“You mean he has no shrewdness, where people are concerned.”
“That’s right.”
“Does he lose by it?”
“Not a thing,” Aileen Murphy said, smiling. And then, sadly: “He has fair-weather friends.”
Dancing with Laura, Pete Murphy said, “Don’t you pay any attention to Amos. Amos doesn’t know anything about painting.”
“I know that,” Laura said.
“I wouldn’t offer Hugh advice, any more than Hugh would try to tell Amos how to sell automobiles.… The thing is not to worry.”
“I don’t,” Laura said, “but we’re living on very little money. And Hugh likes to be extravagant.”
“My family is taken care of,” Pete said, “if anything happens to me. So what I make I spend — and a little more. It’s what I enjoy, and what makes me happy. And if I lose five hundred dollars on the races, I don’t tell Amos.”
THE party broke up around a quarter of one. Hugh tried to pay for his share of the dinner check and Amos waved him aside indignantly. Barbara said good night and left them. There was talk of going on to someplace else — to the Copacabana. For Hugh the evening was finished; he was ready to go home. He invited Amos to come out to the country with Barbara and Ellen, any time during the remainder of their three-day visit. This invitation was left hanging. Amos wanted Pete to go with him to see the Mets play the Cardinals; Pete wanted to go to the races. They decided, while Amos was tipping the waiter, to go their own ways.
All eight of them crowded into one elevator, and the four Cahills got off at the thirteenth floor. Amos had decided that he was tired and wanted to go to bed. They wandered through the corridor, made a wrong turning, and retraced their steps. Amos, reverting to the age of eleven, began ringing the bells of all the doors that lined the corridor. Ellen tried to stop him. Loud, drunk, and not at all unpleasant, Amos was not to be stopped. “I’ll tell them Hugh did it,” he said.
They got Hugh’s hat. The two brothers, the two sisters-in-law said good-bye, and five minutes later, as Laura and Hugh were trying to find their way out of the lobby to the Park Avenue entrance of the hotel, they ran into Amos and Ellen, on their way to join the others at the Copacabana. At this final parting, the handshake of Hugh and Amos was prolonged, the expression in Amos’s eyes tender, misty, and only slightly histrionic.
“He’s got a handshake like a gorilla,” Amos said proudly, to Laura.
“I HAD a feeling he would notice,” Laura said, going home on the train. “And sure enough, he did. He said, ‘Where’d you get that ring?’ and I said, ‘Hugh gave it to me.’ ”
“That was smart of you,” Hugh said. “To realize, I mean, before you met him, that he’d look to see whether I’d given you an engagement ring.”
“I just had a feeling,” she said, and settled into the seat contentedly, with her head on his shoulder. They were taking the last train. The coach was almost full. The passengers were tired, and many of them sat and dozed, with their heads drooping, their necks bent to one side. Hugh looked down at the ring on the fourth finger of Laura’s left hand — the diamond between two smaller sapphires, in a gold setting. It had been her grandmother’s. Next to the false engagement ring was the plain gold wedding band Hugh had given her.
“Do you wish I’d given you an engagement ring?” he asked suddenly.
“No.”
“I don’t like diamonds.”
“Someday I’d like you to give me a ring.”
“What kind of ring?”
“For a special reason,” she said. “On a special occasion.”
He waited, unable to imagine what she had in mind.
“I’d like you to give me an emerald ring when our first child is born.”
“I don’t know that I trust myself when it comes to choosing a ring,” he said. “What if I got one and you don’t like it?”
“We could go and pick it out together,” she said. “When you reached out and took my shoe, Barbara was telling me that Amos never has eyes for any other woman but Ellen, and she thought you had overheard.”
“No. I didn’t.”
“She said, ‘I’d just love to have a husband who’d reach out and take my foot, to say that he was following the conversation and loved me.’ ”
The train drew to a stop at 125th Street. When it started up again, Laura said, “It must be terrifying to be an older brother and have a younger brother who shows a kind of early promise, and then nothing seems to come of it for a while, and then the predictions begin to come true.… And being helpless,” she added.
