The Winter of Our Discontent

by John Steinbeck

  "Onion sandwich--no, two onion sandwiches on rye bread."

  "I'll have to have one to stand you."

  "Don't you want one?"

  "Of course."

  She padded down the stairs and came back in a little while with sandwiches and a carton of milk and two glasses.

  It was a pretty hot onion. "Mary, muldoon," I began.

  "Wait till you swallow."

  "Did you mean that about not wanting to know about business?"

  "Why--yes."

  "Well, I have a lead. I want a thousand dollars."

  "Was it something Mr. Baker told you?"

  "In a way. But private too."

  "Well, you just write a check."

  "No, darling, I want you to get it in cash. And you might pass the word at the bank that you're getting new furniture or rugs or something."

  "But I'm not."

  "You will."

  "Is it a secret?"

  "You said you wanted it that way."

  "Yes--well--I do. Yes. It's better that way. This is a burny onion. Would Mr. Baker approve?"

  "He would if he did it."

  "When do you want it?"

  "Tomorrow."

  "I can't eat this onion. I guess I smell bad enough now, though."

  "You're my darling."

  "I can't get over Marullo."

  "How do you mean?"

  "Coming to the house. Bringing candy."

  "God works in a mysterious way."

  "Now don't be sacrilegious. Easter isn't over."

  "Yes 'tis. It's one-fifteen."

  "Good Lord! We better get to sleep."

  "Ah! There's the rub--Shakespeare."

  "You'd make a joke about anything."

  But it was no joke. The misery stayed, not thought about but aching away, and sometimes I would have to ask myself, Why do I ache? Men can get used to anything, but it takes time. Once long ago I took a job wheeling nitroglycerin in a dynamite plant. The pay was high because the stuff is tricky. At first I worried with every step I took, but in a week or so it was only a job. Why, I'd even got used to being a grocery clerk. There's something desirable about anything you're used to as opposed to something you're not.

  In the dark with the red spots swimming in my eyes, I inquired of myself concerning what they used to call matters of conscience, and I could find no wound. I asked whether, having set my course, I could change direction or even reverse the compass ninety degrees and I thought I could but I didn't want to.

  I had a new dimension, and I was fascinated with it. It was like discovering an unused set of muscles or having come true the child's dream that I could fly. Often I can replay events, scenes, conversations, and pick up from the repeat details which escaped me at first showing.

  Mary found strangeness in Marullo's coming to the house with candy eggs, and I trust Mary's sense of strangeness. I had thought of it as a thanks offering because I had not cheated him. But Mary's question made me reinspect for something I knew but had passed by. Marullo did not reward for things past; he bribed for things to come. He was not interested in me except in so far as I could be of use to him. I went back over his business instruction and the talk about Sicily. Somewhere he had lost his certainty. In some way he wanted something of me or needed something. There was a way to find out. If I should ask for something he would ordinarily refuse and get it from him, then I would know that he was off balance and deeply troubled. I put Marullo aside and went to Margie. Margie-- that gives you an idea of her age. "Margie, I'm always dreaming of you, Margie. I'd give the world to . . ."

  I replayed the Margie scenes against the swimming spots on the ceiling, trying to add no more than was really there. For a long time, maybe two years, there had been a Mrs. Young-Hunt who was a friend of my wife, part of the conversations I did not listen to. Then suddenly Margie Young-Hunt had emerged, and then Margie. She must have come to the store before Good Friday, but I could not remember it. On that day it was as though she announced herself. Before that it is possible that she didn't see me any more than I saw her. But from that time on she was present--a mover and a shaker. What did she want? Could it be pure mischief of a woman with too little to do? Or did she move to a plan? It did seem to me that she had announced herself to me--made me conscious of her and kept me aware of her. It seemed to me that she started the second fortune-telling in good faith, intending it to be the usual performance, polished and professional. Then something happened, something that tore it up. Mary had said nothing to cause her tension, nor had I. Had she really seen the vision of the snake? That would be the simplest explanation and probably the true one. Maybe she was truly intuitive, an intruder into the minds of others. The fact that she had caught me midway in a metamorphosis made me likely to believe this, but it could have been an accident. But what made her run to Montauk when she had not intended to go, join up with the drummer, spill the beans to Marullo? Somehow I didn't believe she spilled things she didn't intend to spill. Somewhere in the attic bookcases there was an account of the life of--was it Bering? No, Baranov, Alexander Baranov, the Russian governor somewhere near 1800. Maybe there would be some reference to Alaska as a prison for witches. It was too unlikely a story to be made up. I must look. I thought maybe I could creep up there now without waking Mary.

