The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  Clifford Willow Stone is my name. Although of Ozarkian extraction, I was born in Little Rock twenty-eight years ago (which also, sometimes, seems entirely too long), educated in the public schools there, at the University of Arkansas (B.A., History, 1957), and at Yale University (M.A., American Studies, 1959). My hair and eyes are a quite ordinary brownish color, I weigh 132 pounds, am five feet and seven inches tall, and, since this is a confession story of sorts, I wear elevator shoes. At the moment I’m living, if it may be called that, with my wife, the former Pamela Calvert (Mt. Holyoke, 1959) on Hammond Street in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. We both work in downtown Boston, she as a secretary for an advertising agency, I as assistant curator for the Cabot Antiquities Foundation, an organization devoted to the preservation of certain important relics, both tangible and intangible, of the Vanished American Past, or yap as we abbreviate it around the office. For quite a long time I was irrationally devoted to my work, often putting in more hours than were good for me, endangering my health, my sanity, ignoring the chance for profitable leisure, not making any new friends and losing many old ones, forgetting nature’s call and calls of nature, and becoming, in an age of machines, an apparatus, an efficient but mentally corrupt tool for prying into the miasmic crevices of obscure history. No longer. In a few weeks I’m getting out. I think I’m going to build myself a log castle out in the deep woods somewhere, anywhere, and I’m going to hole up in it. But that’s future, and I don’t know—I just don’t know about it. What I’m thinking of right now is past, and I know nearly everything about that.

  Chapter two

  Say that I went home to Little Rock for any reason: my chronic and hopeless wanderlust, my nostalgia for a motherland, my lonesomeness for old friends, my search for lost elements of the Vanished American Past. But I think the most obvious immediate reason, the primum mobile, may be traced back to an embarrassing occurrence at the office shortly before my abrupt departure from Boston.

  All through the winter I had been working harder than I realized, trying by sheer industry to extract from my body and brain all of whatever energy and talent they contained, for the service of that branch of scholarship which I had chosen as most suitable for my temperament. I had not had a vacation in two years. Twice a month my wife badgered me into taking her out to dinner and to Symphony; otherwise I had no obligations interfering with my consuming mission, and I was doing two jobs at once, moonlighting, as it were, except that I was doing them together, simultaneously. Although my work at the office consisted primarily of such routine tasks as cataloging items, old furniture and art works and such, for the Cabot Foundation’s Index of American Culture, and helping locate unusual craft objects and other articles indigenous to the Vanished American Past, I was steadily accumulating materials for a long and conclusive study of the Decay of American Civilization, the deterioration of our institutions, the decline of our standards, etc., etc., which, when finished, would promote me into the vanguard of American cultural critics as swiftly as Athena emerged fully armored from the brow of Zeus. Yale had planted the seed of this noble work in my soul, and Boston had fertilized it. Sometimes, while suddenly hitting upon some momentous insight into the sickness of our society after a hard day of painstaking study of various documents and photographs, I wanted to rise and shout for joy that it was I who had made the discovery, I, a young little guy from the same sticks of Arkansas that had produced Lorelei Lee and Nellie Forbush, I, whose parentage and environment were submarginal, I, whose only boyhood ambition had been to capture eventually the Featherweight Boxing Crown of the World. Arriving at Yale in 1957, still wet behind the ears and passionately convinced that American civilization was the greatest in the history of mankind, I had at first affected a style of scholarship which synthesized the mentality of Vance Packard with the prose of Hemingway, spiced occasionally with a dash of Ozarks objectivity, but the result, which I felt was particularly appropriate for verbal exposition of various aspects of American history and culture, offended my professors no end, and pressure was put upon me both subtly (one gentleman suggested that I read through the Adams papers) and harshly (another refused to read my work) until at last I conformed, got in line, hurle avec les loups, and acquired a style of thought, speech, and writing which would leave me indistinguishable from my peers but would replace the unrestrained passion of my mind with coolness, detachment, circumspection. Verily, I had been innocent, modest, and overly naïve, and it was not without great difficulty that I eventually persuaded myself that Clifford Willow Stone the learned antiquary, despite his fustian, would be infinitely more valuable to the world than ole Nub Stone (as I was known in my youth), the buddy-buddy cornpone.

