“He would have killed you.”
“No, people like Ben don’t go around killing anybody. It isn’t practical, it isn’t what the main chance leads to. What would have happened is that you and I would have been married the next day. Married and liking it.”
“Why? Because he told us to? Do you think I was as afraid of him as you were?”
“It had nothing to do with being afraid. It had to do with knowing who the boss was, who the man in charge was, just the way your whole family knew it, and Noel Claiborne knew it, and everyone else who was ever close to Ben knew it. He was in charge, do you understand? He was always in charge. He always intended to be. That’s why he picked me out as the smiling bridegroom, because then he could run both our lives for us with half the trouble. And that’s why you were glad of it when he died—”
“That’s monstrous!”
“It’s the truth and you know it. You were glad when he died, because for the first time in your life you could be your own woman. And that’s why you wore such deep mourning and went to church every day—because you were ashamed of how glad you were.”
“I see,” Marian said tensely. “One way of getting rid of your own shame at letting him die is to pin it on someone else, and I’m the right one for it. You’re in a bad state if you have to go that far to make peace with yourself. You have no idea what a bad state you’re in. I’d advise a psychiatrist for a case like yours.”
“Oh, why the hell don’t you face the truth for this one time in your life? You know how Ben despised Noel. Do you think you’d ever have a chance to play the ambassador’s wife if Ben were alive today?”
“Aren’t you confusing yourself with Noel when you ask that? I never remember Noel’s being a spiritless pup always ready to lick Ben’s hand.”
I had hurled myself at her, I had my bloody nose, and it was the misery of knowing it that made me use the most unfair weapon I could in a final blow. It was a weapon delivered into my hand by fate, because over her shoulder I could see Claiborne and Barbara coming through the doorway into the lobby, and she couldn’t.
“I can’t deny that,” I told her. “If Noel had any vice, it was no more than a roving eye for the ladies. My ladies especially. And I don’t suppose he’s changed any, has he? What do you want to bet that when he shows up again he’ll have an arm tight around my latest one. Valor has always been the better part of his discretion, hasn’t it?”
She was quick at getting meanings, Marian Claiborne, and she knew her husband. She turned and saw what I had been looking at, and that moment was all the triumph I could claim in my war against the shades of my past.
And I knew then that it wasn’t enough.
TWO
The night shift at Voorhees ran from three thirty in the afternoon to midnight, eight hours of paid labor, a half-hour of unpaid dinnertime, and while this was a schedule which put us to work at the worst part of the day in the summer, and which, by forcing the day shift to start at seven in the morning, put them to work before dawn in the winter, it made perfect sense to anyone familiar with union regulations and Jacob Voorhees. Union regulations said that work which carried over past midnight, no matter when it started, was to be paid for at overtime rates, and Jacob Voorhees would rather be boiled in oil than pay overtime, so there it was.
When I walked into the yard that Monday after the reunion week end, it was the worst part of the day. The first hot weather of the year, a foretaste of July and August, had moved in with a vengeance, the ground underfoot was baked to a dusty, stony hardness, the air I breathed was heavy and humid and rich with the fumes of a day’s labor already done. But the weather was the least part of my troubles. It was not of my making, it was out of my control, and while I might curse it now and then for its perversity I could live with it amiably enough.
What I could not live with was Daniel Egan himself. That had not been the case when he left work Friday night chipper as a gamecock, ready to put in a busy week end attacking his past, present, and future with spurs a-flying. But the week end had been too much for him. He had been hit high, low, in front, and in back. The dismal news about Dorothy McGhan, the kindly reception by the brotherhood of Iobacchoi, the back of the hand delivered by his old flame, what had happened with Barbara afterward—it had all been too much, and he had come out of it a pretty battered and unhappy bird. Not completely whipped, but brought up short by the realization that a desperately honest reappraisal of himself and his past, present, and future was called for.
