Edith’s Diary (20 page)

She took the glass down with her, paused in the hall, then moved toward the big white door with the brass knob. She put on the light switch at once – to the left of the door – as if to protect herself from a darkness that might be hostile. This was ‘the library’, also the sitting room, where Melanie brought everyone for drinks before meals, for tea, just for sitting and talking. It was book-lined, but more important was the fireplace, the big low table everyone could reach from armchairs, the old piano that Melanie played sometimes. The carpet was getting threadbare. The room looked lived in. Edith went out quickly, unable to face it longer, because it was as much her aunt as her aunt herself.

In the kitchen, Edith opened the refrigerator and her gaze at once focused on a huge ham, half cut away from the bone. She took the platter out and found a knife. Ham like the old days, baked in brown sugar, browned remnants of pineapple, soft sweet gravy below, an occasional clove. Edith cut slivers with an ancient kitchen knife. She found a half pan of cornbread, poured a glass of milk and banqueted, standing, for five minutes or so.

She heard a car, looked at her watch, and saw it was almost one. Miss Podnanski. Edith went to let her in.

‘Evening. You’re Mrs Cobb’s niece?’ the blonde girl asked, smiling, removing her coat. She had blue eyes, and cheeks pink with health. She looked barely twenty.

Edith showed the girl up to Melanie’s room. The nurse took Melanie’s pulse, still pleasantly smiling. She had a gentle voice. A human machine, Edith thought, and yet she was delighted that the girl was here, because she knew what to do, what had to be done. Miss Podnanski declined Edith’s offer to make coffee, or to bring a sandwich, because she had just eaten, she said.

‘You can sleep now,’ the nurse said.

So Edith did. Without a bath, after washing only her face and brushing her teeth, Edith fell into the big bed in the room where she had always stayed at her great-aunt’s.

She was awakened by a gentle knock, her name being called – by the nurse, of course. Edith got out of bed, and put a sweater on over her pajama top. She was wanted on the telephone. In the dawn light, she could just see in the hall. The nearest telephone was in Melanie’s room, where the nurse had answered. Edith saw by the clock that it was ten past 7.

‘Hello,
Edith
!’ said a woman’s voice amid crackles. ‘This is Penny. I’m ringing from Ankara…’

Another of Melanie’s nieces, Edith remembered, married to a Frenchman in diplomatic service. Edith answered sleepily but efficiently. Yes, Melanie had had a second stroke and the doctor had not much hope.

‘I’m leaving tomorrow – late today your time, I think. My aunt has my address… We had a wire, you see…’

When she hung up, Edith turned from the telephone and to her surprise Melanie was looking at her, had turned her head. ‘That was Penny,’ Edith said.

‘Oh. Penny. – Sit down, Edie.’ Those were the last words Edith could recognize.

Aunt Melanie wanted to talk. The quiet, bursting-with-health nurse touched Melanie’s shoulder through the plastic, gently told her not to try to speak. Melanie’s lips moved a little, but no voice came. Her eyes were almost closed. It was the first time Edith had watched a death. She did not sit down. Neither did the nurse, and after a few moments, she turned to Edith and said, still gently:

‘It’s over now.’ And she nodded. Edith stood another moment, as if in a trance, while it seeped into her slowly that she and the strange nurse were the only two people in the room.

Edith drove back to Pennsylvania that afternoon. She had done all she could at Aunt Melanie’s house, spoken with the doctor, the undertaker, the funeral home, sent a telegram to Penny, telephoned her mother to give her the news. Her own mother was not feeling well, she said, and Edith had felt a twinge of resentment that her mother had seemed more concerned about her own health than Melanie’s death. But her mother had a weak heart, so Edith supposed that was terrifying. Her mother wasn’t overweight and didn’t smoke, yet she had a bad heart. She was going to see the doctor tomorrow. Her mother had already suffered one stroke, maybe three years ago. Edith had even telephoned Cliffie. Cliffie had said merely, ‘Oh,’ at the news. Just as mechanically, Edith had asked about George. Had Cliffie given him something to eat? Cliffie replied in the affirmative, in a vague way, and Edith knew old George would be all right, nothing more certain, but she imagined the worst in regard to the bedpan, Cliffie pretending not to hear George’s requests, George trying to do things himself. Then as she drove on, Edith told herself to stop it. She was always imagining the worst – naturally, so she wouldn’t be surprised, and might even find things better.

