Cloud Nine

Chapter 18

So I went over there, around 9:30 the next morning, first stopping by the office, where Helen Musick drew the check, and when I’d signed it, put it in an envelope for me, marked “Mrs. Sibert.” I parked out front, went up on the porch, and rang.

Almost at once came her voice: “Who is it?”

Thinking fast I decided to stall, because if I said my name, she might decide not to come to the door, and just leave me standing there. So, raising my voice to change it, I called: “Special Delivery!”

She answered: “Just a moment, please,” and I heard movement inside. Then the chain bolt rattled and she opened the door, but when she saw who it was, tried to close it. But I was ready for that, and shoved my foot inside the jamb, so she couldn’t. She tried to kick my shin, but had on tennis shoes, and hurt herself, so she winced. But it took long enough for me to take note of her changed appearance.

She had on a blue gingham dress I’d seen a hundred times, white socks, and the white sneakers. Her top two buttons were open, to show quite a bit of cleavage, and her hair had a ribbon on it, a new frill for her. And if it was the ribbon, the buttons, or what, I can’t rightly say, but there was something gamy about her that wasn’t like her at all.

After a moment she snapped: “What are you doing here at this hour? Pretending to be the postman?”

I told her, “I said ‘Special Delivery’ and very special it is — I brought you your check.”

“Then, I’ll take it.”

“You will when you’ve asked me in.”

“Very well. But give me a moment, please.”

She disappeared, and I heard her going upstairs. Then she was back, holding the door wide, and I went into a place I knew like the palm of my hand, and yet never got used to. I mean, it was more like a gag, a museum someone thought up, a stage set to play a comedy in, than a sure-enough, actual house.

In the hall was a cozy-corner, in under the turn of the stairs, consisting of built-in seat, with Navajo blanket on it, and leather cushions with Indian heads burned on. Over the seat were pipe racks, and over the pipes, college pennants, mostly M.A.C., for Maryland Agricultural College, which was what the university was called before they bigged it up. Facing the stairs was a hat rack, and on the floor was a hooked rug. There wasn’t any living room, of the kind a modern house had, but instead there was a “parlor,” and beyond that a “library.” In the parlor were horsehair sofas, marbletop tables, wax flowers under glass, vases of gilded cattails, a bookcase with a ship model on it, and steel engravings of the Three Graces, Paolo and Francesca, and Grover Cleveland. On the floor was an Axminster rug, and in a corner a square piano. Everything was just as it had been, except for the smell of bacon frying, which had a meaning, as I realized later, though when I first went in I paid no attention to it.

She led me into the parlor, drew herself up, and said: “You may sit down if you wish.”

“Well I damn well wish.”

“Don’t you dare swear at me!”

“Hey, hey, hey, come off it, this is me — and anything short of poking you one in the jaw comes under the head of gentle, considerate kindness. What was the big idea, hanging up on me?”

“What was the big idea, playing that trick on me?”

“And what trick did I play on you?”

She had left me an opening, I thought, and I was ready to let her have it at one word about my marriage. But she crossed me up. Pointing to a chair and waiting until I took it, she came over, looked down at me, and whispered: “Leading me on as you did! Play acting at being a man, and all the time not being one. Being nothing but a vegetable in human form!”

“You mean, like a potato?”

“More like an onion, slippery inside.”

“How does an onion lead a girl on?”

“With all those flowers and music and wine.”

“Thought you liked flowers and music and wine.”

“Oh I do, any woman does. But for what they pledge, not for what they are. And in your case, they were just a false front, a way of imitating masculinity while lacking the thing itself.”

“You sure?”

“Well I certainly am now!”

“Now? What’s now?”

“Since the truth was revealed unto me.”

“Yeah? By whom?”

Of course, by now I knew by whom, but wanted to make her name him. However, once more she crossed me up.

“By you!” she quavered, almost in tears. “Oh you made it plain, that I have to say — with no beating around the bush, in any way, shape or form. ‘Jane, I got married’ — if that didn’t say it, it can’t be said in words.”

“That I’m an onion.”

“If not, why did you marry this girl?”

“I wanted to — that’s why.”

“You had to! She’s pregnant by your brother!”

“Was pregnant by my brother.”

“She still is! What kind of cock-and-bull story was that? You take her to the beach, and — lo and behold — she aborts. Could anyone, any grown-up, adult person, actually believe that?”

“God could — He did it.”

“Ah, God. God!” And then: “You should be asking for God’s forgiveness, that you would pretend He’s responsible. Of course, I find it in me, even so, to pity this poor girl, the life you’ve invited her to — having all a woman’s desires, and none of her satisfactions.”

“She gets satisfied every night.”

“I never got satisfied!”

“You know why?”

“Tell me why!”

