With Option to Die

by RICHARD LOCKRIDGE

  North Wellwood, she discovered, skimming on, was unique in its rural and Colonial atmosphere. It had quiet roads and an unlittered landscape. Was this to be destroyed?

  The proposed club would have a membership of three hundred. But there was no guarantee that this membership would not be expanded. And the members would bring guests. That must be faced. They would, for the most part, not be residents. Most of those who used the facilities of the club would be from outside the community.

  A thousand transients might be expected over any summer weekend. Cars would jam North Wellwood’s quiet roads; their occupants would litter its unlittered landscape. Special police and traffic personnel would have to be employed. The “lives of OUR CHILDREN” would be put in peril. The community, far from benefiting from increased tax receipts, would be bankrupt.

  If disaster was to be avoided, North Wellwoodians must spring to arms. They must “WRITE NOW to the ZONING BOARD OF APPEALS.”

  Else, Ann Martin concluded, the heavens would fall on North Wellwood of the Town of Wellwood. And she was mildly puzzled by so much fuss and fury, to say nothing of such a free hand with capital letters. Her professional mind went absently to a documentary. Storm Over North Wellwood? Rural Community Fears Extinction? Her mind drifted back to her drink and to the talking of, apparently, unperturbed birds. It was humans who chattered.

  And, she thought a few minutes later, with her drink almost finished, the motorcars of humans. The bright blue sports car which spurted up the drive, kicking gravel behind it, chattered. No, more precisely, it roared. Its top was down, if it had a top. The driver was a small, roundish woman, with shining white hair.

  The bright little car swished to a stop behind the station wagon and stood glittering in the sun. Ann went to the door, carrying the wail of The North Wellwood Preservation Association. The white-haired little woman popped out of the car and Ann went out onto the porch to meet her. Selling something, probably. Cosmetics? Conceivably brushes? Arriving in, now Ann was close enough to see insignia, a Mercedes.

  “I hope,” the white-haired little woman said, “I’m not barging in, my dear. Tell me if I am. You are Ann Martin, aren’t you?”

  She smiled with that. It was a warm smile on her smooth, rounded face. The face, Ann thought, of a woman in late middle life. A woman who still popped out of sports cars and who, behind the wheel of one, made it swish. Ann smiled at the brisk little woman and said, “Yes.”

  “Faith Powers,” the white-haired woman said. “As near as you’ll have to a next-door neighbor, my dear. And as near as you’ll have to a Welcome Wagon, I shouldn’t wonder.”

  Ann said, “Mrs. Powers,” and then, “Won’t you come in?”

  “For a minute,” Faith Powers said. “I realize you have dozens of things to do.”

  Ann opened the door for her and the small, round woman went quickly into the living room. She went into it, Ann thought, as if she were perfectly familiar with it; had been many times in it.

  “Dear Lucile,” Faith Powers said. “She does so love green, doesn’t she? She said she hoped you and Mr. Martin would. When she told me about you. Yesterday. And suggested I might drop in and say hello. Say, ‘Welcome to North Wellwood.’”

  Which, of course, made things clearer. Ann—who thought she was going to like this new, if admittedly very prompt, neighbor and wondered, vaguely, why Lucile Barnes had been solicitous—said, “How thoughtful of her. And of you, too,” and then, “I was just having a drink to rest with. Won’t you have something?”

  “Yes,” Faith Powers said. “I’d love a—” She looked at Ann’s almost old-fashioned glass. “Whatever you’re having.”

  “Dubonnet on the rocks.”

  “Perfect. And let me get it, won’t you? Because I imagine you’ve had quite a morning. And I know my way around this house. I …”

  Smiling, Ann shook her head.

  “An officious old woman,” Faith said. “Of course it’s your house, Mrs. Martin. Not too much Dubonnet.”

  Ann took her glass from its table, and dropped the mimeographed sheet on another. When she came back with two glasses on a little tray—off which they tried to skid—Mrs. Powers was sitting and holding the mimeographed sheet at some distance from her eyes. She held it a little awkwardly. Her right index finger was stiffly bandaged.

