The Winter After This Summer

by Stanley Ellin

  Thinking it out like that left me feeling pretty low the next few days, and I noticed that Egan was the same way himself. He seemed to have something troublesome on his mind that he kept turning over and worrying like a dog with an old dead fish on the beach. I figured it was because of the way I felt about the party, and it turned out I was right. A few days after that Saturday we were on his bed smoking and not saying anything when all of a sudden he raised himself up on one elbow and looked down at me. “You and your goddam Aunt Hattie,” he said.

  I said, “Didn’t you get over that yet? Anyhow, I’m sick of hearing about it. Don’t talk about it any more.”

  There was never any use telling him what to do or what not to do. It was all right as long as you’d say, “I’d like to do this or that,” and he felt the same way. But if he didn’t, you could set a stick of dynamite off under him without moving him. It didn’t surprise me any when he said, “I’ll show you Aunt Hattie’s children. I’ll let you see them in all their glory. Next Saturday you and I are going right down to their breeding ground where you can get as close to them as you’d ever want to be.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means that my class in college is having a reunion and we’re invited. You didn’t know I went to college, did you? I hope you’re suitably impressed.”

  I couldn’t tell if he was fooling or not. I said, “How come I’m invited? They don’t know me.”

  “They will. All you have to do is keep that ring on your finger and be Mrs. Egan. The spectacular Mrs. Egan. Don’t you think it’ll be fun to be Mrs. Egan for a whole day and get close to all those nice people, and know something they don’t know? It’s always fun to know something other people don’t know, isn’t it?”

  Now I knew he wasn’t fooling. And it sounded real interesting, the way he put it. The only trouble was that I wouldn’t know what to say to that kind of people or what to do around them. When I told him that, he said, “You don’t say or do anything. You just let them look at you. You wear a pretty dress and little white cotton gloves and black high-heeled pumps, and you stand there and let them look. And you open your eyes wide and smile at the men to let them know how manly they are, and you look the women up and down—just the flick of an eye like this—to see if they’re dressed the way you are. And if they are, you say to them, ‘Oh, isn’t this a lovely place?’ so that they know you mean it. And if they’re not, you say the same thing but with a little something in your voice that tells them you don’t really mean it because they’re spoiling it for you. That’s the way you do it with Aunt Hattie’s children. Do you want to try it?”

  I couldn’t help laughing. I said, “Egan, the way you make it sound, you sure must have been a lot of trouble to them when you were there,” and he said, “Baby, you have no idea.”

  I said, “Anyhow, I thought college people were all doctors and lawyers and running companies. How come you went there and you only work in a shipyard?”

  “Because I’m a failure. But Saturday I’ll show you the successes. You’ll be so close to them that you can put out your hand and touch them. They’ll like that.”

  “Supposing I don’t? I mean, what happens if it turns out all wrong?”

  “We’ll leave any time you want to. There used to be a drive-in movie near there. We’ll settle down with a box of popcorn and have a real ball for ourselves.”

  So Saturday I got all dressed up right down to the new gloves Egan got me, even if they seemed to be the craziest things to wear in all that heat, and we drove out over the George Washington Bridge into the country and headed south to the college. It was a long drive on the highway, and in the middle of the day we stopped to eat. Then there was some more highway and finally we turned off onto another road that went through farm land and up into the hills. There were a few little towns along the way, but after a while we came to a pretty big place and Egan said, “We’re near it now. You’ll see it when we’re on the other side of town.”

  But the first I saw of it I didn’t know it was the college. I thought it would be one big building, I guess like the high school in Key West, but it turned out to be more like a whole town itself. We went past a park with buildings all around it, then another park with more buildings around it, everything so beautifully kept you wouldn’t believe it, and then Egan turned the car into a winding street with just houses on it where people lived, and near the end of the street he stopped the car and pushed open the door on my side.

  “Come on, Mrs. Egan,” he said.

  He had kept calling me that along the way like a kid playing a game, and I thought it was pretty silly but I didn’t really mind. The way I felt, it was kind of like being inside a movie instead of just watching it. And when he was driving fast along the highway with his arm around me I could close my eyes and feel almost the way I did when I used to think about being with Jimmy in his Porsche Spyder. There were a couple of times when it was like being in a dream. And the best part was that when I opened my eyes it was real. That was when I liked Egan most of all. When I opened my eyes and saw it was him and not just Sebastiano sitting on those rocks and reading to me, or Cole dealing out those cards for himself on the table, or Avery.

  So I said to him, “Come on where?” and he said, “No, this isn’t the real thing yet. This is just an old friend of mine I want you to meet, one of the teachers here. I think you’ll like him.”

  We got out of the car and went up to the house. A scrawny little girl about ten or eleven years old with big eyeglasses on and a lot of red hair and freckles was sitting on the porch steps reading a book, and when we came up she looked at us.

  “You’re Heather, aren’t you?” Egan said, and she said, “Yes,” but in a snotty way as if he was bothering her.

  “Do you remember me?” Egan asked.

  “No.”

  “That’s fair enough. Is your father in?”

  “Yes, but he’s working. Nobody’s supposed to talk to him.”

  “I know,” Egan said, “but we’ll make an exception in this case.”

  We went into the house with Heather coming after us, and at the end of the hall Egan knocked on a door and a man said from inside, “What the hell is it now?”

  Egan pushed open the door, and there was this man sitting at an old table with a typewriter on it. He didn’t look like any teacher I ever saw. He looked more like some wrestler on TV. He was as big and fat as they are and almost bald, but with a bushy red beard. And he was dressed in an old T-shirt all sweated through and a pair of shorts so you could see his hairy red legs almost up to the tops. He looked at Egan and me, and then he leaned forward and looked real close at Egan, and Egan said, “I am Lazarus.”

  “The hell you are,” the man said; “you’re Danny Egan,” and he got up and shook Egan’s hand and said, “My God, it’s good to see you. It’s been a long time, Danny. How long has it been?”

  “Six years,” Egan said.

  “Six years?” the man said. “Six years? Is that all?” and then he looked at me and said, “I suppose you’re the one who took the job of taming this wild man. My name’s Lyle McGhan in case Danny hasn’t told you. I’m so glad to meet you.”

  It was the loveliest thing the way he said it. It was as if he really meant it, and I couldn’t help liking him no matter how he looked.

  “This is Barbara-Jean,” Egan said. “But if you’re working—”

  “Oh, crap on that,” McGhan said, “there’s too much to chew over,” and we all went into the front room and sat down there. Heather came along, too, and sat down next to McGhan, half on top of him.

  Egan looked around the room. “Well, it hasn’t changed any,” he said. “Only it looks emptier than I remember it. Where’s the rest of the family?”

  “I suppose the other kids are in the back yard,” McGhan said. “We’ve got one of those portable swimming pools, and they’re usually up to their necks in it.”

  “And Dorothy?” Egan said, and he said to me, “That’s Mrs. McGh
an.”

  “She’s in the rest home,” Heather said. “She’s always in the rest home.”

  Egan looked at McGhan. “Rest home?”

  “It’s nothing,” McGhan said. “It’s just a resort place where she can take it easy. She’s been under a strain, and we felt it was the best thing for her.”

  “It is not a resort place,” Heather said. “It’s where drunks go. She gets drunk all the time and vomits over everything and falls down.”

  “Heather,” McGhan said, “please, don’t say that. Nobody invited you in here in the first place. Now go outside. Please, go outside.”

  “I don’t want to,” Heather said, and she laid all over him on the sofa.

  “I don’t care whether you want to or not,” McGhan said. “Please, go outside,” and we waited until she went out, banging the screen door after her.

  McGhan sat there the way Avery always did, his head in his hands, and then he pulled himself out of it. “You remember the way Dorothy looked?” he said to Egan. “Well, you wouldn’t know her. You wouldn’t know her at all, Danny. Jesus, I don’t know her myself. It’s a terrible thing.”

