The Tight White Collar

by Grace Metalious

  “You’re beautiful,” he said. “And you should enjoy the fact.”

  Lisa stood in front of the mirror and watched his hands on her body and later she could not remember whether it had been the sight or the way he touched her but she was overwhelmed with a sudden need for him. She turned and pressed against him.

  “Do it to me,” she said. “Now.”

  But even then, Anthony went slowly and carefully, waiting until she hovered at the edge of the chasm of ecstasy before he took her.

  When it was over he held her and caressed her gently.

  “You have the makings of a fine little animal,” he said.

  In the weeks that followed, he used and abused her body. He taught her everything that his years and his worldliness had taught him. And Lisa, of course, did the unfortunate thing. She fell in love with him.

  “I love you,” she said. She said it against his mouth and against his body and she said it when he touched her.

  “You’re a nut,” he told her gently. “You’re in love with sex and that kind of love isn’t the right kind. Comes September and I’ll be going back to the city and you’ll go back to being a dutiful wife who is in love with her husband. This is fun. It’s wonderful and exciting but it isn’t love.”

  “You’re a beast,” said Lisa and felt like crying. “Don’t you love me just a little?”

  “That is a question that a woman should never ask a man,” said Anthony. “Come here.”

  “Sometimes I absolutely hate you,” she said.

  “Good,” replied Anthony, reaching for her. “That’s the way it should be.”

  “But haven’t you ever been in love?” she asked.

  “I’ve been too busy,” he said. “Besides, I don’t believe in love. It makes slaves of people and I love freedom.”

  “But aren’t you ever going to get married and have a family?”

  “Now you sound exactly like my Aunt Margery and my Uncle Nathaniel,” he said. “No, I’m not going to marry. I’ll go to my grave as the last of the Coopers and a good thing it will be.”

  “That’s a dreadful way to talk about your own family,” objected Lisa.

  “Maybe, but I mean every word of it. Now will you please shut up and let me kiss you?”

  The summer wore on, green and heavy with heat and moisture, and Doris Palmer had the names of twenty-five percent of the voting population of Cooper Station on her petition.

  “A tempest in a teapot,” Anthony told Lisa. “And much ado about nothing and every other cliché in the world. This thing is a farce.”

  “Don’t you care about anything?” demanded Lisa.

  “Not particularly,” replied Anthony.

  “What in the world ever made you this way?” she asked.

  “I was born this way,” he said.

  But it wasn’t true. Anthony could remember well the jagged edges of too much feeling, of too much caring.

  Anthony Cooper had been a bright child but a puzzling one to his family. Certainly neither his father nor his grandfather had ever understood him and if, sometimes, the child thought that he recognized a kinship of feeling with his uncle Nathaniel, there had never been the time nor the opportunity to turn this feeling into friendship.

  When Anthony had been taken to the mills as a child, he had not turned ill and feverish as Nathaniel had done. Anthony had looked and watched and been overcome with rage and pity. It had been hot that day, he remembered, and the windows of the factories were shut tight against the breeze that might snap the precious yarn or blow lint on the finished goods. The machinery thundered and over everything was the smell of oil. The men and women stood in front of their machines, drenched with sweat, and even as Anthony watched a woman staggered on her feet and fell fainting to the floor.

  “Get her a drink of water,” said Benjamin. “She’ll snap right out of it.”

  Anthony looked up at his father. “Aren’t you going to take her home?” he asked.

  “Don’t be silly,” snapped Benjamin. “We can’t afford to stop one spinning machine. She’ll be all right in a minute.”

  Someone fetched a drink of water for the woman and in a few minutes someone else stood her on her feet and then she began to work again. She was pale and her hands shook, but she was working.

  It’s as if she were part of the machine, thought Anthony. As if she had been doing her job for such a long time that she had become part of the machine.

  “Good girl, Annie,” said Benjamin.

  Her eyes had a sunken look and she smiled tiredly.

  “You know me, Mr. Cooper,” she said. “I’m tougher than I look.”

  “Tough girls are the only kind we can use here,” said Benjamin and led his son on to watch the next operation.

  Anthony watched and for no reason at all he thought of his new bicycle and of the big, airy bedroom in his father’s house in Cooper Station.

  As they were driving away from the factories, Benjamin looked back at the brick building.

  “Someday you’ll be running things here,” he told his son. “The sooner you learn how the better.”

  “I don’t want the mills,” replied Anthony.

  “What the hell do you mean?” demanded Benjamin. “What kind of way is that to talk?”

  “If the mills were mine,” said the child, “I’d close them all up and set everybody free.”

  “And I’d come back from wherever I was and give you a good swift kick in the ass,” said Benjamin. “We’ve worked too hard at building up a business here for you to talk like that.”

  Anthony kept still but then and there he made up his mind that he would never have anything to do with the factories at Cooper’s Mills.

  When Anthony was fifteen years old and living with his grandfather, a union organizer had come to Cooper’s Mills. Ferguson Cooper yelled and stamped around the house for one whole day, and the next day he went to the factories and called his workers together.

