‘You’ll get a bike and not from Uncle George,’ Brett said, wiping his lips on a napkin stretched between his hands. Suddenly Brett grinned and slapped his son on the back. ‘Cheer up, Cliffie. We’re going to have a great life in Pennsylvania. Maybe some fishing. Maybe a little boat of our own to sail on the Delaware! How about that?’
That night, just as Edith was walking toward the bed in her nightgown, she remembered a dream she had had. In the dream, she had closed the refrigerator door, into which Mildew had been poking her head, and cut the cat’s head off. Either she had fainted in the dream or not realized what had happened, because later she had seen the cat walking around the house headless, and when she had rushed to the refrigerator and opened it, the cat’s head had been in there, eating the remains of a chicken, eating everything. Often Mildew stuck her head into the fridge, and Edith had to push her away with her foot before closing the door. Would Cliffie some day slam the fridge door on Mildew’s neck and say it was an accident? Edith found herself clenching her teeth. It hadn’t happened. It wasn’t true. But in her dream, she had done it.
2
Edith sat at her worktable (a flush door on trestles) which was pleasantly set to catch the maximum light from a north bay window. The curving window, some fourteen feet in width, was framed by white curtains, transparent enough for the willows, the green of the box hedges to be visible, and now a light breeze stirred the hems of the curtains. It was a fine November afternoon. They had been in the house nearly two months.
Beyond her worktable, on the wall facing her and above the bench seat hung a framed quotation from Tom Paine which Edith loved.
… These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will in this crisis shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it NOW, deserves the thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered.
The Crisis
She had told Cliffie about Tom Paine, the English-born corset-maker who had become a journalist, whose words had rallied the not always enthusiastic volunteer soldiers of Washington’s army – which had brought their nation into being. She and Brett had taken Cliffie to see the cracked Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, and had in general tried to introduce him to his new Home State, which also included the battlefield of Gettysburg.
Now her diary lay open before her on the table. Last month she had written:
Our Brunswick Corner house – I would like to call it Peace – is as wonderful as I had hoped. Late tomatoes given by Johnsons still yielding in garden. Every day a little improvement on the house. B. arranging for a printer in Trenton for our newspaper which we think to call The Bugle. People here quite friendly, esp. the Johnsons who are one of us politically. Gert J. gives me gardening tips, comes to have a drink around 5:30 now and then.
B. likes his job. Less pressure, less money, but it is time B. began to enjoy life, existence.
A hasty entry, that was. A few days before, in the first weeks of Cliffie’s starting at Brunswick School, Edith had written:
C. today accused of having stolen a football from gym. Teacher called up, asked if I’d seen it in the house. I said no, but would search the house. Did not find it. Have no doubt C. did steal it, maybe passed it on to some boy who doesn’t even go to Brunswick School. This evening C. was evasive, angrily says he is being falsely accused. B. and I on the fence whether we should offer to pay for football. B. ashamed, says let it ride till we know something definite. Too bad C. starts out so soon on wrong foot.
Edith stared at the remaining half page, which was blank, on the right side of her diary, and rubbed her forehead. She and Brett now made Cliffie take a swat at his arithmetic, still his worst subject, two or three evenings a week. She or Brett would sit with him, trying to make it amusing, never making the session a full hour, so that half an hour or forty-five minutes would seem a treat. His English teacher and geography teacher, a woman and man respectively, had written them courteous notes saying that Cliffie was turning up without his written homework done, though Cliffie professed to have had no homework assignments, when Edith had asked him about it. Edith was pleased that the school troubled to write her, after two months. Certainly no New York school would have troubled. Confronted by Cliffie’s obvious lying, Brett had drawn a hand back as if to hit Cliffie. But Brett hadn’t.
She sighed and picked up her pen. She didn’t want to make the entry she was about to make, that she thought she ought to make to keep an honest record. Still balking, she turned back some eight or ten of the sturdy white pages and read:
7/Nov./54. In New York people say politics don’t interest them. ‘What can I do about it anyway?’ This is the attitude government powers in America want to foster and do. News is brief, filtered and slanted. The Guatemalan ‘uprising’ would have been far more interesting if social conditions there had been described and if United Fruit Company’s activities had been exposed – by radio and TV. Discussion clubs should be set up all over America to talk about forces behind things. We have been brainwashed for decades (since 1917) to hate Communism. Reader’s Digest has never failed to print one article per issue about the inefficiency of anything socialized, such as medicine. From the American news media we have snippets without scenery, character or background. How could it be ‘interesting’? People attempting to start discussion clubs, such as B. and I envisage, are labeled Communist. When a Russian is quoted on radio or TV, I find myself thinking in advance, ‘This probably isn’t going to be true, so why listen?’ and if I feel that way already, how about the others? It is still true from 1936 to 1939 the Communists (Russians) were the only people giving the correct interpretation of the Spanish Civil War, giving reasons for the behavior of USA, Germany, France and so on, and the proof was the further rise and enhancement of Hitler and Mussolini and the Second World War.
Since then, of course, she’d read Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia and 1984. Betrayal, betrayal.
