Alone at Night

by Vin Packer

  But I’ll be glad when you’re gone, Jen thought… Maybe she and Slater ought to cut out the drinking; maybe Chris was right: it made good things bad, bad things worse. Sometimes Chris’ corny clichés hit their mark. Ah, but God, not Slater and her, there wasn’t anything wrong there. It was the goddam town and goddam Leydecker, and now the Cloward boy coming back like this. Still, she felt sorry for Donald Cloward. He had told her about his newspaper friend and the long hours spent listening to him pour out his troubles, while Donald sat feeling no one wanted to hear his, and that there was no one.

  She said, “We’ve all had too much to drink.”

  “You certainly can hold it, Mrs. Burr.”

  “I shouldn’t be driving. I can feel my drinks.”

  “I shouldn’t have let you bring me home. I should have called a cab.”

  Jen said, “They take hours to get to our place.”

  “Or a bus, or something.”

  “A bus!” Jen laughed. “The buses don’t run after five o’clock in Cayuta any more… People either have cars, or they’re too poor to go out.”

  “Yes, it’s all changed… Buy, build, boost—Cayuta! But it feels like home, you know?”

  “You’re lucky to be leaving. I wish we were.”

  “I’ll be back though. Unless Mr. Burr’s mad at me now.”

  “He has no reason to be mad at you, Donald. Get it out of your head.”

  “I shouldn’t have called Laura, but I wish I could just see her. I don’t love her. I don’t think I love her. Maybe I never did. It’s hard to say. But I’d like to know what’s wrong, why she never comes out any more.”

  “Donald, you’re driving me crazy with that noise you’re making with the comb.”

  “I’m sorry.” He put it back in his pocket. “It’s a habit. I know it’s irritating. I saw Mr. Burr look at me back at your place once. I was doing the same thing, and I could see in his eyes he was disgusted… I have to watch myself. I’ve been away so long, I’m not used to people. I forget… For awhile there, back at your place, I realized I was talking too much about—the other Mrs. Burr.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I was just saying how much I liked her. He acted sort of angry, you know what I mean? I realized it must have stirred up a lot of old memories for him. It must have hurt him. No offense, or anything, but it must have been hard for him to remember the other Mrs. Burr. I’ve got to watch myself.”

  “What did you think of her, Donald?”

  “She was always swell. I mean, everyone liked her. Mr. Burr worshipped her, I guess. I shouldn’t have brought up her name so much.”

  “Don’t feel guilty about it, Donald. Maybe he doesn’t like to think about her, but it wasn’t all the way you thought.”

  “I guess I shouldn’t even be talking about it now. I’m too drunk… But I did like Mrs. Burr.”

  Jen felt a tiny dart of anger, just a sliver, enough to make herself say, “What was so great about her?”

  “She was kind.”

  “Oh, kind… Sure. Just between you and me and the proverbial lamp-post, Donald, she was a bitch!”

  “Of course, I didn’t know her well, but…”

  “Carrie Burr was far from kind. They were never happy, so just put your mind to rest on that score.”

  “I always thought they were.”

  “Everyone did,” said Jen, turning on to Genesee Street. “But it wasn’t so. If she hadn’t been killed, Slater would have divorced her.”

  “Really, Mrs. Burr?”

  “Really… It’s bad enough to have her life on your conscience, but don’t have their happy marriage on your conscience too. It just wasn’t a happy marriage.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, I’m sure, Donald… And I’m sure you didn’t do any harm calling the Leydeckers either. So sleep well tonight.”

  “You’re great, Mrs. Burr. I mean, you understand what it’s like to feel—oh well, crummy.”

  “Yes, I know what it’s like… Poor Slater, he’s felt pretty crummy for a long time, and I’m afraid I haven’t been much help.”

  “I think you’re both wonderful people, Mrs. Burr!”

  “Thanks… We like you too, Donald… Well, here we are.”

  “I wonder if Mr. Leydecker will tell Laura I called?”