Amos helpless? Hugh wondered. He was exhausted. He felt battered and bruised. The encounter had not come off as well as he had hoped, but at least Amos had not got through (and he always had in the past) his inmost defenses. The fight had been a draw.
“I thought you’d never come back to the table,” Laura said. “When you and Amos weren’t there, it left a vacuum. Nobody had anything to say.”
“I was caught,” Hugh said. “Very nice of him, wasn’t it, to ask Pete to recommend a doctor. And in front of Barbara. How can he do things like that?”
“It didn’t matter,” Laura said.
“It mattered to me,” Hugh said. “I don’t understand it. I don’t understand why I didn’t pick up a chair and brain him with it. There was the chair, and there I was, and he deserved to be killed, and I couldn’t lift my arms to do it. I couldn’t move. You had to do everything.”
“It wasn’t important,” Laura said. And then, slowly: “I have only one complaint against you.” (She had several, as it turned out, all handed to her, all expertly put in her mind by Amos.) “You don’t love me the way Amos loves Ellen.”
Oh my God, he thought, he’s got through to her!
“You didn’t ask me to dance with you,” Laura said.
He sat up in the seat indignantly. “I was dancing with you all evening,” he said. “Everything I said and did was for you and on account of you.”
Neither of them said anything more. He knew that, having said this, she would forgive him, she would never refer to it again. She didn’t hold grudges or put things aside in order to bring them up against him later. He sat back in the seat and drew her head over against his shoulder once more. Looking down at her soft brown hair, at the gardenia now edged with ivory, a chilling idea occurred to him: What if she defended me from Amos cleverly and successfully but at the expense of her faith that I can defend her? Was that Amos’s triumph for this evening?
He couldn’t bear to go on thinking about this, and put it out of his mind, but Amos continued to occupy his thoughts. What had he ever done to Amos that Amos should want to destroy him or to destroy his marriage?
As he sat pondering this unsolvable question, he noticed his own hands, and then thoughtfully, as if he had never seen them before, moved the fingers of one hand back and forth, surprised at what a thing the human hand is, how many ways, and how marvellously, the fingers moved. And then, with no shudder or feeling of any kind, he had a momentary image of the immovable sleeve, the gloved facsimile of a hand that he had so long ago become accustomed to that when he was with Amos he never gave it a thought.
The French Scarecrow
I spied John Mouldy in his cellar
Deep down twenty steps of stone;
In the dusk he sat a-smiling,
Smiling there alone.
— Walter de la Mare
DRIVING past the Fishers’ house on his way out to the public road, Gerald Martin said to himself absentmindedly, “There’s Edmund working in his garden,” before he realized that it was a scarecrow. And two nights later he woke up sweating from a dream, a nightmare, which he related next day, lying tense on the analyst’s couch.
“I was in this house, where I knew I oughtn’t to be, and I looked around and saw there was a door, and in order to get to it I had to pass a dummy — a dressmaker’s dummy without any head.”
After a considerable silence the disembodied voice with a Ger
man accent said, “Any day remnants?”
