Clarkton Read online

  “Francis isn’t a red,” Bernstien said. “By no means. He’s a good liberal and he feels strongly about a lot of things.”

  Lowell waited only long enough, and then signed his check and left. When he reached the street, he was trembling with fury, something that had not happened to him in a long, long time.

  5. By train time, by the time he had settled himself in the chair car with a book, the papers, an extra pack of cigarettes and a present for Lois—all of it and himself as well blending into the perspective of the long, somewhat tedious ride ahead of him, his anger had passed, and he was ready to tell himself that unpleasant people existed everywhere and could be easily met; but afterward, when he came to think about it—as he surely would—he would realize that these two were no more unpleasant than those he knew generally, and he would ask himself, as he had done before, whether or not he was developing a distaste for all people in his circle of acquaintance. That point came while the train was still clattering over the elevated structure that took it through Harlem. He watched the buildings with the empty curiosity of the thousands who ride past them daily, and he asked himself the question, answering it with the more or less objective realization that Berństien seemed a pleasant enough, harmless enough man, and Simpson was the kind the years obviously leave in bereavement, obtaining nothing from nothing and always surrounded by people like George Clark Lowell, surrounded by them but coming no closer to them than envy. So if it had not been these two, but two others instead, he still would have reacted in much the same way; and he fell into the fleeting consolation that if the boy had lived, he would have felt different about this sort of thing.

  But he didn’t want to think of the boy; ever since Elliott Abbott had remarked that thinking about that could become worse than a drug, in reference to Lois more than to himself, he attempted to control his thoughts carefully. Lois would be pleased, he thought, with his present, which was a snakelike choker of flexible gold, very simple and not too expensive. He would give it to her in the car, and she would wear it at dinner that night and probably not again for at least six months; but still she would be pleased with it.

  The chair car was almost empty, half a dozen besides himself—circumstances of railway travel had changed so rapidly since the war ended! After he had looked around once or twice and met the peculiarly empty stare that Americans reserve for railway cars and public elevators, he lost interest, just as he had lost interest in the tenement houses alongside the track. He opened the book he had bought, the Modern Library edition of the short stories of Ernest Hèmingway, and ruffled through it, trying to recall the name of a story he had read once, a long time back, of a couple who went to hunt lions in Africa, and how the wife, a thoroughgoing bitch, had murdered her own husband in a peculiarly horrible way; just what way, he couldn’t recall, but he did recall a line to the effect of American men remaining adolescent until suddenly they were plunged into middle age. He didn’t find the story he was looking for, but that line remained in his head, and when he started to read a story his thoughts were elsewhere, and three pages of words marched by without any meaning whatsoever.

  Instead, he remembered the last time he had seen his son, and how completely pleasant things were between them. After the leave at home, they flew to New York together, and he said to the boy:

  “If you have a date with a girl or if you are going to make a date with a girl or if you want to, or if you want to call some: one up, or if you want to walk around Central Park until you see one you like, then just say so, and I’ll find my way back——”

  No, the boy was genuinely glad to be with him. There was no mistaking it then. They were of a height and of a build, and they looked more like older brother and younger brother than like father and son. So they left the airport building together, walked up Fifth Avenue in the warm summer afternoon, and spent two lazy hours at the Zoo before lunch. And all the time, Lowell was so proud to be next to the handsome youngster in uniform that he glowed, as if he himself were in love and out with his girl in the sunshine.

  That afternoon, his pride was frankly possessive, and he indulged it. When people turned to look again at his son, Clark, he found the corners of his lips twitching. At lunch, he noticed a girl across the restaurant from them staring boldly, and when Clark looked up at him, their eyes met with knowing guilt.

  But now that he had come to think of that afternoon, he sank into it, like a frightened and pursued man who takes thoughtless refuge in a bog and then finds himself entrapped there. The conductor helped him to break out; and after his ticket was punched, he asked where the club car was.

  “Three ahead,” the conductor said.

  He clung to the conductor. “I don’t remember trains like this a year ago.”

  “Travel’s light today,” the conductor agreed. “You’ll see it pick up with the holidays.”

  Then Lowell was able to leave. He walked ahead to the club car, found an empty chair, and ordered a scotch and soda, reflecting that these cars, at least, were a permanent factor in the life he knew and the society he inhabited. They never changed; the faces in them were always the same. He forced himself to look for security in the vacuous middle-aged countenances of traveling men, minor executives, lawyers, and commission men, gray sharkskin and brown worsted, women badly painted or not painted. He drew comfort from them, and when his drink came he was able to open a copy of Life bound in the black jacket of New York, New Haven & Hartford, look at the pictures and sip at his drink, as normally as anyone else in the car.

  6. Lois was waitng for him with the car at Northampton, and Lowell was genuinely pleased to see her, even eager for the forty-five-mile ride ahead of them. His first glimpse of his wife, standing beside the car, was reassuring; she was only two years younger than he, but she had kept her figure; it was the flesh that had held, not brassieres and girdles; and the sight of her—always the first sight, even if, as this time, he had seen her only a day and a half before—was youthful, surprisingly so. She was a long-limbed woman, with gray eyes, light-brown hair, and a very good complexion. The unusual width of her face, the long, straight line of her brows was a little disturbing at first; she was not pretty in any formal sense, and sometimes she appeared quite plain, but men looked at her again and again—and when the calm, almost bovine face lit up, became animated, she was a charming-woman in the fullest way. It was that intermittently regal quality that Lowell recalled from the first time he had ever seen-her, and it was the same quality which satisfied so urgent a need in him now.

