11/22/63: A Novel (62 page)

“Well son, that’s fine,” Lee said. “You’re quite the little businessman, aren’t you?”

“Uh . . . yessir?”

“Tell me how much you make.”

“I don’t get but four cents on every dime, but that ain’t the big thing, sir. Mostly what I like is the prizes. They’re way better than the ones you get selling Cloverine
Salve. Nuts to that! I goan get me a .22! My dad said I could have it.”

“Son, do you know you’re being exploited?”

“Huh?”

“They take the dimes. You get pennies and the promise of a rifle.”

“Lee, he nice boy,” Marina said. “Be nice. Leave alone.”

Lee ignored her. “You need to know what’s in this book, son. Can you read what’s on the front?”

“Oh, yessir. It says
The Condition of the Working Class,
by Fried-rik . . . Ing-gulls?”

“
Engels
. It’s all about what happens to boys who think they’re going to wind up millionaires by selling stuff door-to-door.”

“I don’t want to be no millionaire,” the boy objected. “I just want a .22 so I can plink rats at the dump like my friend Hank.”

“You make pennies selling their newspapers; they make dollars selling your sweat, and the sweat of a million boys like you. The free market isn’t free. You need to educate yourself, son. I did, and I started when I was just your age.”

Lee gave the
Grit
newsboy a ten-minute lecture on the evils of capitalism, complete with choice quotes from Karl Marx. The boy listened patiently, then asked: “So you goan buy a sup-scription?”

“Son, have you listened to a single word I’ve said?”

“Yessir!”

“Then you should know that this system has stolen from me just as it’s stealing from you and your family.”

“You broke? Why didn’t you say so?”

“What I’ve been trying to do is explain to you
why
I’m broke.”

“Well, gol-lee! I could’ve tried three more houses, but now I have to go home because it’s almost my curfew!”

“Good luck,” Marina said.

The front door squalled open on its old hinges, then rattled shut (it was too tired to thump). There was a long silence. Then Lee said, in a flat voice: “You see. That’s what we’re up against.”

Not long after, the lamp went out.

My new phone stayed mostly silent.
Deke called once—one of those quick howya doin duty-calls—but that was all. I told myself I couldn’t expect more. School was back in, and the first few weeks were always harum-scarum. Deke was busy because Miz Ellie had unretired him. He told me that, after some grumbling, he had allowed her to put his name on the substitute list. Ellie wasn’t calling because she had five thousand things to do and probably five hundred little brushfires to put out.

I realized only after Deke hung up that he hadn’t mentioned Sadie . . . and two nights after Lee’s lecture to the newsboy, I decided I had to talk to her. I had to hear her voice, even if all she had to say was
Please don’t call me, George, it’s over.

As I reached for the phone, it rang. I picked it up and said—with complete certainty: “Hello, Sadie. Hello, honey.”

There was a moment of silence long enough for me to think I had been wrong after all, that someone was going to say
I’m not Sadie, I’m just some putz who dialed a wrong number.
Then she said: “How did you know it was me?”

I almost said
harmonics,
and she might have understood that. But
might
wasn’t good enough. This was an important call, and I didn’t want to screw it up.
Desperately
didn’t want to screw it up. Through most of what followed there were two of me on the phone, George who was speaking out loud and Jake on the inside, saying all the things George couldn’t. Maybe there are always two on each end of the conversation when good love hangs in the balance.

“Because I’ve been thinking about you all day,” I said.
(I’ve been thinking of you all summer.)

“How are you?”

“I’m fine.”
(I’m lonely.)
“How about you? How was your summer? Did you get it done?”
(Have you cut your legal ties to your weird husband?)

“Yes,” she said. “Done deal. Isn’t that one of the things
you say, George? Done deal?”

“I guess so. How’s school? How’s the library?”

“George? Are we going to talk like this, or are we going to talk?”

“All right.” I sat down on my lumpy secondhand couch. “Let’s talk. Are you okay?”

“Yes, but I’m unhappy. And I’m very confused.” She hesitated, then said: “I was working at Harrah’s, you probably know that. As a cocktail waitress. And I met somebody.”

“Oh?”
(Oh, shit.)

