Young Mr. Keefe Page 11

  “Jimmy, please—”

  “I do. For my part—”

  “What makes you think it was your fault?”

  “Some of it must have been.”

  “You underestimate me.”

  “There must have been something that I said or did—”

  “You’ve always underestimated me,” she said. “Everyone has. No one knows the many things little Claire is capable of.” She looked at him, smiling a small, defiant smile.

  He flushed. “Well, I’m sorry, anyway.”

  “Don’t be absurd. Is that why you’re getting drunk?”

  “One reason.”

  “And the other reason is—Helen, I suppose?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Oh, Jimmy,” she said earnestly. “What are you trying to do to yourself? What are you trying to prove? Let me talk to Helen. You’re a nice boy, Jimmy! Why do you try to convince yourself you’re a bastard?”

  “I’m not—”

  “Will you let me talk to Helen?”

  “No.”

  “All right.” She turned and walked quickly away, towards Blazer.

  Jimmy sat there. He felt stunned. He felt he couldn’t get up. The last drink stirred within him.

  Helen. Was it possible that in some odd, involuted way Helen had wanted him to ruin himself? No, that was not fair. They had flown home, first to New York, then on to San Francisco. Jimmy had started looking for a job and had found the one in Sacramento. They had moved into the apartment on Capitol Avenue. He had kept his promise; for several weeks, he had nothing to drink, and—though it was hard to remember—perhaps things had got a little better. But then he had broken it—broken it deliberately, in anger and despair.

  It was a warm Sunday in May. The Warrens had driven up from Rio Linda for dinner. Mrs. Warren had been enthusiastic about the apartment, and, as Jimmy remembered it, it had looked rather pretty, with bowls of fresh flowers on the tables and the windows open, a soft breeze blowing in. Helen had worked busily in the kitchen, fixing a turkey. He remembered her standing in front of the stove, frowning slightly, tiny beads of perspiration along her upper lip and a damp lock of brown hair falling across her forehead. The mood had been cosy and domestic, and Jimmy had fixed old-fashioneds for Mr. and Mrs. Warren and a gin-and-tonic for Helen. He had sipped a Coca-Cola. After dinner, Helen’s father had kicked off his shoes and stretched out on the sofa. (“Goodness, Walker, do you need to make yourself that much at home? What will Jimmy think!” Mrs. Warren had said. “Can’t a man be comfortable?” Mr. Warren had replied.) Jimmy and his father-in-law had talked for a while about the hardware business, and Mr. Warren had asked Jimmy several questions about the organizational set-up of the Keefe Company—a subject that Jimmy did not know too much about. Mr. Warren was still puzzled as to why Jimmy hadn’t gone into his father’s business. “I should think there’d be quite a future for you there,” he said.

  “I guess I don’t want to do it, because it would be the easiest thing, sir,” Jimmy said. “I mean, it seems a little lazy. And if I ever did go into the business, I’d be trapped there—it would be almost impossible to leave. I guess I just want to see whether I can do something on my own—see if I’ve got it in me.”

  “Well, I think that’s very admirable,” Mr. Warren said. But he did not look convinced.

  They talked a while longer and suddenly Mr. Warren fell asleep. Jimmy sat opposite him, uncomfortably watching the older man’s heavy breathing. Mrs. Warren came in from the kitchen, where she had been helping Helen with the dishes. “Walker!” she cried. “Walker! Wake up! Goodness me, is that any way to behave on our first visit here?” Mr. Warren sat up and rubbed his eyes. He smiled. “I guess Helen’s dinner was just too good for me,” he said. “Well, I guess we’d better be starting back, Arlene.”

  There were pleasant good-byes, promises to do it again soon, handshakes and kisses. They left and Jimmy and Helen were alone again. Helen sat on the sofa, her face troubled.

  “Well, that was a lot of fun,” Jimmy said easily.

  “Was it?” she asked.

  “Sure. We were just like—like old married people, weren’t we?”

  “I suppose we impressed them that way,” Helen said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean we put on a good act. You especially—”

  “I wasn’t acting, Helen.”

