5:45 to Suburbia

by Packer, Vin

  Charlie stopped before the eagle mirror hung above the couch.

  His reflection frowned at him.

  “A mess,” he said. “A mess … Fifty years old and the wife in the guest room with the door locked. No footstool and my daughter sleeping around from here to hell and gone. And every color of the rainbow in my living room … A mess!”

  Then he fell onto the couch and slept

  MARCH 7, 1957

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  AT FOUR in the morning the couple sat in the living room of the Davises’ home in Boston.

  They were alone, watching the white coals of a fire burn out. It was snowing outside. Dudley could remember that the only words he could think to say to his parents when he brought Jayne into this room hours earlier this evening, were, “Snowing out. Really coming down,” and as he said them, he felt suddenly young and ineffectual and naive. Her fingers had tightened on his arm, and he had thought of the young man in the play Our Town, when on his wedding day he stood facing his bride, oddly frightened and unwilling to have happen to him that which was happening.

  Dudley’s father said, “That is a surprise.”

  Goddam right it is, Dudley thought, and he heard Jayne’s voice crack as she answered, “Yes, it is, isn’t it,” and the slight edge of suspicion to his mother’s, “Yes, it is.”

  Then, unable to live out the niceties, or suffer through the small talk, unwilling to explain, yet unable to avoid the explanation, in an awkward and naked compulsive manner, before he had even unbuttoned his topcoat or taken Jayne’s mouton from her shoulders, he stood and almost hollered, “Jayne and I have to be married immediately!”

  His father had looked at both of them blankly for a moment.

  His mother had said, startled, “Oh?”

  Until, “Take your coats off and sit down,” his father had managed finally.

  And Dudley, with whatever illogical relentlessness was driving him to make the announcement angrily, had added, “she’s three months’ gone.”

  Jayne, of course, had burst into tears instantly.

  Mrs. Davis followed the same course.

  The ice was broken.

  • • •

  Now that it was over, he had his arm around her, thinking as he studied her profile that this was going to be it; this was; and that. It was all right.

  “Not tired, are you?” he said.

  “I couldn’t sleep.”

  “Neither could I,” he said. “I’m glad we came. You are too, aren’t you?”

  “At first I was scared. But they made it easy for us, Dud. They were so nice about it.”

  “I knew they’d come through. Tradition and all. After all, it’s a Davis; not the first one weaned on a gun either.”

  “Don’t talk that way.”

  “We might as well face it,” he said. “Do you know something?’’ “What?”

  “I’m glad it happened. I’m actually glad. I never would have had the sense to know I wanted to marry you. You’d have married someone else probably.”

  “We’re not going to change, are we, Dud? I mean we’re not going to be like everyone else when the baby comes?”

  “Well put him in a knapsack and take him everywhere we go,” he said. “I wish it were morning.”

  “It is.”

  “No, I mean, I wish it were late enough to call Dad.”

  “Soon enough,” he said, “but do you really think you should tell him over the phone? Can’t you wait until we go into the city for the license?”

  She said, “No, I’m going to call him.”

  “What do you think he’ll say?”

  “I just don’t know,” she said. “I just don’t know.”

  MARCH 7, 1957

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHARLIE GIBSON woke after an hour. It was still dark out, and the lights blazed in the room around him. Beside the leg of the couch, the half-empty glass of bourbon rested, and the letter from Janie had fallen from his pocket onto the floor.

