Clarkton (17 page)

“You dirty son of a bitch,” Ryan said to him.

This time Curzon hit him in the groin, the same kind of blow as before, sharp and sweeping, with his whole body behind it. Lowell found the doorknob, twisted it, and got out of the room. He felt drunk now, sick drunk, hopelessly drunk. He stumbled down the corridor until he saw a door marked
WASHROOM,
got inside, and hung over the bowl, vomiting.

10.
T
he morning papers that day, both in New
York and in Boston, said there was every reason to expect skiing weather in the Berkshires and upstate, and there were feature articles on an expected postwar upsurge in the popularity of the sport. “There is no doubt,” one story said, “but that the ancient Norwegian sport of skiing will do much to fill the tame hole in the life of GI Joe. Soon, the white mantle of Jack Frost will festoon the smooth slopes of New England, and the simulated excitement of the wooden runners will replace memories of mine-throwers and high explosive. Professor Jackson Ely Lynn, of the Psychiatric Department of Columbia University Medical School, offered his opinion of the value of such therapy. ‘Skiing and mountain climbing,' Professor Lynn said, ‘will do much to facilitate a normal and tranquil adjustment back to the values of civilian life.' This correspondent, at least, will view the first ski-trains with added satisfaction.…”

And as if to implement the wonder by which man can anticipate almost every mood and act of nature, tiny dry snow-flakes began to fall on Clarkton just about an hour before noon. The little white flakes drifted on the wind, whispered along the streets, and proceeded to festoon the evergreens, in accordance with all the gay predictions of the press. Evan Baxter, who owned the biggest hardware store in town, reacted to the snowfall by taking out a sign and tacking it up inside his window, informing Clarkton that the best non-skid, pavement-proof chains in New England were to be had at a most reasonable price.

11.
L
ois also reacted to the snow; the first snow
fall always achieved a melancholy effect in her, and now, watching the little flakes through the window, she was pervaded with a warm sadness—which was increased by Fern coming in from outside, all flushed and youthful and smiling. Lois couldn't find it in her heart to set herself against Fern; she put an arm around her shoulders and said:

“Ferney darling, do be nice.”

“I feel nice,” Fern said. “There's a boy working for Dad who's just sweet. He's out of the army a few months, and he's nice and simple and straightforward.”

“I'm glad,” Lois smiled. “What's his name?”

“His name's Frank Norman—just a nice, plain name.”

“I knew some Normans in New York. Is he from New York?”

“I think so.”

“They were very nice people.”

“Well he's nice. If it's all snowy tonight, we'll go sledding on Bird's Hill.”

It was partly that conversation with Fern that moved Lois to do what she did—because the conversation was so healthy and straightforward and decent. It made her realize that if you had something, it was worth fighting for and defending—not simply worth the patience of waiting. So before lunch, where Fern had promised to join her, she looked up Antonini in the phone book, found two families by that name, and called one on a chance. A voice half asleep, a drowsy, slow voice answered, and Lois asked her, gently and politely, was she Rose Antonini?

“Yes.”

“Well, this is Mrs. Lowell,” Lois said.

A long silence, and then, “Yes?”

“I know about last night,” Lois plunged on. “I know those things happen. I'm sure you must understand how they happen.…” There was just a long silence then, until Lois inquired, “Hello?”

“What do you want?”

“I know how people like you—need money,” Lois said painfully. “I could manage some money, but my husband must not know. I would want you to go away somewhere. I could manage enough money for that—for you to go away somewhere and even have a pleasant time.…”

There was a long silence once more. “Hello?” Lois said.

“Oh, go to hell, you old biddie,” the sleepy voice told her.

12.
M
ax Goldstein had been one of the heroes
of the First World War, and the things he had done—forgotten, most of them, by now—had earned him the Congressional Medal of Honor. It was a great thing in Clarkton at the time, and when he came home, in June of 1919, there was a band waiting for him at the station, and he headed a triumphal march through the town. All of this he liked as well as the next person; he was a big, easygoing man, and memories of the war held no horrors for him; rather the reverse, for he was very proud of a scrapbook his father had started, filled mostly with clips from the Clarkton
Minuteman
, but also interspersed here and there with pieces from the Boston and New York papers.

