Clarkton (4 page)

“Sure, but take this——” A girl of seven came from inside and wanted to know:

“Mama says, how long?”

“Ten minutes. Tell her Doc is here.” The lather was on, and he was performing the initial going-over. “I don't know, her feet hurt. I tell her she shouldn't be on her feet so much, but she says I should use my head and that is what feet are for. What I meant before was that this is a new situation. Unprecedented, although I don't like the word, a dangerous word. But everything's different, and we're wrong if we expect it to be like before.”

“Tell her to come to the office tomorrow.”

“Sure. But unprecedented is not ruled out. Everything changes. I don't understand it, but I will. Sometimes I just put my finger on it. But the situation is apathetic. They should have five hundred pickets at each gate. Instead, they got ten. It is a situation of love, but my instincts tell me it's murderous. Love and hate are twins—was it Dante said that? I never read Dante; I mean to some day, but now I quote him—it gives me pride in a national origin.”

“How do you quote him, if you don't read him?” Abbott wanted to know.

“Nobody else reads him, so I quote him. I give him equal parts of vision and sound economic understanding. I try to do him justice. If a people's artist of a great nation did not say something that he should have said, is it my part to belittle him?”

His wife came out, a plump, round-faced woman of thirty or so. “I could hear inside,” she said, “but not the doctor's point of view. You allow him to say yes and no, Joe. That's a concession. Doctor, Joe's reasoning is valid until it concerns something practical. He wants me to get off my feet. He says, walk on your hands and all problems are solved.”

The hot towel was on now, so Abbott heard only a blur of sound. He came out of the chair grinning, and told Hannah Santana that one o'clock at the office would be right—just about right. They cared a great deal for him, something that could be seen by the way they helped him into his jacket and coat when the horn sounded outside.

As he got into the coupe next to his wife, he reflected that what was known in old New England terms as a store-bought shave did more for him than a drink. He moved his huge bulk against her, a very small woman with bright eyes, a tilted nose, and a freckled face, until she said:

“Crush me and wreck the car.”

“I try to show affection—”

“I'm grateful, Elliott.” She said; “You will be careful of what you say tonight? It's no better for George than for you.”

9.
T
hey were old friends, however, and this eve
ning reflected it. As far back as college—which was Amherst in a time that was already like a dream, another epoch and another world—one of the professors, which one Lowell could not remember, had spoken about friends to the effect that one did not collect them. This was troublesome to an undergraduate who had more friends than most, and because it was troublesome, the epigrammatic conclusion of what he then considered an old man, it remained in his mind for a good while. Later on, through his own experience, Lowell came to the decision that some men have two friends, some have one, but that most have none. It took him many years to realize consciously that his own very essential loneliness was shared by almost every man he knew, and being incapable of a considered cynicism, he retreated further into himself. His wife, Lois, knew this and also sensed that it was the result of certain fears, although what those fears were, she could not say. In any case, she recognized Elliott Abbott for what he was worth to George and to herself too.

Their friendship had come into a good maturity during the past five years. They were children in Clarkton, growing up together and together in college, and then they had gone different ways. But five years ago, when Lowell's father had died, and he had brought his family to Clarkton—at first only for a short and indeterminate period—there was Elliott Abbott with the solid, tiring practice of a small-town doctor, a monstrously big, gray-haired man, who softly and caustically reacted to life as it came; and quite naturally they saw a good deal of each other. Out of that, without any urging on the part of either, they became very close and good friends.

In part, it was the result of Lois' necessity to have some sort of social life in Clarkton. Her snobbery was fiercely self-controlled, self-resisted, but present nevertheless and fanned by the nature of a factory town that revolved around a single factory. The town was stratified, the more rigidly for the very fact that the citizens never considered the lamination as such. Roughly, there were three classes: the workers, who formed the large majority of the population, who were native New England, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Negro, and Jewish, with a sprinkling of French Canadian: the middle class, shopkeepers, garage owners, insurance agents, real estate agents, the lumberyard owner, a good many foremen in the plant, assistant managers, the brickyard owner, two of the five lawyers, all—including Elliott Abbott—of the six doctors, and a good many of the thirty-two persons who served the nineteen churches in one capacity or another; and these, and others not specified, fell into patterns of national origin similar to. those of the workers: and finally, there was what considered itself in Clarkton the upper class, the two plant managers, the local bankers—five, including vice-presidents—three of the five lawyers, which included a judge, the president of Sparkling Light, a small plant that bottled soda for all that part of Massachusetts, and half a dozen more, but not all of these firmly stratified, not all of these permanently accepted.

