Three Short Novels

by Gina Berriault

  On election day her father came home early, bringing another worker from the refinery. They had been given an hour off at the end of the day and had gone to vote, and they sat in the kitchen, making jokes about the election. She was peeling potatoes at the sink, carefully so the peeler wouldn’t nick the pink polish on her fingernails, aware of her long back and broad hips in the schoolgirl skirt and sweater and of the man’s shy curiosity about her, notorious daughter of his co-worker.

  “What the hell anybody want a change for?” her father asked his friend. One foot was up on a chair, and he lifted his foot to give the chair a push with it. “It’s always the same bullshit, both sides the same bullshit, and when they get in themselves, where’s the change?”

  “There’s a difference,” the friend said, his arms leisurely on the table. “With the Democrats you get war, and with the Republicans you get a depression.”

  She had heard conversations like this before and they had meant little to her, but now she felt a rising resistance, an alarm that she tried to stop with the deadening sound of her hair falling across her ears as she bent her head lower. They recalled government scandals, bribery, and every name they spoke and every acquittal and conviction deprived her of her mystery, brought her down into the arms of a petty politician who had gone berserk with the idea that everything was due him, with wanting everything.

  3

  As Cort Costigan prepared himself to meet his girl, as he showered, shaved, brushed his teeth, shined his shoes, and then resented his being forced to make himself as handsome and as clean as possible when, after all, he was a plain fellow not always scrupulously clean, as he fretted over his falsified self but was pleased by the sight of himself at his best, he was preparing also the revelation of his inward self. He was not preparing the revelation in words because he was afraid of words. Words had a life of their own beyond him. Once when the words great guy, oh, he was a great guy spoke themselves inside his ears, startling him, he clamped his hands down over his head in a desperate stifling reflected in his bathroom mirror.

  Pauline was already at the door when he drove up to her sister’s house, already down the stairs and opening the car door, and was already sitting close to him before he was ready for the transition from the woman of his fantasies to the solid woman animated not by his wishes but by her own, a tall, big-boned, large-breasted girl with a sullen, bony face and straight blond hair to her shoulders. She sat against him, her skirt flaring over his knee, dispelling with her closeness the two days since he had seen her last and in which time his need for her had struggled with his doubts about his need. When she sat by him, he needed her, and this need increased through the evening along with his need to unburden himself of his brother. Now that he had found this girl, it seemed to him that he had been searching for her ever since his brother died, through the winter and into the summer, but he was reluctant to admit to himself his desire to exploit the tragedy of his brother for the benefits he hoped to get from it, the comforting and the passion that he hoped the story would arouse in her.

  After the movie, they wandered around the library grounds, over grass illumined by the neon signs of the theater and the bar across the street, pausing to embrace in the shadows under the trees. It was a warm night in the middle of summer. They circled the old, cream-colored, two-story library, its high stone steps lit by a large white globe on each side, and found a bench at the back, under the windows of the basement reading room. They watched other couples crossing the grounds to their cars slowly, as if wading through the short grass, heard their voices carrying far in the quiet night, heard car doors slam and motors start, and a wakened bird complaining among the thick branches above their heads. Then he heard the words begin, as adroitly fumbled as if he had permitted himself to rehearse them that way.

  “Pauline, Pauline, I want to tell you about my brother. . .,” and the use of his grief to persuade here to love him deepened his grief. “He was a great guy, a great guy.”

  “I know he was, Cort.”

  “No, I’m not saying it like in the obituary. That’s not what I’m saying.”

  “I know what you’re saying,” she told him, stretching her fingers between his fingers.

  “No you don’t. You can’t know until I tell you because I’m the one it happened to. I mean, my mother and Naomi, they cried and they still cry, my mother does, but it didn’t shake them. My mother cries and goes right on watching television, and Naomi goes to work and goes home and talks about nothing and eats half a berry pie and drinks twelve cups of coffee up to the time she goes to bed. I don’t drop by much anymore. That’s the way women are, they survive. The men get killed in a war and the women put ashes on their heads and fight over the men who come back. Mama and Naomi, they got each other. But me,” he said. “It did me in.”

