Young Mr. Keefe

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  He poured himself another drink. Probably he was drinking too much, he thought. But there was so little else to do, in the evenings, when he was alone. Bob Maguire was very kind. He and Margie, his wife, invited Jimmy to dinner every few weeks. In their split-level, ranch-type house in Fair Oaks, a newly developed suburb that was burgeoning east of the city—a suburb that was still a treeless, lawnless stretch of redwood and plate-glass houses—they tried to make him feel at home. They knew that he and Helen had separated. Margie Maguire fixed asparagus with Hollandaise sauce, and fresh fat lamb chops, and the inevitable California garden salad. She had given him the avocado stone and told him how to make it grow, on toothpicks in a glass of water. She had a profusion of avocados growing in her picture window. For dessert, for a touch of gaiety, she served vanilla ice-cream topped with green crème de menthe. He had made the mistake of mentioning this dessert to Claire one time. She had made a face. “Why doesn’t she serve it on top of mashed potatoes?” she asked.

  After dinner, Bob Maguire liked to bring cold beers—quick-chilled in the freezer—into the living-room. They would lower the lights and watch television. The Maguires were fond of I Love Lucy, and, thanks to the fifty-foot antenna which was almost a requisite in the valley, the reception was good. Jimmy realized that he was really leading three lives. One was the quiet, polite, weekday evening life of the Maguires, thanking Margie kindly for the nice dinner, bringing her, occasionally, the box of Mary See’s chocolates that she liked. The second was the week-end life, shared with Claire and Blazer in their apartment on Russian Hill in San Francisco, seeing, from time to time, old friends from the East who were always passing through, on their way to or from Hawaii or Southern California, and who were always ready for a party. The third was his lonely private life, like now.

  He had told the Maguires about Claire and Blazer, his friends in San Francisco, his friends from home. Margie Maguire had asked him to bring them by. She might be able to introduce them to some new people, to some of their Sacramento friends. But Jimmy had been wise enough to see how hopeless this would be—how dull Claire and Blazer would have considered the Maguires to be, how strange and Bohemian Claire and Blazer would have seemed to the Maguires. He could imagine the things Claire would have to say about the Maguires. About their little house, their tiny fruit trees, their backyard barbecue, their picture window.

  Yes, he was moving in three worlds, really. No two of them were compatible. And, in a way, all three seemed empty.…

  The liquor swirled inside and warmed him. The night was cold and ominous; it was easy to imagine himself the only living, pulsing being in it. Yes, he was drinking too much. For too much of a reason. That was the frightening thing. Perhaps his mother had been right. Perhaps he should have let his father help him. Perhaps he should have gone to New York, found a job with a brokerage house, gone to work carrying an umbrella. And yet he was sure that he was doing the right thing. It was a challenge—this was—the sort of challenge Claire had meant, the challenge none of them seemed to have, but all of them needed. He wanted to meet it, and he would meet it, he told himself. If only he didn’t get lost along the way. Perhaps he could explain to Claire. He thought of her face, white and tear-stained, on the mountainside when she had slipped. “I’ll make this without your help!” she had said.

  And for a moment, in her eyes, he had glimpsed a kind of bone-hard courage. This is what I must have, he thought.

  All right, he thought. The drink in his hand glowed palely in the moonlight. With a quick, angry gesture, he threw it on the ground. He stood up and walked back to his sleeping-bag. The ground was cold and frosty under his bare feet. He felt good—as though he had argued something out with himself, and settled something for all time. If Helen should appear now, he would have the right answers for her. As he crawled back into the sleeping-bag, he realized that he had not really been thinking about Helen at all. Just as well, he thought. I won’t think about her any more to-night. I will turn my mind off now.

  5

  There was a noise in the night quite close to his shoulder and he sat up abruptly. “Jimmy?”

  “Who is it?”

  “It’s me—Claire.”

  “What’s the matter?” he whispered. She was obscured in the shadows and he could barely see her.

