Go to the Widow-Maker

by James Jones

  “Ron’s leaving Thursday,” Lucky said lightly. “That’s four days from now.”

  “Oh, you poor darling!” Leslie cried, her eyes losing their dullness.

  Lucky threw her head back, tossing her champagne hair, and laughed gaily though it clearly cost her quite an effort. She looked like she might cry but she didn’t. “Four days is four days. Can be a long time.”

  Grant was hurting more at the moment than he was willing to invest. “Listen, you two deadheads,” he growled at them, more viciously energetic than he meant, and both turned to stare. He softened his tone. “What’s going on here, anyway? What kind of a morgue is this? Is this any way to spend my last four days in town? Come on, let’s all go out and do something.”

  “You’re absolutely right,” Lucky said.

  Leslie’s eyes fired up again with indignant outrage when she looked at Grant. “You really ought to take her with you! She knows everybody in Kingston!”

  “I can’t,” he said. “I’ve explained it all before. I just simply can’t.”

  He remained adamant about that. However, the afternoon at Paul Stuart had made him decide to stay over another week, and coupled to the meeting with his producers, and then the weekend at the Aldanes’, all three were enough to make him change his plans about New York.

  He had intended, after his diving junket to Jamaica, to go straight back home to Indianapolis and start in work on another play (though he had no idea yet what subject it would be about), and try to get as deep into it as he could before he was needed for rehearsals on this one, on I’ll Never Leave Her. (My God, he thought with despair, did you ever really call it that? Yes; you did!) Now though, he was coming straight back from Jamaica to Manhattan, to Lucky. Maybe he would take a small apartment, a cheap one, somewhere and try to get started on the new play here.

  He told all this to Lucky, rather proudly, on Monday on their way back to the city from the Aldanes’. It was once again four days to departure time.

  “All right,” Lucky said calmly, without any great enthusiasm, ”we’ll see. It’s all right. We’ll just have to wait and see. How do I know what will happen in the next six weeks to change you? How do you know what will happen to change me?”

  He was at the wheel. “You don’t mean like—you would fall in love with somebody else? Do you?” Having to watch the road carefully, he did not look at her.

  “I don’t know,” she said, with a sort of tired patience. “How do I know?”

  “Well, if it is, it is,” Grant said, vaguely but also stiffly, and braked slightly before swinging out into the second lane to pass a slower car.

  “That’s what I said,” Lucky said calmly.

  “Nobody’s going to bulldoze me into anything,” he said.

  “Nobody’s trying to,” Lucky said airily, and went on looking out the window. She had, at the Aldanes’, once again been her own unbelievably winning, too-good-to-be-true self.

  It had been a lovely ride up there in the Hertz car, along the curving parkways, the fields all snowy but the road clear and good, not much traffic. Frank had a nice old colonial house under big trees on the side of a hill, a guesthouse, five acres of parklike woods they could walk through in the snow. They did not, however, do much walking. But they did do a lot of drinking. Lucky didn’t like the country outdoors, and Grant discovered he was not equipped with the proper shoes and clothes for snow-walking. On the other hand, they both were properly dressed and equipped for whatever drinking might be done, and Frank Aldane was a big drinker.

  Frank Aldane was a big drinker, but he took very good care of his health while doing it—as he did with everything. This was largely because he was a consummate hypochondriac. Six months ago he had stopped smoking because of the cancer scare. For two months he had been unable to write at all, but after that he had come out of it into the clear, clean-lunged and cured, and now buttonholed everybody that he could get to listen about how they must stop smoking. His intensity when making these speeches made his genuine concern for everybody that much more sweet, endearing. He wouldn’t even smoke a pipe, now, he said.

  Among all of his contemporaries Frank Aldane was the one Grant valued most, both as a talent and as a thinker, the one he felt most drawn to. Although Frank was a novelist and Grant a playwright, they seemed to see more nearly eye to eye concerning the drift of the post-war world, and what was happening to America in it. They seemed to be trying to get said and noticed, each in his field, pretty much the same thing about this world—although in private they admitted to each other that it didn’t matter much even if they did, would not make much difference.