  “It didn’t do you in.” She was stroking his sleeve. “You got a job, you got me, you laughed so hard tonight, the time the guy was holding onto the balloon.”

  “You ever look up to anybody? I looked up to him like he was my father. He was nine years older than me, and my father died when I was four, so it was easy for me to look up to him. I learned from him. He was my brother and my father, he was the man in the family. You know what I thought when I heard he was dead? I thought—somebody did it to him. All these years he’s been showing me how to live. But after a while I had to admit he did it to himself. I had to admit it. I had to admit you don’t do something like that to yourself without saying it’s the thing to do. Jesus Christ, why did he tell me that?”

  A man, standing on the curb before the bar, way across the grounds, glanced toward them, hearing Cort’s faraway voice rising.

  “You’ve heard the old saw about the good die young? It’s true, they’re killed off in the scramble to get to the top. What I mean, they’re stepped on because they can’t step on anybody because they don’t like the goddamn war that goes on all the time. Or they do themselves in like my brother did. I look around me, I look at the other salesmen, and I think to myself—Jesus Christ, is that what we’re put on this earth for, to sell goddamn refrigerators, hop-skip up to a customer before the other guy gets to him, make a big production out of a bloated piece of tin with an electric wire coming out of it?”

  She was scratching his scalp with her long, strong fingers, her pointed fingernails. “But everybody said it was the girl,” her voice low, curious.

  “You sound like my mother, you sound like Naomi. Naomi asked me, ‘You ever seen her, Cort?’” imitating his sister’s grainy, whispery voice. “Mama wanted me to go over there and shoot her, she had this crazy idea about me avenging my brother, maybe something she picked up from a soap opera. If the girl was the reason, he made her the reason on purpose. He wasn’t a kid, he didn’t get all worked up like a kid does, you know how it was in high school, can’t eat, can’t sleep, can’t live if you can’t have the girl. Once he took me in there, bought me lunch there at her mother’s joint, and she was there. It was a couple months before. She was there, it was Saturday, and he treated her like he treated any other waitress, considerate, kind of indifferent, too. I don’t think he knew her name. She was just like any other good-looking high school girl, tall, long hair in a pony tail, used her hips like they do. You see them all the time, everywhere. But he said something to me I remember, he said something out of the Bible. He said, ‘King David was old and stricken in years and his servants covered him with robes, but the old man was still cold. So his servants found a fair young virgin for him, and she ministered to him and lay down on his breast.’ He quoted the Bible word for word, he was always good at that, and he said, ‘That’s an idea, isn’t it? Bring in a young girl to warm up an old man in his last days. That’s what I need.’ And I said, ‘You aren’t old.’ And he said, ‘They call me young. Young Costigan. The young can act, the young can change things, there’s nothing the young can’t do, it takes a young man for the job. But I’m not young, I’m nine hundred and sixty-seven years and I’m cold. They c
over me with campaign posters, I got this nice English suit, I got wool blankets and my wife Isobel and my son and life insurance, I got all that to keep me warm. But how does the Bible say it? He ‘gat no heat?’” The tenor ring of his brother’s voice—he heard it again, and he remembered that his brother had laughed, shifting in his seat in the booth, so unaware of the girl that if he were to choose some handmaiden she would not be the one.

  Pauline was comforting him, stroking his shirt, unbuttoning one button to slip her hand inside and stroke his chest, and he drew her face to his, a swift claiming of her. “Come home with me,” he begged her. “You want to come home with me, don’t you?”

  When he returned alone to his apartment and lay down alone where both had lain, the sorrow he had made use of to bring her to his bed, and that she had soothed away with her embrace, reclaimed him. Pauline’s embrace, her long, strong arms and legs around him, had claimed him for only part of the night. As he was falling asleep, he was wakened by a clear convincing of his own self with the story he had told her. His brother had tried to link himself with life, one last attempt, just as the old king had tried, but the cold was already in the marrow of his bones. But himself? Cort Costigan? The younger brother wanted to live more than he wanted to die, and the girl who had embraced him an hour ago had more power over death than the girl who had lain in his brother’s arms, and he drew her back again, Pauline, young woman fragrant with life, odorous with life.