Their delight at having the younger Lowells back was all too apparent; they took them to their bosoms, but Lois had no desire to be taken, and Lowell himself was made uneasy and uncomfortable. He had never before been placed in a situation where he had to reject social advances, nor had he ever been really conscious of such a desire. He left it to Lois, who managed it well or badly, depending on how you looked at it; but for her it was a necessity, as much as it was a necessity to retain the one person in town she felt easy and comfortable with, Elliott Abbott. Their closeness to the Abbotts grew as the gulf between them and the highest strata of Clarkton widened. The two large—and for the town, exciting—events in the more or less regular flow of their wartime lives, the death of their son, Clark, and the expulsion of their daughter, Fern, from Bennington College, were received in a sort of balance. After the first, there was much formal sympathy—to none of which the Lowells appeared to respond in more than desultory fashion; thereby, after the second, there was considerable satisfaction as well as gossip, much of it vicious, much of it utterly without foundation in any of the facts; but the edge was taken off because the Lowells were able to pursue their lives in precisely the same pattern as before. But there was no doubt but that these two events, along with the war, along with the deep friendship between Lowell and Abbott, as well as between Lois and Ruth Abbott, helped keep the Lowells in the big old colonial house, which was situated on Concord Way, three miles beyond the mill-pond and the plant.

10.
T
he first sip of his martini began a process of
relaxation in Lowell; the warmth trickled down and spread. Abbott made a toast, “
Salud!
” “If I had known that you would be here, Elliott,” Fern said, “I would not have made a date, I would not have budged. It would have taken dynamite.” The drink brought Lowell home. He was very tired tonight. “As I get older,” Lois said, “I want snow more. I want a white Christmas more than a nine-year-old girl wants it.” “We still have the old runner,” Ruth Abbott said, “and it wants nothing but bells on it.” Weariness and the martini mingled ingratiatingly. When Lowell made a martini, he put together eight parts gin and one part of vermouth. He felt now like the man from the old, old times who comes out of the storm and crawls into the cave. “You remember, when I was tiny,” Fern said, “you took me out in a runner,” and Lowell looked at her with a sense of shock, the warmth of her thin voice defining something that was better in retrospect than the four years they had lived in the south of France. He drank, and wanted to put his arm around Fern, gently and warmly, but she was at the other side of the room now, hanging on Elliott's words. He, himself, was strangely rooted by the mantelpiece, looking at the gracious old room, the two Audubon originals on the wall, the weathered mahogany furniture, the deep couch. Elliott was telling Fern about 1927, which was, to hear him, the worst winter in all time. “It's man against his best adversary, Ferney,” he said, “which is the cold of outer space, crawling down from the icecap, and beyond it a million miles of nothing to inquire of us.” “A special question?” “Our dreams are big, and we are very small.” Lowell met his wife's eyes, shook himself awake and began to fill the glasses. Ruth and Lois were talking lazily about nothing. “I had a Model T Ford,” Elliott went on, “which you don't know anything about, either the fact or the folklore—and both were considerable, you may believe me—but which resolved down to the fact that when you were in trouble you threw a handful of sand in the gearbox.” “Which I never believed,” Fern said, “and anyway I drove one at the fair two years ago. You bought a bond and you drove the Ford around the circle. You only make yourself out to be a lot older than you are.”

