Clarkton

by Howard Fast

  “It must have been very flattering,” Ruth said.

  “Why?”

  “I think I’d be flattered if a little boy fell in love with me.”

  “That’s a hell of a thing to say!” His anger was a slow thing, never really emerging, like the repressed sex urge of an adolescent.

  “I’m sorry. Elliott, why didn’t you try to help her?”

  “Would you?”

  “It wouldn’t matter to me,” Ruth shrugged.

  “That’s really the way you feel, isn’t it?” Abbott said.

  “But you didn’t help her.”

  “What in hell could I do?”

  “Maybe you should have gone to bed with her,” Ruth said flatly, turning away and leaving his anger like a live thing fixed in his throat, a hopeless anger that dissolved as quickly as it had gathered. He was a rational creature, and he was able to reflect that, whatever she said, Ruth would have done something. He had done nothing; but the more he probed and considered the thing, the more certain he became that there was nothing he could have done.

  11.Hamilton Gelb sent Frank Norman to take a walk around the town. He had a certain respect and liking for Norman, but because he did not believe that sincerity and a sense of duty were sufficient substitutes for brains and objectivity, he had no particularly high hopes or plans for the boy. As a matter of fact, in those moments when Gelb was irritated with Frank Norman, he mentally classified him as a tout with the soul of a bookkeeper; but afterward he would feel sorry for such an attitude and ascribe it to his long-ago past, to a certain obstinate and foreign reluctance to recognize a clean-cut and forthright type of American. Yet Gelb could not help being annoyed at the way Norman reacted toward any deviation from the pattern, his almost frenetic resistance to change, his attitude toward Negroes, Jews, foreigners, and anything else he considered subversive. Gelb, who had some understanding of radicals, did not hate them; Frank Norman hated them and did not understand them or want to understand them, nor was this hatred appreciably lessened by the patient efforts of Gelb to make him realize that an enemy worth fighting is an enemy worth respecting. He had told Norman, when they first began to work together, “You must get certain things out of your head. You must get it out of your head that these people are part of an international plot, controlled by Moscow, and you must get it out of your head that they are planning a revolution where they will seize the post offices and the state capitols and take over. That is a kid’s notion, all right for senators and congressmen, but not for the kind of work we do.”

  “But they do take orders from Moscow—”

  “My own opinion,” Gelb had said, “is that they don’t give two damns for Moscow. If they were that kind of an organization, they would give us no trouble. What kind of an idiot would join an organization like that? I’ve had twenty years of experience with these babies, and most of them don’t know that the Kremlin exists and don’t care either. Also, if you get to think of them as the mainspring of everything, you’ll get off the track. They’re a very small organization, and at best they’re a catalyst. You get to thinking that they make unions and strikes and the rest of it, and you go off the beam. The opposite is more like the truth.”

  But the opposite was not a conception that Frank Norman could handle. For him, the essential complexity of that kind of thinking defeated itself. He was a simple and not unhealthy type of person, and all during his army experience he had kept the calm and matter-of-fact conviction that America was fighting the wrong nations. It pleased him that he could have a peacetime job on the right side instead of the wrong. Now, before he set out on his walk, Gelb gave him a few words of advice—to the effect of keeping his eyes open and feeling a mood rather than trying to overhear anything. “Whatever they taught you in the service about this kind of work,” Gelb said, “the best way to operate is to put yourself in the same mental state as the people you’re observing. Try to become a part of them and to react as they are reacting. That requires sensitivity, and sensitivity is something you will never have enough of. Never get angry, because as soon as you become angry, you raise a wall between yourself and your subjects. You might drop into Joe Santana’s barber shop and get a haircut. Don’t ask questions, because there’s nothing worth knowing that comes from questions. People want to talk, and if you have patience they’ll tell you everything you care to know. That’s the only factor that distinguishes them from animals.”

