All Fall Down

by James Leo Herlihy

  FINIS

  In the summertime a family of Clevelanders will experience some distressing hot spells, but on the whole it is not a miserable season. Any extreme in the weather is apt to provoke trouble among persons who are sad to begin with. But as far as contented people are concerned, the mercury may do as it pleases without placing much real strain on the spirits.

  And so it was for the Williamses of Seminary Street and their frequent visitor from Toledo. During this long and happy summer Echo O’Brien spent most of her weekends in Cleveland, and the three full weeks of her August vacation as well.

  For her and for Berry-berry it became the summer of their romance. The love affair between these two was known to each member of the family; and its continuance was so fervent a wish in each of them that no one ever risked any direct mention of the possibility to either of the lovers: perhaps, as a thing of beauty, it seemed too fragile to meddle with at all.

  Ralph Williams, on the weekdays, saw to the upkeep of his rental properties. And he sold a small apartment house that had been on his meager list for more than fourteen months. His own commission from the transaction was negligible, but his chief profit was in his own view of himself: it made of him once again a man of affairs. He took pleasure in the most tedious details of the deal, and when it was concluded he even took the seller and the purchaser downtown and bought them lunch in a hotel. At this lunch, Ralph himself swallowed nothing more substantial than a shrimp cocktail. He drank a good deal of liquor, however, and when the party broke up, his spirits were such that he was unable to locate his automobile. After searching the streets for more than an hour, he finally arrived home in a taxi and headed straight for the telephone. Annabel was unable to dissuade him. Nor was Ralph to be contented with a mere report of the situation to the Police Department. Among the calls he put in that afternoon were three to various officials at the City Hall, including the City Attorney himself, and one to the City Desk of the Plain Dealer. To each of these gentlemen in turn, he enumerated the ghastly dangers implicit in their flagrant indifference to the crime wave that was sweeping Cleveland. The next day the police located the car for him, on the street where he had parked it and the whole affair caused no one any serious trouble. But Ralph was back in business; and the following week he started to clean out his old file cabinets.

  Annabel attended with renewed pleasure to her household duties. It was in her nature to be a good housekeeper. She liked making lists and paying bills, and the sound of a vacuum cleaner was no mere nuisance to her ear: it gave her comfort. On long afternoons alone, rather than let time go stale on her hands, she wrote lengthy letters to Bernice O’Brien or attended matinees at the Cleveland Playhouse; and sometimes she made popsicles out of Kool-Aid and passed them out among certain pint-sized friends she had newly cultivated in the neighborhood.

  Clinton continued with his job at Frankie’s Two-Minute Auto Wash. All in all, he was having a good summer, but his problems were these: how to persevere in his resolution to keep away from his notebook; and how to refrain from insinuating himself into the love affair between Berry-berry and Echo. He found that he was not actually jealous of Berry-berry, but of the secrets the two of them shared. He was forever creeping about the house, barefooted, spying on them and listening to their private conversations. If they were on the front porch, Clinton was at the side of the house, sitting in the bushes. If they were in the basement, he was crouching in the driveway outside the window, or sitting on the edge of the bathtub with his head inside the laundry chute. When he got hold of something worth listening to, he then had to summon all the powers of his will to restrain himself from writing it down. Often, when the lovers planned to drive off somewhere to be alone for an evening, they would find Clinton hanging about the car; and without ever asking to be included in the outing, he sometimes presented to them a demeanor so forlorn that Echo and Berry-berry, after a brief and whispered exchange among themselves, would insist that he come along. These occasions were usually painful from beginning to end; he knew they wanted to be alone, just the two of them, but he seldom found the strength to refuse.

  In this way, Clinton’s problems fed one another and grew larger and larger until, at last, it occurred to him that if he returned to his notebook he might have greater success in keeping out of the way of the lovers.

  [Clinton’s Notebook]

  I hereby choose, of my own free will, to write things down again, whenever I goddam well feel like it. Why shouldn’t I? I went practically the whole entire summer without it, which proves I’m not some kind of a madman on the subject. Also, I certainly don’t want to turn out to be the kind of a person that makes a resolution, and then he’d rather kill himself than break it, which would be really nutty. Then it would be like the resolution was some terrible kind of a habit that you couldn’t get away from. In fact, the way I see it, resolutions can be very harmful to a person.