“I can’t think of any,” Gerald Martin said, shifting his position on the couch. “We used to have a dressmaker’s dummy in the sewing room when I was a child, but I haven’t thought of it for years. The Fishers have a scarecrow in their garden, but I don’t think it could be that. The scarecrow looks like Edmund. The same thin shoulders, and his clothes, of course, and the way it stands looking sadly down at the ground. It’s a caricature of Edmund. One of those freak accidents. I wonder if they realize it. Edmund is not sad, exactly, but there was a period in his life when he was neither as happy or as hopeful as he is now. Dorothy is a very nice woman. Not at all maternal, I would say. At least, she doesn’t mother Edmund. And when you see her with some woman with a baby, she always seems totally indifferent. Edmund was married before, and his first wife left him. Helena was selfish but likable, the way selfish people sometimes are. And where Edmund was concerned, completely heartless. I don’t know why. She used to turn the radio on full blast at two o’clock in the morning, when he had to get up at six-thirty to catch a commuting train. And once she sewed a ruffle all the way around the bed he was trying to sleep in. Edmund told me that her mother preferred her older sister, and that Helena’s whole childhood had been made miserable because of it. He tried every way he could think of to please her and make her happy, and with most women that would have been enough, I suppose, but it only increased her dissatisfaction. Maybe if there had been any children … She used to walk up and down the road in a long red cloak, in the wintertime when there was snow on the ground. And she used to talk about New York. And it was as if she was under a spell and waiting to be delivered. Now she blames Edmund for the divorce. She tells everybody that he took advantage of her. Perhaps he did, unconsciously. Consciously, he wouldn’t take advantage of a fly. I think he needs analysis, but he’s very much opposed to it. Scared to death of it, in fact …”
Step by step, Gerald Martin had managed to put a safe distance between himself and the dream, and he was beginning to breathe easier in the complacent viewing of someone else’s failure to meet his problems squarely when the voice said, “Well — see you again?”
“I wish to Christ you wouldn’t say that! As if I had any choice in the matter.”
His sudden fury was ignored. A familiar hypnotic routine obliged him to sit up and put his feet over the side of the couch. The voice became attached to an elderly man with thick glasses and a round face that Gerald would never get used to. He got up unsteadily and walked toward the door. Only when he was outside, standing in front of the elevator shaft, did he remember that the sewing room had a door opening into his mother and father’s bedroom, and at one period of his life he had slept there, in a bed with sides that could be let down, a child’s bed. This information was safe from the man inside — unless he happened to think of it while he was lying on the couch next time.
That evening he stopped when he came to the Fishers’ vegetable garden and turned the engine off and took a good look at the scarecrow. Then, after a minute or two, afraid that he would be seen from the house, he started the car and drove on.
THE Fishers’ scarecrow was copied from a scarecrow in France. The summer before, they had spent two weeks as paying guests in a country house in the Touraine, in the hope that this would improve their French. The improvement was all but imperceptible to them afterward, but they did pick up a number of ideas about gardening. In the potager, fruit trees, tree roses, flowers, and vegetables were mingled in a way that aroused their admiration, and there was a more than ordinarily fanciful scarecrow, made out of a blue peasant’s smock, striped morning trousers, and a straw hat. Under the hat the stuffed head had a face painted on it; and not simply two eyes, a nose, and a mouth but a face with a sly expression. The scarecrow stood with arms upraised, shaking its white-gloved fists at the sky. Indignant, self-centered, half crazy, it seemed to be saying: This is what it means to be exposed to experience. The crows were not taken in.
Effects that had needed generations of dedicated French gardeners to bring about were not, of course, to be imitated successfully by two amateur gardeners in Fairfield County in a single summer. The Fishers gave up the idea of marking off the paths of their vegetable garden with espaliered dwarf apple and pear trees, and they could see no way of having tree roses without also having to spray them, and afterward having to eat the spray. But they did plant zinnias, marigolds, and blue pansies in with the lettuce and the peas, and they made a very good scarecrow. Dorothy made it, actually. She was artistic by inclination, and threw herself into all such undertakings with a childish pleasure.
She made the head out of a dish towel stuffed with hay, and was delighted with the blue stripe running down the face. Then she got out her embroidery thread and embroidered a single eye, gathered the cloth in the middle of the face into a bulbous nose, made the mouth leering. For the body she used a torn pair of Edmund’s blue jeans she was tired of mending, and a faded blue workshirt. When Edmund, who was attached to his old clothes, saw that she had also helped herself to an Army fatigue hat from the shelf in the hall closet, he exclaimed, “Hey, don’t use that hat for the scarecrow! I wear it sometimes.”
“When do you wear it?”
“I wear it to garden in.”
“You can wear some other old hat to garden in. He’s got to have something on his head,” she said lightly, and made the hat brim dip down over the blank eye.
“When winter comes, I’ll wear it again,” Edmund said to himself, “if it doesn’t shrink too much, or fall apart in the rain.”
