Clarkton

by Howard Fast

  “Why don’t you say what you think?” Abbott asked.

  “Because I don’t think it yet. I don’t want to think about it until I know more. I want to go to sleep.”

  “You know as much as they do,” Abbott insisted.

  “I know that Danny Ryan likes to see things in a big way. I also know that nobody has a mind like a camera. A camera is one thing and a mind is another. I’m tired, and I’m not going to stay awake all night arguing because someone drove into the plant.”

  “But you think George is capable—”

  “For God’s sake, Elliott, what do you want me to say?”

  “I don’t know,” he said miserably.

  “Come to sleep.”

  By the time he got into bed, she was sleeping, the soft, even cadence of her breathing like a signature on all that had happened. He lay on one elbow, watching her, seeing her more and more clearly as his eyes accommodated themselves to the darkness. Right now, he felt very close to George Clark Lowell; otherwise, he was alone, a middle-aged New England doctor who had once had an unforgettable experience in Spain

  14.After the Abbotts had left, Lowell went back into the library and sat down at the chessboard, a reflex to the single game man has invented that attempts to make, in black and white squares, a pattern and a duplication of life, a sane and understandable universe of the microcosmic. He stared at the board and considered that it was not the words between Elliott and himself, but the many things unspoken that rose in front of him now, large and demanding. His anger against Elliott died away, and he sat there finally with a quality so wretched that Lois could not fail to notice it when she came to call him.

  “We’ll go to bed, George,” she said.

  He nodded and rose and went upstairs with her; and she, as a reflection of the tension, perhaps, or as an instinctive reaction to this new factor—more disturbing in some strange way than the death of a child, or an adulterous practice, or a scene of one kind or another—found herself wanting him as she had not wanted him for months, an ebbtide and flow in her that made her finger his clothes as he took them off: but afterward, when they were in bed, he was impotent, a shocking impotence and unwillingness that made him sick with himself.

  Friday, December 7, 1945

  Year by year, Jack Curzon’s wife grew just a little fatter, not grossly fat, not unevenly fat, but filling out ripely, until, like one of Renoir’s nudes, she was as matronly as a woman can become without instantly being set down as an obese person. It cannot be said that Curzon was particularly conscious of this change in his wife over a period of twenty-two years of married existence, but he was aware that in some ways she became more attractive and that his pleasure in her did not dwindle, but rather the reverse. As a matter of fact, in his youth he had been something of a tomcat, randying around all over the place, a practice that continued without apparent letup even after his marriage, until he was able to say, at the age of forty, that it seemed to him that he had banged everything worth banging. In the ten years between forty and fifty, he gradually became accustomed to and practically accepted monogamous marriage, partly because his standing in the community made it preferable, partly because at the age of forty-seven he was brought back into the fold, to the tears and rejoicing of his wife, and partly because, as he put it himself, he was just damned sick and tired of chasing around.

  Whether if was because of this, or simply concurrent with this, he discovered his wife anew, a renaissance both pleasant and gratifying to Sally Curzon, who in the slow process of a generation had painlessly discovered that not all of her early notions concerning the relationships of men and women were correct.

  In Jack Curzon, this consciousness of his wife’s possibilities more or less rapidly developed into a habit. He was a man of habit, not concerned particularly—unless he had an attack of indigestion—with what was within himself or his fellow human beings. At night, he fell asleep with the warm aroma of flesh; in the morning he woke with it, as on this Friday morning, when he turned in the restless preparation for consciousness, came in contact with his wife’s body, measured it, recognized it, opened his eyes and reacted to the sickly gray light of dawn, the cold air, the crowing of a cock somewhere in the distance, retreated mentally back under the covers, thought a few vagrant thoughts, and then examined Sally with normal, unhurried interest, a process that tuned her waking comfortably and happily.

