Alone at Night

by Vin Packer

  “I know, dad. I really want to get some sleep.”

  “Means a lot to Olinski to have the Starter show up to his place, you know?”

  “Sure.”

  “Heck, all we’d do is sit around and sip and get dizzy. Be in no shape to open our presents tomorrow morning.”

  “Have a good time, pop.”

  “I put the wine away, Buzzy, but I don’t want you to think I mind if you have another little one. Christmas Eve and all. But you know, too much isn’t good no matter if it’s whiskey or beer or wine.”

  “Don’t worry, pop, I’ve had enough.”

  “I wasn’t worried. Don’t get that idea. You wouldn’t make the same mistake twice, not after what you been through. Isn’t that right?”

  “Right.”

  “So you just feel free to do what you feel like. I don’t think you feel like going out or anything, do you?”

  “No, I told you. Thanks. I’m going to bed.”

  “Well, okay, son. It’s your home. You treat it like your home.”

  “C’mon,” Selma Cloward called from the hallway, “or I’ll be late and have to stand, pop!”

  four

  “‘I do not want to be intimate with people. Why did I come here to a small town?’… Know who said that, Slater?”

  Jen Burr wore a big, jackety lime-green cardigan, over white wool pants. She was barefoot, stretched out on her back, on the thick gold carpet in their living room. There was a black velvet pillow under her blonde head; her legs were crossed, and one hand held a champagne glass half-full; the other, a long cigarette holder carved from ivory. She smoked Gauloises, a French cigarette. The smoke spiraled up between Slater and her. He was lying on his stomach, on the eight-foot salmon-colored velvet couch, his glass of champagne resting on the rug by the couch leg. He wore white boxer shorts, nothing else. The room was dimly lit by the Solar lamp on Slater’s kneehole desk; in the background Booker Little’s trumpet sounded softly on the hi-fi.

  Slater said, “Who said it?”

  “Sherwood Anderson said it.”

  “It’s profound,” Slater said. “I wonder how he ever thought of it.”

  Jen giggled. “I love you, Slater Burr.”

  “Je t’adore,” Slater said.

  “You make it sound like ‘shut the door.’”

  “What time is it?”

  “Eleven-ten P.M. Christmas Eve. Merry X… Do you know how Sherwood Anderson died, darling?”

  “Nope.”

  “He choked on a toothpick.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Isn’t that a typical ending for an American writer?”

  “I’m sure we had a few who coughed themselves to death with consumption, in the grand European tradition.”

  “Are you in a mood tonight?”

  “A mood for what?”

  “A mood… You know. Depressed?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “Good… God, I love Max Roach.”

  Slater said, “Who the hell is Max Roach?”

  “He’s playing the drums and vibes. Hear him?”

  “Um hmm.”

  “I saw Stan Getz in Paris, just about ten years ago tonight. Lord, I remember that night! If anyone had ever told me that night, that I’d be living in Cayuta, New York now, I’d have jumped in the Seine.”

  Slater said, “Darling, when you die—no matter what year or where, I’m going to have engraved on your tombstone, born Buffalo, New York 1929, died Paris, France, 1952.”

  “That’s not very nice.”

  “Don’t make it into something now; it’s just a joke. Just a weak little joke.”

  “I’m not dead—it’s this town.”

  “Sometimes you talk as though I personally dragged you away from Paris by the hair, and brought you here.”

  “Slater, I never blame you. You’re the only one who’s alive in the whole damn town! I knew that the minute I saw you. I saw you across the room that night, and I honest-to-God fell in love with the back of your head!”

  “I wish to hell we could get out of this town too, Jen. You know that, don’t you?”

  “I don’t see why we can’t. With Leydecker squeezing you this way, I don’t see why we don’t just sell out and get out!”

  Slater hauled himself up from the couch. “Want more champagne, or have we had enough?”

  “Please, darling.”

