Dunning Was Prominent in Many Charity Drives 8 страница

“My mother gave it to me a week before Johnny and I were married. She even told me how to put it in, although she couldn’t look me in the eye, and if you’d flicked a drop of water on one of her cheeks, I’m sure it would’ve sizzled. ‘Don’t start a baby for the first eighteen months,’ she said. ‘Two years, if you can make him wait. That way you can live on his salary and save yours.’”

“Not the world’s worst advice.” I was being cautious. We were in a minefield. She knew it as well as I did.

“Johnny’s a science teacher. He’s tall, although not quite as tall as you are. I was tired of going places with men who were shorter than me, and I think that’s why I said yes when he first asked me out. Eventually, going out with him got to be a habit. I thought he was nice, and at the end of the night he never seemed to grow an extra pair of hands. At the time, I thought those things were love. I was very naïve, wasn’t I?”

I made a seesaw gesture with my hand.

“We met at Georgia Southern and then got jobs at the same high school in Savannah. Coed, but private. I’m pretty sure his daddy pulled a wire or two to make that happen. The Claytons don’t have money—not anymore, although they did once—but they’re still high in Savannah society. Poor but genteel, you know?”

I didn’t—questions of who was in society and who wasn’t were never big issues when I was growing up—but I murmured an assent. She had been sitting on top of this for a long time, and looked almost hypnotized.

“So I had a diaphragm, yes I did. In its own little plastic lady-box with a rose on the cover. Only I never used it. Never had to. Finally threw it in the trash after one of those getting-it-outs. That’s what he called it, getting it out. ‘I have to get it out,’ he used to say. Then the broom. You see?”

I didn’t see at all.

Sadie laughed, and I was again reminded of Ivy Templeton. “Wait two years, she said! We could have waited twenty, and no diaphragm required!”

“What happened?” I gripped her upper arms lightly. “Did he beat you? Beat you with a broomhandle?” There was another way a broomhandle could be used—I’d read Last Exit to Brooklyn—but apparently he hadn’t done that. She had been a virgin, all right; the proof was on the sheets.

“No,” she said. “The broom wasn’t for beating. George, I don’t think I can talk about this anymore. Not now. I feel… I don’t know… like a bottle of soda that’s been shaken up. Do you know what I want?”

I thought so, but did the polite thing and asked.

“I want you to take me inside, and then take the cap off.” She raised her hands over her head and stretched. She hadn’t bothered putting her bra back on, and I could see her breasts lift under her blouse. Her nipples made tiny shadows, like punctuation marks, against the cloth in the late light.

She said, “I don’t want to relive the past today. Today I only want to fizz.”

An hour later I saw she was drowsing. I kissed her first on the forehead and then on the nose to wake her up. “I have to go. If only to get my car out of your driveway before your neighbors start to call their friends.”

“I suppose so. It’s the Sanfords next door, and Lila Sanford is this month’s student librarian.”

And I was pretty sure that Lila’s father was on the schoolboard, but I didn’t say so. Sadie was glowing, and there was no need to spoil that. For all the Sanfords knew, we were sitting on the couch with our knees together, waiting for Dennis the Menace to finish and Ed Sullivan’s rilly big shew to come on. If my car was still in Sadie’s driveway at eleven, their perceptions might change.

She watched me dress. “What happens now, George? With us?”

“I want to be with you if you want to be with me. Is that what you want?”

She sat up, the sheet puddled around her waist, and reached for her cigarettes. “Very much. But I’m married, and that won’t change until next summer in Reno. If I tried for an annulment, Johnny would fight me. Hell, his parents would fight me.”

“If we’re discreet, everything will be fine. But we have to be discreet. You know that, right?”

She laughed and lit up. “Oh yes. I know that.”

“Sadie, have you had discipline problems in the library?”

“Huh? Some, sure. The usual.” She shrugged; her breasts bobbed; I wished I hadn’t dressed quite so fast. On the other hand, who was I kidding? James Bond might’ve been up for a third go-round, but Jake/George was tapped out. “I’m the new girl in school. They’re testing me. It’s a pain in the keister, but nothing I didn’t expect. Why?”

“I think your problems are about to vanish. Students love it when teachers fall in love. Even the boys. It’s like a TV show to them.”

“Will they know that we’ve…”

I thought about it. “Some of the girls will. The ones with experience.”

