered that a minor matter. She was more concerned with Edith’s saying that the kids were brainlessly imitating older college kids and making a game out of insubordination, insulting their elders, and demanding equal say in the running of the school.
‘If the young really know as much as teachers about administration or even what they ought to study,’ Edith said, ‘then perhaps they don’t need to go to school at all.’
‘Oh, Edith!’ Gert said, striking a palm gently against her hair, which had gone all salt-and-pepper in the last couple of years. ‘Where’d you get your other quote from?’
‘Penny Ditson. She —’
Gert interrupted, scoffing, as if Penny were brainless, but Penny was observant and articulate, had a sixteen-year-old son and a seventeen-year-old daughter at Brunswick School, the son taking so much LSD, his grades had gone to hell and his mother was worried. The daughter – Edith had talked with her. Edith told Gert all this.
‘It’s just that the piece is a little too alarmist. We’ve got to tone it down a little.’
Edith yielded, hating it, hating herself for yielding. But it was that or breaking, possibly, with Gert, because Edith knew her editorials had strained their relations enough already, especially the birth-control-abortion ones of a couple of years ago. Neither she nor Gert owned the Bugle, and they needed each other to keep it going. Edith changed the subject finally by telling Gert about a sale she had made to Shove It, an underground newspaper. Edith had simply distorted an article that other magazines had rejected, thrown in some vulgarity, and sold it. Gert seemed surprised, but did not congratulate Edith very warmly.
‘Oh, but that Shove It,’ Gert said with a shake of her head. She was now on a short rye, short on water. ‘They’re really screwed up.’
Edith laughed gaily. ‘Sure, or they wouldn’t print my stuff. I have another idea – a fantastic game that I’m going to —’
‘Hey! You’ve got the new Erich Fromm?’ Gert had espied a book, a library book, on the coffee table.
Edith was annoyed by Gert’s interruption. Gert had always interrupted, however, and always a bit more after a drink. How many more years, Edith wondered, would they go on meeting like this, talking, arguing, taking temporary and passing things so seriously? Maybe till they were seventy, eighty. People lived forever, these days, like old George, unless somebody put them out of their misery. Edith interrupted now with a certain defiance, ‘However – wait till you see my game idea in print one day. It’s called “Presidential Election”, unless I think of a sprightlier title. There are masks of the president- and vice-president-elect, you see, and the people in them are immediately shot at the inauguration ceremony, but they’re not the real president or vice-president. They’re still alive, thus giving the American public the pleasure of four assassinations, because the real ones come on – oh, an hour later.’
‘Say, how many drinks have you had?’ Gert asked with a smile.
‘None.’ Edith spun on her toes and went to the bar cart. ‘What I mean is, the security men, the gorillas, wear the masks, and they’re shot, either at a convention like Bobby Kennedy or at the inauguration. But they could be wearing bullet-proof vests and so forth to protect them. They could even have steel armor on their faces like – knights of old, in fact, if they’re wearing masks in the first place, which they are.’
Somehow Gert didn’t like the idea, or took it too seriously. At any rate, she made a rather dampening remark. It was enough to shift Edith’s feelings slightly but defiantly against Gert for the rest of her visit.
‘How is Brett doing?’ Gert asked, blowing cigarette smoke with a gentle puff. ‘Ever hear anything from him?’
Edith shrugged. ‘Not often. I’m sure he’s busy. Baby nearly four – and maybe another for all I know.’ She laughed, and thought suddenly – like a flash that came and went – of Cliffie’s Josephine, a bit older and far prettier.
‘Brett still sends you something toward the house, though. That’s some kind of contact.’
Edith had forgotten that she had disclosed that to Gert. But it didn’t much matter. ‘Yes. I admit I need it. House taxes, you know, heating —’
‘Don’t I know!’
‘I also need my job. And the house – it needs a complete paint job!’ Edith forced a laugh.
‘You’re not kidding! It’d pay you, Edie. Especially the outside.’
Then Gert departed. Edith had agreed to let her re-write the editorial, and in a sense Edith washed her hands of it. It made her a bit sad and also resentful. To alleviate this feeling, which she didn’t enjoy, she went upstairs to her workroom and opened her diary.
30/May/72. Best not to surface too often or at all. The joy of life is in the doing. Don’t judge too much what is done or expect praise or thanks.
