The Winter of Our Discontent Page 8

  She has not wavered, not in the transplanting from Boston Irish tenancy to the old Hawley house on Elm Street. And she never wavered in the slow despondency of my failing business, in the birth of our children, or in the paralysis of my long clerkship. She is a waiter--I can see that now. And I guess she had at lengthy last grown weary of waiting. Never before had the iron of her wishes showed through, for my Mary is no mocker and contempt is not her tool. She has been too busy making the best of too many situations. It only seemed remarkable that the poison came to a head because it had not before. How quickly the pictures formed against the sound of frost-crunching footsteps on the night street.

  There's no reason to feel furtive walking in the early morning in New Baytown. Wee Willie makes little jokes about it but most people seeing me walking toward the bay at three in the morning would suppose I was going fishing and not give it another thought. Our people have all sorts of fishing theories, some of them secret like family recipes, and such things are respected and respectable.

  The street lights made the hard white frost on the lawns and sidewalks glint like millions of tiny diamonds. Such a frost takes a footprint and there were none ahead. I have always from the time I was a child felt a curious excitement walking in new unmarked snow or frost. It is like being first in a new world, a deep, satisfying sense of discovery of something clean and new, unused, undirtied. The usual nightfolk, the cats, don't like to walk on frost. I remember once, on a dare, I stepped out barefoot on a frosty path and it felt like a burn to my feet. But now in galoshes and thick socks I put the first scars on the glittering newness.

  Where Porlock crosses Torquay, that's where the bicycle factory is, just off Hicks Street, the clean frost was scarred with long foot-dragged tracks. Danny Taylor, a restless, unsteady ghost, wanting to be somewhere else and dragging there and wanting to be somewhere else. Danny, the town drunk. Every town has one, I guess. Danny Taylor--so many town heads shook slowly from side to side--good family, old family, last of the line, good education. Didn't he have some trouble at the Academy? Why doesn't he straighten up? He's killing himself with booze and that's wrong because Danny's a gentleman. It's a shame, begging money for booze. It's a comfort that his parents aren't alive to see it. It would kill them--but they're dead already. But that's New Baytown talking.

  In me Danny is a raw sorrow and out of that a guilt. I should be able to help him. I've tried, but he won't let me. Danny is as near to a brother as I ever had, same age and growing up, same weight and strength. Maybe my guilt comes because I am my brother's keeper and I have not saved him. With a feeling that deep down, excuses--even valid ones--give no relief. Taylors-- as old a family as Hawleys or Bakers or any of the others. In childhood I can remember no picnic, no circus, no competition, no Christmas without Danny beside me as close as my own right arm. Maybe if we had gone to college together this wouldn't have happened. I went to Harvard--luxuriated in languages, bathed in the humanities, lodged in the old, the beautiful, the obscure, indulged myself with knowledge utterly useless in running a grocery store, as it developed. And always I wished Danny could be with me on that bright and excited pilgrimage. But Danny was bred for the sea. His appointment to the Naval Academy was planned and verified and certain even when we were kids. His father sewed up the appointment every time we got a new Congressman.

  Three years with honors and then expelled. It killed his parents, they say, and it killed most of Danny. All that remained was this shuffling sorrow--this wandering night sorrow cadging dimes for a pint of skull-buster. I think the English would say, "He's let the side down," and that always wounds the let-downer more than the side. Danny's a night wanderer now, an early-morning man, a lonely, dragging thing. When he asks for a quarter for skull-buster his eyes beg you to forgive him because he can't forgive himself. He sleeps in a shack in back of the boat works where Wilburs used to be shipbuilders. I stooped over his track to see whether he was headed home or away. By the scuff of the frost he was going out and I might meet him any place. Wee Willie wouldn't lock him up. What would be the good?

  There was no question where I was going. I had seen and felt and smelled it before I got out of bed. The Old Harbor is pretty far gone now. After the new breakwater went in and the municipal pier, sand and silt crept in and shallowed that once great anchorage sheltered by the jagged teeth of Whitsun Reef. And where once were shipways and ropewalks and warehouses and whole families of coopers to make the whale-oil casks, and docks too over which the bowsprits of whalers could project to their chain stays and figure-or fiddleheads. Three-masters they were usually, square-rigged; the after mast carried square sails as well as boom-and-gaff spanker--deep-hulled ships built to suffer the years at sea in any weather. The flying jib boom was a separate spar and the double dolphin-striker served as spritsail gaffs as well.

