Ben sat warily. “No.”
“He’s sick, I think. I know he was drunk. But sick too. To do that. When I … came to, I phoned you. Nobody answered. I didn’t want to phone his house. I thought his wife might answer. I think he’s sick. I think he needs help.”
“How did you two meet?”
“Meet? At the mill. I work there. Section nine.”
“I’m sorry. I probably have seen you. But—–”
“I know how I look. It’s all right.”
“What … what do you plan to do about it, Miss Doyle?”
“I’ve … been thinking about that. I don’t know. Just try to make sure somebody helps him. But I don’t … I don’t want to see him again. Hitting me like that … it did something inside me. Nobody ever hit me like that. It isn’t the hurting, or even being afraid. It’s something else. I just don’t want to see him anymore.”
“Has he been giving you money?”
She sat quite still, but he saw her hands lock together. “It hasn’t been like that, Mr. Delevan.” The words came with great dignity from the ruined mouth.
“How long has it been going on?”
“Since spring.”
“Did you think you loved him?”
“I think I did. But I don’t. Not now. It broke something. Maybe that was what it broke. Holding me and hitting me—–”
“I think you ought to see a doctor today. Maybe he’ll want to take an X-ray. You might have a broken cheekbone or a cracked jaw.”
“I don’t think so. My front teeth are loose. But they tighten up, don’t they? Sometimes, I mean.”
“I think they do. Yes, I think they do.”
“I want to give them a chance. I’m not going to bite on anything. They never match your teeth right.”
“Miss Doyle, I … the family feels responsible for this. I want to see that you get proper care. I’m going to insist on that and I want to give you something for … this discomfort.”
“I don’t want anything.”
“What do you feel about my brother now?”
“Not … anything, I guess. Just empty, sort of.”
“He thought he killed you, Miss Doyle.”
“How awful! And you came here to … He must be going half crazy. I’ve got a phone. Right over there. If you—–”
“He left a note for me, Miss Doyle. He killed himself this morning with a gun. He shot himself in the head.”
It seemed as though she hadn’t understood him. She just sat and looked at him. Her hand lifted toward her face and she lowered it again. “He couldn’t have. He didn’t do that. There was no need.”
She leaned back and closed the single eye. He watched her carefully. He realized that he liked her and was concerned about her. Once he had found that she was alive, he had planned to be completely ruthless with her, to bully her out of any idea of making additional trouble. But there was an obvious decency about this one.
“Miss Doyle, I think you’re right in saying he was sick. Only a sick person could do that. And don’t feel that you are in any way to blame for it. I think it would have happened anyway.”
“It’s … a bad thing. For you and his wife and all of us.”
The choice of words seemed strange. “All of us?” he asked gently.
She opened her eye. “I’m sorry. I guess I’m not a part of it. I meant all of us who sort of loved him.”
“Will you let me do something for you?”
“I … don’t know.”
“Is your family here in the city?”
“No. There’s just a brother. In California. He keeps writing me to go out there. I think I’d like to go out there.”
“I’ll get you an airline ticket.”
“No. I don’t want to get there quick. I’ve never been out there. I mean seen the country or anything. And I think I’d like to go by bus. By the time I get there, I won’t look so awful. And I’ll see more.”
He sensed how, already, she was turning her back on it, resolute, fatalistic. Strength in her. Not the same sort of strength as in Susan. This was a more primitive strength. Will of the organism to survive. She had been hurt deeply, and now she would begin to mend herself. As perhaps Bess might one day mend herself, though there was less emotional resilience left in Bess than in this young girl.
“I’m not ashamed, you know,” she said suddenly. “I don’t care what you think about me. I’m not ashamed at all.”
“I’ll use your phone. I’ve got a friend who has X-ray equipment in his office. I think he’ll open his office up for me. Then I’ll drive you over and we can meet him there.”
She touched her skirt. “I guess there’s no need to change my clothes. I guess I can’t look very good no matter what I wear. He’ll know about teeth, won’t he?”
“I think he’ll know about teeth.”
“Does … his wife know about me? Did she see the note you told me about?”
“No. Nobody knows now but you and me. And whoever you or Quinn may have told.”
“Neither of us told anybody. And don’t worry. I won’t tell anybody. Nobody will hear it from me. It’s funny, I keep thinking I ought to cry. Ever since I woke up on the floor with the blood all over my face, I’ve felt like I ought to cry. But I can’t seem to. He was … so sort of lost, your brother was.”
“Lost. I guess that’s right. Have you got a phone book?”
“Right in that drawer. I wish I had a hat with a veil. I’d feel better going out if I had a hat with a veil.”
He looked up the number. He heard the phone ringing in the doctor’s home. Sam would be annoyed. But he’d cooperate. As the phone rang, he thought of what he would do. Cash a check in the morning. A thousand dollars. Advise her to change it to traveler’s checks. He had the uneasy feeling that it would be difficult to get her to accept that much. But she would take it. He would make her take it.
