Clarkton Read online

  “What, Mother?”

  “Do you want me to itemize things, Fern? The way you’re living.”

  “How am I living, Mother?” Fern asked.

  “For one thing, this business with Elliott.”

  “What business with Elliott, Mother?” Fern asked, her voice flat and dull. “Do you think I’m in love with Elliott? Are you in love with him yourself—is that it?”

  “What a foul thing to say!” Her head was throbbing, and for that reason she tried to control herself, to keep herself from yielding to an impulse and saying certain things to her daughter that could never be taken back or forgotten. Ever since Clark had died, her consciousness of Fern had become more and more acute, her need to love Fern and be loved by her more and more intense. She was on the defensive now, completely, and Fern took advantage of it.

  “Or is it the evenings, Mother? Are you thinking of the lurid and filthy things I do at night—the wild and hopeless life I live? It must be a pretty picture for you to live with. I should feel sorry for you, only I don’t.…”

  And through the pain of her head, through the panic that overcame her and made her want to run out of the room, Lois could only think of her son’s death, her son’s leavetaking from this bright and sorrowful earth, her tall, handsome son, who, with several hundred of his comrades, was taken by the Nazis in a French forest, herded with the others, grouped, pressed back, and then shot down to lie in the snow with a hole in his head. That was all that Lois could think of.

  8.Union headquarters of the Clarkton local was a ramshackle frame house at the junction of Oak Street and Fourth Avenue, the outside edge of the town, with the hills beyond, with a gurgling brook running by. Following Oak Street, the pavement turned into an old dirt road which crossed the creek upon one of those old New England covered bridges. Running east on Fourth Avenue was a long line of workers’ homes, those strange red-brick country slums, native to this part of America, and with a quaint, old-country air. The quaintness was further enhanced by the fact that each apartment in the row had four tiny rooms, no central heat, no running water, and no sewage. Every ten families shared a communal outhouse and pump, a fact which Danny Ryan pointed out to Mike Sawyer as they walked up Fourth Avenue toward the union hall.

  “These here are all French Canadians,” Ryan said. “They were mostly brought down in nineteen twenty-nine, when old man Lowell decided he would break the strike—and did, by God—but they’re good union men now, except that the church is beginning to yell red to them.”

  “You have much trouble with the church?” Sawyer asked.

  “It’s coming. They got a new priest here from Boston, Father O’Malley, big and good looking, with the right kind of a smile. A very smart cookie. He comes over to the house and makes a big fuss with the kids—I guess he likes kids, all right—and then he says to me, ‘I hear you’re a Communist, Ryan.’ ‘It’s been said,’ I tell him. So he says, ‘If a man wants to call his brother comrade, that’s all right with me. I love Communists. I hate communism.’ That’s the kind of a cookie he is, very smart, right on the ball. He started slow, but now he’s making a big pitch about the godless reds. Not against the strike; he’s too smart for that.”

  Sawyer was staring at the bridge, and Ryan explained that it was a hundred and forty-three years old. “They were going to tear it down about ten years ago, but old Lowell put up a big kick and had it fixed up.”

  “It’s wonderful,” Sawyer said. “I never saw one of those old covered bridges before. I saw pictures of them, but I just never saw one before. This is a mighty nice place to work.”

  Glancing at him, Ryan said shortly, “Are you kidding me?”

  “No—hell, no.”

  “I don’t get you, Sawyer—Christ, I don’t get you. Maybe you been out of circulation too long.”

  “What’s eating you?” Sawyer said, trying to hold onto his temper. “What in hell is eating you, Ryan? I’m trying to get along. I want to get along with you. If I can’t feel that Ham Gelb’s being here in town is the worst thing that ever happened, providing he is here, that’s my judgment.”

  “Take it easy,” Ryan said.

  “I’m trying to take it easy. I’m trying to tell myself I got to work with you.”

  “I blew my top,” Ryan said slowly, biting his lips. “This is a strike, not a picnic.”