  For instance, I missed a hell of a lot of good stuff this summer. Frankly, though, I don’t mind at all. Because I’ve definitely noticed that when people are sore at somebody else, or they’re miserable, or they’ve got some kind of a gripe, then they have this tendency to say more interesting stuff. Take this summer for instance, Annabel’s been going around making potato salad and singing songs in the kitchen and making excuses for people. This stuff is not any too interesting to put down. I’m crazy about it and all, but it sort of goes in and out of my ears without making much of a dent. She says all these nice things about everybody, and about the weather and the flowers. And not phony either, because she means it, and is not half as nervous any more either. I think it’s because Reason A, she’s gotten over the change of life, and Reason B, Berry-berry’s around all the time. Plus Echo. Also, she’s been doing quite a bit of praying. Every now and then I catch her at it. I see her at the side of her bed, kneeling down and all, and my own personal hunch is that she’s praying about Berry-berry and Echo. I get the feeling that Annabel thinks if she holds her breath long enough and keeps praying a lot, the two of them will get married and have about twenty kids. Which I personally wouldn’t mind at all either, because it’s quite nerve-racking to just wonder about it all the time, I mean about whether or not you’re going to have all these nephews and nieces and sister-in-laws living about a block away. Personally, I wouldn’t mind it at all, a whole neighborhood full of little kids I’d be the uncle of, and pretty soon I’d have about forty of them around my neck, wanting to horn in on everything and be taken places and bought things for. They’d probably drive me out of my head and keep me broke half the time, but frankly, I wouldn’t mind it too much. It’s just that at the moment there’s quite a bit of suspense about the whole thing. The way they’re going at it, I mean Berry-berry and Echo, the way they’re doing is like there’s no tomorrow. They’re always getting in and out of cars, or flying hell-bent up the street, or running into the house to change clothes and eat and fly back out again. It’s nerve-racking as hell. What I’d like is to be sliced right down the middle and have half of me sewed on to Echo and the other half sewed on to Berry-berry, and then when they were flying in and out of the place, and up the street a hundred miles an hour going Christ knows where, then I’d not only know where they were going and what they were doing, I’d be there, and doing it with them, and it still wouldn’t be like three’s a crowd, or anything.

  These are the kind of nerve-racking things I’ve been thinking about quite a bit this summer, because of all this suspense around here.

  The world needs to have its Indian summer. The sun has retreated, deep into the skies, a kind of death has taken place. Indian summer shows the world in its most brilliant colors, and most sad, too, lying, as it were, in state. As a rule, in this gentle season, the people pass by, paying their respects, and in this way accustom themselves to the approach of winter.

  But the autumn of this year was a freakish season. The warm time had no real September in which slowly to wane and die; the last weeks of this ninth month were as cold as
any ordinary November should be. The leaves had hardly turned color before strong winds and icy rains had beaten most of them from their branches and made a pulpy slush on the sidewalks and streets. Even on fair days the sunlight was muted by a vast and heavy veil of clouds, and there was not much color to be seen in the city—only on the traffic lights and certain bold umbrellas. The early days of October did bring sudden and sunny splotches of warmth, intermingled with more rains, so that on certain afternoons children could walk home from school with their sweaters under their arms or tied about their necks, and there were brief and frantic rashes of roller-skating in the streets; but even on the finest mornings, most people, already made cautious by so many bleak surprises, left their houses wearing raincoats and rubbers.

  It was as if the sun, by some awful accident, had suddenly been snatched from the world, and in the place of Indian summer was this terrible art of the skies, a phantasm of gloom and judgment and anger, with only the briefest glimpses of blue and gold.

  And so it was, right into the second week of October, when Ralph Williams contracted a cold. Annabel had heard of recent instances of older persons who had gone from colds into pneumonia and died from it. Ralph hated the idea of death, and he offered only slight resistance when Annabel, after a telephone diagnosis from Dr. Bolz, argued that he should be put to bed.