  She said, “Thank you, dear,” for the glass of ice and wine and, when Ann too was seated, raised the glass in toast. “Welcome to North Wellwood,” the white-haired little woman said. She spoke crisply. “And confusion to our enemies,” she added unexpectedly.

  They sipped together.

  “You’ve read this?” Faith said then, and waggled the mimeographed sheet.

  “Skimmed it,” Ann said. “They seem quite excited.”

  “The protectors of rural character,” Faith Powers said. “Yes. And very prompt with it, weren’t they? Getting it to you, I mean.”

  Probably, Ann said, they had meant it for the Barneses, not for a summer renter.

  And Faith Powers shook her head.

  “No,” she said. “The Barneses haven’t been here for months and everybody knows they haven’t been. It’s a small community, Mrs. Martin. News gets around. You and Mr. Martin stopped by the post office Saturday. Arranged about your mail with dear, dear Adam Ferguson. And—you got screen credit on the one about Mississippi, didn’t you? Under your professional name, of course.”

  “Yes.”

  “Probably,” Faith Powers said, “you thought this was innocently amusing, didn’t you? Quaint, even?”

  “A little, I suppose.”

  “Yes,” Faith said. “Coming from outside, you would. A tempest in a teacup. But it isn’t really amusing, Mrs. Martin. Not for those of us in the teacup. Not really at all amusing. You see, dear, they—our protectors of rural character—aren’t saying at all what they mean. Or, more exactly, not by a long shot all of what they mean.”

  II

  Walter Brinkley, Professor Emeritus of English Literature, Dyckman University, ran heavy pencil marks through twenty lines of typescript, eliminating most of a page of a revision and amplification of A Note on American Regional Accents. He did so with regret, on the assumption that a personal anecdote did not really have a place. That his knowledge of the various ways the word “water” is pronounced in the United States had once helped his friend Merton Heimrich solve a murder was not really germane.* It was one of the things which would have to go. To emphasize this, he drew heavy diagonal lines through the deleted material. As he did so, he sighed.

  He had been sighing, now, every morning for a number of weeks. It is a sad business to scratch out what one has thoughtfully and carefully written in. But A Note on American Regional Accents had, admittedly, grown a good deal during the years Brinkley had been working on it—working, he had all along realized, to nurture an illusion, the illusion that he was not actually an old scholar put out to pasture; working, too, to fill a life a wife’s death had left rather empty. And working, moreover, in a field not his own. Hobby work, actually. He was not really a phonetician. His field was English literature of the seventeenth century, with emphasis on John Milton.

  Even if he were a qualified expert on phonetics, six hundred and thirty-seven pages of a book called a “Note” might, he realized, be a little overdoing it. But “Note” could not be omitted. Unqualified, the title of American Regional Accents would have been presumptuous.

  But it was, by now, too long. He had for some time admitted that to himself; and his prospective publisher, calling to ask when, if ever, the manuscript might be expected, had confirmed his mounting trepidation. “Six hundred and thirty-seven?” the publisher had said. “Ouch, Walter.”

  Brinkley turned over the page which had contained the anecdote and fitted it evenly on top of a sizable pile of pages. He ran down the next page, page 403. He was back on the sound of r, as in “drawing.” There did not seem to be anything which could be cut on page 403.

  I’ve been at it long enough for t
oday, Walter Brinkley thought. At seventy, the mind tires easily. Eight-thirty in the morning to—He looked at his watch. Twelve-thirty. Quite long enough, Walter Brinkley thought, and took his reading glasses off and put them on page 403 to mark it. He then bounced up from his desk and went to his office door and opened it.

  He was in time to hear Harry breaking ice out of a tray. Sounds carried well in the white house on Hayride Lane, in the hamlet of North Wellwood. Brinkley said, “Good morning, Harry,” down the stairs and Harry Washington said, “Good morning, Professor,” back up them. They had met at breakfast, and said “Good morning” then, but what is said at breakfast has no significance.