Such was not the case when she got home. First, to her alarm, Cliffie’s Volks was gone. He was not allowed to drive until June. The front door was not locked. Nelson came downstairs and gave Edith an affectionate ‘M-wah-h!’ and pressed himself against her legs, tail erect.

‘Cliffie?’ Edith called, thinking he might be in his room, having lent somebody his car, but there was no answer.

Edith slipped out of boots and coat, and took her suitcase up the stairs, left it on the landing and walked toward George’s door, which was half open but showed no light. ‘George?’ she called. Then she noticed the smell.

She knew, and without a pause plunged in. It was the carpets, the hall floor and
their
scatter rugs. Edith opened George’s window, and continued to work with a will, with bucket, sponges, liquid rug cleaner. George was asleep through it all, snoring gently, despite the bumps of the plastic bucket as Edith set it down again and again. Next came the bedsheets. No, first the bedpan, just for a moment’s relief, because it was so much easier to clean than what she had been cleaning. Even so, she had to leave it to soak in the bath-tub in five inches of water. Amazing! In not quite twenty-four hours! She had to awaken George in order to change the sheets, which she could now do in professional fashion, rolling the patient half way across the bed and so forth. It occurred to Edith that Cliffie had played an unmentionable prank – he probably had – and Edith was
not
going to mention it, because it would only give Cliffie satisfaction if she did. She could see his innocent, well-fed face, as he said, ‘But I
didn’t
!’

‘Tanky, Edit,’ George mumbled, toothless, and turned again to sleep.

Edith glanced at the codeine bottles, realized she didn’t know what their level was supposed to be, and that she didn’t particularly care. She unpacked her case, went down to check the fridge and found it adequate for tonight’s dinner even if Cliffie returned, had a bath and put on blue corduroy slacks and a sweater, and started preparing dinner, activities which seemed a breeze compared to cleaning George’s room. She poured herself a drink, and rang up Frances Quickman to thank her.

‘Well, you sound quite cheerful, considering,’ Frances said.

‘Why not? What else can one do? I don’t suppose you know where Cliffie is? He wasn’t home when I got home, and his car is gone.’

‘His car! No, I’m afraid I don’t, Edie. And the two times I went in to feed Nelson, Cliffie wasn’t in.’

Cliffie did come in a little after 8, when Edith was having her second drink and listening to Fauré’s
Requiem
on the record player. Because of the music, she had not heard Cliffie’s car, if he had come in the car. Cliffie was pink-eyed, carrying some tabloid-sized newspaper which he had twisted into a tight roll.

‘Well, hello!’ Edith said. ‘You’re driving the Volks?’

‘No, I lent it to someone. He drove it – drove me back.’

Edith knew she would have to move the Volks to get her own car out of the driveway. Suddenly she was impatient with the music, because ‘In Paradisum’ was coming up, and while alone she might have liked it, with Cliffie it became a sacrilege. She switched the set off and said, ‘Aunt Melanie’s funeral is tomorrow morning. I’m going to get a good night’s sleep and start out early. Do you want to come?’

Cliffie stared at her solemnly, almost focusing. ‘No.’

Edith had expected it. ‘Thanks for your help with George.’

‘That
shit-ass
!’
Cliffie hurled the rolled newspaper at the sofa, whence Nelson leapt down, though it hadn’t come near him.

Edith put the record away in its sleeve with deliberate care. Then she took the rest of her drink into the kitchen.

She grilled two lamb chops, not wanting more than one herself. If Cliffie wanted to join her, he could, as usual. But he didn’t join her. Edith ate at the kitchen table, and before she was finished, the telephone rang. It was Brett, who said he had tried earlier to reach her. Edith told him why she had rung him from Delaware, not reaching him either, to tell him that Melanie had died. She had thought he might want to know, Edith said.

‘I can’t make it tomorrow, Edith. I’m awfully sorry about Melanie. But my God, she was getting on, wasn’t she?’

Edith when she had hung up walked away from the telephone with a bitterness, a sourness, in her heart. Brett had sounded phony. The man she had loved, lived with, whose child she had borne, had sounded as phony as a stranger trying to say the right thing.

