All Fall Down

by James Leo Herlihy

  For nerves.

  1 tsp. every 4 hrs.

  Do not exceed.

  Clinton removed one of her gold-tipped cigarettes and lighted it for her. As he handed it to her, he heard a car stopping in front of the house.

  “There’s the truck,” he said.

  Echo started to rise. “Huh?”

  “The truck. I just heard it.”

  Echo sat down again. “Oh.” She looked at the lighted cigarette in her hand, and waved it toward Clinton. “Thanks, lover.” Then she took a couple of deep puffs, and as the downstairs door banged shut, she started to sing:

  ” ‘Hail, hail, the gang’s all here,

  What the heck do we care.’ “

  Berry-berry’s footsteps were heard on the stairs.

  ” ‘What the heck do we care,

  What the heck do we care no-ow?’ “

  Then she wrinkled her forehead and poured all of her attention onto the checkerboard.

  Berry-berry stood at the door of the bedroom. “Hi, everybody.”

  During the moment in which greetings were exchanged in the room, Clinton continued to study Echo’s face. She looked up from the checkerboard and said, “Hi, handsome. Your daddy’s skinnin’ me alive.” Then she gave Berry-berry a smile so filled with love that Clinton felt a pang of deep sadness. It was like a blow to the chest and it had caught him off guard. He wondered why this smile should have so great a power over him: simply because he coveted it for himself? Then why not other smiles on other days?

  There was a graver reason that he could not name, even in his own mind, but it was within him and he felt it: that in Echo’s gift of love was some unearthly purity that Berry-berry could never return. Then suddenly the sadness grew and extended itself beyond any connection with the persons in the room; and for a moment Clinton knew that in this difference, the difference in the love offerings people make to one another, lay the reason for all the pain of the world. And immediately this knowledge was gone from him. It had been like the visit of some ghostly bird, a truant from heaven: at the instant he had tried to catch hold of it, the creature was gone. Of its message, nothing remained but a vague sense of doom.

  Clinton imagined that in some way Echo O’Brien knew these thoughts that were going on in him, and perhaps even shared them.

  Now Berry-berry stood between Echo and Ralph, studying the checkerboard. He touched Ralph’s shoulder and indicated a possible move.

  Ralph said: “That’s what I was gonna do anyway. Listen, you think I need help? You’re crazier’n I give you credit.”

  Clinton thought of the bottle in Echo’s pocketbook. He wished there was something he could do for her that would give her such perfect calm and peace that she would have no need for the nerve medicine. But he could think of nothing at all.

  “He sure don’t need any help,” Echo said. “I bet you didn’t know this; I bet you didn’t know my worthy opponent has got a bigger brain than Albert Schweitzer! Mamma said it’s a fact. She studied his bones in a snapshot.”

  “Echo,” said Clinton.

  “What you want, baby?”

  “I feel like washing your car. You want me to wash your car?”

  “Oh, kiddy, that’s a mean job. I wouldn’t let you.”

  “I want to. I feel like it.”

  “Listen, how could you feel like it, washin’ all them cars five days a week? Nosiree-bob, honey, nothin’ doin’.”

  “Please?”

  “You mean you want to? On a Saturday? —Well, lord knows it needs a good washin’.”

  “Will you let me move it myself? Into the driveway?”

  “Into the driveway! I’d trust you to move it anywhere you want to. But I feel like a heel.”

  “Give me the keys.”

  She took them from her lap and handed them to him. And as she did so, her smile was like a beautiful instrument of torture. But the pain it brought him was in her behalf. He wanted to take Echo away and lock her up in some soft and luxurious place, a place protected by thick stone walls, and he would stand next to her, forever, like a sentry, guarding her.

  As he started down the stairs, Clinton heard her voice: “Clinton’s a peach, do anything for a person. —Hey, what the hell happened to my kings? Ralph, you are a rat, r-a-t. Lord, where was Echo when they passed out the skulls?”