  I have a steel engraving of the Old Harbor chockablock with ships, and some faded photographs on tin, but I don't really need them. I know the harbor and I know the ships. Grandfather rebuilt it for me with his stick made from a narwhal's horn and he drilled me in the nomenclature, rapping out the terms with his stick against a tide-bared stump of a pile of what was once the Hawley dock, a fierce old man with a white whisker fringe. I loved him so much I ached from it.

  "All right," he'd say, in a voice that needed no megaphone from the bridge, "sing out the full rig, and sing it loud. I hate whispering."

  And I would sing out, and he'd whack the pile with his narwhal stick at every beat. "Flying jib," I'd sing (whack), "outer jib" (whack), "inner jib, jib" (whack! whack!).

  "Sing out! You're whispering."

  "Fore skys'l, fore royal, fore topgal'n't s'l, fore upper tops'l, fore lower tops'l, fores'l"--and every one a whack.

  "Main! Sing out."

  "Main skys'l"--whack.

  But sometimes, as he got older, he would tire. "Belay the main," he would shout. "Get to the mizzen. Sing out now."

  "Aye, sir. Mizzen skys'l, mizzen royal, mizzen t'gal'n't, mizzen upper tops'l, mizzen lower tops'l, crossjack--"

  "And?"

  "Spanker."

  "How rigged?"

  "Boom and gaff, sir."

  Whack--whack--whack--narwhal stick against the water-logged pile.

  As his hearing got fuzzier, he accused more and more people of whispering. "If a thing's true, or even if it ain't true and you mean it, sing out," he would cry.

  Old Cap'n's ears may have gone wonky toward the end of his life, but not his memory. He could recite you the tonnage and career of every ship, it seemed like, that ever sailed out of the Bay, and what she brought back and how it was divided, and the odd thing was that the great whaling days were nearly over before he was master. Kerosene he called "skunk oil," and kerosene lamps were "stinkpots." By the time electric lights came, he didn't care much or maybe was content just to remember. His death didn't shock me. The old man had drilled me in his death as he had in ships. I knew what to do, inside myself and out.

  On the edge of the silted and sanded up Old Harbor, right where the Hawley dock had been, the stone foundation is still there. It comes right down to the low-tide level, and high water laps against its square masonry. Ten feet from the end there is a little passage about four feet wide and four feet high and five feet deep. Its top is vaulted. Maybe it was a drain one time, but the landward entrance is cemented in with sand and broken rock. That is my Place, the place everybody needs. Inside it you are out of sight except from seaward. There's nothing at Old Harbor now but a few clammers' shacks, rattlety things, mostly deserted in the winter, but clammers are a quiet lot anyway. They hardly speak from day's end to end and they walk with their heads down and their shoulders bowed.

  That was the place I was headed for. I spent nighttide there before I went in the service, and the nighttide before I married my Mary, and part of the night Ellen was born that hurt her so bad. I was compelled to go and sit inside there and hear the little waves slap the stone and look out at the sawtooth Whitsun rocks. I saw it, lying
in bed, watching the dance of the red spots, and I knew I had to sit there. It's big changes take me there--big changes.

  South Devon runs along the shore, and there are lights aimed at the beach put there by good people to keep lovers from getting in trouble. They have to go somewhere else. A town ordinance says that Wee Willie has to patrol once an hour. There wasn't a soul on the beach--not a soul, and that was odd because someone is going fishing, or fishing, or coming in nearly all the time. I lowered myself over the edge and found the outcrop stone and doubled into the little cave. And I had hardly settled myself before I heard Wee Willie's car go by. That's twice I had avoided passing the time of night with him.

