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Sword In The Darkness
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He was five minutes early and sat in the living room leafing idly through a copy of Newsweek while she carefully applied her lipstick. It had taken her almost a half-hour to make up; maybe she wasn't old (no maybe about it), but habits and fears were hard to reverse. She had a horror of making herself look garish, had been subconsciously afraid all afternoon that she would end up looking like Bette Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane - that she would see herself in a sudden pained wince of his eyes.
"Hell, this is the big night," John called in to her.
"It is?" She blotted the lipstick and looked at it anxiously; it was really too red. And yet anything pinker would be too young, perhaps make him think she was trying to be kittenish.
"Marcus Slade," Edgars said. "He speaks at South City Manual Trades tonight."
"I'd forgotten," she said, unhappily slipping her lipstick back into its holder. "Do you think he'll get a big crowd?" She ventured timidly through the door. She had worn the green dress with the low back - worn it almost defiantly. She had studied her neck and shoulders in the mirror. It looked good. Dammit, it looked good. The skin was smooth, unmarked. The skin of a girl, still.
He got up. "Yes, I think they'll turn them away at the doors. You look fine, Edie."
She felt the weight slip from her shoulders. "I look like what I am," she said dryly. "A lady French teacher on a hot night. But I'll take the compliment - I worked for it."
John grinned. He was wearing a light grey suit of some shiny fabric and a pale blue tie and he looked very fine indeed. She said so.
"Yah," he said. "Suit takes off ten pounds. But let's go."
He had parked his car in front of her building, and he drove through the heavy downtown traffic casually but well. The streets seemed oddly deserted, and the sun hung halfway over the horizon like a drop of blood.
"Red sun at night, sailor's delight," John said.
She nodded, but her thoughts were far off. Partly on Don and the evening in Gates Falls, Maine (the sun had been red that evening too, but it had been winter, a cold sun), and partly somewhere else, in a casual kind of limbo.
"John?"
"Yes."
"I think you're the nicest person I've met in Harding. And I've been here a long time."
"You're New England, aren't you?"
She was startled, then amused. "It still shows?"
"Only a little." They had skirted The Circle and were now approaching the docks; she could smell the salt, the fish odour, could see the dusty pigeons that flapped and wheeled against the darkening sky. "The way you go light on your r's. The way you drop your g's on some of your -ing words."
She smiled. "I was born in Scarborough, Maine. My mother was a schoolteacher and my father was a carpenter. They were quite a couple. Quite a couple." She looked down at her hands, plain, rather long-fingered, unringed. "I was the fifth of 13 children. Eight of them died before they were five. My only brother, John, died of peritonitis when he was 15. He kept a journal. I have it. It's remarkable. I think he might have been quite a writer one day."
"And your sisters?"
"One died of breast cancer two years ago. Cal and Lois are both married. Pennsylvania and California."
"Why did you never marry, Edie?"
"I almost did. His name was Donald Knowles. He - " she hesitated only fractionally - "he was a great deal like you, John. Very nice. Gentle."
"What happened?"
"He died."
"I'm sorry," John said. He put on his blinker and she looked up to see they were turning into the parking lot of Uncle Pete's. She blinked, a little surprised. She had all but forgotten where they were going.
"At times I am too," she said. "Sorry, that is. Sometimes not. I've had a reasonably good life. Not an exciting one, but good. I am satisfied." She told the lie with a calm ease.
"You're a remarkable woman, Edie." He stopped, and the car park boy came over.
"You've said that before," she said, suddenly grinning. It wasn't an easy grin. The memory of Don, unquiet in its grave for so long, seemed to be stirring with a disquieting life of its own. Things better left covered were shifting. It frightened her.
John gave the car park boy a dollar and they went inside. Uncle Pete's was all done in blue - blue tables, blue chairs, blue lights. An unobtrusive band dressed in midnight blue tuxedos was playing an unobtrusive tune which also sounded blue. No one was dancing.
The head waiter, also tricked out in blue, seated them, produced menus, then retired. "My God, the prices are unbelievable!" she said. "John, you can't -"
He put a finger across her lips.
"No more," he said. "This is my night, Edie. Give me what I want."
She smiled. "All right, Mr Edgars. You asked for it." John beckoned the waiter, and she proceeded to order a huge steak (Maine or no Maine, she had always detested seafood), shoestring potatoes, peas, a small salad, and ice-cream to follow. John ordered lobster.
"And to drink?"
Edie hesitated for a moment, at a loss, and John said promptly: "Martinis. Wine with the meal, which I leave to your discretion." The waiter nodded and melted away.
She was about to say something about martinis making her giddy when she stopped, hesitated, and said: "Isn't that Arnie Kalowski over there?"
