This Sweet Sickness (2 page)

“I know, I know,” Wes interrupted him in a tone of misery. “Okay, pal. I'll see you tomorrow.” And he hung up as if he were breaking down in tears at the thought of the long weekend ahead.

David silently replaced the telephone and tiptoed up to his room, which was on the west side of the second floor. There was a slit of light under another door at the rear, next to the bathroom, and he supposed that was where the girl's room was. He unlocked his door with a long key. “Effie—isn't that an awful name?” she had asked apologetically. “My father named me after one of his old flames.” David wondered if her father were still in love with his old flame, Effie, and had got himself married to a shrew?

Life was very, very strange, but David Kelsey had an invincible conviction that life was going to work out all right for him.

2

E
very Friday afternoon at approximately five-thirty, David went to Mrs. McCartney's to pick up the blue duffel kit in which he presumably carried a fresh shirt and pajamas, toothbrush, and razor. Actually, he would not have dreamed of taking any personal possessions that he used at Mrs. McCartney's on his weekends. The little bag might contain books, a bottle of gin or wine, or a small thing for the house, but none of his possessions that he used from Monday to Friday. And really, he did not drop by on Friday afternoons for the duffel bag, which he might easily have taken with him to work on Friday mornings. He came back to the house to see if a letter had come from Annabelle in the 10
A.M.
mail. It was a compulsion for him to see, though in the two years he had been living in the town, Annabelle had written him only twice. And he had written her only four times: it would be a serious mistake, he thought, to inundate her with letters.

His room, like David himself, was orderly and curiously evocative of some forgotten past that one might have experienced, if one was old enough, or that one might only have read about or seen pictures of. People like Mr. Harris, the potbellied piano tuner who lived in the downstairs middle, or Mr. Muldaven, the widower, downstairs front, or Mrs. McCartney herself, when they happened to stand on David's threshold for one reason or another, always stared at the room for a moment with dazed expressions before they opened their mouths to announce their business. (David discouraged visitors, kept his own broom and dust rags, and cleaned his room so well there was no need of Sarah the clean-up girl ever to enter his room, though he knew she sometimes did.) The room was of a general faded yellow color and its furniture was like the furniture of all the other rooms, a tasteless mixture of the old and new, providing the minimum necessities—bed, straight chair, armchair, chest of drawers, table. In David's room the chest of drawers was absent but in lieu of it stood a tall, dark wardrobe with two drawers in its bottom. The carpet was large and worn out, brushed threadbare by brooms and carpet sweepers, its two holes more or less concealed by the hideous brown double bed with its too-short counterpane of machine-made crochet and by the plain writing table on which stood a row of David's books. The maroon easy chair was the newest piece in the room and probably twenty years old. It was both the absence of clutter—David had no pictures at all on the walls—and its invariable order that might first have made people stare at the room, but then came a sense of déjà vu, an awareness of a peculiar antiquity which was even stronger when David's tall, quiet figure was there. Mrs. McCartney spent little time savoring all this. She merely considered David Kelsey her ideal roomer, a fine young man, “a young man in a million.” He neither smoked nor drank, never had a girl visit him even before ten o'clock (by which time she liked them out and she never hesitated to tell her men roomers so before they even moved in), and he spent his weekends, Friday night to Monday morning, with an ailing mother in a nursing home. Mrs. McCartney's only worry about David Kelsey was that he would never find a girl good enough to be his wife.

When David answered a knock on his door at five-thirty, he saw that expression of dull surprise and curiosity on the face of Mrs. McCartney as she gazed past him into his room. Her lean, gray uprightness and efficiency irritated and repelled David. Behind her quick smile, as false as her teeth, David knew she was reassuring herself once more that his room,
her
property, every thread and splinter of it, was still intact in all its ugliness. It pained David most to think that two sons who lived in St. Louis had Mrs. McCartney for a mother.

“I'm sorry to disturb you, David,” Mrs. McCartney said, “but Mrs. Beecham said she'd like you to go up and see her before you leave.” She leaned forward and whispered, “I think she's got a little something for your mother, the sweet old thing.”

“All right. Thank you very much, Mrs. McCartney.”