  “Let’s go for a walk.”

  “Where’s Blazer?”

  “Asleep.”

  He crawled out of his sleeping-bag and stood up beside her. “God, you scared me to death,” he said. “What’s the matter?”

  She laughed mockingly. “I couldn’t sleep. Let’s go for a walk. Just down by the water. I feel like talking.”

  “All right.” He shivered. “Christ, it’s cold.”

  She laughed softly again. “Well, put on your jacket, silly! I have mine on. You don’t need to impress me with your broad bare chest.”

  He was wearing only a pair of suntan pants. He knelt and felt around on the ground for his windbreaker, found it, and put it on. He pulled wool socks over his bare feet and put on his sneakers.

  “I was having the funniest dream,” Claire said.

  “What was it?”

  “Oh, I don’t remember all of it. It was all mixed up. I was married to you … you were Blazer, only you were yourself. Very confusing.”

  “I’ll say.” They walked carefully and slowly towards the water.

  They found a wide, flat stone at the edge of the lake. “Let’s sit down here,” she said. They sat down. “I haven’t finished telling you the story of my life.”

  “This is a great time to tell it,” Jimmy said. “In the middle of the night …”

  She went on, as though she hadn’t heard him. “I have this great frustration,” she said. “When I got out of college—remember—I went to New York for a while. I wanted to go to Europe, but Daddy wouldn’t let me go alone. New York was the next best thing. I lived on West Twelfth Street, in the Village, and went to art school in the evenings. You can imagine what everybody in Mars Hill thought of that! You know Mars Hill …”

  Jimmy knew Mars Hill. Claire’s grandfather had built it on a high bank of the Naugatuck River, in Connecticut, about twenty miles from Jimmy’s home in Somerville. Originally, Mars Hill had been planned as a summer place, and though it contained over fifty rooms, it had been built without central heating. Claire’s family occupied the house now; they had modernized parts of it, closed parts of it off, torn parts of it down. Still, from the road below, Mars Hill was an astonishing sight—built in a variety of styles, part medieval, part Renaissance, part Tudor. It had gargoyles, crenellated roof-tops, and a complex of towers and chimneys that rose above the surrounding trees. Jimmy remembered Claire’s coming-out party there. The house had been opened up. Brightly coloured balloons had been floated in the lighted pool that cast kaleidoscopic shadows into the trees above the outdoor dance floor.

  “I wanted to be an artist,” Claire said. “Nobody in Mars Hill could understand it. They thought I was sowing wild oats, or whatever it is girls are supposed to do at that age. They smiled and said, ‘She’ll be back.’ Of course they were right. I got a job. I sketched housewares for Macy’s, in the advertising department. Housewares—I should say electrical appliances. Steam irons … stoves … refrigerators. One of the other artists had a lamp to draw. It was a hideous lamp—but how I wanted to sketch it! But they wouldn’t let me! ‘You’re doing beautifully on appliances,’ they said. There I sat in front of my little easel. Then one morning the art director called me in and said that all my sketches looked as though they were sitting in piles of coal. The appliances were white! I had to put them on dark backgrounds! But they didn’t understand. They put someone else on appliances. I wanted to try fashion. The last thing I drew was a dress shield. How ironic! That was the closest I ever came to fashion.”

  “Not exactly an exciting career,” Jimmy said.

  “So I quit. Then I wrote some sort of silly heartbroken, mixed-up letter to my mother about all my unfulfi
lled desires. Well, you can imagine what happened. Mother and Daddy drove down to New York and needless to say they were appalled. Imagine, Junius Denison’s daughter living in absolute squalor—the cute little apartment I had told them about—it was unheard of. It shook their very foundations! Of course, I was whisked home. They thought I was repudiating them, or whatever it is that children nowadays are supposed to do to their parents. I wasn’t repudiating them. I just thought they were dull!”

  “I can picture your dad’s face.”