  But sometimes I missed myself. Of course I wasn’t aware of it, but I did, and maybe this is why what happened happened. Arriving for work at the customary time one Friday in late April, I noticed that my superior, Miss Ovett, a brilliant scholar only a few years older than I, was strangely remote, avoiding me as much as is possible in a small office which we share alone. Normally we are quite amiable in our relations, breaking the tedium of the work with an occasional joke or jest. So after wondering for several hours what her reason might be for ignoring me that particular day, I ventured to inquire if she had discovered anything amiss in my work. “Amiss!” she yelled indignantly, and resumed her attitude of insouciant disdain. Later I tried again to worm some word out of her, but again she was evasive. At five o’clock Miss Ovett, who, I will have to say, equaled me in my dedication to the work and often worked late hours overtime at my side, put on her hat and started to leave the office.

  “Leaving early today, Clara?” I asked, being one of the few people permitted to address her familiarly.

  Miss Ovett fixed me with a look which surely contained bits and pieces of all the great variety of hostile looks she had been giving me all day, and said, “Early? Perhaps my watch is fast, Mr. Stone, but as I recall, I set it by the Trinity Church clock during the lunch hour, and the Trinity Church clock has never been known to be inaccurate, therefore I must assume that if it is not precisely five o’clock, it is either going to be in a matter of a few seconds or else it already was, a moment ago.”

  Greatly relieved to hear her break her long silence so effusively, I was emboldened to stand up and move toward her and say, “Aw come on, Clara, why don’t you tell me what I’ve done wrong. I’ll never know unless you tell me.” And to add suasion to my plea, I let my hand fall gently on her arm.

  “Don’t you touch me again!” she shrilled.

  “??” my eyebrows, fluttering upward, said to her, and then I said, “Again?” and began wondering if I had ever touched her before. Miss Ovett, although she was not without certain felicities of appearance despite what eight years in the Radcliffe Graduate School had done to her, possessed the sort of corporal demeanor which automatically discourages physical contact, and I was unable to recall having done more than shake her hand at our first meeting, two years previously. But then I suddenly remembered that once, when we were exchanging confidences over a couple of beers at Jake Wirth’s, she had mentioned being troubled by frequent recurrent nightmares of various types. Aha! “Miss Overt,” I intoned solemnly, dropping the familiarity because it was no longer effective and fixing her with a look of rapt penetration such as she might receive from her analyst, “have you been having bad dreams again?”

  She started to reply, but her breath caught, snagged on some bewildered, hesitant turning of her mind for several moments before she could shake herself loose from it and say, “No.” But timidly now, not indignantly. She gave the front of her sweater a tug, as if to correct a lax swelling of her abdomen. Her sweater, seen and sniffed at close range, was a thoroughly pilled cashmere cardigan the color of mud, sorely in need of a Woolite treatment; her semifeminine body scent was overlaid thickly by a musk redolent of books and papers and old wood. “No, I have not,” she said. “It was too clear. How strange that you dare to suggest that, as if it were all only a dream to you.
”

  “What was? What was only a dream?”

  “Last night. Surely it wasn’t of such little consequence that you’ve already put it out of your mind.”

  It was my turn to be bewildered. But my confusion rapidly gave way to annoyance. “For God’s sake, Clara, I don’t have the foggiest notion what you’re talking about. What happened last night?”

  She studied me for a moment and then said, “One of us is unhinged, and I think it must be you, because Dr. Rosepine assures me that my analysis has reached the point where I am definitely capable of distinguishing between reality and fantasy. Unless, of course, it is possible that last night’s experience put me right back where I started from.”

  “Please, Clara, please. I swear on a stack of Nutting’s Furniture Treasuries that I can’t possibly imagine what you’re talking about. Look, why don’t we step around the corner and get a couple of drinks and talk this over like a couple of mature, rational people?”

  “After last night I don’t think I’d want to risk consuming alcohol in your company.”

  “All right. Would it make you feel better if I just gave you my resignation right now, and then you wouldn’t have to look at my horrible face ever again?”

