Edith’s Diary (11 page)

‘Carol will be leaving us early January,’ Brett said.

Methinks they both protest too much, Edith thought. Was New York so far away? Hardly two hours in a fast car.

Five minutes later, Edith was reproaching herself for her bitchy thoughts. Carol was talking knowledgeably on the care of camellias as she stood by the front window, admiring the plant which Edith had brought in from the garden for the winter, and which now had eight buds that were going to open in January or February. Edith saw from the way Carol gently touched the sturdy leaf points that she cared about plants. Cliffie was no longer smirking, but regarded Carol with his straightforward neutral expression – observant, maybe, but maybe his mind was miles away, Edith could never tell. Edith was thinking that Carol was young, and knew little about Brett. Why fear Carol? Why worry? Brett wasn’t the type to sweep a girl off her feet and never had been. He was incapable even of putting on a temporary act. And – happy thought – maybe Carol had called it off herself, and not Brett.

‘She’s pretty,’ Cliffie said, when Carol had gone.

Carol’s car had just turned to the right in the street, toward Trenton.

Brett had heaved a great sigh, and was draining his ice-watery drink. ‘You look nice. I like you in that skirt.’

‘Want a dividend?’ Edith asked, standing by the bar cart.

Brett did. Edith made herself a short one too. Cliffie lingered, chomping ice cubes noisily. Because of Cliffie’s presence, Edith couldn’t talk, and yet, what would she have said anyway? She didn’t feel like paying Carol a compliment, and would never have said under any circumstances, ‘Well, are you sure it’s really over?’ So silence was inevitable.

‘Am I supposed to phone Carstairs again? This week, wasn’t it?’ Brett asked.

Dr Francis X. Carstairs was George’s doctor, who came once a month to have a look at George. Carstairs lived in Washington Crossing, and Brett usually telephoned him from Trenton to remind him, otherwise the doctor could forget.

‘I don’t know,’ Edith said. ‘It seems like a month. Phone tomorrow and ask. Or phone now.’

‘I’d like to try some of that codeine,’ Cliffie put in, smiling. ‘Opium derivative, I see from my trusty dictionary.’

‘Well, don’t,’ Brett said. He was walking about with his drink, and suddenly he scratched his head, which left his black and gray hair standing up in a silly way on top. ‘If I catch you sampling that stuff, I’ll present you with the bill for it.’

‘Is it expensive?’ Cliffie asked. ‘Must be. Opium. Look what the junkies have to pay for it.’

‘Cliffie, get
off t
he subject,’ Brett said.

‘You’ve got to have a very careful prescription for that, haven’t you?’ Cliffie went on.

Brett nearly blew a gasket. He gasped, swung a fist in the air, but it was over in a couple of seconds. Brett became livid at what he considered Cliffie’s stupid, driveling questions, his hanging onto a subject that everyone else had dropped. Edith glanced calmly at her son who was slumped in an armchair. We’re all crackers, Edith thought, all insane, including old George, doped on his pain-killers. She went into the kitchen to prepare dinner.

It was a particularly glorious spring in 1966, not merely because of people’s gardens and trees bursting into blossom (Brunswick Corner looked prettier to Edith every year), but she and Gert got the
Bugle
launched again as a semi-monthly. This was due to increased advertising, and the new price of twenty-five cents a copy. Lots of weekend tourists bought it as a souvenir. Ten or more new shops had opened in town, gift shops, two more antique shops, a pottery shop, and all these advertised. The
Bugle
now had eight pages, and was on sale in a few Philadelphia stores such as Strawbridge and Clothier. As for Edith’s duties, there was always something to report about the local fire department, the police force – the latter well-meaning boobs whom everyone laughed at and called the Keystone Kops. The local cops (two or three) often ran out of gas on a chase, lost their direction for want of a map, or were hopelessly late for emergency calls. Some Brunswick Corner residents were musicians, actors, or painters, and Edith did profiles of them. She wrote most of the editorials on such subjects as the size of shop signs, preservation of local scenery, building permits. She had written one piece in praise of the Lyndon Johnson Head-Start program, and another on LBJ’s remark that the nation was not going to solve its problems by pouring money down a hole, meaning handouts to the poor.

On the Peace Corps, Edith wrote an editorial which never got printed in the
Bugle
,
because Gert thought it too far out, or unrealistic.

That was the way Edith’s first draft went, and she showed it to Gert. Edith was briefly annoyed, out of patience with Gert for saying so emphatically, ‘No. No one would ever let minors go.’ But Edith didn’t quarrel with Gert, and the incident was forgotten. Edith had plenty of editorial ideas in reserve. Every month, two or three people, sometimes more, whom Edith encountered on the street or in shops, stopped her and told her how much they enjoyed the
Bugle
’s
editorials. Some even wrote congratulatory letters. The disapprovers were few.

