by Irwin Shaw
“Back home in Sicily,” she said, “he probably would have been burning crops and kidnapping principessas. Poor man, stuck in Boston, handing out mail. Oh,” she said, “I got some news for you today in the office. I wrote a letter to an old newspaperman in Elysium, Ohio, who occasionally strings for us when there’s anything of interest happening in that part of the world, and I think he’s found your father’s Clothilde for you.”
“How the hell did he do that?” Wesley asked, although after Alice had discovered the whereabouts of Dominic Joseph Agostino he had begun to believe that nobody could avoid being pinpointed by Time Magazine if it were looking for him.
“It seems that there was a juicy divorce in Elysium quite a few years ago,” Alice said, “a respected burgher named Harold Jordache—the name’s familiar to you, I imagine …?” She smiled at him over the platter of cold cuts.
“Oh, come on,” he said.
“His wife sued him for divorce because she found him in bed with the maid. It was big news in Elysium, Ohio, and our stringer, his name is Farrell, you might look him up if you have time, covered it for the local sheet. Farrell said the wife walked away with a bundle, the house, half the business, alimony, a woman publicly scorned and all that in a small, God-fearing town. Anyway, can you guess the name of the lady taken in flagrante delicto?”
“You tell me,” Wesley said, although he could guess the name and even guess what flagrante delicto meant.
“Clothilde,” Alice said triumphantly. “Clothilde Devereaux. She runs a Laundromat just down the street from Farrell’s paper. I have the address in my pocketbook. How does that grab you?”
“I’ll leave for Ohio tomorrow,” Wesley said.
He stood in front of the Laundromat on the sleepy street. From the bus station he had called the Jordache Garage and Ford Dealer, with the idea of seeing his Great-Uncle Harold for a few minutes before looking up Clothilde Devereaux. Might as well get the ugly part over first. When Harold Jordache finally came to the phone and Wesley told him who he was, the man started to yell at him over the phone. “I don’t want to have anything to do with you. Or anybody in your family.” He spoke curiously, the traces of the German accent in his speech accentuated because of the high pitch of his voice. “I’ve had enough trouble from the goddamn Jordaches to last me a lifetime, if I live to be ninety. Don’t you come snooping around here or my house or I’ll have the police on you. I don’t want anything to do with the son of the man who defiled my home. The only good thing I have to say about your father is that he’s dead. Do you hear me?”
“I hear you,” Wesley said and hung up the phone. He left the booth, shaking his head. He had been impressed by the neatness and beauty of the town as he came in on the bus, the trimmed lawns, the white-painted, New England-style houses, the wooden churches with their narrow steeples, and he wondered how anybody could remain angry as long as his Great-Uncle Harold obviously had managed to in a pleasant town like this. Divorce had plainly not improved his great uncle’s temper. Idly, as he walked toward the address Alice had given him for the Laundromat, he speculated on how Great-Uncle Harold and his own mother would get along.
The Laundromat belonged to a chain and was like any other establishment of the kind—a big plate-glass window through which he could see rows of machines with chairs opposite them on which some women were sitting talking, waiting for their wash to be done.
He hesitated before going in. The way his father had spoken about Clothilde, with such a melancholy note of longing and regret for her beauty and goodness of character, made it seem almost silly for him to go past the swishing machines and the gossiping women to a counter behind which stood a thickset, short woman handling other people’s laundry and making change, to say, “I am my father’s son. He told me he loved you very much when he was about my age.”
Still, he hadn’t come all the way from New York to Ohio just to stare at a Laundromat window. He squared his shoulders and went in and ignored the curious stares of the women who had fallen silent to examine him as he passed them.
The woman had her back turned to him; she was putting paper-wrapped bundles of clean laundry into the racks as he came up to the counter. Her arms were bare and he noticed that they were strong and full, the skin dark. Her hair was pitch black and she had it tied carelessly on top of her head so that he could see the powerful muscles in her neck work as she tossed the bundles into place. She was wearing a loose print dress that made her back and shoulders seem even broader than they were. He waited at the counter until she had finished with the bundles and turned around. “Yes?” she said pleasantly. Her face was broad, with high cheekbones, and almost coppery complexion, and the whole effect, he thought, with the coal-black hair and the deep black eyes, was that of an Indian squaw. He remembered his father telling him that he thought that she had Indian blood in her, some tribe in the wilderness of Canada. To him, she looked very old.