  Both men were deeply despairing-type personalities anyway but neither had sufficient egomania to try, like some in their generation, in every generation, to corner the market on despair all for himself alone. So they could talk about all this. Both believed that, given the expectable increase in government’s control of the social body’s functions and its mental attitudes, in order for it to perform efficiently in an ever increasingly complex industrial society, men of their type would be squeezed out of existence in a very short time, maybe fifty years, and they loved to discuss all this and elaborate on it gloomily when in their cups, which is what they did most of that weekend. Neither was in favor of this sort of human development. But neither had any answer to the problem since, as one of them was almost perpetually pointing out to the other, it was manifestly impossible to return to a more primitively industrial society and the taking over of men’s minds was advancing at a vastly accelerated rate (compared to Rome, say, or the Middle Ages) because of both modern techniques in persuasion and advanced mass methods of what fools called ‘communication’.

  “Yes. Not only all that, we’re in the Age of the Believer, Decameron,” Frank hiccupped from in front of the great fireplace late on the night of their arrival (he adored calling Grant by his full first name, because Grant hated it). “The real Age of the Believer. Believers have always been dangerous. The most dangerous. But the various Inquisitions of the past have never had our means of communication, or the mechanical ability to employ our full saturation methods. Or the sheer bureaucratic political power of a modern great nation to enforce attention.”

  “I know it,” Grant gloomed over his glass. “I know all that. In fact it was me who first pointed it out to you so succinctly. And there’s no way out.”

  “Or!” Frank continued, finger in air, “the incredibly efficient means of industrialized destruction which the Believer can employ to destroy a segment of a society. I need not point out to you what happened with Hitler and the Jews.”

  “What happened with Hitler and the Jews had been grossly misunderstood by modern thinkers,” Grant said.

  “Exactly!”

  “And not only that! It was not even a military function. It was a civil function! And there’s no way out,” Grant said again, hugging his glass gloomily.

  Lucky was with Frank’s wife Marie in the kitchen preparing them all a 3 A.M. snack to kill hangovers.

  “Don’t be too sure!” Frank said, and laid a sly drunken finger alongside his rather shapeless nose there in front of his beautiful great roaring fire. “I think there is, finally, something that can be done.”

  “Then tell me.”

  “Not yet, not yet. I think I have to prepare you a little first. You’re peculiar. But I’ll tell you before you leave this place. That’s a promise.”

  “Aw, fuck, come on. If you knew how depressed I get thinking about all this. I get so depressed I— That’s the main reason I’m going away. Off on this diving business. Just to—”

  “I don’t see that that’ll do you no good,” Frank said with the air of a sage. “It don’t make sense.”

  “I didn’t say it did. I said—”

  “Come and get it, or we’ll eat it all ourselves,” Lucky called to them softly so as not to wake the four Aldane children.

  “On the other hand,” Grant said, getting up to follow her, “this skindiving stuf
f and underwater archeology and all that is the last frontier left to an individual to do individual work by himself and all on his own as an individual.”

  “But what the hell good does that do the world you and I’re talkin about?” Frank said following him. “And anyway!” he roared gleefully from behind Grant, “I think that you’ll find that to really contribute anything to anything even skindiving will have to become—bureaucratized, organized!”

  “Maybe not,” Grant said over his shoulder mysteriously— with much more mystery than he actually felt. What he actually felt was depressed, rock bottom depressed.

  “Aw fuck, come on! Look at fucking Cousteau,” Aldane hollered triumphantly, following through the door. “He’s made the biggest contribution made so far—with his Organization!”

  “The hell with Cousteau,” Grant said glumly.

  “Not so loud, Professor,” Marie Aldane said to her husband from the kitchen table, and winked at Lucky.

  “I saw that,” Frank said.