And Brett was making progress on his book which he had talked about for years,
Pothole Road
,
an analysis of American foreign policy since the end of the Second World War. He had re-written his outline, broken it down into chapters and given the chapters working titles, a method of structure which Edith had suggested to him. He went a couple of times to New York on Saturdays to look up things in the main Public Library and in newspaper articles.

In June Aunt Melanie paid another visit, and Edith was grateful that Cliffie had a job at that time (clerk in one of the town’s haberdasheries called the Stud Box), and that he curbed his drinking during Melanie’s stay. Edith had gently remarked to Cliffie that he seemed to be making inroads into the living room bar cart, and the result of this was that Cliffie cut down a bit on what he took from the living room, but kept a bottle of scotch or gin in his own room in a corner of his closet, Edith had noticed. He wasn’t ever drunk, just a bit oiled all day long. She wished the Stud Box boys would call him down about it, but since the two of them were famous for being oiled themselves, it was rather vain to hope Cliffie would get a reprimand, Edith supposed.

‘Let’s be thankful it isn’t dope,’ Edith said to Brett. ‘The stories Gert tells are
appalling
– right here in Brunswick Corner High School!’ Kevin, their fourteen-year-old, had been recruited somehow by the police and had been on the police payroll as an informer on his schoolmates’ drug purchases, a job, Gert said, that couldn’t last more than a month or so, because the kids would find out who was informing and beat him up. Kevin had escaped that fate, and of course school had closed in June for summer holidays.

Then in mid-September, when the leaves had begun to fall, though it was too early for them to have changed color – Edith’s favorite season, the autumn – Brett made his big speech. Edith always thought of it as his big speech (maybe because she was sure Brett did too), though she didn’t write that flippant-sounding phrase in her diary. He said he was deeply in love with Carol Junkin, that she loved him too, and that neither he nor she could repress it or hide it any longer.

‘I am – bitterly sorry,’ Brett said gently, firmly, and with a kind of clenched teeth desperation, ‘but I don’t see anything honest to do but tell you – and to hope somehow that you’ll agree to a separation.’

Edith’s first surprise, which was total, gave way almost instantly to a sense of impatience. She felt annoyed, as if someone had lit a firecracker under her nose. ‘Are you serious?’

This conversation of a week ago, whenever she recalled it, seemed ludicrous. Brett had assured her he was serious. Then he had launched into the longer part of his speech with the same earnest, dry-mouthed determination.

‘I have a right before it’s too late, or at least that’s the way I feel about it. Our son’s grown up – for better or for worse.’ A shake of his head here. ‘And of course I’ll see about things financially. That’s my responsibility. But I have a right to be happy.’

Edith never said that he hadn’t. She hadn’t bothered asking if he was unhappy with her, and now it was evident that he was unhappy. Or perhaps not happy enough. Not as happy as he considered he deserved to be.

‘I do want to marry Carol. It’s that serious,’ Brett had continued.

This conversation had taken place in their bedroom upstairs, where Brett had asked her to come, Edith knew because Cliffie might have come into the house and the living room at any moment. It had been just past 6 p.m., and Cliffie was lately usually home for dinner.

‘I suppose it’s a shock,’ Brett said. ‘But I just couldn’t go on like this, pretending – or seeing Carol on the sly. It’s not my nature.’

Then Edith had remembered the New York research expeditions since January. He had of course been seeing Carol those Saturday afternoons. And maybe it had been three months since she and Brett had made love? Edith hadn’t the faintest idea or memory, because the act of making love didn’t seem terribly important. Yet, she reminded herself, what else was Brett talking about now in regard to Carol? As Cliffie would have put it, he wanted to screw a younger woman while he still could, while a younger woman would still have him. And in the midst of her confusion or speechlessness, Edith had still been able to think, she remembered, that she wasn’t the first woman in the world to whom such a thing had happened, who had had to listen to the same earnest speech from an honest man who really meant what he was saying.

And now a week later, Edith hadn’t been able to write a word about it in her diary. Who cared anyway whether she noted it in her diary? Certainly she didn’t.

The atmosphere in the house has suffered a sea-change
,
Edith thought she might write, and laughed briefly and hysterically at the idea. Brett went about his usual routine like a little soldier, giving the grass what he hoped might be a final cut but probably wouldn’t be, not daring to put the power mower away for the winter yet, corralling his dirty shirts for the laundry as usual.

How was he going to pay for this house as well as the establishment he and Carol would have, Edith wondered. Of course Carol’s family had money. Brett said he was sure of a job on the
Post
,
he’d been making efforts there. But what if it fell through, Edith thought. Would she have to get a job? She was forty-six. She wouldn’t have to get a job, legally speaking. The noose was around Brett’s neck, but to be decent she might get a job, clerking in a local shop, something like that, because otherwise she didn’t see where enough money would be coming from. Cliffie could get a regular job or get out, Edith thought with a surge of intent, because God knew he’d never paid his keep here.