“And thank you for the rent,” she said, making a backward retreat. She checked herself. “You didn't notice that biggest window leaking any, did you? That rain Monday—”

David glanced quickly at the window behind him, a huge window flanked by two small tall windows and set in an oriel bay. “Not a bit,” he said, “not a bit.” It probably had leaked, but he did not want Mrs. McCartney or her handyman George prowling about his room while he was gone.

“Good. Well, have a nice weekend, David, and give our regards to your mother.”

“I will, thanks.” David waited behind his closed door until her steps faded to silence on the stairs, then went out and locked his door behind him.

Mrs. Beecham lived on the third floor at the back. The third floor of the house was much smaller than the others, and had only Mrs. Beecham's room, a bath at the center rear, and a room the size of Mrs. Beecham's at the left which Mrs. McCartney slept in. David knocked gently on Mrs. Beecham's door, and her sweet, high voice immediately called, “Come in, David.” She knew his step.

She was in her wheelchair with some knitting and a book on her lap. On the book stood her rectangular magnifying lens which she moved downward on the page as she knitted and read simultaneously. She was eighty-seven, and she had been paralyzed in her left leg and partially paralyzed in her left arm for twenty years from a stroke. Her daughter in California sent her a little money regularly, but David had heard that she never came to visit her.

“Sit down, David,” Mrs. Beecham said, gesturing to a broken straw-bottomed straight chair. “I was hoping I'd catch you before you took off. Didn't you say your mother was about my size?” She had thrust her chair expertly over to her bureau and parked it sidewise.

“Just about,” David said, as he had many times before. “Don't tell me you've made something else.” He had sat down, smiling, to be polite, but he leaped up nervously as she drew a pink garment out of her bureau drawer.

“It's just another bedjacket. You know it doesn't take me any time to make 'em, David, and who else've I got to give 'em to?”

David examined it appreciatively, and tried to think what he could give Mrs. Beecham in return. He had given her several presents. But presents for Mrs. Beecham were difficult for him to think of. “It's really beautiful, Mrs. Beecham. You know, though, she's still wearing that other one you made her—last year.”

“Won't hurt to have two. Two pairs of socks aren't hardly enough for you neither, David. Be sure you bring 'em to me when they get holey. I'm making my new little great-grandchild a coat and bonnet now, but socks for you come next.” She was fiddling with her knitting needles, too old and gray to blush with her pleasure at David's liking the bedjacket.

David stood looking at the pink thing in his hands, abandoning the idea of asking her anything about her great-grandchild, whose sex he had forgotten, because he was not sure her family had been decent enough to send her a picture of it.

“I asked that nice girl downstairs to bring me home a box for it, and I know she will, but she's not back yet. I know her walk already, I do.” Mrs. Beecham looked at him brightly through glasses that enlarged and made quite visible to David the cataracts in both pupils.

“What girl?” David asked.

“Effie Brennan. You don't mean to say you haven't met her?”

“Oh, yes, of course, I have,” David said with a smile. “Well, Mrs. Beecham, what can I bring back for you this trip? Some more of that cheese you like? A plant you'd like?” Her east windows were banked with potted, blossoming plants of all kinds.

“There's not hardly any more room, is there, David?” she said with a laugh. Then she held up a finger warningly. “There's Effie now.”

“I'd better go.” David unzipped his duffel bag, shielding it slightly with his body, though Mrs. Beecham probably could not have seen what was in it at this distance, and put the folded bedjacket carefully into it. “I know she'll be crazy about that,” he said, standing up. “Well, until Monday morning. You take care of yourself, Mrs. Beecham.”

The old lady seemed in a trance of expectation at the sound of the girl's approaching footsteps, and did not reply to David who awkwardly awaited one word from her as dismissal. Then the knock came, and Mrs. Beecham sang out for her to come in.

She fairly burst into the room, her arm full of gold-colored flowers, and David might have retreated out the door without being seen, if he had been ruder or quicker.

“Now here's your box,” Mrs. Beecham said excitedly, taking the silver-and-white striped box from the girl's arm. “Put it in, it looks nicer.”

“Hi, there,” said Effie, smiling broadly. “So the box was for you.”

“My mother,” said David. “Thanks very much for troubling about it.” He unzipped the bag and whisked the bedjacket out.

Effie helped him, unnecessarily, to wrap the bedjacket in the piece of tissue that was in the box. Their hands brushed and David drew his back quickly. The girl looked at him.