  “What do you mean? Do you mean to say you enjoyed it? Well,” she said defensively, “they’re my parents and I love them very much! They mean—everything in the world to me! I don’t care how dull you think they are.”

  “I don’t think they’re dull—”

  “Of course you do! I saw you—talking to Daddy—wishing you were somewhere else—a thousand miles, three thousand miles away from here! Back at one of your elegant Connecticut parties! Drinking French champagne!”

  “Helen, that just isn’t true.”

  “Of course it is!” She stood up. “Oh, why did you marry somebody like me! What in the world did you see in me?”

  “Listen,” he said, “you’re absolutely wrong. Helen, I want to be married. Married! Like—like your mother and father. I want things to be homey and comfortable and friendly. I don’t insist on everything being expensive and exciting. That’s why I married you.”

  “That’s what you thought you wanted, perhaps,” she said bitterly. “But now that you have it—now that you see what it’s like—you’re bored to death! I know it.”

  “Well,” he said finally, “what did I do wrong? What should I have done? Wasn’t I nice to them?”

  “Oh, you were nice! You’re always nice, but I could tell that you were dying of boredom inside. When Daddy talked to you—”

  “For Christ’s sake, what was I supposed to do?”

  “Do? Oh, I don’t know, I don’t know.” She put her face in her hands.

  “I don’t get it,” he said. “I’m sorry, but I don’t.”

  “I mean, you were superior!” she said, looking at him. “Superior—and snooty and condescending—and stuffy! Calling my father ‘sir’ all the time—and did you see how my mother acted? All in a dither—nervous—trying to match your so-called Eastern polish! You made both of them feel uncomfortable!”

  Suddenly he was angry. “Uncomfortable!” he said. “I made them feel uncomfortable? Your old man didn’t look so damned uncomfortable when he pulled off his shoes and lay down and started to snore!”

  “You see, you see?” she said. “Just as I said!”

  “You’re right,” he said, standing up. “I was bored to the ears. Bored to the God-damned ears, sitting around listening to a lot of dull, middle-class platitudinous crap!”

  Helen sat down hard in the chair and Jimmy marched into the kitchen and poured himself a drink from the whisky bottle. He stood there, drinking his drink, his hand shaking. He wished he hadn’t said that. It was not just the harshness of the remark that disturbed him. It was the fact that he wasn’t sure whether he had meant it or not. He just did not know. Once upon a time, he had thought he knew what he wanted. He was no longer sure.

  The days went on. It was as though some mutually destructive force compelled them now, drove them on, forced them to continue hurting one another. They were on a road by then that carried them down, wound them under, and it was too late to stop, to let it end; they hurtled along it, faster and faster. It was no longer possible to tell whether anyone meant anything that was said; the sudden, unkind remarks were always a mixture of truth and gratuitous cruelty.

  As summer approached, the apartment was often oppressively hot. It was difficult to keep cool. In the Central Valley of California, hot days and nights can continue, relentlessly, from April. They slept under pink linen sheets—wedding presents from the East, from Mosse’s, with gigantic pink K’s monogrammed on them—but soon threw them off and slept naked, perspiring. Jimmy bought an electric floor fan. It was the only real purchase he made for the apartment. Its whirring breeze lulled them to sleep.
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  Sometimes they went out, to a movie or to dinner. Sometimes they stayed out late, sitting in an air-cooled bar, drinking, talking, trying somehow to figure things out. The last act of the play had begun; it was too late to alter the scenes that had gone before, the churning months between the hushed, snow-covered valley of Yosemite and the apartment in Sacramento.

  Returning to the apartment, late at night, was hard. For no reason, the light switch was across the room. They groped towards it together, forgetting where the furniture was placed, suddenly finding a chair, set like a trap to spring on moving prey. A whisper: “Did you put this here?”

  Angrily: “No, it wasn’t I—”

  And then, perhaps later: “Darling—”

  “Yes?”

  “Would you—?”

  “What?”

  “Oh, never mind …”

  One night, after playing tennis poorly in the park, they sat up very late with three bottles of red wine, talking, feeling that they must talk, feeling that somehow, by talking, they could pin it down, clarify and spread out on the table everything that had gone wrong. Helen had a phrase. “We are emotionally unsuited for each others,” she had said.