That thought did not make Edith feel any better, but she took a firmer grip on her pen – she preferred her lever-filling Esterbrook to a Parker Brett had given her last October for her birthday – and wrote:
9/Nov./55. Awaiting B.’s return from NY with Uncle George. He is coming to stay with us, for a while anyway. I wonder what I’ll be writing a year from now about him? Because I don’t see any end to it, and don’t think G. is anywhere near dying. He’s 73 or 74 and the family lives a long time. I’m quite sure he’s going to need some waiting on. C. already grimly resentful (no milk of human kindness in him!) saying, ‘Does he think we’re an old folks’ home or something?’ If G. does turn out to be insufferable, surely I’ve got the right to say so to B. G. has plenty of money to live in a proper nursing home somewhere. He wants to pay us something, B. says, exactly what I don’t know. When I
She stopped. Through the gentle hum of a car passing on the street, the distant shout of a child, she had heard the closer, more meaningful crackle of the Chrysler climbing the graveled driveway. She made sure the ink was dry on what she’d just written, closed her pen, closed her diary, and pushed it toward a corner of her worktable. She checked her appearance in a mirror on the wall. Hardly any lipstick, but it didn’t matter. Her hair would do, and she ran her fingers upward through the loose, reddish brown curls.
At thirty-six, Edith was trim and athletic, in the sense that her shoulders were strong, her waist rather flat. Once in a while she thought she had put on too much weight, but she could take it off in days with a minimum of effort. She had light brown eyes, much the color of her hair, and eyelashes that seemed to be pointed artificially, which gave her a bright, alert look, she thought, a fact she was grateful for, because she did not always feel bright and alert, and it was nice to think she looked it. Her face was rather square, unlike her mother’s or father’s, and was perhaps a throwback to her Irish great-grandmother whose daguerreotype Edith possessed. Brett had once said she looked like a girl one could come up to and talk to, and Edith remembered he had sai
d this in regard to the first time they met, Brett among a contingent of left-wingers from Columbia visiting Bryn Mawr in the spring of 1942. Brett had been then a post-graduate student at the School of Journalism. How full of energy and enthusiasm he had been then! Why should she think of all that – now? Edith gave her hair a final touch, and turned from the mirror.
A cheerful welcome was what counted now, and Edith intended to give George that. Plus tea or a drink of whatever he wanted. She had seen the old boy three or four times, she remembered, a couple of times in his New York apartment, then once in the nursing home more than a year ago. It was not quite 5 p.m.
Edith went out on the front porch, which had side steps onto the driveway as well as front steps. George, in the front seat beside Brett, seemed to be wearing a plaid bathrobe, and Edith felt a twinge of pity which was at once counteracted by the thought that he might be putting on an act. ‘Hello, George!’ she called as Brett opened the passenger door for him. ‘Welcome!’
‘Hi, honey,’ Brett said. ‘Give me a hand with a couple of these things? Is Cliff around?’
‘He went for a walk with some boys – or to get a soda, I don’t know. – How’re you, George?’ There were two or three carry-alls besides a big suitcase on the back seat.
‘Not too bad, thank you, Edith. And it’s kind of you to have me – indeed.’ He coughed, and had barely squeezed out the last words. His face was pale and flat, his head bald with a fringe of gray. He was a tallish man, and by no means slender but rather solid.
Brett assisted George in getting out of the car and walking up the steps. George stooped, as if he hurt. Edith hovered, ready to take an elbow, but Brett seemed to be doing all right. George wore black shoes with no socks, and had pajamas on under his robe. There was something indecent-looking to Edith about his bare, blue-veined ankles.
‘That’s it. Thank you, Brett, old boy,’ said George.
They got George seated on the living room sofa, and then brought all the luggage into the front hall. Edith announced that she would make some tea, and Brett took the suitcase and one carry-all up the stairs. Edith had decided to give George the small bedroom, not the main guestroom which had a double bed and which Edith knew Brett had thought to give him. They had occasional weekend guests like the Zylstras, and Edith wanted the big guestroom for them. As it was, she was giving up her sewing-and-ironing room.
They had tea in the living room with cinnamon buns and lemon cookies from the shop in town called the Cookie Jar, which was first-rate and used old-fashioned ingredients like butter. George praised the cinnamon buns and ate heartily.
‘How is your back now?’ Edith asked, thinking it a permissible question, and that George might even like to talk about his ailments.
‘My dear, if I only knew,’ replied George. ‘The X-rays don’t show anything, doctors can’t – put their fingers on anything, though they poke enough. Ha-ha! Damned back hurts, that’s all.’
‘You didn’t fall – I’ve forgotten —’
‘No, no. I remember lifting someone’s suitcase, friend I was seeing off at Grand Central – years ago, maybe nineteen-fifty, and bang – a day later, crick in the back and I went from bad to worse.’
‘But – you can walk, at least,’ said Edith, speaking clearly, because George was a little deaf.
‘With a cane sometimes. Yes. But I manage.’ George had large, dark brown eyes, shiny as eyes in a varnished picture, and intelligent.
