by Sol Stein
As the years went by, Merle traveled less to Cambridge and not at all to New York. For him, in his middle age, it had become a foreign capital, fraught with hazardous encounters. By the time he was in his late forties, Merle’s home-rootedness became an inconvenience to Abigail. However, he was prevailed upon to attend a not terribly important seminar in genetics at the University of Texas because of its geographic convenience. It was at that lackluster meeting, however, that he met the single most brilliant individual in his field he had ever encountered, a younger man by the name of Tarkington. Merle flowered, listening to Tarkington’s incisive brilliance. He invited Tarkington to his home for a weekend of good conversation. It was only at the end of it that Merle learned, quite accidentally, that Tarkington was a changed name and that while Tarkington was not a religious man, there was no blinking the fact that he was a Jew.
Merle felt betrayed. Had he known about Tarkington’s background, he might have still engaged him in conversation, but not as a friend, not in his home.
Merle thought quite a bit about Tarkington’s physiognomy and build. There was absolutely nothing to give you a clue to his origins. In fact, he was quite a good-looking man, even handsome, and he stood straight, effusing strength in a way that reminded Merle of his father. The only odd thing about Tarkington was that he smoked cigarettes in an amber holder, which Merle considered foppish.
When Tarkington phoned to invite the Cliffords to dinner at the Tarkington home, Merle pleaded a prior engagement, but wished he had come right out with a definite never. Three weeks later, looking for a certain letter that had been addressed to Mr. & Mrs. Merle Clifford, he thought Abigail might have taken it into her bedroom. Merle was looking for it in the drawer of her night table, when he came across an amber cigarette holder that still had a half-inch of snuffed-out cigarette in it. What was it doing here? He dreaded fire, and absolutely forbade Abigail to smoke in her bedroom. Why was that cigarette holder being kept? When Abigail had not accompanied him to Cambridge the preceding week, he had thought nothing of it.
The thought that Abigail might have fornicated with a Jew—even if she didn’t know he was a Jew—obsessed Merle’s mind. He could ask her outright. She might lie. The whole thing might only be a further embarrassment between them. He waited another week and then asked Abigail, as casually as he could, whether there was the slightest possibility that she might be pregnant.
He saw the alarm in Abigail’s face. There had only been contact between them once in recent weeks, just before the trip to Cambridge, and Merle’s seed had been spent outside her body as was now their custom. Was he accusing her of infidelity openly? Did she need to consult the lawyer before they talked further?
“I have my period, if that’s what you mean,” Abigail said, astonished to see instant relief on Merle’s face. When he kissed her on both cheeks, she could feel the heat of his face, and both his hands that held her were trembling. However astute Abigail was, she could not guess that Merle had been near an intolerable internal panic over the possibility that his wife might bear Tarkington’s half-Jewish child. He felt as if he had escaped a terrible danger, a humiliation worse than death.
Even Texas was no longer safe. Within a month three significant things happened. Sam Clifford died. With his father dead, Merle relocated himself and Abigail to Orange County in southern California, where he would find the comfort of more like-minded people. And soon thereafter Merle Clifford started assembling the parcels of redwood forest that would eventually become Cliffhaven.
Something needs to be said about the death of Sam Clifford. One would never have suspected he was past eighty. Up until the month before his death, he exercised vigorously, swimming at the country club two or three times a week, playing golf without a cart, and doing twenty sit-ups before showering each morning, as he had done all of his adult life. Then one day he had what he thought of as a stitch in his side that wouldn’t go away with bourbon, aspirin, or trying to walk it off. He went to see his doctor, whom he called a funeral director to his face, and the doctor sent him to a specialist who told him, after various diagnostic procedures the old man hated, that he had the disease that comes to most people if they live long enough, and it seemed inoperable.
“It’ll go fast now,” the specialist had said.
“How fast?” Sam asked.
“Month or two. Anybody’s guess.”
