by John Gardner
“Stupid babbler,” Editha said. Then, calling upstairs, it seemed: “Agnes!”
They listened a moment, but the dead Agnes said nothing.
“She’ll bury us all,” Octave said. “She has a strong constitution, like all the Woodworths. Good stock.” She sighed, a sound like sandpaper. “Well, the younger ones don’t care. They want those tiny little houses with their tiny fat chairs and those tiny little cars. I just don’t want any part of it, Mr. Cooper. I like houses with stories, places people have lived in. That settee there, the one Mr. What’s-his-name is sitting on, it came down in the family from our Uncle Ferris and Aunt Margaret. They had nine children, and five of them died in one week of diphtheria.”
He missed whatever it was she said next. Three fire engines went by, some blocks away, the last two hard on the tail of the first, from the sound of it, and their sirens howled along the twilight like the cranes he’d heard once crossing the sky in single file directly over the ship. When he could listen again she was saying, suddenly animated, “Wasn’t it a terrible winter?”
Clumly pursed his lips. “Terrible,” he ventured.
“We thought we’d die, didn’t we Editha? I get the hives so bad, don’t you know. We were shut up here one time for four days, right here in the city, telephone lines down and everything. I’d just get choking, don’t you know, in the middle of the night, and I just gave myself up for gone. We finally got out a message to the doctor by some children that were playing in the drifts out in front, and he came over here on foot. It was T. Murray Steele. Such a good man, and very famous in the medical circle, or so we hear. Not our circle, you know—” she rasped out a laugh “—though he’s rich, we understand. Very active in politics too, one of us, where that’s concerned. He said he just couldn’t understand why I wasn’t dead. ‘Well, I’ve got a good constitution,’ I says. It’s so rare to find a good doctor, these days, what with socialized medicine and the Catholics and the rest. You wonder what this country’s coming to. Poor Editha came down with pneumonia one time—three years ago February, wasn’t it Editha? It came over her late at night, I remember. She’d had a cold, poor thing, and my colitis was so bad I could scarcely get around to wait on her—it’s so hard when you’re sickly, don’t you know—I suppose that was partly what made it worse. I’d just wound this clock—I remember as if it was yesterday—and I heard poor Editha gagging in the second parlor. Not a doctor that would come at that hour of the night. Except T. Murray Steele. He’s known far and wide for his medical skill, and yet out he comes in the middle of the night, just as regular as the post office. We had poor Editha in an oxygen tent—God’s will be done!—and he cured my bursitis the same night, as well as possible. I can’t tell you how grateful it made us. What’s wrong with these young doctors? I hear they put people in ten different rooms, not counting the room with the magazines, and they just make them wait. I heard of a doctor in Leroy who went away on vacation and left two poor ladies sitting in his office for days and days. Imagine! They might have starved! I haven’t been to one of those places myself. I can’t get out much, don’t you know, with these fallen arches. It’s just like walking with glass inside your shoes.”
Clumly shook his head.
She fiddled with the Kleenex, looking for a place still unused. “Have you ever seen Editha’s poetry books?” Miss Octave asked them. “There’s boxes and boxes of them up in the attic. They’ve never sold well, but they’re lovely, you know. She used to read her poetry all over New York State, years ago. She’s written some lovely children’s pieces and of course volumes of beautiful religious verse. She doesn’t do it any more, naturally.”
She sat silent a moment, looking at the canes in her lap. At last, with an effort, she wrapped her stiff knuckles around the handles and got the canes in position to help her up. “You’ll want to see where the burglar came in,” she said.
“Yes, good,” Clumly said. The sky was gray now, the room almost dark, but Octave Woodworth seemed no more aware of the darkness than Clumly’s wife would have been. Slowly, she led them through the dining room to the kitchen and out to the back porch.
“He must have found the hammer out there in the garage,” she said. “This is where he knocked out the pane of glass and reached in to unlock the door.” There was plywood where the pane had been. The door was nailed shut. “We have a man who comes by to mow lawn for us. We had him nail the door, just to be on the safe side.”