Then she re-read the Times article of 1 April 1970 from a Faculty Member. It began:
In view of the appalling situation at Hunter College, this correspondent, a faculty member, feels it incumbent upon him to inform the public as to how far a college of considerable distinction in this city has sunk.
A hard core of defiant students are riding roughshod over the sensibilities of their fellow students and faculty members with the malicious glee of those who know
in advance that they will not be held accountable for whatever vile and vituperative utterances they choose to speak or print.
It went on:
A young lady informed the faculty with drawling insolence that if they remained intransigent to ‘present student demands’ for fifty-fifty representation on all faculty committees, the students might just go ahead and ‘up our demands’ – after all ‘there are nineteen thousand students and one thousand faculty, and the Supreme Court has ruled one man, one vote – that is democracy.’ Wild cheers and applause.
A fine hundredth anniversary for Hunter College.
She put the letter away in a folder marked News Clips, and turned back in her big diary, now more than three-quarters filled. Yes, the diary was four-fifths filled, she saw, and foresaw that this would make her write a bit smaller in future, so the diary might last out her life – or last a few years more anyway. She read (an entry of two years ago):
The difference between dream and reality is the true hell.
And on another page, simply:
‘Dreams of hyper-acidity.’
Now what did that mean? A future title of something? It wasn’t something she suffered from, anyhow. Another page held something written only five years ago, though it was a memory from her childhood:
Writing notes to Aunt Melanie on Tennessee birch-bark found in the woods, stripped carefully to give the most surface, later to be carefully folded into an envelope. What purity! The inside slightly moist, lovely tan color, so smooth, the writing surface, and on the back the crisp and curling thin white bark with brown flecks, reminding me of Indian canoes. ‘Dear Aunt Melanie, we are spending the night in a motel near Birmingham tonight, we hope, if we make it that far. We had a picnic lunch on pine needles today in a huge forest. This is genuine birch-bark…’ And how the pen glided over the tan, with a virginal squeak!
The virginal squeak struck Edith as comical, and she laughed now, but didn’t change it. Maybe she had laughed when she had written it. She didn’t remember.
28
Gert was of course right about painting the exterior of the house. So Edith set about this the following Monday morning. She telephoned a painting-and-lumber company named Leffingwell in Flemington, and they said they would send a man the following day to have a look and give an estimate. Meanwhile Cliffie had even on Sunday taken a look at the house and volunteered to do some scraping.
‘It’ll cut down on the final price, if I do a little work before,’ Cliffie said. ‘These guys get paid by the hour.’
Edith could never tell what chore would arouse Cliffie’s enthusiasm, and sometimes she was pleasantly surprised.
Cliffie now had his bandage off – a little too soon – his jaw was still swollen, and he could just about eat hamburger and mashed potatoes. This however did not interfere with his beer and scotch consumption. Cliffie did sign checks sometimes on his own bank account for ten dollars, specifically for drink. Edith still bought liquor in New Jersey (not considered legal), and brought it back in her car over the bridge.
The estimate for the house painting was seven hundred dollars, which Edith had rather expected, but she put on a long face, talked of getting another estimate from a company whose name she mentioned, and the price was knocked down to six hundred. Edith agreed to this. The men arrived the Friday of that week, by which time Cliffie had done quite a bit of scraping and tying up of rose bushes for their protection.
The painting went on into the following Tuesday, since the men didn’t work on Saturday. By this time Edith had finished the second draft of her piece called ‘Shoot-the-President,’ and sent it off to Shove It in New York. In this version the Vice-President-elect wore the mask of the President-elect, and was shot at the inauguration ceremony on the theory (Edith wrote) that nobody knew or liked vice-presidents, anyway. This left the real president alive to display himself as a future target for public amusement. It was a game with possible variations. Presidents-elect, all in masks of the president-elect, would read the inaugural address, be shot down, and at once replaced by another man in president-elect mask, who would resume the script of the address, while among the crowd the unfortunate assassins, not in on the game, were at once jumped on by the populace or shot at and really killed by secret servicemen. Therefore the game, besides being fun for the public, was a way of weeding out and destroying real murderers in the nation. Edith was pleased with her story-game, but had no intention of showing it to Gert Johnson. Gert would think it far-out. Cliffie, so far, was Edith’s only reader, and he loved it, which pleased Edith.
