The Winter After This Summer

by Stanley Ellin

  That was time inside the yard. Outside the yard were other events whose orbits sometimes locked with mine. There were two marriages to record, and who can deny that the sacraments must be written large and in red letters? The first was the wedding of my sister to Austin Thwaite, and while I was invited to attend—might, in fact, have been elevated to role of usher had I attended—I did not. I did not for the simple reason that I was in jail that week end and thus unable to accommodate the happy couple. It was the second time I had spent a week end in jail—the charges in both cases indicating that when I drank too much my mood was unreliable—and while I had found my first experience in this line an infuriating one, I rather enjoyed the second. I had been torn between the feeling that I ought to attend the wedding, since Margaret had so prayerfully begged me on the phone to do so, and the feeling that to be confronted by my assembled family would certainly turn my stomach, so that finding myself behind bars until it was too late to do anything about it solved everything neatly. I spent a contented week end playing craps for pennies, checkers for cigarettes, and reading pornographic literature which one of my cellmates purveyed at a reasonable rate, and when on Monday I was bailed out and delivered into the hands of Joe Guion and his wife, Shirley, and the lawyer they had hired for the purpose, I made it my first duty to write Margaret an explanation. It was not a wholly honest explanation, but I was not of a mind to cloud her happy time of honeymooning. Or, what I hoped without conviction would be a happy time.

  The other marriage of concern to me I was not invited to, nor was I given official notification of it. It was the highly Episcopal wedding of Miss Marian Lucy Gennaro to Mr. Noel Claiborne at the Claiborne estate in Easton, Maryland, and Mr. Victor Gennaro escorted his daughter, who wore a gown of white peau de soie, fashioned with a fitted bodice embellished with lace, long sleeves, and a full skirt. She wore also an heirloom lace veil and carried a bouquet of white roses and gypsophila.

  I read that in a column of the society pages of the Sunday Times as I had known some day I would read it. Had, indeed, searched those pages of the Times each Sunday with the sure knowledge I would read it sooner or later, and with each search prepared myself for its reading. But all the preparation did not help me. There was a picture of the bride at the head of the column, and looking at it—at it and into it and through it—I saw that the bride was much too beautiful for her own good or anyone else’s. I lay on my back in bed at the Cloud Cuckooland run by Mrs. Waterhouse, a voice down the hallway bellowing from a bathroom for hot water, goddamit, would Egan or McGuire or somebody go down and tell the old fart to get the hot water going, sick memories in me, sweaty memories of another time when I lay like this in a dormitory of the University listening to someone crying my name down the hall, the Sunday Times in ink-smelling piles around me, the picture of the brand-new, ante-bellum, warm, musky, soft-breasted Mrs. Claiborne in my hand, Mrs. Claiborne in her deceitful white gown and veil, and I went through a bad time.

  The symptoms came in the form of a murderous impulse, a blind need to do something violent and disastrous that thudded through me with each piston stroke of my heart. I tried to tame and control it, lying there on my bed of nails and writhing under it. I finally resolved it into a picture in my mind that I could play with. The picture of Mrs. Claiborne’s body tight against mine as we stood there, and my stroking, feeling hands moving up to her throat and encircling it. She smiled at first, then was panic-stricken as the hands closed tight. Her struggles were feeble. The hands closed tight, the lovely wet red tongue thrust swollen between her lips, her eyes bulged, her face blackened—she was not beautiful at all any longer. She was, in fact, a lump of death.

  I staggered out of bed drunk with that image, the voice down the hallway still roaring for hot water, and I ran barefooted and in my pajamas down the stairs to Mrs. Waterhouse’s door and hammered on it. She came to the door and gaped at me—or whatever she saw that resembled me—and I said, “What the hell kind of place are you running here? Will you get some hot water up, or would you rather be nailed to that door?”

  “Mr. Egan!” she said, and took the cigarette holder out of her mouth to say more, but I placed my hands around her throat gently but firmly, feeling as if I were gripping a toad around the belly, and said, “Hot water. Just hot water. Will you be reasonable or will you be dead?” and then, God help me, that pile of suet, that smelly, orange-topped mass of putrescence became coy in my hands, smiled like a lipsticked sow, warmed like a bitch in heat, so that I dropped my hands in horror.

  “Mr. Egan,” she cooed, “that’s not very funny, trying to scare me. And running around the way you are. Now you come right in here if you want to talk to me. I was just having a cup of coffee, anyhow, and there’s more on the stove.”

  I said something garbled, it made no sense to either of us, and I left her there. When I got back to my room I found that the worst of the bad time had passed; it was desensitized by laughter, wild shrieking laughter, but real enough to prop me into balance again. And for a long time afterward there was hot water. Not as much as was wanted, but enough to make a fitting celebration for the marriage of Marian Gennaro.

  These were the sacraments that concerned me, designated as sacraments by the church. But something else that came my way one December night might have been designated a sacrament, too, although it was not. The act of being laid off the job, the chilling discovery of the pink slip in the pay envelope deserves, if not book and candle, at least a slow tolling of the bell.