"Where?"
"To your right."
He turned a little and looked. It was Arnie. He was with a stunning blonde girl who was wearing a low-cut blue minidress that had half the men in the room watching every twitch of her nyloned legs. And Arnie was looking at her with a kind of low key lust that she could feel from where she sat. It was as if she had put her face perhaps two feet from an open fireplace.
"It's him, all right," John said. "I wasn't sure at first. He's aged five years since his people died. The girl's a knockout, isn't she? I've seen her around school, I think."
"She's Kitty Longtin," Miss Rowsmith said. "Mr Coolidge's niece. She has a reputation."
"Oh?"
"Yes." She was about to say more but just then the waiter appeared with the drinks and she decided not to. She remembered Janet Cross, sitting beside her on the green bench, and how they had talked and looked at the bronzed people on the littered beach.
"He looks strung out," John said thoughtfully. "He wouldn't be taking drugs, would he?"
"Arnie?" The question surprised her, and she was upset to realise that she didn't know. "I don't think so. It's everything, I think. Everything that's happened to him. It's too bad."
They tried to pick up the threads of conversation, but something had gone out of it. She felt Arnie's presence behind them like a dull pressure on her back, and could see it in John's eyes, too - that baffled, frustrated look that comes when you had to face something indecipherable, off the tracks, wrong. Failure. Too bad. The words echoed in her mind, and she thought of the day Earl Neiman had called Arnie a hunky in class.
The food came, and they ate. The band played old standards, and not many people danced. The steak was excellent, but she only tasted it in an absent way. The dessert was slow in coming and nowhere near excellent.
After, John lit a cigarette and said, "Well, it was a bust, wasn't it?"
"It was fine, John Edgars, and you know it."
"It was a bust. I wanted us to have a good meal and a good time and Arnie Kalowski and his girl with a reputation spoiled it."
"Not your fault, John."
"It is," he said softly. "It is. He came to me, Edie. For help. He wanted somebody to get him off dead centre ... somebody to make him move again. In any direction. And that was a bust, too. He walked out just like he walked in."
"I doubt that," she said softly.
He put his hand over hers and she shivered a little. "I'm going to miss you, Edie. Very much."
She felt her eyes sting, and suddenly she was crying. She dabbled at her eyes with a napkin. "You shouldn't go, John. You're running away. Stay here and fight their lousy system. That's what young men are for. Fighting lousy systems."
He avoided her eyes. "I'm not all that young, Edie. Maybe that's one thing that Arnie taught me. I want a clean slate and a fresh start. Harding has gone sour in my mouth."
"That's what we were going to have," she said softly. "Don and I. A fresh start. A new place. We even talked about this place, although we talked about lots of others, too."
"And he died."
"He was murdered," she said. The band was playing Stardust.
* * *
And suddenly it came back to her, the thing that had been stirring, that awful Gothic thing that had been buried for years. And here it came at her, covered with the rot and slime of years, lurching through this amazingly blue restaurant like a horrifically absurd Frankenstein's monster. It came back to her, home to roost. It came rushing back through all the vacuum barriers of the intervening years (the dry, closed years) with an ease that terrified her - as if it had been waiting, crouched directly under the trapdoor of her conscious mind, alive and well, thank you. The blood, the smell of burning apple pies, the icicles hanging from the eaves beyond the kitchen windows, and the woman, the horrible, drooling woman crouched in the corner with Don's genitals wrapped in her apron.
"I'm going to be sick," she said. "Get me out."
They rose quickly and he guided her across the room (the orchestra was playing As Time Goes By - it made her want to cackle) and she was vaguely aware that they had passed Arnie's table, but neither Arnie nor the girl had looked up, lost in their own thoughts. She didn't throw up. The air of the parking lot was warmer than inside, but it was fresh. Even the lingering odour of fish seemed to make her feel better. It was, after all, here and now.
"Do you feel better?"
"Yes." She smiled a little shakily. "It happened a long time ago. Too long ago to throw up over."
"Can you talk about it?"
She looked up at him. "I don't know. I never have. I never did."
"Come on." He took her arm and led her back to the car. The car park boy came over (he was black, Edie saw, and she was reminded of Luke) and John gave him another dollar. "The lady isn't feeling well. We thought we'd just sit in the car for awhile."
The boy nodded and went away. Even his shadow looked blue, a dark blue cutout against the arc-lamped cement.
John helped her in, got in himself, and lit a cigarette. He said nothing. He simply smoked and said nothing. Edie tried to think of how he had felt inside her, that strange feeling of pressure and parting. She could not recapture it. She opened her mouth twice and nothing came out. The third time she said, "Perhaps we'd better go."