  Therefore when Saturday came around it looked as if Ralph’s room would be the family’s weekend headquarters. When Echo O’Brien arrived from Toledo at noon, she rushed straight up the stairs and found him and Clinton engaged in a game of checkers. The old man received her with a bleary-eyed grin. He was propped up on pillows and wearing brand-new green pajamas with a mandarin collar that made him look like a jolly and wicked old Buddha. Echo paused just inside the door, pocketbook in one hand, car keys in the other, her eyes big with concern.

  “Ralph, I swear, if I’d known you was sick, I’d have brung my thermometer and nurse’s cap and two barrels of beer. Good lord, now listen, tell me how you feel?”

  “Terrible. I got enough germs to wipe out this entire town.”

  Echo started toward him, but he withdrew like a leper. “No, no, no! Unclean, unclean! Oh, Christ, woman, don’t come near me!” But she went over and kissed the top of his bald head.

  “That’s better,” he said.

  She gave Clinton a kiss on the cheek. “How’s m’guy?” she said. Then she started to pace the floor, rattling her car keys.

  “I’m okay,” Clinton said. “Only I was afraid you weren’t comin.’ What happened?”

  “Well, baby, two weeks is about all I can go without a look at you. I mean it, too, that’s the awful truth.”

  Clinton watched her as she wandered aimlessly about the room. He liked to watch her move. Her clothes were always cut in a way that made them move with her body, in the same rhythm.

  “Besides,” she said, “Mamma wanted me to come. Makes her feel bad if I stay home just for her account. Where’s Berry-berry?”

  “He didn’t get here yet,” Clinton said.

  Echo leaned on the windowsill and looked at the sky. “It started out like a real pretty day. Didn’t it? I can’t tell what it’s gonna do next, though. Oh, but I had such a scrumptious drive comin’ down. Made it in just under two hours. I mean, sweetheart, I moved! I’m not claimin’ I set a record, but who’d believe that old girl had so much speed left in her.” She walked over to the bedroom door. “I got something to tell Annabel.” She called down the stairs. “Annabel! I know you’re in that kitchen. And I know what you’re doin’ in there, too!”

  Annabel’s voice came from the downstairs hallway.

  “Well, aren’t you just starved?”

  “Now, see? That’s what I mean. And if you fix me anything, I’m goin’ to slap your fingers. I got something to tell you.”

  “But I know you’re starved!” Annabel said.

  “I’m not really, darlin’. I’m truly not. Can I help with Ralph’s tray?”

  “Absolutely not. Just keep him busy up there.” Annabel’s voice receded as she returned to the kitchen.

  In the bedroom, Ralph studied the checkerboard. “I don’t know how I got into this hole,” he said. “I think my mind is deteriorated. I think I’m senile is my trouble.”

  Clinton watched Echo in her aimless progress about the room. She sat at Annabel’s dressing table, her keys silent for a moment, and she said: “Now, let’s see. I had three things to tell, for cryin’ out loud, and I can’t remember a one of them.”

  Now, unaware that Clinton was watching her every move, Echo suddenly focused on her own image in the mirror. Some aspect of what she found there caused her to tremble; for a brief instant her eyes closed and her body seemed to buckle from within. Clinton felt that what she had experienced in that moment was not physical pain—but a flash of terror. It had been so brief he could not even be certain that it had taken place at all. But he had lost all interest in the game, and watched her more closely than ever.

  Echo began immediately to chatter once again, as if nothing had happened. “Oh, I know one, anyway. This one’s for Annabel when she comes up. The Buckeye China Company’s havin’ this gigantic sale, seen about a dozen big signs on the highway.” She had turned from the mirror and fixed her gaze on something outside the window. Clinton thought her face looked slightly puffed. In spite of a heavy application of powder, there was a darkness showing through under the skin surrounding her eyes; and in the eyes themselves, usually alive with such profound inner brightness, there was an almost beladonna-like glaze that suggested some mild hysteria. She had painted herself with exceptional care, but perhaps somewhat too heavily.

  She turned suddenly to Clinton and gave him a big smile, and winked at him. He knew he had been caught staring, and looked quickly at the checkerboard.

  “Where’d you move to ?” he said to Ralph.

  “Where the hell would I move to?” Ralph said. “I’m in a goddam corner, for Chrisake.”