  He reached down for her glass. “I wouldn’t get more than peanuts for the place, the condition it’s in. And if the new zoning proposal goes through, I couldn’t sell it even for peanuts. I’d have to merge with some company already set up, work for them. I’m 47 years old, and the only thing I know a damn about is the forging business. I’d be lucky to be a foreman in a merger. Burr would just be a subsidiary business. No one’s crying for a 47-year-old executive whose own place went bust!”

  “But we aren’t bust, darling!”

  “Jen, we’re damn close. People are really beginning to listen to Leydecker. Any more industry in here, I’ll be out of business. I lost 10 men last week to L.E.… If a new industry doesn’t do it, the zoning proposal will. Leydecker’s beginning to pick up votes, and I mean—fast!”

  “Oh, you’ve always beat out Leydecker, darling, and you will again. I wish we were in Paris… right now.”

  “I won’t beat out Leydecker. He’s foxier than I thought.”

  “Besides hating you, darling, what does he want all these changes for? He’s got his new contract. Why isn’t he satisfied?”

  “For one thing, how many sheikdoms are going to be wanting air-conditioners? He’s got to worry about what happens after this job. Some of the industry he’s scouting might use his plant… Hell, if I can just get a loan somewhere, I can fix up our place, get a status quo on the zoning, and find a subsidiary line for Burr… But—it’s like dreaming. If it wasn’t for Leydecker, I’d get all three, but he’s boxed me in. He’s scheming day and night… It used to be, a strike down at the plant meant money lost, and I’d fight to prevent it. Now, I’m torn. The more labor problems we have, the more unattractive Cayuta is to industry scouts. I’m getting so I’m tempted to cause a strike. I’m getting—”

  “Sentimental over me, darling?… Come on, honey, it’s Christmas Eve. Hush! I didn’t mean to start it all up again.”

  Slater said, “It doesn’t start and stop at your command, I’m afraid.”

  “Let’s have another drink.”

  “I’m on my way for more right now. I don’t know if we need more, but here goes.”

  “Since when have we cared if we need more?”

  “All right, okay, more champagne, coming up.”

  “And no more shop talk, hmm?”

  “No more shop talk,” Slater said.

  Jen McKenzie had initially come to Cayuta for a few months’ visit with her brother. Chris was a veterinarian, who used to practice in Buffalo, New York. He moved to Cayuta after a scandal over the fact that he was selling, for medical experiments, the pets which clients brought him to “put to sleep.” The near ruin resulting from the scandal had a sobering effect on Chris, whose very name in the same sentence with “sober” was a novelty. Chris joined Alcoholics Anonymous, and the Society For The Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. The toughest and most scraggly old cat handed over by a client, was put to sleep as delicately as one handled long-stemmed crystal, and anti-vivisection became Chris McKenzie’s middle name.

  Whatever thread of rebellion there was left in Chris by summer 1954 squirmed uneasily around his sister in the presence of Slater Burr. He had been the one to introduce them, on a June night at the country club.

  “Who’s that large man with his back to me, Chris?”

  “Slater Burr.”

  “And the woman?”

  “Carrie, his wife.”

  “She’s his wife?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good God, I saw her earlier in the Ladies. I took her for a lesbian.”

  “Well, she’s not, and don’t sho
ut that word around the club.”

  “Introduce me… to him, I mean.”

  It began then.

  Chris did not know it then, and Lena never knew it. Maybe no one at The Kantogee Country Club knew it that night, but Jen and Slater.

  Slater told her later… a few days later as they parked in his Jaguar up at Blood Neck Point, on Cayuta Lake: “I fell in love with you instantaneously, Jen. Was it that way for you too?”

  “Faster than that,” Jen had answered.

  A month from that night, Chris came into the guest room where Jen was finishing dressing.

  “Going out again?”

  “And again, and again.”

  “I know who it is, Jen. It’s trouble, believe me.”

  “I can’t help it, Chris,” she had told him frankly. “I don’t know how to stop.”

  The Booker Little record rejected itself, and Eric Dolphy’s alto sax began a lazy exploration of “Stormy Weather.” Jen Burr rolled over on her stomach and lit another Gauloise.

