Clarkton (21 page)

“There's usually a dance here on Saturday nights,” she told him. “There is one tonight. We can either do that, or go out to the toboggan run. They light it up, and it's fun at night. It's not a real toboggan run, but just a long slide with one curve and a winch to draw you up. But it's very exciting, really.”

“That would be nice,” he said. “Anything you want to do would be nice.”

20.
J
oe Santana usually closed up his shop at six.
By six-fifteen, supper was on the table, and by half-past seven or a quarter to eight, the dishes were washed, wiped, and put away, the kids were in bed, and that best hour of the evening had come, when he could put on his slippers, stretch out in the easy chair, light his first cigar—he never smoked during the day, when he worked—and turn on the radio, dialing in a news broadcast, or one of the commentators, or a quiz show; and at the same time holding a newspaper in his lap, or a book or a magazine, in case the radio should prove disappointing. He liked the quiz shows best. As he said to his wife one time, “The hunger for knowledge is very basic. Everybody wants to know. What makes us different from animals? What produces a man like Dante or a people like the Italian people? Without doubt, the hunger for knowledge.” More often than not, the commentators made him angry, but he listened consistently and took a certain mild satisfaction from the punishment he had to undergo.

Both he and his wife were easygoing people, grateful for the security the store and the apartment behind it provided. If it had ever occurred to Joe Santana to think about it, he would have stated that he was a happy man, a singularly happy man, with two such fine and healthy children, a reasonable living, and a wife who cooked
manacotti
like no one else on earth. He had come to this out of a childhood of poverty, hunger, and beatings; he said to his wife once, “The way I remember, my pop was never nice to the kids. He loved us, but he was never nice to us. I don't understand it.”

But tonight he was worried. He sometimes wondered why he, like almost all Communists he knew, should value the peace of his home so much and should like trouble so little. Out of the small Italian he had, he could quote one old-country proverb fully: “You can't call trouble by a good name.” When he told his wife there would be a meeting in their place that night, she shook her head, “I'm afraid.” “It's logical,” he answered. “I sometimes envy people who are not afraid. On the other hand, I sometimes have contempt for them.”

“You live so quiet in a little town like this,” Hannah said, “that when something happens the way it happened to Danny Ryan today, it can drive you crazy.”

“It happens.”

“But I know Sally Curzon. I was in the A-and-P this morning, and there she was with her little girl, and she said she would have to be bringing in all the kids for haircuts.”

“That kind of reasoning baffles me,” Santana smiled. “The Third Reich was not a place where people's hair grew down to their shoulders.”

“But the way she said it. Danny isn't a stranger here. This isn't a town where people are afraid. This isn't a town where there are those gangs of hoodlums, like in Boston and Worcester. What's happening, Joe?”

He shrugged and decided to smoke a cigar after all. It was only eight, and there was still a full half-hour before the meeting would start. “I sometimes speculate on what is happening,” he said meditatively. “I sense it. My pop, he used to tell me how in the old country, the water witches would walk around with an olive branch in their fingers. When they came over water, no one would see the branch move, but they sensed it. That is, of course, providing you believe in such old-fashioned superstition, which I, naturally, don't. But something is happening, which I sense. Maybe this is just the beginning, with a little piece breaking off here and there. Something big is dying and something else is being born, and we get a backwash of it here, which is only natural. It is just as natural that we should be nervous. A world in motion creates nervousness.”

21.
D
anny Ryan and Joey Raye were waiting in
the littered executive office of the local when Bill Noska walked in, his big body loose, his face sad and querulous. He looked at them wonderingly and then he sat down behind his desk. “Where in hell were you?” Danny Ryan asked. Noska stared at him. “Did they hurt you bad?” “It's a pleasure,” Ryan said, and momentarily Joey Raye grinned. “I like to be beat. I like to take it. I'm a dog for punishment.” He gave Noska a brief description, and the big blond man shook his head and said, “The dirty bastards.”