  She thought about this, and apparently decided that she didn’t want me to quit. Giving in, she let me take her to a cocktail lounge around the corner on Charles Street, and I was very careful, during the first pair of drinks (I had a whiskey sour and she had a gin Alexander and you should always be chary of ladies who drink Alexanders), to discuss nothing but trivia totally unrelated to the matter at hand. For the second round, after I had persuaded her to switch to a sidecar and she had gone through half of it, I delicately reminded her of what we had to debate.

  “Come to think of it,” she said, coming to think of it gently, politely, like a mature, rational person, “you weren’t quite yourself last night. I mean, there was more than the usual bemused detachment in your speech and manner. How much can you remember of what happened?”

  I didn’t remember very much, because nothing out of the ordinary had happened. It was my custom, three or four evenings a week, to phone a local delicatessen and have a light supper sent up so that I could stay in the office without interruption until, sometimes, nine or ten o’clock. Miss Ovett frequently remained there with me, but both of us were so absorbed with our individual tasks that only rarely did we speak to each other.

  “Well,” I offered, “all I can think of is that about eight o’clock you asked me if I had seen the 1670 Hadley desk-box which had just arrived yesterday afternoon, and we went down to the storeroom for a look at it, and we talked about it for a while, and then I went home.”

  “Do you recall anything in particular you said about that piece?” Miss Ovett asked, with her eyes looking down at her hands in her lap.

  “No, I only recall that I was quite impressed with it, its excellent condition and rarity and all, you know. Didn’t I make some remark to the effect that I wished I could have it for my own?”

  “Yes, you did,” she said, her eyes still on her lap. Then she looked up. “Clifford, order me another drink, please. Something pure this time, undiluted, unadulterated by extra ingredients.”

  So I got her a double Scotch-on-the-rocks and one for myself, and we drank them, and she touched one of her palms down lightly on my arm and left it there, moist and nervous. Then she said, “I think you’ve been working too hard.” Then she told me, in a quavering voice, using the third-person narrative form for modesty’s sake, what had happened the evening before. I was incredulous, naturally, but when belief at last got to me, I agreed that, indeed, I had been working too hard.

  The woman looks up from her work and says to the man, “Say, have you looked at the Hadley desk?”

  The man very slowly raises his head, looks through her, and addresses a cigar-store Indian (school of J. B. Woodhue, circa 1836, Willimantic, Conn.) behind her, “Hadley desk? Hadley desk? Hadley? Desk?”

  “Yes,” the woman says. “We just got it this afternoon. Didn’t I tell you? Merrow found it in a junk shop in Delaware.”

  “Merrow? Delaware?”

  “Yes. Near Dover, I think he said it was. Cost him fifteen dollars.”

  “Dover? Fifteen?”

  That’s right. Would you like to run down and take a look at it?”

  “Down?”

  “Yes, it’s downstairs in the storeroom. I thought you’d be dying to see it. Come on.”

  Rather reluctantly the man follows the woman downstairs. She decides that, as is frequently the case, he has left his mind behind him at his desk, where it is still wrestling with a problem of authenticity regarding a Portsmouth, New Hampshire, fire-house sign of about 1828. But perhaps the sight of the magnificent Hadley desk will snap him out of it.

  “There!” she says, snapping on the lights of the storeroom. “Isn’t it a beauty?”

  The man gives it only a cursory glance, as if it doesn’t interest him at all. Then he begins to stare at the woman. Often he is abstracted, she realizes. Even more often he is brash, pert, and flippant in his manner. But now she detects in his gaze something trancelike, even evil. Mr. Stone is a strange man, but a profound scholar; like all brilliant people, he has his peculiarities.

  “Clifford?” the woman says. “Do you like it?”

  “Very much,” he says, still staring fixedly at her.

  “Clifford? Are you feeling well?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Don’t you want to examine it? Pick it up, see how solid it is.”

  The man, although he is a small man an inch or so shorter than she, lifts her bodily and places her upon one of the worktables in the room, holding her down with arms whose strength amazes her.

  “Clifford! What are you doing?”

  “Very solid,” he says, and then he begins to stroke her body with his hand.

  “Mister Stone!” she gasps, and struggles to free herself, but the little man is very powerful. “What is the meaning of this?” she demands.

  “Virgin oak,” he says. “Perfect craftsmanship. So nicely put together.”