She huffed out smoke. “Great.” But she didn’t look entirely displeased.

“How about dinner out at The Saddle in Round Hill? Get people used to seeing us as a couple.”

“All right. Tomorrow?”

“No, I have something to do in Dallas tomorrow.”

“Research for your book?”

“Uh-huh.” Here we were, brand-new, and I was lying already. I didn’t like it, but saw no way around it. As for the future… I refused to think about that now. I had my own glow to protect. “Tuesday?”

“Yes. And George?”

“What?”

“We have to find a way to keep doing this.”

I smiled. “Love will find a way.”

“I think this part is more lust.”

“It’s both, maybe.”

“You’re a sweet man, George Amberson.”

Christ, even the name was a lie.

“I’ll tell you about Johnny and me. When I can. And if you want to hear.”

“I want to.” I thought I had to. If this was going to work, I had to understand. About her. About him. About the broom. “When you’re ready.”

“As our esteemed principal likes to say, ‘Students, this will be challenging but worthwhile.’”

I laughed.

She butted out her cigarette. “One thing I wonder about. Would Miz Mimi approve of us?”

“I’m pretty sure she would.”

“I think so, too. Drive home safe, my dear. And you better take those.” She was pointing at the paper bag from the Kileen Pharmacy. It was sitting on top of her dresser. “If I had the kind of nosy company who checks the medicine cabinet after they tee-tee, I’d have some explaining to do.”

“Good idea.”

“But keep them handy, honey.”

And she winked.

On the way home, I found myself thinking about those rubbers. Trojan brand… and ribbed for her pleasure, according to the box. The lady didn’t have a diaphragm any longer (although I guessed she might arrange for one on her next trip to Dallas), and birth control pills wouldn’t be widely available for another year or two. Even then, doctors would be wary about prescribing them, if I remembered my Modern Sociology course correctly. So for now it was Trojans. I wore them not for her pleasure but so she wouldn’t have a baby. Which was amusing when you considered that I wouldn’t be a baby myself for another fifteen years.

Thinking about the future is confusing in all sorts of ways.

The following evening I revisited Silent Mike’s establishment. The sign in the door was turned to CLOSED and the place looked empty, but when I knocked, my electronics buddy let me in.

“Right on time, Mr. Doe, right on time,” he said. “Let’s see what you think. Me, I think I outdid myself.”

I stood by the glass case filled with transistor radios and waited while he disappeared into the back room. He returned holding a lamp in each hand. The shades were grimy, as if they had been adjusted by a great many dirty fingers. The base of one was chipped so it stood crooked on the counter: the Leaning Lamp of Pisa. They were perfect, and I told him so. He grinned and put two of the boxed tape recorders next to the lamps. Also a drawstring bag containing several lengths of wire so thin it was almost invisible.

“Want a little tutorial?”

“I think I’ve got it,” I said, and put five twenties down on the counter. I was a little touched when he tried to push one back.

“One-eighty was the price we agreed on.”

“The other twenty is for you to forget I was ever here.”

He considered this for a moment, then put a thumb on the stray twenty and pulled it into the group with its little green friends. “I already did that. Why don’t I consider this a tip?”

As he put the stuff into a brown paper bag, I was struck by simple curiosity and asked him a question.

“Kennedy? I didn’t vote for him, but as long as he doesn’t go taking his orders from the Pope, I think he’ll be okay. The country needs somebody younger. It’s a new age, y’know?”

“If he were to come to Dallas, do you think he’d be all right?”

“Probably. Can’t say for sure, though. On the whole, if I were him, I’d stay north of the Mason-Dixon line.”

I grinned. “Where all is calm, all is bright?”

Silent Mike (Holy Mike) said, “Don’t start.”

There was a rack of pigeonholes for mail and school announcements in the first-floor teachers’ room. On Tuesday morning, during my free period, I found a small sealed envelope in mine.

Dear George—

If you still want to take me to dinner tonight, it will have to be five-ish, because I’ll have early mornings all this week and next, getting ready for the Fall Book Sale. Perhaps we could come back to my place for dessert.

I have poundcake, if you’d like a slice.

Sadie

“What are you laughing about, Amberson?” Danny Laverty asked. He was correcting themes with a hollow-eyed intensity that suggested hangover. “Tell me, I could use a giggle.”