“Yes. A very nice man. Charming. A gentleman. Just shy of forty. His name is Roger Beaton. He’s an aide to the Republican senator from California, Tom Kuchel. He’s the minority whip in the Senate, you know. Kuchel, I mean, not Roger.” She laughed, but not the way you do when something’s funny.

“Should I be glad you met someone nice?”

“I don’t know, George . . .
are
you glad?”

“No.”
(I want to kill him.)

“Roger is handsome,” she said in a flat just-the-facts voice. “He’s pleasant. He went to Yale. He knows how to show a girl a good time. And he’s tall.”

The second me would no longer keep silent. “I want to kill him.”

That made her laugh, and the sound of it was a relief. “I’m not telling you this to hurt you, or make you feel bad.”

“Really? Then why
are
you telling me?”

“We went out three or four times. He kissed me . . . we made out a little . . . just necking, like kids. . . .”

(I not only want to kill him, I want to do it slowly.)

“But it wasn’t the same. Maybe it could be, in time; maybe not. He gave me his number in Washington, and told me to call him if I . . . how did he put it? ‘If you get tired of shelving books
and carrying a torch for the one that got away.’ I think that was the gist of it. He says he’s going places, and that he needs a good woman to go with him. He thought I might be that woman. Of course, men say stuff like that. I’m not as naïve as I once was. But sometimes they mean it.”

“Sadie . . .”

“Still, it wasn’t quite the same.” She sounded thoughtful, absent, and for the first time I wondered if something other than doubt about her personal life might be wrong with her. If she might be sick. “On the plus side, there was no broom in evidence. Of course, sometimes men hide the broom, don’t they? Johnny did. You did, too, George.”

“Sadie?”

“Yes?”

“Are
you
hiding a broom?”

There was a long moment of silence. Much longer than the one when I had answered the phone with her name, and much longer than I expected. At last she said, “I don’t know what you mean.”

“You don’t sound like yourself, that’s all.”

“I told you, I’m very confused. And I’m sad. Because you’re still not ready to tell me the truth, are you?”

“If I could, I would.”

“You know something interesting? You have good friends in Jodie—not just me—and none of them know where you live.”

“Sadie—”

“You say it’s Dallas, but you’re on the Elmhurst exchange, and Elmhurst is Fort Worth.”

I’d never thought of that. What else hadn’t I thought of?

“Sadie, all I can tell you is that what I’m doing is very impor—”

“Oh, I’m sure it is. And what Senator Kuchel’s doing is very important, too. Roger was at pains to tell me that, and to tell me that if I . . . I joined him in Washington, I would be more or less sitting at the feet of greatnesss . . . or in the doorway to history . . . or something like that. Power excites him. It was one of the few things it was hard to like
about him. What I thought—what I still think—is, who am I to sit at the feet of greatness? I’m just a divorced librarian.”

“Who am I to stand in the doorway to history?” I said.

“What? What did you say, George?”

“Nothing, hon.”

“Maybe you better not call me that.”

“Sorry.”
(I’m not.)
“What exactly are we talking about?”

“You and me and whether or not that still makes an
us.
It would help if you could tell me why you’re in Texas. Because I
know
you didn’t come to write a book or teach school.”

“Telling you could be dangerous.”

“We’re
all
in danger,” she said. “Johnny’s right about that. Will I tell you something Roger told me?”

“All right.”
(Where did he tell you, Sadie? And were the two of you vertical or horizontal when the conversation took place?)

“He’d had a drink or two, and he got gossipy. We were in his hotel room, but don’t worry—I kept my feet on the floor and all my clothes on.”

“I wasn’t worrying.”

“If you weren’t, I’m disappointed in you.”

“All right, I was worried. What did he say?”

“He said there’s a rumor that there’s going to be some sort of major deal in the Caribbean this fall or winter. A flashpoint, he called it. I’m assuming he meant Cuba. He said, ‘That idiot JFK is going to put us all in the soup just to show he’s got balls.’”

I remembered all the end-of-the-world crap her former husband had poured into her ears.
Anyone who reads the paper can see it coming,
he’d told her.
We’ll die with sores all over our bodies, and coughing up our lungs.
Stuff like that leaves an impression, especially when spoken in tones of dry scientific certainty. Leaves an impression? A scar, more like it.

