by Peter Straub
I too have an unusual feeling which I’ll record here at the risk of feeling idiotic whenever I see it in later years. This feeling is absolutely unfounded: more a hunch than a feeling. It’s that if I start to look more closely into Milburn and do what the Chowder Society asks, I’ll find what sent David over that railing in Amsterdam.
* * *
But the oddest feeling, the feeling that makes the adrenalin go, is that I am about to go inside my own mind: to travel the territory of my own writing, but this time without the comfortable make-believe of fiction. No “Saul Malkin” this time; just me.
III
The Town
Narcissus, gazing at his image in the pool, wept. A friend passing by saw him and asked, “Narcissus, why do you weep?”
“Because my face has changed,” Narcissus said.
“Do you cry because you grow older?”
“No. I see that I am no longer innocent. I have been gazing at myself long and long, and so doing have worn out my innocence.”
1
As Don has noted in his journal, while he sat in room 17 of the Archer Hotel and relived his months with Alma Mobley, Freddy Robinson lost his life. And as Don has noted, three cows belonging to a dairy farmer named Norbert Clyde had been killed—Mr. Clyde, walking over to his barn on the night of this occurrence, had seen something which scared him so badly that he felt as though the wind were knocked out of him. He ran back to his house and did not dare to come out again until he could see dawn, when at any rate it was again time for chores and he had to go out. His description of the figure he had seen inspired, among a very few of the most excitable souls of Milburn, the story of a creature from a flying saucer which Don had heard in the drugstore. Both Walt Hardesty and the County Farm Agent, who inspected the dead cows, had heard the story, but neither was gullible enough to accept it. Walt Hardesty, as we know, had his own ideas; he had what he considered good reason for assuming that a few more animals would be bled white and then that would be that. His experience with Sears James and Ricky Hawthorne made him keep his theory to himself and not share it with the County Farm Agent, who chose to overlook certain obvious facts and form the conclusion that somewhere in the area an oversize dog had turned killer. He filed a report to this effect and went back to the county seat, having completed his business. Elmer Scales, who had heard about Norbert Clyde’s cows and was constitutionally half inclined to believe in flying saucers anyhow, sat up three nights in a row by his living-room window, holding a loaded twelve-gauge shotgun across his knees (. . . come from Mars boy maybe you do but we’ll see how you glow when you got a load of shot in you). He could not possibly have foreseen or understood what he would be doing with that shotgun in two months’ time. Walt Hardesty, who would have to clean up Elmer’s mess, was content to take things easy until the next weirdo happening and think about how he could get the two old lawyers to open up to him—them and their friend Mr. Lewis Snob Benedikt. They knew something they weren’t telling, and they knew something too about their other old buddy, Dr. John Dope Fiend Jaffrey. They just didn’t take that normal, Hardesty told himself as he bedded down in the spare room behind his office. He put a bottle of County Fair on the floor beside his cot. No sir. Mr. Ricky Snob Hawthorne-With-Horns and Mr. Sears and Roebuck Snob James just didn’t act normal at all.
But Don does not know, so he cannot put in his journal, that after Milly Sheehan leaves the Hawthorne house to return to the house on Montgomery Street where she lived with John Jaffrey, she remembers one morning that the doctor never did get around to putting up the storm windows and yanks on a coat and goes outside to see if she can do it herself and while she looks up despairingly at the windows (knowing that she’ll never be able to lift the big storms that high), Dr. Jaffrey walks around the side of the house and smiles at her. He is wearing the suit Ricky Hawthorne picked out for his funeral but no shoes or socks, and at first the shock of seeing him outside barefoot is worse than the other shock. “Milly,” he says, “tell them all to leave—tell them all to get out. I’ve seen the other side Milly, and it’s horrible.” His mouth moves, but the words sound like a badly dubbed film. “Horrible. Be sure to tell them now,” he says, and Milly faints. She is out only a few seconds, and comes to whimpering, her hip aching from the fall, but even through her fear she can see no footprints in the snow beside her and knows that she was just seeing things—she’ll never tell anyone. They put you away for things like that. “Too many of those darned stories, and a little too much of Mr. Sears James,” she mutters to herself before picking herself up and limping back inside.