  “I know it’s a strike, Ryan. I don’t know all the answers. I’m trying to learn a job. I didn’t ask them to drop me into the biggest strike wave that ever hit this country. But they did, and here I am.”

  “Okay—I blew my top.”

  Sawyer said, “This Byron Rand they had here before—he was quite a guy?”

  “He was a hell of a guy,” Ryan answered evenly. “Why don’t you write them a letter down there in New York and tell them we exist. If I ran my Ford the way they run their organization, I’d sell it for scrap.”

  “If that’s the way you feel,” Sawyer said, “it’s the way you feel. I got a job to do, and I’d like to do it. If you think I’m stinking it up, write them a letter yourself. Until then, I’ll stick around.”

  They were at the union hall now. On the sidewalk in front were at least twenty-five or thirty men and women, standing in groups and chatting, or just leaning against the wall, enjoying the warm sunlight of the deliciously unseasonable weather. They all knew Ryan, and Sawyer noticed again how patiently he listened to their beefs, and how readily the complaints came out in his presence. Watching Ryan, he realized that he could learn a good deal from the little Irishman. It was worth trying. It was worth taking his spleen—which he had to, in any case. He also noticed that at least a dozen of the people were reading the Daily Worker, and when he commented to Ryan about it, the little man said:

  “We can move it during the strike. Bill Noska raised hell, but what is he going to tell them when it’s the only sheet that doesn’t take their pants off? Come on in. I want you to meet Noska.”

  They went inside, into a dirty, crowded hallway. A group of workers were reading notices on a bulletin board on one wall, and opposite that there was a cashier-type window labeled Business Office. Here too, there was a lineup, with a harried woman trying to talk to five people at once. Beyond her, two efficient and tired-looking girls operated a mimeograph machine. A big hand-lettered sign over the window said, WRITE DOWN YOUR BEEFS—DON’T TELL THEM. The place had a feeling of motion and action that Sawyer noted with satisfaction, thinking that the time to start worrying was when a strike movement bogged down, not when it complained and spouted its bitterness all over the place.

  Walking on down the hall, Danny Ryan opened the door of a small, littered office and motioned Sawyer in. There was an old desk, a telephone, a typewriter, a pile of picket signs, and a carpet of mimeographed sheets and paper coffee cups on the floor. Behind the desk, a big, blond man rubbed a two-day-old beard speculatively and chewed a cigar between words of a letter he was dictating. A thin girl, with circles under her eyes, took the dictation patiently. A huge, very dark Negro sat at one side, his chair tilted back against the wall, kneading a wad of gum and apparently counting the cracks in the ceiling. As they entered, the blond man broke off his dictation and waved the cigar at Ryan.

  “Hello, Danny—”; and then to the girl, “The hell with that! Write them a letter and tell them what you think I ought to tell them. I’m too tired to think.” He said to Ryan, “‘Sit down, Danny. What do you know? Joey here tells me I ought to get shaved and go home to my wife.”

  “Sure you ought to,” Ryan said. “Everything’s running—what are you worried about? This is Mike Sawyer.” He turned to Sawyer and told him, “This is Bill Noska.” And nodding at the Negro, “This is Joey Raye. I guess you met Joey yesterday.”

  Raye grinned, slow and good-naturedly. He unfolded himself from the chair, and in his very motion there was a feeling of boundless good nature.

  “A special, beautiful person—this is Sally Dorcet, who runs the whole works,” Ryan said, putting an arm arou
nd the girl’s shoulder. Noska leaned over the desk and took Sawyer’s hand. “Glad to know you,” Sawyer nodded. Ryan added, “Sawyer is the new party guy for the area. I figured you should meet him, so you could tell him what you think to his face and not send it via me.”

  “I think you ought to lay off,” Noska said, but without any conviction. “The union’s running this clambake, not the party.”

  “I got no argument with that,” Sawyer said.

  “If I could figure what the hell you guys are after,” Noska complained, “I could figure out a way to handle you. But I never seen a Communist who could give me a straight answer.”

