The Winter of Our Discontent (29 page)

“Yes.”

“What does he want?”

“I don’t know. He asked some questions about Mr. Marullo. I didn’t know the answers.”

Mr. Baker released the image of Margie as slowly as an anemone opens and casts out the shell of a sucked-clean crab. “Ethan, have you seen Danny Taylor?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“Do you know where he is?”

“No, I don’t.”

“I have to get in touch with him. Can’t you think where he might be?”

“I haven’t seen him for—well, since May. He was going to try the cure again.”

“Do you know where?”

“He didn’t say. But he wanted to try.”

“Was it a public institution?”

“I don’t think so, sir. He borrowed some money from me.”

“What!”

“I loaned him a little money.”

“How much?”

“Sorry, Ethan. You are old friends. Sorry. Did he have other money?”

“I think so.”

“You don’t know how much?”

“No sir. I just had a feeling he had more.”

“If you know where he is, please tell me.”

“I would if I knew, Mr. Baker. Maybe you could make a list of the places and phone.”

“Did he borrow cash?”

“Yes.”

“Then that’s no good. He’d change his name.”

“Why?”

“They always do from good families. Ethan, did you get the money from Mary?”

“Yes.”

“She didn’t mind?”

“She didn’t know.”

“Now you’re being smart.”

“I learned from you, sir.”

“Well, don’t forget it.”

“Maybe I’m learning little by little. Mostly I’m learning how much I don’t know.”

“Well, that’s healthy. Is Mary well?”

“Oh, she’s strong and tough. Wish I could take her on a little vacation. We haven’t been out of town in years.”

“That will come, Ethan. I think I’ll go to Maine over the Fourth of July. I can’t take the noise any more.”

“I guess you bankers are the lucky ones. Weren’t you in Albany lately?”

“What gave you that idea?”

“I don’t know—heard it someplace. Maybe Mrs. Baker told Mary.”

“She couldn’t. She didn’t know it. Try to think where you heard it.”

“Maybe I only imagined it.”

“This troubles me, Ethan. Think hard where you heard it.”

“I can’t, sir. What does it matter if it isn’t true?”

“I’ll tell you in confidence why I’m worried. It’s because it is true. The Governor called me in. It’s a serious matter. I wonder where the leak could be.”

“Anyone see you there?”

“Not that I know of. I flew in and out. This is serious. I’m going to tell you something. If it gets out I’ll know where it came from.”

“Then I don’t want to hear it.”

“You haven’t any choice now that you know about Albany. The state is looking into county and town affairs.”

“Why?”

“I guess because the smell has got as far as Albany.”

“No politics?”

“I guess anything the Governor does can be called politics.”

“Mr. Baker, why can’t it be in the open?”

“I’ll tell you why. Upstate the word got out and by the time the examiners got to work most of the records had disappeared.”

“I see. I wish you hadn’t told me. I’m not a talker but I wish I didn’t know.”

“For that matter, I wish the same thing, Ethan.”

“The election is July seventh. Will it break before that?”

“I don’t know. That’s up to the state.”

“Do you suppose Marullo is mixed in it? I can’t afford to lose my job.”

“I don’t think so. That was a federal man. Department of Justice. Didn’t you ask for his credentials?”

“Didn’t think of it. He flashed them but I didn’t look.”

“Well, you should. You always should.”

“I wouldn’t think you’d want to go away.”

“Oh, that doesn’t matter. Nothing happens over Fourth of July weekend. Why, the Japs attacked Pearl Harbor on a weekend. They knew everyone would be away.”

“I wish I could take Mary someplace.”

“Maybe you can later. I want you to whip your brains and try to find where Taylor is.”

“Why? Is it so important?”

“It is. I can’t tell you why right now.”

“I sure wish I could find him, then.”

“Well, if you could turn him up maybe you wouldn’t need this job.”

“If it’s that way, I’ll sure try, sir.”

