She was looking at television. There had been talk of the possibility of a colossal new war; Clinton wondered if its beginning was now being announced. But what he saw on the screen was a familiar master of ceremonies, nearly as overcome with emotion as his mother. He was reading song titles into a microphone. After a moment, Annabel exclaimed, “I would have won!” She was near tears.
Clinton said, “Won what?”
“I had all three! It’s World War I song titles. Give My Regards to Broadway, Hello, Central, Give Me No Man’s Land, and Indianola. Of course, any fool could have got the first one, but the others were real toughies! How many people today know Indianola? ‘Ta-te-ta-te-ta-da, I love your harem eyes’.”
Clinton said, “I thought I’d go out tomorrow and get some kind of a job.”
“Imagine,” Annabel said, “I had the envelope all addressed, everything. The only difference between me and that lady in Milwaukee is, she mailed hers.” And then, “What?”
“I thought just some kind of a job for a while, to keep occupied.”
“Why, that’s a grand idea, maybe part time at the post office. Just for the Christmas rush. Then next semester, who knows? Will you come and kiss me?”
Clinton kissed his mother on the forehead. Her eyes were damp, filled with emotion—but whether for himself or for the lady in Milwaukee, he could not be certain.
“Clinton, you’ll think I’ve lost my mind, but do you know I’ve got Indianola all mixed up with Dardanella?” She turned to the television. “I wish they’d play it again.”
Clinton went to his bedroom and brought the notebook up-to-date.
Now, this day in the Williams house had been like many that had passed before and many that were yet to come. Similar late morning scenes took place in Clinton’s bedroom and in the kitchen and basement, and the issues at stake shifted only slightly. Clinton did not find work. Annabel laid this failure to the fact that only early birds caught worms: no one had ever been hired for any kind of job after twelve o’clock noon; you had to be there wearing a starched shirt when the place opened its doors at 9:00 A.M. Then they knew you meant business.
But the actual reason for Clinton’s continued unemployment was the fact that, even though he appeared at many places in starched shirts, he failed to tell anyone he wanted to be hired. He could not believe that anyone would take his request for a job seriously: a person with nervous habits who needed professional counsel could hardly expect anyone to pay him for his services. They might even laugh at him.
But he did spend five afternoons a week away from the house. Every now and then on a clear day he would go downtown on the streetcar and sit on the steps of the City Hall where old men fed pigeons, or out in front of the Public Library where groups of college students huddled together in the winter sunshine smoking cigarettes and looking wiser than the rest of the world. On colder days or when it snowed, Clinton did not venture far from home. He found a number of places where he could sit indoors without being too conspicuous. Afternoons were slow at the Aloha Sweet Shop, and so long as the visit did not extend itself for more than, say, a half-hour, the manager seemed to enjoy his company.
One day, at another of his stops, Voitek’s Dependable Pharmacy, he did a favor for Mr. Voitek: the floor was covered with melting slush that had fallen in cakes from the customers’ galoshes; Clinton took the broom from the old druggist and swept the mess out the front door for him. For a while the performance of this task gave the boy an almost proprietary feeling about the place, and at the soda fountain he often used the end stool, the same one that Mr. Voitek himself sat on when he rested. But one day Clinton went too far. Mr. Voitek had been out in back filling a prescription, when a second customer walked in and stood at the cigarette counter. Clinton had a sudden impulse to wait on him: in this way he might demonstrate to Voitek his value as a possible employee. The man wanted a cigar. Clinton, with all the appearance of boldness, though his heart beat heavy under his shirt, went behind the counter and brought out the box of cigars. The customer made his selection and left the correct number of coins on the counter. When the druggist came back up front, Clinton handed him the money and described the transaction to him. Mr. Voitek frowned and he did not look Clinton in the eyes when he said: “I thank you, but I don’t like a customer behind my counter. And you not a customer, you don’t buy nothing. And you not work here eeder. I thank you.” He rang the cash register and deposited the coins. He did not sit down at the fountain as usual, but made himself appear very busy at the cigarette counter. Clinton moved slowly toward the door, whistling in his effort to appear casual. He did not want Mr. Voitek to think he was leaving because of what had taken place between them. But once outside, he quickened his pace and hurried through the cold gray slush like a fugitive. When he stopped for a traffic light, his head whirled dizzily, his body was hot and moist, and he felt so weak he wanted to sit down right there on the curbstone.