Tuesday evening shortly after 7, when Edith came home from work, she found the trio of painters had tied up their scaffolds and were drinking beer with Cliffie in the driveway. It was a lovely June evening, not too warm, with a refreshing breeze off the Delaware. A moon was rising, though it wasn’t near dusk, and her house looked clean and proud again, really splendid with its doric columns and white shutters, its dark gray, almost black slate roof.
‘Can’t you do better than beer, Cliffie?’ Edith said.
‘Oh, this is just great!’ one of the men said. ‘After sweatin’, y’know —’
One of his colleagues laughed loudly, and made some remark about the man’s laziness.
The telephone rang, and Edith went in to answer it. It was Brett. Edith found herself stammering. Brett was like another world, another language, which she had forgotten.
‘Where are you – did you say?’
‘Lambertville. I said I’m with a friend, Pete Starr. Driving him to Doylestown tonight, and can we come by? Now, for a few minutes?’
‘Well – all right. Yes, Brett.’
Edith hated it, realizing that she could have manufactured a previously made date, and hadn’t had the wit. She checked that there was enough drink in case they wanted any, that the living room was reasonably clear of newspapers and magazines. Potato chips? Peanuts? Yes. ‘Christ,’ she whispered. She wasn’t in a mood to see Brett.
A minute later the painters had left, and Cliffie came in with his hands full of empty beer cans.
‘Brett’s coming,’ Edith said.
‘What? Really! Really?’
‘Bringing a friend for a few minutes en route to Doylestown.’
‘To the mortuary, I hope.’
A car arrived. Brett came in, looking yet thinner, grayer, more anxious, or maybe she was imagining. The friend was a sturdy, boring-looking man of about sixty with gray hair, dark suit and tie, the type who might be a senator, an accountant, anything but a journalist, Edith thought.
‘Pete’s a writer,’ Brett said as soon as they were seated, the first thing he had said besides ‘Hello,’ and his friend’s name. ‘Non-fiction. Political books.’
‘Oh,’ Edith replied in an interested tone. She was on her feet by the bar, waiting for orders. ‘Scotch?’
Brett sprang up to help her. Scotch on the rocks, and with a splash, Brett and Mr Starr wanted.
Cliffie strolled in. His jaw was still a bit swollen, making him look, in general, fatter. ‘Hello, Dad.’
‘Hi, Cliffie! And how’re things? This is Pete Starr. My son – Cliffie.’
Cliffie gave one of his brief nods and a mumble, and stuffed his hands in his trousers pockets. He drifted across the room to get a drink.
‘Who’s your publisher?’ Edith asked.
‘Oh – um – Random House now,’ said Mr Starr.
Then Brett asked about Gert, about the Bugle. ‘You’re still – writing stuff —’
‘Same as usual,’ said Edith. ‘Don’t you get it? I thought you were sent a courtesy subscription.’ She smiled pleasantly. She knew he was sent it.
‘Can’t always recognize your stuff,’ said Brett, smiling also.
‘Oh.’ Edith glanced at Mr Starr, who was looking her up and down (she was now seated), as if appraising her for – what, at her age?
‘Why’re the rose bushes covered?’ Brett asked.
‘Oh, didn’t you notice? The whole house h
as just been painted! Well, it’s getting a bit dark outside. They’ve just finished.’
‘Sniff-sniff!’ said Cliffie, lifting his nose. ‘Can’t you smell the paint, Brett?’
‘Why, yes!’ said Mr Starr. ‘Now I do.’
‘Job going all right at the – What’s it called?’ Brett asked.
‘The Hatchery,’ said Cliffie. ‘Or the Scratchery.’
Edith paid Cliffie no mind. ‘The shop. Sure.’ Edith lit a cigarette. ‘Money’s very useful. Also I like working. And —’
‘What?’ asked Brett.
‘Nothing.’ She had been going to mention her short story sale, but Brett wouldn’t have any respect for Ramparts or even a sense of humor about Shove It. Edith really wanted to inform Brett he was dead, since about three years now. Mr Starr’s arm was rising at long intervals to bring his glass to his lips, reminding Edith of toy ducking birds whose beaks absorbed liquid causing their heads to jump backwards, and Mr Starr’s head did jump a bit backwards soon after his glass touched his lips. ‘And how is your family?’ Edith asked Brett.