  “What are you smiling about?” Slater said, coming in with the champagne glasses.

  “I was remembering a night at Blood Neck Point.”

  “Any one in particular?”

  “The first one.”

  “The night poor Secora got beat up for making time with Francie Boyson.”

  “That’s right, we saw them there. They were leaving when we were driving in. You said ‘Good God, that’s my foreman with Rich Boyson’s wife.’ I didn’t know how funny it was then. I was just afraid it’d be our first and last night.”

  “Boyson broke a couple of his ribs… You’d never think Rich was anything but easy-going. Tonight, I think he was drunk. He offered to buy me a drink, and said something about Santa Claus coming in this afternoon to use the phone.”

  “Our first night,” Jen said, “and you said you fell in love with me instantaneously.”

  “Do you remember what was playing on the radio?”

  “Doggie in the Window.”

  “Right!” Slater grinned down at her as he gave her the champagne. “I must have that doggie in the window.”

  “And I was thinking—I must have that Slater Burr.”

  “You had him.”

  “Not quite, darling, not at all quite.”

  He went back and flopped on the couch.

  She said, “Slater? If things hadn’t turned out the way they did, what do you think you’d be doing tonight?”

  “What do you want to hear, Jen? That I’d be up in bed laying Carrie?”

  “Why do you get so angry? You get angry whenever I bring it up.”

  “There’s no need to bring it up. Why must we talk about Carrie?”

  “Because we never have. It’s been eight years. It seems to me enough time has elapsed so—”

  “So that we can go into the intimate details of my marriage with Carrie?”

  “I didn’t mean just that, but that’s a start, at least.”

  “A start to what? A fight? Every time you drink—”

  “No, Slater, you know that’s not fair. Not every time I drink. Hardly ever. But Carrie was—so damn unlike someone you’d marry. I could understand if it had been for money, but—”

  “But it wasn’t.”

  “I know. You’ve said it enough.”

  “I’m not in a mood to tell you what Carrie was like in bed, and that’s what you’re fishing for, Jen.”

  “There probably wasn’t any bed.”

  “Then there probably isn’t anything for me to say on the subject.”

  “I wish you’d just talk about her. You still feel guilty, Slater, that’s what I’m getting at. Just because we wished her dead, and she died, you feel guilty.”

  “I did not wish her dead, goddam it! I wanted you, and I didn’t want her, but I did not wish her dead, Jenny!”

  Slater sat up and scratched a match to light a cigarette. “I wished her dead! That’s one hell of a nice topic for Christmas Eve!”

  “Should we save it for December 26th, or the day after Easter, or the day after Thanksgiving, or the day after Mother’s Day, or—”

  “Stop it, Jenny!” Slater shouted. “You’re drunk, and you want a fight. You’re bored, and you want a good fight!”

  “If it takes a fight to make you discuss it with me, then let’s fight. Turn up Eric Dolphy and we’ll shout over it, if you want, but let’s discuss it!”

  “Eric Dolphy, Eric Dolphy, somebody or other Roach! I’ll say this for you, Jen, you don’t miss one goddam beat of the music. We could be blown sky-high by the bomb, and you’d know whether it was Charles Mingus playing at the time, or Thelonious Monk!”

  “Carrie wasn’t killed, Slater! You didn’t kill her and whatever-his-name-was Cloward didn’t kill her. She jumped in front of that car!”

  Slater sighed. “Whatever-his-name-was Cloward would be happy to hear that,” said Slater. “Why don’t we wire Brinkenhoff, or whatever-the-name-is prison, and give him the news.”

  “Oh, you know the name of the prison. When I was in the office Tuesday, Miss Rae said, “Isn’t Mr. Burr wonderful? Every year he sends that boy a card to the penitentiary!’… isn’t that just wonderful!”

  “So what? What do you want to make of that?”