At first Sam intended to keep the news a secret. Then he thought it would be great fun to watch the different reactions of people in his life to the announcement of his forthcoming passage. If anybody behaved greedily or insincerely, he thought, hell, there’s still time to change the will and twist a few tails. The problem was, however, that Sam looked so well nobody believed him except Abigail. And the reason she knew was that she called the doctor on her own from Los Angeles, and he referred her to the specialist, who told her that the diagnosis was locked up in the confidentiality of the relationship between patient and doctor. Abigail figured that if the news was good, it wouldn’t be confidential.
Early the next morning, she phoned Lucinda to tell Sam she was coming. She caught an early plane from Los Angeles to Dallas, and a feeder from there, so it was afternoon by the time she arrived. Lucinda said that Sam was lazying.
“You mean he’s still in bed this time of day?” Abigail asked. To her it was the worst news she had heard.
She went up to Sam’s bedroom, knocked, heard his feeble “Come in,” and entered quietly.
Sam’s smile told her she was welcome, but the rest of his face looked like it had aged in Tibet since she’d seen him last.
“Close the door, girl,” he said.
She obeyed.
“Turn the lock,” he said.
She did as she was instructed.
“I knew you’d come without asking,” Sam said. “You know, you get a vibration about something and I think it goes through your head just as it does mine.”
“Telepathy,” Abigail said.
“Something like that. I got something to ask you.”
She came close to the bed, bent down, and kissed his forehead.
“You and me,” Sam said, “woulda made a great couple. Much bettern me and Lucinda or you and Merle.”
Abigail smiled. “Yes,” she said.
“And we been on absolutely good behavior all along.”
“Yes,” she said.
“Well, can you tell what’s on my mind?”
She thought about money, oil, wills, but said none of that.
“You see,” he said, “sometimes it doesn’t work. Telepathy. I guess I’ll just have to tell you straight-out.”
She sat down on the edge of the bed.
“I think it’s over,” he said.
“What’s over?”
“Life. Mine. Couldn’t get out of bed this morning without feeling I’d fall on my face. I don’t want to finish off with a pratfall and have Lucinda scraping me off the floor. There’s something else I want.”
She looked closely at his face and thought he was in pain.
“You taking your pain-killers like the doctor said?” she asked.
“Not today when I heard you were coming.”
“Why not?”
“Don’t want it to interfere.”
“With what?”
“With what I’m going to ask.”
She began to realize what his request might be.
“I know you’re my daughter-in-law, and I know it’s wrong in some people’s eyes, but not in mine. I want you to touch it.”
When she rolled down the coverlet, Abigail felt as if she was about to perform a religious ritual. Even in those flannel pajamas he looked like a skeleton. She could see the outline of it between his legs.
“Go ahead,” Sam Clifford said, his voice stronger than it had been.
And so she put her hand, the palm and all five fingers on it. She moved her fingers just a bit, then felt it stir. She looked at Sam’s eyes and they were wet and bright. She opened his paj
ama bottoms just enough to get her hand in, and then gently stroking it on its underside and just below the corona, she felt it begin to stiffen. This man was indeed an eighty-year-old death’s-door miracle.
“I always knew you’d be terrifically knowledgeable about something like this,” he said.
She accepted the compliment with a nod of her head, not breaking the rhythm of her stroke. When it was firm and upright, she looked at him as if to ask what’s next. She would do anything for that old man.
“That’s it,” he said happily. “Just wanted to see if I could get it up one more time.”
“You want me to…” She indicated the possibility with a gesture.
“Oh no,” Sam said. “It’d take too damn long and just be a frustration. This is fine.”
She stroked it once more, then neatened his pajama bottoms, and pulled the coverlet up.
“Lucinda would have laughed at me if I had asked her,” Sam said. “You’re a lady, Abigail. I thank you.” Abigail kissed his forehead.
“Ready to take your pill now?”
“Guess so,” he said. “Nothing it can interfere with now.”