  They were on their way before either of them spoke more than a word or two. She liked to drive, drove fast without speeding, and was by the tacit admission of both of them a better driver than he. “Fern took the convertible,” she said, in the way of explaining the big four-door Buick, but he was glad for it, the size and warmth of it. “I thought it would snow,” she said. “It kept feeling like snow. Did it snow in New York?”

  “No … no,” he said, thinking of the gift immediately and remarking that he had bought something for her. “Do you want to see it here or at home?”

  “Here, of course.” And, laying a restraining hand on his arm, added, “Wait, I’ll guess.”

  “You wouldn’t, I don’t think. I just saw it and I bought it. I saw it and I thought that you would like it.”

  “You have it in your pocket, so it’s fairly small. It’s not a book. Why did you buy Hemingway’s stories to read, when you don’t like them so?”

  He took out the choker and laid it across her knee. With swift, regular glances, she saw it and estimated it, and did not, as some other woman might, protest at either the gift or the price. “Put it on my neck,” she said, and he did that, being careful not to throw her off her stride in the driving.

  “It’s very nice,” she said. “Thank you. Was the trip a success?”

  “If you call those things a success. I saw the man I wanted to see, and I spoke to him.”

  Glancing sidewise, she saw his head bent, the flare of
a match, and the quality of him came home, the thought that she was fortunate to be in love at her age. Dusk was falling-over the scrubby New England landscape. She flicked on her headlights, swallowed, and said deliberately:

  “I don’t like the word, George. It’s a nasty, dirty word—and it’s what people call us and say about us; but were those men you went to see in town strikebreakers?”

  “Why?”

  “Why am I asking you, George? Or why am I thinking that way?”

  “I just wondered—”

  “I think of things,” she said impatiently. “It wasn’t Elliott, George. Ever since this thing started, you let it get into you. It’s not for us. It’s not our kind of thing.”

  “I suppose it’s not my kind of thing.” He made lines with a finger on the windshield. “My father’s kind of thing—is that what you mean? But not mine.”

  “George!”

  “Not strikebreakers,” he said, a note of weariness creeping into his voice. “Where do you get those things, Lois? I suppose it happened once, but it doesn’t happen that way now. I felt out of my depth, just as you say. We’re not Morgans or Du Ponts or Tom Girdlers, and I don’t particularly care to study any of them. I was out of my depth, that’s all, and I talked to Tom Wilson at the plant about it, and he thought I ought to see these people, if only because of the property—in the way of taking some adequate steps in advance and preventing trouble later.”

  “But what are they, these people you saw?”

  It oppressed him that he didn’t really know, that he had to make shift for an answer. “Industrial consultants, which, I suppose, could cover anything. I suppose it does cover anything. These people specialize in labor problems. They understand the question a strike poses in terms of protection, protecting the strikers as well as the plant. The two go together, you know. I wouldn’t call them strikebreakers, Lois. They’re sending up two men—”

  “Only two men?”

  “That’s all. Not an army.” He turned to her, angry for the moment, realizing that he had wanted all day to be respectably angry at someone. “What am I becoming to you? You know how I feel about this damned plant! You know how I’ve always felt about it!”

  “I know, George.”

  “Whatever my father did, that was another time, another age. He wasn’t the only one. When they built this country, they didn’t do it delicately.”

  “I know, George,” she said. “I’m sorry I raised it at all.”

  He lit another cigarette and retreated into silence. He could be childish enough at a moment like that to tell himself that he would not speak until she spoke first, and it only rubbed his irritation to realize that she knew. It was quite dark now; the rubble of foothills, stone walls, and sparse fields blended into the Massachusetts evening, and above the hard beam of car lights there showed one plaintive band of pink that the setting sun had left. In regular succession, they drove through the small towns, beads on a concrete necklace, following the winding road up into the foothills, almost home before Lois said:

  “George, did Clark have a girl?”

  He had dozed a little; he came awake with his hurt gone and tried to think in this new direction.

  “A girl? I suppose so—I suppose a good many.”

  “I mean—was there a special girl? Was there someone we didn’t know about?” They were coming to the cutoff, where she could go straight ahead, into the town, past the plant, or turn right and go directly out to their house. “You don’t mind if I go straight home?”

  “I wish you would,” he said. “What about tonight?”

  “I asked Elliott and Ruth for dinner.”

  “Will Fern be there?”

  “She said she would. I meant a girl in town, George.”

  “I don’t know. What difference could it possibly make?”

  “No great difference, I guess, but it would mean something to me. I would want to know about it. I would want to know who she was and what she was like. Wouldn’t you want to know?”

  “Not particularly,” Lowell said.