  Clinton put the Dodge in the driveway. He used a whisk broom on its upholstery, swept out the inside of it, wiped the dashboard and steering wheel, and washed the windows. Then he got out the garden hose and several soft rags, and set to work on the body of the car. During much of this time, the sun was shining, and the harder he worked, the better he felt about Echo O’Brien. He had begun to learn that it was possible to shed some of his worries by the simple process of turning his attention elsewhere, especially to some labor that would use up his energies. After a while, a small group of neighbor children had formed in the driveway and soon his imagination was engaged in answering their questions about this strange car. He explained to them that this valuable relic had enough mileage on it to have traveled around the world twenty times over; that jealous manufacturers of competitive cars had offered thousands of dollars just to keep it off the streets, and the lady who owned it was always being hounded by these big executives from Detroit, but she herself was so rich she would not even bother to talk with them. When he had covered the car with a milky liquid wax, he distributed soft rags among these youngsters and allowed them to help with the polishing. Annabel came out later and passed out cookies and prunes and peanuts; and she said, Wasn’t it a shame that Berry-berry’s pretty blue truck had all that mud on it? Clinton drove the truck into the driveway, and while he and his young crew were busy washing it, Berry-berry and Echo came out to watch. When the job was done, the children climbed into the back of the truck and Berry-berry took them for a ride around the block. Then Echo took them for a ride in her Dodge. When they got back to the house, she gave them all the loose change she had in her pocketbook. The young mob went home happy, and Echo told Clinton her Dodge had never looked better.

  Ralph came down to the dining room for the evening meal, and sat at the head of the table in his bathrobe. It seemed to Clinton that everyone was in good spirits. He thought that Echo, to whom he gave most of his attention, was in better form than ever before: perhaps the nerve medicine in her pocketbook had caused him to imagine, earlier in the day, that some deep problem existed, when in reality she might simply have suffered from the effects of a bad night, troublesome dreams of no significance whatever. Because now Echo was herself again, alert, interested, gay, causing the conversation to flourish by touching off in each person, as if by some magical intuition, his secret sources of gold; and drinking in with her eyes all the faces and voices, her responses reflecting with quicksilver sensitivity the mood and quality of each moment. Clinton saw that Berry-berry, too, was attentive, considerate, absorbed by all the talk and activity at the table.

  By the time dinner had ended, Clinton had all but forgotten his earlier fears. He accompanied Ralph to his bedroom, and when Annabel had finished with the supper dishes, the three of them sat for an hour reading the Sunday papers. There was not much talk, but they were together in a warm and easy companionship that had been restored to them with the advent of Echo O’Brien in their lives, and with Berry-berry’s return. Annabel and Ralph had learned not only to tolerate each other, but to overlook or forgive in each other many of the qualities that had for so many years driven them to separate corners of the house. Ralph had lost much of his former eagerness to offend Annabel’s sensibilities; and she, in turn, was less inclined to take issue with him when she found his behavior objectionable. Clinton knew that it was Echo who had, by her own example, brought them to this truce, and led them even beyond it to the pleasures and comforts of mutual sympathy: it seemed to him very much like love; and life itself had gradually been restored to them.

  As they sat reading in this fine silence that had been given to them, there was a knock on the
bedroom door, and the beautiful people, the lovers, came into the room, dressed for an evening in the night clubs: Echo O’Brien, her slim body sheathed in black and teetering elegantly on the spiked heels of her black slippers, drops of topaz depending from her ears and throat; and at her side, Berry-berry Williams, eyes alight with pride in his companion and the deep pleasure he took in his own animal beauty; his necktie, like his smile, ever so slightly askew, a subtle and good-natured mockery of the manners and customs of the tame and the ordinary. Together they had come into the room to give, from their bounty, this staggering glimpse of themselves, a marvel of luminosity like the glow of angels.