I had put most of my time during the day into that reappraisal; I was still at it when I abstractedly walked across the shipyard, scuffing up dust as I went. And the one conclusion that my thoughts kept leading to, the one that always confronted me no matter how I tried to circle around it, was that I had never yet in my whole life really been Daniel Egan. I didn’t even know who he was, granting that his physical presence on the scene made him anybody at all.
What I had been doing all these years was playing one role after another. I was at various times Ben Gennaro, Lyle McGhan, and Joe Guion. To a lesser extent I was my own father and my uncle Charles. There were times when I was even Noel Claiborne. And on some week ends I was a reasonable facsimile of Oxley Wesson and Nat Wise, a pair of Greenwich Village, Zen-worshiping types I had fallen in with. It made as wild and incongruous a series of mis-castings as anyone could want.
The one small comfort attached to this painful insight was that everyone in his youth plays such roles, which is, after all, what makes him youthful and has him always tripping over his own feet. But the departure from youth is supposed to be marked by the rejection of the more unlikely roles and the absorption of the proper ones into the whole man. That, no matter how you look at it, is maturity, and while a few men like Ben Gennaro, my peerless, self-contained, stainless steel hero, evidently arrive at it with their first steps, most others approach it slowly by way of twenty years of existence, and then are hauled headlong into it by careers and wives and the social currents they must swim in.
What had done me in was, that at the very moment I had been teetering on the brink, I had been knocked flat by Ben’s death and then trampled on by his sister in her rush to start living her own life. Was it possible to be wholly myself when a large part of me was buried with him and another part lived with her? So far it had not been. Now, because there was Barbara and because I had been triggered by the reunion into seeing what had become of me, it was possible that something could be done about it.
When I walked into the hangar-sized plate shop I dismissed the question for the time being. The lockers for the hull and repair men were at the far end of the plate shop, and they were no place for the subtle probing of the psyche. Not, at least, at three thirty in the afternoon when they were loud with the sounds of day-shift departure and night-shift arrival, noisy with the humor swapped between the two shifts. It was a good-natured and caustic humor based on two themes. The day men cordially despised the night men for working nights, and the night men just as cordially despised the day men for being specialists—fitters or riggers or welders or riveters or burners—instead of being the Jack-of-all-trades that every respectable night man was supposed to be. Offhand, these would not seem to be themes that allowed the humorists much scope for their efforts, and they weren’t. But it was the volume that counted, not the wit. The Voorhees’ code was a simple one: the older and riper the insult, the louder the laugh.
My locker was between that of a burly and companionable day welder named Fields and that of Little Noonan who was everything that Fields was not. When I came up they were sitting on the bench before the locker, Fields cheerfully baiting Noonan and Noonan snapping back, and after they made sitting room for me and I had started to get into my work clothes, the interchange continued across me so that I was getting it, you might say, in one ear and out the other. It was Fields who suddenly cut it short. “Well, for chrissake,” he said, addressing no one in particular, “look who’s here again.”
I lo
oked. Others looked also, but without their knowing it I was the only one with reason to. And what I saw told me at a glance that in weighing all my problems I had carelessly omitted the very one that loomed before me now. A classical problem at that, stale as the oldest of jokes, menacing as a knife at the throat. The problem of the outraged husband.
It was Avery, and he lurched along the outskirts of the crowd, towering over everyone there, peering this way and that out of deep-sunken eyes. And, wonder of wonders, he was clean-shaven and dressed in a clean shirt, the only time I had seen him that way. So might the executioner prepare himself, I thought, when his axe is sharpened and the black mask ready to slip over his face. And so might the executioner get himself into a drunken stupor while he searched for the right victim, because no one I ever saw looked more like an executioner in the making than Avery on his search. And while I was not at all afraid of him for my own sake, I was very much afraid of him for Barbara’s sake. Somehow he must have found out what had happened this past week end. Or he suspected it, which amounted to the same thing. And he had worked himself up to the point where he was going to do something about it.