  “Yes. And so I went home with them—back to Mars Hill, to the warm womb of love. I took tennis lessons instead of art lessons, and started seeing Blazer again. We had sort of broken off. But Mother and Daddy always liked Blazer, so I married him.”

  “Claire, why are you telling me all this?” In the darkness, he tried to make out her face.

  “I don’t know … I guess it’s because I think you understand. My one big dream. Blazer doesn’t understand. Jimmy,” she said suddenly, “do you want Blazer and me to be happy?”

  “Why do you ask me that?”

  “I don’t know that, either. Sometimes I wonder if I love him as much as I should.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “It’s true. I’m so sorry I was unkind to you this morning—when you wanted to help me. It was just crazy—I felt that Blazer would have wanted me to get out of that jam myself. I wanted you to help me, really. A woman doesn’t always want to be self-sufficient. Still, that’s what Blazer wants me to be.”

  “I understand.”

  “Do you? Sometimes I worry about Blazer and me. Blazer is so fond of Daddy, for instance. When Daddy phones me from home, Blazer gets on the phone … they talk for hours. Blazer tells him all about how many hundreds of dozens of sheets he’s sold … how he approached a prospect, how he followed a lead. All about business. Daddy loves that, of course. He says Blazer has his feet on the ground now—even though he used to be a little wild. He says Blazer is a solid citizen. Remember Death of a Salesman? Is Blazer turning out like that? I have a terror that Daddy’s right—that Blazer is turning into a solid citizen. A stuffed shirt—like Daddy!”

  “He takes his job seriously, that’s all,” Jimmy said. “I take my job seriously, too.”

  “Too seriously! You should hear Blazer when he gets going on the soft-goods business. He can be such a bore. I want him to be funny and gay. I have to supply all that myself now. Blazer and Daddy have hit it off so well, I’m afraid one of these days Daddy is going to offer Blazer a job … and I’m afraid Blazer will take it! I’ll be right back with everything I’ve always tried to run away from. Am I shocking you, talking like this?”

  “No, not really …”

  “When Blazer’s company transferred him out here, to San Francisco, I thought everything was going to be different. We’d be away from that warm womb of love at home—build one of our own, perhaps. But we haven’t.”

  “Of course you have.”

  “No, no. Look at that moon!” she exclaimed. “It should have a bird flying across it now, shouldn’t it? Except for that one detail, don’t you think it’s awfully well done?”

  He laughed. “Yes,” he said, “it certainly is.”

  “Let’s get into it,” she whispered, and stood up. “Over here.”

  They walked, a few feet apart, along the strip of beach, into the moonlight. Claire began scuffing her toes carelessly into the sand, and Jimmy tried matching his footprints to hers so that their tracks would be one. “There’s no tide up here,” he said, “to wash our footprints away.”

  Claire started taking bigger steps. Away from the trees, their shadows stood out clearly on the sand beside them. “Do you know why I’m named Claire?” she asked him. “It’s for ‘Clair de Lune.’ Years ago, when Mother was a girl, Debussy played ‘Claire de Lune’ for her on the piano. Mother says he wrote the song for her … but I don’t know. Let’s sprawl here.” She took a little nose dive into the sand and lay there, face downward, arms stretched out. “Are you afraid?”

  “Of what?”

  “Of the dark?”

  “No.”

  “Sleepy?”

  “No. I was. I feel a little heady now. The altitude …”

  “Yes. I feel that way, too. Sit down.”

  Jimmy sat down beside her, and she raised herself on her elbows. “Of me?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “Are you afraid of me?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I want you to kiss me.”

  At the base of his spine, a feeling started, spread, travelled. “I think we’d better go back,” he said huskily.

  “Why?”

  “Blazer is my best friend.” The words sounded hollow, childish.

  “You’re stuffy,” she said. “But you’re nice. I like you. You’re a very nice boy indeed.”

  “Thank you.”

  Quietly, she put her hands on his shoulders and kissed him. “There,” she said, drawing back. “My!”

  “I’m sorry you did that.”

