The Winter After This Summer

by Stanley Ellin

  The shop was scrupulously clean and orderly, redolent of freshly cut wood, of shavings hot from the planer, of wet lacquer. A couple of men were working on a cabinet in the middle of the floor, another was at the power saw against the wall.

  “Fisher?” I said to the shop at large, and the man at the saw shut if off and came toward me. A gaunt man with a mop of white hair and a rock-ribbed New England look to him. And as he came closer I saw that the glasses he wore were so thick that they distorted his eyes to twice their real size. He wiped his hands on his apron, the instinctive gesture of the craftsman getting ready to serve a customer, and he peered back and forth at Joe and me, probably seeing neither of us too well.

  “Yes?” he said. “What can I do for you?”

  “I don’t know yet,” I said. “It’s about a phone call you made to Mrs. Avery. You did call her, didn’t you?”

  “Mrs. Avery? Yes, I did, but I wasn’t given the chance to speak to her. And there’s no reason why she—”

  “No reason?” I said. “You make a threatening call to a woman and then expect her to be grateful for it?”

  Fisher stood there wordlessly, his eyes narrowed behind the thick glasses, his mouth set like a trap. Behind him the two men working on the cabinet stopped working and looked around at us, but when Joe made a small pantomime of hitting a nail with a hammer they promptly went back to work, their ears fanned out to take in every word. Then Fisher found his voice.

  “What’s your name?” he said abruptly.

  “Egan,” I said. “And this is Mr. Guion. And none of this changes the fact that you’re Mr. Fisher who’s making a serious nuisance of himself and ought to know better.”

  “Oh, come on, man,” said Fisher contemptuously. “Do I look like someone who goes around threatening women? Didn’t it enter your thick head for one minute that I might have been trying to do Mrs. Avery a favor? What’s your interest in this, anyhow? Are you a relative of hers? A friend? Or just a busybody out to make things worse?”

  “One thing at a time,” I said. “No, it didn’t enter my thick head that you were doing anyone but Avery a favor, and a misbegotten one at that.”

  “Then I take it you’re a friend of the lady’s,” said Fisher. “But do you know anything at all about Michael? Michael Avery, that is.”

  “Guion and I work for the same outfit he does. You don’t have to do more than that to know everything about him that’s worth knowing.”

  “You think so?” said Fisher. “You’re a real master of the glittering generalization, aren’t you? Well, that’s a dangerous pose, Mr. Egan, especially in hot weather like this. It either muddies the troubled waters or starts them boiling, and you seem on your way to doing both at the same time. Now, if you want to have a serious talk about Michael—and I assure you that I’m very anxious to do that myself, even with a poorly qualified emissary from his wife—”

  Joe put a hand on my shoulder, and I took a deep breath before speaking. “That’s what I’m here for,” I said.

  “All right, then if you don’t mind waiting upstairs I’ll join you there in a few minutes. It’s the door next to the shop. And if you look in the icebox you’ll find a jar of drinking water there. Take all you want. It might cool off your blood.”

  On the way up those narrow stairs, Joe said, “Take it easy, for chrissake. That Fisher must be as old as Voorhees. He couldn’t hurt a fly. That’s all you wanted to know, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes,” I said, but I wasn’t telling the truth. There were other things I wanted to know now, and among them was what possible affinity could exist between someone like Fisher and a brute like Avery. For all Fisher’s crusty, self-assured air and his whiplash tongue he was to Avery what the last Victorian would be to a Neanderthal man. And for all the sting inflicted by that whiplash tongue, there was something about Fisher’s utter fearlessness and outrageous bluntness that inspired a sort of unwilling respect in me. He was much more like Jacob Voorhees than Joe might have realized.