“Sadie, that’s crap.”

“Oh?” She sounded nettled. “I suppose you have the inside scoop and Senator Kuchel doesn’t?”

“Let’s say I do.”

“Let’s not. I’ll wait for you to come clean
a little longer, but not much. Maybe just because you’re a good dancer.”

“Then let’s go dancing!” I said a little wildly.

“Goodnight, George.”

And before I could say anything else, she hung up.

I started to call her back, but when the operator said “Number, please?” sanity reasserted itself. I put the phone back in its cradle. She had said what she needed to say. Trying to get her to say more would only make things worse.

I tried to tell myself that her call had been nothing but a stratagem to get me off the dime, a
speak for yourself, John Alden
kind of thing. It wouldn’t work because that wasn’t Sadie. It had seemed more like a cry for help.

I picked up the phone again, and this time when the operator asked for a number, I gave her one. The phone rang twice on the other end, and then Ellen Dockerty said, “Yes? Who is it, please?”

“Hi, Miz Ellie. It’s me. George.”

Maybe that moment-of-silence thing was catching. I waited. Then she said, “Hello, George. I’ve been neglecting you, haven’t I? It’s just that I’ve been awfully—”

“Busy, sure. I know what the first week or two’s like, Ellie. I called because Sadie just called me.”

“Oh?” She sounded very cautious.

“If you told her my number was on a Fort Worth exchange instead of Dallas, it’s okay.”

“I wasn’t gossiping. I hope you understand that. I thought she had a right to know. I care for Sadie. Of course I care for you, too, George . . . but you’re gone. She’s not.”

I
did
understand, although it hurt. The feeling of being in a space capsule bound for the outer depths recurred. “I’m fine with that, Ellie, and it really
wasn’t much of a fib. I expect to be moving to Dallas soon.”

No response, and what could she say?
Perhaps you are, but we both know you’re a bit of a liar?

“I didn’t like the way she sounded. Does she seem all right to you?”

“I’m not sure I want to answer that question. If I said no, you might come roaring down to see her, and she doesn’t want to see you. Not as things stand.”

Actually she
had
answered my question. “Was she okay when she came back?”

“She was fine. Glad to see us all.”

“But now she sounds distracted and says she feels sad.”

“Is that so surprising?” Miz Ellie spoke with asperity. “There are lots of memories here for Sadie, many of them connected to a man she still has feelings for. A nice man and a lovely teacher, but one who arrived flying false colors.”

That one
really
hurt.

“It seemed like something else. She spoke about some sort of coming crisis that she heard about from—” From the Yalie who was sitting in the doorway of history? “From someone she met in Nevada. Her husband filled her head with a lot of nonsense—”

“Her head? Her pretty little head?” Not just asperity now; outright anger. It made me feel small and mean. “George, I have a stack of folders a mile high in front of me, and I need to get to them. You cannot psychoanalyze Sadie Dunhill at long distance, and I cannot help you with your love life. The only thing I can do is to advise you to come clean if you care for her. Sooner rather than later.”

“You haven’t seen her husband around, I suppose?”

“
No!
Goodnight, George!”

For the second time that night, a woman I cared about hung up on me. That was a new personal record.

I went into the bedroom and began to undress.
Fine
when she arrived.
Glad
to be back with all her Jodie friends. Not so fine now. Because she was torn between the
handsome, on-the-fast-track-to-success new guy and the tall dark stranger with the invisible past? That would probably be the case in a romance novel, but if it was the case here, why hadn’t she been down at the mouth when she came back?

An unpleasant thought occurred to me: maybe she was drinking. A lot. Secretly. Wasn’t it possible? My wife had been a secret heavy drinker for years—before I married her, in fact—and the past harmonizes with itself. It would be easy to dismiss that, to say that Miz Ellie would have spotted the signs, but drunks can be clever. Sometimes it’s years before people start to get wise. If Sadie was showing up for work on time, Ellie might not notice that she was doing so with bloodshot eyes and mints on her breath.

The idea was probably ridiculous. All my suppositions were suspect, each one colored by how much I still cared for Sadie.