  He looked at his watch and saw that it was fifteen minutes past four. He still felt a little foggy, high. Getting up, Charlie went to the front door through the hallway, opened it and breathed in the cold March air. He looked across the street at the Marksons’, wondering why he felt some preposterous satisfaction in the knowledge that all seemed serene there. And then, he glanced next door at the Lederers’. He remembered a couple of months back when Ashley Lederer lost his job; just got dumped — wham-o, like that! — out of a $30,000 a year P.R. job. He remembered how Mil, Ashley’s wife, tried to cover for him, saying Ash had always wanted to free-lance and Ash himself coming right out with it one night at the club — sober, too; saying, “I was fired. And I’m plenty worried about getting something else. Man my age, for the love of Pete!” Charlie remembered that Bruce interviewed Ashley almost the next day, after Markson got him an interview at a colleague’s firm; and Charlie remembered when Ashley finally got placed — for more than he’d been making in P.R. Well, Charlie felt great, he remembered. God damn it, when Ash got that break Charlie felt great. And the only time he’d probably ever see Ash before spring, when they’d wave casually from their lawns, would be if Ash wanted to borrow a snow shovel, or if Charlie’d forgotten his chains and wanted a push.

  It was funny all right, Charlie thought. God damn it, it was nice. He decided he was either drunk or a candidate for the laughing academy to be standing on his front porch at four in the morning waxing sentimental over a bastard like Ashley Lederer who couldn’t even keep his hedges clipped. Or Mel Markson, a lousy cheapskate who still drove a ‘41 Buick. Likes their lines, the ‘41’s, he claims, goddam rubbish, Charlie thought; cheapskate. Charlie grinned. Yep, he was off his rocker, all right, standing out at the crack of dawn choking up over his neighbors.

  He took a deep breath, one last one, went in and shut the door behind him. Again he tripped on the edge of the coat rack. Some day he’d kill himself that way.

  Charlie walked into the living room and reached down to take the letter from Janie from the rug. He decided to answer it before he went to bed. He decided he could do that much anyway. With it, Charlie went to his den, around the corner from the kitchen near the rear staircase, and sitting down at his desk there, shooting a clean piece of paper into the roller, Charlie began to type.

  MARCH 7, 1957

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  DEAR JANIE (Jaynie)

  Your father is a little high; he thinks, with good reason.

  In this world of comfortable shoes, Dr. Spock and Scrabble after dinner, he finds himself in the awkward position of being locked out of the bedroom by your mother. And yesterday he was fifty years old. He received your letter about Dudley Davis, and he suddenly realized he had no answer for you, only some stray and sundry thoughts to pass along to you.

  This then, in the form of an answer.

  You’re right to say I never failed you — along material lines. I wanted you to have everything, and I think I provided you with everything you wanted — in the way of schools, clothes, allowance and so forth. You were more or less handed these things on a silver platter.

  But honey, I think I failed you by never telling you that the platter wasn’t just pulled out of the butler’s pantry, but that it was worked for.

  When you were born — and what a squalling brat you were — and what a terror that first year — your mother and I sat up nights thinking of ways to slash the budget to afford you, and through the years we planned and saved so that you could enjoy the things we’ve given you and hope to give you in the future.

  I don’t tell you this to say, “See what we’ve done for you, see how we’ve sacrificed,” but to explain to you that you are the end product of the two machineries which, in your letter, you most abhorred, the business world and marriage. And the struggle within both for success.

  You’re right in believing the business world is not all lollipops and luncheon dates, but neither is it all “step-on-the-toes-and-go-for-the-buck.” Li
ke any other world, what it is depends on what you are. Like any other world, it has its stereotypes and clichés, its ruts and necessities, and its challenges, casualties, triumphs and tragedies.

  Your young man wants to be a writer, a serious writer, and that’s a fine ambition. But in the writers’ world too there are the ruthless and the kind, the monotonous and the vital. No one world holds a monopoly on either good or bad, more “meaningful” or more “meaningless.”

  As a lad, I believed I’d be a poet or a novelist, a renowned one. I imagined I’d have several alluring and fawning mistresses, and maybe a wife, and at the chance of shocking you, I never, not even when your mother told me you were on the way, wanted children to have any part in my life.

  Now at 50 I find myself an editor in a chain magazine house, who rarely even gets the opportunity to read poems or novels; on the verge, after this letter is written, of trying to persuade the woman I have been married to for 22 years to unlock the door of the guest bedroom and come on into ours (because your father never rests comfortably unless he sees the curler-pinned head on the pillow of the bed opposite him) and attempting in a clumsily affectionate way to tell the other woman he loves — you — how many good things he wants for her, not material things, but cliché things he never thought he’d endorse as a boy. Marriage, and a family, and some certain place in the community of people.