  He was not one of those men who wake up surly. He was full of old-fashioned habits, like wearing a long flannel night-gown in preference to pajamas, and shaving with a carefully prepared lather in a big mug, and with a straight-edged razor too, and he liked to have his three kids scurrying in and out of the bathroom while he shaved. He liked the smell of fresh coffee and the smell of breakfast cooking while he shaved, and he always ate a big breakfast, fruit, cereal, eggs, ham or bacon, toast, and sometimes coffee cake too. In the rare moments when it occurred to him to think about it, he considered himself a goodhearted man, who, by the dint of certain additional virtues, had become about as successful as one ever did in his line.

  This morning, there were hotcakes instead of eggs on the Curzon table, a special treat for everyone in the family. They all had breakfast together, Sally in a pink housecoat, her yellow hair already combed, Curzon dressed except for his shirt, revealing the heavy woolen underwear he wore, and the three children, aged eleven, eight, and six respectively, the oldest a girl, the two youngest boys—all sitting around the kitchen table. Curzon prepared his hotcakes carefully and scientifically, preferring a stack of four, giving each an even layer of butter, then pouring honey on each one separately, then molding the four together, and pouring honey over the whole thing, like icing on a layer cake. This was always interesting to his wife and children, who lacked his precise approach to small matters, and they almost always paused in their own eating to watch him complete the process and take the first bite. When the first bite was down, they relaxed and joined with him, but somehow never completely divorced themselves from his particular gusto in the food, retaining at least a vicarious appreciation.

  It was while Curzon was at breakfast that the phone rang. One of Curzon’s few material concessions to success was that he had three telephone extensions in the house, one in the hallway, one next to his bed, and one in the kitchen; so that now he was able to reach out an arm and say “Hello” through a gratifying mixture of pancakes and coffee.

  It was Tom Wilson at the other end, his hearty, malleable voice booming loud enough for everyone in the kitchen to hear:

  “Hello, Jack, did I catch you at breakfast?”

  “Not at all,” but with the unhappy realization that a break in the consumption of food ruins the delicious continuity of it, and letting some of that impatience creep in. Jack Curzon hαated any interruption that took him from the table before he had finished eating.

  “I won’t keep you a minute,” Wilson said. “I just thought I’d let you know that Ham Gelb is in town, and if everything’s clear I’ll be over with him and maybe Mr. Lowell round about ten or ten-thirty.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” Curzon said thoughtfully. “Ham Gelb.”

  “The time all right?”

  “I’ll look for you,” Curzon said. Then he replaced the phone and said, to his family and to no one in particular, “Ham Gelb—now what do you know!”

  2.Lowell and his wife were finishing their breakfast, a silent affair for the most part, when Fern came down. As a rule, the Lowells had their breakfast, and very often their lunch, in a little room adjoining the dining room, which was called the gun room but which contained, in the way of firearms, only an old flintlock musket, which hung over the Dutch oven. Lois had papered the room in a small-figured, dark-green pattern, and had hung the high, small windows with white chintz curtains. The trestle board and the reed-seat, ladder-back chairs were all the furniture it contained outside of a small pine sideboard, and when a door had been cut through to the pantry, Lois found the room admirably suited to its new purpo
se. In the five years they had lived there, she had changed not only this room, but the whole aspect of the house, removing bit by bit, slowly, without ever giving George reason for protest, the presence of a man who had made his home there for half a century and more. The older George Lowell, her father-in-law, was not easily eliminated, but Lois was patient. Just as patiently, just as undisturbed, she had waited something less than twenty years for his death, and she saw no reason why her patience should be less durable now that he was gone.

  Patience was a quality of hers, and very often she used it the way her grandmother had used a favorite patent medicine. When her understanding of something was limited, she resigned herself to waiting for the problem to remove itself and because her knowledge of men was more limited than she and most of those who knew her supposed, she considered that the same treatment would be most advisable for what had happened the night before. The result was a calm but rather silent breakfast until Fern appeared, and said:

  “I’ve been having bellyaches, although I’m not pregnant, if that’s what you’re thinking, Mother, and I’ve decided to see Elliott about it. How long did he stay last night?”