  Norman would have been angry, had he not respected Gelb so much. Gelb was the type of man he admired, the type of man who, in Norman’s opinion, made the best officers in the service. It made him want to do what Gelb asked him to do.

  Now he sauntered down the main street of Clarkton, his hat tilted back on his head, his coat open, his hands in his pockets, looking for all the world like one of those college boys who sometimes came down from Williams to keep a date with a girl at the hotel, to get drunk, or maybe just to eat a steak dinner. It was not difficult to operate without anger on such a nice, sunny day, and he would have had to be far more insensate than he was not to collect some of the feeling that pervaded the town. His gaze wandered from store window to store window, and here and there he saw posters which expressed storekeepers’ support of the strikers, a movement in which, as Gelb assured him, the reds had taken the lead, basing it on the more or less sound presumption that the workers in the town did most of the buying. Norman also noticed the girls, dark haired, most of them, and pretty, and he wished that he had a date for that evening. He went into the dusky, sour cave of a saloon and ordered a beer; and contrary to his expectations the talk of the dozen or so men at the bar, all of them workers, did not stop at his entrance. They gave him hardly more than a glance, and then went on talking, in that slow, deliberate way of theirs, about the atomic bomb, the Lowell family, the price of food, the late war, the President, the hockey matches, the Russians, and a number of other things. He went back into the daylight and sauntered on. He came presently to Joe Santana’s barber shop and turned in. A man was being shaved, and a boy of about twelve was waiting. Norman seated himself, picked up a copy of the New Masses; and leafed through it, recalling the apt remark of a columnist about butcher-paper periodicals. His own regard for technical excellence was balanced by an opinion of those who did not and apparently could not do things well.

  The barber was talking about evolution in a way that reminded him of his freshman days in college. He fell into a sort of a doze as he listened, content with himself and satisfied that he was doing an exciting job well.

  12.The maid, who opened the door of his house for Lowell, stood there looking at him as he got out of his overcoat, until he asked her what it was.

  “Miss Antonini has been waiting for half an hour inside, and I just want to know if I should ask her to keep on waiting?”

  “Who is Miss Antonini?”

  “I don’t know,” the maid said. “She says she had an appointment with Mrs. Lowell.”

  “And where is Mrs. Lowell?”

  “She’s upstairs with a sick headache since one o’clock, and now she’s asleep. I think she ought to sleep.”

  “All right,” Lowell said. “I’ll talk to Miss Antonini. Where: is she—in the living, room?”

  “In the living room,” the maid said.

  Lowell was not curious; curiosity, interest even, was not a part of him at this point. The twenty-two hours since he had returned to Clarkton translated themselves, in terms of his body, into emptiness—a mental high colonic that left him indifferent and apathetic. The only thing he wanted at this moment was a drink, and however painful a human being Miss Antonini might be, she would be preferable to his wife with a sick headache. He went into the library first, and while he was mixing the martinis, he tried to engender in himself some enthusiasm for the rest of the day and the evening. He tried to think of something to do that he would want to do, some place to go where he would want to go, and he found himself agreeing with Lois’ proposal that they go away from Clarkton. The only thin
g that held him, he realized now, was the strike itself. Only since the strike had his attitude toward the plant become anything more than casual; in a sense, only since the strike had he become aware of himself as a person with more than immediate needs. The strike was a calendar.

  Carrying the mixer of martinis and two glasses, he entered the living room, glanced casually at the girl who sat there, and then set down his paraphernalia on the piano. In the way he had of acknowledging a person without seeing her, he said:

  “How do you do, Miss—”

  “Miss Antonini,” she said.

  “You had an appointment with my wife, and she’s indisposed. Isn’t there anything I can do for you? I’m Mr. Lowell.”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  He had seen her since he entered the room, but now she lived, and she became Miss Antonini. She was twenty or twenty-one years old, and she had a figure that ripped into him, that made him sick not instantly but progressively; so that his want, which had begun imperceptibly when he entered the room, pitched on a key so high that it pumped his heart and pressured his ears and drew sensation down into him like long needles thrust under the skin.