“That’s the boy, Ethan. I’m sure you will. And if you do locate him, you call me—any time, day or night.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

I wonder about people who say they haven’t time to think. For myself, I can double think. I find that weighing vegetables, passing the time of day with customers, fighting or loving Mary, coping with the children—none of these prevents a second and continuing layer of thinking, wondering, conjecturing. Surely this must be true of everyone. Maybe not having time to think is not having the wish to think.

In the strange, uncharted country I had entered, perhaps I had no choice. Questions boiled up, demanding to be noticed. And it was a world so new to me that I puzzled over matters old residents probably solved and put away when they were children.

I had thought I could put a process in motion and control it at every turn—even stop it when I wanted to. And now the frightening conviction grew in me that such a process may become a thing in itself, a person almost, having its own ends and means and quite independent of its creator. And another troublesome thought came in. Did I really start it, or did I simply not resist it? I may have been the mover, but was I not also the moved? Once on the long street, there seemed to be no cross-roads, no forked paths, no choice.

The choice was in the first evaluation. What are morals? Are they simply words? Was it honorable to assess my father’s weakness, which was a generous mind and the ill-founded dream that other men were equally generous? No, it was simply good business to dig the pit for him. He fell into it himself. No one pushed him. Was it immoral to strip him when he was down? Apparently not.

Now a slow, deliberate encirclement was moving on New Baytown, and it was set in motion by honorable men. If it succeeded, they would be thought not crooked but clever. And if a factor they had overlooked moved in, would that be immoral or dishonorable? I think that would depend on whether or not it was successful. To most of the world success is never bad. I remember how, when Hitler moved unchecked and triumphant, many honorable men sought and found virtues in him. And Mussolini made the trains run on time, and Vichy collaborated for the good of France, and whatever else Stalin was, he was strong. Strength and success—they are above morality, above criticism. It seems, then, that it is not what you do, but how you do it and what you call it. Is there a check in men, deep in them, that stops or punishes? There doesn’t seem to be. The only punishment is for failure. In effect no crime is committed unless a criminal is caught. In the move designed for New Baytown some men had to get hurt, some even destroyed, but this in no way deterred the movement.

I could not call this a struggle with my conscience. Once I perceived the pattern and accepted it, the path was clearly marked and the dangers apparent. What amazed me most was that it seemed to plan itself; one thing grew out of another and everything fitted together. I watched it grow and only guided it with the lightest touch.

What I had done and planned to do was undertaken with full knowledge that it was foreign to me, but necessary as a stirrup is to mount a tall horse. But once I had mounted, the stirrup would not be needed. Maybe I could not stop this process, but I need never start another. I did not need or want to be a citizen of this gray and dangerous country. I had nothing to do with the coming tragedy of July 7. It was not my process, but I could anticipate and I could use it.

One of our oldest and most often disproved myths is that a man’s thoughts show in his face, that the eyes are the windows of the soul. It isn’t so. Only sickness shows, or defeat or despair, which are different kinds of sickness. Some rare people can feel beneath, can sense a change or hear a secret signal. I think my Mary felt a change, but she misinterpreted it, and I think Margie Young-Hunt knew—but she was a witch and that is a worrisome thing. It seemed to me that she was intelligent as well as magic—and that’s even more worrisome.

I felt sure that Mr. Baker would go on a holiday, probably on Friday afternoon of the Fourth of July weekend. The storm would have to break Friday or Saturday to give it time to take effect before election and it was logical to suppose that Mr. Baker would want to be away when the shock came. Of course that didn’t matter much to me. It was more an exercise in anticipation, but it did make several moves necessary on Thursday, just in case he left that night. My Saturday matter was so finely practical that I could move through it in my sleep. If I had any fear of that, it was more like a small stage fright.

On Monday, June 27, Marullo came in soon after I had opened up. He walked about, looking strangely at the shelves, the cash register, the cold counter, and he walked back to the storeroom and looked about. You would have thought from his expression that he was seeing it for the first time.

I said, “Going to take a trip over the Fourth?”

“Why do you say that?”

“Well, everybody does who can afford it.”

“Oh! Where would I go?”

“Where’s anybody go? Catskills, even out to Montauk and fish. School tuna running.”

