Clemmie (2 page)

But this was not a party. This was family, Chet and Alice had insisted. “Just come over for some drinks and dinner, Craig. The kids eat on the first shift. Then, after they’re out of the way, just the three of us.”

Now he realized he was slightly drunk. It was nearly midnight. Tomorrow was a working day. He knew he would feel grim in the morning. Yet he knew he should not blame Chet. His restlessness since Maura had left had
made it a little easier to take that next drink. When you were not having a very good time, you hoped one more drink would help. The evening had been a little awkward merely because the four of them had been together so often. The absence of Maura made a great gap and caused unexpected silences. Craig knew that during all the time Maura would be away, from this Wednesday, the tenth of July, until she arrived back in New York, six hundred miles away, on Friday, the sixth of September, the Burneys would have him over from time to time. Not too often, as this evening had not been entirely comfortable, yet not so seldom that his terminal report to Maura would indicate thoughtlessness.

He realized that Chet was telling a story that Craig had heard many times before. Alice was sitting on the floor in front of Chet’s chair. She had her cheek against the side of his knee and, as Chet talked and played with her cropped hair with his blunt fingers, she wore an expression that was at once smug and dreamy. She was a small lean woman with coarse dark-red hair, delicate pointed features, large gray eyes. She was not particularly intelligent, but she had a good sense of fun. She was a superb cook, and despite three children, she kept her house gleaming. Yet the clothes she selected for herself and the make-up she used were never quite right for her. This lack of style had absolutely no effect on the impression she made on most men, and the impression she so obviously made on her husband. This was a wife who, in spite of a boyish body, in spite of an absence of the mannerisms of the temptress, was obviously very capable and very eager. And with equivalent emphasis, those favors were available only to Chet Burney.

Chet was a big-chested blond man with a boyish face that made him look younger than thirty-nine, quite a bit younger. Craig, who knew that Chet and he were only three weeks apart in age, was sometimes faintly indignant about Chet’s air of youthfulness. Yet, of late, the blond hair was thinning more rapidly, and the paunch was becoming more than a hint. In another ten years the situation would be reversed.

Chet Burney was a lawyer, a junior partner in the firm of Tolle, Rufus, Kell and Burney. The firm made a speciality of corporation law and, on local problems that
were not of a serious nature, was quite often retained by the firm where Craig worked, the Quality Metal Products Division of the U.S. Automotive Corporation. Burney was a bluff and friendly man who liked to tell people that if it wasn’t for lawyers, the law would be a very easy thing to understand.

Burney played good golf and had a weakness for important-looking automobiles. Craig suspected that when Chet and Alice had bought this house in the River Woods section, he had taken on more than he should have. But the odds were good that Chet’s income would continue to improve. His political connections were good, and he was well-liked.

Chet was telling the story Craig had heard so many times. “Well, old Junior Thompson, the well-known wolf, had this little girl right here come to the house party on a football week end. We were playing Cornell that week end. This little Alice here was trying to look all grown up, but I found out she’d just turned seventeen and she was only a junior in high school, and she’d done some plain and fancy lying to get her people to let her come along. After I got a good look, I moved right in, and knowing how much of a chance she would have stood with a sharp operator like Thompson, I’ll bet you I wasn’t more than ten minutes too soon. Junior was sure sore. But I had me a date for that week end too. Big ole blonde girl from Smith. Name of Nancy. Nancy and Junior stayed sore for all of twelve minutes when we suggested we trade off, and you know …”

Craig stopped listening. It had happened a long time ago. He had heard it before. Once he had asked Maura on the way home why in the world Chet, who wasn’t usually boring, kept repeating that very ordinary yarn of how they met. Maura thought a moment and said, “He never tells it unless she’s so close he can touch her. Then he seems to be talking to her more than to anyone else. I think it’s a sort of love play with them. You can almost hear her purr.”

Craig watched her. She had a sleepy, flushed, almost humid look. The heavy fingers toyed with her hair. She arched her back in an almost imperceptible way, and Craig felt a sharp sudden thrust of envy and desire. Not specific desire for Alice. Nor was it desire for Maura. It
was not as specified. It was a desire for flesh, for togetherness, in which identity seemed of small importance.