Chapter Seventeen
The memorial service for Quinn Delevan was held at ten o’clock Tuesday morning at the church in Clayton, and after it was over, the procession, led by the soft-purring, shiny-black Packard hearse of Durr and Commings, went to the old Church Hill Cemetery in Stockton where a hole, dug with almost excessive neatness, awaited the nine-hundred-dollar casket, where a granite shaft stood with Delevan carved deeply into it, where the family stood, dark-clad, patient—the women with a new one among them, the men with one less—where this substance that had been Quinn Delevan was put deep into the ground in the company of his ancestors in an ancient tribal ceremony under a soft gray sky on a fittingly cheerless day.
And these people, these Delevans and Furmons, drove back to their hushed houses, and were now two days removed from the day Quinn died, knowing that inevitably two days would become twenty and two hundred and two thousand. The last of them to remember it would be Sandy, and perhaps in her very old age, childhood memories would come back strong and clear as they so often do. Then she would be gone and there would be only the marks on paper and the marks on stone.
This day filled them with thoughts of their own mortality. For the young ones it was an early flaw in the strong notion that they would live forever. For the older ones it made a further adjustment in their sure knowledge of eventual death.
There were no rules for mourning this sort of death. You could not cry out in rage and loss at the blown tire, the dangerous corner, the shaky ladder, the cancer cell. Friends were uneasy as they offered condolences. Telephone voices were uncertain. People glanced quickly and away. There were not as many flowers as one would expect. Here the cells of the brain had forced their rebellion on all the other cells of the body and destroyed them.
It was mutiny. Rebellion. I quit! And so it was shameful. A wild leap over the railing and the tiny head bobbing and then lost in the wake of the ponderous ship which held all the rest of them. Go on without me. I’m getting out of this.
Benjamin Delevan walked around the house restlessly. He snapped small, dead branches from shrubbery. He went in a
nd tried to read. He looked at his watch frequently. He felt a vast, directionless impatience. Tuesday afternoon television was full of insipidities. Wilma was with Bess. Brock was in his room. Ellen was writing letters.
He was sitting in the living room when he heard Wilma and Bess come into the kitchen, talking in the low voices everybody seemed to be using, as though something slept in the world and should not be awakened. When they came into the living room, he looked quickly at Bess. Her face had the slightly bloated look of too many tears, but she seemed calm and quiet.
“How’s David doing?” Ben asked.
Bess sighed as she sat down. “He’s taking a nap now. He gets so tired. But he’s been wonderful. Maybe I’m imagining it, Ben, but it almost seems as though, all of a sudden, he’s … he’s more responsive to things.”
“That might be true.”
“I don’t want to hope too much. You know.”
“I know what you mean,” he said. “Willy, how about making some coffee. I’ve got a yen for coffee.”
Wilma smiled at him and headed for the kitchen. “You’ve always got a yen for coffee. You drink too much of it.”
After she was gone, Bess said, “Ben, I just wish I could keep from having a crazy thought all the time. About Quinn. All the years we’ve been married, and I keep thinking he wasn’t really … here all the time. As if I didn’t know him.”
“I get that same sort of feeling.”
She looked at him sharply, eagerly. “Do you? I keep thinking he’s going to … fade so quickly. As if I couldn’t hold onto him.”
“What are your plans? I know this is a little soon to even be talking about it, but I guess you’ve given it some thought.”
“I’ve been thinking, yes. But I don’t know yet how much money there’ll be.”
He thought of Griffin and of how much money there could be for her. And knew this day of funeral was also day of decision for him, for all of them.
George came in through the side door into the living room, sat down heavily. “Smell coffee, don’t I? How you doing, Bess?”
“Okay, I guess. How’s Alice?”
“Better than I would have thought she’d be. Having Robbie and Susan there has been the best thing in the world. Keeps her mind off it. Robbie said they were going to move to a hotel or something. Too much work for Alice. I think that was Susan’s idea. Alice wouldn’t hear of it. She’s coming over in a little while.”
And she came over, Robbie and Susan with her. Brock and Ellen joined them all in the living room. So they were all together, and Ben knew that in this way they were strengthening and reassuring each other. That it was a time to be together. With general talk that stayed carefully away from the immediacy of death and loss. Yet even in this small way, there was a borrowing of his own strength. Inadequate though he might have been, and indecisive though he felt, it was the leadership itself that they needed. And there was no one else. The pressure was subtle but it was there. He sensed that they wanted subconsciously some token of leadership. That they wanted to be told that things were all right, that things were safe, that the helm hand was strong and sure.
He sat back within himself and looked at them and felt oppressed by the pressure, the weight of them. And now it was so easy to change it all. Say the words to them and to Griffin that would make it fly apart. Scatter. Enter then, from the wings, the sunburned catcher of many fish. A new cast of characters. Then they would not rest so heavily on him. They would be letters in the morning mail. Boxes at Christmas.
The words were lined up neatly in his head, waiting to be said. He could change their lives and achieve his own freedom in just about fifty quiet and persuasive words. Approval would be automatic. Susan would see that their portion was used wisely. He could help Bess manage her portion. George would be delighted.