Don, sitting alone in room 17, of course does not know most of the things that happen in Milburn while he takes a three-week tour of his past. He barely sees the snow, which continues to fall heavily; Eleanor Hardie does not skimp on heating any more than she allows the lobby carpet to go unvacuumed, so he is warm, up in his room. But one night Milly Sheehan hears the wind shift to the north and west and getting out of bed to put on another blanket, sees stars between the rags of clouds. Back in bed, she lies listening to the wind blow more strongly—and then even more strongly than that, shaking the sash of the window, forcing itself in. The curtain billows, the shade rattles. When she wakes in the morning, she finds a drift of snow covering the sill.
* * *
And here are some other events from two weeks in Milburn, all of which happened while Don Wanderley consciously, willfully and at length evoked the spirit of Alma Mobley:
Walter Barnes sat in hs car at Len Shaw’s Exxon station and thought about his wife while Len filled the tank. Christina had been moping around the house for months now, staring at the telephone and burning dinners and at last he had begun to think that she was having an affair. Disturbingly, he still carried in his mind a clear picture of a drunken Lewis Benedikt fondling Christina’s knees at Jaffrey’s tragic party: and of a drunken Christina letting him do it. It was true that she was still an attractive woman, and he had become an overweight small-town banker, not the financial power he had once envisaged: most of the men of their class in Milburn would have been happy to go to bed with Christina, but it had been fifteen years since a woman had looked at him in a challenging way. Misery settled over him. His son would be leaving home in a year, and then it would be just he and Christina, pretending that they were happy. Len coughed and said, “How’s your friend Mrs. Hawthorne? Thought she looked a little peaked last time she was in here—thought maybe she had a touch of the flu.” “No, she’s fine,” Walter Barnes replied, thinking that Len, like ninety per cent of the men in town, coveted Stella: as he did himself. What he ought to do, he thought, was run away with Stella Hawthorne; go someplace like Pago Pago and forget about being lonely and married in Milburn; not knowing that the loneliness which would in fact visit him would be worse than anything he could imagine;
and Peter Barnes, the banker’s son, sat in another car with Jim Hardie while they drove at twenty miles over the limit to a rundown tavern, listening to Jim, who was six-two and muscular and the kind of boy described forty years earlier as “born to hang,” and who had set fire to the old Pugh barn because he’d heard the Dedham girls kept their horses in it, tell stories of his sexual relations with the new woman at the hotel, this Anna woman, stories which would never be true, not in the way Jim meant them;
and Clark Mulligan sat in the projection booth of his theater, watching Carrie for the sixtieth time and worried about what all this snow would do to his business and if Leota would have something besides hamburger casserole for dinner and if anything exciting would ever happen to him again;
and Lewis Benedikt paced the rooms in his enormous house tormented by an impossible thought: that the woman who had appeared before him on the highway and whom he had nearly killed was his dead wife. The set of the shoulders, the swing of the hair . . . the more he thought back to those seconds, the more agonizingly quick and vague they were;
and Stella Hawthorne lay
on a motel bed with Milly Sheehan’s nephew, Harold Sims, wondering if Harold would ever stop talking: “And then, Stel, some of the guys in my department are looking into myth survival among the Amerinds because they say the whole group dynamic thing is a dead letter, can you believe it? Hell, I only finished my thesis four years ago, and now the whole thing’s out of style, Johnson and Leadbeater don’t even mention Lionel Tiger anymore, they’re getting into field work, and the other day, for Chrissake, a guy stopped me in the corridor and asked me if I’ve ever read any of the stuff on the Manitou—the Manitou, for Chrissake. Myth survival, for Chrissake.”