When Chet was through and tried to give him another drink, Craig said he had to go. They told him he shouldn’t run off so early, but their protestations were more glib than sincere. They walked out to his car with him. The July night was sticky. A passenger liner moved slowly overhead at about four thousand, running lights blinking, curving towards the big airfield on the other side of Still River.

“When Maura gets back, Craig, you two ought to consider moving out here. The new school will be going up next year. No through traffic. Playgrounds. No city taxes. It’s great for dogs and cats and kids. And there’s a damn fine bunch out here.”

“It’ll be even handier when the new shopping section is finished,” Alice said.

“It’s a little out of my reach, kids,” Craig said.

“I think you ought to grab a good lot, though, before those go out of sight. Then you’ve got it, and when you get ready to change, you’ve got a place to build. You know, I can go from my garage to the Club in twelve minutes.”

“And you ought to take twenty. You drive too fast,” Alice said.

“We’ll talk about it when Maura comes back,” Craig said. “But, you know, she likes that old place. I guess because it’s got all the inconveniences she’s always been used to.”

“If you want to make your limey bride feel really at home, you ought to have the central heating ripped out,” Chet said, laughing.

“If I just leave it alone, it’ll rust away. Look, thanks for a wonderful dinner and a good evening. I’ve enjoyed it.”

“And we’ll ask you again real soon,” Alice promised. “I hate to think of you rattling around in that place. You should go to a hotel. It must be grim.”

“It’s pretty empty, but I’m beginning to adjust. She’s been gone, let me see, two weeks and four days.”

“Are you going to take a vacation?” Chet asked.

“Not much point in it while she’s gone. I’m taking a late one. In October. That’ll give her time to get settled
in, and we’ll get somebody to stay with Penny and Puss while we go away and get re-acquainted.”

“Those parts you read us were charming, Craig. Do let us know when you get another letter like that,” Alice said.

They said good night, and he thanked them again and drove off. He drove down the whispering smoothness of asphalt, around the carefully engineered curves, past the dark homes which made those severely architectured lines against the night sky, lines that spoke of the wonders inside—the stainless steel, the immaculate plastics, the deodorized flesh. As he turned down another grade, moving down toward the city, he saw out of the corner of his eye, for just an instant, a child’s tricycle on a high curve of lawn, outlined against the night-pink halo of the city. It stood contemplative under the sky, a small, lonely, whimsical figure, half insect, half Martian. He felt a quick touch at his heart and said to himself, you are drunk, my friend, and damn close to bathos. Your mind reaches out, seeking any possible excuse for a crying jag.

As he did not trust his reflexes, he drove quite slowly. The car was a three-year-old Ford station wagon, maroon with white trim. Lately there had been odd sounds in the motor, and he kept forgetting to have the car checked.

As he drove toward home he wondered why the evening had seemed so flat. It was more than the fact that Maura was missing. Tonight he had been unable to respond properly to the Burneys. He had felt a restless impatience with them, with conversation that seemed unnecessarily trivial and predictable—gossip about mutual friends, second-hand analyses of political trends. Such an evening would have been satisfying in the past, but on this night it had merely made him restless.

And when Chet had urged him to move to River Wood, he had felt a sudden wariness, like an animal that senses strangeness and thus avoids a trap. River Wood was a restricted, carefully zoned community full of people whose goals were the same as his. Yet he had the feeling that to move there would make all of his future as predictable as the conversation of this evening. He could look forward to making the final mortgage payment in 1968. By then Penny and Puss would have long since been married, and there would be a grandchild or two. By then, according to company policy at the time, he would be retiring
in either ten years or fifteen. And in another few years, he would die, and Maura, according to the actuaries, would live on several years longer. Craig Andrew Fitz, born the twenty-third of March, 1918, to die X years later in a little Florida retirement house.