  “And the second thing is,” Echo said, “I had an offer from a Dodge dealer who’ll give me seven hundred and fifty on a trade-in for my limousine.”

  “I hope you spit in his eye,” Ralph said.

  “Well, I said, ‘Mister, you’re going to have to do better’n that. This car’s a lady and don’t like insults!’ —Course, I wouldn’t sell her, Ralph, you know that. So what if she drinks oil like an elephant? I told him, too, I said, ‘Listen, she drinks oil like an elephant.’ But he don’t care. He just wants to have her settin’ out front, to show off how a Dodge gets to be a million years old without even a whimper. Which is smart on his part. Don’t you think he’s smart?” She walked over to the window and looked down at the street where the old Dodge was parked. Clinton went to the window and stood at her side. She linked her arm in his, and said, “Look at that sweet thing. Now I’m going to say something goofy, but you know, that gorgeous old flivver puts me in mind of the Queen of England. I don’t mean the real queen-queen, but the mamma queen. You know which one? —Listen, if I had to put caviar in her crankcase every ten minutes, I wouldn’t sell her for a million bucks. Now that’s a lie, baby, I would. But you see what I mean?” She turned away from the window. “Now I’m going to play the winner. Who’s the winner, gentlemen? Look out, ‘cause Echo Malvina O’Brien is rollin’ up her sleeves!”

  “You play, Ralph,” Clinton said.

  “But you won.”

  “I want to watch.”

  “Well,” Ralph said, resetting the board, “I don’t mind playin’ another game.”

  “I just thought of number three,” Echo said. “Now listen, Ralph, this is for you. Mamma’s takin’ up phrenology, and she says you got more on the dime than Albert Schweitzer. You know, Schweitzer! That went to Africa with the mustache? Who Mamma has read every single word of, that’s he’s written.”

  Ralph looked at Echo. “Where’d Bernice O’Brien ever get hold of a sample of my handwriting?”

  “No, Ralph,” she said, “phrenology is b
ones. Skulls and noses and all. Remember them snapshots I took a while back? Well, she took one look at you and said, ‘Ralph Williams is a genius!’ “

  Ralph’s hand went instinctively to his head. “Is that what she said? I wonder if there’s anything to it?” He felt his skull with his fingertips.

  “Oh, a hundred per cent,” Echo said. “Listen, I showed her a picture of Felix Frankfurter, who she’d never laid eyes on before, and what do you suppose she said right off the bat? ‘Why,’ she said, ‘I don’t know what that man does, but what he ought to do is be a judge!’ —I’m tellin’ you, she absolutely floors everybody in Toledo. But the point is that you are a humanitarian of the first water. —Now am I red or black?”

  Clinton said, “Did you show her a picture of me?”

  “I sure did!” Echo said.

  “What she say?”

  “Well, she said if you had a haircut, she’d know more. But she swears you got a dandy imagination.”

  “What about Berry-berry?” he said.

  “What about him?”

  “I mean,” Clinton explained, “did she say what kind of bones he’s got?”

  “Who, Berry-berry?” Echo said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh. Uh-huh. Well, it was all kind of complicated. Sometimes Mamma gets astrology mixed into it. —Now I’ve got to concentrate. I’m black, right?” She moved one of the checkers. “I had a system for this game once, but it’s gone completely out of my head. Clint, will you reach into my pocketbook and help yourself to a cigarette and light one for me? Lately, if I’m not smokin’, my mind turns to oatmeal.”

  “You want a little drink?” Ralph said.

  “No thank you, Ralph, it’d put me right to sleep.”

  Clinton went to the dressing table and opened Echo’s pocketbook. He had been through it before on a number of occasions, both at Echo’s request and on his own initiative. A person’s intimate belongings had always held for him as much fascination as any private conversation or even a personal letter. Echo’s pocketbook contained the usual female paraphernalia of cosmetics, Kleenex, address book, identification cards, money, a pocket flashlight; and along with these a pair of pliers, a set of small wrenches, a screw driver, an assortment of nuts and bolts and headlight fuses that were as essential to Echo O’Brien as her mascara and lipstick. —Now a new item had been added: a small medicine bottle containing a clear red liquid. Clinton read these typewritten words on its label: