The Winter of Our Discontent (26 page)

The skin on my face felt as hard as a crab’s back. I closed the alley door slowly as you’d close a vault. The first two sheets of paper I folded carefully and placed in my wallet, and the other— I crumpled it and put it in the toilet and pulled the chain. It’s a high box toilet with a kind of step in the bowl. The balled paper resisted going over the edge, but finally it did.

The alley door was a little open when I emerged from the cubicle. I thought I had closed it. Going toward it, I heard a small sound and, looking up, I saw that damn cat on one of the top storage shelves hooking out with its claws for a hanging side of bacon. It took a long-handled broom and quite a chase to drive it out into the alley. As it streaked past me, I swiped at it and missed and broke the broom handle against the doorjamb.

There was no sermon for the canned goods that morning. I couldn’t raise a text. But I did get out a hose to wash down the front sidewalk and the gutter too. Afterward I cleaned the whole store, even corners long neglected and choked with flug. And I sang too:

I know it’s not a song, but I sang it.

PART TWO

CHAPTER ELEVEN

New Baytown is a lovely place. Its harbor, once a great one, is sheltered from the northeast screamers by an offshore island. The village is strewn about a complex of inland waters fed by the tides, which at ebb and flow drive wild races through narrow channels from the harbor and the sea. It is not a crowded or an urban town. Except for the great houses of the long-gone whalers, the dwellings are small and neat, distributed among fine old trees, oaks of several kinds, maples and elms, hickory and some cypresses, but except for the old planted elms on the original streets, the native timber is largely oak. Once the virgin oaks were so many and so large that several shipyards drew planks and knees, keels and keelsons, from nearby.

Communities, like people, have periods of health and times of sickness—even youth and age, hope and despondency. There was a time when a few towns like New Baytown furnished the whale oil that lighted the Western World. Student lamps of Oxford and Cambridge drew fuel from this American outpost. And then petroleum, rock oil, gushed out in Pennsylvania and cheap kerosene, called coal oil, took the place of whale oil and retired most of the sea hunters. Sickness or despair fell on New Baytown—perhaps an attitude from which it did not recover. Other towns not too far away grew and prospered on other products and energies, but New Baytown, whose whole living force had been in square-rigged ships and whales, sank into torpor. The snake of population crawling out from New York passed New Baytown by, leaving it to its memories. And, as usually happens, New Baytown people persuaded themselves that they liked it that way. They were spared the noise and litter of summer people, the garish glow of neon signs, the spending of tourist money and tourist razzle-dazzle. Only a few new houses were built around the fine inland waters. But the snake of population continued to writhe out and everyone knew that sooner or later it would engulf the village of New Baytown. The local people longed for that and hated the idea of it at the same time. The neighboring towns were rich, spilled over with loot from tourists, puffed with spoils, gleamed with the great houses of the new rich. Old Baytown spawned art and ceramics and pansies, and the damn broadfooted brood of Lesbos wove handmade fabrics and small domestic intrigues. New Baytown talked of the old days and of flounder and when the weakfish would start running.

In the reedy edges of the inner waters, the mallards nested and brought out their young flotillas, muskrats dug communities and swam lithely in the early morning. The ospreys hung, aimed, and plummeted on fish, and sea gulls carried clams and scallops high in the air and dropped them to break them open for eating. Some otters still clove the water like secret furry whispers; rabbits poached in the gardens and gray squirrels moved like little waves in the streets of the village. Cock pheasants flapped and coughed their crowing. Blue herons poised in the shallow water like leggy rapiers and at night the bitterns cried out like lonesome ghosts.

Spring is late and summer late at New Baytown, but when it comes it has a soft, wild, and special sound and smell and feeling. In early June the world of leaf and blade and flowers explodes, and every sunset is different. Then in the evening the bobwhites state their crisp names and after dark there is a wall of sound of whippoorwill. The oaks grow fat with leaf and fling their long-tasseled blossoms in the grass. Then dogs from various houses meet and go on picnics, wandering bemused and happy in the woods, and sometimes they do not come home for days.