  “I hear tell,” said the old man, “that there’s been talk of making the mills into what’s called a union shop. Well, that’s up to you. Who am I to say that you can’t gather to bargain collectively or whatever the hell it is? But I can tell you one thing. If I hear any more union talk in any of my mills, I’ll close everything up and damn quick, too. Anybody who doesn’t want to work here on my terms can pick up his pay at the office right now. That’s all I’ve got to say.”

  The workers went back to their machines and as far as Anthony knew, there had never been any more union talk in his grandfather’s factories.

  “Grandpa,” said Anthony. “They may be millhands but they have certain rights as human beings.”

  “Get the hell out of my sight,” roared Ferguson. “Go sit in the woods and look at something. That’s all you’re good for anyway.”

  Anthony began to write that year. He wrote stories which he was sure were filled with great social significance and in which the hero was always an underprivileged, overworked millhand.

  As he grew older, he watched the slow, inexorable pressure that was put on his uncle, Nathaniel, and he knew that Nathaniel hadn’t a prayer against the old man. His uncle would go into the mills, like it or not, and because Nathaniel was cast in what Anthony called the true Cooper mold, he would not resist.

  Freedom, thought Anthony. They’ll never make a slave out of me.

  By the time he was twenty, Anthony was selling short stories to the better magazines and by the time he was twenty-five he had written a novel which became an immediate bestseller. He had a penthouse apartment in New York and a different girl to amuse him every evening. Some of them fell in love with him and as soon as this happened, Anthony dropped them from his list of friends.

  “Freedom,” he told them, “is the greatest gift given to man. I never intend to give mine up.”

  Marriage, to Anthony,
meant Nathaniel and Margery Cooper. It meant the mills and, worst of all, it meant a child.

  “Not for me,” he said often and decisively. “I’ll be the last of the Coopers and I’ll go out in a blaze of glory.”

  Nine years and three novels later, Anthony Cooper was in a private sanitarium in a town ninety miles from New York.

  He had felt the breakdown coming but he had refused to give in to what he was sure was only weakness. He had known it first when he could no longer work. The typewriter seemed to be a huge, open-mouthed monster that would gobble up his very soul unless he kept away from it.

  Let me alone! screamed Anthony silently. Let go of me!

  For the first time in his life he began to drink heavily. He took drugs to make him sleep and others to wake him up. He could not eat and he began to feel as if the world were made of slime and he knew he was ill. But still he fought.

  If I give in, he told himself, they’ll put me in a hospital somewhere and I won’t be able to get out.

  He had terrible nightmares in which he dreamed that he was enclosed in a small space and that the people who surrounded him had never heard of the word freedom. He would wake up with the bedsheets wrapped around his body in soggy imprisonment and it would take every bit of self-control he had to keep from screaming.

  He remembered very little of his first weeks in the hospital and, as he said to his agent, Kent Purdom, it was a shame because he imagined that it would have made one hell of a good story.

  “Don’t try to be wise, Anthony,” advised Purdom. “You’re sick and you might as well face it.”

  “Nonsense,” replied Anthony. “What I had was one hell of a good, smashing hangover. I’ll be out of here by the end of the week.”

  But Anthony was no better at fooling himself than he was at fooling Kent Purdom or his doctor.

  “You need a good rest,” said the doctor. “You’ve spent so much of your life running that you’re all worn out.”

  “Nonsense,” said Anthony again, but when a nurse came to give him an injection he admitted to himself how he had been counting the time until she would arrive with the medicine that enabled him to shut off his head for a little while.

  Anthony spent almost a whole year in the hospital and when he left it was with a number of ultimatums. No drinking, no late nights, as few women as possible and no work.

  “You’ve got a few years left,” said the doctor, “if you behave yourself.”

  “Why don’t you just hand me a knife,” said Anthony, “and I could finish myself off properly.”

  “If you don’t do as we say,” replied the doctor, “that’s probably exactly the way you’ll wind up and much sooner than need be. Good luck and don’t come back to see us again.”

  “I won’t,” said Anthony. “I’m going home. Not that Cooper Station is any great utopia, but at least it’s dull there. No women, no liquor and no material. After a few months at home I’ll be so goddamned tranquil that I’ll have to come back to the city to keep from going to the bughouse all over again.”

  And Cooper Station had been good for Anthony, he reflected. There was no pressure on him here. The days stretched ahead quiet and long and he even began to work on a novel that he had outlined a few years before. There was Lisa to amuse and excite him and as for drinking, a few bottles of beer were good for him. They relaxed his mind and sharpened his appetite. The summer that had seemed to be eternal and never ending pressed on into August and, as Anthony said later, something had to happen to bitch it up.

  Anthony stood very still in the middle of his living room, and he listened very carefully as Lisa spoke and when she had finished, every nerve in his body went toward making his voice cool and casual.

  “I’ll say this much for you, darling,” he said as he opened another can of beer. “You may be a headache at times, but you’re never a bore.”

  He was trying very hard to keep from trembling and not doing a very good job of it and he turned his back to her so that she could see nothing of his face.