But aside from the Aloha and Voitek’s Dependable Pharmacy, Clinton had several other stops: two chain drugstores, a chili-con-carne place, a magazine store, and the White Tower. Mevvin from Heaven was always glad to see him, but Clinton knew he was in danger of wearing out his welcome and so he timed these visits accordingly.
He rarely returned to the Old Neighborhood any more. Perhaps once in two or three weeks he would go there to wait for Mildred Murphy on the corner where he knew she caught her bus when school let out. Mildred Murphy was usually good for an hour’s conversation, but there were never any letters from Berry-berry.
On the first day of December, Annabel received an answer to her letter to Bernice O’Brien. Clinton managed to get hold of it within a few hours after its arrival: when Annabel took her afternoon bath, he saw his opportunity and seized it. He could see, in the penmanship itself, sprawling and childlike, all the pain in the hand that had written it.
Nov. 27
DEAREST ANNABEL,
Your letter big event for me. Excuse writing, hard to manage pen, but pain not bad now. Thanksgiving lovely, Echo cooked with all trimmings, so devoted I worry she may miss out on life of own. We play cards, she does my hair each Saturday, sits with me evenings, tries to read to me but is hard for her as has no literary bent. But is getting to be good mechanic, put new motor in her Dodge all by self, and so feminine never even gets clothes or hands dirty. Whod ever guess she’s strong as mule. Make good wife some day but meets nobody. Loves her mother and so patient with useless old woman. At night in bed with eyes closed I study you and family. Don’t worry, everything works out, law of nature. Your dream of old days makes me cry, you sweet thing. But smile and pray, everything okay in end. Forgive shortness, hand tired. Write soon to your loving friend
B—
P.S. I see your older boy and X-mas tree in same picture. Holiday visitor may surprise you. So smile and pray.
Christmas preparations began at once. Clinton knew that this postscript in Bernice O’Brien’s letter had lighted a fuse in Annabel. Though she scarcely mentioned Berry-berry at all, he knew she had accepted Bernice’s prophecy as fact. Clinton was afraid to share this belief himself. His experience had taught him that if you wanted a thing too much, you would not get it. You would only be doomed to wanting it all the more and your longing would be more painful than ever. He therefore worried about Annabel, who devoted all her powers to preparations. When she spoke of the holiday, he felt he saw an invisible jaw squared as she led her invisible armies across the days of December. “By heaven, we’re going to have a Christmas,” she said repeatedly, and each time with renewed intensity until the word “Christmas” contained all the guttural determination of a war cry. Indeed, “Christmas” had become the name of the archenemy that marched toward them. It would strike on the 25th of the month, and by all the gods of dime stores, mail-order catalogues and cookbooks, the Williamses—her actions seemed to serve notice on the enemy—the Williamses would have their larders stocked, their tree would blaze in the window like a torch. She brought out greeting
cards received in other years and glued the prettiest hundred of them to the doorframes. She shopped each day and baked long into the nights. No other subject was worthy of discussion: “I have no time for that, don’t you see?” And pausing only long enough to retie an apron or to check her many “lists,” she pressed tirelessly forward in her strategy of cookies and candles and ornaments. Higher and higher grew the bulwarks of mincemeat, gift wrappings and holly, as Bing Crosby on the radio inspired the resistance forces with musical promises of snow. The newspapers each day kept the count in a front-page box: Twelve more shopping days till Christmas! it threatened; and then nine, eight, seven; the number diminished ominously. For a time things began to go haywire, a cake fell, a package refused to arrive, or the weatherman did not foresee snow. The footsteps of Christmas echoed in the distance, and there was every possibility that with some mistake in timing they would be unprepared for it.