  Jen sat up and shook her Gauloise at Slater, knocking its long ash off on the rug: “Guilt! You’re so guilty you identify with that drunken kid! You wished Carrie dead, and you feel as though you killed her, and not that kid. Well, I don’t think anyone killed her. She couldn’t stand losing you! It was suicide!”

  Slater laughed. “Oh, God, you must be out of your mind, Jen!”

  “I say she jumped in front of that car!”

  “Out of your mind!” Slater laughed again. He tipped his glass over, breaking it, sweeping the glass aside on the table.

  “And you pay penance! That’s why Burr Company is failing! You’re afraid to be successful without her!”

  “Balls, Jen!”

  “You’re letting the place slip through your fingers, because you have to pay penance for something you didn’t even do! You can’t let go of your guilt! That’s why we’re stuck here, you have to pay penance for Carrie’s death!”

  “Jen, shut up!” Slater was on his feet.

  “You’d think you ran over her, the way you act! Penance!” In a long, sudden step, Slater Burr crossed to her. His large hand cracked down across her jaw; the slap rang out like a lash. Her champagne glass tumbled over on the rug. She fell backwards, her hands covering her face.

  For a moment, nothing but the lazy bleating of the saxophone filled the room. Then Slater dropped to his knees beside her.

  He said softly, “Jenny?”

  He pulled her up.

  “I don’t want you to touch me,” she said.

  Slater took his hands away.

  “Slater, that’s the first time you’ve ever hit me.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You know why I don’t want you to touch me?”

  “I don’t blame you,” he said.

  “No, it isn’t that… I don’t want you to touch me, because I want you to touch me. I don’t care what you do, if you’ll touch me. Do you see what that’s like, Slater? I hate it!”

  “We’ve both had a lot to drink.” He knelt so that her legs were between his. He leaned in to her and kissed her mouth. She put his hands up to the buttons of her cardigan. “I’m so in love with you, Slater.”

  “That’s the way I feel about you.” He undid the buttons, reached his hand behind her sweater to the clasp of her brassiere, and undid that.

  After a while, he said, “Who’s on the trombone?”

  “Jimmy Knepper.”

  “I knew you’d know, even now.”

  “I love you, Slater. I just love you.”

  “Move to the couch? Rug’s wet. Champagne.”

  “No.”

  The phone rang out and Slater groaned.

  “Never mind it,” she said, “Never mind, darling.” />
  “Why do you wear pants? Complicate things.”

  “Why do you?” She looped her thumb around the elastic on his boxers. “Off!”

  Slater chuckled. “I do not want to be intimate with people. Why did I ever come here to a small woman… Know who said that, Jen?”

  “Slater Burr said that.” Jen sighed.

  five

  There was no answer.

  Donald Cloward put the phone’s arm back in its cradle.

  He did not think of himself as “Buzzy” any longer. When Selma and his father called him by that name, it registered in the same nominal way most things about his old life did.

  His memory of that life was very sharp, except for those few hours on the night of August 30, 1954. In prison he had relived his years like someone reading and rereading a novel, finding new things, re-examining old ones—viewing his life in a detached way, as a reader views a character in a novel, knows everything he can about the character, but feels no flesh-and-blood intimacy with him.

  He stood up and ran a comb through his hair, while he studied his reflection in a mirror. He remembered once Slater Burr snapping at him: “Stop combing your hair!” and he thought of it then, and stuck the comb back in the rear pocket of his trousers. He was amazed to learn that the memory was still so sharp, that the inner punch of apprehension, still vivid… Today, he might have said flatly: “Why?”—he wasn’t sure—but at the time he had felt as though he were stealing something, picking his nose—something, and Slater Burr had found him out.

  Cloward walked across to the window of his father’s apartment and looked out. Across the way the tower clock on top of the Cayuta Trust: 11:20 P.M.… In a way, he was thankful Slater Burr had not answered the telephone. It was late; what if he had awakened him? At the same time, he felt the urgency of making contact with Slater Burr… of starting the business he had come to Cayuta to accomplish.