“I’m looking for Mrs. Devereaux, Mrs. Clothilde Devereaux,” he said.
She stared at him, unsmiling, studying him, frowning a little, as though she was trying to remember something. “I know you,” she said. “You’re Tom Jordache’s son, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Good God Almighty,” she said. “I thought I was seeing ghosts.” She smiled. “The haunted Laundromat.” She chuckled. She had a deep, throaty chuckle. He liked her after the chuckle, but, being honest with himself, he couldn’t see any of the beauty his father had found in this aging, wide lady. “Lean over the counter, please,” she said.
He leaned over and she took his face in her hands, the palms soft and firm, and stared at him, hard, for a moment, close up, then kissed him on the forehead. Behind him he heard one of the women opposite the washing machines giggle.
She released him and he stood erect again, still feeling the touch of soft lips on his forehead. Clothilde smiled, a little, almost dreamy, sad smile. “My Lord,” Clothilde said softly, “Tom’s son in this town.” She began to undo the strings of the apron she wore over the print dress. “We’ll get out of this place,” she said. “We can’t talk here. Sarah!” she called to the back of the store, behind the laundry racks, “will you come here, please?”
A blond young woman with straggly hair shuffled out and Clothilde said, “Sarah, I’m taking off the rest of the afternoon. It’s only an hour before closing, anyway, and I have an important date. Take over here for me and lock up like a good girl, will you?”
“Yes, ma’am,” the woman said.
Clothilde hung up her apron and did something with her hair, so that it fell straight to her shoulders. It made her look more Indian than ever. She pushed up a hinged portion of the counter and came out. She had wide hips, a generous bosom and thick, strong, unstockinged legs, and suddenly she reminded him almost unbearably of Kate.
She took his arm as they passed the sitting women, who were now staring frankly at the couple, nasty little smiles curling the corners of their mouths. When they were outside, Clothilde said, “Ever since the court case, the ladies of the town keep looking at me as though I’m the Whore of Babylon.” She was still holding his arm and they started walking down the street. She breathed deeply. “My,” she said, “it’s good to get out in the air after smelling dirty laundry all day long.” She looked obliquely at him. “You’ve heard about the case?”
“Yes,” he said. “That’s how I found out where you were.”
“It’s an ill wind,” she said. “I know your father is dead.” She said it flatly, as though whatever emotion she had suffered when she heard the news had been long ago put under control. “I saw in the article that he married twice. Was he happy?”
“The second time.”
She nodded her head. “I was afraid he’d never be happy again. They all kept hounding him so.…”
“He owned a boat. A yacht,” Wesley said. “On the Mediterranean. He loved the sea.”
“Imagine that,” she said wonderingly. “Tom on the Mediterranean.
I always meant to travel, but …” She left the sentence unfinished.
“He named the boat the Clothilde.”
“Oh, God,” she said, still walking briskly, holding his arm. “The Clothilde.” Then he saw that she was crying, the tears falling unheeded from the dark eyes, glistening on the thick black lashes.
“When people asked him how he happened to pick the name Clothilde for his ship, he used to say it was the name of an old queen of France. But he told me the real reason.”
“After all those years,” she said, wonderingly, her voice choked. “After what happened.” Now her voice turned harsh. “Did he tell you about that, too?”
“Enough,” Wesley said. “That his uncle found you and him—well—together, and threatened to have you deported back to Canada for corrupting the morals of a minor.…”
“Did he tell you the rest of it?” Her voice was even harsher than before.
“Enough. About you and his uncle. The stuff that came out in the trial and the papers,” Wesley said uncomfortably.
“That ugly, slobbering man,” Clothilde said fiercely. “I was a servant in his house. I couldn’t run the risk of going back to Canada, my husband would have killed me. I tried to make Tom understand. He refused to understand. He wanted me to run away with him. A sixteen-year-old boy …” She laughed, the sound sad on the sunny, tree-lined street.