She suddenly felt clear as ice in the head. She looked around her familiar hall and stairway, at the coathooks, with different eyes – or so it seemed. She detested it all, detested Cliffie, George, even the image of her own garden. She opened the front door and let the icy air surround her, enter her nostrils where it seemed to turn to crystal. She remembered her great-aunt’s face in repose, and deliberately erased from it the twist that the stroke had caused. Melanie’s spirit was still with her.

In her diary, Brett’s little daughter had no place, had not been mentioned, and the thought of her in the Brunswick Corner living room no longer made Edith giggle. Cliffie and Debbie now had a pleasant house in the country near Princeton, a comfortable number of miles from Debbie’s parents, and Edith sometimes visited them there. Brett had vanished like a shadow that never was, never had been. Just now Cliffie commuted once a week to New York, where he stayed overnight in the apartment he and Debbie maintained. For a period of two months, Cliffie was in conference with other engineers of his company, discussing current work in Kuwait where he had just come from, or he was at home in New Jersey working on an invention of his own which he did not talk about to anyone (outside of his company), even Debbie. Edith continued:

‘Our,’ she thought. Who was our? But she let it stand. She added only:

I am happy.

She wrote this with a rather defiant firmness. There was a smile on her face as she stood up from her worktable.

The floor of the room was nearly covered now by a couple of plastic sheets meant to catch the clay droppings and plaster dust from castings. She had removed the two carpets, which were rolled up in the guestroom. In February, she had found what books she could on sculpture in the Trenton library, had bought others, and bought a book about Epstein’s work, which she admired. Her head of Melanie, life-size, was a bit in the style of Epstein, but there was no harm in imitating the masters, she thought, since even great artists had, at first. When she had begun her sculpting, Gert Johnson had said, ‘Oh! Let’s start a class! A club!’ but Edith had wriggled out of that. Edith didn’t fancy a bunch of semi-idle women, starting with enthusiasm, dropping out in less than a month. Anyway, who among them was equipped to teach?

Besides the head of Melanie in Plasticine, Edith had done two abstracts, each about ten inches long, six inches broad and high. One looked like a crouching horned toad, though one could see many things in it – an interesting rock, peak-roof houses, the Alps, perhaps. The other abstract was ‘Four-Legged Animal,’ unidentifiable as any particular animal, lying heavily on its stomach, head turned slightly with an air of alertness. Gert liked this best.

Actually, Edith was unhappy, and there were moments when she realized this, as for instance in late January, not long after Melanie’s death, when she had seen jonquils pushing upward again through the still frozen ground. Pushing upward for what? She had realized that another spring was coming (it was really coming on now in March), to be followed by another summer, blossoming red roses, dahlias and all that. For what? Nature had its own rounds, and now Edith felt out, left out. She realized, when she was thinking logically (or thought she was), that this was her own doing, that her thoughts made her more depressed and unhappy. Yet the thought (that she felt left out) had its own truth and reality, so what was so wrong in thinking it? She couldn’t just ‘deny’ it, like a Christian Scientist, and derive any solace from that.

So the sculpting, amateurish, blundering though she might be as yet, took her away from the dreariness. It was a second crutch, maybe, her diary being the first. One had to live somehow. The Thatchery passed the time, brought in some money, and logically was a healthy escape, because she had to work with people, had to look presentable, had to be pleasant and efficient. Sometimes Edith saw herself quite objectively, she felt, and surely that was all to the good. Sometimes she imagined seeing herself from a great height up in the sky, trudging along Main Street toward the Thatchery at ten to 2 p.m., one more little cog in the messy human-race machine, full of proper food and vitamins, destined to die one day like everybody else.

Edith went down to check the dinner in the oven. It was Sunday. She had a pot roast, surrounded now by carrots, onions and small potatoes, gently bubbling in brown juice. It could stand another twenty minutes, she thought. Cliffie was out in the garden, rather to Edith’s surprise, strolling about with a squirelike air, hands in pockets. He wore the tweed jacket with loud blue stripes which Edith didn’t care for, though to be nice she had paid him a compliment on it when he had bought it. She saw him teeter a little in his slow pace, knew he was a bit drunk, and congratulated herself for not caring at all. She went upstairs again to her workroom, which she had begun to call a studio.