  4

  Naomi, following her friend Athena into the bar’s blue-glass entry, was reminded of a black-fig tree on a summer day, of the smell of the figs fallen to the ground and beaten to a fermenting pulp by the hot sun. The summers of her childhood were surprisingly contained in this unfamiliar bar one step from the cold street of late October.

  “Smells like old figs. You know, old fruit,” she said, tittering, stumbling because it was so dark inside, only the mirror behind the row of bottles lit by an amber light.

  “That’s everybody’s breath you smell,” Athena said, the lifting of her voice like a greeting to the bartender. “They never air the place. Everybody’s old whisky breath stays in here.”

  “Some people need it like oxygen,” said the bartender, a tall old man, bald. He was turned to the mirror, fussing with something, and Naomi saw his face and the back of his head at the same time. The double image heightened her wariness.

  Athena dropped her purse on the small round table and pulled out a spindly chair. Naomi, in imitation, pulled out the other spindly chair and sat down. Her knees, as she crossed them, kicked up the table and joggled the amber glass ashtray.

  “It’s so damn dark in here,” Athena said, explaining away Naomi’s clumsiness. “Over at the Executive they got two sixty-watts going day and night.”

  “They can afford it,” said the bartender.

  A young man at the end of the bar turned his face toward them, taking them in and disgorging them at the same time. “That’s where the bigshots hang out,” he said. “The D.A., the mayor, those guys. Every time I go in there I see big money passed under the table.”

  “You’re crazy, boy,” the bartender said. “They do that kind of thing in privacy.” He lifted his eyebrows at the women. “What’ll it be?”

  “A martini for me,” Athena said.

  “Privacy!” The young man blew his lips out to make an obscene noise. “Who’s private? Everybody writes their mem-wahs about who they screwed, all the movie stars write their mem-wahs. Big swindlers, big gamblers, they all write their mem-wahs. Privacy ain’t natural.”

  “He sounds like my dad,” Athena said, bowing her shoulders with a secret laugh.

  “Sounds like Mama,” Naomi said, and she too bowed, laughing.

  The bartender, deaf to the young man at the bar, was tipping his head toward Naomi, his eyebrows still lifted queryingly.

  “Oh, it’ll be the same for me,” Naomi said. She was familiar with martinis. Her brother Hal had taken her into the Executive a few times and she had liked martinis best, and this possession of a preference made her feel at home now.

  “My old dad hates everybody,” Athena said. “I got it figured out that the closer you get to dying, see, the closer you get to being alone the rest of eternity, the more you want to be alone. It’s kind of like nature preparing you.”

  “My mother’s not that bad,” Naomi said. “She’s got pity for orphans. One time there was a piece in the paper about five kids left in a room by their mother. She went out with some guy and there they were with no food, no fire, nothing, and one kid real sick.”

  Athena shrugged off her coat with a nervous, coquettish movement that went from her shoulders down her arms to her dry, wrinkled hands and their nails heavy with red polish. “There was this father who was shot by his boy scout son. You remember, up in Lassen County? My dad says, ‘Must of been a mean bastard, guess he deserved it.’ Then he says, ‘Boy must be crazy, whole family crazy.’ Course me,” she said, twisting her red beads, “I feel sorry for the father, you know, but I feel even worse for the boy. There in one minute his whole life is ruined. The father, he lived his life and maybe he didn’t live it right and maybe he shouldn’t of brought kids into the world. Or maybe he lived it right, they say he was a church elder. Who knows? You never know what goes on inside a house. But I feel sorrier for the boy. You think, someday he’ll wake up and realize what he did, and then you think, he’s never going to wake up because when he pulled the trigger he done himself in, too. You know what I mean? Unless these psychologists they got working on criminals like that, I mean kids in jail because they’re too young to go to the gas chamber, unless the psychologist makes him feel not too bad about what he did. I mean, bad enough, bad enough, that’s the first step, and then not too bad, so he’ll be able to redeem himself.”