“He understood in the end,” Wesley said. “He told me so. The name of the boat proves that, doesn’t it?”
“I suppose so.” She walked in silence, drying her tears roughly with the back of her hand. “Did he tell you I put in a note with his sandwiches one day when he went to work?”
“I don’t think so.”
“I wrote, ‘I love you,’” she said. “That’s how it all started.” She laughed abruptly. “My God, he had an appetite. I never knew anybody, man or boy, who could eat like that. The meals I cooked for him! The roasts, the garden vegetables, the best of everything, when his uncle and the terrible family were away in Saratoga and we had the house to ourselves. I used to sing over the stove in the afternoons, waiting for him to come home. Those two weeks I’ll remember all the days of my life.” She stopped walking, as though pulled up by an invisible leash, and turned him around and held him by both arms as she stared into Wesley’s eyes. “Why’ve you come here? Do you need anything from me?”
“No,” he said. “I came just for what you’re doing—talking about him.”
After a moment of silence, in which the dark eyes searched his face, she kissed his forehead again.
“It’s uncanny,” she said, “how much you look like him. He was a beautiful young man—I told him he looked like Saint Sebastian—he looked it up in the encyclopedia in the library—that’s where he found out where my name came from, too. It was hard to imagine him, the sort of wild boy he was, looking up anything in the encyclopedia.” Her face softened as she spoke, and Wesley imagined that she must have had very much the same expression on her face when his father had come back from the library and told her what he had learned there.
“Are you disappointed?” she asked.
“In what?”
“After what your father must have told you about me, naming a boat after me and all, queen of France …” She laughed briefly. “And then you see a fat old lady behind the counter of a Laundromat.”
“No,” Wesley said, “I’m not disappointed.” He wasn’t quite sure he was telling the truth. She must have been a lot different when she was younger, he thought.
“You’re a decent boy,” she said, as they started walking again. “I hope you’re having a better time than your father did.”
“I’m okay,” Wesley said.
“After we—well—after we broke up, in a manner of speaking, although we still lived in the same house and I saw him every day and served him his meals with the family in the dining room, but we never said another word to each other, except for good-bye, he turned ferocious, as though he was tormented. He’d come home bloody from fights night after night, people began to treat him as though he was a stray, dangerous dog, he screwed every little tart in town. I heard about it, of course, I guess it was a kind of revenge, I didn’t begrudge him it, although I knew it would one day catch up with him, in this nasty, hypocritical town. They put him in jail for rape—rape, mind you, when every girl and woman in town with hot pants was after him like kids after a fire engine. Did he tell you about that?”
“Yes.”
“And the twins he was supposed to have knocked up and the father made the complaint?”
“Yes, he told me.”
“He must have loved you very much,” Clothilde said, “to tell you things like that.”
“I guess he did. He liked to talk to me.” Nights on deck, under the stars, or in the dark pilothouse.
“Naturally they would pick on him, his reputation here and all, everybody was glad to believe the worst about him,” Clothilde said bitterly. “Those twins had a choice of fifty fathers! Including the cop who arrested Tom. I see them—the twins—they’re still in town, grown women. I advise you not to look them up. One of the kids looks as though he was your brother.” Clothilde chuckled merrily. “Finally, there’s some decent blood running through a few veins in this town. Ah …” she said softly, “sometimes late at night, I take to wondering what it would have been like, how it all would have turned out if I’d listened to his crazy begging and run off with him, a twenty-five-year-old servant and a sixteen-year-old boy, without a penny between us.… I couldn’t do it to him, could I?” she asked, pleading.
“No, I guess not,” Wesley said.
“Ah, I keep on talking. About myself. About ancient history.” Clothilde shook her head impatiently. “What about you? Are you all right?”
“Not too bad,” Wesley said.
“You having a good time?”
“I wouldn’t go as far as to say that.”
“Still,” she said, “you look as though you’re being taken care of—nice clothes and all, like a young gentleman.”
“I’ve been lucky,” Wesley said. “In a way. Somebody is taking care of me. Sort of.”
“You can tell me all about yourself over dinner. You’re in no hurry to leave town, are you?”