Carefully, she shook one of the white pills out of the plastic bottle on his night table, and let him take it from the palm of her hand. She poured some water from the carafe, and he took just the barest sip to swallow the pill and fell back on his pillow, exhausted.
“I’ll go chat with Lucinda a bit,” Abigail said. “She’ll be wondering what we’re up to here.”
The old man let a hoarse laugh drift through his lips.
“Be back before I go,” she said. “You rest.”
Abigail and Lucinda exchanged the kind of gossip two women with nothing in common learn to manage, and after an hour or two of pretending to be civil to each other, it was getting time to catch the feeder flight back to Dallas.
“I’ll go up and say good-bye,” Abigail said.
“He’s probably asleep,” Lucinda said, “but go up if you want to.”
There was no response to her light knock. Perhaps he was indeed asleep. Abigail went in quietly. When she saw the position of his head on the pillow, it reminded her of a pigeon she once saw whose neck was broken. As she moved closer, she noticed that the plastic pill container was lying on its side, empty. The old son of a bitch wasn’t going to let God or anyone else have the last word. He’d got what he wanted, she thought, and now he’s gone. She pocketed the empty container and went to tell Lucinda that Sam had died in his sleep. That part was easy.
*
The hard part was telephoning Merle in California.
“Abigail,” he said. “I’m glad you called. How is the old man? Are you flying home this evening? Shall I meet you?”
“I am not coming home. Your papa—”
“What do you mean you’re not coming home!” Merle’s voice was indignant.
“Not tonight. You have to come on out here. The funeral’s day after tomorrow,” Abigail said.
“What are you talking about?”
“I was trying to tell you. Your papa’s dead.”
She listened to his breathing.
His voice a whisper, Merle said, “Suddenly?”
“He killed himself,” Abigail said. “Your mother doesn’t know. I took the empty pill bottle away. It’s better this way. Say something.”
Of course he couldn’t speak because he was sobbing. Like a woman, she thought, not like Sam. She wanted to say Get ahold of yourself, Merle, you’re a big boy. Pretty soon you’ll be old enough to die yourself.
At long last, Merle was able to speak. “Was he depressed?”
“Hell, no, he was fine-spirited.”
“You saw him, then, before—”
“Of course I did.”
“Did he say anything?” Merle asked. “I mean any clue he’d—”
“No.”
“What was the last thing he did?” Merle asked.
She’d have liked to tell him. Maybe one day she would. What she said was, “I heard him laugh. A good laugh. When I came back up to say good-bye, he was gone. What flight will you be taking?”
Merle knew the schedules from Los Angeles to Dallas by heart. “I’ll try to get on the 7:05 TWA that connects with the feeder. Meet me.”
It was an order. “Sure,” Abigail said.
*
Merle and Lucinda went in together to view the body one last time. Abigail hung back at the door. She wanted to remember Sam when he was admirably alive.
Abigail watched Merle’s expression as he bent down over the casket. That wasn’t love on his face, it was pure, steaming hatred for a man who’d had no foresight, who’d been thoughtless about his genes, who’d mixed his with dumb Lucinda’s, not giving Merle the heredity he still longed for. Quickly, Abigail went over and took Lucinda by the arm and led her out of the room so that she would not see her offspring’s face.
*
Afterward the three of them sat together in the private mourner’s room, next to the room where the casket had just been closed. Merle indicated to Abigail that he wanted to talk to her privately, and led her back into the heavily carpeted room, where the aluminum and brass casket gleamed as if it were made of gold and silver.
“I have to know something,” Merle said. He jabbed a thumb in the direction of the casket. “Have you ever—I mean ever—done anything bad with him?”
“Bad? What are you talking about?”
“You know what I mean,” Merle said.
“I have done nothing but good with your father,” she said, determined to tell only the truth on this solemn occasion.
“That isn’t what I mean!” Merle said, his voice rising so that his mother came to the door and said, “Anything wrong?”
Abigail took her away and returned to Merle. “Now say what you mean.”