  Then I heard a creak of the old oak stair treads, then a second and a third, so I knew it was not a settling of the house from a change of temperature. It had to be Ellen walking in her sleep.

  Of course I love my daughter, but sometimes she frightens me for she seems to have been born clever, at once jealous and loving. She was always jealous of her brother and often I feel she is jealous of me. It seemed to me that her preoccupation with sex began very early. Maybe fathers always feel this. When she was a very little girl, her uninhibited interest in male genitalia was embarrassing. Then she went into the secrecy of change. Here was no angelic innocent girlhood of the magazines. The house boiled with nervousness, the walls vibrated with unease. I've read that in the Middle Ages pubescent girls were thought to be susceptible to witchcraft and I'm not sure it is not so. For a time we had what we called as a joke a poltergeist. Pictures fell from their hangings, dishes crashed to the floor. There were poundings in the attic and thumpings in the cellar. I don't know what caused it, but I was interested enough to keep my eye on Ellen, on her secret comings and goings. She was like a night cat. I satisfied myself that she was not responsible for the fallings and crashings and thumpings, but also I found they never happened when she was out of the house. She might be sitting staring into space when the poltergeist came, but she was always there.

  As a child I remember hearing that the old Hawley house was haunted long ago by the ghost of one of the puritan-pirate ancestors but, according to accounts, he was a decent ghost who walked and wandered and groaned as he should. The stairs creaked under his invisible weight and he rapped on the wall when a death was imminent, all proper and in good taste. The poltergeist was something quite different--malicious, malignant, and mischievous and vengeful. He never broke a valueless thing. Then he went away. I never really believed in him. He was a family joke, except that there he was and there were the broken pictures and shattered china.

  When he left, Ellen began walking in her sleep as she was now. I could hear her slow but certain footsteps going downstairs. And at the same time my Mary sighed deeply and murmured beside me. And a breeze sprang up and moved the shadows of leafing limbs on the ceiling.

  I slipped quietly from bed and slid into my bathrobe, for I, like everyone else, believed that a sleepwalker should not be startled awake.

  This sounds as though I didn't like my daughter, but I do. I love her, but I am somewhat in fear of her because I don't understand her.

  If you use our stairs near the edge on the side of the wall, they do not creak. I discovered that as a tomcatting boy coming home from the back fences of the town. I still use the knowledge if I do not want to disturb Mary. I used it now--moved silently down the s
taircase, trailing my fingers against the wall for guidance. A dim and lacy sublight penetrated from the street-lamp side and dissipated to semidarkness away from the window. But I could see Ellen. She seemed to have a glow, perhaps her white nightgown. Her face was shadowed but her arms and hands picked up light. She was standing at the glass-fronted cabinet where the worthless family treasures are kept, the carved scrimshaw, the sperm whales and boats complete with oars and irons and crews, harpooner in the bow--all carved from whales' bone--like teeth and the curved tusks of walrus; a small model of the Belle-Adair, shiny with varnish, her furled sails and cordage brown and dusty. There were bits of the chinoiserie the old captains brought from the Orient after they had stripped the China area of sperm whales, bits and pieces, ebony and ivory, laughing and serious gods, Buddhas, serene and dirty, carved flowers in rose quartz and soapstone and some jade--yes, some good jade--and thin cups, translucent and lovely. Some of the things might be valuable--like the small shapeless horses which yet had life--but if they were valuable it was an accident, must have been. How would those sailing, whale-killing men know good from bad--or would they? Or did they?