In June man, hustled by instinct, mows grass, riffles the earth with seeds, and locks in combat with mole and rabbit, ant, beetle, bird, and all others who gather to take his garden from him. Woman looks at the curling-edge petals of a rose and melts a little and sighs, and her skin becomes a petal and her eyes are stamens.

June is gay—cool and warm, wet and shouting with growth and reproduction of the sweet and the noxious, the builder and the spoiler. The girls in body-form slacks wander the High Street with locked hands while small transistor radios sit on their shoulders and whine love songs in their ears. The young boys, bleeding with sap, sit on the stools of Tanger’s Drugstore ingesting future pimples through straws. They watch the girls with level goat-eyes and make disparaging remarks to one another while their insides whimper with longing.

In June businessmen drop by Al ’n’ Sue’s or the Foremaster for a beer and stay for whisky and get sweatily drunk in the afternoon. Even in the afternoon the dusty cars creep to the desolate dooryard of the remote and paintless house with every blind drawn, at the end of Mill Street, where Alice, the village whore, receives the afternoon problems of June-bitten men. And all day long the rowboats anchor off the breakwater and happy men and women coax up their dinners from the sea.

June is painting and clipping, plans and projects. It’s a rare man who doesn’t bring home cement blocks and two-by-fours and on the backs of envelopes rough out drawings of Taj Mahals. A hundred little boats lie belly down and keel up on the shore, their bottoms gleaming with copper paint, and their owners straighten up and smile at the slow, unmoving windrows. Still school grips the intransigent children until near to the end of the month and, when examination time comes, rebellion foams up and the common cold becomes epidemic, a plague which disappears on closing day.

In June the happy seed of summer germinates. “Where shall we go over the glorious Fourth of July? . . . It’s getting on time we should be planning our vacation.” June is the mother of potentials, ducklings swim bravely perhaps to the submarine jaws of snapping turtles, lettuces lunge toward drought, tomatoes rear defiant stems toward cutworms, and families match the merits of sand and sunburn over fretful mountain nights loud with mosquito symphonies. “This year I’m going to rest. I won’t get so tired. This year I won’t allow the kids to make my free two weeks a hell on wheels. I work all year. This is my time. I work all year.” Vacation planning triumphs over memory and all’s right with the world.

New Baytown had slept for a long time. The men who governed it, politically, morally, economically, had so long continued that their ways were set. The Town Manager, the council, the judges, the police were eternal. The Town Manager sold equipment to the township, and the judges fixed traffic tickets as they had for so long that they did not remember it as illegal practice—at least the books said it was. Being normal men, they surely did not consider it immoral. All men are moral. Only their neighbors are not.

The yellow afternoon had the warm breath of summer. A few early season people, those without children to hold them glued until school was out, were moving in the streets, strangers. Some cars came through, towing small boats and big outboard motors on trailers. Ethan would have known with his eyes closed that they were summer people by what they bought—cold cuts and process cheese, crackers and tinned sardines.

Joey Morphy came in for his afternoon refreshment as he did every day now that the weather was warming. He waved the bottle toward the cold counter. “You should put in a soda fountain,” he said.

“And grow four new arms, or split into two clerks like a pseudopod? You forget, neighbor Joey, I don’t own the store.”

“You should.”

“Must I tell you my sad story of the death of kings?”

“I know your story. You didn’t know your asparagus from a hole in the double-entry bookkeeping. You had to learn the hard way. Now wait—but you learned.”

“Small good it does me.”

“If it was your store now, you’d make money.”

“But it isn’t.”

“If you opened up next door, you’d take all the customers with you.”

“What makes you think so?”

“Because people buy from people they know. It’s called good will and it works.”

“Didn’t work before. Everybody in town knew me. I went broke.”

“That was technical. You didn’t know how to buy.”

“Maybe I still don’t.”

“You do. You don’t even know you’ve learned. But you’ve still got a broke state of mind. Junk it, Mr. Hawley. Junk it, Ethan.”

“Thanks.”

“I like you. When is Marullo going to Italy?”

“He hasn’t said. Tell me, Joey—how rich is he? No, don’t. I know you’re not supposed to talk about clients.”