  “Mostly, we’re after the same things you are,” Sawyer said, feeling the eyes of Ryan and the Negro on him.

  “I want eighteen and a half cents an hour and not pipe dreams. Also, I think we can get it without any strategy from Moscow. Ain’t we got trouble enough without the goddam papers pulling a red scare on us?”

  9.Driving through town, Fern maneuvered her roadster with that peculiar mixture of abandon and skill which had already won for her the dislike even of those folk who dreamed of nothing higher or more desirable than an evening at the Lowells’. The feeling was returned. Fern despised Clarkton and most of the people it contained and went to no pains to disguise her contempt; and along with other things, it was known about town that she would cheerfully drive twenty miles to avoid patronizing a local merchant. When the Episcopal church held memorial services for the Clarkton boys who had died in the service, the Lowells dutifully attended, but Fern was conspicuously absent. As Lowell tried to point out to her once, it did no good and only increased the gossip; to which Fern replied that she would not, for the world, lessen the already small pleasures of their lives.

  Today, it was almost one o’clock when she arrived at Dr. Abbott’s. The talk with her mother had not bettered her state of mind, and when she saw that there were two patients still left in the waiting room, she curled into a corner of the couch and buried her nose in a magazine. Elliott Abbott’s office hours, during the day, were between twelve and one, but usually they lasted for at least a half-hour more. This time, however, it went on schedule. He nodded at Fern when he came out, and then, in the next ten minutes, disposed of the two people who were waiting. Then he dropped on the couch beside Fern and asked:

  “Are you sick, Ferney—or is a nice day going to be complete because you wandered over to visit me?”

  “I’m sick, I think,” she said. “Did you have a fight with Father last night?”

  “I don’t know what puts such ideas into your head. Come into my office and tell me what hurts you.”

  She asked him if it could be without Ruth, and he looked at her strangely, wanting to say no, beginning to say no, and then shrugging his shoulders and agreeing. “All right, if you want to see me alone.” He walked into his office, and Fern heard him say, “Ruth, I’m going to see Fern alone.” She was shivering as she came in, and she knew that he noticed it and was laying it alongside other things. She sat down in a chair beside his plain, boxlike oak desk, and he sat behind it, playing with a pen. “Why do you think you’re sick, Fern?” he asked, his slate-colored eyes fixed on her, examining her. “You don’t believe I am?” “If you think you are, of course I believe you.” “Mother doesn’t think I’m sick. She thinks I have a crush on you. She has a pure mind, but I can’t bring myself to say what she thinks.” Then Fern added, “It’s not a crush. I love you. That’s so crazy mad, and I’ve got pains down there so I can’t sleep any more.”

  Still watching her, he said, “Let’s go inside and look at you, Fern, and then we’ll talk about the other things.”

  10.“You don’t believe me,” Fern said. “Mother’s mind runs on a pattern, and you think the same way. I thought up a story to be alone with you.”

  “I believe you. I tell you the pain is real. I don’t think you’re imagining the pain. It hurts you and it’s there. But it’s not produced because anything is organically wrong with you. And I think it will go away.”

  “Then why is it there?”

  “Why does your mother get her headaches, Fern?”

  The girl looked at him hopelessly. He told her to put on her clothes, and then he went back to his office and sat at his desk, staring at a calendar. He had a habit of playing with smooth-surfaced things, as if tactile sensation was a need, and he picked up his pen, handled it, and then made marks on the pad in front of him, and was like that, doing that when Fern came out.

  “What’s wrong with me, Elliott?”

  “Why do you say wrong, Ferney?” he answered without looking up. “I told you before that you weren’t sick.”

  She stood in front of his desk and told him, in that flat voice that was becoming more and more a part of her these days, “You’re the only good thing that ever happened to me, Elliott, and I tell you that I love you, and you look at me as if I’m a fool kid, and you think I invent things—”

  “I don’t think you’re a fool kid, Ferney. If I had a daughter, I would want her to be like you.”

  “That’s a lie,” Fern said. “But it’s the nicest lie I ever heard. I don’t hear anything nice any more.”