  The room we waited in upstairs fit the man. It was the front room of the flat overlooking the street, and was sparsely furnished with some hard, straight-backed pieces, uncomfortable even to look at. Everything there, including the naked hardwood floor, had been polished and waxed to a mirrorlike luster, and a faint smell of the polish permeated the warm, still air. For ornamentation there was only a row of woodcarvings on the mantelpiece of a sealed-up fireplace, but against the opposite wall was a well-filled bookcase and next to it a desk also stacked with books.

  I went along the shelves of the bookcase and saw that the collection there was a curious one for any carpenter. History, philosophy, and comparative religions were evidently Fisher’s interests. Works on them filled the shelves, works especially on Biblical study from the Higher Criticism to the lower cynicism. And the books I opened were well-worn and heavily annotated along the margins in a minute and old-fashioned hand which could only be the hand of Samuel Fisher. Here and there between the pages were slips of paper inscribed in the same hand, and the whole thing reminded me of the way my sister would read books, always more interested in the part than the whole.

  The books on the desk were of the same order, but one of them was a startler, a copy of Thucydides in Greek, the same edition I had struggled through in my classics course at the University. Looking through it, seeing the penciled interlineations on page after page, I remembered almost too well the angry pride with which I had read it without the aid of a pony, getting for my trouble a barely passing grade while the pony riders galloped off with honors. The University had its own way of making cynics, and if I had it to do over again, I thought—and then I thought, no, if I had it to do over again, there would be no one in the class except this ancient carpenter and me, and, after a little while, no one at all. My generation, at least, was the practical one. It not only announced that there was no profit in learning to read Homer’s Greek, but clapped the lid on the garbage pail once and for all. As long as you knew Homer’s alphabet you could tell whether you were with the right people or not, and that was enough.

  “This Fisher’s not only a carpenter,” said Joe as if to confirm my own thoughts. “Take a look here.”

  He was studying the woodcarvings on the mantelpiece, and when I walked over to see what had caught his interest he handed me one of them. It was the image of a hunting dog, a pointer in the act of flushing his birds, forepaw lifted, tail out rigid, carved with some skill and no imagination. There was not even the barbaric innocence in it that Waterhouse had managed to get into the landscape on his garden wall. When I examined the others there, figures of dogs, cats, horses, a couple of pretty-pretty busts of long dead Gibson girls, I saw that whatever Fisher’s talents were, they were not artistic.

  When Fisher walked into the room, in shirt sleeves but with his apron removed, I put the woodcarving back on the mantelpiece but still had the Thucydides under my arm. He looked at me and then cocked his head at the book. “Well,” he said, “you look as if you’ve cooled off a little by now. Don’t tell me you go for that kind of reading. That’s Greek, you know.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I know.”

  “He went to college,” Joe said to Fisher, which was the line he always used whenever he felt compelled to explain my aberrations to company. And he always said it with the same mixture of pride and apology, like a father explaining that his son was a misguided genius. “I’ll bet he can read any book you’ve got around here and make sense out of it.”

  Fisher removed his book from under my arm and sat down at the desk with it. “This one, too?” he asked me. “You mean you learned Greek in school?”

  “A little Latin and less Greek,” I quoted for his benefit, and I saw with cheap gratification that it had the effect I wanted it to.

  He lowered his head to stare at me hard over his glasses. “They make strange shipyard workers nowadays,” he said. Then he clapped his hand on the book. “Do you remember how this history ends?”

  I thought he w
as testing me. “It doesn’t end,” I said. “It was left unfinished.”

  “Yes,” he said impatiently, and I saw that I had misjudged him. He wasn’t testing me but was trying to make a point. “But do you remember the last line in it? The line it closes on?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Well, you should, because it’s one of the saddest and truest lines ever written. No historian ever found a more enlightening one to end his work with.” He opened the back cover of the book and leaned forward over it, his eyes only a few inches from the page he was scanning. “Listen to this, Mr. Egan. ‘When the winter after this summer is over, the twenty-first year of this war will be completed.’ Do you get the significance of that? Do you see how it applies to your own hotheaded case? Here’s Athens and Sparta, two peoples speaking the same language, full of the need to understand each other, but lunging at each other’s throats in a blind fury of ignorance. Not only yesterday and today, but as this line tells us, tomorrow as well. Was there ever a better description of the disaster brought about by the failure of communication among men?”