“I can rupture a rule for a friend, Ethan. I don’t know all his affairs, but if our account means anything, I’d say he is. He’s got his fingers in all kinds of things—piece of property here, vacant lot there, some beach-front houses, and a bundle of first mortgages big around as your waist.”

“How do you know?”

“Safe-deposit box. He rents one of our big ones. When he opens it, he has one key and I have the other. I’ll admit I’ve peeked. Guess I’m a peeping Tom at heart.”

“But it’s all on the level, isn’t it? I mean—well you read all the time about—well, drugs and rackets and things like that.”

“I wouldn’t know about that. He don’t tell his business around. Draws some out, puts some back. And I don’t know where else he banks. You notice I don’t tell his balance.”

“I didn’t ask.”

“Could you let me have a beer?”

“Only to take out. I can put it in a paper cup.”

“I wouldn’t ask you to break the law.”

“Nuts!” Ethan punched holes in a can. “Just hold it down beside you if anybody comes in.”

“Thanks. I’ve put a lot of thought on you, Ethan.”

“Why?”

“Maybe because I’m a Nosy Parker. Failure is a state of mind. It’s like one of those sand traps an ant lion digs. You keep sliding back. Takes one hell of a jump to get out of it. You’ve got to make that jump, Eth. Once you get out, you’ll find success is a state of mind too.”

“Is it a trap too?”

“If it is—it’s a better kind.”

“Suppose a man makes the jump, and someone else gets tromped.”

“Only God sees the sparrow fall, but even God doesn’t do anything about it.”

“I wish I knew what you’re trying to tell me to do.”

“I wish I did too. If I did, I might do it myself. Bank tellers don’t get to be president. A man with a fistful of stock does. I guess I’m trying to say, Grab anything that goes by. It may not come around again.”

“You’re a philosopher, Joey, a financial philosopher.”

“Don’t rub it in. If you don’t have it, you think about it. Man being alone thinks about things. You know most people live ninety per cent in the past, seven per cent in the present, and that only leaves them three per cent for the future. Old Satchel Paige said the wisest thing about that I ever heard. He said, ‘Don’t look behind. Something may be gaining on you.’ I got to get back. Mr. Baker’s going to New York tomorrow for a few days. He’s busy as a bug.”

“What about?”

“How do I know? But I separate the mail. He’s been getting a lot from Albany.”

“Politics?”

“I only separate it. I don’t read it. Is business always this slow?”

“Around four o’clock, yes. It’ll pick up in ten minutes or so.”

“You see? You’ve learned. I bet you didn’t know that before you went broke. Be seeing you. Grab the gold ring for a free ride.”

The little buying spurt between five and six came on schedule. The sun, held back by daylight-saving, was still high and the streets light as midafternoon when he brought in the fruit bins and closed the front doors and drew the green shades. Then, reading from a list, he gathered the supplies to carry home and put them all in one big bag. With his apron off and his coat and hat on, he boosted up and sat on the counter and stared at the shelves of the congregation. “No message!” he said. “Only remember the words of Satchel Paige. I guess I have to learn about not looking back.”

He took the folded lined pages from his wallet, made a little envelope for them of waxed paper. Then, opening the enamel door to the works of the cold counter, he slipped the waxy envelope in a corner behind the compressor and closed the metal door on it.

Under the cash register on a shelf he found the dusty and dogeared Manhattan telephone book, kept there for emergency orders to the supply house. Under U, under United States, under Justice, Dept of . . . His finger moved down the column past “Antitrust Div US Court House, Customs Div, Detention Hdqtrs, Fed Bur of Investgatn,” and under it, “Immigration & Naturalization Svce, 20 W Bway, BA 7-0300, Nights Sat Sun & Holidays OL 6-5888.”

He said aloud, “OL 6-5888—OL 6-5888 because it’s late.” And then he spoke to his canned goods without looking at them. “If everything’s proper and aboveboard, nobody gets hurt.”

Ethan went out the alley door and locked it. He carried his bag of groceries across the street to the Foremaster Hotel and Grill. The grill was noisy with cocktailers but the tiny lobby where the public phone booth stood was deserted even by the room clerk. He closed the glass door, put his groceries on the floor, spread his change on the shelf, inserted a dime, and dialed 0.