Her head of Cliffie showed a pleasant but determined face, looking to Cliffie’s left. The strong brows scowled a bit, the closed lips, however, turned up gently at the corners. The hair on the top of the head peaked as if blown by a wind, abundant hair, with sideburns, but not long in back, certainly not the way Cliffie usually wore his. Since two months or so, Cliffie looked like an unkempt Jesus, and of course he didn’t even comb or brush his hair, discouraged no doubt by the tangles.

After gazing for a while at two photographs of Cliffie propped on a conveniently near bookcase, Edith made a slight addition of Plasticine to the right cheekbone. She loved the muscular neck, which she thought a success: it had dash, and was a constant inspiration to her to make the rest of the head as good. In the dark clay head, Cliffie was emerging as a young god, the way he was in her diary, conqueror of continents, master of rivers, fine husband and provider, begetter of the angelic little Josephine.

As usual, time flew, and twenty-five minutes had passed before she knew it. Edith went into the bathroom to scrub her hands, then down the stairs. She cut off the oven, then poured herself an iceless scotch and water. She went to the back door to call Cliffie, but he wasn’t there.

‘Cliffie?’ She directed this toward his room.

‘Yep?’

‘Lunch in about one minute.’

Edith had already set the table. She added a jug of inexpensive Italian red wine to the table, then carved the meat. It looked delicious, and she was hungry. Cliffie came in and sat down in silence.

‘Cliffie, would you mind turning that music off?’ Edith had realized it was not the transistor now, but his record player, because ‘Hey, Jude’ was playing over and over.

‘Why? That’s a good song.’ Cliffie looked at her with pinkish eyes, and shoved his fork in his food.

‘I know it’s a good song, but this must be the sixth time —’

‘It is not the sixth time.’

Edith stifled her temper, because the alternative was to go in and turn it off herself, and she didn’t want a fight.

‘My record player, after all,’ Cliffie added in the gentle tone he sometimes assumed when he was saying something defiant. ‘Got to have some rights around here.’

Edith sighed and ate slowly. ‘Did something happen this morning? – Yesterday?’ Cliffie had come home late, maybe 3 or 4 a.m., and Edith assumed he had been at Mickey’s bar, because he never went to anyone’s house, as far as she knew.

‘Not at all,’ Cliffie said. ‘Nothing happened. Why? – Why’re you picking on me?’

Edith decided to ignore it, reminded herself she had weathered many a meal like this before, that there was no use spoiling Sunday dinner with a quarrel. Better to have an imaginary conversation with an imaginary person sitting at one of the places to right and left of her. And – to make her food go down better – she reminded herself that Cliffie had been badly shocked by Melanie’s death, though he had hardly said a word. He had reacted with a frozen fear, a paralysis of tongue, maybe of feeling. Melanie had been a link with Cliffie’s childhood. Perhaps, Edith thought and hoped, Cliffie was capable of more normal and deep emotion than she and Brett had ever given him credit for. Edith herself, though carrying on her duties, had been also in a kind of paralysis for at least a week after Melanie’s burial. She could sympathize.

‘You know, Cliffie,’ Edith said, ‘I miss Melanie very much – shall miss her. You mustn’t let the fact that she’s dead get you down too much. We all have to face death. I wanted you to know it depresses me too – upsets me.’

Cliffie threw his knife down with a clatter that sounded loud enough to have broken the plate. ‘I don’t give a
damn
about the
dead
!
What makes you think I do? What can anybody do about it, anyway? What’s the use of
talking
about it?’

‘I didn’t mean to be talking about it, going on about it,’ Edith said quickly.

‘Then shut up about it!’ Now Cliffie was on his feet. He seized his wine glass and drank it off, dribbling red wine down the front of his sweater. He grabbed a napkin and gave the sweater a single wipe, wiped his mouth, dropped the napkin, and went to his room. A second later, ‘Hey, Jude’ boomed up louder.

Edith took her plate into the kitchen, shut the door, and finished her meal. There were baked apples for dessert, keeping warm in their pan atop the stove, but she had no appetite for anything more. For God’s sake, she had wanted only to try to
join
him in whatever was troubling him, to make him feel he wasn’t alone in feeling troubled, or hopeless sometimes, or discouraged. And his eyes had flashed red, it seemed to her.