  When they had said goodbye and started down the stairs, Annabel and Ralph and Clinton looked at one another and shared, at that moment, the same mindless, wordless sense of wonder. But no one of these three persons knew how often, in the future, this moment would be dredged up in memory, to be looked at and savored, and endlessly pondered.

  Ralph soon fell asleep, and Annabel declared herself ready to retire as well. She gave Clinton a good-night kiss and went into the bathroom for her nightly preparations of cold cream and hairpins.

  Clinton went to his own room. He thumbed through his notebook and picked up his fountain pen. But he found that he had no desire to record all of the small happenings of the day: Echo’s arrival, and the evidence, so trifling as to be almost imaginary, that he had found to support his own fears in her behalf. When a day had been as nearly perfect as this one, it seemed to him that any impulse to dwell on its defects should be thwarted as unwholesome, even wicked. Perhaps, in a few minutes, when Annabel was in bed, he would take his notebook downstairs to her desk, and catch up on the week’s mail. But as he lay back on his pillow, to wait for her to finish in the bathroom, his eyes closed, and soon he was fast asleep.

  Some sound in the night brought him suddenly to full wakefulness. He wondered how long he had slept. His light had been turned off and there was a bathrobe covering his legs; Annabel must have placed it there. In a moment he heard footsteps on the stairs and the whispering of Echo and Berry-berry. He turned his lamp on, in hopes that one of them, or both, would see the light under his door and come in to visit with him. Then he heard the gentle opening and closing of doors, and the tiptoeing sounds of journeys to the bathroom. In a few minutes there was silence; and then he heard a gentle rapping on the door of his own room.

  “Come on in,” he whispered.

  The door opened. Berry-berry, still dressed, put his head in and looked around. “Where is she?”

  “Who?”

  “Echo. I saw your light and thought maybe she came in to say good night.”

  “Huh-uh. But come on in.”

  “She’s not in her room either,” Berry-berry said.

  “Maybe she’s getting something to eat. Where’d you go, to Wood’s Inn?”

  “Yeah, and the Shamrock. You know; all over.”

  “What time is it?”

  “About two. I’m not drunk either.”

  “Is she a good dancer?”

  “Oh, yeah, she’s a good dancer.” Berry-berry seemed unable to stand still. He walked from one end of the room to the other. Then he sat on the bed, and instantly arose. “I wonder where she is though.”

  “Eating something?”

  “No. ‘Cause we had a hamburger. I think I’ll go see.”

  “You had a good time though, huh?”

  “Oh, God yes.”

  “Did everybody stare at her?”

  “Sure. They always do.”

  “I don’t blame them,” Clinton said.

  “Neither do I.”

  “If I was them, I sure would.”

  “Me too.” Berry-berry had started toward the door, but abruptly returned. “Have you got some butts? ‘Cause I’m out.”

  “Here.” Clinton tossed his packet to Berry-berry.

  “Thanks. Only what if you want some yourself?”

  “Take ‘em. I got more.”

  “You sure?”

  “Sure.”

  “Okay then, thanks. She’s probably downstairs.”

  Clinton stopped him. “Hey. Did you get any photographs taken?”

  “Photographs?”

  “In the night club. You and Echo at the table. You know.”

  “Oh. —No, they didn’t have any of that.”

  “Oh.”

  Berry-berry went out and closed the door. Clinton got up and went to the bathroom. On the way back to his room, he paused at the stairway and listened for their voices. Then, barefooted, he went down to the landing and inclined his head toward the kitchen. There were no sounds at all. He went down to the front door. Echo’s car was parked in front of the house, and Berry-berry’s truck right in front of it. Then Clinton noticed a small patch of light on the driveway, reflected from the basement window. As he stepped out onto the porch, closing the door softly behind him, he could hear their voices from the open window. He stepped into the driveway and stood there, pressed against the wall of the house, listening. The first words he could make out were spoken by Berry-berry.

  “I can tell,” he said.