  “I hate that kind of talk,” Lois said. “It’s not flip, it’s not clever. It’s cheap talk.”

  She kissed her father and sat down next to him, and Lowell, who was going to say something, swallowed his words.

  “I got home at twelve-thirty,” Fern said. “I thought Elliott would still be here.”

  “Why was that so important?” Lowell asked.

  Fern, who was drinking her orange juice, put it down suddenly and looked at her father reflectively. “He’s a beautiful man,” she said. She finished her juice, and began to pour her coffee. Lois asked:

  “Is there any reason why we have to wait for this wretched business to be over, George? I hate a winter in Massachusetts. I always have hated it.”

  3.But this was not really a winter’s day, in the old, time-accepted sense of the word; this was not the sort of a day that comes down out of the Berkshires, growling with suppressed anger, raising a godhead out of petulant Mount Greylock. This was a day when the morning mists cleared in the earliest dawn, and the sun flooded the hills around Clarkton, the cobbled red streets, and the long rows of red-brick tenements—that amazing New England combination of slum and countryside—that were strung the length of First and Fourth Avenues, nestling into the hills themselves. It was a windy, sunny day, full of delight for the senses—something that Mike Sawyer was highly conscious of as he walked down the main street with Danny Ryan, on their way to JÓe Santana’s barber shop.

  Sawyer was one of those men whose face hair ingrew unless he was regularly shaved and double-shaved by a barber, and when he brought this up with Ryan, the little man remarked that it was a good way to kill two birds with one stone, since he ought to meet Joe Santana in any case, and that they might as well walk over there and get him shaved, and then maybe chew the fat a little with Joe before they went up to the plant, which Mike Sawyer had not yet seen. Sawyer agreed to this; the prospect of a walk on this fine, cool morning was inviting, and he was immensely curious about New England, every aspect of it, all of it new to him, each part of it a part of a problem that would be his to solve, sooner or later. As they strolled along, he discovered that walking with Danny Ryan was a very good way to meet people. Also, Ryan showed no sign of the antagonism he had displayed the evening before. Ryan knew everyone, and he seemed to be consistently liked. It was just early enough for the workers to be drifting over to the plant, their pace that slow, puzzled walk of men on strike for the first time in many years, the big sheep-skin collars of their wind-jackets turned up, their red-flapped hunting caps sitting on the backs of their heads. Every so often, one of them buttonholed Ryan to pour out a long, quick-paced gripe, to each of which he listened, making a quick, seemingly snap decision.

  Sawyer noticed how many of the men wore one part or another of army uniform, and when he remarked on this to his companion, Ryan said, “They been coming back since ’forty-two. This is a one-plant town, Mike. How many filling stations you going to open in a place like Clarkton?”

  When they were almost at Santana’s place, Ryan was stopped by a thin, redheaded, middle-aged man whom he introduced to Sawyer as Freddy Butler, one of the lasters. “What do you know, Danny?” Butler inquired, and Ryan answered that he didn’t know much—it was quiet, too damned quiet. Butler said, “I hear it talked around that we got big-time company in town.” “You hear it talked around,” Ryan grinned. “The lips flap like they was in a hurricane. You going to listen, you going to hear an awful lot talked around.” “Well, what do I tell the guys?” “Take it easy,” Ryan said. “They want to know, you just tell them to take it easy.”

  “A good guy?” Sawyer asked; as they walked away.

  “A good guy, only he’s awful nervous. He got pushed around too much, I guess. It makes him nervous.”

