The Winter of Our Discontent (16 page)

“Oh, you fool,” said Mary. And she looked glad and relieved. The ache went out of the air.

“Can they bleach ostrich feathers?” I asked. “It’s turned yellow.”

“I think so. Ask Mr. Schultz.”

“I’ll take it down Monday.”

“I wish Margie would turn the cards,” said Mary. “I would dearly love that.”

I put the hat on the newel post of the banister, and it looked like a drunken admiral if there is such a thing.

“Get the card table, Eth. It takes lots of room.”

I brought it from the hall closet and snapped the legs open.

“Margie likes a straight chair.”

I set a dining chair. “Do we have to do anything?”

“Concentrate,” said Margie.

“On what?”

“As near as possible on nothing. The cards are in my purse over on the couch.”

I’d always thought of fortune-telling cards as greasy and thick and bent, but these were clean and shining, as though they were coated with plastic. They were longer and narrower than playing cards and many more than fifty-two. Margie sat straight at the table and fanned them—bright-colored pictures and intricate suits. The names were in French:
l’empereur, l’ermite, le chariot, la justice, le mat, le diable
—earth, sun, moon, and stars, and suits of swords, cups, batons, and money, I guess, if
deniero
means money, but the symbol was shaped like a heraldic rose, and each suit with its
roi, reine,
and
chevalier
. Then I saw strange cards—disturbing cards—a tower riven by lightning, a wheel of fortune, a man hanging by his feet from a gallows, called
le pendu,
and Death—
la mort,
a skeleton with a scythe.

“Kind of gloomy,” I said. “Do the pictures mean what they seem to?”

“It’s how they fall in relation. If they fall upside down they reverse their meaning.”

“Is there a variation in meaning?”

“Yes. That’s the interpretation.”

The moment she had the cards Margie became formal. Under the lights her hands showed what I had seen before, that she was older than she looked.

“Where did you learn it?” I asked.

“I used to watch my grandmother and later I took it up as a trick for parties—I suppose a way of getting attention.”

“Do you believe in it?”

“I don’t know. Sometimes remarkable things come out. I don’t know.”

“Could the cards be a concentration ritual—psychic exercise?”

“Sometimes I think that’s true. When I find I give a value to a card it didn’t have before, that’s when it is usually accurate.” Her hands were like living things as they shuffled and cut and shuffled and cut again and passed them to me to cut.

“Who am I doing?”

“Read Ethan,” Mary cried. “See if it matches yesterday’s.”

Margie looked at me. “Light hair,” she said, “blue eyes. Are you under forty?”

“Just.”

“The king of batons.” She found it in the deck. “This is you”—a picture of a crowned and robed king holding a huge red and blue scepter and
Roi de Bâton
printed under him. She laid it out face up and reshuffled the deck. Then she turned the cards rapidly, speaking in a singsong voice as she did. A card on top of my card—“This covers you.” Crosswise on top—“This crosses you.” One above—“This crowns you.” One below—“This is your foundation. This before, this behind you.” She had formed a cross of cards on the table. Then rapidly she turned up four in a line to the left of the cross, saying, “Yourself, your house, your hopes, your future.” The last card was the man hanged upside down,
le pendu,
but from where I sat across the table he was right side up.

“So much for my future.”

“It can mean salvation,” she said. Her forefinger traced the line of her lower lip.

Mary demanded, “Is the money there?”

“Yes—it’s there,” she said absently. And suddenly she gathered the cards, shuffled them over and over, and laid them out again, muttering her ritual under her breath. She didn’t seem to study individual cards but to see the whole group at once, and her eyes were misty and remote.

A good trick, I thought, a killer at ladies’ clubs—or anywhere else. So must the Pythoness have looked, cool and composed and confusing. If you can hold people tense, hardly breathing, expectant for a long time, they’ll believe anything—not acting, so much as technique, timing. This woman was wasting her talent on traveling salesmen. But what did she want of us or of me? Suddenly she gathered the cards, patted them square, and put them in the red box, which said:
I. Muller & Cie, Fabrique de Cartes
.

“Can’t do it,” she said. “Happens sometimes.”

Mary said breathlessly, “Did you see something you don’t want to tell?”