"I don't think so," he said, and his voice was as crisp and blue as the car park boy's shadow. It brought her mixed feelings of reassurance and fear. "Edie, I've wanted to do something for you ... apart from the other thing. We did that together, and that was good, but I want there to be more. For both of us. It's necessary. For you and I both. It's the last thing. A hard way to go, but a good way."
She began to protest, but he held up a hand. "We love each other, Edie. We do. It has to be this way."
Edie stared at him, all her feelings frozen.
"You loved Don and you love me. Maybe they're both mixed up. But I only love you. I want to see you whole before I go away. Tell me. Tell me."
She touched his hand and he gripped it. She uttered a very small, unhappy laugh. "My system finds the act of vomiting very distasteful, John. The last time I threw up was 12 years ago at my older sister's wedding anniversary. There was a plate of bad shrimp. And even then - "
"Make yourself," he said harshly. "Stick your finger down your throat, if you have to."
"Hold me, then. Hold me, John."
* * *
He put an arm around her and drew her against him. She pressed against his shoulder. She felt better. She put a hand to her forehead, nervously, and collected her thoughts.
Somewhere out on the lake a boat tooted, and that was a blue sound, too. John sat and smoked. He was very quiet.
"I was born in Scarborough," she said suddenly. "I went to Gorham Normal School, which was not far from there, and I graduated fifth in my class. I was a good student. I was dedicated to the idea of teaching. I wanted to teach. It wasn't a case of those who can't do something being up to teaching it. I was like a missionary.
"Most of my class - the men at least - went out of state. My mother wanted me to teach in Scarborough or Portland. I didn't want to do that, and I didn't want to go to New York where the money was good. I got a position out in the piney woods, a place called Gates Falls. I'd sent out a number of inquiries, and that was the second lowest-paying place. I picked it over the first lowest because the conditions sounded worse at Gates Falls. An idealist, do you see?
"I was hired - by mail and with hardly any questions asked. My mother wept and my father took me aside and said: Don't you get caught alone with boys bigger than yourself, Edie. Do you understand what I am talking about?
"I had two suitcases and a toilet box and a copy of The Ladies' Magazine to read on the train. I got onboard at the old Union Station in Portland - there's a shopping centre there now, I understand - and the train pulled out at 11.15am sharp. That was the last time I ever saw my father - he died of a stroke a month later. I can remember him so well ... even better than the rest of them, my mother and sisters. He was standing on the station platform in his dungarees, wearing a flannel shirt and suspenders. He had a walrus moustache and he was going bald. He and my mother and two of my sisters saw me off. They were still waving when the train went around the first bend. And when they were out of sight I sat up very straight with my toilet box behind my feet and my magazine in my lap. I didn't even cry. Do you see how idealistic I was?"
She drew a deep breath in the darkness and let it out, hoping he would say something, break the spell, somehow dam the memories that were boiling in on her, a river run over its banks.
"I was to board with a family named Knowles. Mister and Mrs Knowles met me at the Gates Fall station and we drove back to the house in their buggy. It was a 10-mile drive, and you could smell the sea. Sometimes you could hear it, when the woods thinned.
"They were lobstering people. There was John and his wife Cass, and the children - Donald and Julia. Donald worked in Brunswick, at a bank. He was college educated, and John was very proud of him. Cass didn't let on if she was proud or not. She was thin - scrawny, really - and there were pouches under her eyes. The little girl, Julia, was a change-of-life baby, seven years old. She was solemn as the Pope.
"Don didn't come home that first night - he had business in Portland. But Cass fixed a huge roast and ... and an apple pie for dessert. She made simply lovely apple pies. They won blue ribbons every Fourth at the town fair. We sat and ate and afterwards John had a cigar while Cass put the child to bed. And there I sat, watching the dark come in, listening to the sea, my toilet box safely stowed away in the bathroom, wanting my mother, wanting to be able to smell the special smell of the sachet she used, feeling lonesome and sad.
"Do you know the feeling?"
But John didn't speak. He had lighted another cigarette.
"I started the Monday following. I wrote my name on the blackboard in fine round letters - Miss Rowsmith. I wore a dark blue skirt and a white shirtwaist. I had put a comb in my hair.