He turned into the narrow driveway between his house and the house next door and put the car carefully in the garage that was too narrow for it, and not quite long enough. He walked slowly across the small fenced back yard, climbed the six steps to the back porch and stood there on the porch for a little time, listening to the night sounds of the city, reluctant to go in because he knew how empty the house would feel. The kitchen floor creaked as he walked across it. It was a narrow, ugly, two-and-a-half-story house in a decaying neighborhood, and it had been built in the early years of the century. The materials had been honest so the house was reasonably sound, but each room was small and square and unimaginative. They had improved it slightly by knocking out the wall between the living room and the dining room, but it was not a house you could be proud of.

He remembered 1946 when U. S. Automotive had reemployed him and sent him to the Quality Metal Products Division here in Stoddard. That was in January, and it had been a most bitter winter. Penny was born the following June, so Maura was four months’ pregnant when they had lived in that furnished room while house-hunting.

Maura had been convinced that this was the land of plenty, but her education was abrupt. They spent a great deal of time looking at new houses. New little crackerbox houses, triumphs of monotony, concrete cracking before occupancy, sleazy plywood warping, tiny yards a wilderness of frozen mud—and they were priced to give a minimal profit of one-hundred per cent to the developer. They were selling because there was nothing else to be had in that price range. Future slums were being created with energy, venality and optimism.

He remembered Maura’s shocked look after she did some mental computation. “Good Lord, Craig. Five thousand two hundred pounds for this—this absolute horror!”

The salesman had looked injured. “Lady, this is the best you’ll find around here for this money.”

Maura had drawn herself to full height. “I would far
prefer to live under a hedge like a rabbit. Let’s go, Craig.”

Even if a suitable apartment could be found, rents were exorbitant. The rent-control program in Stoddard had been administered with maximum advantage to the landlord. The fruitless searching finally reduced Maura to one of her rare periods of weeping. It made Craig feel apologetic about the whole country.

Finally they had found this house. It was a block and a half from a school, and not far from an area of stores. But the neighborhood was well advanced along the path of inevitable decay. Room to rent. Qualified Electropath Treatments. Music Lessons. There was an ancient and marginal textile mill four blocks away. There was a cellar barber shop on the corner. In warm weather old men sat in their underwear tops on the steps of shallow front porches, and tough teen-agers roamed in harsh packs. The school was aged, the playground paved with bricks and wire-fenced.

The price had been ninety-four-hundred dollars. The only pleasant thing about it had been a fairly deep front yard with one big elm tree. Craig had paid two thousand down and, after difficulties with the appraisal, had managed to get a G.I. loan on the balance. In 1949 the city had decided that Federal Street, all twenty-two blocks of it, should be widened to provide a cross-town highway to relieve traffic congestion in the cramped city. So the deep yard became shallow, and the tree was taken away, and Craig had received nine-hundred dollars which he applied to the mortgage principal. Maura had mourned the loss of the tree. Co-ordinated traffic lights had been installed. The widened road was smooth asphalt with vivid yellow traffic lanes. Day and night the traffic moved endlessly by, silent, orderly, with a sound like breathing.

Craig walked through the house to the front windows. Enough light came in so he could avoid dark shadows of the furniture. Down in the next street, an entire block of houses had been taken out. The skeletal steelwork of a new shopping section had already been erected. The block their house was in had recently been re-zoned to Commercial A. He’d heard that many of the people in the next block had gotten handsome prices for ancient, ugly houses such as this one.

And that, he thought, might be the answer. There was
less than two thousand left on the mortgage. Should the shopping center prosper—and the men behind it were hardly fools—the commercial value of this block might go up.

It would be good to get out of here. The kids in that school were rough. And sometimes you could have bad dreams about what might happen to a pretty, blonde, little girl caught out after dusk in such a neighborhood.

Yet the orderly ostentation of River Wood was not appealing. Not tonight at least. Not while he felt so restless. He turned on the light in the archaic kitchen and opened the refrigerator to get milk before he remembered there would be no milk. There were two cans of beer in the nearly empty refrigerator. He opened one and stood leaning against the sink and drank it. The refrigerator choked, stammered, and began to hum loudly. Turn the damn thing off when that next beer is gone.