I stood up, and then I saw that I wasn’t alone in my thinking. Joe Guion had just come through the door of the plate shop with the night’s work orders in his hand. He walked fast and faster, thrusting the sheaf of papers into his pocket as he moved. He went directly up to Avery and caught a handful of that clean shirt front in his fist so that Avery staggered to a standstill. “Go on,” Joe said in a hard voice, “get out of here. You don’t belong here. Get on your barge where you belong,” and with all the skill of an old bartender he swung Avery half around and started him toward the door, jostling him on his way with sharp jabs of the fingers in the back. It was like a bull terrier handling a bull, never giving it a chance to dispute the issue until it was herded where it belonged.
When Avery was gone it was Joe’s turn to look at me, and the look said plainer than words that we had things to talk about, he and I. But that would come later. This was not the time and place for it, and, considering how I felt, I wasn’t sorry about that.
I sat down. “What did you mean,” I asked Fields, “when you said he was here again? Was he here before?”
“Like a guy looking for somebody owes him a week’s pay,” said Fields. “He kept showing up here and there around the yard all morning until they chased him away. And the barge division’s got a boil on about him, too. You know how he’s supposed to watch the mooring lines while that scow’s in the Basin? Well, he forgot all about it, and when they go down there this morning the tide’s out from under her, and she’s snubbed up so short on those lines it looks like she’s hanging sideways on them. Ten minutes more they’d pull the bitts right off her and she’d be on her way to Jersey. That old guy must have some load on. He don’t watch out, they’ll fire him right out of here.”
So I had my warning, and when I went to work on the 181, chipping out and rewelding spots that the tank-testing crew had marked as faulty, I half expected to find Avery standing behind me every time I turned around. He knew who I was and what I was. It only remained for him to find out where I was so that he could nicely settle accounts with me. And Voorhees’ yard was made to order for settling such accounts. It was a shadowy place at night, full of heights to fall from and depths to fall into, and it was hard enough keeping yourself all in one piece there without some vengeful drunk on your trail.
I was not surprised, therefore, when I sat down with Joe at dinnertime, a little apart from the rest of the crew, that it was the first thing he came out with. He had every right to. Not only was he in charge of the yard at night, but after six years of friendship we knew everything worth knowing about each other, and there were no holds barred. So he discussed the Avery problem dispassionately and at length. “And,” he concluded warningly, “if you find him around, you don’t do anything about it. You give him all the room he wants. Let me handle it.”
“Suppose he jumps me before I know it?”
“What the hell, you know I’m not telling you to roll over and play dead if he jumps you. Just make sure he don’t.”
“If that’s what you want.”
“That’s what I want. One of the things, anyhow. The other one is that you’d get yourself married and settled down so there wouldn’t be this kind of horseplay around here. Now you take a girl like Shirley’s kid sister, Helen. She’s as cute as they come, she likes that same kind of longhair music you do—”
I said: “I’ve seen Shirley’s kid sister and you’ve seen Barbara. Take your pick.”
“All right, but Barbara’s married. And the last I heard she still wasn’t getting any divorce or annulment or whatever you want her to get.”
“Only because she’s scared to death of Avery. Can you blame her?”
“Not after what happened, I can’t blame her. But that—what’s the matter? You know what happened to her, don’t you?”
“No.”
“Take it easy,” Joe said. “She’s still alive and kicking, so get hold of yourself.”
I got hold of myself. “What happened to her?”
“I’m surprised you don’t know. When was the last time you saw her?”
I tried to remember. “Saturday night. No, Sunday morning about seven. We got back from the reunion then, and I dropped her at the door and went to park the car.”
“And you haven’t seen her since?”
“You heard me say it, didn’t you?”