  Outwardly, he was no different. This had happened to him before, but it did not happen often. It happened sometimes when he was walking on the street, and then it was something that approached and passed, like a sweet smell that the very laws of nature made unobtainable. It didn’t pass this time, and he looked at the girl slowly and intently, meanwhile filling the glasses. She wore a black silk dress and filled it like one of those ripe black plums fills its shining skin. She had high, round breasts, a curved, narrow waist, a slight roll where her stomach was, full hips, and legs that were not slim or yet heavy, and all of this he saw before he really saw her face. She was not an exceptionally pretty girl, but her face extended his hunger until he felt an actual physical ache. Her nose was straight and just a shade too long to fulfill the Hollywood standard. She had full lips, a rather large jaw, and an unusually beautiful and long and shapely neck. Her eyes were dark, as was her hair, which she wore in a heavy bun at the nape of her neck.

  He spoke her name out of need now, “Miss Antonini, will you have a drink, please? I’m sorry you had to wait.”

  “That’s all right.” She neither refused nor accepted the cocktail, and he stood there holding the drink, cataloguing her voice, which except for a certain shrillness would have been rather pleasant, the voice of an Italian working girl who grew up in Clarkton and who had put on her best black silk dress and high-heeled black pumps to come to the Lowell house—for any one of twenty reasons, none of which he cared about in the least, knowing that Lois, in the throes of a headache that signaled her frustration as surely as certain other factors marked his, had forgotten, shelved this factor, put it aside, put it out of her memory with all other matters that proposed contradictions. He wanted his drink desperately, but held it without tasting it and walked over to her and said:

  “Won’t you have a martini, Miss Antonini? I would have been having one myself, whether or not there was anyone here.”

  Now she accepted the drink, saying, “Mrs. Lowell asked me to come here and have tea.”

  “For tea?” Something clicked in his mind. He tried to remember; it was something that Lois had said to him, and he tried to remember but for the life of him could not. He stood over her, looking down at her face, at her breasts, at the cleft where the neck of her dress leaned forward, thinking that he would let his hand drop and slide gently over the surface of the silk, and she would not move, would not draw away, as her eyes told him, staring into his, open and calm, her upper lip curled a little, the fine dark down on it glistening with just a fragrance of moisture. But he didn’t let his hand drop, and asked her instead if he could help her, if she wished to tell him what she was there for.

  “I don’t know,” Miss Antonini said, looking steadily at the tall, distinguished looking man who stood before her. “My name is Rose Antonini, and your son, Clark, was a friend of mine. Mrs. Lowell asked me to come here, but I don’t know what she wanted to talk to me about.”

  It came back now, and he stepped away and drank a good part of his martini. She sipped at hers. ‘The ache in him had become an actual pain, a physical pain that twisted his stomach, tightened his thighs, and gripped at his heart. He had to sit down. He said it to himself, I have to sit down, I have to sit down. He walked over to a chair and sat in it, and the girl said:

  “This is a very nice room.”

  “You’re Clark’s girl,” he nodded.

  She neither confirmed nor denied the fact. “I don’t know what Mrs. Lowell wanted to see me about.”

  “I think she only wanted to talk to you—because you had known Clark.”

  “I see.”

  “Did you know Clark well—for long, I mean?”

  “We had some dates. Almost whenever he was on furlough, we had a date.”

  He found himself saying, and listening to himself somewhat curiously as he said it, “Clark and I were very close. He was my only son.”

  “I know.”

  “I suppose it must have hurt you too,” he said.

  There was a puzzled note in her voice when she answered. “I cried when I heard about it,” she told him. “I had a brother who was killed at Tarawa. That made it worse.”

  “What do you do, Miss Antonini?” he asked her.

  “I work—at the plant.” Unnecessarily, she added, “I’m not working now.”

  “No, I guess not. Are you married?”