He had been born and brought up in Clarkton, where his parents had a small drygoods store, and his affection for the place was deep-seated and genuine; nor was he ambitious. He held the post of magistrate once and again he ran for and was elected to a term in the state legislature. But that was the extent of his political career; he preferred his commonplace practice and his office, which was in a loft building squarely in the center of town. In the course of the years, he married a tiny, very pretty Polish girl, had no children, lost his hair, and developed an enormous paunch. He was only a reasonably fat man, but he had the largest stomach of anyone in town, and since his needs were not many, he took only the cases he wanted and almost never pressed anyone for a bill. In the winter, there was usually a group of his cronies and a political argument or a checker game in his office; in the summer, he transferred this to the courthouse square. Actually, by now, in his fifty-first year, he was a relic, an old-fashioned courtroom lawyer who abided by principle and loved his art and took hopeless cases and prepared them himself and fought them himself and had only one substantial client, the local union.

He was playing checkers with the dentist who occupied the suite next door, on this Saturday morning, when Maurice Renoir burst in and told him about what had happened at the plant. He listened calmly, nodding his head, and making his move in the middle of the account. The dentist jumped three of his men.

“The hell with it,” Goldstein said. “Twenty years and I still can't play the game.”

“I got a patient in five minutes. One more?” the dentist asked.

“Oh, the hell with it. How much you ahead—two-bits?”

“Two-bits.”

Goldstein paid, deliberately and judiciously, counting the change out of a leather snap-purse he kept in a drawer of his rolltop desk.

“Sacred God,” Renoir cried, “you hear me, no? They're in jail.”

“If they're there, they're there. They ain't going to run away, and nobody'll move the jail.” The dentist left; Goldstein shifted his enormous bulk and began to place the checkers back in their box. “Did you see Noska?” he asked Renoir.

“Where in hell is Noska? You tell me, Max.”

“You tell me,” Goldstein said. “This is nothing. This is a cheap, dirty little stall—trespassing, oh, my hat.”

“Danny said, you get him out.”

“What's eating Ryan? Didn't he ever spend a few hours in jail before?” He swung back to his desk, picked up the phone, kidded the operator gently for a while, and then asked for his number. “Elliott,” he said, “is that you, Elliott? All right, this is Max. They just picked up Danny and Joey Raye on some damfool trespass charge. I don't know what's behind it—maybe just some more of Tom Wilson's brilliance. No—no, it won't stick. Even if Curtis does warm his pants in Lowell's vest pocket, he'll have to throw this out of court. But look, it seems they can't locate Noska right now, and Danny's got ants in his pants, so if you can pick up a few hundred of bail money, we'll take it over to the court.”

13.
A
bbott had to finish with his patients first
, so he sent Ruth over to the bank and then called Max Goldstein back and asked why didn't they all meet at his house and ride over to the court together? Goldstein said no reason why not, and it wouldn't hurt Ryan to spend an extra hour in the can, but rather be good for his immortal soul. “There's no chance they'll push him around, is there?” Abbott wanted to know, and Goldstein said, “What for? This isn't that kind of a situation.”

But Abbott was not so sure, and he finished his office work mechanically. Max Goldstein could be wrong, he thought to himself. Max Goldstein had been wrong before. “You're a somber, humorless, loveless, faithless New England man,” Goldstein had told Abbott only a week or so before, when Abbott said that the war and the war's end was the beginning of something and by no means the end of it. “We have put fascism to death,” Goldstein said. “All of them?” Abbott asked him, looking at him and trying to fix in his mind that Max Goldstein was a Jew, one of the same people who had surrendered six million to the cold enfolding of the earth and part of a sorrow the world would not forget soon; but that was difficult with Goldstein, who was more New England and more of the valley and hills hereabouts than he himself. At that time, Goldstein had said, “I'm looking to trout in the spring. I want to get out in the sunshine with high boots and a pouch and forget that this beastliness ever was.” Now Elliott Abbott considered that forgetfulness was never to any purpose; memory sought you out, and you were better prepared if you knew that in advance. Since 1939, he had lived the quiet life of a country and small-town doctor, here in the foothills of the Berkshires, and he had forgotten how to fight. His unease increased and became somber and melancholy, so that he had, perforce, to explain to his patients that it was his misery and not theirs that made for the look on his face.