He tucked the box under his arm. “I'll be going, Mrs. Beecham. Thanks again.” He nodded to the girl. “Good-bye.” Then he closed the door on Mrs. Beecham's “Drive carefully, David,” and on the girl's alert and staring eyes. He heard their rather whining, female voices as he went down the stairs. He supposed Mrs. Beecham would be telling her what a fine young man he was. He knew that several of the roomers, behind his back, called him “The Saint.” It was annoying, and David tried to forget it.

David took a highway northward. Dusk was falling with a swiftness that meant the beginning of winter, and David was glad. He loved the night better than the day, despite his occasional melancholic moments at night, and he loved winter better than summer. Now in the car, heading for home, he allowed himself to daydream about the evenings to come, sitting by his fireside with books, or working on furniture down in the cellar, or lying on the floor in front of the fireplace listening to music in the dark. To hell with the flowers of summer, cut roses that perished in less than a week. When he looked out his living room windows, he could see green ivy, strong and dark, clinging to the rough stone of the house's foundation. He had seen ivy embalmed in ice, still green and alive. It asked for no care, though he gave it some care, and it endured through summer and winter.

At a crossroads of a town called Ballard, about a mile from his house, David stopped at a butcher's shop and bought a steak and some hamburger meat. At another store he bought fresh rolls, salad greens, a couple of pears, and some imported mustard of a kind he had never tried. And at a liquor shop next door, he bought two bottles of Pouilly-Fuissé and a case of Frascati. Then he drove on, turned onto a narrow tar road and then onto a dirt road. Woods of pine trees grew on either side. The car rattled the boards of a little bridge over a stream, and then at the next slight curve, his headlights made the white jambs of his windows flash briefly, like a welcoming hail.

There were no other houses around. David's house was of stone and brick, and had a disproportionately tall chimney at one end, as if the chimney had been built for a house one story higher than this. The color was a dull brown with here and there a shade of gray—the color of natural stone. Someone had once seeded the lawn, so there was some growth of grass now, but this went quickly into woods on three sides. Even on the fourth side, where his headlights had picked out the window jambs, a couple of pine trees grew, taller than the chimney.

David, with one bag of his groceries in his arm, unlocked his front door and automatically wiped his shoes on a rough brown doormat before he went in. He clicked on the light to the right of the door, and with a deep intake of breath surveyed the attractive living room, its smooth couch, its brown and white cowhide rugs, the mantel with its two photographs of Annabelle, his shelves of books and records, before he went into the kitchen with the groceries. Within half an hour he had taken a shower, changed to clean blue jeans and shirt in the bedroom upstairs, turned up the furnace, stored his case of wine in the cellar, put his groceries away, and laid a fire. He lit the fire, and for the second time that evening took down a photograph of a faintly smiling girl with brown, waving hair that hung to her shoulders, and gently kissed its lips. Then he made a small pitcher of martinis, poured two in generous, stemmed glasses beside a plate of anchovies and black olives, sipped a little from one glass, then went to work installing a wall lamp he had brought in his duffel bag. It was a special kind of lamp that he had ordered from a New York department store by mail and had sent to Mrs. McCartney's. He fixed it to the wall above the couch, between some bookshelves. By that time, he had drunk the first martini, and he carried the second into the kitchen with him to sip while he prepared dinner. He remembered that he had used to lift his first martini to an imaginary Annabelle and say, “To you,” before he drank, and say it again when he lifted the second, but he was glad to realize he had not done that in several months. No use being that absurd. A man could start losing his mind if he kept that kind of thing up.

While his potato was baking, he put a Brahms symphony on his stereo, and set the gleaming mahogany table with silver, wine glass, and linen napkin for one. Then he laid a book on geology within reach in case he should want to read while he ate. He hummed softly to the beautiful first movement of the symphony, not loud enough to have annoyed anyone, if anyone else had been present, for having no neighbors, he played the machine loudly, and now it drowned out his humming. He moved very smoothly and happily, more smoothly and far more happily than he did at Mrs. McCartney's or at the factory. Now and then he paused, lifted the second martini, which was still not empty, and looked into the living room with expectantly raised brows as if Annabelle, sitting there, had said something to him or asked a question. Sometimes, too, he imagined her in the kitchen with him.