  He had long ago stopped being sorry for people, out of a full-blown realization of the purposelessness of sorrow; but his friend’s daughter, standing in front of his desk, wholly impotent and childlike, moved him. It gave him a strange feeling to think of her loving him. He didn’t want to react to it now, but talk about it to Ruth; he would say to Ruth, in the calm acceptance of facts that underlay their relationship, that this was in all actuality as sincere and real as anything called love was in these United States in this year of 1945, where Katharine Hepburn or Ingrid Bergman defined the highest relationship that the ethics of civilization had produced, or Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart. Dreams came out of the dream factory, and what else was to be expected in any case! He began to feel old, a common feeling of late, hardly hearing Fern say to him:

  “Isn’t it important for you to believe me? Why do you think they threw me out of Bennington?”

  “Sit down,” he said, motioning at the chair alongside his desk. “Do you want a cigarette, Fern?” She nodded, and he lit one for her and another for himself. “I don’t care why they threw you out of Bennington,” he said. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “It matters to me what you think,” she insisted. “I did nothing. Do you know what they say about me here? Do you know what they think of me, and my own father and mother too? Do you know what it was—we picked up a boy, a soldier with leave and with no money and no place to go, and we thought it would be smart and like movies we had seen to sneak him up to our room, and when we got him up there we had to fight him off for a while, but finally he agreed to get into one of the beds and the two of us, my roommate and I, got into the other, but during the night he started in again, stark naked, and it made such a fuss the whole school came in—and he lied. He was just rotten, filthy rotten, and he lied.…”

  It didn’t occur to him that she was not telling the truth. There was all of the forlorn conviction that comes with the truth and from nowhere else. He asked her why she hadn’t told her father or her mother.

  “Because I hate them,” she said simply.

  “You shouldn’t hate them, Fern. It’s pointless to hate them.”

  “That’s what Clark used to say, and he hated them too. In a different way. He felt sorry for them. I don’t. When Clark died, I wanted to die, but they didn’t care.”

  “They cared, Fern.”

  “Do you think so? You don’t know much about them, do you, Elliott? It was their best possession, and they lost it. People couldn’t look at Mother walking with Clark and think that they were brother and sister any more. They can’t love anything, Elliott—they can’t. They can’t love and they can’t hate. And I hate them for that. I hate them because Clark died, and they didn’t even know that it hurt him or how it hurt him. And all I could think of was how it hurt him. You don’t eve
n think I’m talking sense, do you, Elliott?”

  “I think you’re talking sense, Ferney.”

  “What should I do?”

  But it made no sense for her to ask the question, or for him to try to answer it. He had at least ten answers; he could lay them out, blueprint them, itemize them, and extend them into an indefinite future. He recalled Ruth telling him once that the worst sin of a radical was glibness, but you didn’t change people as easily as you changed a sentence you could say but wouldn’t. Change was a process basic to all others, but you couldn’t play it as you played a musical instrument. His own daughter, if she had lived, would be a little more than eleven years old today, not too much younger than the girl who sat there now, telling him that she was in love with him. When his own little girl had died that night, in Barcelona, her face mashed to a pulp by a piece of five-hundred-pound demolition bomb, he had walked all night with the body in his arms, looking for Ruth, not defining paths of action for his future, but sitting down more and more often to weep over the small corpse as the night wore into morning, mingling his sorrow with despair. Then it had shocked him, when he found Ruth, to realize her cold and murderous anger; it was a shock he needed. It brought him back to life at a moment when the heart was flowing out of him, when he called into question and found unanswered all the motives and reasons that had taken him where he was. The difference between himself and his wife came into focus then; he had gone to Spain because it was logical and rational and idealistic—and eminently correct in terms of his need to sleep easily at night, and then the little girl died and he realized he would not sleep well any more. But in Ruth, hatred hardly left space for sorrow.

  Now, later, when Fern had gone, he told Ruth about it, she all the while watching him curiously, something birdlike in the way her head was cocked.