“Good idea,” Clumly said politely.
“He’s a queer,” she said. Clumly glanced at her, startled, and could not tell whether or not she meant what he supposed. She said, “But he’s a good worker. We’re glad to have him.”
Boyle stood gazing morosely into the overgrown garden, holding the flower box under his arm. The old woman, shaking like a leaf all over, noticed the direction of his gaze. “It used to be a beautiful garden. Father started it seventy years ago, and we tried to keep it up, as long as we could. But now it’s gone back to Nature, as you see.” She spoke the word Nature with hostility, as though for her it were a familiar and tolerable evil. The marble birdbath lay on its side, the base cracked, grass growing out of the opening obscenely. The brick wall at the rear of the garden hung thick with what seemed to be poison ivy—it was hard to be sure in the failing light. The tulip tree in the center of the garden was dead as a doornail, and roses overran the brick paths at liberty, with branches like the limbs of trees. In the high grass to the right of the porch, an ice-box lay on its side, with the door secured by an old rusty chain.
“He went through there,” she said. She pointed to a hole yawning in the back right corner of the brick wall.
“Very helpful,” Clumly said soberly. “This has all been very helpful.”
She looked up at him earnestly, dim eyes loose in the dark, sunken sockets. “I hope you’ll catch him, Mr. Cooper, and bring back some of our things. You’ll want that hammer, I imagine, for the fingerprints.”
“Yes indeed, we certainly will.”
She turned back to the kitchen and brought it, still wrapped in the handkerchief, from the cupboard.
She said, “We’ve always been good citizens, Mr. Cooper. We don’t like to trouble the police over nothing.”
“I understand that,” Clumly said. “This is a serious matter, as you know,”
She was looking at him again, searching for something, or expecting something, he couldn’t make out quite what. “That’s what I said to Editha,” she whispered.
“Boyle?” Clumly said.
The thief turned away from his gloomy inspection of the garden and came into the kitchen.
“You must go now, yes,” Miss Octave said. “Thank you, thank you.” She was looking at the flower box Boyle carried. She pulled her gaze away and started through the dining room toward the parlor. They inched along behind her.
“Say good-bye, Editha,” she whispered.
In the deepening darkness there was only a vague glow of white now where Miss Editha sat. She did not answer.
“You’d vow she was dead,” Miss Octave said.
“Yakety yakety yakety,” Miss Editha whispered.
Miss Octave ignored it. “Think what a man like that must have in store for him,” she said. “It’s my belief the Lord is not as merciful as some people suppose, especially thieves. You try to lay a little pittance by, you put your money in the bank or you lend it out at a fair rate of interest, you build up a position of authority in the community, and along comes some ugly little wretch—” Her throat convulsed. “If thieves go to Heaven, then we’d be better off with no God at all. That’s the truth.”
Clumly patted her arm. It was dry as paper and hot as the center of a compost pile. At the front door Miss Octave whispered slyly, “Are the flowers for us, Mr. Cooper?”
Police Chief Clumly took the box from Boyle with a sigh and gave it to her.
“God bless you,” she whispered. She scraped at his hand with her stiff fingers. “The Lord bless you and keep you
.”
From the parlor came Miss Editha’s sharp whisper, “Tell them Shoo! Go away!”
Clumly bowed and gave the younger of the ancient sisters a wave. Then, closing his hand firmly around his prisoner’s arm, he marched Boyle down to the car. There was another car parked down the street, across from the Adams place, and there was someone in it, smoking a cigarette. As he turned his own car toward Main he glanced in the rearview mirror to see if the car was following him, but it was gone. He would not think about it.
“Good people, the Woodworths,” Clumly said with conviction.
Boyle looked at him.
After that, neither of them spoke. Clumly scowled and concentrated on his driving. He’d forgotten that Bank Street was one-way now, the wrong way. He caught his own reflection in the windshield, a face vague with consternation, and thought of his wife’s glass eyes.