"The rustic country school. The red Currier & Ives building peeking serenely through the elms. Gingham girls and happy little boys rolling hoops. Yes, yes, oh yes. Only this one was a yellow-gray, pitted and flaked with salt from the ocean. And there was an outhouse tacked on to the back of the building and it smelled of shit. Yes, that is the correct word. Shit. Not excrement. Much too juicy for such an academic word. Shit. It hung on the air until you hardly knew it was there. I used to sprinkle lime by the pound, but there was no drainage to speak of and the smell was always there. And the gingham girls and the bright-eyed boys turned out to be great hulking brutes and vapid sows, most of them. There was Alvah Campbell, who ran bootleg down to New Hampshire on the weekends, and there was Tom Guinn, who was supporting his mother on short lobsters. There was a boy named Joey Hall who was retarded - if you gave him a penny he would catch hopping things from under the shed stoop and eat them.
Six-five if he was an inch. He used to pee himself, too. And cry about it. He might've been 15 or he might've been 30. It was impossible to tell. There were six girls in the whole eight grades. One was Julia Knowles. She was in the first grade. Two of them were twin sisters from Gates Centre, cute and almost dear. They always dressed alike and held hands. One of them was a slut named Karen Genack. Fast? She was a streak. I caught her in the shed one recess with Alvah. She wasn't wearing any underwear. She was leaning up against the birch-stove lengths and she had his money in one of her hands. She had him in the other.
"But all this wasn't the first day. The first day was just enough to start getting the smell of shit and to find the old books with rat-turds stuck to the covers and to sit and hear the woodchuck running under the floor. I had 40 pupils and when I came home with Julia I nodded and smiled at Cass (she didn't even ask how things had gone) and then I went up to my room and cried. I decided to go home. I was homesick and disheartened and all the ideals in the world couldn't stand up higher than that smell. To the smell of shit and the vacant Joey Hall stared at me.
* * *
"I was going to tell them at supper, but I never did. Don came back late that afternoon, fresh back from Portland and a day late, and I fell in love. I fell all at once, and there was never any question about it. He looked something like you - I said that once, didn't I? - only not quite as tall. He had blue eyes and he was wearing a tweed suit with a vest. He came just while we were sitting down to the table. Cass had the Bible to read from and she was just opening it. Julia scrambled up and threw herself at him. He laughed - a big, roaring laugh - and grabbed her up and swung her until she squealed and her underpants showed.
"John grinned and told him to come on and get his supper, and when he came to the table his father introduced us. He looked right at me, directly at me. Later on he told me he fell in love just as quick, and I think perhaps he was telling the truth. We shook hands and he sat down. He grabbed a chop and was starting to tell about his trip when Cass said: I was going to read from the Book, Donald. Course, unless you mind. She looked sour and put out.
"Don just smiled and said she should read the prodigal son story. Cass said: Don't you be flip, and she read from Job. By the time she was done, the chops had stopped steaming. We were all quiet for a minute. Cass closed the Bible and looked around at us, almost like a queen. But she looked like a chicken, too - an old hen whose laying days are done but who still rules the roost. It sounds funny, saying she looked like a queen and a chicken at the same time, but she did and it wasn't - funny, I mean. I think I started being afraid of Cassandra Knowles right then.
"But John asked his son something about the chances of getting a railroad loan for town roads, and that broke it. Everybody ate and Don talked about loans and banking and what was new in the city. He was a wonderful talker, witty, but not a bit filled with his own importance. I don't think he had any idea what a fine conversationalist he was. After supper we went into the sitting room and Cass knitted and Mr Knowles read from a collection of stories by Arthur Conan Doyle. There was a little fire, and Julia sat between Don and I. I forgot all about going back, and I never thought seriously about it again.
"There was Don to think about, and Julia who was bright and perky enough when Cass wasn't around, and there was Peter van Nook. Peter was in the fifth grade. He was the son of factory people, and he came to school in the most horrible scarecrow pants and shirt. But his hair was always brushed and his fingernails were clean. He'd already read his way through most of H.G. Wells' science fiction novels and there was always one of those pulp magazines hidden in the back of his Spiral notebook - God knows where he got the money for them. Sometimes in the winter I'd catch him dreaming out the windows as if he could see way past the snow and the slush. He wrote beautiful papers about countries he made up in his mind. Sometimes he drew pictures to go with them.
"The rest was pretty bad. It was the smell of shit and the blank wall of stalled minds. The ideals couldn't get past those things, but I held on to the ideals some way - Don had something to do with that. So I kept them. Their horizons had shrunk a good deal, but I kept them. And they seemed to centre more and more around Don and that little boy with the pulp magazines. Peter. The other boys used to call him Nooky. I guess that word meant the same then that it does now. But he was strong enough, that was the fine thing. He wouldn't back off from them. He played ball and once he got hit by a pitch and his nose bled. I wanted him to go inside but he just sniffed it back and went on batting. He looked so little, waving the big old splintery bat we had, blood on his nose and the front of his shirt.
* * *
"Then I got word that my father was gone."