  “Why won’t you see a doctor?” he asked her.

  “What kind of doctor?”

  “Someone—a psychiatrist—who knows about these things.”

  “You still think that, don’t you?”

  “What?”

  “That I’m crazy …”

  “No,” he said hopelessly. “But it isn’t getting any better—don’t you see?”

  “If you had helped!” she said.

  “How could I help?”

  “Ah—” She reached for the wine bottle. “Does drinking make you forget?” she asked. “Is that what it’s supposed to do? It doesn’t work for me.”

  “It makes me remember,” he said.

  “What? What is there to remember? Quarrels … scenes …”

  “Don’t you remember those first few days—when we were all by ourselves in Yosemite? My God, Helen, I’d never been so happy as I was then! But then it changed, all at once.”

  “You were a different person in Yosemite,” she said. “In the beginning. Then you frightened me.”

  “What do you mean, I frightened you?”

  She looked at him steadily. “You frighten me often,” she said. “You frighten me right now.”

  He turned away from her angrily. “You’re right. I do think you’re crazy!”

  “You frighten me when you drink.”

  “And why do you think I drink? Because of you!”

  “Is everything my fault?” She stood up with tears in her eyes. She went into the bathroom and stood in front of the mirror, brushing her hair. He followed her. “What about that night?” he asked. “By the pool—do you remember that? We were happy for a while. We can be happy, can’t we?”

  “Such a waste!” she said.

  “What?”

  “The honeymoon. How much do you suppose that honeymoon cost? Three thousand dollars? Just so that we could go from island to island, drinking and torturing ourselves …”

  “But we’re in our own apartment now. I’ve got a job, we’re settled—or we should be! Why do we have to keep harking back to that honeymoon?”

  She didn’t answer him, but stood there, brushing fiercely, counting the brush strokes silently, under her breath.

  “You should be grateful that there’s money,” he said.

  “Not when it’s helped to do this to us—”

  “Look,” he said, “I don’t want to rely on the money. I want to do things on my own. I’ve told you that. That’s why we’re here, in Sacramento, and not back with the Keefe Company making hinges and staples! I want to be independent of that—”

  “I know, I know …”

  “Do you love me?” he asked her.

  She stopped brushing and leaned forward, resting her forehead on the mirror. “Yes,” she said.

  “Then can’t we be happy?”

  “I want to be! I do want to be!”

  “Then—” He put his hand on her arm.

  “Then give me time!” she sobbed. “Give me time to forget things, and help me. Be considerate and patient, and help me!”

  “I try,” he said gently. “But there’s some sort of curtain between us now. Something’s stopping us—”

  She bowed her head further, letting her forehead slide down along the cool glass. “Please … please don’t talk to me any more. Please just leave me alone.”

  He went back into the kitchen and poured himself another drink. It was like all their quarrels—aimless, oblique, beginning nowhere, ending nowhere.

  Later, she came into the kitchen in her robe. “Do you mind if I drive home to-morrow for the day?” she asked him. “I’ll drive you to work. Then go on in the car.”

  It was a short drive to Helen’s home, forty miles down the valley. “All right,” he said. With her short brown hair loose, in her light cotton robe, her tanned face and small body had a frail, sculptured look. She stood there, swaying a little—the way a few drinks always made her do—and smiled at him with a strange apologetic smile. “Are you sure you don’t mind?”

  “No. Why do you want to go?”

  She looked away from him. “I want to think. I want to go home and think things out.”

  “Sure.”

  He took a cigarette from his pack and reached for the kitchen lighter.

  “Be careful of that lighter,” she said. “It throws out sparks.”

  “I know.”

  He smoked his cigarette, then put it out and followed her to bed. After he had switched out the light, he pulled the pink sheet tight around his throat. “Good night.”

  “Good night.”

  He huddled there, afraid to move, afraid that moving the slightest inch would start the shivering, the trembling he felt inside him. When, much later, he did move, the trembling started, but by that time Helen was asleep.

  The next morning, she had driven to Rio Linda, but that evening she did not come back. Around seven, the telephone rang. “Jimmy?” she said. “I’m still here. Daddy’s sick. We’re a little worried. Would you mind if I spent the night?”