“Oh, I’ll tell all right! Once when I was a little girl I saw a snake change its skin, a Rocky Mountain rattler. I watched the whole thing. Well, looking at the cards, they disappeared and I saw that snake changing its skin, part dusty and ragged and part fresh and new. You figure it out.”

I said, “Sounds like a trance state. Ever have it happen before?”

“Three times before.”

“Make any sense the other times?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Always the snake?”

“Oh, no! Other things, but just as crazy.”

Mary said enthusiastically, “Maybe it’s a symbol of the change in fortune that’s coming to Ethan.”

“Is he a rattlesnake?”

“Oh! I see what you mean.”

“Makes me feel crawly,” Margie said. “Once I kind of liked snakes and then when I grew up I hated them. They give me the willies. I’d better be going.”

“Ethan can see you home.”

“Wouldn’t think of it.”

“I’d be glad to.”

Margie smiled at Mary. “You keep him right here with you,” she said. “You don’t know what it’s like to be without one.”

“Nonsense,” said Mary. “You could get a husband by crooking your finger.”

“That’s what I did before. It’s no good. If they come that easy, they’re not worth having. Keep him home. Someone might grab him.” She got into her coat as she talked—a fast scrammer. “Lovely dinner. I hope you’ll ask me back. Sorry about the fortune, Ethan.”

“Will we see you in church tomorrow?”

“No. I’m going up to Montauk tonight.”

“But it’s too cold and wet.”

“I love the mornings on the sea up there. Good night.” She was out before I could even hold the door for her, out as though something was after her.

Mary said, “I didn’t know she was going up there tonight.”

And I couldn’t tell her: Neither did she.

“Ethan—what do you make of that fortune tonight?”

“She didn’t tell one.”

“You forget, she said there would be money. But what do you make of it? I think she saw something she didn’t want to tell. Something that scared her.”

“Maybe she once saw the snake and it stayed in her mind.”

“You don’t think it had a—meaning?”

“Honey roll, you’re the fortune expert. How would I know?”

“Well, anyway. I’m glad you don’t hate her. I thought you did.”

“I’m tricky,” I said. “I conceal my thoughts.”

“Not from me you don’t. They’ll stay right through the second show.”

“Come again?”

“The children. They always do. I thought you were wonderful about the dishes.”

“I’m devious,” I said. “And, in due course, I have designs on your honor.”

CHAPTER SIX

It has been my experience to put aside a decision for future pondering. Then one day, fencing a piece of time to face the problem, I have found it already completed, solved, and the verdict taken. This must happen to everyone, but I have no way of knowing that. It’s as though, in the dark and desolate caves of the mind, a faceless jury had met and decided. This secret and sleepless area in me I have always thought of as black, deep, waveless water, a spawning place from which only a few forms ever rise to the surface. Or maybe it’s a great library where is recorded everything that has ever happened to living matter back to the first moment when it began to live.

I think some people have closer access to this place than others—poets, for example. Once, when I had a paper route and no alarm clock, I worked out a way to send a signal and to get a reply. Lying in bed at night, I would see myself standing on the edge of the black water. I pictured a white stone held in my hand, a circular stone. I would write on its surface in very black letters “4 o’clock,” then drop the stone and watch it sink, turning over and over, until it disappeared. It worked for me. On the second of four I awakened. Later I could use it to arouse me at ten minutes of four or quarter after. And it never failed me.

And then sometimes a strange, sometimes hideous thing thrusts up to the surface as though a sea serpent or a kraken emerged from the great depths.

Only a year ago Mary’s brother Dennis died in our house, died dreadfully, of an infection of the thyroid that forced the juices of fear through him so that he was violent and terrified and fierce. His kindly Irish horse-face grew bestial. I helped to hold him down, to pacify and reassure him in his death-dreaming, and it went on for a week before his lungs began to fill. I didn’t want Mary to see him die. She had never seen death, and this one, I knew, might wipe out her sweet memory of a kindly man who was her brother. Then, as I sat waiting by his bed, a monster swam up out of my dark water. I hated him. I wanted to kill him, to bite out his throat. My jaw muscles tightened and I think my lips fleered back like a wolf’s at the kill.

When it was over, in panic guilt I confessed what I had felt to old Doc Peele, who signed the death certificate.