5
At quarter-to-eight, back in his office, Walter Boyle safely in his cell again, Clumly could not shake the feeling that someone was watching him, following him, dogging his footsteps. Salvador was off duty, Miller was nowhere to be seen; only Figlow and one of the cops off the street were in the front office. Now that darkness had fallen, the stack of papers on his desk seemed less obviously harmless. It might be true (it was true, of course) that he knew more about running a police department than Mullen did, but Mayor Mullen was a great believer in paperwork, and it was a bad practice to bite the hand that fed you. Figlow had given him an odd look when he’d come in with Boyle—almost a dangerously odd look, it seemed to Clumly. They’d been talking about him, probably, Figlow and Miller and Salvador and whoever had happened along. They might perhaps be talking about him now. Without exactly meaning to, merely walking around, as anyone might do, cooped up in an office, Clumly worked his way over to the door, where he could hear what Figlow and the other cop were saying. He could hear their voices distinctly, but not the words, partly because of the radio there with them, partly because the old, high-ceilinged room was full of echoes. He pressed flat against the wall and pushed his ear up against it, but it didn’t help. After a moment, scowling, he stooped over toward the crack below the door. He could hear better now, but still it was not clear. He glanced around the office, though he knew there was no one there to see him, then quietly got down on his hands and knees and pressed his ear to the crack. Now the words came distinctly.
“Salami,” Figlow said. “Same sandwich as yesterday and the day before.”
The other cop grunted.
“I don’t mean just the same kind, I mean the same exact sandwich. She sees I didn’t eat it, she puts it right back in the lunchbox.”
“You should throw it away, then she’d give you a fresh one.”
“Hell no! I hate salami, I don’t care if it’s fresh or stale.”
A silence. The wax paper rustled, and then he heard the sound of coffee being poured into the thermos cup.
“Just the same, fresh salami’s better than stale. Stale can poison you.”
“Not if you don’t eat it.”
“Well, just the same,” the other cop said.
“You don’t get the point,” Figlow said. “It’s a war, see? Who’s gonna give in first, me or her?”
“You,” the other one said.
“You wanna bet?”
“She’s a woman, right? Give up, Sarge. You’re beat.”
Clumly got stiffly to his feet.
At his desk, he considered calling his wife. She’d be worried by now, though of course she understood a policeman couldn’t be expected home the same exact minute every night, like some grocery man. But the supper would be cold, and she’d be cross. Persecuted. He put his hand on the phone, squinting, looking up at the cobweb in the corner of the room, then changed his mind. How’d that cobweb get there? he wondered. He tried to think of something to knock it down with, but there was nothing, or nothing here in the room with him. He thought, fleetingly, of knocking it down with his belt.
Suppose Mayor Mullen had stopped by this afternoon. He did that sometimes. Miller might have talked to him—might have mentioned the business with Kozlowski, or Salvador might have mentioned his taking the thief over to Woodworths’. The Mayor would be puzzled, ask a question or two, glance in at Clumly’s littered desk.
“Got to clean this mess out,” he said aloud. “Matter of just settling down to it.” Panic flooded his chest and he reached for a cigar. As he was just about to strike the match he became aware of the murmur of voices from the cellblock. Bearded one holding forth again. Clumly studied his cigar and noticed the scratches on the side of his hand. Now that he noticed them he could feel them again. Not a pain, exactly; a presence. Musing on the scratches, thinking nothing whatever as far as he knew, he walked slowly over to the door that opened on the hallway leading to the cells. He glanced casually to his left and saw that no one in the front office was looking, then walked on, still casually, in the direction of the cellblock. A few feet from the door, where none of the prisoners but Boyle could see him, he stopped, leaned against the wall, and lighted the cigar. Boyle looked over the paper at him, then went back to his everlasting reading.