My mouth was primed to let her have it, to tell her she was too old for such satisfactions, at least as supplied by me, but somehow the words didn’t come. I heard myself say, in a moment, “You’re so beautiful I didn’t have the heart.”

Her answer to that was to sneer, and then, sitting primly on the edge of a chair, she proceeded to tell me off, speaking slow and going into details — how my whole life had been a pretense of being something which I was not, of desperate playacting, with my athletic career at Yale, my jumping my arm muscles up, when we’d go swimming at Chesapeake Beach, my picking brawls with people, “though sometimes you meet your match.” She pointed to my hand, which was still scabbed up, and went on and on and on. It was all part of the same old record I’d heard a few times before, so it was no trouble to know where it came from, or why it appealed to her: It put a totally different light on those years of not being passed-at by me.

So sometimes my attention wandered, and I had a chance to think. One of those times I woke up to the bacon smell in the air, and the thing of it was what I hadn’t remembered before: She didn’t like bacon, so who’d she been cooking it for? Why did she duck upstairs before bringing me in?

“Okay,” I said, “if that’s how I prove masculinity, what are we waiting for? Why not prove it here and now, by beating you up, Mrs. Sibert? You have a pretty cute backside — come on, I’ll blister it for you!” With that I grabbed her hand and yanked her out of her chair. “No!” she screamed. “No! No! No!”

Vloomp, vloomp, vloomp!

When I looked he was on the stairs, piling down fast, a hammer in his hand, one she kept on her dressing table, don’t ask me why. “Why!” I said. “Burl! I thought that would smoke you out!”

“Gramie, leave her alone.”

“Hand me the hammer or I’m taking it off you.”

He was still in the hall, and I marched myself out there, slow. Now there’s something about a big guy, walking toward you step by step, that somewhat dampens courage, and that’s how it was with him. I held out my hand and he gave me the hammer, handle first, though giving the head a flip to indicate his contempt. I motioned him into the parlor. “Sit down,” I said. “The both of you, sit down.”

They sat, and I asked him: “You spent the night in this house?”

“What’s it to you where I spent the night?”

“Answer me!”

“Yes!” she whined. “With me! In my bed!”

“Having intimacies with you?”

“Oh! And how! More than you ever did!”

“It would appear I’ve been missing something.”

“It certainly would, Mr. Graham!”

“Okay, let’s get on.”

“Let’s not! You may give me my check and go!”

“Honey, you’re not taking his check.”

He went over, knelt by her chair, put his arms around her, and kissed her. She inhaled him, and it crossed my mind, he may have smelled like feet to Sonya, but apparently smelled different to her.

She kissed him, and said, “When I take money off a crumb, I figure he’s still a crumb, but I’ve got the money.”

“But Honey, I have money.”

“Oh Burl, my little Burl — that’s the sweetest thing that ever was said to me, that ever was said to me in my whole life.”

“The reason is, I love you.”

“Now you’re making me cry.”

She mumbled kisses all over his cheek, and then he turned to me. “So, brother-o’-mine, we’re done. Beat it.”

“Just a moment,” she said.

“You taking this check or not.”

“I’ve been forbidden to take it, so no. But there’s one more thing, Gramie. Did you bring my will too?”

“Your will’s at the bank, in my box.”

“I want it. I want it today.”

“You’ll get it, when I find it convenient to open my box at the bank, get it out, and bring it to you.”

“Mail it over, you mean.”

“I’ll say what I mean, Mrs. Sibert.”

“I want my will!”

“I bid you good day.”

“And a good day to you, Gramie, boy — and it is a good day for you, come to think if it, isn’t it? Here I get the girl with the looks and the shape and the million-dollar farm, but look what you get, Gramie. The girl with the bastard inside — and my little bastard at that, which guarantees he’s really good stock. You lucky dog!”

“How’d you like to go to hell?”

“If this be hell, they ought to charge me for it!”

As I left, she burst into silvery laughter.

I went home to make my report, and found Mother waiting for me, with Sonya, over café au lait in the living room. They both listened, and all Sonya said was: “At least you know where you stand.”

“Poor thing, she’s not old — Jane is fifty-eight, still in rosy middle age, and she was forty-three when she took you, Gramie, widowed, wet, and willing. So you let her down — I’m still amazed at that, as I had taken for granted, all this time ever since, that she had an arrangement with you. But if that’s how it was, that’s how it was.

“Anyway, for fifteen years she yearns and nothing happens. And then one day, you jolt her back teeth out by calmly announcing, ‘Jane, I got married.’ That she can’t forgive you. And then, to top it off, appears this practiced seducer, and the rest was a foregone conclusion. But it had to come sooner or later, once you and Sonya got married. That it came with Burl was unfortunate, but it’s her life, and we can’t choose for her. Still, I should call Stan Modell.”