  “So did I,” Grant said. He stopped before the table. “Look at my girl,” he said spreading his arms, more to cheer himself up than anything else. “Aint she something.”

  “She sure is,” Aldane said with a lecher’s appreciation.

  “I think so too,” Marie grinned, “and I’m a girl.”

  Lucky looked up at them and smiled, especially at Grant, and calmly went on eating. She was three-fourths drunk like the rest of them.

  But it was all true. She had already seduced them both. By whatever alchemy or internal magic it was that she employed Lucky had once again, as she had done with the producers, completely altered her entire personality.

  It was as if she had reached down inside herself with both hands and molding her spirit as if it were pie dough, changed herself into someone else, a someone she knew with a shrewd psychology both the Aldanes would adore.

  When they arrived just before dark and Marie showed them their room to which Grant carried the suitcase for her, she first put away all of Grant’s things neatly, then put away her own, changed to a sweater and an old pair of slacks and came downstairs in old ballet slippers with her champagne hair tied back in a stringy ribbon, looking as if she loved and had lived in the country all her life.

  It was an entrance calculated to sew the literary Aldanes up in a sack and deliver them at her feet from the very beginning, which was just what it did. But it wasn’t only physical. She had made herself a country girl, like Marie. Leaving the men at the fire (a thing Grant had never seen her do anywhere before at any party or anywhere else: leave the men), she went out to the kitchen and began to help Marie and the colored maid who were feeding the children their supper, all the time complaining laughingly how she was not a country girl, she was a city girl, she hated the country, all those trees!, she could not cook, and didn’t want to learn, she detested washing dishes well, she would never do housework, she was a rare and delicate flower, and would be treated as such, if you hump them well that’s enough, until she had both women laughing out loud.

  At the same time she did as much work as either of them, tied on an apron, petted the children, but everything she told them was the truth and what was more they knew it was the truth.

  That night was Friday. The next night being Saturday, they had a large bunch of people in and a big buffet for them, critics, newspaper writers, painters, an art critic, a sculptor, Grant’s one-night-stand lady novelist whose recent book had lately suddenly shown signs of becoming a towering bestseller, all people who lived in the area. Now dressed to the teeth with full makeup and a simple sheath dress, and those magnificent tits and that high, back-switching ass below the champagne hair, Lucky had every man in the house breathing hotly through his nose and with one hand in his pocket to finger himself tentatively through the cloth. The art critic especially, an aging and humorous egotist with a ragged white moustache and lecherous goatee, could not stay away from her and followed her wherever she went about the two large rooms filled with people. Even so, she made a friend out of his wife by more of her talk about the horrors of living in the country, and by calling him laughingly to his face a dirty old goat so charmingly that he was flattered and delighted. Grant had only to stand and beam, and the next day, Sunday, Marie received five phone calls about Ron Grant’s marvelous new girl.

  Saturday night after most of the people had departed, when Grant went out to the kitchen to refill his scotch glass and encountered Marie Aldane sitting all by herself over a large drink just giggling, he was ordered to sit down and was then given a ten-minute lecture on the reasons why he should immediately and forthwith marry Lucky Videndi, for good and all, without looking back, before some gentleman smarter than himself swept her, so to speak, out from under him. Thus he had the answer of one of the Aldanes. He never did find out why she was giggling.

  Later on, when the two girls had given up and gone on to bed and the two drunk writers sat together before the fire, Frank was more circumspect. It was true that she had all the personal—and personable—qualities necessary. My God: an MA in political science! And a wit that couldn’t be learned in any school. He wouldn’t even bother wasting time going into her physical beauty and charm. But marriage was, or should be, for a long time. She had been on her own—really on her own, not by her family—around New York quite a long time; seven years was it? and that might indicate a kind of overly wild quality in her. And any girl around town that long had a tendency to get a little rumpled and shopworn which often made for neuroses later in her. Not so far as Grant was concerned, but as far as she was concerned inside herself. And after all, how long had he known her? only three weeks? She wasn’t really a very literary type girl. And Grant had always been more a literary type playwright, rather than the Broadway type playwright. Anyway, after all, the clincher was that Grant himself was not taking her down to Jamaica with him like she wanted, but was going alone. Incidentally, if Grant wanted to give him her telephone number he could look after her and sort of keep an eye on her while Grant was gone since he was going to be in the city quite a lot the next couple of months.