  Now, on hearing “Good morning, Professor,” Walter Brinkley was perturbed. Harry was out of character, which might mean he was brooding over something. In character, as part of the game the two men played together, Harry said, “’Mawnin’, Professor.” Or, on occasion, “’Mawnin’, suh.” Now and then he said, “You-all ready, suh?”, which was perhaps overdoing it.

  Harry’s rendition of the Southern Negro—and Southern white, for that matter—pronunciation was not especially good. He was, to Brinkley’s ear, inclined to mix Georgia and Tennessee, as any man born and educated in South Jersey reasonably may. But Brinkley had never mentioned this to his old family retainer from the deepest South. They both enjoyed the masquerade. Only when circumstances were serious, or adverse, did Harry abandon it.

  For some months now, Harry had increasingly slipped out of his role. But for some months, and not only to Harry Washington, things had been going amiss in North Wellwood. He and Harry had not discussed it much, but things were not going in North Wellwood as, placidly, they had gone for years. They had talked, when they talked at all of such matters, of the way things were going in those years of violence throughout the nation. That one of them was pink-faced and very white-haired and the other tall and thin and middling-brown did not enter into what they thought and said.

  Perturbed now, Walter Brinkley bounced downstairs. Harry, his white jacket as immaculate as always, was by the terrace door, waiting to open it. He held a tray in his left hand. There was a little pitcher on it, the pitcher filled with ice and pale liquid. On the tray, also, there was a thin-stemmed cocktail glass, with crushed ice pressed down in its bowl. Ritual held, if charade did not. Harry opened the door for his employer, and Walter Brinkley went out onto the terrace and to a table in the shade. The May sun was warm that Monday mid-day.

  Harry emptied crushed ice from the cocktail glass onto the lawn, which still, for all the previous month’s rainfall, could take whatever moisture came its way. He poured martini into the glass and twisted lemon peel over it and rubbed the twisted peel around the edge of the glass. He put the peel in an ash tray at the far end of the terrace, and returned to stand in front of Professor Walter Brinkley and to ask him, still in the speech of South Jersey, if shirred eggs and sausages would be satisfactory. He actually said “satisfactory” and Brinkley was more than ever perturbed.

  Brinkley sipped from his glass. The martini was, as always, perfect.

  “All right, Harry,” Brinkley said. “What is it?”

  “Mr. Peters was shot last night,” Harry Washington said. “Mr. Thomas Peters. A flesh wound, I understand. Nothing serious. Accidentally, he insists. Some kid with a new rifle, shooting at a target and missing it. It happened before, Mr. Peters says. About a week ago. Then he wasn’t hit. But he was near a tree on his place and the bullet hit the tree.”

  “That’s not good,” Walter Brinkley said. Then he said, “Sit down, Harry, and tell me about it.”

  There was nothing unusual in the suggestion nor would there have been in a further suggestion that Harry make himself a drink before he sat. Two men who live together in a too large house are not, if they like each other, inclined to adhere strictly to formalities. Harry often sat with his employer when invited, and drank with him, too. And at such times he stepped out of his role as old family retainer.

  Brinkley did not then suggest the drink that day because, on being invited to sit down, Harry Washington stood very erect and shook his head.

  “No, Doctor,” Harry said. “The terrace is in sight from the road.”

  There were two things wrong with that. Brinkley was entitled to be called “Doctor,” by virtue of his Ph.D. He did not much approve of the appellation, which made much of what, in his world, was too common to convey any distinction. Almost never before had Harry Washington put “Doctor” before his employer’s name. It was now as if he put a fence between them.

  The other thing wrong with what Harry had said was that Brinkley knew perfectly well the terrace was in sight from the road and could not, for the life of him, see what difference it made.

  After looking up at his employee for several seconds, Brinkley said, “So?”

  “Things aren’t the way here they’ve been before,” Harry said, and then, “Shirred eggs ought to be cooked slowly, Doctor.”

  Walter Brinkley knew that shirred eggs ought to be cooked slowly. He also thought they ought not to be cooked too hard.

  “There’s time enough,” Brinkley said. “I may have a second drink, Harry.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Did Mr. Peters go to the police about it? About this accidental shooting?”