  It sounds uncomfortable and silly, sitting cross-legged in a niche like a blinking Buddha, but some way the stone fits me, or I fit. Maybe I've been going there so long that my behind has conformed to the stones. As for its being silly, I don't mind that. Sometimes it's great fun to be silly, like children playing statues and dying of laughter. And sometimes being silly breaks the even pace and lets you get a new start. When I am troubled, I play a game of silly so that my dear will not catch trouble from me. She hasn't found me out yet, or if she has, I'll never know it. So many things I don't know about my Mary, and among them, how much she knows about me. I don't think she knows about the Place. How would she? I've never told anyone. It has no name in my mind except the Place--no ritual or formula or anything. It's a spot in which to wonder about things. No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself. Now, sitting in the Place, out of the wind, seeing under the guardian lights the tide creep in, black from the dark sky, I wondered whether all men have a Place, or need a Place, or want one and have none. Sometimes I've seen a look in eyes, a frenzied animal look as of need for a quiet, secret place where soul-shivers can abate, where a man is one and can take stock of it. Of course I know of the theories of back to the womb and the death-wish, and these may be true of some men, but I don't think they are true of me, except as easy ways of saying something that isn't easy. I call whatever happens in the Place "taking stock." Some others might call it prayer, and maybe it would be the same thing. I don't believe it's thought. If I wanted to make a picture of it for myself, it would be a wet sheet turning and flapping in a lovely wind and drying and sweetening the white. What happens is right for me, whether or not it is good.

  There were plenty of matters to consider and they were jumping and waving their hands for attention like kids in school. Then I heard the slow puttering of a boat engine, a onelunger, a fishing craft. Her masthead light moved south beyond the Whitsun rocks. I had to put everything aside until she turned her red and green lights safe in the channel, a local boat to have found the entrance so easily. She dropped anchor in the shallows and two men came ashore in her skiff. Little wavelets brushed the beach and the disturbed gulls took time to settle back on the mooring floats.

  Item: There was Mary, my dear, to think of, asleep with the smile of mystery on her lips. I hoped she wouldn't awaken and look for me. But if she did, would she ever tell me? I doubt it. I think that Mary, for all that she seems to tell everything, tells very little. There was the fortune to consider. Did Mary want a fortune or did she want it for me? The fact that it was a fake fortune, rigged by Margie Young-Hunt for reasons I didn't know, made no difference at all. A fake fortune was just as good as any and it is possible that all fortunes are a little fake. Any man of reasonable intelligence can make money if that's what he wants. Mostly it's women or clothes or admiration he really wants and they deflect him. The great artists of finance like Morgan and Rockefeller weren't deflected. They wanted and got money, just simple money. What they did with it afterward is another matter. I've always felt they got scared of the ghost they raised and tried to buy it off.

  Item: By money, Mary meant new curtains and sure education for the kids and holding her head a little higher and, face it, being proud rather than a little ashamed of me. She had said it in anger and it was true.

  Item: Did I want money? Well, no. Something in me hated being a grocery clerk. In the Army I made captain, but I know what got me into O. T. C. It was family and connections. I wasn't picked for my pretty eyes, but I did make a good officer, a good officer. But if I had really liked command, imposing my will on others and seeing them jump, I might have stayed in the Army and I'd have been a colonel by now. But I didn't. I wanted to get it over. They say a good soldier fights a battle, never a war. That's for civilians.

  Item: Marullo was telling me the truth about business, business being the process of getting money. And Joey Morphy was telling it straight, and Mr. Baker and the drummer. They all told it straight. Why did it revolt me and leave a taste like a spoiled egg? Am I so good, or so kind, or so just? I don't think so. Am I so proud? Well, there's some of that. Am I lazy, too lazy to be involved? There's an awful lot of inactive kindness which is nothing but laziness, not wanting any trouble, confusion, or effort.