Ruth came back. “I got five hundred,” she said. “Will that be enough?”

“I think so.”

“What is it?” she asked, seeing his face.

“Nothing. Why don't you make a sandwich, Ruth? I've only Jackie Maurois and Mrs. Bailey, and then I'll be through.”

Mrs. Bailey had a nephew, out of the army, who wanted to study medicine. After he had prescribed for her back, Elliott had to listen for ten minutes to a recital of her family history, before he could shoo her out of the door and go back to the kitchen. Goldstein had not yet arrived, and it was already ten minutes past one. “Damn that walrus!” Abbott said. “The sky could fall on him, and he still wouldn't hurry.”

“Elliott, what's eating you?” Ruth wanted to know.

“Nothing.”

“It's not that thing with George this morning?”

“I almost forgot about that,” Abbott said. He sat down at the table with a sandwich and a glass of milk. “I almost forgot about it—that's funny, isn't it? That's damned funny. You know, I'm afraid,” he said. “That's it—I'm afraid.”

“Most of the time I am,” Ruth shrugged. “Do you want a piece of pound cake?”

“Yes—sure.” He sat at the table, a huge man, his enormous hands dwarfing glass and sandwich; she had to smile. “I wish I could,” he said. “Give me another piece of the cake, Ruth. You're not afraid, are you?”

“Not any more—not the way you mean. I'm afraid in other ways.”

“You get to feeling alone and helpless. You belong to a movement, and it's your whole life, and the only thing decent and good and real in this land. But I need more than you, Ruth. I look around and I count on both hands the people who are Communists in a place like this. It's different in the cities, I guess.”

“I don't know,” Ruth said.

“And where in hell is Max?”

He waddled in then by the side door, grinning and asking gently, “Were you disturbed, Doc? If I move slowly, I prolong my own life, and the revolution will still come on schedule, won't it? This is a business for the young. I'm a museum piece. I got no business being a red.”

“What stopped you—a checker game?”

“Different motivations in different folk,” Goldstein mused, as Ruth got into her coat. “Wear boots—there's an inch of snow. You, Elliott, are a professional revolutionary; I am a stout slug; let us face the truth, all of it. When you were in Spain, I sat in the sunshine and kept my feet by the fire, and whatever comes, I will die in bed with uremia and high blood pressure. As to what kept me, I informed myself on the facts, an old-fashioned but necessary detail.” He followed them outside and climbed into the coupe, grunting as he squeezed Ruth into the few inches the two great bulks left. “I would prefer a quiet movement,” he sighed. “Ethical and correct and patient in the smooth flow of events. A movement that sees both sides of a thorny matter,” he added after a moment, “but takes definite action on neither. Instead, I ally myself with a group of pariahs. Ye are the cursed of the earth, even as the early Christians were. But I am neither meek nor sinful, and martyrdom holds no gentle attractions, neither have I a nervous system, or what you fancy young fellows call a neurotic compulsion. I am George Babbitt, with a smattering of learning—and the only compulsion I have is in the shape of a mesalliance with a whore called .truth. I find no one else interested—in truth, I mean—”

“For Christ's sake,” Abbott snapped, “stop trying to be a latter-day Socrates! What's going on?”

“Nothing that I can make sense of. Their childish fancy—which, I am given to understand, sprang full blown from the mind of a gentleman of ancient repute, Gelb by name, as Athene sprang from the brow of Zeus—is that since Lowell owns all of the property between the gates of the plant and Birch Street and has posted it to that effect, he can prevent picketing through the ordinary function of the trespass ordinance. They faked up a handful of warrants, waited for Ryan and Joey Raye to turn up, and then ran them in. Also, they pushed the picket lines back to Birch Street. I couldn't locate Noska, and nobody else seems to know what to do.”