The Winter of Our Discontent (27 page)

“Operator.”

“Oh! Operator—I want to call New York.”

“Will you dial the number, please?”

And he did.

Ethan came from work, carrying his bag of groceries. How good the long afternoons are! The lawn was so tall and lush that it took his footprints. He kissed Mary damply.

“Pollywog,” he said, “the lawn is running wild. Do you think I could get Allen to cut it?”

“Well, it’s examination time. You know how that is, and school closing and all.”

“What’s that unearthly squalling sound in the other room?”

“He’s practicing with his voice-throwing gadget. He’s going to perform at the school closing show.”

“Well, I guess I’ll have to cut the lawn myself.”

“I’m sorry, dear. But you know how they are.”

“Yes, I’m beginning to learn how they are.”

“Are you in a bad temper? Did you have a hard day?”

“Let’s see. No, I guess not. I’ve been on my feet all day. The thought of pushing the lawnmower doesn’t make me jump with joy.”

“We should have a power mower. The Johnsons have one you can ride on.”

“We should have a gardener and a gardener’s boy. My grandfather did. Ride on? Allen might cut the lawn if he could ride.”

“Don’t be mean to him. He’s only fourteen. They’re all like that.”

“Who do you suppose established the fallacy that children are cute?”

“You
are
in a bad temper.”

“Let’s see. Yes, I guess I am. And that squalling is driving me crazy.”

“He’s practicing.”

“So you said.”

“Now don’t take your bad temper out on him.”

“All right, but it would help if I could.” Ethan pushed through the living room, where Allen was squawking vaguely recognizable words from a vibrating reed held on his tongue. “What in the world is that?”

Allen spat it into his palm. “From that box of Peeks. It’s ventriloquism.”

“Did you eat the Peeks?”

“No. I don’t like it. I’ve got to practice, Dad.”

“Hold up a moment.” Ethan sat down. “What do you plan to do with your life?”

“Huh?”

“The future. Haven’t they told you in school? The future is in your hands.”

Ellen slithered into the room and draped herself on the couch like a knob-kneed cat. She rippled out a steel-cutting giggle.

“He wants to go on television,” she said.

“There was a kid only thirteen won a hundred and thirty thousand dollars on a quiz program.”

“Turned out it was rigged,” said Ellen.

“Well, he still had a hundred and thirty grand.”

Ethan said softly, “The moral aspects don’t bother you?”

“Well, it’s still a lot of dough.”

“You don’t find it dishonest?”

“Shucks, everybody does it.”

“How about the ones who offer themselves on a silver platter and there are no takers? They have neither honesty nor money.”

“That’s the chance you take—the way the cooky crumbles.”

“Yes, it’s crumbling, isn’t it?” Ethan said. “And so are your manners. Sit up! Have you dropped the word ‘sir’ from the language?”

The boy looked startled, checked to see if it was meant, then lounged upright, full of resentment. “No, sir,” he said.

“How are you doing in school?”

“All right, I guess.”

“You were writing an essay about how you love America. Has your determination to destroy her stopped that project?”

“How do you mean, destroy—sir?”

“Can you honestly love a dishonest thing?”

“Heck, Dad, everybody does it.”

“Does that make it good?”

“Well, nobody’s knocking it except a few eggheads. I finished the essay.”

“Good, I’d like to see it.”

“I sent it off.”

“You must have a copy.”

“No, sir.”

“Suppose it gets lost?”

“I didn’t think of that. Dad, I wish I could go to camp the way all the other kids do.”

“We can’t afford it. Not all the other kids go—only a few of them.”

“I wish we had some money.” He stared down at his hands and licked his lips.

Ellen’s eyes were narrowed and concentrated.

Ethan studied his son. “I’m going to make that possible,” he said.

“Sir?”

“I can get you a job to work in the store this summer.”

“How do you mean, work?”

“Isn’t your question, ‘What do you mean, work?’ You will carry and trim shelves and sweep and perhaps, if you do well, you can wait on customers.”