“Nah,” I said. “Private joke. You wouldn’t get it.”

But we got it, poundcake became our name for it, and we ate plenty that fall.

We were discreet, but of course there were people who knew what was going on. There was probably some gossip, but no scandal. Smalltown folks are rarely mean folks. They knew Sadie’s situation, at least in a general way, and understood we could make no public commitment, at least for awhile. She didn’t come to my house; that would have caused the wrong kind of talk. I never stayed beyond ten o’clock at hers; that also would have caused the wrong kind of talk. There was no way I could have put my Sunliner in her garage and stayed the night, because her Volkswagen Beetle, small as it was, filled it almost wall-to-wall. I wouldn’t have done so in any case, because someone would have known. In small towns, they always do.

I visited her after school. I dropped by for the meal she called supper. Sometimes we went to Al’s Diner and ate Prongburgers or catfish fillets; sometimes we went to The Saddle; twice I took her to the Saturday-night dances at the local Grange. We saw movies at the Gem in town or at the Mesa in Round Hill or the Starlite Drive-In in Kileen (which the kids called the submarine races). At a nice restaurant like The Saddle, she might have a glass of wine before dinner and I might have a beer with, but we were careful not to be seen at any of the local taverns and certainly not at the Red Rooster, Jodie’s one and only jukejoint, a place our students talked about with longing and awe. It was 1961 and segregation might finally be softening in the middle—Negroes had won the right to sit at the Woolworth’s lunchcounters in Dallas, Fort Worth, and Houston—but schoolteachers didn’t drink in the Red Rooster. Not if they wanted to keep their jobs. Never-never-never.

When we made love in Sadie’s bedroom, she always kept a pair of slacks, a sweater, and a pair of moccasins on her side of the bed. She called it her emergency outfit. The one time the doorbell bonged while we were naked (a state she had taken to calling in flagrante delicious), she got into those threads in ten seconds flat. She came back, giggling and waving a copy of The Watchtower. “Jehovah’s Witnesses. I told them I was saved and they went away.”

Once, as we ate ham-steaks and okra in her kitchen afterward, she said our courtship reminded her of that movie with Audrey Hepburn and Gary Cooper—Love in the Afternoon. “Sometimes I wonder if it would be better at night.” She said this a little wistfully. “When regular people do it.”

“You’ll get a chance to find out,” I said. “Hang in there, baby.”

She smiled and kissed the corner of my mouth. “You turn some cool phrases, George.”

“Oh yes,” I said, “I’m very original.”

She pushed her plate aside. “I’m ready for dessert. How about you?”

Not long after the Jehovah’s Witnesses came calling at Sadie’s place—this must have been early November, because I’d finished casting my version of Twelve Angry Men—I was out raking my lawn when someone said, “Hello, George, how’s it going?”

I turned around and saw Deke Simmons, now a widower for the second time. He had stayed in Mexico longer than anyone had thought he would, and just when folks began to believe he was going to remain there, he had come back. This was the first time I’d seen him. He was very brown, but far too thin. His clothes bagged on him, and his hair—iron-gray on the day of the wedding reception—was now almost all white and thinning on top.

I dropped my rake and hurried over to him. I meant to shake his hand, but hugged him instead. It startled him—in 1961, Real Men Don’t Hug—but then he laughed.

I held him at arm’s length. “You look great!”

“Nice try, George. But I feel better than I did. Meems dying…

I knew it was going to happen, but it still knocked me for a loop. Head could never get through to heart on that one, I reckon.”

“Come on in and have a cup of coffee.”

“I’d like that.”

We talked about his time in Mexico. We talked about school. We talked about the undefeated football team and the upcoming fall play. Then he put down his cup and said, “Ellen Dockerty asked me to pass on a word or two about you and Sadie Clayton.”

Uh-oh. And I’d thought we were doing so well.

“She goes by Dunhill now. It’s her maiden name.”

“I know all about her situation. Knew when we hired her. She’s a fine girl and you’re a fine man, George. Based on what Ellie tells me, the two of you are handling a difficult situation with a fair amount of grace.”

I relaxed a little.

“Ellie said she was pretty sure neither of you knew about Candlewood Bungalows just outside of Kileen. She didn’t feel right about telling you, so she asked if I would.”