“I wish I believed you meant it,” Ryan said.

“Why?”

“There's talk you had a meeting with Wilson,” Joey Raye said flatly.

“That's no crime.”

“It's no crime, but it don't sound too good.”

Noska said, “Why in hell don't you wait until I sell out, Danny, before you hand it to me?”

“It's too late then.”

“What I hate most about a red,” Noska said, “is this goddamned aloof, superior attitude which says that anybody could be bought but one of you guys.”

“Did they try to buy you?” Joey Raye asked softly.

“Feller by the name of Gelb,” Noska said moodily.

“A sweet guy. He did the talking and he let Curzon do the mauling.”

“Yeah. I remembered him from Pittsburgh. I worked in a mill there in 'thirty-five.”

“But effective,” Ryan said. “Maybe you'll listen to me now and put two thousand people up against that gate.”

“They got the law,” Noska said wearily.

“What are they going to do—arrest two thousand people? What in hell is wrong with you, Bill?”

.”I just don't like to be pushed around by you babies!” Noska said savagely. “I don't like to be pushed around by Gelb and Wilson and I don't like to be pushed around by you guys! I want the membership to run this strike, not a little clique of reds!”

“You want us to pull out?” Joey Raye asked quietly.

“I want you to stop trying to take over.”

“Who says that? Wilson?” Ryan asked.

“I say it!”

“Why?” Ryan demanded, getting up, going over to the desk, and standing there with both hands on it. “Why do you say it? You know me a long time. You know Joey a long time. What in Christ's name do we want to take over, and why? Sure I'm a Communist. I never denied it. You know it—Wilson knows it too. I'm a Communist because I see every goddamned thing in this civilization of ours produced by the workers, coming out of their sweat and their work. I'm a worker. I always been a worker. I been a worker since I'm ten years old. I'm a Communist because I don't see anybody else willing to get his face pushed in or his throat cut or a bullet in his head because he's for the workers. I don't see anybody else who won't sell out.”

“You mean I'm selling out?” Noska said coldly.

“The hell I do! I'm trying to get you to think, to use your head, to stop letting all that crap you hear split us wide open.”

“It seems to me maybe you split us wider,” Noska said.

“Do we? Who got the merchants in town to support the strike? Who set up the food kitchens? Who's been working day and night to bring in food, feed the salamanders, set up entertainment, keep the picket lines going? Answer that one.”

“That's the point—for what you get out of it,” Noska said wearily.

“All right, all right, Bill. Look—you ain't made to believe that anybody does anything for nothing. I don't blame you, see. You live in a country that's got only one value, one standard, one measure, the buck. The quick buck, the sharp buck, the easy buck. Lay it on the line, printed in green, with a picture of Washington on it. That pays off, that tells the story. In other words, Moscow pays us, and we're in this racket for what comes out of it. But let me say something else—you and me, we're both Catholics. I broke with the church, you didn't. But we can talk the same language. I can talk about the brotherhood of man, and it ain't like I'm talking Chinese to you. I don't like to talk about it, because if ever a line was butchered out of meaning, it's that brotherhood-of-man stuff. But there's only one place I met with the brotherhood of man, and that's in the Communist Party! Sure we have our lice. We got all kinds. We got a movement out of the people, and you don't get saints in the people. We got, right at this moment, a louse here in town who's selling us out—yeah, and selling out the union too. But what we got, at its worst, is still the best damn thing this society ever produced.”

“I don't buy it, Danny,” Noska said.

“I don't ask you to buy it. I just ask you to keep your mind open—keep it open.”