“I want to go to camp.”

“You also want to win a hundred thousand dollars.”

“Maybe I’ll win the essay contest. At least that’s a trip to Washington anyway. Some kind of vacation after all year in school.”

“Allen! There are unchanging rules of conduct, of courtesy, of honesty, yes, even of energy. It’s time I taught you to give them lip service at least. You’re going to work.”

The boy looked up. “You can’t.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Child labor laws. I can’t even get a work permit before I’m sixteen. You want me to break the law?”

“Do you think all the boys and girls who help their parents are half slave and half criminal?” Ethan’s anger was as naked and ruthless as love. Allen looked away.

“I didn’t mean that, sir.”

“I’m sure you didn’t. And you won’t again. You stubbed your nose on twenty generations of Hawleys and Allens. They were honorable men. You may be worthy to be one someday.”

“Yes, sir. May I go to my room, sir?”

“You may.”

Allen walked up the stairs slowly.

When he had disappeared, Ellen whirled her legs like propellers. She sat up and pulled down her skirt like a young lady.

“I’ve been reading the speeches of Henry Clay. He sure was good.”

“Yes, he was.”

“Do you remember them?”

“Not really, I guess. It’s been a long time since I read them.”

“He’s great.”

“Somehow it doesn’t seem schoolgirl reading.”

“He’s just great.”

Ethan got up from his chair with a whole long and weary day pushing him back.

In the kitchen he found Mary red-eyed and angry.

“I heard you,” she said. “I don’t know what you think you’re doing. He’s just a little boy.”

“That’s the time to start, my darling.”

“Don’t darling me. I won’t stand a tyrant.”

“Tyrant? Oh, Lord!”

“He’s just a little boy. You went for him.”

“I think he feels better now.”

“I don’t know what you mean. You crushed him like an insect.”

“No, darling. I gave him a quick glimpse of the world. He was building a false one.”

“Who are you to know what the world is?”

Ethan walked past her and out the back door.

“Where are you going?”

“To cut the lawn.”

“I thought you were tired.”

“I am—I was.” He looked over his shoulder and up at her standing inside the screened door. “A man is a lonely thing,” he said, and he smiled at her a moment before he got out the lawnmower.

Mary heard the whirring blades tearing through the soft and supple grass.

The sound stopped by the doorstep. Ethan called, “Mary, Mary, my darling. I love you.” And the whirling blades raged on through the overgrown grass.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Margie Young-Hunt was an attractive woman, informed, clever; so clever that she knew when and how to mask her cleverness. Her marriages had failed, the men had failed; one by being weak, and the second weaker—he died. Dates did not come to her. She created them, mended her fences by frequent telephone calls, by letters, get-well cards, and arranged accidental meetings. She carried homemade soup to the sick and remembered birthdays. By these means she kept people aware of her existence.

More than any woman in town she kept her stomach flat, her skin clean and glowing, her teeth bright, and her chinline taut. A goodly part of her income went to hair, nails, massage, creams, and unguents. Other women said, “She must be older than she looks.”

When supporting muscles of her breasts no longer responded to creams, massage, and exercise, she placed them in shapely forms that rode high and jauntily. Her make-up took increasing time. Her hair had all the sheen, luster, wave the television products promise. On a date, dining, dancing, laughing, amusing, drawing her escort with a net of small magnets, who could know her cold sense of repetition? After a decent interval and an outlay of money, she usually went to bed with him if she discreetly could. Then back to her fence-mending. Sooner or later the shared bed must be the trap to catch her future security and ease. But the prospective game leaped clear of the quilted jaws. More and more of her dates were the married, the infirm, or the cautious. And Margie knew better than anyone that her time was running out. The tarot cards did not respond when she sought help for herself.