  “Let me go, Mr. Stone! I’ll scream!”

  He climbs onto the table beside her, and gazes soulfully into her eyes. “So rare,” he murmurs. “I wish I had it for my own. It’s so exquisite, I’m tempted to steal it.” And his soft words, mingled with the gentle fondling of his hand, have a curious effect on her, more overpowering than his physical strength.

  “The lid” he says, grasping her skirt and raising it. “How perfectly it is hinged!”

  “Clifford,” she sighs weakly, “don’t.”

  “The drawers,” he says, grasping her panties and pulling them down her legs. “How smoothly they slide!”

  Then he gets on top of her.

  “Would you like another drink, Clara?” I gently inquired.

  “I guess not, thank you,” she said. “I have those Rensselaer papers to collate, so I’d better get back to the office.”

  “Shall I help you?”

  Noisily she Kleenexed her nose, then looked at me for a moment before replying, and began to smile, the first smile I had seen on her face all day. “No, Cliff,” she said and patted my arm. “I think you should stay away from the office for a few weeks. You haven’t taken a day’s leave in over two years, and I think you’ve been driving yourself too hard. Perhaps you could let Dr. Rosepine have a few talks with you. He’s an awfully good man.”

  “Oh, I couldn’t do that,” I protested sincerely. “I mean I couldn’t leave the office. I’ve got too much to do.’

  “But you’re verging on a breakdown, I can sense it. Last night…well, last night was simply the culmination of a series of developments in your anxiety syndrome, and if you don’t get away for a while, I fear for your health.”

  I mulled this over while I finished my drink, and I also thought of something which had been in the back of my mind for quite some time—a trip to Little Rock, a chance to see various
good people I hadn’t seen for years, including my own relatives, a chance to encounter once again the self of my youth, Nub Stone, a nice, well-adjusted boy who never, never would have done what the adult Clifford Stone did to poor Clara Ovett. “Perhaps you’re right,” I said to her, “but I could combine some business with the pleasure of a vacation.” Then I told her how I might take advantage of a trip to Arkansas to look into some of the aspects of that section of Southern culture and possibly obtain a few items for the Foundation’s collection.

  “Why, that’s an excellent ideal” she said. “But don’t spend too much time for us. Get some rest, and do a little fishing or swimming or something. Stay as long as you like.”

  Thank you,” I said and gave her my most grateful smile. “And, Clara…I want to say how sorry I am about last night. I must have been out of my head. Anybody else but you would have fired me for a stunt like that.”

  Objective Ovett, she said, ‘I am convinced now that you were the victim, temporarily, of nervous pressure over which you had no control.”

  We got up and left the bar and I walked her to the corner, where she would turn up the hill to the office and I would cross the Common to catch the M.T.A. home. I shook her hand. “Thank you again,” I said. “I’ll see you in a few weeks and drop you a card or two while I’m away. And Clara—”

  “Yes?”

  “Before I go, I’d like to know…well…last night…you didn’t finish telling me everything about it…did I…well, uh, I mean…did I—?”

  “Did you insert your organ?”

  I nodded, my eyes averted.

  “No, you didn’t. I managed to throw you off in time.” Miss Ovett set her jaw and turned to go, saying rapidly yet almost inaudibly over her shoulder, “But I wish I hadn’t.”

  I thought about that all the way home on the M.T.A. Trying like a hungover reveler on the day after to remember the improprieties of the night before, I sought in vain to recall what I had done and at last gave it up, deciding that maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad idea for me to see that Dr. Rosepine after all. I knew I was oversexed, I was aware that I often suffered a mild form of chronic unmitigated satyriasis, which in my personal punning manner I think of as “Stone-ache,” but there had only been two times in my life when I had not been aware of what I was doing: once in a boxing match in high school when I had become so punch drunk that I felled my opponent with one thunderously uninhibited blow and then knocked down the referee and my seconds before finally being stopped by the coach; and another time at Yale when I had killed a fifth of bourbon in two hours on a dare and recited all of Lincoln’s first inaugural address from a memory which I was not even aware I had had. But both of those occasions had been stimulated by an actual change in the chemistry of my body. The affaire Clara, however…I just didn’t know. It was all a dream I wanted to forget.