  “No. He doesn’t want to make an issue of it. The way things are.”

  “Damn it, man,” Brinkley said. “Sit down. You want me to get a crick in the neck looking up?”

  Harry said, “Well-l-l,” and pulled a chair near, but not really very near, and sat on it. He sat on the edge of it, which was difficult, since it was a small director’s chair.

  “Anybody,” Brinkley thought, “would think you think I was the one who took potshots at Mr. Peters.”

  “No,” Harry said. “Nobody would think that. But somebody did. He knows it. We all know it, Doctor.”

  There is a certain way of using the word “we.” It is a way which excludes others. Brinkley had never heard Harry use it so before; never before so build a fence between two men with a single word. The house they both lived in—Harry in his own apartment on the ground floor—was big, but it was not big enough to hold a fence.

  The “we,” used as Harry Washington used it, was in a way a declaration, as well as a fence. It explained what had not really needed to be explained about Washington’s lapse into unaccented American. (Or, of course, as near as any speech comes to being unaccented.) Harry had lightheartedly, sure of understanding, burlesqued something of which he himself was a part. It could no longer be burlesqued. That game was over.

  “Mr. Peters should have gone to the police all the same,” Brinkley said.

  He realized he was being careful with the “mister” and that Harry knew he was. If Thomas Peters had been a white man, Walter Brinkley would have called him, at any rate in his absence, merely “Peters.” He wished he had this time. It was too late now; now Harry had noticed excess courtesy and probably thought it condescension.

  “Damn it all,” Brinkley said. “Go get yourself a drink.”

  Harry looked at him for some seconds, and lines of thought, of uncertainty, appeared between his eyebrows. Then, without saying anything, he got up from the chair and went into the house. Whether he would come back with a drink or set about the shirring of eggs was, suddenly, a vital point. Brinkley drank his martini more rapidly, a good deal more rapidly, than he usually drank. He felt uneasiness about many things, including what Harry would do. It’s that damn club Peters is organizing, Walter Brinkley thought, and at once realized the thought unfair. The club was merely bringing to a head what had been swelling up in the hamlet of North Wellwood for a long time. Brinkley had lived in North Wellwood most of his life. It was changing under him. The club was only part of the change, but it was a climactic part. He could look back on it as he waited to find out whether Harry was coming back with drinks for both of them.

  It had begun with things which seemed to have nothing to do with what it
was coming to. (Not that it was possible to say precisely when it had begun.) But the school board business was what had made Walter Brinkley, professor emeritus, first think about it.

  It was not primarily that, after two years on it, he and Faith Powers had not been re-elected to the school board. The qualified voters of the Town of Wellwood had a right to decide who was to supervise the education of their children. If they wanted to remove from it the only two qualified educators who had ever been on it, that was their business as voters. If they wanted to use money which would have paid for good teachers to enlarge the gymnasium the matter was one for them to decide. There was no other way Walter Brinkley could think of to run a town or, for that matter, a nation. School-board meetings had taken a good deal of time which he preferred to spend on A Note on American Regional Accents.

  There had been, in the discussions which preceded the election, in letters to the editor of the North Wellwood Sentinel, considerable reference to “so-called liberals.” There had been derisive comments on “intellectuals” who were trying to bring “new-fangled” methods into teaching. One letter writer had demanded to be told why children were being taught communism in the North Wellwood High School, and this had been perplexing until it developed that the one-time existence of a man named Karl Marx had been admitted by the instructor of a course on current events.

  And, although Brinkley had not learned of this until he and Faith Powers had finished ninth and tenth in a field of ten, there had been reference to the Aaron Nagle case, which Brinkley had supposed buried in the past—buried some ten years deep in the past. He and Faith Powers had both been members of the Dyckman University faculty then, and so had Assistant Professor Aaron Nagle. Nagle turned out to be a member, and a vociferous one, of the American Nazi Party. He made many speeches in which Jews, who were also of course Communists except when they were in complete control of the nation’s economy, were the hidden organizers of a Negro conspiracy, the purpose being to destroy Anglo-Saxon civilization.