Joe bent down and picked up a rusted welding rod. He carefully traced a circle on the ground with it, making sure that the ends of the circle met exactly. “Well,” he said, “then I know something you don’t know. Shirley took a couple of the kids to the movie matineé Sunday afternoon, and she saw Barbara on the line there. Yeah, and with a pair of dark glasses on because of the shiner over her eye. A black eye you could see a mile away. And a split lip swelled up like a Ubangi. Somebody really landed on her all right, and we all know who it was.”
“Did Shirley say anything to her?”
“She wanted to, but Barbara ducked into the theater before she could. Now don’t get yourself worked up about it, for chrissake. That won’t make it any better. You want my opinion, the only thing’ll make it better is if you listen to Shirley’s slant on it. That Barbara is a married woman, and if she wants to screw around she does it like the sign says, at her own risk. It’s not your job to fix things up for her. Just stay away from her.”
“That’s great,” I said. “Whose side are you on, anyhow?”
He shook his head stubbornly. “I don’t take sides once it comes down to getting killed over a woman. And I’ll say it right out loud—the kind of woman who gets somebody killed over her is never worth it. I saw it happen once when I was in the Navy, and I know.”
“And what makes you think there has to be any killing done?”
“Avery does. What the hell, when you wanted me to go on that scow and talk to him I told you what happened, didn’t I? I never heard any man talk about his wife that way, or curse her up and down the way he did. I could smell trouble coming then, and I can see it right here in front of me now. What do you think he’s looking for around the yard—a nickel he dropped?”
“And that’s what you want me to leave Barbara to?”
“Well, she’s his wife, isn’t she?”
“Is she?” I said. “Then I know something you don’t know. The first time she ever went to bed with a man was with me, Saturday night. How much of a wife does that make her?”
“You’re full of it,” Joe said. “From what he told me—”
“I’m telling you the truth,” I said, and when he looked at me he saw that I was.
“I don’t get it,” he said. “Then why would he want to talk like that about her?”
“So he’d have an excuse to beat her up whenever he wanted to. Another guy like him would go over to one of those houses in Red Hook and pay a girl to get beaten up and like it. He’s smarter
than that. He married Barbara so he can get it free on demand.”
“You sure about that?”
I said impatiently, “You’ve been around, haven’t you? This isn’t the first time you’ve heard of a case like his.”
“No, it isn’t,” Joe admitted. “But, Jesus, what a picture I had of her up to now. You can’t blame me after the way he talked, can you?”
“I had the same picture, didn’t I? That’s why I even took her to that motel. Then afterward I felt like somebody who committed rape. What the hell, I don’t have to tell you that. You know how I must have felt.”
He did. “I’ll lay odds,” he said, “that any lawyer in town’ll tell her she’s got all the grounds for an annulment that anybody needs.”
“I told her that myself. And she won’t do anything about it because she’s afraid of Avery. And you just said she had every right to be. So where does that leave us?”
He was given no chance to answer this, although the answer, at best, could hardly have been helpful. Andressen was suddenly there on the scene, and yard business came first. Andressen’s appearance itself was unusual because when the super occasionally showed up at night it was always early on the shift and he was always wearing work clothes. Now instead of those and the dirty golfing cap which seemed to have been nailed to his head, he was wearing a rumpled business suit and was hatless.
He wasted no time in greetings. “Indian,” he said, “how many men do you have over on that Rio de Centrale in drydock?”
“Two,” said Joe. “That’s what work orders wanted.”
“Never mind the work orders. After dinner put more on. That plate near the keel is all bolted in, and I want it riveted up tonight. Everything below the waterline has to be fixed up as quick as you can.”
“What’s the rush?” said Joe. “That tub’s got a week to go in drydock.”
“A big rush,” said Andressen. “Tomorrow, the next day, we need the drydock empty. The Karen just went down off Hell Gate, and she’ll be here as soon as they raise her. Now I must get her blueprints out of the office and go over there. They’ll have the divers ready in a couple of hours and they want the prints to work from. A couple of hands went down with her.”
The Winter After This Summer Page 36