  “Haw! None of that shit, you bastard!” Grant said. “Don’t forget I’m comin back in six weeks. You’re on your honor”

  Aldane sighed sadly. “Ahh. These damned honors of ours that we have.” He stood up. “Well. We have a choice. We can go to bed, or we can play the Civil War records.” For a moment he wavered slightly like the needle of some gauge, then came to rest fully perpendicular.

  “No, not tonight,” Grant said. “The way I feel, if I heard The Yellow Rose of Texas right now, I’d break down and cry again, like I did the last time.”

  “Then I suggest a nightcap, Decameron,” Frank said heading for the kitchen. “What about her family?”

  Decameron, Decameron! Grant thought with a sudden blind drunken rage. Boccaccio, Boccaccio! Once going to summer camp he gave himself the name Michael Jeremy Grant on the Application Form, and was very nearly disallowed for the season by the camp director until he agreed to fill out a new form. Very few people knew his real first name. And although Time magazine had once sent a researcher out to look it up amongst the birth certificates in the Indianapolis courthouse in order to expose it in their theater section, very few readers remembered it. To the world and to readers of Life he was still Ron Grant. He had even legalized it. But not to yourself, not to yourself! As a very little boy it was Cam or Cammy. He still hated the superciliousness of grownups using a -y or -ie diminutive for youngsters. When he was ten or eleven for a year or two he was called Camera by his witty classmates. In high school where he just barely played football it was Deke which of course eventually, inevitably became Deacon and spoiled high school for him. At college he beat them to it and gave himself the nickname Ron, which seemed to work well with the girls—at least until he made the mistake of telling each new love his real first name, whereupon they would break into golden, joyous, sexless college girl peals of laughter. Apparently his father (whom he never knew
well) had been one of those secret iconoclastic Middlewestern scholars who believed in and loathed the general frigidity of the local females like Grant’s mother (whom he never knew well either). But to name a defenseless kid Decameron was a low blow whatever the reason. Certainly it had contributed to his terrible and lifelong inferiority complex. Was it also what had made him so terribly oversexed all his life? Grant knew lots of people who didn’t seem to give a damn about sex one way or the other.

  “I don’t know much about her family,” he said. He discovered that he was now on his feet—had gotten up already —and followed to the kitchen. “I know her father was a big bootlegger, but he’s dead. She doesn’t seem to be on good terms with her mom. Uhh. She did say that when we got married, her mother would give us ten thousand dollars as a wedding present.”

  Aldane’s head jerked up a little from the bourbon bottle he was pouring out of. “That’s good,” he said.

  “I must admit that it impressed me considerably,” Grant said shamefacedly.

  “It never hurts a writer to have a rich wife,” Frank said pouring now from the scotch bottle for Grant.

  He was of course referring obliquely to himself, since Marie was worth something just under a million dollars. Grant knew the story of how Marie had chased him all over France one whole year right after his first novel came out, trying to marry him, and he kept refusing because her mother’s family had had him investigated by a private detective when they found out she was in love with him. Aldane had had the upper hand ever since.

  “You don’t have to write potboilers, or for the movies,” Aldane continued. “But then you as a playwright make a lot more dough than I do as a novelist. It’s in the cards.”

  “If I do, I don’t have any of it,” Grant said ruefully.

  “Maybe you should meet her mother,” Frank said, and paused. “What’s your uh foster-mother going to say about it? What’s her name?—Mrs. Abernathy.” There was, under that question, a serious note of secret interest.