"I went home for the funeral and to mourn with my family, and it would have been easy to stay home, but I didn't. I brought back a copy of The Thousand and One Nights for Peter. He was entranced. He asked me to write my name in it. A few weeks later, he came up to me after school. He wanted me to help him think of a way to earn the money for a library card in town. I offered to give him the money and he wouldn't take it and I was glad. I set him to chopping kindling for the school stove, half an hour after school every night, 20 cents a week. By the end of the first week I had kindling enough for the rest of the winter and Peter was starting on stove-lengths.
"And it seemed I was staying on because I'd found somebody worth staying on for, but there was more than one. There was two. There was Don.
"When I came back after the funeral he began courting me. I didn't want to be courted; I wanted to grieve. There was a hole where my father had been. I kept seeing him on the Union Station platform, his arm around mother, in his overalls, in his walrus mustache. And I hadn't cried when I left home. It almost seemed as if his death was God's way of punishing me for not crying.
"Don didn't ask me to go riding until Thanksgiving. It snowed - just a powdering, like confectioner's sugar, and Cass laid out a tremendous spread, all of it with a sour face, like something in her stomach was bad and hurting her. She sometimes mumbled to herself in the kitchen when she must have thought she was alone, strange little half-prayers that made me uneasy. It was as if God walked with her, like He walked with Esau. Except that Cass's God wasn't Esau's. Sometimes she made faces. I don't think she had any idea she was doing it. As if there were ropes and pulleys inside her head, and her God was yanking on them every now and again, just to remind her. I tried to ignore it.
It was her affair. That's the way people are in New England - or maybe everywhere.
"When he asked me to go out riding in the snow I said I was too tired. He said: That's not it, you know that's not it. With no school how'd you get so tired? I said: My mind is tired, Don. My father died, don't you remember? He said: If you brood over it, it will just hurt the longer. I'll take you into Gates and buy you a sundae at Roth's. I said: I'd rather not, Don, thanks. I'm full anyway. He said: Please? And I said all right, almost as if I were doing it to be polite, but I wasn't, I wanted it to be just politeness because my father was dead and I hadn't even cried the last time I saw him alive, but it wasn't that way. I wanted to go. I wanted him to love me because I already loved him.
* * *
"So we went riding that first time, and I can remember looking back just as we left the dooryard and seeing Cass looking out of the kitchen window at us. And the ropes and pulleys were making her muscles work with the faces she didn't know she was making and I almost screamed because she looked like a gargoyle.
"There was a lot of snow that early winter. I was out of school almost as much as I was in it. The sky was the colour of lead and the smell of salt was always in the air, and the gulls would come right up to your feet for a scrap of bread or a piece of suet. Peter van Nook got his library card and asked me what he should get first. I recommended The Count of Monte Cristo. That same day I caught Alvah and Karen Genack in the shed. She screamed at me and tried to claw my face. I had to slap her. She slapped me back and ran out. She left her bloomers on the floor. Alvah stood there with his ... his penis still in ... a state of excitement. He grinned and said: She wanted too much anyway. He took a step toward me and I said: Kindly tuck yourself in, Alvah. And he looked down at himself and then looked at me and then took another step. I shut him in the woodshed and locked the door. He started pounding on it. He pounded and cursed and kicked, and I went on with my third grade geography lesson. My heart was going like a crazy clock. Fifteen minutes or so later I saw him tramping down over the hill, plowing through snow up to his knees. He must have let himself out through the shed window. He came back the next day looking embarrassed and mumbled a little apology at the floor. I accepted it. Karen Genack never came back.
"When the snow was hard enough on the roads, Don took me out in the sleigh, both of us all wrapped up in robes, and when it got near Christmas he put bells on the horse, which was named Jason, and it was so gay! It was all very gay and sweet, like a fine wine that makes your mind warm.
"On Christmas eve, when we were coming home from town, he kissed me for the first time - he was very proper, you see. Very sweet and proper. It was snowing and almost dark and everything was white and gray and violet. His nose was cold on my cheek but his lips were very warm. He said: I'm afraid I love you Edie. I said: Afraid? He laughed and said: No. No, not afraid. I said: I love you. Kiss me again. So he did and Jason found his way home by himself.
"When the travelling was passable, I went home for a week. It was the longest week of my life. Mother cried on the last day, but she didn't ask me to stay home. She wanted to, but she was very strong. When I got back, Don asked me to marry him. I said yes, and he almost squeezed the life out of me. We were in the entry and my bags were on the floor and we kissed each other until I saw stars. I said: Have you told your mother and father yet? He said: Not yet. Stay in the parlor this evening. We have to talk."
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