Grandma and Grandpa were right off the cover of the Saturday Evening Post, rocking and dozing on the porch of their big house. Grandpa, if pressed, would modestly display his bullet scars from the Oklahoma land rush, and Sarah assured me that Grandma had some too. Great Grandmother, pushing the century mark a couple miles down the road, gloomily queened it over five hundred central Ohio acres from her dusty plush bedroom. She had decided in ’35 that she would go to bed, and stuck to this decision while suburban housing developments and shopping centers and drive-in movies encroached on the old farm, and the money rolled in. Sarah had a grudging respect for her, though she had seen the will, and it was all going to a Baptist mission in Naples, Italy.
There was even at last a strained sort of peace between Sarah and her father. He came out of World War I with a D.S.C., a silver plate in his skull and a warped outlook on civilian life. He was a bootlegger throughout most of the twenties. It made for an unpleasant childhood. When it was too late to do the children much good, the V.A. replaced his silver plate with a tantalum plate and he promptly enrolled in a theological seminary and wound up a Lutheran pastor in southern California.
Sarah’s attitude toward all this is partly “Judge not lest ye be judged” and partly “What the hell,” but of her cousin’s husband, Bill Oestreicher, she said dogmatically: “He’s a lousy bastard.”
We used to see more of bun than of the rest of her family, as an unavoidable side effect of visiting Sarah’s Cousin Claire, to whom he was married. Sarah was under some special indebtedness to Cousin Claire.
I think Claire used to take her in during the rough spells with Dad.
On the way to meet them for the first time-they lived in Indiana, an easy drive from Detroit-Sarah told me: “Try to enjoy the scenery, because you won’t enjoy Bill. Did I say you weren’t to lend him money or go into any kind of business deal with him?”
“You did.”
“And one other thing, don’t talk to bun about your own business. Uncle Edgar let him mail a couple of customers’ statements for him, and Bill went to the customers offering to undercut Edgar’s prices. There was hell’s own confusion for a month, and Edgar lost two customers to the Japs. To this day Bill can’t understand why Edgar won’t talk to him any more.”
“I will come out fighting and protect my chin at all tunes.”
“You’d better.”
Claire was a dark, bird-like little woman with an eager-to-please air, very happy to see Sarah and willing to let some of it splash over onto me. She had just come from work. She was a city visiting nurse and wore a snappy blue cape and hat. Even after eight hours of helping a nineteen-year-old girl fight D.T.’s, she was neat, every hair in place. I suspected a compulsion. She wore a large, incongruous costume-jewelry sort of ring which I concluded to be a dime-store anniversary present from good old Bill.
Bill’s first words to me were: “Glad to meet you, Tommy. Tommy, how much money can you raise in a pinch?” I came out fighting. I’ve got an automotive upholstery business with a few good accounts. The Ford buyer could rum me overnight by drawing a line through my name on his list, but until that happens I’m solvent. I concealed this from Bill. It was easy. At fifty-odd he was a fat infant. He was sucking on candy sourballs, and when he crunched them up he opened a box of Cracker Jacks. I never saw him when he wasn’t munching, gulping, sucking. Beer, gum, chocolates, pretzels-he was the only person I ever heard of who lapped pretzels-pencils, the ear pieces of his horn-rimmed glasses, the ends of his moustache. Slop, slurp, slop. With his mouth open.
Bill maneuvered me into the kitchen, sucked on a quartered orange and told me he was going to let me in on a can’t-miss scrap syndicate which would buy Army surplus and sell it right back to the government at full price. I told him no he wasn’t.
His surprise was perfectly genuine. “What do you want to be like that for?” he asked, round-eyed, and went over it again with pencil and paper, sucking on the end of the pencil when he wasn’t scribbling with it, and when I said no again he got angry.
“Tommy, what’re you being so stupid for? Can’t you see I’m just trying to give one of Claire’s people a helping hand? Now listen this time, I haven’t got all day.” My God, what can you do? I told him I’d think about it.
