“I do not know what you are talking about.”
“Why did you tell my wife you had the key?”
“I did not tell your wife.”
“Then who did you tell?”
“I did not tell anyone.”
She worked her shoulders and looked down at the tip of her slipper. Like most incurable fibbers, she had an extravagant regard for the truth, which she expressed by sending up signals meant to indicate that she was lying. He saw then that he could not get the truth out of her, that he could not shake it out of her with all the strength in his arms, and that her confession, if he had it, would have done him no good.
“Get me something to drink,” he said.
“I think you had better go away and come back later, when you are feeling better,” she said.
“I’m tired,” he said. “I’m tired. Oh, God, I’m tired. I haven’t sat down all day.”
He went into the living room and poured himself a whiskey. He saw his hands, blackened by the trains and the banisters, the doorknobs and the papers, of a long day, and in the mirror he saw that his hair was soaked with rain. He went out of the living room and through the library to the downstairs bathroom. She made a little noise, scarcely a cry. When he opened the bathroom door, he found himself face to face with an absolutely naked stranger.
He shut the door, and then there was that nearly metronomic stillness that precedes a howling confrontation. It was she who broke the silence. “I do not know who he is, and I have been trying to make him go away…. I know what you are thinking, and I do not care. It is my house, after all, and I did not invite you into it, and I do not have to explain everything that goes on to you.”
“Get away from me,” he said. “Get away from me or I’ll break your neck.”
HE DROVE HOME through the rain. When he let himself in, he noticed the noise and the smell of cooking from the kitchen. He supposed that these signs and odors must have been one of the first signs of life on the planet, and might be one of the last. The evening paper was in the living room, and, giving it a shake, he shouted, “Throw a little nuclear hardware at them! Show them who’s boss!” And then, falling into a chair, he asked softly, “Dear Jesus, when will it ever end?”
“I’ve been waiting for you to say that,” said Mrs. Pastern quietly, coming in from the pantry. “I’ve been waiting nearly three months now to hear just that. I first began to worry when I saw that you’d sold your cuff links and your studs. I wondered what was the matter then. Then, when you signed the contract for the shelter without a penny to pay for it, I began to see your plan. You want the world to end, don’t you? Don’t you, Charlie, don’t you? I’ve known it all along, but I couldn’t admit it to myself, it seemed so ruthless—but then one learns something new every day.” She walked past him into the hallway and started up the stairs. “There’s a hamburger in the frying pan,” she said, “and some potatoes in the oven. If you want a green vegetable, you can heat up the leftover broccoli. I’m going to telephone the children.”
WE TRAVEL with such velocity these days that the most we can do is to remember a few place names. The freight of metaphysical speculation will have to catch up with us by slow train, if it catches up with us at all. The rest of the story was recounted by my mother, whose letter caught up with me in Kitzbuhel, where I sometimes stay. “There have been so many changes in the last six weeks,” she wrote, “that I hardly know where to begin. First, the Pasterns are gone and I mean gone. He’s in the county jail serving a two-year sentence for grand larceny. Sally’s left college and is working at Macy’s, and the boy’s still looking for a job, I hear. He’s living with his mother somewhere in the Bronx. Someone said they were on home relief. It seems that Charlie ran through all of that money his mother left him about a year ago and they were just living on credit. The bank took everything and they moved to a motel in Tansford. Then they moved from motel to motel, traveling in a rented car and never paying their bills. The motel and the car-rental people were the first ones to catch up with them. Some nice people named Willoughby bought the house from the bank. And the Flannagans have divorced. Remember her? She used to walk around her garden with a silk parasol. He didn’t have to give her a settlement or anything and someone saw her on Central Park West in a thin coat on a cold night. But she did come back. It was very strange. She came back last Thursday. It had just begun to snow. It was a little while after lunch. What an old fool your mother is but as old as I am I never cease to thrill at the miracle of a snowstorm. I had a lot of work to do but I decided to let it go and stand by the window awhile and watch it snow. The sky was very dark. It was a fine, dry snow and covered everything quickly like a spread of light. Then I saw Mrs. Flannagan walking up the street. She must have come out on the two-thirty-three and walked up from the station. I don’t suppose she can have much money if she can’t afford a cab, do you? She was not very warmly dressed and she had on high heels and no rubbers. Well, she walked up the street and she walked right across the Pasterns’ lawn, I meant what used to be the Pasterns’ lawn, to their bomb shelter and just stood there looking at it. I don’t know what in the world she was thinking of but the shelter looks a little like a tomb, you know, and she looked like a mourner standing there with the snow falling on her head and shoulders and it made me sad to think she hardly knew the Pasterns. Then Mrs. Willoughby telephoned me and said there was this strange woman standing in front of her bomb shelter and did I know who it was and I said that I did, that it was Mrs. Flannagan who used to live up on the hill, and then she asked what I thought she should do and I said the only thing to do I guessed was to send her away. So then Mrs. Willoughby sent her maid down and I saw the maid telling Mrs. Flannagan to go away and then in a little while Mrs. Flannagan walked back through the snow to the station.”
A Vision of the World
THIS IS BEING WRITTEN in another seaside cottage on another coast. Gin and whiskey have bitten rings in the table where I sit. The light is dim. On the wall there is a colored lithograph of a kitten wearing a flowered hat, a silk dress, and white gloves. The air is musty, but I think it is a pleasant smell—heartening and carnal, like bilge water or the land wind. The tide is high, and the sea below the bluff slams its bulkheads, its doors, and shakes its chains with such power that it makes the lamp on my table jump. I am here alone to rest up from a chain of events that began one Saturday afternoon when I was spading up my garden. A foot or two below the surface I found a small round can that might have contained shoe polish. I pried the can open with a knife. Inside I found a piece of oilcloth, and within this a note on lined paper. It read, “I, Nils Jugstrum, promise myself that if I am not a member of the Gory Brook Country Club by the time I am twenty-five years old I will hang myself.” I knew that twenty years ago the neighborhood where I live had been farmland, and I guessed that some farmer’s boy, gazing off to the green fairways of Gory Brook, had made his vow and buried it in the ground. I was moved, as I always am, by these broken lines of communication in which we express our most acute feelings. The note seemed, like some impulse of romantic love, to let me deeper into the afternoon.
The sky was blue. It seemed like music. I had just cut the grass, and the smell of it was in the air. This reminded me of those overtures and promises of love we know when we are young. At the end of a foot race you throw yourself onto the grass by the cinder track, gasping for breath, and the ardor with which you embrace the schoolhouse lawn is a promise you will follow all the days of your life. Thinking then of peaceable things, I noticed that the black ants had conquered the red ants and were taking the corpses off the field. A robin flew by, pursued by two jays. The cat was in the currant hedge, scouting a sparrow. A pair of orioles passed, pecking each other, and then I saw, a foot or so from where I stood, a copperhead working itself out of the last length of its dark winter skin. What I experienced was not fright or dread; it was shock at my unpreparedness for this branch of death. Here was lethal venom, as much a part of the earth as the running water in the brook, but I seemed to have no space for it in my considerations. I went back to the house to get the shotgun, but I had the misfortune then to meet up with the older of my two dogs, a gun-shy bitch. At the sight of the gun she began to bark and whimper, torn unmercifully by her instincts and anxieties. Her barking brought the second dog, a natural hunter, bounding down the stairs, ready to retrieve a rabbit or a bird, and, followed by two dogs, one barking in joy and the other in horror, I returned to the garden in time to see the viper disappear into a stone wall.