  This isn’t quite the world I imagined and dreamed of in my younger days, but it’s very nice all the same — and that’s the way in this life. One’s prayers and wishes are usually granted, but often the fullfillment is quite different — and much better — than the wish.

  I can’t advise you, sweetheart, but I can hope for you, that somehow this feeling you have which is “more than love” will bring what love brings — the immense complexity involved in being not different from everyone else, and not exactly like everyone else, but more or less the way people are in all worlds: unwilling, protesting, happy, sort of soaring along without knowing it.

  This, in place of an answer.

  Love, DAD

  MARCH 7, 1957

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  IT WAS six forty-five in the morning when Charlie finished what he had begun after he had written Janie.

  Carefully, he began to reread the memo he had worked over:

  RE: THE VILE DUMMY

  One of the principle reasons this book is a mistake is that it will alienate a major advertising account — the sponsors of Avery’s shows, who take full-page advertsements in seven of our books, including the weekly, Topic.

  They have built the name Avery, and vice versa, and to attack him is to attack them, so closely associated are they in the mind of the consumer. In addition, it is obvious that —

  Suddenly, Charlie put the pencil down and let the memo fall to the desk. He began to wonder just what in hell he was doing writing a memo to Bruce. Why didn’t he just tell Bruce? Why hadn’t he told him before this? … He was immensely ashamed to believe that Wally Keene could have even in any small way been the reason, so ashamed that he guffawed aloud. My God, Charlie, whata you know about that.

  Impulsively he wadded up the memo. He would remember it, all right! And before he got up to Bruce’s office, he’d get the sales figures on the last issue of the Dorset book which ran the banner on the cover with the Hemingway piece.

  That was what Cadence needed more than they needed a new book; they needed to do something about the old ones. They needed banners and big-name writers, and they needed to promote hell out of them — billboards, radio spots across the board canned for national consumption. They needed to spark up what they had. What the hell made Bruce sell Cadence down the river for a book on queers and creeps and crackpots? Charlie was going to ask him just what the hell Bruce was thinking of. Never mind if it’s in dummy. Never mind if it’s in mock-up. Shove it! Can it!

  The hell with a memo!

  Charlie leaned back in his desk chair and laughed.

  Then, stretching, he pulled himself to his feet. He felt good, better than he’d felt in a long time. He wanted to go up and pound on Joan’s door and tell her how he felt, and as he stood there staring out at the beginning blue of early morning, he began to resent her locking him out without even waiting to hear his side. And as suddenly as he had felt the resentment, he felt a certain resignation, and a flash of uncanny loneliness.

  He thought of how really alone people could be — not for long, not most people, but for those suspended moments of utter isolation. And he thought of Marge waking up in a bed in the hospital, and he stood staring at the day with an empty feeling, wishing Joan would appear miraculously, like the wife in some slick story, with a pot of hot coffee on a tray, and a smile and a kiss.

  But God, he was too tired now. He decided to go up to bed and sleep the few hours left before it would be time once more to catch the New York bound.

  After he put out the light, Charlie went up the stairs, past “Janie & Mamma, Glen Falls, 1936 — ?icnic” and “Papa’s new car & Janie, 1946” and on down the hall toward the bedroom.

  In her bed across from him, Joan was asleep.

  Quietly Charlie slipped out of his clothes and under the covers in his own bed.

  At some point in the night, she had come back to their room. She had met him halfway. The rest was up to him when they woke up, and Charlie grinned as he shut his eyes.

  That’s right, he thought, it never works out quite the way you dreamed it would in this life. But somehow it does work out.

  It isn’t total one-hundred percent-Ivory-Soap perfect. Nothing is.

  But it’s okay.

  Charlie Gibson was just dropping off to sleep then, when the telephone began its persistent ringing.