He shook my hand. Between chomps and slurps he said it was a wise decision; if I could pony up, say, five thousand we’d get underway with a rush; had I thought of a second mortgage on my house? “Let’s celebrate it,” he said. “Claire. Claire, Goddamn it!”
She popped in. “Case of beer,” he said. He didn’t even look at her. “The beauty of this, Tommy, is it’s Air Force money. Who’s going to say no when the Air Force wants to buy something. Tommy, what about borrowing on your insurance?”
Cousin Claire came staggering up from the basement with a case of twenty-four bottles of beer. “Nice and cold,” she panted. “From the north corner.”
He said, “Giddadahere. Now the markup-“ She fluttered out. He turned to the case of beer, and his eyes popped. “How do you like that?” he asked me incredulously. “She didn’t open any. She must have thought I wanted to look at beer.”
“Well,” I said, “you know.” Martyred, he got a bottle opener from a drawer.
Driving back to Detroit I was in a state of shock for about twenty miles. Finally I was able to ask Sarah: “Why in God’s name did she marry him?”
She said hopelessly: “I think it’s because they won’t let you be an old maid any more. She got middle-aged, she got panicky, Bill turned up and they were married. He gets a job once in a while. His people are in politics . . . She’s still got her ring,” Sarah said with pride.
“Huh?”
“The Charlier ring. Topaz signet-didn’t you see it?”
“What about it?”
“Bill’s been trying to get it away from her ever since they were married, but I’m going to get it next. It’s family. It’s a big topaz, and it swivels. One side is plain, and the other side has the Charlier crest, and it’s a poison ring.”
I honked at a convertible that was about to pull out in front and kill us. “You’ll hate me for this,” I said, “but there aren’t any poison rings. There never were.”
“Nuts to you,” she said, indignant. “I’ve opened it with my own little fingers. It comes apart in two little slices of topaz, and there’s a hollow for the poison.”
“Not poison. Maybe a saint’s relic, or a ladylike pinch of snuff. In the olden days they didn’t have poisons that fitted into little hollows. You had to use quarts of what they had. Everything you’ve heard to the contrary is bunk because everybody used to think everybody else had powerful, subtle poisons. Now, of course, we’ve got all kinds of—”
She wasn’t listening. “Somebody unwisely told Bill that the Ford Museum offered my grandmother a thousand dollars for the ring. Ever since then he’s been after her to sell it so he can ‘put the money into a business.’ But she won’t . . . She doesn’t look well, Tommy.” I spared a second from the traffic to glance at her. There were tears in her eyes.
A week later began a series of semiliterate, petulant letters from Cousin Bill.
He was, or said he was, under the impression that I had pledged my sacred word of honor to put up $30,000 and go in with him on the junk deal. I answered the first letter, trying to set him straight, and ignored the rest when I realized he couldn’t be set straight. Not by me, not by anybody. The world was what he wanted it to be. If it failed him, he screamed and yelled at the world until it got back into line.
We saw them a couple of months later. He bore me no malice. He tried to get me to back a chain of filling stations whose gimmick would be a special brand of oil-filtered crankcase drainings, picked up for a song, dyed orange and handsomely packaged. He took to using my company name as a credit reference, and I had my lawyer write him a letter, after which he took to using my lawyer’s name as a credit reference. We saw him again, and he still was not angry. Munching and slobbering and pryi
ng, he just didn’t understand how I could be so stupid as not to realize that he wanted to help me. At every visit he was fat, and Claire was thinner.
He complained about it. Licking the drips off the side of an ice cream cone he said: “By God you ought to have more meat on your bones. The way the grocery bills run.”
“Has it ever occurred to you,” Sarah snapped, “that your wife might be a sick woman?”
Cousin Claire made shushing noises. Cousin Bill chewed the cone, looking at her. “No kidding,” he said, licking his finger. “For God’s sake, Claire. We got Blue Cross, Blue Shield, City Health, we been paying all these years, won’t cost a nickel. What’s the matter with you? You go get a checkup.”
“I’ll be all right,” said Cousin Claire, buttering a ‘ slice of pound cake for her husband.