“What’s a Manitou?” she asked him, but didn’t pay any attention to his answer—some story about an Indian who chased a deer for days up a mountain, but when he got to the top the deer turned on him and wasn’t a deer anymore. . . .
and bundled-up Ricky Hawthorne, driving to Wheat Row one morning (he now had his snow tires) saw a man wearing a pea jacket and a blue watch cap beating a child on the north side of the square. He slowed, and just had time to see the boy’s bare feet kicking in the snow. For a moment he was so shocked that he could not think what to do; but he stopped, pulling the car over to the curb, and got out. “That’s enough,” he shouted, “that’s quite enough,” but the man and the child both turned to stare at him with such peculiar force that he put down his arm and got back in the car;
and the next night, sipping camomile tea, looked out of an upstairs window and nearly dropped the cup, seeing a forlorn face staring in at him—gone in an instant when he jerked to one side. In the next instant, he realized that it was his own face;
and Peter Barnes and Jim Hardie come out of a country bar, and Jim, who is only half as drunk as Peter, says hey, shithead, I got a great idea, and laughs most of the way back to Milburn;
and a dark-haired woman sits facing the window in a dark room in the Archer Hotel and watches the snow fall and smiles to herself;
and at six-thirty in the evening an insurance salesman named Freddy Robinson locks himself in his den and telephones a receptionist named Florence Quast and says, “No, I don’t think I need to bother either of them, I think that new girl of theirs could answer my questions. Could you give me her name? And just where is she staying again?”
and the woman in the hotel sits and smiles, and several more animals, part of the fun, are butchered: two heifers in Elmer Scales’s barn (Elmer having fallen asleep with the shotgun across his lap) and one of the Dedham girls’ horses.
2
That was how Freddy Robinson came in. He had written the policy for the two Dedham girls, the daughters of the late Colonel and the sisters of long-deceased Stringer Dedham. Nobody bothered about the Dedham girls much anymore: they lived out in their old house on Willow Mile Road, they had their horses but rarely sold one, they kept to themselves. The same age as most of the men in the Chowder Society, they had not aged as well. For years they had talked obsessionally about Stringer, who had not died immediately when the threshing machine pulled off his arms but had lain on the kitchen table, wrapped in three blankets during a sweltering August, babbling and passing out and then babbling again until the life ran out of him. People in Milburn got tired of hearing about what Stringer was trying to say while he died, especially since it didn’t make much sense; even the Dedham girls couldn’t properly explain it—what they wanted you to know was that Stringer had seen something, he was upset, he wasn’t fool enough to get caught in the thresher if he was really himself, was he? And the girls seemed to blame Stringer’s fiancée, Miss Galli, and for a little while eyebrows were raised at her; but then Miss Galli just upped and left town, and after that people lost interest in whatever the Dedham girls thought of her. Thirty years later not many people in town even remembered Stringer Dedham, who had been handsome and a gentleman and would have turned the horses into a business and not just a half-hearted hobby for a couple of aging women, and the Dedham girls got tired of their own obsession—after so many years, they weren’t so sure what Stringer had been trying to say about Miss Galli—and decided that their horses were better friends than Milburn people. Twenty years after that they were still alive, but Nettie was paralyzed with a stroke and most young people in Milburn had never seen either of them.
Freddy Robinson had driven past their farm one day not long after he had moved to Milburn and what made him reverse and go up the drive was the name on the mailbox, Col. T. Dedham—he didn’t know that Rea Dedham repainted her father’s name on the box every two years. Even though Colonel Thomas Dedham had died of malaria in 1910, she was too superstitious to take it off. Rea explained it to him; and she was so pleased to have a spruce young man across the table from her that she bought three thousand dollars’ worth of insurance. What she insured were her horses. She was thinking of Jim Hardie, but she didn’t tell that to Freddy Robinson. Jim Hardie was a bad ‘un, and he’d had a grudge against the girls ever since Rea shooed him away from the horse barn when he was a little boy: the way young Robinson explained it to her, a little insurance was just what she needed, in case Jim Hardie ever came back with a can of gasoline and a match.