“Candlewood Bungalows?”

“I used to take Meems there on a lot of Saturday nights.” He was fiddling at his coffee cup with hands that now looked too big for his body. “It’s run by a couple of retired schoolteachers from Arkansas or Alabama. One of those A-states, anyway. Retired men schoolteachers. If you know what I mean.”

“I think I’m following, yes.”

“They’re nice fellows, very quiet about their own relationship and about the relationships of some of their guests.” He looked up from his coffee cup. He was blushing a little, but also smiling. “This isn’t a hot-sheet joint, if that’s what you’re thinking. Farthest thing from it. The rooms are nice, the prices are reasonable, and the little restaurant down the road is a-country fare. Sometimes a gal needs a place like that. And maybe a man does, too. So they don’t have to be in such a hurry. And so they won’t feel cheap.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“Very welcome. Mimi and I had many pleasant evenings at the Candlewood. Sometimes we only watched the TV in our pajamas and then went to bed, but that can be as good as anything else when you get to a certain age.” He smiled ruefully. “Or almost. We’d go to sleep listening to the crickets. Or sometimes a coyote would howl, very far away, out in the sage. At the moon, you know. They really do that. They howl at the moon.”

He took a handkerchief from his back pocket with an old man’s slowness and mopped his cheeks with it.

I offered my hand and Deke took hold.

“She liked you, although she never could figure out what to make of you. She said you reminded her of the way they used to show ghosts in those old movies from the thirties. ‘He’s bright and shiny, but not all here,’ she said.”

“I’m no ghost,” I said. “I promise you.”

He smiled. “No? I finally got around to checking your references. This was after you’d been subbing for us awhile and did such a bang-up job with the play. The ones from the Sarasota School District are fine, but beyond there…” He shook his head, still smiling. “And your degree is from a mill in Oklahoma.”

Clearing my throat did no good. I couldn’t speak at all.

“And what’s that to me, you ask? Not much. There was a time in this part of the world when if a man rode into town with a few books in his saddlebags, spectacles on his nose, and a tie around his neck, he could get hired on as schoolmaster and stay for twenty years. Wasn’t that long ago, either. You’re a damn fine teacher. The kids know it, I know it, and Meems knew it, too. And that’s a lot to me.”

“Does Ellen know I faked my other references?” Because Ellen Dockerty was acting principal, and once the schoolboard met in January, the job would be hers permanently. There were no other candidates.

“Nope, and she’s not going to. Not from me, at least. I feel like she doesn’t need to.” He stood up. “But there’s one person who does need to know the truth about where you’ve been and what you’ve done, and that’s a certain lady librarian. If you’re serious about her, that is. Are you?”

“Yes,” I said, and Deke nodded as if that took care of everything.

I only wished it did.

Thanks to Deke Simmons, Sadie finally got to find out what it was like to make love after sundown. When I asked her how it was, she told me it had been wonderful. “But I’m looking forward to waking up next to you in the morning even more. Do you hear the wind?”

I did. It hooted around the eaves.

“Doesn’t that sound make you feel cozy?”

“Yes.”

“I’m going to say something now. I hope it doesn’t make you uncomfortable.”

“Tell me.”

“I guess I’ve fallen in love with you. Maybe it’s just the sex, I’ve heard that’s a mistake people make, but I don’t think so.”

“Sadie?”

“Yes?” She was trying to smile, but she looked frightened.

“I love you, too. No maybe or mistake about it.”

“Thank God,” she said, and snuggled close.

On our second visit to the Candlewood Bungalows, she was ready to talk about Johnny Clayton. “But turn out the light, would you?”

I did as she asked. She smoked three cigarettes during the telling. Toward the end, she cried hard, probably not from remembered pain so much as simple embarrassment. For most of us, I think it’s easier to admit doing wrong than being stupid. Not that she had been. There’s a world of difference between stupidity and naïveté, and like most good middle-class girls who came to maturity in the nineteen-forties and-fifties, Sadie knew almost nothing about sex. She said she had never actually looked at a penis until she had looked at mine. She’d had glimpses of Johnny’s, but she said if he caught her looking, he would take hold of her face and turn it away with a grip that stopped just short of painful.

“But it always did hurt,” she said. “You know?”