  “When did it happen?” Egan said.

  “Oh, these things don’t happen overnight. It must have been going on a long time, but about two years ago she came apart completely. The hell of it is I never knew. I thought it was cancer at first, the way she was losing weight and looking jaundiced and being so damn tense about everything. I thought some doctor must have told her that, and she was being brave about it right into the cemetery. But God damn it, you can operate on cancer and you can’t operate on this. Why didn’t I know? She was sopping up the stuff like a sponge when I found out.”

  “Why?” Egan said.

  “I don’t know why. Oh, we had one big showdown where she kept telling me how unhappy she was, how she’d wake up in the morning and think of the day ahead and the day after that and so on to infinity, and how the only way she could live through them was all juiced up, but that’s the typical alcoholic attitude. It’s the way they all rationalize a condition they could beat with one hand if they really wanted to. But it’s incredible to me that anyone like Dorothy would go that way. You know how stable she was, how she was always in control. Now you wouldn’t know her. Even when they dry her out she goes around in some kind of subhuman state.”

  “How many times has she been in?” Egan said.

  “Three in the last two years. Then she comes home and it starts all over again. You can see what it’s doing to the kids.”

  “Yes,” Egan said. “She used to be a nurse, didn’t she?”

  “One of the best.”

  “Then why does she have to stay around the house?” Egan said. “Why doesn’t she keep the hell away from it as much as she can? She could try nursing again, couldn’t she?”

  “And be some place where I can’t watch her every minute? And with all those pretty bottles of alcohol so handy?”

  “You watch her every minute now,” Egan said. “It doesn’t seem to be doing much for her.”

  “But at least I can claim responsibility. It’s terrible, Danny. You wouldn’t know her if you saw her.”

  I could tell Egan was getting edgy from the way he was looking at McGhan. “You already said that,” he told McGhan, and McGhan said, “Yes, I suppose I did. Well, this is a hell of a homecoming, isn’t it? Why don’t we just change the subject? What have you been doing with yourself?”

  “Shipbuilding,” Egan said. “I work in a yard in Brooklyn that makes tugboats. I put on a tin hat and a dirty shirt and I pick up a riveting gun and make boats.”

  “You don’t mean it,” McGhan said.

  “I mean it.”

  “Then you really went through with it,” McGhan said. “And your family—”

  “I don’t have any family.”

  “Well, that was inevitable, wasn’t it?” McGhan said. “But I certainly admire you for going through with it.”

  “Why?” Egan said, and even if McGhan didn’t know what it meant when he started to sound like that, so sweet and interested, I knew. I could feel it the way you feel a storm building up in the Gulf. So I said to McGhan, “Do you know if there’s a drive-in movie around here?” and Egan looked at me real sharp and then started to laugh.

  “Yes, there is,” McGhan said, and then he had to laugh, too, the way Egan was laughing, and he said, “What’s so funny about that?”

  “It’s a family joke,” Egan said, and then not wanting to talk more about it he said, “Any of my class keep in touch with you?”

  “Which class was it?” McGhan said, and when Egan told him some people’s names he shook his head. “No, but I suppose most of those boys weren’t literary lights anyhow. But I do see Banner-man now and then. He’s taking over the magazine next year as full editor. Have you read his book?”

  “Yes,” Egan said.

  “What did you think of it?”

  “I thought it sounded like a fag breaking wind.”

  McGhan looked surprised. “I don’t know,” he said. “I thought it was pretty good myself. Thin in spots, but very skillfully done. And there isn’t much choice nowadays. It’s either Bannerman’s kind of book or one of those abortions by some bearded, Zen-happy slob. You know, we’ve got a few of them in classes now. They pop up in the creative writing courses and mumble challenges at me. Inarticulate bastards, every one of them. Have you been following the rise of the beat generation?”