  The cabinet had always been the holy place of the parenti to me--Roman masks of the ancestors, or the lares and penates back to a stone fallen from the moon. We even had a mandrake root--a perfect little man, sprouted from the death-ejected sperm of a hanged man, and also we had a veritable mermaid, pretty ratty by now, but cleverly made by sewing the front end of a monkey and the after end of a fish together. It had shrunk with the years and the stitches showed, but its little teeth still showed in a ferocious smile.

  I presume that every family has a magic thing, a continuity thing that inflames and comforts and inspires from generation to generation. Ours was a--how shall I say?--a kind of mound of translucent stone, perhaps quartz or jadeite or even soapstone. It was circular, four inches in diameter and an inch and a half at its rounded peak. And carved on its surface was an endless interweaving shape that seemed to move and yet went no place. It was living but had no head or tail, nor beginning or end. The polished stone was not slick to the touch but slightly tacky like flesh, and it was always warm to the touch. You could see into it and yet not through it. I guess some old seaman of my blood had brought it back from China. It was magic--good to see, to touch, to rub against your cheek or to caress with your fingers. This strange and magic mound lived in the glass cabinet. As child and boy and man I was allowed to touch it, to handle it, but never to carry it away. And its color and convolutions and texture changed as my needs changed. Once I supposed it was a breast, to me as a boy it became yoni, inflamed and aching. Perhaps later it evolved to brain or even enigma, the headless, endless, moving thing--the question which is whole within itself, needing no answer to destroy it, no beginning or end to limit it.

  The glass case had a brass lock from colonial times and a square brass key, always in the lock.

  My sleeping daughter had the magic mound in her hands, caressing it with her fingers, petting it as though it were alive. She pressed it against her unformed breast, placed it on her cheek below her ear, nuzzled it like a suckling puppy, and she hummed a low song like a moan of pleasure and of longing. There was destruction in her. I had been afraid at first that she might want to crash it to bits or hide it away, but now I saw that it was mother, lover, child, in her hands.

  I wondered how I might awaken her without fright. But why are sleepwalkers awakened? Is it for fear that they may hurt themselves? I've never heard of injury in this state, except through awakening. Why should I interfere? This was no nightmare full of pain or fear but rather pleasure and association beyond waking understanding. What call had I to spoil it? I moved quietly back and sat down in my big chair to wait.

  The dim room seemed swarming with particles of brilliant light moving and whirling like clouds of gnats. I guess they were not really there but only prickles of weariness swimming in the fluid of my eyes, but they were very convincing. And it did seem true that a glow came from my daughter Ellen, not only from the white of her gown but from her skin as well. I could see her face and I should not have been able to in the darkened room. It seemed to me that it was not a little girl's face at all--nor was it old, but it was mature and complete and formed. Her lips closed firmly, which they did not normally do.

  After a time Ellen put the talisman firmly and precisely back in its place and she closed the glass-fronted case and twisted the brass key that kept it closed. Then she turned and walked past my chair and up the stairs. Two things I may have imagined-- one, that she did not walk like a child but like a fulfilled woman, and second, that as she went the luminescence drained away from her. These may be impressions, children of my mind, but a third thing is not. As she ascended the stairs, there was no creak of wood. She must have been walking near to the wall, where the treads do not complain.

  In a few moments I followed her and found her in her bed, asleep and properly covered. She breathed through her mouth and her face was a sleeping child's face.

  On compulsion I went down the stairs again and opened the glass case. I took the mound in my hands. It was warm from Ellen's body. As I had done in childhood, I traced the endless flowing form with my forefingertip and I took comfort in it. I felt close to Ellen because of it.

  I wonder, did the stone bring her somehow close to me--to the Hawleys?

  CHAPTER NINE

  On Monday perfidious spring dodged back toward winter with cold rain and raw gusty wind that shredded the tender leaves of too trusting trees. The bold and concupiscent bull sparrows on the lawns, intent on lechery, got blown about like rags, off course and off target, and they chattered wrathfully against the inconstant weather.