  Joe Santana had just opened up when they got to his place. and he was sitting in his number-one chair, reading the New York Times. He was introduced to Sawyer, and shook his hand with real warmth. “You got a problem,” he admitted, referring to Sawyer’s beard. “You get used to a certain kind of shave and you got to follow through. But you also got a situation where most barbers are butchers. I got a respect for my work—as a matter of fact, for work in general—but how many barbers have? Barbers are not a good type, unfortunately. I know; I worked for them all over the country. Mostly, I preferred other kinds of work, but sooner or later I’d have to fall back on tonsorial work to make a buck that was badly needed. This is different. This way I got a little independence—as much as a man can have in this system of ours—and I got people to talk to. Also, I got a basis for knowledge,” grinning and nodding at the New York Times, which he had folded carefully and laid on his pile of newspapers.

  “I guess you know the town pretty well,” Sawyer said.

  “Yes and no. You got to talk of a degree. How well does a man know his own wife? Only within limitations. A town like this is a problem for a social scientist with a sincere interest in the species. I never been to Lowell’s house—he owns the plant. I never been to Gafferty’s house—he’s the big-shot banker in town; I got connections with limitations, so I try to make insight do the work. A man like yourself, he probably learns more in a week than I do in a year. But insight has a place, a legitimate place. Take this business of the atom bomb. The New York Times thinks there is going to be a war with Russia; I dissent—not on political grounds, although there is no doubt you could give an argument there, a leading man like you, I mean—but on the basis of human nature. I put myself in the place of the average man, the average Joe. He don’t want to die by an atom bomb. To you and me, it don’t matter. But the average guy, he don’t like this thing; it’s unnatural. That’s a factor.”

  He had already finished lathering Sawyer’s face, and now he was beginning to shave, with quick, competent strokes. He knew his work, and regardless of the part of it with which he was engaged, his smooth flow of talk was not interrupted.

  4.Driving down Concord Way toward the plant, Lowell found himself thinking of his daughter in terms of Elliott Abbott, something which—and this he was willi’ng to admit to himself—would have been inconceivable only a few days ago. His resentment, his feeling of frustration in terms of his wife, had to crystallize somèwhere, and the very fact that he was beginning to realize how much he had leaned upon Elliott Abbott during the past years helped to focus it upon the doctor. Yet mixed up in that and added to the crazy feeling he had that his daughter was in love with Abbott—a natural, understandable adolescent crush, he was also willing to admit—was a sense of envy. This morning, for the first time, he had been able to see his daughter from a point of vantage, and the sight disturbed him. He wondered whether he would remain close enough to Abbott to talk to him about it, and then he admitted that even if this were the case, it was something he could not possibly bring up.

  He was close
to the Fourth Avenue gate of the plant now, and he slowed down, so that he could present his pass to the picket captain in charge. Again, as on all previous times, since the beginning of the strike, it occurred to him what an element of the childish, of the absurd, there was in the antics of the little group of men and women who marched monotonously round and round in front of the gate, carrying their signs, which called so gracelessly for a wage raise, for the union of black and white, for unity, for solidarity—for all those other things which, it seemed to Lowell, were unwieldy slogans and no more. They themselves were either new at this thing or had forgotten the last time they were out on strike—so many years ago now—and betrayed the fact in a sort of self-consciousness, which they attempted to hide but were unable to.

  Three more-than-middle-aged men on the line—they were probably inspectors, Lowell thought—carried furled umbrellas, the height of incongruity on that sun-drenched morning, and to complete the picture of respectability, the old gentlemen wore long black overcoats, silk scarves, and felt hats. Even though there was no one in particular watching them, they would every so often pick up a ragged chant, “… black and white, unite and fight …,” keep it going for a while, and then allow it to fade away. In this, the three old gentlemen were unable to join, and it was the clean voices of the young folks; the girls in their slacks and cheap fur coats, the boys in their motley of army uniform and outdoor clothes, that sounded through. Lowell noticed that, as always, there were half a dozen extras standing around, ribbing the pickets in a good-natured way occasionally, and making sure that the fires in the big oil cans, perforated with holes, and known from coast to coast as salamanders—perhaps because they turned red when heated long enough—were kept going.