  “No,” he said, “that’s all right.”

  He had suspected that she was not telling the truth, but the next day, at his office, she had telephoned him again. “Daddy’s much worse … he’s had an internal hæmorrhage. The doctor’s terribly worried. Jimmy—I’m afraid he’s going to die!”

  “Would you like me to come down?” he asked.

  “Could you? Could you come down to-night on the bus?”

  “All right.”

  That night when he arrived at the Warrens’ house in Rio Linda, Helen met him at the door. “He’s upstairs,” she said. “Go up and see him.”

  Mr. Warren lay in bed in the half-darkened room. He was not a large man, but in the big bed he seemed even smaller, shrunken. In sleep, his face was fallen and old. Mrs. Warren sat beside him with a pile of yellow knitting in her lap. “Hello, Jimmy,” she whispered. She reached up and brushed his cheek with her lips. “He’s still asleep … he had a pill.”

  “What is it?” he asked her.

  “It’s a duodenal ulcer. Dr. Manger says he must have been suffering from it for years. They’re afraid to operate—his heart. Poor Walker! He never mentioned anything to me.”

  Mr. Warren opened his eyes once, closed them, then opened them again.

  Jimmy took his heavy, veined hand. “Hello, sir,” he said. “How are you feeling?”

  “Me?” Mr. Warren said. “I’m feeling fine, just fine. Did somebody tell you I wasn’t? It’s just these women—Helen and her mother—trying to make an invalid out of me.”

  “Don’t let ’em do it, sir.” Jimmy smiled.

  “Yes,” Mr. Warren said. “It’s tough to live in a houseful of women. Was that the way your house was, Jim?”

  “Well, there was my dad, sir—”

  “
Oh, yes. Do I sound fuzzy? I’m running a little temperature. Your dad’s a fine fellow, Jimmy, a smart man—”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Mr. Warren closed his eyes. “Arlene!” he said. “Arlene! Are the children in?”

  Mrs. Warren rose and stood beside him. “Yes, Walker, everything’s fine.”

  “It’s going to rain—”

  “There, there, you’re just having a dream.”

  Mr. Warren opened his eyes once more and looked at Jimmy. “I’ll be up and around to-morrow, wait and see,” he said. “Just running a temperature, that’s all.”

  Mrs. Warren placed her hand on his forehead. “Hush, Walker,” she said. “You need rest … lots of rest. Go back to sleep.”

  When Jimmy got downstairs, he found Helen curled on the sofa, weeping. She was close to hysteria. “He’s going to die!” she sobbed. “He’s going to die! I know he’s going to die!”

  “Don’t talk like that,” he said gently. “He’s not going to die. He said he feels fine now …”

  “Don’t you know him? He says he feels fine—but he’s in terrible pain. Oh, oh, oh! He’s going to die! Daddy’s going to die!”

  “Please, Helen,” he said. “You mustn’t think that—”

  She turned to him angrily. Her face was white and streaked with tears. “He is going to die!” she screamed. “Can’t you understand that? Don’t you have any feeling? Don’t you even care?”

  Later, he had gone for a walk. He walked aimlessly, up and down the lighted streets of Rio Linda. Finally, he went into a bar and had a drink. When he got back to the house and opened the door, Helen stood at the head of the stairs. Her face was expressionless as she started down. “Well,” she said, “he’s dead.”

  He couldn’t believe her. “That’s not true—”

  She ran down the stairs and across the hall to where he stood and slapped him. “What do you mean, it’s not true?” she cried. “Of course it’s true! He’s dead! And where were you? Getting drunk!”

  Mrs. Warren hurried down the stairs after her. Helen turned to her mother. “He says I’m lying! He says Daddy isn’t dead!” She turned away from him and ran into the living-room.

  “What?” Mrs. Warren said. “What do you mean, you dreadful, dreadful boy?” Her pale eyes blazed at him. “I suppose, in your house, death is nothing! Well, in our house, it’s not like that! My husband is dead. Now get out of my house! Go back where you came from! Get out of my house, you drunken wastrel!”