Margie had known many men, most of them guilty, wounded in their vanity, or despairing, so that she had developed a contempt for her quarry as a professional hunter of vermin does. It was easy to move such men through their fears and their vanities. They ached so to be fooled that she no longer felt triumph—only a kind of disgusted pity. These were her friends and associates. She protected them even from the discovery that they were her friends. She gave them the best of herself because they demanded nothing of her. She kept them secret because at the bottom she did not admire herself. Danny Taylor was one of these, and Alfio Marullo another, and Chief Stonewall Jackson Smith a third, and there were others. They trusted her and she them, and their secret existence was the one warm honesty to which she could retire to restore herself. These friends talked freely and without fear to her, for to them she was a kind of Andersen’s Well—receptive, unjudging, and silent. As most people have secret vices, Margie Young-Hunt concealed a secret virtue. And because of this quiet thing it is probable that she knew more about New Baytown, and even Wessex County, than anyone, and her knowledge was un-warped because she would not—could not—use it for her own profit. But in other fields, everything that came to her hand was usable.

Her project Ethan Allen Hawley began casually and out of idleness. In a way he was correct in thinking it was mischievous, a testing of her power. Many of the sad men who came to her for comfort and reassurance were hogtied with impotence, bound and helpless in sexual traumas that infected all other areas of their lives. And she found it easy by small flatteries and reassurances to set them free to fight again against their whip-armed wives. She was genuinely fond of Mary Hawley, and through her she gradually became aware of Ethan, bound in another kind of trauma, a social-economic bind that had robbed him of strength and certainty. Having no work, no love, no children, she wondered whether she could release and direct this crippled man toward some new end. It was a game, a kind of puzzle, a test, a product not of kindness but simply of curiosity and idleness. This was a superior man. To direct him would prove her superiority, and this she needed increasingly.

Probably she was the only one who knew the depth of the change in Ethan and it frightened her because she thought it was her doing. The mouse was growing a lion’s mane. She saw the muscles under his clothes, felt ruthlessness growing behind his eyes. So must the gentle Einstein have felt when his dreamed concept of the nature of matter flashed over Hiroshima.

Margie liked Mary Hawley very much and she had little sympathy and no pity for her. Misfortune is a fact of nature acceptable to women, especially when it falls on other women.

In her tiny immaculate house set in a large, overgrown garden very near to Old Harbor, she leaned toward the make-up mirror to inspect her tools, and her eyes saw through cream, powder, eye-shadowing, and lashes sheathed in black, saw the hidden wrinkles, the inelasticity of skin. She felt the years creep up like the rising tide about a rock in a calm sea. There is an arsenal of maturity, of middle age, but these require training and technique she did not yet have. She must learn them before her structure of youth and excitement crumbled and left her naked, rotten, ridiculous. Her success had been that she never let down, even alone. Now, as an experiment, she allowed her mouth to droop as it wanted to, her eyelids to fall half-staff. She lowered her high-held chin and a plaited rope came into being. Before her in the mirror she saw twenty years clamber over her and she shuddered as the icy whispering told her what lay waiting. She had delayed too long. A woman must have a showcase in which to grow old, lights, props, black velvet, children, graying and fattening, snickering and pilfering, love, protection, and small change, a serene and undemanding husband or his even more serene and less demanding will and trust fund. A woman growing old alone is useless cast-off trash, a wrinkled obscenity with no hobbled retainers to cluck and mutter over her aches and to rub her pains.

A hot spot of fear formed in her stomach. She had been lucky in her first husband. He was weak and she soon found the valve of his weakness. He was hopelessly in love with her, so much so that when she needed a divorce he did not ask for a remarriage clause in his alimony settlement.

Her second husband thought she had a private fortune and so she had. He didn’t leave her much when he died, but, with the alimony from her first husband, she could live decently, dress well, and cast about at leisure. Suppose her first husband should die! There was the fear spot. There was the night- or daymare— the monthly-check-mare.

In January she had seen him at that great wide cross of Madison Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street. He looked old and gaunt. She was haunted with his mortality. If the bastard died, the money would stop. She thought she might be the only person in the world who wholeheartedly prayed for his health.

His lean, silent face and dead eyes came on her memory screen now and touched off the hot spot in her stomach. If the son of a bitch should die . . . !