  “No, you can’t, baby,” said Echo. “You’re just bein’ sweet and considerate. I should’ve known better’n drink that coffee is all.”

  “Maybe Annabel’s got a sleeping pill.”

  “What, and wake her up? Huh-uh.”

  “She won’t mind.”

  “No, what I’ll do is throw this puzzle together and carry it up to Ralph tomorrow. You go ahead on up to bed, hear me?”

  “You want me to close the windows?”

  “No, thanks, I like the air. Now, listen, I mean it, I want you to go on on up. I’ll be sleepy in no time.”

  Clinton was afraid Berry-berry might go back upstairs and notice his absence. He hurried back into the house and up the stairs to his room, and waited for several minutes, expecting to hear Berry-berry’s footsteps. He knew that if Berry-berry remained in the basement, he himself would be unable to resist eavesdropping on their conversation. He tried to will himself to sleep, but as the moments passed he knew that sleep was impossible for him. Berry-berry had been questioning Echo, apparently about her insomnia. She had blamed it on a cup of coffee. If Berry-berry had believed her, wouldn’t he simply come to bed and let her amuse herself with the puzzle until she felt inclined to sleep? In Clinton’s heart, he knew that sooner or later he would be crouched outside the basement window, listening. Certainly it was within his power to resist the temptation altogether, but somehow he had convinced himself that there was a reason for his witnessing their conversation: it had to do with Berry-berry’s restless demeanor of a few moments ago, and his own deep concern for Echo.

  Clinton turned out his light, closed his door, and went downstairs. He went this time to the opposite side of the house. He knew that from the vantage point of the window nearest the furnace, he could see without being seen, hear without being heard. The ground was damp, but he knelt down, and waited.

  Echo was seated at Ralph’s card table, sorting out the pieces of the puzzle. Berry-berry was standing on the other side of the table, looking at her. An unnatural silence was taking place, and Clinton felt it sharply. Echo continued with the puzzle: by family procedure, one began by placing all pieces of like value in separate groups around the edges of the table, and all border pieces in the center. Echo, her cigarette hanging from her lips, moved through this early process with considerable speed, her full attention apparently on the table.

  “Why is it,” Berry-berry said, “you have to pretend you’re so goddam interested in that puzzle?”

  Echo took her cigarette from her mouth and looked at him with genuine concern. “Berry-berry,” she said, “I’ll stop. This minute, if you want me to. Do you?”

  “Don’t you have something to say to me?”

  “No, baby, I don’t,” she said gently.

  “I think I better have a drink.”

  “Will you pour me a thimble, too?” she said.


  Berry-berry moved out of Clinton’s line of vision. Apparently he had gone to the kitchen for Ralph’s liquor. Echo watched him leave. Then she straightened her body and took a deep breath of air. Looking up, her eyes somewhere in the rafters of the basement, she made the Sign of the Cross, as Catholics do; her lips moved in some brief and silent prayer. Then, quickly, she returned the cigarette to her mouth, and went to work on the puzzle. Berry-berry came back carrying one glass and a bottle nearly half full of bourbon. He poured some of it into the glass, and set the glass on the table. Echo took a sip from it.

  “Whee!” she said. “Straight!”

  “You want water?”

  “This is fine, thanks. Now listen, if you want to talk, and this puzzle makes you nervous—just say so.”

  “Go ahead if you want to, I don’t care. I’m not that touchy. God, I hope I’m not that touchy.”

  “I want to thank you for tonight, lover. Best time I ever had.”

  “You shouldn’t call me lover, not around here.”

  “I’m sorry. —Boy, I’d like to’ve danced my heels off. Usually a man wants to quit after two or three.”

  “Has that been your experience?”

  “Mm-hmm. But I could go on all night.”

  “Could you?”

  “Yes. I could. —Now, Berry-berry, the reason I came down here was so you all could sleep. And I think you need it. So go on on up, for heaven sake.”