  “Like, you know, man,” Egan said, “there was one gone cat on the scene I really balled. But I was not unlimited, man, I was limited. I was only a T.O. But now I’ve gone and split, because, man, like the scene is strictly shuck.”

  I guess McGhan didn’t know anybody like Wesson and Wise because he said, “Where the hell did you pick that up?” and Egan said, “In the shipyard. That’s the way all of us talk in the shipyard. It’s in-group talk so that the boss won’t know what the union is up to.”

  “That’s some shipyard,” McGhan said with a big smile, and then he shook his head and got very serious. “No, Danny, the working class would never buy the kind of crap the Beats peddle. The man who earns his bread by the sweat of his brow may be intellectually limited, but he’s healthy. You know, when I was going for my fellowship I used to put in summers with a road construction gang, and I found out that the working class—”

  “I know,” Egan said, and all of a sudden he stood up. “Well, I hate to break up the party,” he said, “but we have to go now. We’ve got a big evening ahead of us.”

  So we all shook hands and said a lot of good-byes, and then Egan and I went out on the porch and down the steps where that Heather was sitting reading her book. Egan said to me, “Wait a minute,” and went over to her, and I could see she was making believe not to notice him.

  Egan said to her, “Heather, you know the way you talked about your mother before?”

  She kept reading the book, but he said, “Look at me,” and she did.

  He said, “Don’t ever talk that way about your mother again. Not in front of your father or sisters or anyone else in the whole world. Never again. Do you hear me?”

  “It’s none of your business,” she said.

  “From now on,” Egan said, “it’s my business. And if you ever open your mouth again the way you did in there it’ll get back to me. And when that happens I’ll be here the next day and turn you over my knee and beat your little tail black and blue. No matter how you try to get out of it that’s what’ll happen. You see my hand here. That’s what’s waiting for you the day you forget. Will you forget?”

  “No,” she said, and she looked so scared that I thought she would bust out crying.

  “All right,” Egan said, and we went out to the car and got into it, and when we drove off, Heather was still watching us as if she saw the devil riding away.

  I said to Egan, “Now she’ll tell her pa, and he’ll be plenty mad at you for it.”

  “Will he?” Egan said.

 
“He will. I bet that little girl knows how to get real close, to him,” because anybody could see that with half an eye. And I said, “It’s a funny thing, Egan. For all you were telling me how I’d like that man, you don’t like him yourself, do you?”

  “I don’t know,” Egan said.

  “What do you mean, you don’t know? Everybody knows if they like somebody or not.”

  “Do they?”

  “They sure do. They can’t help it.”

  He didn’t say anything for a while, just put his arm around me so I’d be sitting close to him, and then he said, “Do you love me, Barbara-Jean?” and when I wouldn’t tell him one way or the other, he said, “You see?”

  That’s the way he was sometimes. So tricky it was hard to stay ahead of him.

  THIRTEEN

  At the other end of the college the road went uphill past some houses that Egan said were fraternity houses, and at the top of the hill was the biggest one. It looked like the picture of George Washington’s house with a long porch in front of it and white pillars and all, and it turned out that’s where we were going. Egan parked on the grass in back, but when I started to get out he said, “Hold on. There’s no rush.”

  So we sat and smoked for a while, not saying anything, but looking out of the window. It was something to see, with a lake below us and woods on the other side, and if it wasn’t for some people in canoes on the lake it would have looked just like Mr. Waterhouse’s picture. I told that to Egan and he said, “I guess it does,” and then he said, “Look, if you don’t want to go through with this we don’t have to. We can pack in right now.”

  I said, “No, I don’t mind.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes,” I said, “I’m sure,” because I really didn’t mind seeing what it was like. The main thing was that we could go away any tune I wanted to. I guess that was what I liked most about the movies. Whenever they got so unhappy you couldn’t stand it you could always go out to the ladies’ room or just keep your eyes closed and think about something else for a while so it didn’t matter. I only hated it when it was something you couldn’t get out of. But as long as I knew I could, I didn’t mind at all.