Ralph merely tended the stoker and sipped his bourbon in the basement. His pacifism galled her, but Annabel’s efforts increased in intensity. She glutted the mails with greeting cards and handkerchiefs and mufflers. She prepared envelopes with two-dollar tokens for the mailman, the milkman, the breadman, and the newsboy. The newsboy’s nose was always running that winter: Annabel noticed this and included in his envelope a box of Four-Way Cold Tablets and a note:
DEAR LITTLE BOY,
Season’s Greetings. Take these faithfully and that head will clear right up. Best wishes.
MRS. WILLIAMS
She packed Berry-berry’s share of fruitcake and cookies and gifts in a large cardboard box. When it was all wrapped and tied and ready for the post office, she placed it under the tree with the address sticker left blank. But Clinton knew that she believed privately the box would never be posted: Berry-berry would be there in person to open it in the Williams living room.
Now, in a Christian country not even a professed atheist can be totally indifferent to the advent of Christmas; and Ralph Williams was to make his own peculiar contribution to the holiday. It had been a month of bitter cold, and through many of these long evenings, in which he listened to the cruel winds that beat upon his basement windows, the old man was besieged with memories of his own earlier Decembers. He told Clinton of a Christmas Eve he had spent in Grand Island, Nebraska, hungry and cold, in the back seat of a parked car whose owner had left it unlocked; another, in a Salvation Army place in Cincinnati, Ohio; and one year he and two companions broke into a tomb in a Dearborn, Michigan, graveyard, where they passed a sleepless Christmas night huddled together against its marble walls. These thoughts of his own hard times, now long past, caused him to ponder the present situation of millions of others. He told Clinton of the hungry Chinese, the Eskimos, the Navajo Indians, the Negroes, the homeless refugees everywhere, and of all the wanderers of the world.
“But you know what we are?” At this, he raised his voice and projected it toward the laundry chute: “We’re the fat-asses of the world. We just sit here and think about it, and stuff all the cupboards full of fruitcake!” In his heart, he laid all the blame for the world’s wretchedness upon Annabel’s indifference to it. The more she baked and laid by for the stomachs of the Williamses, the deeper his bitterness grew.
But suddenly, on the morning of the day before Christmas, this sullenness disappeared, mysteriously to Annabel, altogether. Indeed, Ralph became so remarkably cheerful that she looked for an opportunity to sniff his breath: there was bourbon on it, but since she couldn’t remember a time when there had not been, the clue was useless to her. When he left the house in mid-afternoon, with spirits so exalted that he kissed her on the mouth, Annabel was forced to conclude that by some miracle Ralph had been so touched by the contagion of her own Christmas zeal that he had actually gone out to buy a present for her. If this were true, she might even hope that another miracle would see him standing next to her in church, flanked by his sons, on Christmas morning.
When he failed to return for supper, other possible explanations crept quietly into the corners of her imagination, but none of them were ugly enough to subdue her own high spirits. She served Clinton a simple meal in the kitchen—the real gorging did not begin, traditionally, until Christmas itself—but her own appetite was small. A taste of soup and half a slice of bread was all she could manage.
When dishes were out of the way, Annabel took a long hot bath. Then, as if she were dressing for a lover, she spent forty minutes applying make-up and removing curlers from her hair. She put on a new dress, a dark blue one with a full skirt that rustled when she moved; matching earrings and necklace, set with false sapphires; and her high-heeled shoes.
It was not until she made her appearance in the living room and, with an elaborate crinkling and whooshing of her skirts, arranged herself on a pouf at the foot of the Christmas tree, that she admitted to herself the existence of some doubt as to Berry-berry’s returning for the holiday. If she had thought by her elaborate preparations to exclude from her mind this painful possibility, Annabel’s error was great. But if her private wish had been to set up a vivid backdrop against which to play her Christmas Eve drama of the mother who sits in her chair, waiting, candle in the window, for the return of the prodigal who never arrives, then her labors had not gone unrewarded. For the garish carnival trappings of the holiday seemed only to call attention to the emptiness of all of his places in the house. Who can say for sure which of these ends she had envisioned? perhaps both. For a woman’s heart is known to be a battleground of conflicting sentiments, and her deepest wishes are often a mystery even to herself.