  “Mrs. Delara was in to sew on a dress for Fern, and she began to talk about an Italian girl, here in town, who was going around with Clark. It seems that a good many of the people in town knew about it, and I thought I would want to see the girl and talk to her.…”

  She kept glancing sidewise at him, and Lowell could see that she was uncertain of her ground, indulging sentiment, indulging memory, picking in the past for something where actually there was nothing.

  “Why not, if you want to,” he said.

  “I asked Mrs. Delara to ask her to come to the house tomorrow for tea.”

  They turned into the gates of the house then, the car lights picking out the bluestone drive, the shrubbery of the grounds, and then one wing of the big, rambling colonial house where Lowells had lived for well over half a century.

  7.Fern, who had come home an hour or so before, greeted Lowell as he came into the house, threw her arms around him and kissed him. Actually, it was four days since he had seen her; sometimes, their paths just didn’t happen to cross, and this was one of those times, as Lowell knew from the careful lack of reference his wife made to his daughter. Ever since the spring before, when Lowell was advised by the people who conducted Bennington College that it would be better for all concerned if his daughter were to go elsewhere, advised most diplomatically yet firmly, he had refused to face the reality of the slim, pretty nineteen-year-old girl. She was necessary to him, and he let it pause there; since Clark died, she was more than ever necessary to him—Lois knew that as well as he did. If there was a part of her that had an objective reality, he could brush it aside with the personal observation that he could vouch only for what he saw; and he saw what he wanted to see. Fern was medium size, slim, with a very good bust, a shock of very dark hair that she cut short, good legs, a convertible roadster that he had given her on her eighteenth birthday, blue eyes, a membership at the Revere Country Club, a soft voice, and stocks, bonds, and tangible assets to the extent of a million and a half dollars, which would be hers when she was twenty-one years old. She was also someone George Clark Lowell felt he loved a great deal.

  Arm in arm, they walked upstairs to his room. “I went skiing today,” she said, “believe it or not—because there’s snow fifty miles from here. Why didn’t you come with me instead of going to New York?”

  “Because I wasn’t asked,” he smiled. “Did you go alone?”

  “I picked Dave up at the club—and for a hundred miles he pawed me while I drove. That’s nice. That’s your sex in this generation.”

  He didn’t know who Dave was; when she spoke like that, he had no retort, no answer, no connection even, and he said instead: “Get dressed now, Fern, because Elliott’s coming for dinner.”

  “I’ve got a date afterward,” she said. “Why didn’t you tell me that Elliott was coming?”

  8.At precisely seven minutes after six, providing that there was no interference from the weather and no unexpected change in schedule, the westbound plane from Boston could be heard from the main street of Clarkton. At twelve minutes to six, the evening train from Worcester arrived, and at fourteen minutes after six, usually, the tower of the Catholic church would sound a short passage of bells—this last the only individual, special local custom, and one that dated back to the War Between the States. Somewhere in the general time given—a full hour and a half before the same custom was observed at the Lowell house—most of the twenty-two-thousand-and-odd folk of Clarkton sat down to their evening meal, called by most supper, by a minority dinner, but however called eaten at the same time by almost all. At that time, on this evening of the sixth of December in 1945, the streets were almost deserted, the main street which dipped through the valley, bisecting it from the old millpond at one end to the big iron bridge at the other, the side streets that were to the main street what the bones of a fish are to the spinal cord, and the four streets—or avenues, as they were called—which ran parallel to the main
street. With some initial attempt at historical recollection, the main street was called Concord Way, but practicality came with the big plant, and the avenues that paralleled it were simply known as First and Second and Third and Fourth Avenues, while the cross streets were impersonally named after trees, Linden and Chestnut and Maple and so forth. A sharp, cold wind from the Berkshires had blown away the threat of snow, bringing cold instead, the biting winter cold that seems to freeze the stars into a stage-setting of a sky. Most of the merchants closed up early this night, realizing that it was not and could not very well become a night for shopping, and as they dimmed their lights, the glow of red-hot salamanders at the end of Concord Way, where the main gate of the plant was, became more apparent, as if troops of some sort were camped down there in the valley alongside the millpond—giving that sort of fanciful suggestion added reality in the fine frame of stars and tumbled hills.

  Joe Santana, whose barber shop on the corner of Concord and Linden was probably the best in town—considering that he only cut hair and shaved—had already pulled down the shades in the window, and locked the front door. A thin, hard-featured boy sat in the chair, and Joe, having already trimmed with the razor, was giving those few random final touches, the mystery of haircutting that seems in some way to mark the ultimate skill of the barber. The boy in the chair wore a uniform, the discharge insignia sewn on, and enough overseas bars to make for three years. It was warm in the barber shop, and from the apartment in back, where the Santana family lived, came the good odor of a veal saute and a bubbling tomato sauce. Joe was talking—with some customers he always talked, and with others not at all—when the boy interrupted him to mention the food, commend the smell, and remark what a stinking cold night it was turning out to be.

  “Stay for supper,” Joe said.

  “No—I got a date over at Midland.”

  “Johnny,” Joe said seriously, “you got ants, you got needles in you, you got yourself all hopped up and you can’t climb off.”