  “The best thing is to forget all about the Leydeckers.”

  “I know that,” he said. “It’s just that I wonder about Laura. I guess it’s the drinks.”

  “It always is… No, you get a good night’s sleep.”

  “Mr. Burr said I was to come out to your place tomorrow. We’d figure things out.”

  “Then I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  He got out of the car and then ducked his head inside for a moment. “You’ve been just swell, Mrs. Burr!”

  “Sweet dreams,” said Jen.

  “Thank you, ma’am.”

  He slammed the door shut and watched her car turn on Capitol Street. Then he started towards the entranceway of The Burr Building. He glanced at his wrist watch, pausing a moment in the wet street, looking across at The Clark Building. After a second or more, he turned away from the entranceway, down Genesee, weaving a little from left to right, but going rapidly.

  fourteen

  When she had been very young, when her mother was still alive, in the years and years before Buzzy Cloward, she used to sit around the back porch steps with Peony Stubbs and Betty Jean Means, solemnly debating a preference between losing her hearing, or going blind.

  “I’d rather be deaf any old day of the week!” she would insist. “If I were to go blind. I’d wish I were dead!”

  And Peony would declare that she would wish she were dead if she could not hear, and Betty Jean Means, stuck on horror stories of World War II, told by an older brother, would ask them both what they thought of being “basket cases.” Wasn’t that worse than going deaf or blind?

  Laura Leydecker often thought of those days and that particular theme, when she went nightly down the back stairs to fix her snack before the 11:15 late show on television. She turned on as few lights as she could. There were no near neighbors on Highland Hill. Not near enough to see from their windows into the Leydeckers’. But the thought was always there that someone might look in, see her through the straw blinds in the kitchen, the same way she could see the outlines of the pine trees and hydrangea bushes outside. She crept around in an old robe of her father’s; the wig made her flesh creep, she never wore it, someone else’s hair, like someone’s hand sewed on; no, let any busybodies think it was him raiding the icebox; him whom she hated… and she thought how much better it would have been, had blindness struck than this unimaginable thing. This Thing was somehow shameful, laughable, as she had always been laughable, really, oh, she knew that… but blind… Blind she could have gone to one of those schools for the sightless, entered their world and stayed among them… and she had fantasies of that being what had happened. Sometimes she would shut her eyes going up the back stairs and see how easy it was to maneuver… Or in her room, she would sometimes turn off the sound on the television set, watch it and think of being deaf.

  Both alternatives were better. To be the way she was, was to be Betty Jean Means’ “basket case.” The irony of those discussions and those days (O how hysterically and gleefully she had laughed when her mother sang the song about the ball being over, and Mary taking out her false teeth, her false eye, taking off her wig!) was renewed nearly every day.

  No amount of newspaper clips left under her door by her father, telling of wigs being The Fashion, could do war with the bitter fact she would rather die than let it be known. God, Fate was like Dreams the way it chose just the right thing for you, so brilliantly and cruelly selective in its choice… wouldn’t you know that would happen to Laura Leydecker, ha ha’s down the tunnel of her imagination, wouldn’t you just know it would be something like that!… And in her bureau drawer, the gold-back brushes of her mother, and gold-edged combs to m
ock her.

  She had tried; tried everything every doctor told her, and long after she had stopped seeing doctors, stopped mourning the loss of Buzzy, stopped everything but living in the world of her room, there was nothing to change things. Only in dreams was it any different, and that was nearly every night. The same, the same: the whole thing had simply never happened. There she was! Walking down Highland Hill, brown hair spilling to her shoulders, blowing ever so lightly in the breeze: blown hair is sweet, over the mouth blown.

  Settling before the set again that night, at eleven-fifteen, she saw her reflection opposite the bed, in the mirror, while she ate the turkey, taken from the refrigerator downstairs. She looked to herself like some wild creature, gnawing a bone; and on purpose, she exaggerated her performance, contorting her features, ugly and crazy, all the while remembering the sound of his voice on the telephone an hour ago: I want to hear her tell me that she’s all right.