But George didn’t come down for dinner. Edith had seen that his clothes, sweaters and so forth were stowed away in a small chest of drawers which she had cleared for him, and that his trousers and jackets were hung in the closet. There was a closet in every room in the house, which Edith considered a god-send, as one had no right to expect closets everywhere in a house a hundred years old. Brett had gone up to ask George to come down to dinner, but George had been in bed and asked if they minded if he had a tray. Brett carried the tray up, complete with Jello dessert and a cup of coffee.
‘Is he going to want all his meals in bed, do you think?’ Edith asked when Brett returned.
‘Gosh! An invalid! Bedpans too?’ Cliffie asked, and shrieked with appreciation of his own wit.
‘Hush, Cliffie!’ Edith said.
‘I dunno,’ Brett said. ‘Can’t tell any more than you can.’
Edith sighed, thinking Brett might have asked or somehow found out about a thing as important as this. Cliffie was listening sharply. It was not the time to ask about George’s finances. Edith was ashamed of her own hardness suddenly. Was she tired today? Maybe. The curse to boot. ‘Cliffie?’
‘Yes?’ His brown eyes, hardly darker than her own eyes, looked at her steadily, though sideways.
‘I want you to be polite to your Uncle George, do you understand? Your great-uncle George.’
Cliffie nodded. ‘Yes, Mum.’
After dinner, Brett helped Edith in the kitchen, as he often did. It was a good time to talk, amid the clatter of dishes, and when Cliffie had drifted off to the television.
‘He’s offered – well, he wants to pay us sixty dollars a month,’ Brett said, drying plates one behind the other, making a brisker clatter than usual.
That would just about take care of food, Edith calculated. ‘Well – that’s nice.’
‘I really don’t think he’s stingy.’
What had he been paying at the place he left, Edith wanted to ask, but she didn’t want to seem petty. There was his bedlinen, laundry to consider if he wanted his shirts done. But above all Edith was going to miss those hours Monday to Friday when Cliffie and Brett were out of the house. She liked being alone. Her thoughts flowed better.
‘Look, if it doesn’t work out, honey, we’ll give him a gentle hint, all right?’ Brett kissed Edith below her left ear. ‘I promise.’
Edith didn’t want to say bluntly that it appeared a permanent move. ‘Yes. If he’s got enough money to live somewhere else – and it appears he has.’
‘Sure.’
‘What’s his money in? Stocks?’
‘Some kind of trust, I think. He gets a certain income.’
Edith wanted to have a bath and go to bed and read, but George was in the bathroom. She could see the light under the door. The bathroom was absolutely silent. Edith seized the moment to see if all was well in George’s room, and noticed that Brett had not taken down the tray, though he had come up to chat with George after the dishwashing. Edith picked it up from the floor. George had eaten everything.
A firm, assertive belch came suddenly from the bathroom, and Edith smiled, even shook with laughter for an instant.
In the days that followed, it became evident that George could come down for his meals, but he came down or not, according to whim. Anyway on the days (or noons or evenings) when he wanted a tray brought up, he didn’t say that his back was any worse than on the days when he came down for two or three meals. He never dressed for breakfast, just wore bathrobe and pajamas, and didn’t always get dressed for dinner.
When the Johnsons came for dinner one Saturday night, George did get dressed, and though stooped and stiff as ever, talked a lot and plainly enjoyed the company. George had worked as Paris representative for his law firm in his late twenties, and he had amusing anecdotes to relate. Gert and Norman Johnson lived in Washington Crossing about ten miles away. Norman was a free-lance interior decorator, Gert a painter as well as commercial artist, and she had also been a journalist for a while in Philadelphia. They had three children, the oldest twelve, and they hadn’t much money. Edith rather liked them for their bohemianism (their house was a mess), their sense of humor, and left-wing politics. Edith’s idea of starting a discussion club that would meet once a week at Edith’s house, or at the house of anybody else who was willing, had brought a quick response from Gert. Gert had offered her own house at once, and Edith had gone, bringing one recruit, Ruby Maynell, whom Edith had met in the Brunswick Corner grocery store, where she had met Gert also. And Gert had invited a youthful wido
w from Washington Crossing, plus another woman who hadn’t come. Edith had had some ideas for topics, and they had discussed them for twenty minutes or so, then the conversation had wandered. Such meetings needed a chairman, Edith knew. One could always try again, and she meant to. The same Trenton printer whom she and Brett intended to engage for the Bugle had said he could also print throw-away notices in regard to meetings. That was what they needed, real meetings of twenty or more, men and women, and if they got a discussion group going with at least twelve attending every time, the Brunswick Corner Town Hall could be lent to them, Gert had said. The Town Hall had heating and plenty of folding seats.
The Johnsons had brought their oldest, Derek, along at Edith’s request. Derek went to a different school from Cliffie and was doing well, especially in math and physics, much to his parents’ surprise. He was a slender, blondish boy with slightly wavy hair, a long nose and intense eyes. Now he stared at George Howland, opposite him at the table, like a painter memorizing a face for future use, until finally George said:
‘You’ve got photographic eyes, my boy, as well as a photographic memory?’ George chuckled and glanced at Edith. ‘I think he’s taking a slow daguerreotype.’