Afterward I burst out: “All right, I’m not a doctor, I supply auto upholstery fabrics, but can’t you get her to a hospital?”
Sarah was very calm. “I understand now. She knows what she’s doing. In Claire’s position-what would you do?”
I thought it over and said, “Oh,” and after that drove very carefully. It occurred to me that we had something to live for, and that Cousin Claire had not.
My wife phoned me at the office a few weeks later, and she was crying. “The mail’s just come. A letter from a nurse, friend of Claire’s. Bill’s put her in the hospital.”
“Well, Sarah, I mean, isn’t that where she ought to—”
“No!” So that night we drove to Indiana and went direct to Claire’s hospital room-her one-seventh of a room, that is. Bill had put her in a ward. But she was already dead.
We drove to their house, ostensibly to get a burial dress for Cousin Claire, perhaps really to knock Cousin Bill down and jump on his face. Sarah had seen the body, and neither on the clawed finger nor in the poor effects I checked out at the desk was the ring. “He took it,” Sarah said. “I know. Because she was three weeks dying, the floor nurse told me. And Claire told me she knew it was coming, and she had Jiyoscine in the ring.” So Sarah had her triumph after all, and the ring had become a poison ring, for a sick, despairing woman’s quick way out of disappointment and pain. “The lousy bastard,” Sarah said. “Tommy. I want her buried with the ring.”
I felt her trembling. Well, so was I. He had taken the ring from a woman too sick to protect herself and for the sake of a thousand lousy bucks he had cheated her of her exit. I don’t mean that. I’m a businessman. There is nothing lousy about a thousand bucks, but . . . I wanted to bury her with the ring too.
No one answered the front door, and when we went around to the pantry and found it open we found out why. Bill was slumped in a kitchen chair facing us, a spilled bottle of beer tacky on the linoleum, a bag of pretzels open in front of him and his finger in his mouth. You know what hyoscine is? They used to get it from henbane before they learned to put it together in a test tube more cheaply. It was a good, well-considered substance for a nurse to put in her ring because it kills like that. Slobbering infant, Bill must not have been able to resist taking the ring from her. And then he could not resist putting it in his mouth.
1962
Critical Mass
Everybody was talking about politics and baseball—and somebody, at last, was going to do something about them!
THE neutron was a plump young man named Walter Chase, though what he thought he was was a brand-new Engineering graduate, sitting mummified and content with the other 3,876 in Eastern’s class of ’98, waiting for his sheepskin.
The university glee club sang the ancient scholastic song Gaudeamus Igitur with mournful respect and creamy phrasing, for they and most of the graduates, faculty members, parents, relatives and friends present in the field house thought it was a hymn instead of the rowdy drinking song it was. It was a warm June day, conducive to reverence. Of Eastern’s 3,877 graduating men and women only three had majored in classical languages. What those three would do for a living from July on was problematical.
But in June they had at least the pleasure of an internal chuckle over the many bowed heads.
Walter Chase’s was bowed with the rest. He was of the Civil Engineering breed, and he had learned more about concrete in the four years just ended than you would think possible. Something called The Cement Research and Development Institute, whose vague but inspirational commercials were regularly on the TV screens, had located Walter as a promising high-school graduate. He was then considering the glamorous and expensive field of nuclear physics. A plausible C.R.D.I. field man had signed him up and set him straight. It took twelve years to make a nuclear physicist. Now, wasn’t that a hell of a long time to wait for the good things of life? Now, here was something he ought to consider: Four years. In four years he could walk right into a job with automatic pay raises, protected seniority, stock participation and Blue Everything, paid by the company. Concrete was the big industry of tomorrow. The C.R.D.I. was deeply concerned over the lack of interest in concrete engineering, and it was prepared to do something about it: Full four-year scholarship, tuition, living costs and pocket money. Well?
Walter signed. He was a levelheaded eighteen-year-old. He had been living with a pinch-penny aunt and uncle, his parents dead; the chance of the aunt and uncle financing twelve years of nuclear studies for him he estimated to lie midway between the incredible and the impossible.