  “There’s more to it than that,” I said. “When two people have a stake in the same thing, any communication between them isn’t going to stop their conflict.”

  “You’re wrong,” said Fisher, “but at least you’re honest about it. There’s no need to play games with each other about this, is there? The stake in this case is Mrs. Avery, and you feel that you’ve got the same vested interest in her that Michael has. That’s what it comes to, isn’t it?”

  “Is that what Avery told you?”

  “No, he never named you or any man in particular. All he told me was that he had made an unfortunate marriage to a woman who would gladly open the door to any man who knocked on it. Even with my poor eyesight I can see that you, in particular, took advantage of that. I’m describing the situation in polite language, of course, but that doesn’t change the dirty nature of it.”

  “Avery’s a drunk and a liar,” Joe interposed. “He married the girl just for a chance to beat her up. Does she have to take that? Is that what you’re in favor of, mister?”

  “Michael is an emotionally sick man,” said Fisher. “I have all the evidence of it I need. That’s why I called Mrs. Avery. I wanted to warn her, not threaten her, as you both seem to think. Obviously, my interest in this is to prevent her from being hurt.”

  “What interest?” I said. “Why do you take any interest in Avery at all?”

  “I have my reasons.”

  “I’d like to hear them,” I said. “So far, we seem to be going on the assumption that I’m on trial here and that you’re qualified to sit as judge and jury. Now I’d like to know what your qualifications are. I mean, besides the sanctimonious way you have of describing dirty situations in polite language.”

  I expected the barbed tongue to lash out at this, but it didn’t. Fisher was silent a long time, and when he spoke there was no edge in his voice, no anger in it.

  “I never meant to sound sanctimonious,” he said heavily. “God forbid I should. Especially since I’m as much responsible as anyone for what Michael has come to.”

  “What has he come to?” I asked.

  “Satan,” said Fisher surprisingly. “I knew him as a young man, he lived with me many years, and during that time I tried to bring him close to God. When I met him again I found that I had brought him only to Satan. I mean that in its literal sense. He is as much a Satanist as any godforsaken human being can be. Do you know anything about the Manichean heresy?”

  “Not much,” I said. “It was a heresy against Catholic doctrine, wasn’t it?”

  “It was a heresy against humanity,” Fisher said. “In simplest terms it was the belief that while God may have created the heavens and the earth, it was Satan who created man. And the sad truth is that those who come to this belief inevitably come to believe that Satan is the one to appease and glorify. This is what Michael has come to. There is a fanatic religiosity in him that I thought would be his salvation when I first knew him. Now that I see how it’s been warped in the direction of Satan I’m afraid of what it may lead to.”

  “Are you serious?” I said.

  “Yes,” said Fisher. “Do you have any reason to doubt that?”

  The truth was that I did not. He had addressed all this to me feelingly, but with none of the bitterness and vehemence of the unfrocked priest or fire-eating revivalist which was what I began to suspect he was. More than that, Joe had already told me that when he spoke to Avery on the barge Avery had not only cut loose with his vicious diatribe against Barbara but also with some wild religious talk. So, all in all, it was remotely possible that I might have been marked by Avery not only as a rival for his wife, but as a victim for an impending Black Mass. Yet, that is not a situation which the ordinary citizen and voter can readily imagine himself in. Nor did trying to imagine myself in it change the unpleasant fact that if Avery succeeded in splitting my skull open, his precise motives would mean little to me afterward. It seemed to me that whether a murder was explained by religious jargon or psychiatric jargon it was still a murder, and that the object of sympathy should be the victim and not the murderer. Whatever their problems of communication might be, it was the victim who would not be around the winter after this summer to help solve them.