  “Why? I have a wanton streak in me, didn’t you know? What’s wrong with it? You’d never tell Blazer … and certainly I never would. Why shouldn’t we?”

  “Why shouldn’t we do what?”

  “Have an affair? It would be sort of an experiment. Do you think it would be hard to love me?”

  Jimmy was silent, looking at her. Her head was thrown back, her blonde hair brushing the sand. Her lips were parted in a half smile, and her eyes, in the shadows, glowed bright and dark. “No,” he said. And it would not, he knew, be hard. Wouldn’t it be very easy now to take her face in his hands, and forget that she was Blazer’s wife? Why not? Mentally, he shattered the Seventh Commandment, hovering between kissing her and not kissing her, kissing her lips and hands and forehead, tangling his fingers in her long gold hair. “But I feel loyal,” he said slowly. “And I want you to be loyal, too.”

  “Loyal to what? To our Puritan ancestors …?”

  And then, as though something suddenly snapped into focus inside his mind, he knew why, the real reason why he wanted to kiss her. It was not Claire he wanted; it was revenge, against Helen. As though, by taking Claire, he could put to rest the ghost of Helen. “You see,” he would be able to say to her spectre, “you have hurt me; I will repay you this way; I will profane your image.” The thought sickened him. He closed his eyes. Be careful of that lighter, it will throw out sparks. Like this. He knew he had to say something.

  “Look,” he said. “We’re not making any sense, are we? We’ve both had quite a bit to drink to-night … we’re just two people who are very fond of each other. Let’s not get carried away.”

  She turned away sharply. “You’re making me feel like a tramp!”

  “I don’t intend to. It’s wonderful. I’m very flattered—you should be flattered, too.” He stood up. “Let’s get back.”

  She was silent. He wondered if she was going to cry, but she was not. Presently she gave a little shrug and stood up. They walked back together in silence. The moon disappeared when they reached the trees. With a little trouble, they found their beds.

  Claire said, “Good night,” and her voice—he could not see her face now—sounded cold and distant. They separated.

  For a long time Jimmy lay looking up into the blackness. A slight wind came up, stirring the leaves, tossing up sparks from the dying fire.

  6

  In the morning, he was the first to wake. The sun was coming brightly through the trees, and he had to spend a moment or two locating himself, remembering that he was on a mountain, on a hard sleeping-bag that had become wadded and uncomfortable beneath him.

  He stood up. Claire and Blazer were still asleep. On their bed of pine boughs, they had rolled apart. He fished inside his knapsack for his bathing-trunks, found them, and slipped off his trousers. For a moment he stood there, tall and naked, wondering what they would say if they should suddenly wake and see him. Then he stooped, pulled on his trunks, an
d walked down towards the water. The footprints were still there in the sand. Carefully, he walked up and down over them, erasing them. For what reason, he didn’t know. Perhaps, he thought, by erasing the footprints, I can erase the incident from my mind. For a long time, he stood looking out across the water. Then he turned, and saw that Claire was standing farther back, on a rock, watching him. She turned quickly and moved away. Had she had the same thought, he wondered? To erase the footprints in the sand? The glimpse he had of her, in blue jeans and a sweater, standing there, her blonde hair tousled and loose, printed itself on his mind, then dissolved. He went to the water’s edge, leaned over, and splashed cold water in his face.

  He walked to where the rocks formed stepping-stones out into the lake, and he tried to step out to the farthest one. He lay flat on his belly on the final stone and looked over its edge into the water. With his fingertips, he drew slow angel-wing patterns on the smooth surface. Not far from him a snake darted along the top of the water. He followed it with his eyes until it reached the bank and hid among tall weeds and rushes. After a while, he got up and started back to the camp.

  Claire was fixing breakfast. Blazer lay on his back on top of the sleeping-bag, still foggy with sleep. “We have cereal,” Claire said brightly. “No eggs … I told you I was afraid eggs would break. And I’ve made coffee. I don’t have any idea how it is.”