  I greeted Mr. Red Baker on his tour, his tail blown sideways like a battle flag. He was an old acquaintance, squinting his eyes against the rain. I said, "From now on you and I can be friends on the surface, but I feel it only right to tell you that our smiles conceal a savage contest, a conflict of interests." I could have said more but he was anxious to finish his chores and get under cover.

  The Morph was on time. He may have been waiting for me-- probably was. "Hell of a day," he said, and his oiled-silk raincoat flapped and billowed around his legs. "I hear you did a social turn with my boss."

  "I needed some advice. He gave me tea too."

  "He'll do that."

  "You know how advice is. You only want it if it agrees with what you wanted to do anyway."

  "Sounds like investment."

  "My Mary wants some new furniture. When a woman wants something she first dresses it up as a good investment."

  "Not only women, either," said Morph. "I do it myself."

  "Well, it's her money. She wants to shop around for bargains."

  At the corner of High Street we watched a tin sign tear loose from Rapp's Toy Store and go skidding and screeching along, sounding like a traffic accident.

  "Say, I heard your boss is going to make a trip home to Italy."

  "I don't know. Seems odd to me he never went before. Those families are awful close."

  "Got time for a cup of coffee?"

  "I ought to get swept out. Should be a busy morning after the holiday."

  "Oh, come on! Live big. The personal friend of Mr. Baker can afford time for a cup of coffee." He didn't say it meanly the way it looks in print. He could make anything sound innocent and well-intentioned.

  In all the years I had never gone into the Foremaster Grill for a cup of coffee in the morning and I was probably the only man in town who didn't. It was a custom, a habit, and a club. We climbed on stools at the counter and Miss Lynch, I went to school with her, slid coffee to us without spilling any in the saucer. A tiny bottle of cream leaned against the cup but she rolled two paper-wrapped cubes of sugar like dice so that Morph cried out, "Snake eyes."

  Miss Lynch--Miss Lynch. The "miss" was part of her name by now, and part of herself. I guess she will never be able to excise it. Her nose gets redder every year, but it's
sinus, not booze.

  "Morning, Ethan," she said. "You celebrating something?"

  "He dragged me in," I said, and then as an experiment in kindness, "Annie."

  Her head snapped around as though at a pistol shot and then, as the idea got through, she smiled and, do you know, she looked exactly as she had in the fifth grade, red nose and all.

  "It's good to see you, Ethan," she said and wiped her nose on a paper napkin.

  "When I heard it, I was surprised," Morph said. He picked at the paper on the sugar cube. His nails were polished. "You get an idea and then it's fixed and you think it's true. Gives you a turn when it's not."

  "I don't know what you're talking about."

  "I guess I don't either. Goddam these wrappers. Why can't they just put it loose in a bowl?"

  "Maybe because people might use more."

  "I guess so. I knew a guy once lived on sugar for a while. He'd go in the Automat. Ten cents for a cup of coffee, drink half, fill it up with sugar. At least he didn't starve to death."

  As usual, I wondered if that guy wasn't Morph--a strange one, tough, ageless man with a manicure. I think he was a fairly well-educated man, but only because of his processes, his technique of thinking. His erudition hid in a demi-world dialect, a language of the bright, hard, brassy illiterate. "Is that why you use one lump of sugar?" I asked.

  He grinned. "Everybody's got a theory," he said. "I don't care how beat a guy is, he'll have a theory why he's beat. A theory can lead you down the garden path 'cause you'll follow it in spite of road signs. I guess that's what fooled me about your boss."

  I hadn't had coffee away from home in a long time. It wasn't very good. It didn't taste like coffee at all but it was hot, and I spilled some on my shirt, so I know it was also brown.

  "I guess I don't know what you mean."

  "I been trying to track where I got the idea. I guess it's because he says he's been here forty years. Thirty-five years or thirty-seven years, okay, but not forty years."

  "I guess I'm not too bright."

  "That would make it 1920. You still don't dig it? Well, in a bank you've got to case people quick, check hustlers, you know. Pretty soon you get a built-in set of rules. You don't even think about it. It just clicks into place--and you can be wrong. Maybe he did come in 1920. I could be wrong."