  THE END

  of a Gold Medal Original

  VIN PACKER

  If you liked 5:45 to Suburbia check out:

  Something in the Shadows

  Chapter One

  Upstairs in his study, Joseph Meaker heard Maggie’s voice drown out the others. Weekends, Maggie held court in the living room, over coffee and brandy, after a late dinner. Her audience was always a captive one, since the guests were there for the weekend. Last night had been a two-thirty night, and this one? Joseph Meaker glanced at his watch. Ten-after-one. He was reminded of an old Frost poem which ended: “And miles to go before I sleep.” Hours to go — Saturday night Maggie was always in top form.

  They had reached an agreement about weekends after the last fight, four or five days ago. Joseph could simply sleep in his study on weekends. Maggie would close the door separating the upstairs from the downstairs. By the time everyone was ready to turn in, Joseph would be asleep, and Maggie would sleep in their bedroom so as not to disturb him. After all, wasn’t that the fair way, Maggie asked? It was certainly no fault of hers that Joseph did not drink and did not enjoy sitting up and talking. “Chewing the fat,” as she put it. Besides, Maggie always added, the move to Pennsylvania had completely inconvenienced her, and all it had done where he was concerned was to make life easier. It was Maggie who had to get up at six every weekday morning, in order to be at her office in New York by ten. It was Maggie who had to watch the weather reports and the road reports and the Trenton train schedules; Maggie, who had to rearrange her entire life so they could rent this farm. And — the knife’s final thrust — if Maggie did not have friends out for weekends, what the hell kind of a weekend would it be for her? A quiet one, maybe? Joseph Meaker thought of that answer, but said nothing. It would only start her off again on her favourite subject: how he lived in a dream world. So they had reached an agreement about weekends, and here it was in effect.

  Maggie’s shrill laughter startled the cat on Joseph’s lap. A Siamese cat named Ishmael, after a favourite opening line of Joseph’s. One of his pastimes was recollecting famous opening and closing lines of novels, plays and poems; and his cat’s name came from Moby Dick. “Call me Ishmael” — and then followed the narrator’s description of the “damp, drizzly Nove
mber in my soul.” Often Joseph took down his copy of the novel and read and reread the whole opening paragraph. It was always November in Joseph Meaker’s soul, and no way to wander and escape it as Herman Melville’s hero had. The cat, then, could do it for him, Ishmael — wanderer. Joseph put his hand out and calmed the creature. Everyone downstairs was laughing now, and Joseph wondered if Ishmael felt more than a disturbance at the noise. Ishmael often slept contentedly through the noise of Joseph’s typewriter, the noise of the radio — even the noise of Joseph’s and Maggie’s arguments; but now the cat’s ears twitched nervously, and he switched his position on Joseph’s lap, and flagged his tail. Oh, there was more to it than the noise, wasn’t there? Something else, even more annoying than noise: a door closed to you. Not just the door separating the downstairs from the upstairs, but the door separating Maggie’s kind from Joseph’s. The Maggies of the world outnumbered the Josephs, and even if that was not a fact, who would know? If there were a million or more Josephs alone in the night, who would count them? Would one of the Maggies leave the bright room, put down her drink, excuse herself from her friends and go off to make the report on Josephs? No, unlikely. A Joseph doing it was even more unlikely. He would never find his way around the Real World.

  “Listen! Hush, I’ll read it!” Tom Spencer’s voice from downstairs now.

  “Yes, read it, Tom!” — Maggie’s — “Joseph had them printed in Doylestown.”

  Joseph Meaker did not have to listen too carefully to know what they were talking about. Maggie always got out one of the signs on weekends, to show guests. Joseph had designed them and had them made up as supplements to the standard NO GUNNING signs required by law to keep hunters off your property. Joseph’s signs were just as large as the official ones, and he had gone about his land tacking one over the other, on every tree in sight. It was a sort of postscript to the cold legal wording of the official one, and Joseph was aware that his sign was shamelessly sentimental, but he had always liked the poem; “corn” never really bothered Joseph Meaker if it made the point well.