  Oh yes, fine.

  “Really?”

  “Yes, glorious, Buzzy!”

  “Just as good as the last time?” he had murmured, his mouth warm and moist at her ear. “Or better?”

  “The best and happiest moments of the happiest and best!”

  “You say beautiful things all the time, don’t you? Shakespeare and things.”

  “That was Shelley. You know it’s usually Shelley. It was from his ‘Defence of Poetry’.”

  “But those are words. I make you feel them, don’t I?”

  “Oh, yes! You do!”

  It was hot that July afternoon, and he was very tan, his bronze-colored arms and legs and shoulders wet from love-making, but not heavy on her; he never once was. The lightest thing in the world was the loved one’s body. He stayed that way smoking a cigarette, giving her a drag, touching the wetness of her hair at her forehead with his freckled fingers, kissing her gently at first and then with the renewed passion that was always there, the hard hanging-on of one to the other.

  “Darling, do be careful. We have to dress. The man will be wondering what happened to us.”

  “I wonder if he’ll keep this same crummy bed in here after we move in?”

  “‘Bed of crimson joy, and dark secret love.’”

  “Shelley.”

  “No, not that time. Blake.”

  “It’s still a crummy bed.”

  “I love this place!”

  And she had. She had closed her eyes in the few slow seconds of silence between them, and thought of memorizing it: this feeling of herself under him, the two of them wet and loving, so that there seemed to be no sensation but their joy. On the stairway as they left, she had said: “I think sometimes it’s all an illusion. ‘All is illusion till the morning bars, Slip from the levels of the Eastern Gate. Night is too young, O friend! day is too near!’… Don’t you feel that way, darling?”

  There was a tin guard loose on one step, the stairway dark, smelling of mustiness, coffee cooking, and the noise below of traffic in the street. She thought how beautiful it was that soon she would know every step of the stairs, every crack in the plaster, every detail of their home, and the sound of him on those steps coming up to number four at a day’s end, waiting for that sound: how beautiful… And there was a roach running down the stairway, frightened and blind and ugly looking, and he had stepped over it, not wanting to kill it; that was him.

  “I only worry about your father,” he had said.

  She put aside her plate of food and leaned back against the pillows. She closed her eyes and tried to remember what it had felt like, but her mind fastened on the bizarreness of herself under any man now. She opened her eyes. On the television screen a woman in tights, carrying a fan, was performing a seductive dance before a man sitting at a table, holding a drink, leering at her.

  The woman was singing:

  “Do you know what it means?

  To miss New Orleans,

  When that’s where you left your heart?”

  She remembered an afternoon years back at Cayuta Lake, when a boy named Ted Chayka had looked that way at her. Chayka had gone to Industrial High with Buzzy; he was a big unruly fellow who fished off the pier at the lake and drank beer out of cans, always eyeing the girls who came to swim there. Buzzy had told him to stop staring at Laura; there had been a fist fight, and Buzzy had cut his eye. At home later, Laura had fixed a bandage to the cut, and her father had walked in the kitchen then, home from work. He had been unmoved by the story. As though Buzzy were not present, he had said, “If you’d been at the pier with a decent boy to begin with, Chayka wouldn’t have bothered you at all. You were with someone of his own class. That was the reason you were treated in such a manner!”

  Bed of crimson joy, and dark secret love.

  She remembered… an afternoon in summer, at the clearing in Hunter’s Woods, the shelf fungus they had broken off a tree to write their names on, beside them on the ground; the lavender joe-pye weed near the spot Buzzy had lain his shirt, and the red-start warbling above them in the catalpa tree, while Buzzy undid the buttons of her blouse. And their eyes! The way they were looking at one another then, looking right into one another, as though eyes could touch the parts of a person, burrow right into the heart and hold it securely; keep it that way forever, in one long look like that, and then…

  Laura Leydecker sat up in bed suddenly. She reached for the control panel of the television. She shut off the sound, listening. She heard the noise on her window pane, as though someone were throwing pebbles at it from down on the ground. Quickly, she turned off the set, and pulled the lamp chain. She sat in the darkness.