  We ate in silence before a fire in the forge shop that night, each man, I think, hearing the bell toll for himself when he looked at me and inwardly crossing himself. Work was slack at the yard, men had been laid off the day shift, and one of them had elected to move over to the night shift and take his chances there. Because I had least seniority I had to be the one to make room for him. I was, as I had been some other times in my life, the dispensable man. Dispensable, by official reckoning, to Voorhees, if not to myself.

  When the silence grew oppressive, it was MacPherson who relieved it by saying in gloomy consolation, “Anyhow you’re not married. That’s one good thing,” leading Guion to say angrily, “What’s that got to do with it?”

  “It’s tough to tell the old lady,” someone said. “Even tougher when you got kids. Young feller like Egan’s in good shape that way.”

  MacPherson said, “It ain’t only the telling that hurts. Or getting up the rent. First time I got laid off I was married only a month, and you know something? I couldn’t even climb on the old lady for a week afterward. Didn’t want to and couldn’t have done anything about it if I did. That shows you where the boss got you.”

  “The boss got Egan nowhere,” Guion said. “He’ll be back here in a week. I don’t care who takes his place, I’m grinding that guy’s ass to a sharp point. I’m sweating the day-shift fat off him until he yells. One week is all it’ll take.”

  It took more than one week, but the treatment worked, and it was the last time that my place on the night crew was ever threatened. I later found out that not only Guion had made my replacement’s life a living hell, but that his assistant demons had also worked with a will on the project. The day shift had intruded on them, the day shift had to be taught a lesson.

  They were a strange gang that night crew, as men who voluntarily work nights would be. A couple of the junior men, myself included, were there because we were offered no choice. But we were the exceptions. MacPherson was a gardener by days, amateur by inclination, professional when he was offered enough money to lend his neighbors a hand with their buds and blossoms. Skoglund and Jorgensen lived for soccer; they came to work always sweating from their daytime practice. Little John Noonan said fervently and humorlessly that the only thing in the world he detested was getting up early; the day he started on night shift he had thrown his alarm clock out of the window and found true happiness. Joe Guion, Big John Noonan, and some others lived for the race track. Belmont Park, Jamaica, Aqueduct were the lodeston
es; by timing themselves closely they could get in three or four races a day at the track and still be at the yard before the whistle blew. And so it went. But the strange thing was that having been lured to the night shift by this reason or that obsession they one and all found it the only way of life to which they were attuned.

  It was not the friendships they made with each other—aside from the kinship Skoglund and Jorgensen had found and the affinity between Guion and me, there was nothing of the Damon and Pythias about any relationship there—and it was not the fact that there was only one eye of authority on them at night where there would be twenty during the day. It was, I came to see, something they were not even aware of. It was that at night, isolated with a few kindred spirits in the nighttime world of the yard, doing a job on their own, they could feel that they were in possession of themselves and this small floodlit world. What I knew Aldo felt as he looked over the Gennaro acres, they felt, but without knowing it, as they walked through the emptiness of the yard breaking its silence when they chose to. They grumbled and cursed at the way the night shift got the dirty end of the stick—fifteen martyrs laid on the rack while two hundred day men lolled in perfumed luxury—but none of them wanted to change over to day work. I came to feel that way myself. During the time I was laid off I found a day’s work here and a day’s work there at plants in Brooklyn and Long Island City, but pale sunlight through a factory window instead of bright moonlight overhead distressed me. When I got back to the night shift at the yard I felt that I was home.

  Joe Guion dimly understood that feeling; Shirley Guion worried about it, but then Shirley had been born to worry. She was the daughter of an elderly couple who still ran a candy store in the neighborhood—candy store being the generic term in the neighborhood for a hole in the wall where you could buy newspapers, tobacco, soda, and ice cream and anything else involving pennies and nickels—and Joe had come to know her there. It was his theory, so he claimed in her presence, that she only married him because she found out he had five brothers and three sisters, and that meant she could really get a lot of people to worry about all in one load. She denied that stoutly, but she worried about each of the brothers and sisters, and each of her own many brothers and sisters, and every one of her neighbors, and when she had run out of flesh-and-blood people to worry about she could always concern herself with the shades who acted out soap operas on television every afternoon, her face clouded with concern as their woeful lives oozed along to disaster.

  So she worried about me, about my bachelorhood, my sometimes violent week ends, my taste in women, the strange things I read, the shocking ideas I expressed, and what I ate, drank, and wore. She worried over these things like a mother hen, clucking about them to Joe, but never daring to come to me directly about them except on one occasion. That was when I formed a few weeks’ liaison with a girl I had picked up at a Greenwich Village bar, a girl with the unlikely name of Thecla Ives. Thecla was, or said she was, a modern dancer. Since her unvarying costume consisted of a black leotard, an unhemmed skirt, and sandals, and since she had a hard disciplined body and an eager inquiring spirit, I saw no reason to doubt this. And, as it turned out, her interests were not restricted to the schools of Graham and Humphries. When I happened to say something about Joe Guion to her once in the way of idle talk, her eyes lit with a fanatic light. She was, she explained breathlessly, a devotee of the ethnic dance, she was quietly mad about it, and she had never even met any real Indians.

  That Saturday night I took her along with me to the Guions, where a party of braves was warming up to the weekly poker game, and she stole the show. She started by downing the series of drinks Joe offered her—his theory of hospitality was simple and direct—and wound up by delivering a lecture on the ethnic dance to a rapt audience. It was quite a lecture, especially after Thecla pulled off her skirt and sandals and illustrated it with her idea of an Indian ritual dance with emphasis on the pelvic contractions that gave it its real significance.

  After I had hauled Thecla off to my room where we could put those contractions to worthier use, Shirley must have brooded over the scene at length. The next time I came to the house she led me out of the living room, where kids were playing all over the floor, and into the isolation of the bedroom.

  “That girl you had here last time,” she whispered fiercely.

  “Yes?”

  “You shouldn’t have anything to do with such a girl.”

  “Why not?”

  It obviously took all of Shirley’s courage to say it. “Because she can give you a disease!” And then with the air of someone who is forced to speak the unspeakable in order to save a soul she came out with it. “A social disease!”

  The Guions were childless, but I rarely went over there during an afternoon without finding kids crawling around the floor or beating each other over the heads with toy guns, Shirley holding the smallest one in her arms and blissfully and fearfully trying to keep order among the others. Most of the kids were the progeny of the Mohawks who made up a fair-sized colony in that section of Brooklyn, and all of them were loud, so it made a hectic time for Joe on those days when he didn’t go to the track. But he took the excitement amiably. If he and Shirley could have had kids of their own, he said, he’d never let her get away with it. But what the hell, the way things were, let her mother all the kids on the block; it was the best thing for her.

  What he finally revealed to me—and he swore me to secrecy, telling me no one else in the world knew this or was ever to know it—was his conviction that the failure to have children was his fault. Everyone knew what a welding arc did to a man, he said; you get too much of it and there’s a chance your juice turns to water. So it was his fault no matter what the goddam doctors said, and he was glad to get it off his chest to somebody. But if I ever let it out—!

  I said: “You know I won’t. But why didn’t you adopt a kid?”

  “Because there’s some kind of law says if you’re different religions you can’t. And she’s Jewish and I’m Pagan, so what’s the use?”

  It was the first time I had ever heard him use that word to describe himself. “What do you mean, Pagan?”

  “I mean what I said. Didn’t you ever hear of anybody being Pagan? Half the guys you play cards with here are Pagan. The other half don’t give much of a damn either way; their grandpas sold out for a sack of flour, and how Christian can you be for a sack of flour? But we still got some that stick to the old ways. You come up Hogansburg with me next time I look in on the reservation and you’ll see.”

  That was the last said about the failure to have children, and Joe’s feelings about it. I knew it would be useless to argue the matter with him; there would be no way of convincing him that I was not just trying to take the onus off him, that his theory of sterility was all wrong, and so I let it go at that. He had, besides a diabolic, poker-faced sense of humor, a grim single-mindedness. He would digest some idea slowly and thoroughly as a boa constrictor digests a rabbit and there it would be, as much a permanent part of him as the rabbit was of the boa. It was a single-mindedness that could work for him, too. It had won him Shirley against overwhelming objections from all sides, but largely Shirley’s people, gentle, devout, orthodox Jews to whom this Indian was as incomprehensible as a man from Mars.

  “You know what they used to call me?” he once asked me with a wink, eying Shirley, who was raptly following a television drama about a woman’s efforts to find love despite menopause. “They used to call me shegetz. You know what that means? It means a no-good Indian.”

  Shirley came to swift attention. “It does not,” she said. “It means Gentile. And they don’t call you that any more, do they?”

  “It means Indian,” said Joe. “But they sure don’t call me that any more. The way your mother keeps sending over stuff to eat, she must figure she’s feeding me right into a Jew.”

  “Oh, you,” said Shirley.

  And that single-mindedness of his had been what led him to make the other big dec
ision of his life—to leave construction work and settle down in a shipyard job. He had been a high-iron man, had moved with the Mohawks from one part of the country to the other as calls went out for them to work on girders high up in the air, but the first time after his marriage that he had been called on a job and found Shirley weeping in her room at his departure, he had weighed everything in the balance and turned down the job. It was one thing for a single man to be a construction bum, but it was not for a man with a wife. Not if the wife didn’t happen to be an Indian who knew how to take these things. To be away from Shirley all the time, to know the chances of making her a young widow, no, it was not for him. He owed her something more after all the trouble he had made between her and her family, so to hell with the good times and the good money.

  That was Joe Guion. He was a sad Indian sometimes, thinking about it, an Indian who was always left behind when the tribe moved along to make the real money, chase the girls, gamble the big stakes away, and he hated to hear them talk about it when they sat around his table playing poker for twenty-five-cent stakes out of deference to him and his limited income. But, as he told me, “You make up your mind and you stick to it, and you don’t look back. All you figure is here I am and I’m lucky to be here because who knows what would have happened if I did it any other way. That’s how a smart Pagan figures it, Danny. Everything that matters is here in your hand this minute. Not the last one, not the next. This one right here while I’m talking.”