Why not, then?
Why the reluctance? Am I a sucker for tradition? Is this some special brand of egomania I have, that I must continue to be king of the hill, shortening my own life, driving myself in ways they do not even understand? Or habit, maybe? A blinded mule plodding the endless circle around the grindstones? My God, it isn’t something you bleed and die for, is it? There’s no mission involved. No greater good for greater number, no advancement of humanity, no shining sword involved.
It’s a mill. It is a place where things are made. And a great dowdy beast of a mill. A shambling, clattering, spavined place, with too many dusty corners. It goes nowhere. Together, it and I, we make this great noisy effort, merely to survive.
The romance of business. Some copywriter dreamed that one up. Not romance. Romance can’t survive a daily threat of ruin.
They handed it to me and lay back and died, laughing like hell. Let’s see you make this run, buster. So I did. And when, by some intricate miracle, we get a new piece of equipment, I go down and watch it uncrated, and it is my turn to laugh like hell. And I go to shipping and see the stencils that say SKC, and see the stuff going out and I laugh some more. And I pare inventory down to the danger line and hold my breath and wait for the drop and then jump in with both big feet and overload and watch the price rise and laugh louder.
Here I am in my clatter-bang truck crawling the hills on the potholed roads, taking the wildcat short cuts, and there they are down there on the superhighways, all the Griffins in their streamlined glory, running on a schedule of micrometer accuracy. I drive my old truck and I know each pulse of the motor, every rattle and squeak. And when it threatens to quit entirely, I know just how to fix it with spit and string and baling wire and hope.
So is that it? Because I’m a pirate at heart? Or a gambler?
Or deeper than that. Deeper than looking for reasons. You work because you work. You do your job because you do your job. Without sword or mission or grail. And the clan rides your shoulders. Full of a ridiculous, trusting confidence in you. Knowing that their world cannot change.
[The insurance will be paid because it has been in effect long enough to cancel out the suicide clause, and that means fatter working capital, some new equipment and that overdue roof-repair job. See how I trade on everything, even on the blood of a brother, twisting it to my conniving purposes?]
So there is no point in even telling them. So adios to the sunburned man in the billed cap, that man with the fiberglass casting rod. He is sorry but he has other appointments. With a younger brother whose nose must be pressed firmly against the whirring grindstone. With a daughter who must not be permitted to run away from the scene of a broken love.
Miss Meyer is back and tomorrow we will place the call to Griffin, and his voice will be calm so that I will be unable to guess how he feels about it.
He looked across at his wife and saw that she was watching him over the rim of her tilted cup, her eyes cloudy with concern. He realized with a certain wryness that she always knew. She would not know the specific problem, merely that there was one and that it was bothering him. She would not ask, but he would sense her watchfulness. The way she would wait to be told.
And he grinned at her, telling her in that way that whatever it was, it was now over. Relax, Willy. I’m fine now. I wasn’t, for a while, but I’m fine now. I’m heartsick over my brother, and I feel much guilt about him, but in all other departments I am back solidly on the rails.
He looked around at the others. They were talking with each other. He knew what they wanted. The assurance that nothing bad would happen. The warm knowledge that nothing dark would reach out from a strange place and grab them. They wanted to be told that there is no danger in life and no uncertainty. So they had gathered here to warm themselves.
It was an impossible request to make. They were all bound together, walking blindfolded through a place where there was disaster and terror on every side. Death and pain and fright and loss.
But he knew he would go on telling them in all the indirect ways that they were safe from harm. It was all that you could do, both for them and for yourself.
So that made it, perhaps, an act
of love.
The day had turned darker. Wind was stronger, and it began to make the television aerial whine, the sound coming down the chimney and out of the fireplace.
There was a silence in the conversation. Clink of a cup. Wind whine. And it seemed they had all moved in that moment a bit closer to each other. Close ranks, for one is gone.
Bess suddenly began to cry again, quite softly, and Wilma took her to the bedroom to lie down. Brock and Robbie got out the scrabble board. Ellen and Susan talked about schools. George and Ben talked about George’s new plans. Alice went to the kitchen with Wilma to make sandwiches.
The wind died and a steady rain began to fall. By dusk it was so cool that Brock built a fire in the fireplace. And they all mentioned the changeable weather you had to expect in June.
About the Author
John D. MacDonald was an American novelist and short story writer. His works include the Travis McGee series and the novel The Executioners, which was adapted into the film Cape Fear. In 1962 MacDonald was named a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America; in 1980 he won a National Book Award. In print he delighted in smashing the bad guys, deflating the pompous, and exposing the venal. In life he was a truly empathetic man; his friends, family, and colleagues found him to be loyal, generous, and practical. In business he was fastidiously ethical. About being a writer, he once expressed with gleeful astonishment, “They pay me to do this! They don’t realize, I would pay them.” He spent the later part of his life in Florida with his wife and son. He died in 1986.
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