  I put that to Fisher in plain language, and I said, “It also comes down to a matter of terminology. What you’re glamorizing as fanatic religiosity, I would call alcoholism, sexual perversion, and brutality. Aside from myself, does Mrs. Avery have to put up with that?”

  “She has legal recourse,” said Fisher.

  Joe snorted. “I can see her trying to get him into court,” he said. “He’d probably break her arm for it.”

  “Has she tried?” asked Fisher.

  “No,” I said. “She’s too afraid of him for that. She has good reason to be.”

  “Whatever her reasons,” Fisher said, “the decision is hers to make and no one else’s. You have no right to interfere.”

  “Interfere?” I said. “For God’s sake, that girl and I love each other. And she’s a decent kid in every respect. She’s entitled to her share of happiness, isn’t she?”

  “Why?” demanded Fisher.

  “I’d say it was one of her inalienable rights.”

  “That’s very clever of you,” said Fisher, “but it’s bad to use cleverness to conceal truth. Face up to it, Mr. Egan, what you’re calling on in defense of immorality is today’s hedonistic code, not your grandfather’s Declaration of Independence. That’s the code that allows you to taste experience and then run from it if it’s unpalatable. Taste marriage and then rinse out your mouth with divorce. Have children but settle your boredom with them by throwing them into nurseries. Try one soft job after another, looking for the one where you get the most money for doing the least work. That’s what your definition of happiness stands for, and the saddest part is the equation of the word love with it. What sins, what infinitely dreary little sins, are covered by that word love.”

  “It happens to be a word with a profound meaning,” I said. “Whatever God you’ve found for yourself is a strange one if he denies that.”

  “He denies nothing,” said Fisher. “He affirms nothing. He created the heavens and the earth, and he set me here to do my duty by him. Duty, Mr. Egan. The duty to use my hand and brain to the utmost, and not to sit and yearn to love or be loved.”

  “You’re not giving me my due,” I said. “I wasn’t talking about romantic love. I meant the kind of love you’re supposed to feel for mankind at large.”

  “And I meant the same thing.”

  “Oh,” I said. “In that case, it’s not hard to see why Avery landed in the devil’s lap. He couldn’t possibly miss. Not with you there to help him along with your own peculiar image of divinity.”

  “I tried to lead him to the one true God above,” said Fisher, “and that is the God of duty. What we call the devil is only a man-made demon constructed
out of man’s hates and fears. Yes, and those hates and fears are still in us and always will be. And the only thing that can rule them is a sense of duty to our fellow men, not that nonsensical, unearthly abstraction you call love. I tell you, if the world waits for men to love one another it will remain rotten until Judgment Day! There is no need for them to love one another. Their only need is to do their duty by each other, and that is the answer to all problems. Feel about me as you will, despise me in your heart if you wish—but pick me up when I fall by the wayside, feed me when I starve, uphold my honor at all times. Don’t tell me you have to love me before you can do this. That has been the dreadful error of our days and our ways—that idea that love must be the first condition of duty, its inspiration and meaning. It is a sickness today, that need for love, the insistence on it, the talk, talk, talk about it, the insane notion that it is the cure for all troubles. What did Solomon say? There is a time for love, he said. Yes, a time for it. And a time for every purpose under the sun. He knew what was in the human heart. He did not ask the impossible of it, but only the necessary.”

  “And by the necessary I suppose you mean one’s duty?”

  “Yes.”

  “You sound positive enough about that,” I said. “Now tell me how anyone can judge what his duty is without being guided by love. Where does he get the word?”

  “The word is in the Bible,” Fisher said. “That is what you will find in it, the word of God setting forth man’s duties. And wherever that word is most truly revealed, you will not find love made a condition of those duties.”

  “You were in the clergy once, weren’t you?” I said.

  “I was.”

  “But not any more?”

  “No,” said Fisher, “not for a long time. I learned the carpenter’s trade from my father before I got the call to preach gospel, and I returned to it as soon as I left the clergy.”

  “What made you leave?”