At any rate, Annabel wept inconsolably. When Clinton entered the living room he found her in the last stages of her sorrow, blowing her nose. She smiled brightly: “Merry Christmas, precious.”
Clinton sensed something of insincerity in both her gaiety and her tears. “What’s wrong?” he said.
“Oh, it’s just I’m so happy. Mothers are crazy creatures, you know that. —Isn’t the tree perfect? It’s beautifully shaped. We always have such well-shaped trees, I lose my mind deciding which part to face to the wall. And my favorite ornament is still that lovely angel. What time is it?”
“Ten o’clock.”
“Oh, just ten o’clock? That’s the shank of the evening. Now, which is your favorite?”
“Favorite what?”
“Ornament.”
“I guess the angel,” Clinton said, without considering the matter at all. Then he glanced at the top of the tree: a haggard old doll with misshapen wings perched there in the branches, smiling benignly upon the room. It was like the image of a dilapidated chorus girl who had gone mad and fled to the top of the tree to escape her keepers.
Clinton handed his mother a small package. “Here. Merry Christmas.”
Annabel praised the wrappings, and then, holding the box to her ears, she shook it, acting out a pantomime of curiosity over its contents. All of this she performed with a little girl’s sense of wonder that was unbecoming to her; in repose, her face was pretty enough, but this posturing seemed to sharpen and distort her small features. “Dare I open it?” she said. “As a rule I wouldn’t open a stick of gum till Christmas morning, but I just don’t think I can wait. Shall I do it?”
“I don’t care.”
“All right then, here goes!”
The box contained six ball-point pens, purchased through the mail from the crippled war veteran in North Dakota. Each pen was of a different color and each had ANNABEL WILLIAMS stamped on it in gold.
“Why, what are they?” she said.
“Ball-point pens!”
“Ball-point? The kind that slides off the paper?”
Clinton said, “Yeah, but they’ve got your name stamped on ‘em in gold.”
“And they’re lovely. But my tenth anniversary pen is still good as new. —Awwh, bless your heart, lover, that’s very sweet. But you know how everyone admires my handwriting, how graceful it is, and six of them, my heaven, won’t they look pretty on my desk? That’s
what I’ll do, I’ll put them on my desk. What ever made you get six?”
“They’re different colors, and I thought, like say, if you wore a blue dress, then . . .”
“Oh! For different outfits! Well, you’ve got the biggest darned heart of anybody. Here, I’ll leave the box open so people can see.”
The sight of these pens, sitting at the base of the tree where she placed them, caused in Clinton a sudden wave of hatred for himself and for Annabel and, more than ever before, for this house they lived in. Its barnlike proportions were suddenly dwarfed, and he felt that its walls pressed in on them like those of a tiny jail cell.
“You know, Annabel, I think all this crap in here’s gonna make everybody feel lousy.”
“All of what ‘crap’?”
“I don’t mean crap exactly, but this Christmas stuff. I mean, I think this family’s got to the point where Christmas’d be better if we didn’t make such a big do over it.”
Annabel’s hand went to her chin. “I can’t believe my ears,” she said.
“Okay, excuse me, maybe I’m wrong, that’s all.”
“Clinton, just answer me something: do you think I went to all this agony for myself?”
“Look, please just forget I said anything. All of a sudden I just got kind of nervous is all.”
At this moment, the front door opened. Ralph Williams entered. “Just a moment, gentlemen,” he said to whomever the people were who waited for him on the porch. “Just one moment.”
He closed the door softly and approached the pouf where Annabel sat, her face distorted by an equal mixture of pain and puzzlement.
“Now listen to me, Annabel.” Ralph lowered his head and pinned her to silence with his eyes. “On our front porch there stand three children of God, orphans of misfortune, whom I have invited to spend this night and tomorrow under my roof. Shut up.”
She had scarcely opened her mouth.
He continued: “You’re gonna stuff their gullets with about half that food you got stashed away in there, then we’ll put ‘em to bed with a bottle o’ whisky apiece. Keep still. In the morning, I want you to give ‘em some of that junk under the tree there. And if you betray by an eyelash that they’re anything less than welcome in Ralph Williams’ house, I’ll beat your rear end till it’s black and blue.”
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