The Blunderer (5 page)

Walter sat at his desk and reread a letter that had arrived last week from his brother Cliff in Bethlehem. It was a letter on several pages of a small cheap writing tablet, and it told of the everyday events around the farm that Cliff supervised for their father: the rise in the price of eggs, and the champion hen's latest record. It would have been a dull letter, except for Cliff's dry humor that came out in nearly every line. Cliff had enclosed a clipping from a Bethlehem newspaper that Walter had not yet read, with the notation: “Try this on Clara. See if it gets a laugh.” It was a column called
Dear Mrs. Plainfield.

Dear Mrs. Plainfield:

My wife has a way of getting under my skin like no one else I've known. She doesn't do anything but she becomes so darned expert that you can't live with her. If she follows football, well, she knows the scores all over the country, and the records of the teams better than anyone else, so it's no fun talking football with her.

Right now it is the indoor planter fad. She has spent weeks, to say nothing of dollars, amassing her collection of philodendron dubia, philodendron monstera, and even a poor little philodendron hastatum—elephant ear to you and me.

There's a perfectly nice Fiddle Leaf plant in her collection, but let me call it Fiddle Leaf and she goes up in smoke and snarls “Ficus pandurata!” at me. It's the same with the rubber plant. It's not rubber plant to her, it's “Ficus elastica.”

I'm not against plants or those who plant them, but I am against people who turn up their noses at a sweet potato vine because it isn't a deacaena Warneckii—and that's the way my wife is.

Mr. Aspidistra

Walter smiled. He doubted if it would get a laugh from Clara. He knew what had prompted Cliff to send it: the time he and Clara had visited his father, and Cliff had shown them around the barns, pointing out a tractor he called “Chad,” which was an abbreviation of its make-name. Clara had asked Cliff very seriously what he meant by “Chad,” and then had peered at the front of the tractor and announced that it was “Chadwick.” After that, without cracking a smile, Cliff had called every piece of machinery he pointed to by some unintelligible, abbreviated name. Clara had not apparently got the point. She had only looked bewildered. Clara thought Cliff was half cracked, and often tried to convince Walter that he was, and that he ought to do something about him. He was grateful to Cliff for staying on the farm, and for looking after their father. Walter's father had wanted him to be an Episcopalian preacher, like himself, and Walter had disappointed him by holding out for law. Cliff was two years younger than Walter, and not as serious, and their father had never even tried to persuade Cliff into the church. Everyone had expected Cliff to go off after he quit college, but he had chosen to come back and work on the farm.

Walter tossed the letter to one side of his desk, and opened the big scrapbook that he used for his essay notes. The scrapbook was divided into eleven sections, each dealing with a pair or group of friends. Some pages were covered with dated notes in Walter's small handwriting. Others were spotted with pasted pieces of paper on which he had written thoughts at odd moments, sometimes on his typewriter at the office. Other pages held the beginnings of outlines. He turned to the outline he had begun on Dick Jensen and Willie Cross. There were two parallel columns listing Dick's traits and their complements in Willie Cross's character.

Walter remembered another note he had written about them in his memo book, and he went into the bedroom to get it. He felt in the pockets of his jackets for other loose notes, found a piece he had torn out of a newspaper, and a folded envelope on which he had written something. He took them back to his study. The note on Dick said:
Lunch of D. and C.D.'s violent resentment of C.'s proposal to freelance for other law firm.

That was a fertile little note. Cross was also a partner in another firm of legal advisers, Walter had forgotten the precise name. Dick had told Walter all about the offer. It was tempting. Walter wasn't sure that Dick would resist.

There was a gentle knock at the door.

“Come in, Claudia,” he said.

Claudia came in with a tray. She had brought him a chicken sandwich and a beer.

“Just what I need,” Walter said. He uncapped the beer.

“I thought you might be getting kind of hungry. Mrs. Stackhouse said she's already eaten her lunch. Don't you want me to open these curtains, Mr. Stackhouse? There's such a bright sun today.”

“Thanks. I forgot them,” Walter said. “Did you have to come today, Claudia? We shouldn't need any cooking with all that food from the party?”

“Mrs. Stackhouse didn't tell me not to come.”