The scarecrow stood looking toward the house, with one arm limp and one arm extended stiffly, ending in a gloved hand holding a stick. After a few days the head sank and sank until it was resting on the straw breastbone, and the face was concealed by the brim of the hat. They tried to keep the head up with a collar of twisted grass, but the grass dried, and the head sank once more, and in that attitude it remained.
The scarecrow gave them an eerie feeling when they saw it from the bedroom window at twilight. A man standing in the vegetable garden would have looked like a scarecrow. If he didn’t move. Dorothy had never lived in the country before she married Edmund, and at first she was afraid. The black windows at night made her nervous. She heard noises in the basement, caused by the steam circulating through the furnace pipes. And she would suddenly have the feeling — even though she knew it was only her imagination — that there was a man outside, looking through the windows at them. “Shouldn’t we invite him in?” Edmund would say when her glance strayed for a second. “Offer him a drink and let him sit by the fire? It’s not a very nice night out.”
He assumed that The Man Outside represented for her all the childish fears — the fear of the dark, of the burglar on the stairs, of what else he had no way of knowing. Nor she either, probably. The Man Outside was simply there, night after night, for about six weeks, and then he lost his power to frighten, and finally went away entirely, leaving the dark outside as familiar and safe to her as the lighted living room. It was Edmund, strangely, who sometimes, as they were getting ready for bed, went to the front and back doors and locked them. For he was aware that the neighborhood was changing, and that things were happening — cars stolen, houses broken into in broad daylight — that never used to happen in this part of the world.
THE Fishers’ white clapboard house was big and rambling, much added onto at one time or another, but in its final form still plain and pleasant-looking. The original house dated from around 1840. Edmund’s father, who was a New York banker until he retired at the age of sixty-five, had bought it before the First World War. At that time there were only five houses on this winding country road, and two of them were farmhouses. When the Fishers came out from town for the summer, they were met at the railroad station by a man with a horse and carriage. The surrounding country was hilly and offered many handsome views, and most of the local names were to be found on old tombstones in the tiny Presbyterian churchy
ard. Edmund’s mother was a passionate and scholarly gardener, the founder of the local garden club and its president for twenty-seven years. Her regal manner was quite unconscious, and based less on the usual foundations of family, money, etc., than on the authority with which she could speak about the culture of delphinium and lilies, or the pruning of roses. The house was set back from the road about three hundred yards, and behind it were the tennis courts, the big three-story barn, a guest house overlooking the pond where all the children in the neighborhood skated in winter, and, eventually, a five-car garage. Back of the pond, a wagon road went off into the woods and up onto higher ground. In the late twenties, when Edmund used to bring his school friends home for spring and fall weekends and the Easter vacation, the house seemed barely large enough to hold them all. During the last war, when the taxes began to be burdensome, Edmund’s father sold off the back land, with the guest house, the barn, and the pond, to a Downtown lawyer, who shortly afterward sold it to a manufacturer of children’s underwear. The elder Mr. and Mrs. Fisher started to follow the wagon road back into the woods one pleasant Sunday afternoon, and he ordered them off his property. He was quite within his rights, of course, but nevertheless it rankled. “In the old days,” they would say whenever the man’s name was mentioned, “you could go anywhere, on anybody’s land, and no one ever thought of stopping you.”
Edmund’s father, working from his own rough plans and supervising the carpenters and plumbers and masons himself, had converted the stone garage into a house, and he had sold it to Gerald Martin, who was a bachelor. The elder Fishers were now living in the Virgin Islands the year round, because of Mrs. Fisher’s health. Edmund and Dorothy still had ten acres, but they shared the cinder drive with Gerald and the clothing manufacturer, and, of course, had less privacy than before. The neighborhood itself was no longer the remote place it used to be. The Merritt Parkway had made all the difference. Instead of five houses on the two-and-a-half-mile stretch of dirt road, there were twenty-five, and the road was macadamized. Cars and delivery trucks cruised up and down it all day long.
All the Days and Nights Page 13