“I don’t think it’s unusual,” he said. “I’ve seen it on people’s faces, but few admit it.”

“But what causes it? I liked him.”

“Maybe an old memory,” he said. “Maybe a return to the time of the pack when a sick or hurt member was a danger. Some animals and most fish tear down and eat a weakened brother.”

“But I’m not an animal—or a fish.”

“No, you’re not. And perhaps that’s why you find it foreign. But it’s there. It’s all there.”

He’s a good old man, Doc Peele, a tired old man. He’s birthed and buried us for fifty years.

Back to that Congress in the Dark—it must have been working overtime. Sometimes a man seems to reverse himself so that you would say, “He can’t do that. It’s out of character.” Maybe it’s not. It could be just another angle, or it might be that the pressures above or below have changed his shape. You see it in war a lot—a coward turning hero and a brave man crashing in flames. Or you read in the morning paper about a nice, kind family man who cuts down wife and children with an ax. I think I believe that a man is changing all the time. But there are certain moments when the change becomes noticeable. If I wanted to dig deep enough, I could probably trace the seeds of my change right back to my birth or before. Recently many little things had begun to form a pattern of larger things. It’s as though events and experiences nudged and jostled me in a direction contrary to my normal one or the one I had come to think was normal—the direction of the grocery clerk, the failure, the man without real hope or drive, barred in by responsibilities for filling the bellies and clothing the bodies of his family, caged by habits and attitudes I thought of as being moral, even virtuous. And it may be that I had a smugness about being what I called a “Good Man.”

And surely I knew what was going on around me. Marullo didn’t have to tell me. You can’t live in a town the size of New Baytown and not know. I didn’t think about it much. Judge Dorcas fixed traffic tickets for favors. It wasn’t even secret. And favors call for favors. The Town Manager, who was also Budd Building Supplies, sold equipment to the township at a high price, and some of it not needed. If a new paved street went in, it usually turned out that Mr. Baker and Marullo and half a dozen other business leaders had bought up the lots before the plan was announced. These were just facts of nature, but I had always believed they weren’t facts of my nature. Marullo and Mr. Baker and the drummer and Margie Young-Hunt and Joey Morphy in a concentration had been nudging me and altogether it amounted to a push, so that “I’ve got to put aside a little time to think it out.”

My darling was purring in her sleep, with the archaic smile on her lips, and she had the extra glow of comfort and solace she gets after love, a calm fulfilledness.

I should have been sleepy after wandering around the night before, but I wasn’t. I’ve noticed that I am rarely sleepy if I know I can sleep long in the morning. The red dots were swimming on my eyes, and the street light threw the shadows of naked elm branches on the ceiling, where they made slow and stately cats’ cradles because the spring wind was blowing. The window was open halfway and the white curtains swelled and filled like sails on an anchored boat. Mary must have white curtains and often washed. They give her a sense of decency and security. She pretends a little anger when I tell her it’s her lace-curtain Irish soul.

I felt good and fulfilled too, but whereas Mary dives for sleep, I didn’t want to go to sleep. I wanted to go on fully tasting how good I felt. I wanted to think about the I Love America Essay Contest my offspring were entering. But behind these and others, I wanted to consider what was happening to me and what to do about it, so naturally I got out the last thing first and I found that the dark jury of the deep had already decided for me. There it was, laid out and certain. It was like training for a race and preparing and finally being down at start with your spikes set in their holes. No choice then. You go when the pistol cracks. I found I was ready with my spikes set, waiting only for the shot. And apparently I was the last to know. All day people had remarked that I looked well, by that meaning I looked different, more confident, changed. That drummer had a look of shock in the afternoon. Marullo had inspected me uneasily. And Joey-boy felt the need to apologize for something I had done. Then Margie Young-Hunt—maybe she was the sharpest with her rattlesnake dream. Some way she had penetrated and discovered a certainty about me before I was certain of it. And the symbol was a rattlesnake. I found I was grinning in the dark. And afterward, confused, she used the oldest trick—the threat of infidelity, a bait cast in a flowing tide to find what fish are feeding there. I didn’t remember the secret whisper of her hidden body—no, the picture was of her clawed hands that showed age and nervousness and the cruelty that comes to one when control of a situation is lost.