Walter watched her tall, thin figure as she opened the long curtains and fastened them back. Claudia was that rare thing, a servant who enjoyed her job and consequently did it to perfection. A lot of people around Benedict had tried to outbid them and buy her away, but Claudia struck with them, in spite of the exacting routine Clara laid down about the running of the house. Claudia lived in Huntington, and came by bus every morning at seven on the dot, left at eleven to baby-sit in Benedict, came back at six and stayed until nine. She couldn't sleep in, because she took care of her little grandchild, Dean, who lived at home with her in Huntington.

“I'm sorry we ruined your Sunday,” Walter said.

“Why, Mr. Stackhouse, I don't mind!” Claudia stood by his desk watching his progress on the sandwich. “Will there be anything else, Mr. Stackhouse?”

Walter stood up and reached in his pocket. “Yes. I want you to take this—and buy something for Dean.” He handed her a ten-dollar bill.

“Ten dollars, Mr. Stackhouse! What can he use for ten dollars?” But Claudia was beaming with pleasure at the gift.

“Well, you think of something,” Walter said.

“I sure do thank you, Mr. Stackhouse. That sure is nice of you,” she said as she went out.

Walter sipped his beer and opened the newspaper clipping. It was the item he had torn out in Waldo Point.

BODY OF WOMAN FOUND NEAR TARRYTOWN, N.Y.

Tarrytown, Aug.
14—The body of a woman identified as Mrs. Helen P. Kimmel, 39, of Newark, N.J., was found in a wooded section about a mile south of Tarrytown, the police of the 3rd Precinct reported today. She died from strangulation and from dozens of savage cuts and blows on face and body. Her pocketbook was found a few yards away from her body, its contents apparently untouched. She had been traveling by bus from Newark to Albany to visit a sister, Mrs. Rose Gaines. The driver of the bus, John MacDonough of the Cardinal Bus Lines, stated that he noticed Mrs. Kimmel's absence after a 15-minute rest stop at a roadside café last night at 9:55 p.m. Mrs. Kimmel's suitcase was still aboard the bus. It is believed that she was assaulted while taking a short walk along the highway. None of the passengers questioned reported hearing an outcry.

The victim's husband, Melchior J. Kimmel, 40, a bookdealer of Newark, identified the body in Tarrytown this afternoon. Police are searching for clues.

Not of any use for the essays, Walter thought, because the attacker had probably been a maniac. But it was strange no one had seen or heard anything, unless she had been a very long way from the bus itself. Walter wondered if someone she knew could have met her there, lured her quietly away under a pretence of talking to her, and then attacked her? He hesitated, then leaned towards the waste-basket and dropped the clipping, saw it flutter down to one side of the waste-basket on to the carpet. He'd pick it up later, he thought.

He put his head down on his arms. He suddenly felt that he could sleep.

5

B
y Tuesday, Walter was in bed with the flu.

Clara insisted on calling the doctor to find out what it was, though Walter knew it was the flu: somebody at the party had mentioned a couple of cases of flu around Benedict. Still, Dr. Pietrich came, pronounced it flu, and sent Walter to bed with pills and penicillin tablets. Clara stayed for a few minutes and briskly assembled around him everything he would need—cigarettes and matches, books, a glass of water and Kleenex.

“Thanks, honey, thanks a lot,” Walter said for everything she did for him. Walter felt he was inconveniencing her, that she was grimly doing a duty in trying to make him comfortable. On the rare occasions when he fell ill, he felt as constrained with her as he would have felt with a total stranger. He was glad when she finally went off to work. He knew that she wouldn't call all day, that she would probably even sit downstairs reading the evening paper tonight before she came up to see how he was.

That evening he couldn't force down even the bouillon that Claudia made for him. He had acquired a flaming soreness in his nasal passage, and smoking was impossible. The pills made him drowse, and in the intervals when he was awake, a depression settled on his mind like a black and heavy atmosphere. He asked himself how he had come to be where he was, waiting for a woman he believed himself in love with to come home, a woman who would not even lay her hand on his forehead? He asked himself why he hadn't pushed Dick a little harder about getting out of the firm in the fall instead of the first of the year? He'd talked to Dick the night of the party, which had been a bad time, but Dick was shy about discussing it in the office, as shy as if the office were full of hidden dictaphones planted by Cross. Walter wondered if he'd finally have to get out by himself. But even in his feverish anger, he realized that he needed Dick's partnership. The kind of office they had in mind would take two men to run, and Dick, as a working partner, had some virtues that were hard to find.