“It’s a question of point of view,” the bearded prisoner explained. He would be sitting with his big white hands on his knees, that burnt, hairy face looking up at the ceiling, infinitely sad. He sounded now incredibly like one of those lawyers summing up, tyrannical and grandiose. “It’s not pure madness to maintain that Society is rotten—rotten beyond all hope of redemption. Not at all! I don’t hold with that view, naturally, but it’s not pure madness, I give you my official word. Take a place like Watts, for instance. The evil of the ghetto is clear enough, yes?—and Los Angeles is maybe the richest city in the world. Average income of four hundred dollars a day, I read somewhere. They could do something—churches, Chamber of Commerce, businesses—but do they? Not till it explodes. And what does a city like Los Angeles do then? There are two possibilities. (Correct me if I’m wrong.) Go in with tommyguns, kill a few men, put the rioters down, place Watts under martial law. Or fiddle around—second alternative—let the fires die slowly, arrange for what’s called Serious Talks. What comes of all this? If martial law stops the riot, the result is a return to the old evil, no change of any significance. Why? Because responsible officials are responsible to voters, and mostly the people of places like Watts don’t vote. On the other hand, if you use Serious Talks, those Serious Talkers talk on and on, the way Serious Talkers always do, and the population keeps climbing in Watts and the responsible officials get busier and busier with the problem of houses that slide down hills, and pretty soon another explosion, more stores on fire. Burn, baby, burn, as the spade people say. If you happen to be a responsible citizen who feels a modicum of Christian concern for his unfortunate brothers, you try to mobilize public sentiment, you write letters, make phonecalls, talk to your fellow Elks. Result? Your wife divorces you on the grounds that you’re a nut, inattentive, also impotent. Which you are, it may be. Your boss discovers you’re not as efficient as a machine he can get. Your church slides into the persuasion that you’re out to block the Bishops’ Fund. In short, you are given good reasons for pulling your head in. Also, of course, you inevitably pick up some friends you could manage without: to wit, queers, neurotic ladies, Jewish psychiatrists, Muslim boys, and young Presbyterian assistant ministers. Those who hold this position (which I do not hold) would argue that the responsible citizen necessarily gives up. The situation is hopeless, and as a reasonable man the responsible citizen becomes indifferent. All the available options disgust him, from Ayn Rand to CORE to the Birch Society. He learns to punch the button and collect his check. In the exceptional case of the man who refuses to renounce his human dignity (as the newspapers call it), well, for him, gentlemen and friends, the outlook is by no means bright. He becomes, unwittingly, a Hell’s Angel of sorts, a rebellious lunatic defying the society he lives in. There’s a difference, of course. The Hell’s Angel holds up no model in oppositi
on to the society he hates. The Just Man defies society in the name of a dead cause. He is somewhat more confused than the Hell’s Angel (this position would hold), but he does not recognize his confusion. In other words, in nontechnical terminology, he’s crazy. Ah! As I say, I do not myself hold this opinion—or any other. I am the strawberry eater, the skylight smasher—in a word, King Solomon’s cod. Meanwhile, let it be mournfully added, Watts—for all the failures of high-minded Christian citizens of the master race, or machine guns, or Talk—Watts takes care of itself, from inside, for no known reason. The people become proud, it may be. Or they overflow with foolish, sentimental emotion, and they improve the damn place! Life has no shame.”
A long silence.
“This is called Capitalism,” he said. “A deadly sickness of taste.”
Abruptly, again almost before he knew what he was thinking, Clumly strode down the hall to get the cell keys.
CLUMLY: You’re an intelligent man. What was your purpose, writing love on a busy highway?
PRISONER: The world needs more love.—Don’t you think so, brother?
CLUMLY: Is that any way to get it?
PRISONER: When the spirit say paint …
CLUMLY: Stop talking gibberish. Listen, I’ll tell you something. I don’t ask these questions out of idle curiosity. I’m interested. I feel friendly toward you, generally speaking. Also, of course—
PRISONER: It’s your job.
CLUMLY: Correct. You spoke of the Hell’s Angels. Are you—