By dinnertime, Lowell was relaxed and comfortable for the first time that day. He realized that from the moment, Lois had told him that the Abbotts would be here tonight, he had been conscious of a feeling of guilt, a need to rationalize the six-day-old strike and absolve himself from it, to anticipate Elliott's approach; but the conversation so casually went elsewhere that he could assure himself now of Elliott's understanding. It had been their plan to go south for the winter, and they still intended to when the unpleasantness at the plant was finished; and he thought that somehow he ought to convey that to Elliott, in the way of pointing out tangentially how little he considered the factory and how lightly he would be rid of it now, if only he had the chance. He had drunk two large martinis, enough to unchain his thoughts; the room was warm, with a fire in the hearth to give an ancient and physical manifestation of the heat; he felt, at the moment, a great tenderness toward Lois, toward Ruth and Elliott Abbott, as well as compassion and understanding for his daughter. What did anybody know about her that they dared condemn her! In fact, he asked himself, what right had any human being to condemn another? He rose to pour the wine and then sat down again. He talked freely and easily now—of nothing of great importance, but of nothing completely inconsequential either, just pleasant, ordinary conversation, which was so rare these days. It was only after he had suggested that next year, or the year after, when things in Europe had returned to some degree of normalcy, all of them go abroad, at least two months in England and Wales and Scotland, and then perhaps four or five months on the Continent—that it occurred to him that he knew nothing about Elliott's finances, nothing about whether or not he could afford a trip to Europe, and that he had presumed that six or seven months away from work would be a simple and desirable matter for his friend.

But Elliott only smiled and nodded, and Ruth said, “That's the kind of dream I've dreamed every night for twenty years.”

When they finished eating, they went back to the living room for their brandy and coffee. Fern joined them, dressed, a beaver coat and a beaver hood, smiling, flushed, begging Elliott to sing just one song before she left.

“Only one—just one, Elliott. I can't stay for the evening. If I could stay, we could have the piano to ourselves, and let them do what they want to.” He cared for Fern in a way that puzzled Lowell; he let himself be drawn to the piano and sat there, plunking a note thoughtfully. “Which one?” “The Spanish ones,” Fern said. “
La Cinque Brigada.
” He turned to look at her for a moment, and then beyond her to meet his wife's eyes. He sang in a deep, rich voice, rather softly:

“Long life to the Fifteenth Brigade …” the words in Spanish, muted, glancing at the girl for the chorus, “
Rhumba la, rhumba la, rhumba la …
”

“Who have covered themselves with glory …” “
Ay Manuela
,” Fern sang.

“At the Jarama Front … we had neither planes, nor tanks, nor cannon … yet we fought against the Moors … against the mercenaries and the fascists, we fought …”

“
Ay Manuela
,” sang the girl, swaying to the quick Castilian beat.

11.
“C
heckmate, I think,” said Elliott, apologet
ically. “You invited it—your mind isn't in it.”

Lowell pushed the board away. They were in the library; he had wanted an excuse to be away from the women, to let Elliott talk if he wanted to talk, but the doctor had pressed for a game of chess, concentrated on it. For Lowell, chess had been a thing he played two or three times a year before he came to Clarkton to live, but Abbott liked it, was clever at it, and had taught him a good deal about the game. They played it in silent accord after his son had died, and sometimes Lowell suspected that the doctor used it as a deliberate therapeutic; yet if that were the case, he had no inclination to resist. Perhaps of all people, only Abbott knew what Clark's death had meant to him and understood the emotional pitch of suffering of which he was capable.

Only Abbott, not Lois, not any other soul, knew the incredible and unbelievable thing he had done some five weeks after the news of Clark's death had arrived. Then Lowell went to Boston and consulted a spiritualist and participated in a seance, a filthy business compounded out of gauze and fakery, a world he had not touched or thought of before, being a man of only the most casual and indeterminate religious belief; and because he had to purge himself of that or lose his mind, he told Elliott. “Why did you do it?” Elliott had asked him. “Why in God's name, George?” “Because I can't give him up?” “You never owned him,” Elliott replied harshly. “Can't you get it into your head that you never owned him? He lived his life. Who in hell are you to determine whether he lived it right or not?” “I'm not saying that.” “But you are. And now he's dead. Christ, what kind of people are we that we can't look at death!” And somehow, it was better for Lowell than sympathy; but now, tonight, Lowell wanted sympathy and understanding—and Elliott Abbott had avoided the subject like a plague. And now, finally, when after the game Lowell asked him directly, Abbott said: