The Winter After This Summer

by Stanley Ellin

  “Yes,” I said.

  “All right, what do we do about it?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I don’t want to do anything about it.”

  He didn’t push me away, but he pulled his arm from around me and that’s how it felt. “What makes you so holy anyhow?” he said. “Your husband’s prayers catching up to you?”

  “No.”

  “Then what is it? What’s the reason for the great change?”

  “What great change?”

  “The one in your attitude. From all I heard, you didn’t keep saying no to the boys around Key West before Avery came along.”

  “That’s a lie!”

  “Not according to Avery. What would be the point of his lying about this and telling the truth about everything else?”

  “Because he’s crazy! Because he talks that way and it doesn’t mean anything. I swear to God, I never did it with any boy, Egan. I never did.”

  It was awful. It was like being with Lettie all over again when she was having one of her fits about me. But it was worse with Egan. I hated it to be Egan.

  And he wouldn’t listen. I said, “Listen to me, Egan,” and I shook his arm, but he was being the old stone face the way Lettie used to be. So I said, “I swear to God, Egan, I never did it with anybody. Not anybody in the whole world. I never even did it with Avery!”

  Then he looked at me. “Oh, Jesus,” he said, “here we go back to the butler and the yacht and the seacoast of Bohemia. My error—make that Mooney’s Key.”

  I guess that was what did it. It hurt so much that I didn’t care what happened. “All right, Egan,” I said, “you’re so smart, could you tell if a girl ever did it before when you get in bed with her?”

  “You want to try me?” he said.

  At the end of the road, right near where it turned into the highway, there was a motel, and that was the one we went to. The thing that made it easy was not caring. I let him undress me because he wanted to, and he took all the time in the world over it, and it didn’t bother me. And I lay on the bed looking at him as he reached up to turn off the light, standing there all naked, and I thought, Oh, Egan, are you in for the biggest surprise of your life.

  And he was surprised there in the dark, but more than that he was ashamed. I didn’t want him to be. I didn’t want him to stop, because now I wouldn’t have to wonder what it was all about. So I held my arms around him tight and wouldn’t let go, and I said, “It’s all right. It’s all right,” even when I was thinking that it hurt like hell. And I said, “Beloved Husband,” thinking that it didn’t matter if I had a baby. It didn’t matter at all, because it would be like having Jimmy’s baby.

  When it started to get gray I took his arm from around me very carefully so as not to wake him up, and I went to the window. There was a wet green smell coming through it from the grass outside, and beyond it you could just begin to see the highway. Now and then a car would come along, just headlights at first and then the noise as it whooshed by, and after that it would be so quiet again that I felt like the only thing alive in the whole world.

  My cigarettes were on the little table by the bed. I took one and when I lit the match I saw on the sheet what Lettie had been looking for that last morning I was with her. I didn’t know that then, but now I did. I knew more than I ever thought I could, and I thought, All she had to do was ask me about it.

  All she had to do was ask me about it, and now it was too late.

  PART THREE

  Michael Avery

  ONE

  And I gave her space to repent of her fornication; and she repented not.

  That was a hot night, so hot that the sweat rolled off me when I walked the dark streets homeward, but for all the heat and for all my belly growled because I hadn’t eat or drunk the whole time I talked with Samuel Fisher, I came to the room full of glory and the peace that passeth understanding.

  Then I saw she wasn’t in the room and the bed not slept in, so the peace and the glory departed. I went down the hall to the man’s room and called him out, but he wasn’t there, so I knew. And I went downstairs and rousted out the fat bitch who ran the place, and no matter all the money I paid her every week she cursed me for an old fool, and said, yes, my woman was off with him somewhere and whose fault was it when a dirty old man married a young girl? And said Egan was a fine man, the best boarder she ever had, and not to blame if the girl kept wiggling her ass at him.

  So I went back to the room, and all I felt was confusion and evil rising in me. And knew if I died then I would be cast into the Pit and the evil would be turned into molten lead and fed to me until the Coming. Then I kneeled down and prayed for understanding of what was happening and what was written for me. I prayed on my knees, beating my forehead and my chest with my fists, until suddenly there was a great light like rockets and flares going off, and in the middle of it was the angel Ithuriel. He came to me like he had come before, and like he had come to my father, because I was the seventh son of a seventh son and sometimes possessed of the Devil that Ithuriel had to seek out.

  Then he said, “Do you believe?” and I said, “I believe,” and put my hand into his light so that the heat of it burned me. And he said, “It is written in the Book which is the book with your sins in it,” and then he was gone and there was only the sunrise in the window.

  So I took the Bible which was my father’s before me with his name written in it with his own hand, and I read the Book of Revelation. So I could see what was meant and could wrestle with the confusion and evil in me.

  It said, Neither repented they of their murders, nor of their fornication, nor of their thefts.

  Because I who had murdered and fornicated and stolen had not rightly repented. The money for Samuel Fisher was gone to buy the woman, and the woman tempted me.

  Yet it said, Him that overcometh will I make a pillar in the temple of my God.

  So the gate was not closed. Samuel Fisher had forgiven me for taking the money. I had been led to him so that I could cast myself at his feet and be forgiven. And I had not taken the woman in lust. For all my flesh swelled and stood erect when I looked at her, I had not covered her body with mine. She had been sent to test me, but I overcometh.

  And it said, Behold, I will cast her into a bed, and them that commit adultery with her into great tribulation, so I knew the sin was hers and that of the man with her and none of mine.

  And the tribulation of the man was written down, too, because it said, He that killeth with the sword must be killed with the sword.

  That was his tribulation, to be my killer, and there was no turning away from it for him or for me, because that was the way to my salvation. For want of the woman he would kill me, and so the words of the Book would be fulfilled and I would be saved.

  In the Pit below lay the sinners. Naked they lay for eternity on white-hot flames like the flames firing a ship’s boilers. The flame is around them and in them. Their hair smolders. Their breasts are like torches. Their bellies split open and their guts fall out and shrivel in the heat. Their mouths are open for water but suck in flame.

  That is the flame I shall be saved from. For it said, And to them it was given that they should not be killed, but that they should be tormented five months. From the time I met the woman to the time I got understanding was near five months, so the end of the torment was at hand.

  And it said, In those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it, and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them.

  And then I understood all the workings of the Almighty. The woman was my torment and temptation, and the man would kill me for her, and so I would be a brand snatched from the burning. For I was accursed, but I would be saved when he killed me.

  That is what was written in the Book of Revelation, which is the book with my sins in it.

  TWO

  I learned about the Book from my father, who was a mighty man before the Lord and had visions and spoke in
tongues, and was the best clammer out of Tippietown on Long Island like his father before him. And he loved me best of all his sons, like Israel loved Joseph, because it was written, Now Israel loved Joseph more than all his children, because he was the son of his old age.

  In his prime he could tong nine bushels a day all by himself in the boat, and that was more than any clammer in Tippietown or even Islip. But when he got old and it pained him to straighten his back and pull up the haul with the tongs he took me along to help. I was the only son left to him then. I was the one stayed when all the others went. Two killed in the first big war, and one on a freighter that went down off Sable Island, and one going off to California but never letting us know if he got there or not, and two marrying Islip women and casting out their father from their hearts like the mockers and scorners they were.

  So I was the only one left, and I went out with him in the boat to take my turn at the tongs and to do all the raking because that was beyond him altogether. And while he was resting he would read the Book to me and exhort me, not that I understood much what with all the pride and ignorance burning in me like sulphur. I was with him the first time Ithuriel came, and I saw it for myself. My father was sitting in the stern of the boat reading the Book to me while I tonged, and all of a sudden he stopped reading and I turned to see what was wrong. He put down the Book and he stood up, his arms out, his face turned up to the sun so you’d think it would sear the eyeballs out of him, and he spoke in tongues and cried with the tears running down his cheeks. Louder and louder he spoke, with the spit and foam coming to his mouth and dripping from it, and I watched him not knowing what to make of it and so scared I didn’t have strength to close the handles of the tongs I was working in ten foot of water. Only when he made a move to the gunwales like a man set to go overboard I let go the handles and grabbed him, wrestling with him like Jacob wrestling with the angel of the Lord until he was quiet again and laying on the bottom of the boat.

  It was afterward he told me how Ithuriel came to him while he was reading the Book. He came all in a golden glory with his face in the middle of it, and he said, “Do you believe?”

  And my father said, “I believe.”

  And Ithuriel said, “If you believe, then walk on the water,” and my father started to do it, but I stopped him.

  After that I was afraid to have him go out in the boat with me, because I was still a doubter. And like all doubters I was torn by my doubts. I thought, if it wasn’t Ithuriel but just something in my father’s head like bothered other Averys before him, then I’d be standing there in the boat watching him drown in front of me. But if it was Ithuriel, and I tried to stop my father from doing what he was told, then the sin was on me and I would be struck down for it.

  So the easy way was not to let him go out in the boat with me again, and he never did. He stayed home with the old lady and tried as well as he could to steer away from her angry tongue and the hatefulness of her. There was a time long before when she found that he sometimes slept with whores and from that day on she used that sin like a stick to beat him with. And for all she went to church every Sunday she snarled at him for his praying and fasting and exhorting, telling him that his own father had prayed himself into the crazy house, and telling him she’d see him there soon enough, too.

  It happened that way in the end, because I was weak enough to let it happen. Because Ithuriel came to him again and again to test him, but there were only mockers and scorners around who didn’t understand.

  And one day Ithuriel said to him, “Do you believe?”

  And he said, “I believe.”

  And Ithuriel said, “Then cast off your garments and walk naked on the streets that all may see. Because I will be in your body, and they will look upon me.”