  Athena pushed away the money Naomi was trying to place on the bartender’s tray. “When I was sixteen,” she said, sipping, “I had it all plotted out to get rid of my dad. He hated everybody even then. There was some people he liked, he wasn’t as bad as now but bad enough for me because I felt like I had to grow up to hate people and I didn’t want to hate people. I had it all plotted out. Now he’s seventy-six, I make custard for him and kiss him and tuck him in at night.”

  Naomi’s eyes began to water from the drink and the embarrassment of hearing a confession.

  “Sometimes I think that maybe I should’ve done it. They would’ve sent me to Tehachapi Prison for Women. I’d have had a little patch of garden, maybe, and listened to other tales of woe over the sewing machines or the jute mill or whatever they put you to work on. I would’ve been out by now, if it was twenty years. But I mean, there’s something about doing something like that that lifts you out of the rut. While you’re young, I mean.” She laughed a long laugh, buoyed up by the pleasure of being in the bar. “It doesn’t mean anything when you’re fifty. No purpose in it. The old man’s not long for this world anyway.”

  Athena stirred the martini with the toothpick. “That’s why I never had kids. I could have, I was married eleven years, but I figured they’d grow up to hate me. No, maybe that wasn’t the reason, maybe I just didn’t have the courage. Is it courage? What is it? Maybe I was selfish, but when I look back on those years, I wonder what I had to be selfish about. You like kids?”

  “My brother Hal, his wife’s got a boy, thirteen years old now. I haven’t seen him for a year. Yeah, I like that kid.” She sipped. “My brother Cort’s going to have himself some kids. Got married this summer. Met this girl, love at first sight, got married a month after. He’s the baby of the family. I always think of him as the baby of the family.”

  “I feel sorry for kids,” Athena mused. “So damn much to learn. Sometimes you almost snap your cap, like my own plot.”

  Naomi found it very hard to lift her gaze to the tired face across the table. Athena had come to work in the assessor’s office six weeks ago, and this was the first time they had gone out together after work, and Naomi was unable to combin
e in one person the friendly, joking woman and the woman confessing a plot to murder her father.

  Three young men came in, bareheaded, wearing jackets, and hoisted themselves up in a row at the bar, talking loudly, carrying on a humorous argument. One, at the end, leaned around the one in the middle and punched low in the back the one at the other end. The punched one gave a half-laugh, half-moan, jerking his back inward.

  “If kids could only see beyond the hump,” Athena said. “If they could see that pretty soon they’re going to be helping the old man out of the tub. When you’re a kid, you couldn’t see them with no clothes on and you wouldn’t let them see you, your father I mean, and now I help him out of the tub.” She laughed through closed lips because she’d put the olive in her mouth.

  “Cort married a nice girl,” Naomi said, wanting to drop this talk about the terrible things that could have happened when they were young. “Her name’s Pauline. She’s a typist at the Bon Marché. One time Cort brought her over to meet Mama and she hardly said two words. She wouldn’t let Cort hold her hand.”

  “I got no brother,” Athena said. “Got a kid sister, used to have two but one died a couple of years ago, left three kids. The sister I got left lives in Tulsa.” She took another sip, began to laugh before she had swallowed it. “I remember one time we were living in Louisville, Kentucky. My dad was working in the tobacco company there, and one night my mom and dad had this awful fight, he said the kid she was pregnant with wasn’t his. My sister and me, we held each other in bed. I guess I was about eleven or so. Then he comes in and orders us girls to get up and get our clothes on. Our mom began to beat on his back, and he let her because it wasn’t hurting him any, he was a big guy. He piled my sister and me into his Chevy and drove us a hundred miles to some little town where we’d never been and he knocked on a door there. To this day I don’t know if he knew those people or not. He won’t answer me when I ask, I think he’s forgot. He says to the woman who answered the door, he says that ‘we hadn’t no breakfast and hadn’t no money,’ and would she give us some breakfast while he looked around for work in that town. She gave us oatmeal, my sister and me. It was the first time I ever ate oatmeal.”