George might be asked to contribute a bit more. What was old George going to do with his capital anyway, except pass it on to Brett? Edith gathered that he and Carol wanted to move into a bigger apartment in New York than the one Carol had at the moment. They would live together for a few months, then if Edith agreed to the divorce, they would be married.

But Edith had already agreed to the separation, she remembered. She had said, ‘Yes,’ a word like ‘I will,’ when one got married, she thought. It seemed strange. Edith had sometimes the feeling she was dreaming, and when she woke up in the mornings, she would think first that it was a dream, then realize that it wasn’t, because she could see at once the change in Brett, could feel that most of his mind wasn’t present. Not to mention the fact that they didn’t share the same bed any longer. Whose idea had that been, hers or Brett’s? Maybe Edith had suggested that she sleep in her workroom, which she didn’t mind at all as a sleeping place, and Brett to be courteous had said
he
would, and Edith had insisted that
she
sleep in her workroom, really because she didn’t want the recollection of Brett’s having been there, sleeping, so close to her desk and her typewriter, her manuscripts, notes and all the rest of it.

‘What’s going on here?’ Cliffie asked, on noticing the new sleeping arrangements. This was at breakfast one morning.

‘People have a right to sleep where they please,’ Brett said, biting into toast.

‘Maybe it’s a new marital experiment,’ Cliffie said, also biting into toast, and looking from one to the other of his parents for a reaction.

Edith ignored the remark, out of old habit. If Brett glanced at her, sympathetically, Edith simply didn’t care. Brett would soon be out of it, she remembered.

Brett had begun his packing. Edith could see him hesitating over such things as a half dirty pair of Levis, deciding to leave them. He would drive to New York with his things, he said, and return the car later.

‘What do you want me to say to George?’ Edith asked.

‘Oh – I’ve already told him, tried to explain,’ Brett said. ‘I’m not even sure he grasped it. He’s really in his dotage, poor old guy.’

‘Well, it’s all those pills and medicines too,’ Edith said, ‘making him sleepy.’ She was inclined to feel sympathetic toward George just now, because George was at least polite and friendly, as civilized as he could be in his condition. Somehow Brett’s behavior wasn’t civilized. And yet intellectually she had to agree with Brett that he had the right. Brett had told Edith also that he had had a talk with Cliffie. Edith assumed this. Brett had asked Cliffie to come for a walk (or a beer) one evening, which Brett would never have done under ordinary circumstances.

One day that week, when Brett was at the office in Trenton, Cliffie remarked to Edith, ‘My father’s just an old shit like the others. An old letch – leaving you for a younger woman.’

Edith was in the kitchen then, making sandwiches for herself and Cliffie for lunch. ‘I think your father thinks of it as – maybe an experiment,’ Edith replied calmly. ‘You’re old enough to understand that. And if you want to be really grown up, don’t talk about it to your chums. Or anybody.’

Cliffie nodded, his lips slightly parted.

Was he thinking, Edith wondered, that everybody knew already? Gert Johnson knew. The news spread like an invisible gas. How? Yesterday Gert had asked Edith in an unusually worried tone how she was. Gert was coming over for a drink today at 5 p.m., bringing also some checks from Washington Crossing and Hopewell Township advertisers. Edith kept the books.

When Gert arrived, Edith asked about Derek, who had been reported wounded a week ago.

‘Oh, we had a letter from him yesterday!’ Gert said, smiling. ‘It’s just a flesh wound in the calf. To tell you the truth Norm and I are delighted
– naturally
–
that he’s laid up. We wrote back telling him to make the most of it.’ Gert laughed with genuine glee. ‘Maybe the mail is censored, but
I
don’t give a damn. He’s my son and what the hell kind of war is
this
?’

Cliffie was vaguely watching television from an armchair and also listening to them, Edith knew. She and Gert could have gone up to her workroom, and sometimes they did with
Bugle
work, but it was time to offer Gert a rye and water, and Edith knew Gert wanted to talk to her.

‘Cliffie, would you mind terribly,’ Edith began. ‘That’s not an important program, is it?’

‘It’s a load of —’ Instead of the final word, Cliffie brush-banged his hands together, a recent gesture to censor a dirty word, and stood up. His belly projected like an older man’s, and part of his shirt was visible between trousers and the waist of his sweater.

Edith saw Gert give him a glance, as if to say, what a slob you’ve got hanging around the house. They took care of the
Bugle
business in a very few minutes, and Edith made a tidy heap of papers to take up to her room, then made drinks for both of them.

‘By the way, I heard about Brett,’ Gert said, following Edith into the kitchen. Gert wore bell-bottom pink slacks.

‘How, by the way?’ Edith was smiling a little.

‘Oh! A friend of Kevin’s. I don’t know how
he
knew.’

So even Brunswick Corner High School knew. It could hardly be of interest to kids, Edith thought.

‘He’s really leaving – for that Carol,’ Gert said in a whisper.

‘Tomorrow.’ Edith dropped ice cubes into their glasses, and left the rest of the ice tray on the drainboard. ‘He’s moving to New York tomorrow.’