  So my father did, and the police caught him like that not far from the house, all the women around screaming and with their hands over their eyes though, like as not, there wasn’t one of them didn’t know what a man looked like. Then they put him in jail, and the only reason they let him off easy was because the judge was Fred Duane who was half kin to the Averys. He was a mocker and a scorner like the rest of them, but he had a good heart and blamed it on Prohibition and bootleg liquor, saying no man could drink the rotgut he had to nowadays and stay in his right mind, making a joke of it so that everyone in the courthouse laughed.

  But the next time it happened, Ithuriel came to my father right in the middle of Tippietown on shopping day, and this time there were no jokes. Fred Duane called in the doctor, and after a time he and the doctor came to the house and sat down to talk to my mother and me, saying we ought to sign a paper to put my father away before there was real trouble. My mother signed it, but I didn’t want to, and for three days and nights I held out until she wore me down and I did sign it, and he was taken away.

  He didn’t live long after that. He died inside the year, and near the end whenever I went to see him on visiting days he got so that he didn’t know me from anybody else. He just sat in a straight-backed chair staring up at the sky through the window with a glory on his face. Then he died and was buried, and when I saw my mother crying at the funeral, I cursed her to her face before everyone, because she had killed him.

  THREE

  For a while after that I stayed on at the house with the old lady, because it didn’t seem natural to think of living off by myself somewheres. But it was a house of hate, and the worst of it was sitting in the parlor and listening to her tell all the old biddies from roundabout what a fine man she had lost and what an emptiness was left to her. And mopping away the vinegar tears while she told it, so they could all have something to shake their heads and cluck about.

  There was an emptiness left, but it was in me, not in her. From the time I first got hair on my body my father had stood between me and the Pit, and now with no hand to stop me I went into the Pit head-first and not caring. I drank and whored and I gambled money away, so the old lady came at me from all sides with that double-edged tongue. And the more she did, the less I repented, except that it was like having a swarm of mosquitoes whining around you in the dark.

  I got to thinking about this while I was out clamming, because clamming is work where you can do a lot of thinking while you’re at it. And got to thinking about other things, too, until like any man that presses his thinking too hard, I became an unbeliever.

  I thought, no, it wasn’t Ithuriel he saw at all; it was just the Avery acting up in him the way it had in his father before him, so it was only in his head and not for real. Maybe a lot of things put down in the Book were like that. Along the way some folks who knew how to write down these things were took with ideas that just happened in their own heads, but they put it down for real. Like the waters of the Red Sea parting could just be an ebb tide that would be a surprise to people from inland. Or bringing a man back to life could be that he wasn’t dead to start with, but laying there and hardly breathing, and how would they know back in those times when there weren’t real doctors around. And other such thoughts which made even more of an emptiness than my father’s dying, because if the Book was only words, words, words, what was left to take hold of?

  But for all of that the thoughts were a comfort to me when I sinned, now that I was on my way to being a full-time sinner. Late afternoons when I had my haul of clams put aboard O. P. Smith’s pay boat, and I had my money in my hand—getting paid cash on delivery the way we always did in Tippietown—I would head right back inshore to town, and go to Fred Duane’s blind pig, where there was liquor for those he knew, and a poker game always going on, and in the shanty down the lane behind the store the two women he had brought in from New York and put into business.

  But late at night, like it or not, I had to go home, and that was the bad part of it. The old lady would be up and waiting for me, her hand out for whatever money was left, and then it would be the same thing over and over. She would count the money and cry out about how little there was of it, and curse the day she bore me, and the d
ay she stood up and married my father for all that her people warned her about the bad blood in the Averys and the way so many of them came to trouble in the end. And, for that matter, cursed the liquor in me although it was the only thing gave me strength to come home and face up to her at all.

  That was the way she had talked to my father in his time, and he had taken it meek and mild, never talking back to her but always knuckling under until she drove him out of his wits. And I took it the same way, too, until it happened once too often. Then I had it out with the old lady, telling her the house and clam boat were hers anyhow, and she could have them with my good wishes, and could sell them or rent them or do whatever she wanted with them to pay her way, but me she would have no more of the rest of my life. And put the few things I owned into a paper bag, and left the house once and for all, never looking back. That was the way my brothers had left in their time, so now there was no Avery man in the old house and never would be again.

  I went from there back to Fred Duane’s place which was still open and doing good business. It was only when I got inside I remembered I didn’t have any money on me, the old lady having taken whatever was left, and not being the kind to beg or borrow I just sat in a corner chewing on the bitter thoughts in my head and listening to the talk going around. That was the day President Harding died, a man my father thought much of because he was named after Gamaliel who said unto the Hebrews about the Apostles, Refrain from these men, and let them alone, and so most of the talk was about the death and the new President, and some about clamming and the way the clams were thinning out in Tippietown waters, and some about Prohibition and what to do about it. I sat and listened to this, not saying anything, just thinking my own thoughts and getting thirsty watching everybody swilling beer and booze and never offering to buy a friend a drink.