The very thought of fighting a thirty-pound plunging fish drove arthritic pains up his arms so that he flexed them and winced.

I very nearly asked him when he planned to go to Italy, but that seemed too much. Instead, I moved over to him and took him gently by his right elbow. “Alfio,” I said, “I think you’re nuts. Why don’t you go into New York to the best specialist? There must be something to stop that pain.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“What have you got to lose? Go ahead. Try it.”

“What do you care?”

“I don’t. But I’ve worked here a long time for a stupid son of a bitch dago. If a yellow dog hurt that much, I’d get to feeling it myself. You come in here and move your arms and it’s half an hour before I can straighten up.”

“You like me?”

“Hell, no. I’m buttering you up for a raise.”

He looked at me with hound’s eyes, rimmed with red, and dark brown iris and pupil all one piece. He seemed about to say something but changed his mind about it. “You’re a good kid,” he said.

“Don’t depend on it.”

“A good kid!” he said explosively and as though shocked by his show of emotion he went out of the store and walked away.

I was weighing out two pounds of string beans for Mrs. Davidson when Marullo came charging back. He stood in the doorway and shouted at me.

“You take my Pontiac.”

“What?”

“Go someplace Sunday and Monday.”

“I can’t afford it.”

“You take the kids. I told the garage for you to get my Pontiac. Tank full of gas.”

“Wait a minute.”

“You go to hell. Take the kids.” He tossed something like a spitball at me and it fell among the string beans. Mrs. Davidson watched him plunge away again down the street. I picked the green wad from the string beans—three twenty-dollar bills folded in a tight square.

“What’s the matter with him?”

“He’s an excitable Italian.”

“He must be, throwing money!”

He didn’t show up the rest of the week, so that was all right. He’d never gone away before without telling me. It was like watching a parade go by, just standing and watching it go by and knowing what the next float would be but watching for it just the same.

I hadn’t expected the Pontiac. He never loaned his car to anybody. It was a strange time. Some outside force or design seemed to have taken control of events so that they were crowded close the way cattle are in a loading chute. I know the opposite can be true. Sometimes the force or design deflects and destroys, no matter how careful and deep the planning. I guess that’s why we believe in luck and unluck.

On Thursday, the thirtieth of June, I awakened as usual in the black pearl light of the dawn, and that was early now in the lap of midsummer. Chair and bureau were dark blobs and pictures only lighter suggestions. The white window curtains seemed to sigh in and out as though they breathed, because it’s a rare dawn that does not wave a small wind over the land.

Coming out of sleep, I had the advantage of two worlds, the layered firmament of dream and the temporal fixtures of the mind awake. I stretched luxuriously—a good and tingling sensation. It’s as though the skin has shrunk in the night and one must push it out to daytime size by bulging the muscles, and there’s an itching pleasure in it.

First I referred to my remembered dreams as I would glance through a newspaper to see if there was anything of interest or import. Then I explored the coming day for events that had not happened. Next I followed a practice learned from the best officer I ever had. He was Charley Edwards, a major of middling age, perhaps a little too far along to be a combat officer but he was a good one. He had a large family, a pretty wife and four children in steps, and his heart could ache with love and longing for them if he allowed it to. He told me about it. In his deadly business he could not afford to have his attention warped and split by love, and so he had arrived at a method. In the morning, that is if he were not jerked from sleep by an alert, he opened his mind and heart to his family. He went over each one in turn, how they looked, what they were like; he caressed them and reassured them of his love. It was as though he picked precious things one by one from a cabinet, looked at each, felt it, kissed it, and put it back; and last he gave them a small good-by and shut the door of the cabinet. The whole thing took half an hour if he could get it and then he didn’t have to think of them again all day. He could devote his full capacity, untwisted by conflicting thought and feeling, to the job he had to do—the killing of men. He was the best officer I ever knew. I asked his permission to use his method and he gave it to me. When he was killed, all I could think was that his had been a good and effective life. He had taken his pleasure, savored his love, and paid his debts, and how many people even approached that?