John Clayton came from a conventionally religious family, nothing nutty about them. He was pleasant, attentive, reasonably attractive. He didn’t have the world’s greatest sense of humor (almost none might have been closer to the mark), but he seemed to adore her. Her parents adored him. Claire Dunhill was especially crazy about Johnny Clayton. And, of course, he was taller than Sadie, even when she was in heels. After years of beanpole jokes, that was important.

“The only troubling thing before the marriage was his compulsive neatness,” Sadie said. “He had all his books alphabetized, and he got very upset if you moved them around. He was nervous if you took even one off the shelf—you could feel it, a kind of tensing. He shaved three times a day and washed his hands all the time. If someone shook with him, he’d make an excuse to rush off to the lav and wash just as soon as he could.”

“Also color-coordinated clothes,” I said. “On his body and in the closet, and woe to the person who moved them around. Did he alphabetize the stuff in the pantry? Or get up sometimes in the night to check that the stove burners were off and the doors were locked?”

She turned to me, her eyes wide and wondering in the dark. The bed squeaked companionably; the wind gusted; a loose windowpane rattled. “How do you know that?”

“It’s a syndrome. Obsessive-compulsive disorder. OCD, for short. Howard—” I stopped. Howard Hughes has a bad case of it, I’d started to say, but maybe that wasn’t true yet. Even if it was, people probably didn’t know. “An old friend of mine had it. Howard Temple. Never mind. Did he hurt you, Sadie?”

“Not really, no beating or punching. He slapped me once, that’s all. But people hurt people in other ways, don’t they?”

“Yes.”

“I couldn’t talk to anyone about it. Certainly not my mother. Do you know what she told me on my wedding day? That if I said half a prayer before and half a prayer during, everything would be fine. During was as close as she could come to the word intercourse. I tried to talk to my friend Ruthie about it, but only once. This was after school, and she was helping me pick up the library. ‘What goes on behind the bedroom door is none of my business,’ she said. I stopped, because I didn’t really want to talk about it. I was so ashamed.”

Then it came in a rush. Some of what she said was blurred by tears, but I got the gist. On certain nights—maybe once a week, maybe twice—he would tell her he needed to “get it out.” They would be lying side by side in bed, she in her nightgown (he insisted she wear ones that were opaque), he in a pair of boxer shorts. Boxers were the closest she ever came to seeing him naked. He would push the sheet down to his waist, and she would see his erection tenting them.

“Once he looked at that little tent himself. Only once that I remember. And do you know what he said?”

“No.”

“‘How disgusting we are.’ Then he said, ‘Get it over with so I can get some sleep.’”

She would reach beneath the sheet and masturbate him. It never took long, sometimes only seconds. On a few occasions he touched her breasts as she performed this function, but mostly his hands remained knotted high on his chest. When it was over, he would go into the bathroom, wash himself off, and come back in wearing his pajamas. He had seven pairs, all blue.

Then it was her turn to go into the bathroom and wash her hands. He insisted that she do this for at least three minutes, and under water hot enough to turn her skin red. When she came back to bed, she held her palms out to his face. If the smell of Lifebuoy wasn’t strong enough to satisfy him, she would have to do it again.

“And when I came back, the broom would be there.”

He would put it on top of the sheet if it was summer, on the blankets if it was winter. Running straight down the middle of the bed. His side and her side.

“If I was restless and happened to move it, he’d wake up. No matter how fast asleep he was. And he’d push me back to my side. Hard. He called it ‘transgressing the broom.’”

The time he slapped her was when she asked how they would ever have children if he never put it in her. “He was furious. That’s why he slapped me. He apologized later, but what he said right then was, ‘Do you think I’d put myself in your germy womanhole and bring children into this filthy world? It’s all going to blow up anyway, anyone who reads the paper can see that coming, and the radiation will kill us. We’ll die with sores all over our bodies, and coughing up our lungs. It could happen any day.’”

“Jesus. No wonder you left him, Sadie.”

“Only after four wasted years. It took me that long to convince myself that I deserved more from life than color-coordinating my husband’s sock drawer, giving him handjobs twice a week, and sleeping with a goddam broom. That was the most humiliating part, the part I was sure I could never talk about to anyone… because it was funny.”

I didn’t think it was funny. I thought it was somewhere in the twilight zone between neurosis and outright psychosis. I also thought I was listening to the perfect Fifties Fable. It was easy to imagine Rock Hudson and Doris Day sleeping with a broom between them. If Rock hadn’t been gay, that was.