22.
L
owell and his wife had dinner together at
home. It was one of those dinners where they sat across the table from each other, tasted their food, and exchanged a word or two now and then. The words were formal and polite. If Lois said of the weather, “Snow in New England is miserable. I don't know why people are romantic about it,” Lowell agreed. When it cut deeper, and she told him that she was going south, he nodded, “I guess that would be best.” “I thought of Arizona,” she said, leaving it at that, as if to indicate how many memories Arizona held for her; and Lowell only nodded again. He didn't care. It held no relationship now to the incident of the little Italian girl in town. He was not even ashamed of that; by some alchemy of his system, it had retreated into the gray wardrobe of things that had happened but were shapeless and colorless, the woman he had left in the hotel in New York, the girl before that in Boston, the girl he met on the train going to join Lois in Canada some months before, and before that and before that, the endless, futile, muddy search that tortured his senses and mocked at his dreams, the hotel ceilings, the beige walls, the innerspring beds with the innersprings coming through, the
Do Not Disturb
signs, the Gideon Bibles, the cheap fishnet curtains, the supercilious, half-contemptuous expression on the faces of numberless bellhops and elevator men, the treasure hunt with no treasure—it evened out, like a flat plain with never a hump or a hillock of earth to break it. He sat there at the dinner table, watching Lois, and thinking of how Wilson envied and admired him and how Curzon crawled before him.

“What are you going to do, George?” Lois asked him suddenly.

“Do? How do you mean?”

“I mean us.”

“I didn't think of doing anything,” he said slowly, thinking that their marriage had as much now as it ever had, as any marriage he had known. He was tired and he didn't want to talk about it but sit down somewhere and rest and forget. But she kept on talking, and his resentment turned into a deep irritation.

“Is it wrong—is it so wrong, George, to want to keep something, what little I have left, and fight for it and struggle for it …”

She was not bright, not clever, he realized; she was a dull woman who never understood sufficiently to doubt. In a sudden surge of hatred and contempt for her, he told himself that nothing would prevent him from going away now. He wanted to hurt her, but found nothing to say that was precise, sufficient to the moment, and instead he left the table abruptly and went into the library. He mixed himself a drink, a long scotch that was very short on water, and drained it down almost at a gulp, shivering, reacting with a wave of nausea; he mixed a second drink—with more scotch and more water. Wanting something to read, he selected Donn Byrne's
Destiny Bay
, which he remembered only vaguely from the time, ten or fifteen years before, when he had first read it, but which offered at least the recollection of a sunny Irish fairyland, a place where courtly men and lovely women moved with slow and stately dignity. He finished his second drink too quickly, so quickly that it sickened him, and he poured himself a third. He was a little drunk by now, but not so drunk that he didn't realize how often of late he had retreated like this, very quick drinks and a chair and a book he only half saw. He began to read “The Tale of the Gipsy Horse,” which he had once, so long ago, read aloud to Clark, and the memory it brought back of a relationship which, through the murky haze of time, became so warm and good and gentle, made him almost maudlin. He had read only three or four pages, when the phone rang. He answered it himself, and Wilson's voice told him:

“I'm sorry to bother you now, George, but Ham Gelb wants to know could we come over with Butler later?”

“Butler?”

“You remember, Fred Butler—he's the man we talked to at the station.”

He remembered then, but he complained, “Why here? Why the devil can't you and Gelb—”

“I'm sorry, George. He's nervous, won't come to any house in town.”

“All right, bring him out,” Lowell said.

Then Lowell went back to his book, but it was dull and tasteless. At this moment, more than anything else he wanted to call Elliott Abbott, but he couldn't do that either.

23.
I
t was quite late when Wilson came with But
ler, and Gelb arrived a few minutes later. Lois had gone up to her room, and Lowell was drunk enough not to mind their being here, drunk enough to have the rough edges smoothed down, and he took them into the library with an almost courtly and old-country grace. He gravely mixed drinks for them, revealing the liquor he had consumed only by the deliberate drag of his motions. He was drunk, but not too drunk to walk, to talk, to sit down and listen to Gelb say, “You have all our apologies, Mr. Lowell. It's not simply that Butler here has a case of nerves—I don't want any aspect of this developing apart from you. I think it's a curse of our system that people like yourself—and I say this with the deepest respect—withdraw themselves from an active participation.”