* * *
At that time, Freddy was a new agent and his ambition was to become a member of the Million Dollar Roundtable; eight years later he was close to making it, but it no longer mattered to him—he knew that if he’d been in a bigger town he’d have had it long before. He had been to enough conferences and conventions and sales meetings to think that he knew most that there was to know about the insurance business; he knew how the business worked, and he knew just how to sell life and property insurance to a scared young farmer whose soul belonged to the bank and whose nest egg had just vanished into a new milking system—now a fellow like that really needed insurance. But eight years of living in Milburn had changed Freddy Robinson. He no longer took pride in his ability to sell, since he had learned that it was based on an ability to exploit fear and greed; and he had learned half-consciously to despise most of his fellow salesmen—in the company’s phrase, the “Humdingers.”
It was not his marriage or children which had changed Freddy, but living across the street from John Jaffrey’s house. At first, he had thought that the old boys he saw trooping in once a month or so were comic, unbelievably stuffy-looking. Dinner jackets! They had looked unprecedentedly grave—five Methuselahs padding out their time.
Then he began to notice that after sales meetings in New York he returned home with relief; his marriage was going badly (he was finding himself attracted to the high school girls his wife, two children ago, had rather resembled), but home was more than Montgomery Street—it was all of Milburn, and most of Milburn was quieter and prettier than anywhere he’d ever lived. Gradually he felt that he had a secret relationship to Milburn; his wife and children were eternal, but Milburn was a temporary restful oasis, not the provincial backwater he had first thought it. And once at a conference, a new agent sitting next to him unpinned his Humdinger badge and dropped it under the table, saying, “I can stand most of it, but this Mickey Mouse crap drives me up the wall.”
Two further events, as unremarkable as these, assisted Freddy’s conversion. One night, aimlessly walking about an ordinary section of Milburn, he went past Edward Wanderley’s house on Haven Lane and saw the Chowder Society through a window. There they sat, his Methuselahs, talking among themselves; one raised a hand, one smiled. Freddy was lonely, and they seemed very close. He stopped to stare in at them. Since moving to Milburn, he had gone from twenty-six to thirty-one, and the men no longer seemed so old; while they had stayed the same, he had aged toward them. They were not grotesque, but dignified. Also, something he had never considered, they were enjoying themselves. He wondered what they were talking about, and was assailed by the sense that it was something secret—something not business, not sport, not sex, not politics. It simply washed through him that their conversation would be of a sort he had never heard. Two weeks later he took one of the hi
gh school girls to a restaurant in Binghamton, and saw Lewis Benedikt across the room with one of the waitresses from Humphrey Stalladge’s bar. (Both had sweetly rejected Freddy’s advances.) He had begun to envy the Chowder Society; before long he would begin to love what he considered they represented, a way of combining civilization with a quiet good time.
Lewis was the focus of Freddy’s feelings. Closer to Freddy’s age than the others, he showed what Freddy might become.
He watched his idol at Humphrey’s Place, noticing how he raised his eyebrows before answering a question and how he tilted his head to one side, often, when smiling; how he used his eyes. Freddy began to copy these mannerisms. He copied too what he thought was Lewis’s sexual pattern, but scaling down the ages of the girls from Lewis’s twenty-five or twenty-six to seventeen or eighteen, which was the age of the girls who interested him anyhow. He bought jackets like those he saw Lewis wearing.
When Dr. Jaffrey invited him to his party for Ann-Veronica Moore, Freddy thought the doors of heaven had opened. He pictured a quiet evening, the Chowder Society and himself and the actress, and told his wife to stay home; when he saw the crowd, he began behaving like a fool. He stayed downstairs, too shy and disappointed to approach the older men he wanted to befriend; he made eyes at Stella Hawthorne; when he finally gathered the nerve to approach Sears James—who had always terrified him—he found himself talking about insurance as if under a curse. After Edward Wanderley’s body was discovered, Freddy crawled away with the other guests.