She washed up halfway, so the kitchen wouldn’t look like too much to do when she faced it again. There was, of course, George’s meal to be served. George was eating later, and less, but Edith had not as yet failed to give him his three meals plus, usually, tea. Edith prepared a tray, an attractive hot plate of food, a half glass of wine – surely good for him – and took it up.

She now had the old radio in her workroom, because she spent so much time there since the sculpting. She switched on to an afternoon concert. Beethoven’s fourth piano concerto, she recognized, somewhere in the first movement. That was splendid. She picked up a wooden tool shaped like a spoon with a pointed tip. With this she pressed a deeper crease under the lower lids, finished them off with an upward sweep. Excellent! That was all right, and she wasn’t going to touch the eyes again. She felt pleased. And now she wanted the mouth less wide, with the same puzzled, amused expression.

Edith went to work, lit a cigarette, continued. She kept a big metal ashtray on the floor now.

Into the last movement, into the full orchestra which sounded like the finale of a symphony, came a discordant roar that Edith first supposed was a car horn. But it hadn’t come from the street side. She paused with the wooden instrument still held high. It had come from behind her. Cliffie was in George’s room, shouting something at him, of course. Suddenly she lost the train of the music, lost pleasure in following it.

What was happening now? Curiosity made her put down the wooden thing on the square platform of the armature, go to the door and look into the hall.

Now Cliffie’s tones sounded soothing. Cliffie even laughed. Then there was silence. Edith advanced farther. She could see Cliffie through the partly open door, bending over George, holding something for him.

‘Ha! There we go!’ Cliffie said.

Another step, and a floorboard creaked under Edith’s foot.

At once, George’s door went briskly shut with a familiar slam of latch. Cliffie had kicked it with his foot, Edith was sure. What was he doing?

Edith had an impulse to call out ‘Cliffie!’ and didn’t. Maybe he was arranging the tray to bring it down, making George drain the last of the wine, but she knew Cliffie wasn’t. Cliffie never did anything constructive. That was an axiom, wasn’t it?

To hell with him! To hell with them both!
 

Edith pivoted round, faced her own room again where Beethoven played on, then turned once more to look at George’s closed door. If she was so curious, she told herself, she could go and look through the keyhole. Better yet, knock once and open the door.

She didn’t want to open the door. She wanted to keep standing there, looking, not even trying to listen. The music would have kept out all but quite loud sounds, anyway.

Was Cliffie just wandering about in there, whistling, tippling from a bottle of codeine? Making insulting remarks, inaudible to old George?

But Edith was imagining Cliffie bent over George with a glass of something, Cliffie grinning and ghoul-faced, laughing a little.

‘A-ha! – Ha-ha!’ That was Cliffie. His stage laugh, a burlesque of triumph, but with no mirth.

Edith faced her room again and walked toward it, and at that instant the brilliant music died, there were a few seconds of stunned silence from the audience, then applause began, gathered power, roared to a climax that peppered off the walls as she entered her room and closed the door. ‘
Bravo!
’
a voice from the audience cried. ‘
Ey!
’ ‘
Hey!
’ Thousands of hands proclaimed their delight.
‘Bravo-o-o!
’

Edith picked up the same wooden tool, lifted it to a level of the clay brow, then laid it down again. A voice had begun to announce a Schubert something-or-other. She seized the wooden stick and went to work. After a few seconds, she became absorbed, then lost. It was going to be a good session on the head. That was something. And she suddenly remembered that she was invited to the Quickmans’ for a drink at 6:30. That was nice to look forward to.

Later, Edith didn’t know how much later, she heard the faint boom of the front door closing. She assumed it was Cliffie going out or coming in. Her radio began to play pop music, and Edith turned it off, bent and shook the clay particles into a heap on the plastic sheet, and swept them up. She straightened her back and stretched, looked at the head in profile now, and thought it not bad. And what would Gert say? Gert was a severe critic.
Rotten
and
kitsch
were Gert’s favorite words for some of the stuff in local gift shops,
sick-making
and
phony
for the imitation peasant pottery and machine-made wooden objects.