“I have to know. Did you ever with him?”
“Ever what?”
“Sexual relations.”
“You mean did I fuck him? The answer is no. Never.”
“I’m sorry,” Merle said. “I’m sorry for suspecting you. But you didn’t have to be so vulgar about it. You ought to be ashamed.”
Abigail looked at Merle, who knew he wasn’t half the man Sam had been. The only thing she was ashamed of was that she had never been able to seduce old Sam. All the others since, gratifying as some of the experiences had been, were substitutes for the man lying in the coffin. She was prouder of what she had done yesterday than anything else in her life she could remember.
7
“That’s quite a place you got yourself up there in Big Sur, Merle,” Jordan Everett said, letting his lanky frame down into an armchair.
“Why thank you,” Merle Clifford responded, genuinely pleased. Though he and Jordan didn’t see each other often, what with Jordan in Texas and the Cliffords now permanently in California, they’d been friends since they met over an oil deal nearly thirty years earlier. Nevertheless, Merle had taken a bit of a chance letting Jordan visit Cliffhaven. If the Cliffhaven idea was to spread, it wouldn’t be like fast-food franchises. You’d have to start with trusted friends.
Jordan looked around the cavernous and expensively furnished living room of the Cliffords’ Orange County mansion. “Quite a place here, too,” he said. “Merle, I got to give you credit. You do things. A lot of other like-minded people I know would contribute dough to somebody else’s scheme, but you did it on your own.”
“Well, I have some really good staff up there,” Merle said.
Jordan let a laugh be his comment, then he said, “You and I know what staff is, Merle. People you hire.”
“It’s a bit different in Cliffhaven, Jordan.” Merle hesitated just a second. “Once in, they can’t quit, you understand.”
“I guess it’s not that far different from sharecropping. I never knew one to pay off the company store. I’ll bet you lend some of them serious money from time to time.”
Merle smiled. In fact, he had lent money only to Clete. He didn’t wan
t to get into the subject any further until he knew how committed Jordan would be.
Jordan liked Merle because he had no time for people who weren’t successful early in life. He had some reservations about what he thought of as Merle’s “polish,” meaning the neutralizing of his Texas accent and the cultivation of a polysyllabic vocabulary, posh manners, and so-called intellectual interests. Jordan was satisfied to talk the way he’d been brought up to talk, to read the local papers, and to eat steak and fries as often as he liked. His quick tour of Cliffhaven had convinced him that his old friend Merle had more going on behind his eyes than Jordan’d ever given him credit for.
Abigail Clifford, wearing a floor-length gown of a sheer and luminous material, paused at the doorway of the living room until Jordan saw her.
“Why Abby,” Jordan said, elevating himself to a standing position and then walking to her as she came toward him. He reached out to hold her arms, then leaned close to buss her cheek. “You get purtier all the time. I don’t know how Merle lets you out in the street with all them sex maniacs you got in Los Angeles.”
They’d been lovers only once, a long time ago when Merle had been briefly hospitalized with pneumonia. Jordan had gone to the hospital, but the nurse made him wave to the wheezing Merle from afar. He’d then stopped by the house to see if he could be of any help, or so he said to Abigail, with whom he had never been alone for ten seconds. He stayed two days. Abigail and Jordan had gotten out of bed only to go to the john and sneak some food from the ice box, which they ate in bed, and for Abigail to slip a cotton dress over her naked body in order to make one quick trip to the hospital to assure Merle that he’d be better real soon, and, more importantly, to make sure he hadn’t recovered unexpectedly and was getting ready to come home.
Jordan remembered those two days with Abigail as one of the highlights of his life, a roller coaster of exhilaration, exhaustion, sleep, and exhilaration all over again. Some weeks later he’d phoned during the business day, hinting to Abigail could she provide another opportunity, even a short one. Abigail chose to ignore the hint. She was interested in men in general and not in acquiring a particular lover on a regular basis.