  There is a smell and a feel of dawn long before the light. It was in the air now, a tempering of the wind; a new star or a planet cleared the horizon to eastward. I should know what star or planet but I don't. The wind freshens or steadies in the false dawn. It really does. And I would have to be going back soon. This rising star was too late to have much of a go before daylight. What is the saying--"The stars incline, they do not command"? Well, I've heard that a good many serious financiers go to astrologers for instruction in stock purchase. Do the stars incline toward a bull market? Is A. T. and T. influenced by the stars? Nothing as sweet and remote in my fortune as a star. A beat-up tarot deck of fortune-telling cards in the hands of an idle, mischievous woman, and she had rigged the cards. Do the cards incline but not command? Well, the cards inclined me out to the Place in the middle of the night, and they inclined me to give more thought than I wanted to, to a subject I detested. That's quite a bit of inclining right there. Could they incline me to a business cleverness I never had, to acquisitiveness foreign to me? Could I incline to want what I didn't want? There are the eaters and the eaten. That's a good rule to start with. Are the eaters more immoral than the eaten? In the end all are eaten-- all--gobbled up by the earth, even the fiercest and the most crafty.

  The roosters up on Clam Hill had been crowing for a long time and I had heard and not heard. I wished I could stay to see the sun rise straight out from the Place.

  I said there was no ritual involved with the Place but that is not entirely true. Sometime on each visit I reconstruct Old Harbor for my mind's pleasure--the docks, the warehouses, the forests of masts and underbrush of rigging and canvas. And my ancestors, my blood--the young ones on the deck, the fully grown aloft, the mature on the bridge. No nonsense of Madison Avenue then or trimming too many leaves from cauliflowers. Some dignity was then for a man, some stature. A man could breathe.

  That was my father talking, the fool. Old Cap'n remembered the fights over shares, the quibbling with stores, suspicion of every plank and keelson, the lawsuits, yes, and the killings-- over women, glory, adventure? Not at all. Over money. It was a rare partnership, he said, that lasted more than one voyage, and blistering feuds ever afterward, continuing after the cause was forgotten.

  There was one bitterness old Cap'n Hawley did not forget, a crime he could not forgive. He must have told me about it many times, standing or sitting on the rim of Old Harbor. We spent a goodly time there, he and I. I remember him pointing with his narwhal stick.

  "Take that third rock on Whitsun Reef," he said. "Got her? Now, line her up with the tip of Porty Point at high water. See it there? Now--half a cable-length out on that line is where she lies, at least her keel."

  "The Belle-Adair?"

  "The Belle-Adair."

  "Our ship."

  "Half ours, a partnership. She burned at anchor--burned to the waterline. I never believed it was an accident."

  "You think she was fired, sir?"

  "I do."

  "But--but you can't do that."
/>   "I couldn't."

  "Who did?"

  "I don't know."

  "Why?"

  "Insurance."

  "Then it's no different now."

  "No different."

  "There must be some difference."

  "Only in a single man alone--only in one man alone. There's the only power--one man alone. Can't depend on anything else."

  He never spoke to Cap'n Baker again, my father told me, but he didn't carry it to his son, Mr. Banker Baker. He wouldn't do that any more than he would burn a ship.

  Good God, I've got to get home. And I got. I almost ran and I went up the High Street without thinking. It was still dark enough but a rim of lightness lay on the edge of the sea and made the waves gray iron. I rounded the war memorial and passed the post office. In a doorway Danny Taylor stood as I knew he must, hands in pockets, collar of his ragged coat turned up, and his old peaked shooter's cap with the earflaps turned down. His face was blue-gray with cold and sickness.

  "Eth," he said, "I'm sorry to bother you. Sorry. I've got to have some skull-buster. You know I wouldn't ask if I didn't have to."

  "I know. I mean I don't know, but I believe you." I gave him a dollar bill. "Will that do it?"

  His lips were trembling the way a child's lips do when it's about to cry. "Thank you, Eth," he said. "Yes--that will put me away all day and maybe all night." He began to look better just thinking of it.

  "Danny--you've got to stop this. Think I've forgotten? You were my brother, Danny. You still are. I'll do anything in the world to help you."

  A little color came into his thin cheeks. He looked at the money in his hand and it was as though he had taken his first gulp of skull-buster. Then he looked at me with hard cold eyes.

  "In the first place it's nobody's goddam business. And in the second place you haven't got a bean, Eth. You're as blind as I am, only it's a different kind of blindness."

  "Listen to me, Danny."