The Winter of Our Discontent (14 page)

“No.”

“Margie will be dressed to the nines.”

“Margie likes Old Dobbin.”

“How do you know?”

“She told me.”

“She did not.”

“Wrote a letter to the paper about it.”

“Be serious. You
are
going to be nice to her?”

“I’m going to make love to her.”

“I’d think you’d like to wear the dark—with her coming.”

“Look, flower girl, when I came in, I didn’t give a damn what I wore or nothing. In two short moments you have made it impossible for me to wear anything but Old Dobbin.”

“Just to be mean?”

“Sure.”

“Oh!” she said in the same tone Allen had used.

“What’s for dinner? I want to wear a tie to match the meat.”

“Roast chicken. Can’t you smell it?”

“Guess I can. Mary—I—” But I didn’t go on. Why do it? You can’t buck a national instinct. She’d been to the Chicken Bargain Day at the Safe Rite Store. Cheaper than Marullo’s. Of course I got them wholesale and I have explained to Mary the come-on bargains at the chain stores. The bargain draws you in and you pick up a dozen other things that aren’t bargains just because they’re under your hand. Everyone knows it and everyone does it.

My lecture to Mary Manyflowers died afoaling. The New Ethan Allen Hawley goes along with the national follies and uses them when he can.

Mary said, “I hope you don’t think I was disloyal.”

“My darling, what can be virtuous or sinful about a chicken?”

“It was awful cheap.”

“I think you did the wise—the wifely thing.”

“You’re making fun.”

Allen was in my bedroom waiting for me. “Can I look at your Knight Templar sword?”

“Sure. It’s in the corner of the closet.”

He knew perfectly well where it was. While I skinned off my clothes, he got it out of the leather case and unsheathed it and held the shiny plated blade up in the light and looked at his noble posture in the mirror.

“How’s the essay going?”

“Huh?”

“Don’t you mean, ‘I beg your pardon, sir’?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I said, how’s the essay?”

“Oh! Fine.”

“You going to do it?”

“Sure.”

“Sure?”

“Sure, sir.”

“You can look at the hat, too. In that big leather case on the shelf. Feather’s kind of yellowy.”

I got in the big old wide-bottomed tub with the lion’s feet. They made them big enough to luxuriate in in those days. I scrubbed Marullo and the whole day off my skin with a brush and I shaved in the tub without looking, feeling for the whiskers with my fingertips. Everyone would agree that’s pretty Roman and decadent. While I combed my hair, I looked in the mirror. I hadn’t seen my face in a long time. It’s quite possible to shave every day and never really to see your face, particularly if you don’t care much for it. Beauty is only skin deep, and also beauty must come from inside. It better be the second if I was to get anywhere. It isn’t that I have an ugly face. To me, it just isn’t interesting. I made a few expressions and gave it up. They weren’t noble or menacing or proud or funny. It was just the same damn face making faces.

When I came back to the bedroom, Allen had the plumed Knight Templar hat on, and if it makes me look that silly I must resign. The leather hatbox was open on the floor. It has a supportmade of velvet-covered cardboard like an upside-down porridge bowl.

“I wonder if they can bleach that ostrich plume or do I have to get a new one?”

“If you get a new one, can I have this?”

“Why not? Where’s Ellen? I haven’t heard her young screechy voice.”

“She’s writing on her I Love America essay.”

“And you?”

“I’m thinking about it. Will you bring some Peeks home?”

“I’ll probably forget it. Why don’t you drop in at the store and pick it up someday?”

“Okay. Mind if I ask something—sir?”

“I’d be flattered.”

“Did we use to own all High Street for two blocks?”

“We did.”

“And did we have whaling ships?”

“Yep.”

“Well, why don’t we now?”

“We lost them.”

“How come?”

“Just up and lost them.”

“That’s a joke.”

“It’s a pretty darned serious joke, if you dissect it.”

“We’re dissecting a frog at school.”

“Good for you. Not so good for the frog. Which of these beauty-ties shall I wear?”

“The blue one,” he said without interest. “Say, when you get dressed can you—have you got time to come up in the attic?”

“I’ll make time if it’s important.”

“Will you come?”

“I will.”

“All right. I’ll go up now and turn on the light.”

“Be with you in a couple of tie-tying moments.”

His footsteps sounded hollowly on the uncarpeted attic stairs.

If I think about it while I tie a bow, the tie has a rotating tendency, but if I let my fingers take their own way, they do it perfectly. I commissioned my fingers and thought about the attic of the old Hawley house, my house, my attic. It is not a dark and spidery prison for the broken and the abandoned. It has windows with small panes so old that the light comes through lavender and the outside is wavery—like a world seen through water. The books stored there are not waiting to be thrown out or given to the Seamen’s Institute. They sit comfortably on their shelves waiting to be rediscovered. And the chairs, some unfashionable for a time, some rump-sprung, are large and soft. It is not a dusty place either. Housecleaning is attic-cleaning also, and since it is mostly closed away, dust does not enter. I remember as a child scrambling among the brilliants of books or, battered with agonies, or in the spectral half-life that requires loneliness, retiring to the attic, to lie curled in a great body-molded chair in the violet-lavender light from the window. There I could study the big adze-squared beams that support the roof—see how they are mortised one into another and pinned in place with oaken dowels. When it rains from rustling drip to roar on the roof, it is a fine secure place. Then the books, tinted with light, the picture books of children grown, seeded, and gone;
Chatterboxes
and the Rollo series; a thousand acts of God—
Fire, Flood, Tidal Waves, Earthquakes
—all fully illustrated; the Gustave Doré Hell, with Dante’s squared cantos like bricks between; and the heartbreaking stories of Hans Christian Andersen, the blood-chilling violence and cruelty of the Grimm Brothers, the Morte d’Arthur of majesty with drawings by Aubrey Beardsley, a sickly, warped creature, a strange choice to illustrate great, manly Malory.

I remember thinking how wise a man was H. C. Andersen. The king told his secrets down a well, and his secrets were safe. A man who tells secrets or stories must think of who is hearing or reading, for a story has as many versions as it has readers. Everyone takes what he wants or can from it and thus changes it to his measure. Some pick out parts and reject the rest, some strain the story through their mesh of prejudice, some paint it with their own delight. A story must have some points of contact with the reader to make him feel at home in it. Only then can he accept wonders. The tale I may tell to Allen must be differentlybuilt from the same tale told to my Mary, and that in turn shaped to fit Marullo if Marullo is to join it. But perhaps the Well of Hosay Andersen is best. It only receives, and the echo it gives back is quiet and soon over.

I guess we’re all, or most of us, the wards of that nineteenth-century science which denied existence to anything it could not measure or explain. The things we couldn’t explain went right on but surely not with our blessing. We did not see what we couldn’t explain, and meanwhile a great part of the world was abandoned to children, insane people, fools, and mystics, who were more interested in what is than in why it is. So many old and lovely things are stored in the world’s attic, because we don’t want them around us and we don’t dare throw them out.

A single unshaded light hung from a roof beam. The attic is floored with hand-hewn pine planks twenty inches wide and two inches thick, ample support for the neat stacks of trunks and boxes, of paper-wrapped lamps and vases and all manner of exiled finery. And the light glowed softly on the generations of books in open bookcases—all clean and dustless. My Mary is a stern and uncompromising dust harrier and she is neat as a top sergeant. The books are arranged by size and color.

Allen rested his forehead on the top of a bookcase and glared down at the books. His right hand was on the pommel of the Knight Templar sword, point downward like a cane.

“You make a symbolic picture, my son. Call it ‘Youth, War, and Learning.’ ”

“I want to ask you—you said there was books to look up stuff.”

“What kind of stuff?”

“Patriotic jazz, for the essay.”

“I see. Patriotic jazz. How’s this for beat? ‘Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!’ ”

“Great! That’s the berries.”

“Sure is. There were giants on the earth in those days.”

“I wisht I lived then. Pirate ships. Oh boy! Bang-bang! Strike your colors! Pots of gold and ladies in silk dresses and jewels. I sure wisht I lived then. Some of our folks done—did it. You said so yourself.”

“Kind of genteel piracy—they called them privateers. I guess it wasn’t as sweet as it sounds from a distance. Salt beef and biscuit. There was scurvy on the earth in those days too.”

“I wouldn’t mind that. I’d get the gold and bring it home. I guess they won’t let you do it any more.”

“No—it’s bigger and better organized now. They call it diplomacy.”

“There’s a boy in our school that won two television prizes— fifty dollars and two hundred dollars. How’s that?”

“He must be smart.”

“Him? Course not. It’s a trick, he says. You got to learn the trick and then you get a gimmick.”

“Gimmick?”

“Sure—like you’re a cripple or you support your old mother raising frogs. That gives you audience interest so they choose you. He’s got a magazine with every contest in the whole country in it. Can I get one of those magazines, Pop?”

“Well, piracy is out, but I guess the impulse lingers.”

“How do you mean?”

“Something for nothing. Wealth without effort.”

“Can I get that magazine?”

“I thought such things were in disrepute since the payola scandals.”

“Hell, no. I mean no, sir. They just changed it around a little. I’d sure like to cut in on some of that loot.”

“It is loot, isn’t it?”

“It’s all dough, no matter how you get it.”

“I don’t believe that. It doesn’t hurt the money to get it that way but it hurts the one who gets it.”

“I don’t see how. It’s not against the law. Why, some of the biggest people in this country—”

“Charles, my son, my son.”

“How do you mean, Charles?”

“Do you have to be rich, Allen? Do you have to?”

“Do you think I like to live without no motorbike? Must be twenty kids with motorbikes. And how you think it is if your family hasn’t even got a car, leave alone no television?”

“I’m deeply shocked.”

“You don’t know how it is, Dad. One day in class I did a theme how my great-granddad was a whaling captain.”

“He was.”

“Whole class bust out laughing. Know what they call me? Whaley. How’d you like that?”

“Pretty bad.”

“It wouldn’t be so bad if you were a lawyer or in a bank or like that. Know what I’m going to do with the first chunk of loot I win?”

“No, what?”

“I’m going to buy you an automobile so you won’t feel so lousy when other people all got one.”

I said, “Thank you, Allen.” My throat was dry.

“Oh, that’s all right. I can’t get a license yet anyway.”

“You’ll find all the great speeches of our nation in that case, Allen. I hope you’ll read some of them.”

“I will. I need to.”

“You surely do. Good hunting.” I went quietly down the stairs and moistened my lips as I went. And Allen was right. I felt lousy.

When I sat down in my big chair under the reading light, Mary brought the paper to me.

“What a comfort you are, wiggles.”

“That suit looks real nice.”

“You’re a good loser and a good cook.”

“The tie matches your eyes.”

“You’re up to something. I can tell. I’ll trade you a secret for a secret.”

“But I don’t have one,” she said.

“Make one up!”

“I can’t. Come on, Ethan, tell me.”

“Any eary children listening in?”

“No.”

“Well, Margie Young-Hunt came in today. Out of coffee, so she said. I think she’s carrying a torch for me.”

“Come on, tell.”

“Well, we were talking about the fortune and I said it would be interesting to do it again and see if it was the same.”

“You didn’t!”

“I did so. And she said it would be interesting.”

“But you don’t like things like that.”

“I do when they’re good.”

“Think she’ll do it tonight?”

“If you care to offer me a penny for my thoughts, I think that’s why she’s coming.”

“Oh, no! I asked her.”

“After she set you up for it.”

“You don’t like her.”

“On the contrary—I’m beginning to like her very much, and to respect her.”

“I wish I could tell when you’re joking.”

Ellen came in then quietly so that you couldn’t tell whether she had been listening but I suspect she had. Ellen is a girl-girl-girl and thirteen to boot, sweet and sad, gay and delicate, sickly when she needs it. She is in that stage like dough beginning to set. She may be pretty, or not. She is a leaner, leans on me, breathes on me too, but her breath is sweet like a cow’s breath. She’s a toucher, too.