  “Well, I must say, this is what is known as a pretty kettle of fish.”

  Lisa did not answer but sat still and watched him. It was the middle of August and only a few moments before she had told Anthony what she had been rehearsing in her mind all the previous night.

  “You’re not going to be the last of the Coopers after all,” she had said. “I’m pregnant.”

  “How do you know it’s mine?” demanded Anthony brutally.

  “Because Chris hasn’t touched me since it started with you.”

  “Don’t give me that happy horseshit. He’s sleeping in the same bed with you, for Christ’s sake.”

  “It’s your baby, Anthony. I wouldn’t lie to you about this.”

  “Well, what are we going to do?” he asked a little hysterically.

  “I don’t know,” replied Lisa.

  “I have a friend in New York who knows a doctor. I’ll call her tonight.”

  “You go to hell, Anthony,” said Lisa. “If you think I’m going to have an abortion, you’re crazy.”

  “Well, what else?”

  “We could get married.”

  “Are you out of your mind?”

  “No, I’m not. Of course there’d be a stink, but then, you always told me that you didn’t mind shocking Cooper Station anyway.”

  “I’ve got to think,” said Anthony.

  When she had gone, he sat for a long time and then he knew what he was going to do. He would go to see Doris Delaney Palmer. Perhaps he could be of some use in getting Chris and Lisa Pappas out of Cooper Station.

  And in the gardener’s cottage, Lisa, too, was thinking. She had not been entirely truthful with Anthony. Chris had had intercourse with her twice during the weeks of her affair with Anthony Cooper, and then she had pleaded pain and had said that she must go to see Jess Cameron.

  Chris Pappas was not an unkind man.

  “Maybe it’s nerves,” he offered. “All this foolishness about that damned petition and everything. You go see Jess anyway, but I’ll bet it’s just that you’re all upset about Doris Palmer. Don’t you worry, honey. She’ll never get anywhere with her campaign. I’ve got that signed contract and there’s nothing she can do about that.”

  Lisa sat at her kitchen table and her fingers drummed soundlessly against the Formica top.

  It was just twice with Chris, she thought. It can’t possibly be his baby. I know it belongs to Anthony.

  But she knew that she did not know for sure and that if she went ahead and had the baby she would wonder for the rest of her life.

  Chapter XI

  It was raining.

  Margery Cooper sat in Robin’s room rocking the cradle that was the bed of the ten-year-old child. It was a large cradle, a bed actually, with rockers where the legs should have been.

  “Hush-a-bye, my baby, slumber time is coming soon,” sang Margery softly. “Lay your head upon my breast while Mammy croons a tune. The darkies are humming, their banjoes are strumming, soft and low.”

  The pretty room was very still. Its pale-blue walls soft in the dim light.

  “Hush-a-bye, my baby, slumber time is coming soon . . .”

  Margery let her voice drift off.

  The pale-blue walls had a dado of brightly colored circus animals. There was a light-blue rug on the floor and crisp white curtains at the windows and all along one wall there were white painted shelves stacked with dolls and stuffed toys.

  Perfect, remembered Margery. Everything was going to be perfect for her baby.

  In the cradle the child who slept there fitfully was truly ugly to look upon. She had a short, broad skull, coarse black hair, yellowish skin and slanted eyes. But the most terrible thing of all was to see the child awake and to gaze into the emptiness of those slanted eyes.

  Margery Cooper looked away from her daught
er and stared out the windows of the room. The summer rains fell heavily, as if they were going about a job they had been sent to do and meant to do it well. Water washed at every windowpane so that Margery could barely discern the shapes of the trees outside. Once Margery had loved the rains of summer falling in fruitful torrents to the waiting earth. But today she merely stared, unseeingly, at the blurred windows.

  There were times when she felt that if she ever once let go of the tears that she kept dammed behind the wall of her self-control, they too, would fall like the summer rains, hard and unabatingly, to cover the earth. But her tears would not be fruitful drops to fall and enrich the soil. They would be salty and bitter and they would leave barrenness in their wake.

  Margery turned and looked again at her daughter. Automatically her hand began its rocking and her voice picked up the lullaby.

  “Hush-a-bye, my baby, slumber time is coming soon . . .”

  “Why?” She asked silently as she had so often.

  And the answer was always the same. Nobody knows.

  But what shall I do?

  There is nothing to be done.

  “Hush-a-bye, my baby . . .”

  Margery Cooper no longer asked her questions aloud. She went about the business of breathing, moving, living as if there were really something in the world that mattered besides Robin.

  Now her hand stopped its gentle pushing against the cradle for the child slept soundly. She tucked a soft blanket around her and kissed her daughter’s forehead.

  “Sleep well, my darling,” she said softly. “Sweet dreams.”

  Margery went quietly down the maroon-carpeted stairs of her house. It was going to be a long, long day and a longer evening. At seven o’clock there was going to be an emergency meeting of the Town Board of Guardians at which Doris Palmer, everyone knew, would present her petition for a referendum and ask that a date be set for a town meeting.