“Not really,” Wesley said. “I figured tomorrow.”
“I’ll make you a roast loin of pork, with mashed potatoes and applesauce and red cabbage. It was one of your father’s favorite meals.” She hesitated. “I have to tell you something, Wesley,” she said. “I’m not alone. I’m living with a nice man, he’s the foreman at the furniture factory. We’re not married. He’s got a wife and two kids and they’re Catholics.… He’ll be at dinner. You don’t mind?” she asked anxiously.
“It’s got nothing to do with me,” Wesley said, “or my father.”
“People’re funny,” Clothilde said. “You never know how they’re going to react.” She sighed. “A woman can’t live alone. At least not me. Ah, you live two ways—every day, with the man coming home and sitting down at night to read his paper and drink his beer and not say anything much to you, and in your memory, the wonderful days you had when you were younger, with a wild boy. Wesley, I have to tell you, your father was the gentlest and tenderest man a woman could ever hope to find in her travels on this earth. And he had the softest skin, like silk, over all those young muscles, that I’ve ever felt. You don’t mind my talking like this, do you?”
“I want to hear it,” Wesley said, feeling the tears come to his eyes now, not for himself or even for his dead father, but for this wide-shouldered, Indian-dark, aging woman, marked by a lifetime of work and disappointment, walking by his side.
“Do you like wine with your dinner?” Clothilde asked.
“I wouldn’t mind a glass,” Wesley said. “I was in France for quite a long time.”
“We’ll stop in at the liquor store,” Clothilde said gaily, “and buy a delicious bottle of red wine to celebrate the visit of my love’s beautiful son to a
n old lady. Frank—that’s my man, the foreman at the furniture factory, can give up his beer for the occasion.”
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Schultz, his father’s old manager, was, Alice told him, in the Hebrew Home for the Aged in the Bronx.
“He’s that fat old man sitting in the hall with his hat and coat on as though he’s going out,” the attendant told Wesley. “Only he never goes out. He sits like that all day, every day, never saying anything. I don’t know if he’ll talk to you. He don’t talk to anyone else.”
Wesley walked down the bare hall to where an enormously fat man, bloating out of his suit and overcoat, a derby hat squarely on his head, his features little squiggles in the immense expanse of his face, sat on a straight wooden chair, staring at the opposite wall, the eyes half closed, the breath coming in snorts.
“Mr. Schultz,” Wesley said, “can I talk to you for a minute?”
The fat man’s wrinkled eyelids lifted heavily and the eyes slowly turned in Wesley’s direction, although the head, with its derby, remained rigid.
“What’s it to you if I’m Schultz or I’m not Schultz?” the fat man said. His voice was guttural and there was a clacking of dentures as he spoke.
“My name is Wesley Jordache,” Wesley said. “A long time ago you managed my father. Tom Jordan.”
The eyes slowly went back to their original position, staring at the peeling paint of the wall of the corridor. “Tom Jordan,” the fat man said. “I don’t allow that name to be used in my presence. I hear tell he got himself killed. Son or no son, don’t think you’re going to hear old Schultzy say he’s sorry. He had it in him to go someplace and he screwed it away. Two weeks with an English whore, eating and drinking like a pig, after all I did to bring him along. And then, when he was down on his ass I got him a salary in Las Vegas. He got fifty bucks a day sparring with Freddy Quayles—there was a boy, my one chance in my whole miserable life to handle a champion—and what does he do, he shacks up with Quayles’ wife, and then when Quayles goes to his room to object to his conduct, he near murders him. And Quayles couldn’t beat my mother after that. If I hadn’t taken pity on your stupid old man and loaned him my car to get out of Vegas, the mob would’ve cut him to little pieces with steak knives. Your old man wasn’t anything to be proud of, boy, and that’s for certain, but he sure was dynamite in a hotel room. Only, for money, you have to fight in a ring twenty-four feet by twenty-four feet, with a referee on the premises. If they let your old man fight in a closet and charged admission he’d still be the champion of the world, the sonofabitch. My one chance, Freddy Quayles, moved like a dancer, wrecked for cunt. You want to hear about your old man—I’ll tell you about your old man—he let his cock destroy him.”