“And he hasn’t come looking for you?”

“No. I applied to a dozen different schools and had the answers sent to a post office box. I felt like a woman having an affair, sneaking around. And that’s how my mother and father treated me when they found out. My dad has come around a little—I think he suspects how bad it was, although of course he doesn’t want to know any of the details—but my mother? Not her. She’s furious with me. She had to change churches and quit the Sewing Bee. Because she couldn’t hold her head up, she says.”

In a way, this seemed as cruel and crazy as the broom, but I didn’t say so. A different aspect of the matter interested me more than Sadie’s conventional Southern parents. “Clayton didn’t tell them you were gone? Have I got that right? Never came to see them?”

“No. My mother understood, of course.” Sadie’s ordinarily faint Southern accent deepened. “I just shamed that poor boy so bad that he didn’t want to tell anyone.” She dropped the drawl. “I’m not being sarcastic, either. She understands shame, and she understands covering up. On those two things, Johnny and my mama are in perfect harmony. She’s the one he should have married.” She laughed a little hysterically. “Mama probably would have loved that old broom.”

“Never a word from him? Not even a postcard saying, ‘Hey Sadie, let’s tie up the loose ends so we can get on with our lives?’”

“How could there be? He doesn’t know where I am, and I’m sure he doesn’t care.”

“Is there anything you want from him? Because I’m sure a lawyer—”

She kissed me. “The only thing I want is here in bed with me.”

I kicked the sheets down to our ankles. “Look at me, Sadie. No charge.”

She looked. And then she touched.

I drowsed afterward. Not deep—I could still hear the wind and that one rattling windowpane—but I got far enough down to dream. Sadie and I were in an empty house. We were naked. Something was moving around upstairs—it made thudding, unpleasant noises. It might have been pacing, but it seemed as if there were too many feet. I didn’t feel guilty that we were going to be discovered with our clothes off. I felt scared. Written in charcoal on the peeling plaster of one wall were the words I WILL KILL THE PRESIDENT SOON. Below it, someone had added NOT SOON ENOUGH HES FULL OF DISEEZE. This had been printed in dark lipstick. Or maybe it was blood.

Thud, clump, thud.

From overhead.

“I think it’s Frank Dunning,” I whispered to Sadie. I gripped her arm. It was very cold. It was like gripping the arm of a dead person. A woman who had been beaten to death with a sledgehammer, perhaps.

Sadie shook her head. She was looking up at the ceiling, her mouth trembling.

Clud, thump, clud.

Plaster-dust sifting down.

“Then it’s John Clayton,” I whispered.

“No,” she said. “I think it’s the Yellow Card Man. He brought the Jimla.”

Above us, the thudding stopped abruptly.

She took hold of my arm and began to shake it. Her eyes were eating up her face. “It is! It’s the Jimla! And it heard us! The Jimla knows we’re here!”

“Wake up, George! Wake up!”

I opened my eyes. She was propped on one elbow beside me, her face a pale blur. “What? What time is it? Do we have to go?” But it was still dark and the wind was still high.

“No. It isn’t even midnight. You were having a bad dream.” She laughed, a little nervously. “Maybe about football? Because you were saying ‘Jimla, Jimla.’”

“Was I?” I sat up. There was the scrape of a match and her face was momentarily illuminated as she lit a cigarette.

“Yes. You were. You said all kinds of stuff.”

That was not good. “Like what?”

“Most of it I couldn’t make out, but one thing was pretty clear. ‘Derry is Dallas,’ you said. Then you said it backwards. ‘Dallas is Derry.’ What was that about? Do you remember?”

“No.” But it’s hard to lie convincingly when you’re fresh out of sleep, even a shallow doze, and I saw skepticism on her face. Before it could deepen into disbelief, there was a knock at the door. At quarter to midnight, a knock.

We stared at each other.

The knock came again.

It’s the Jimla. This thought was very clear, very certain.

Sadie put her cigarette in the ashtray, gathered the sheet around her, and ran to the bathroom without a word. The door shut behind her.

“Who is it?” I asked.

“It’s Mr. Yorrity, sir—Bud Yorrity?”

One of the gay retired teachers who ran the place.