Stan Modell was our lawyer, and she called from the hall extension, with me standing by, in case. The call went on for some time, after she sketched out what had happened, touching on Burl lightly, and bearing down on the will. When she hung up she said, “He wants to see me this afternoon, wants me to come to his office, so he can look things up, in connection with her farm, and ‘try to work something out,’ as he said. But he says hang on to the will — under no circumstances let it out of your hands. We don’t know what will come up, and if you have it you have it.”

So it seemed I’d done the right thing, in giving Jane a stall about sending it back. Sonya suggested that Mother come to the house, when she got back from Upper Marlboro, “so I can give you dinner, and you won’t do any talking at Gramie’s office about it.” Mother agreed and accepted, and left.

I left, for a day that was endless — I had two houses to look at, to get the history of, to make an appraisal on, and it took me all afternoon, until after six o’clock. But at that I got home before Mother, who had had to wait in Stan’s office until Mort Leonard got back from a trip to the District and could talk when Stan called him.

“I heard the call,” said Mother. “Stan made it perfectly plain that he felt we had a suit, the basis for an action, to recover the money you’ve paid, the ten thousand or so Jane’s accepted, in return for the will she drew, making you her beneficiary. But he wasn’t exactly threatening — he was ‘hoping it wouldn’t be necessary,’ and reminding Mort of what it might mean to Jane to have it come out in a lawsuit that though she pretended to farm this land, she was actually living off you, so the farm was not her main income, and her Rural Agricultural tax status more or less, mostly more, phony. These lawyers can figure angles, but I told him hold his horses, not to move unless I gave the word.

“Gramie, I don’t know much, but this much I’ve learned in my life: Stay out of lawsuits. It looks as though we’ve lost it, but if we just do nothing, refrain from aggravation, and mark time, Jane may come to her senses, may kick this scavenger out, may resume her life. After all, she’s not married yet.”

“I’m sorry to say she is.”

That was Sonya, very quiet. She’d brought the cocktail tray, and was watching me stir the martinis. “What did you say?” I asked her.

“She got married. To Burl.”

“She couldn’t. In Maryland, they must wait two days, as who knows better than we do, before they can get their license.”

“They drove to Dover, Delaware, and had it done there. She called from the motel they’re in — she wanted you to know, ‘wanted Gramie to be the first one.’ Also she asked me to tell you, don’t bother about the will, sending it back to her. She’s having a new one drawn when she gets back tomorrow, leaving the farm to Burl, and voiding the one you have.”

I poured the martini, raised my glass, said “Mud in your eye.” But Mother didn’t raise hers, and Sonya didn’t raise hers, and pretty soon Mother said: “I’m scrubbing her — putting her out of my mind.”

“Well I certainly am,” I assured her.

“You’re not, Mrs. Stu isn’t, and I’m not.”

Mother stiffened so you could see it, not being used to that kind of talk, from a sixteen-year-old snip. But Sonya went right on: “Father was here when she called, and the first thing he said was: ‘Jesus, who’s on that hook now?’”

“He has that hook on the brain.”

I was fairly disagreeable about it, but she kept her cool as she said: “Yes, he has, hasn’t he? It rides him all the time.”

But Mother cut in then, very cold, and very much in the grand style: “Sonya, I’m done with Mrs. Sibert, so stop talking about her please, as I’ve heard all I mean to listen to on a most unpleasant subject.”

“Mrs. Stuart, I think you mean.”

“Ah yes, Mrs. Stuart, of course.”

“Your daughter-in-law has the same name as you.”

“Sonya, I’ve accepted your correction.”

“And in my house, I decide what I talk about.”

“Very well, I withdraw my remark.”

“And you’re listening, whether you mean to or not.”

If Mother replied to that, I don’t just now recollect, but Sonya had cut her to size, and now got up from her chair and sashayed over to her, in kind of a slow way she had, one hand on her hip. “So the dream,” she said, “is kerflooie — the white moon, the white shells, the white cotton, are gone, except the lilies aren’t.”

“When did lilies get in it?” I snapped.

“White ones, on Miss Jane, before they close the lid.”

“Of the coffin, you mean?”

“The casket, they call it now.”

That settled my hash for a while, as it was the part of the dream I tried not to think about.

She went on then, to Mother: “You’re not scrubbing Miss Jane — she’s married to your son.” Then, to me: “And you’re not — she’s been your godmother, and she’s now your brother’s wife.” And then, tapping her own wishbone: “And I’m not — I’m the cause of it all.” And after letting that much sink in: “One of us, one of us three in this room, is on that hook, the one my father worries about. Because, if she signs a new will, making Burl her heir, she won’t live to see the snow — it’ll drift down on her grave before it falls on her. Somebody here must see that she doesn’t die.”

She picked up her cocktail glass, raised it, and said: “Here’s to the lucky one, whichever of us gets elected.”