  Again.

  She stole out of bed and crept across, pulling up a slat of the Venetian blind.

  By the light of the street lamp in front of the Leydecker home, she saw him.

  He was standing beside the Engelmann’s spruce, in the side yard. He was looking up at her window, and now, he reached down again, tossing a scattering more of gravel, some of it hitting the pane lightly, the rest, the wooden frame of the house.

  Momentarily she watched, without moving, staying to the side of her window. Then, when he did it again, she reached out her hand, up under the blind, and raised the window a few inches. She got down on her knees, peeping out at him through the bottom slats of the blind.

  She heard him call her name softly.

  She was trembling now; again he called, “Laura? Laura?”

  Her voice broke when she answered him. “Go away!” Her lips rubbed against the cold plastic slat, as she forced her words out, softly as she could manage.

  “Laura, is it you?”

  “Yes. Go away.”

  “I have to see you! I called your father tonight, but he wouldn’t let me talk to you. I want to know if you’re all right.”

  “Yes, but go away, please.”

  “Will you see me tomorrow?”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why? What’s wrong with you, anyway?”

  “I’m—ill.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s… a form of alopecia.”

  “What? I can’t hear you.”

  “I don’t want to tell you. Please go.”

  “Can I come back tomorrow night?”

  “No.”

  “Please! Let me come tomorrow night. I can be here any time you say, meet you down by the back porch, the way we used to. Please!”

  “Go now, Buzzy!”

  “Yes, you’ll meet me tomorrow.”

  “Go now, or father will…”

  “Tomorrow,” he said, “nine-thirty tomorrow night. Okay?”

  “Yes,” she said. She began to feel weak and sick.

  “I’ll be here at nine-thirty!”

  She waited long enough to be sure he had gone. She saw him walk away, saw his red hair under the street lamp, as he turned down Highland Hill, and then she sank back on her haunches and held her hand to her mouth, heaving up nothing but retching agony from deep inside.

  II.

  In the dream,
Kenneth Leydecker was explaining the reformulation of the zoning rules, at a luncheon. He was standing on the podium in the large dining room at The Mohawk Hotel, looking out at the faces of his audience, seeing now Paul Ayres, now Elmo Caxton, now… a light, a very bright light, just as he was stating the new boundaries, a glaring light suddenly… and then he was awake.

  “Laura!” He jerked himself up, his eyes blinking, his hands fumbling for his glasses.

  “Father, you have to go to Buzzy and talk to him.”

  “I have to do nothing of the kind, Laura! I certainly do not have to do anything of the kind… Now what’s this all about?” adjusting his spectacles on his ears and nose. Her eyes were bloodshot and tearful, her mouth quivering. She stood bare-headed, wearing his old robe and her pajamas under it, barefoot… suddenly pathetic-looking, worse than he could remember, the defiance gone out of her. He had always hated the defiance, but now that it was replaced with this hopeless despair, he realized how much easier it had been for him the other way.

  “Laura,” he said, “I know you heard the telephone call.”

  “You have to see him, father. You have to go and see him. I want you to do that for me.”

  “What good would that do? What would it accomplish? Laura, put your mind at ease. He won’t come here.”

  “He just left here, father.”

  “He did what?”

  “He was outside my window just now.”

  “I’m going to call the police.” Leydecker’s hand reached across for the telephone. Her hand stopped his.

  “Father, please listen to me. I beg you to listen to me. For once!”

  “Well, Laura?”

  “He’ll come back again. He will, father, no matter if you call the police or not.”

  “Don’t you worry. The police can take care of him.”

  “Father, don’t you understand? I don’t want him taken care of that way. Haven’t you done enough to Buzzy?”

  “I did nothing to Donald Cloward, Laura. He did it to himself.”

  “The same way I did it to myself, is that it, father?”