  She shook her head. Lowell could think of nothing else to say now, nothing that mattered saying and nothing that needed saying. His questions about Clark were formal; he didn’t care. In terms of this girl, Clark had no association and no reality and no being, and in the fullest sense he was not talking about Clark at all. He was not talking about anyone or anything.

  He saw that she was almost through with her drink, and he rose and filled her glass again. “These are very good,” she said. “It’s too early for me to drink, and on an empty stomach it goes to my head.”

  “I don’t like to drink alone.” That wasn’t what he had meant to say, but for the first time since he came into the room, she smiled at him.

  “I have to be going,” she said.

  “Finish the drink first.”

  “All right. But then I have to go. I took the bus out here. Can I get a bus back?”

  “I’ll drive you back.” He wondered whether Lois would have offered her money. Recalling now what Lois had said, in the car the day before, he realized that she had given him the feeling that she intended to do something for the girl. But Lois had never seen Rose Antonini, and it was questionable whether she would feel the same way after she had seen her. He remembered the girls Clark had brought home that Lois liked; they were not like this girl. Asking himself whether she would expect him to offer money, the sick feeling pervading his stomach, his flesh and bones and spinal column, pushed the question away.

  “It’s funny about you being Clark’s father,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. It’s just funny.”

  “You’re not sorry you came here?” he said.

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “I have no right to ask you this, I guess. You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. But did you care a great deal about Clark?”

  “I liked him. He wasn’t my only friend, but I liked him.”

  “I see.”

  She stood up and said, “I have to be going now. It’s getting dark outside.”

  He got her coat himself, an imitation seal, and helped her into it. The maid appeared as they were leaving, and he said, “You can tell Mrs. Lowell that I’m driving Miss Antonini back to town.”

  13.As soon as he got into the car next to her, he knew what would happen. She didn’t look at him; she looked straight ahead of her, but before he switched on the head-lights, he put a hand inside of her coat, against her breast. She d
idn’t move; his stomach was empty now, the pain deep down in his groin. He switched on the lights, started the car, and wheeled it around. It was quite dark out now, and if she noticed that he turned to the right instead of to the left, which was the direction of Clarkton, she gave no evidence of it. He drove half a mile and then pulled into an empty cowpath, cutting the lights. There was no resistance on her part when he took her in his arms, but no response either. He kissed her with his mouth open, grinding her lips against his teeth until she cried out in pain, and from there she came alive, almost as if the muscles and nerves were live entities, waked from sleep. He pushed the coat down from her shoulders and tore at the dress. She said, “Don’t—you’re tearing it. Don’t you see?” He tore the dress off, the brassiere too, and she whimpered like a puppy. “Not here,” she begged him, “not here.” “It has to be here! Jesus Christ Almighty, it has to be here!” “Not here in the car.” The bottom came out of his stomach, and he turned into fire. Her moans went on, but on a different note, a different key. He was hardly conscious of his fingers in the flesh of her back, his teeth in her shoulder; her body tensed in every muscle and joint, vibrating like a tuning fork.

  14.Crouched in his corner of the seat, holding a cigarette, his arm cradled over the wheel, he studied her profile, a black silhouette painted on gray that became flesh and blood only when she drew deep on her own cigarette. Rose Antonini—Rosa Antonini—Rosita Antonini—Rosolita Antonini. His belly was full now; he was like a cup holding sweet wine.

  “You tore my dress,” she said. “It’s no good for anything now, just torn into pieces.”

  “You can have dresses, all the dresses you want.”

  “I don’t want dresses from you. I don’t want anything from you.”

  “You want me?”

  The silhouette nodded. His thoughts were loose now, like pieces of flannel, and he let them slip around and slide and wave and go where they wanted to go, because he didn’t give a damn about anything now, didn’t care about the thought in his mind that Clark must have been a blundering, passionless, gawky fool with her. As the tension in his stomach, his heart, his groin, and all of his muscles and nerves and arteries relaxed, youth flowed into him and contentment.