When Clara came home, she said. “Are you feeling any better? What's your temperature?”

He knew his temperature, because Claudia had taken it that afternoon. It was 103 degrees. “Not bad,” he said. “I'm feeling better.”

“Good.” Clara emptied her pocketbook methodically, put a few things on her dressing-table, then went downstairs to wait for dinner.

Walter closed his eyes and tried to think of something besides Clara sitting in the living-room, listening to the radio and reading the evening paper. He played a game he played sometimes on the brink of sleep at night, or on the brink of waking in the morning: he imagined a newspaper spread before him, and he let his eyes sweep rapidly over the first sentences of every story.
Today in Gibraltar, in the presence of Foreign Secretaries, Hump-de-dump-de-dump, a new bilateral reciprocal agreement was signed by President Mugwump of Blotz…. Wife says, “He destroyed my love! I had to save my child!” … A grim story unfolded yesterday before District Chief of Police Ronald W. Friggarty. A young blonde woman, her blue eyes dilated with terror, told how her husband came home and beat her and her child regularly with a frying pan every evening at six…. Weather in South America growing ever more temperate, experts declare. A chance discovery of a tiny plastic meteorite on the left shoulder of Mt. Achinche in Bolivia has led climatologists to believe that in the next six hundred years chinchillas will be able to compute their own income taxes…. Radio-photo shows streams of shalluping mourners shuffling by bier of murdered Soviet explorer Tomyatkin in Moscow…. International Weaving Trades Fair to be inaugurated infamous Glass Receptacle at Cologne….
Walter smiled. He saw the item he had torn out about the woman murdered at the bus stop. The words did not come, but he saw the picture of her. She lay in some woods, and there was a bloody gash down her cheek from her eye to the corner of her lip. She was not pretty, but she had a pleasant face, black wavy hair, a strong simple body and a trusting mouth that would have opened in horror at the first threat from her assaulter. A woman like that wouldn't have gone with a stranger any distance on a road. He imagined her accosted by someone she knew:
Helen, I've got to talk to you. Come here.…
She would have looked at him with surprise.
How did you get here? Never mind. I've got to talk to you. Helen we've got to settle this.
It could have been her husband. Walter thought. He tried to remember whether the paper had said where the husband was at the time. He didn't think it had. Perhaps Helen and Melchior Kimmel had lived in a little hell together, too. Walter imagined them fighting in their home in Newark, reaching a familiar impasse, then the wife deciding to take a trip to see a relative. If the husband had wanted to kill her, he could have followed her in a car, waited until she got out at a rest stop. He could have said,
I have to talk to you
, and his wife would have gone with him, down to some dark clump of trees beside the highway….

Thursday evening, Clara came in and sat for a few moments on the foot of his bed. She was afraid of catching the flu from him, and she had been sleeping on the couch in his study. Now that she had not come in contact with him for three days, Walter thought, she was positively blooming. He said very little to her, but she didn't seem to notice. She was absorbed in new sales possibility on the North Shore.

I hate her
, Walter thought. He was intensely aware of it. It gave him a kind of pleasure to think about it.

Later that evening, the sound of a car motor awakened Walter from a doze. He heard two voices on the stairs, one, a woman's voice.

Clara ushered Peter Slotnikoff and the girl called Ellie into the room. Peter apologized for not telephoning first. Ellie had brought him a large bunch of gladioli.

“I'm not quite dead yet,” Walter said, embarrassed.

Walter looked around for something to put them in. Clara had left the room—Walter knew she was annoyed because they had dropped in without calling—and there was no vase in sight. Peter got a vase from the hall and filled it in the bathroom. Walter lay back on the pillows and watched Ellie's hands as she put the flowers in the vase. Her hands were strong and square, like her face, but gentle when they touched things. Walter remembered that she played the violin.