Two solid hours dwindled past in. addresses _by the Chancellor, the Governor of the State and a couple of other politicos receiving honorary degrees. Walter Chase allowed the words to slip past him as though they were dreams, although many of them concerned his own specialty: shelters. You knew what politician talk was. He and the 3,876 others were coldly realistic enough to know that C.S.B. was a long way from being enacted into law, much less concrete-and-steel Civilian Shelters in fact. Otherwise why would the Institute have to keep begging for students to give scholarships to? He drowsed. Then, as if with an absent-minded start, the program ended.
Everybody flocked away onto the campus.
IN THE hubbub was all the talk of the time: “Nice weather, but, Kee-rist! those speeches!” “Who d’ya like in the All-Star?” “Nothing wrong with C.S.B. if it’s handled right, but you take and throw a couple thousand warheads over the Pole and—” “My feet hurt.” Chase heard without listening. He was in a hurry.
There was no one he wanted to meet, no special friend or family. The aunt and uncle were not present at his graduation. When it had become clear from their letters that they expected him to pay back what they had spent to care for him as soon as he began earning money he telephoned them. Collect. He suggested that they sue him for the money or, alternatively, take a flying jump for themselves. It effectively, closed out a relationship he loathed.
Chase saw, approaching him across the crowded campus, another relationship it was time to close out. The relationship’s name was Douglasina MacArthur Baggett, a brand-new graduate in journalism. She was pretty and she had in tow two older persons who Chase perceived to be her parents. “Walter,” she bubbled, “I don’t believe you were even looking for me! Meet Daddy and Mom.”
Walter Chase allowed his hand to be shaken. Baggett pere was something in Health, Education and Welfare that had awakened Walter’s interest at one time; but as Douglasina had let it slip that Daddy had been passed over for promotion three years running, Walter’s interest had run out. The old fool now began babbling about how young fellows like Walter would, through the Civilian Shelters Bill, really give the country the top-dog Summit bargaining position that would pull old Zhdetchnikov’s cork for him. The mother simpered: “So you’re the young man! We’ve heard so much about you in Douglasina’s letters. I tell you, why don’t you come and spend the All-Star weekend with us in Chevy Chase?”
Walter asked blankly: “Why?”
“Why?” said Mrs. Baggett in a faint voice, after a perceptible pause. Walter smiled warmly.
“After all,” he said, shrugging, “boy-girl college friendships .
. . She’s a fine girl, Mrs. Baggett. Delighted to have met you, Mr. Baggett. Doug, maybe we’ll run into each other again, eh?” He clapped her on the shoulder and slipped away.
Once screened from the sight of their faces, he sighed. In some ways he would miss her, he thought. Well. On to the future!
IN THE dormitory he snapped the locks on his luggage, already packed, carried them down to be stowed in the luggage compartment of the airport bus and then circulated gently through the halls. He had in four years at Eastern made eleven Good Contacts and thirty-six Possibles, and he had an hour or two before his plane to joke with, shake the hand of, or congratulate the nine of those on the list who shared his dorm. He fooled the fools and flattered the flatterable, but in his wake a few of his classmates grimly said: “That young son of a bitch is going to go far, unless he runs out of faces to step on.” Having attended to his nine he charitably spread some of his remaining time among the couple dozen Outside Chances he ran into. To a sincere, but confused, servo-mech specialist he said, man-to-man, “Well, Frankie, what’s the big decision? Made up your mind about the job yet?” The servo-mech man clutched him and told him his tale of woe. “God no, Walt. I don’t know which way to turn. Missile R&D’s offering me a commission right away, captain inside of two years. But who wants to be a soldier all his life? And there’s nothing in private industry for inertial guidance, you know. Damn it, Walt, if only they let you resign from the service after a couple years!” Chase said something more or less comforting and moved on. He was careful not to chuckle until he was out of sight.
Poor Frankie! Got himself educated in what amounted to a military specialty—who else could afford servo-mechanisms?—and discovered he hated the Army.
Collected Short Fiction Page 273