Two steps down the walk, Albert’s slipper socks skidded on the wet pavement, his feet went out from under him, down he went in a flailing of arms and legs, and that’s how he broke his collarbone
Elizabeth and Dr. Francis carried him up to his bed. And there, after Dr. Francis taped him, he stayed, silent and grouchy and mad at the world.
He was still there Wednesday afternoon when the phone rang and Elizabeth came to the door, an odd expression on her face, and said, “It’s Mr. Clement, dear.”
Fatalistically, Albert picked up the bedside phone, put it to his head and said, “Hello?”
Mr. Clement’s voice grated on Albert’s eardrum: “My plane leaves in a minute, you little sneak, but I wanted to talk to you first. I wanted you to know we’re not done, you and I. I’ll be back. I’ll be back.”
Click.
Albert hung up.
Elizabeth, still in the doorway, asked, “Dear?”
Albert opened his mouth. What to tell her? How to tell her? It was ail so troubled and complicated.
“Dear? Is something wrong?”
“Yes,” he said. And then, in a burst of irritation, “Can’t you leave me alone? I’ve lost my job!”
Devilishly
I said, “I’ll go as the Devil. That ought to be funny.”
“Hilarious,” said Doris, in that sardonic voice of hers. “Where do you think them up?”
“Well, after all,” I went on defensively, “it is appropriate. The scalawag son returns—”
“To cop his mama’s sparklers,” Doris finished.
“Just so. A Lucifer suit seems perfectly in keeping with the occasion. The mast devilish guest at the costume ball, that’ll be me.”
“Subtle,” said Doris. “That’s what I love about you, how subtle you are. Why don’t you just go as the Prodigal Son?”
I considered the idea, but shook my head. “No,” I said. “The costume wouldn’t be self-explanatory. But a bright red demon suit, now, with a long tail and a pitchfork—”
“Scrumptious,” said Doris. “Pass the pickles.”
I passed the pickles. I took a bite out of my pastrami sandwich, chewed it, swallowed it, and said, “You’re so smart, what are you going to be?”
“I haven’t decided yet. But nothing banal, darling, believe me. Nothing obvious. Something beautifully original.”
“September Morn,” I suggested.
“You would say something like that,” she said. “Why don’t you suggest Lady Godiva?”
Just before we finished lunch, Doris reached across the table and took my hand and said, “Don’t mind me, Willy. You know I don’t mean it as bad as it sounds—”
I did know that, and said so. “You’re cleverer than I am,” I said, “in some ways. But you love me all the same.”
“Oh, you know I do,” she said, and gave me an emotional smile, and squeezed my hand. “And I know you love me,” she said.
“I should think so.”
Yes, I should think so. I’d been disowned for loving Doris, disinherited, kicked out of the biggest house in this city. I threw over a multimillion-dollar inheritance for the love of Doris. Here was one wife who need never have doubts about her husband’s affection.
The last five years, since I’d packed and moved out of the Piedmont estate, giving up any claim to the Piedmont soapflake fortune, had not been entirely easy ones. William Piedmont III could not, it goes without saying, do manual labor for his livelihood, but a liberal arts education at an Ivy League college had left me singularly unprepared for any sort of white-collar occupation. With work impossible, Doris and I had had to be fast on our toes and quick with our wits in order to maintain an income sufficient to our tastes.
But after the first year, when in essence we’d been learning our trades, life went along rather well. A bit of pocketpicking here, a touch of burglary there, a modest stock sale elsewhere, it all mounted up. And in rural parts of the country, especially in the South, the old badger game was still worth a small but reliable income.
Not that things went so well that I was prepared to forgive my dear family, however. Oh, no, definitely not. Aside from having turned me out to starve or worse, my nearest and dearest relatives had seen fit to be insulting about Doris, my only true love, merely because she had come from a poverty- stricken family with a scattering of police records among its members. The sting of that rejection was still with me, as sharp as ever, and had been with me constantly throughout these five years. To get back at my family, to somehow even the score with them, how I longed for the opportunity.
But it was impossible. I couldn’t approach them, not on any pretext, and if I couldn’t approach them, how could I get at them, how could I work my vengeance upon them? No, it was impossible.
Or, that is, had been impossible. Impossible until the happy day when I’d found, within a wallet my light fingers had lifted from its former owner, an invitation for two at the Piedmont estate. For a Mardi Gras, a masquerade ball. Prizes would be given.
Oh, yes. Prizes would be given.
The time was two weeks off. We had just come to town the day before I received the invitation — I returned once or twice a year to my native city, drawn back time and time again by the till now fruitless quest for revenge — and had engaged in only the barest minimum of pilfering and light larceny. It was safe to stay, so long as we avoided any part of town where my family might be and recognize me, and so long as we were careful not to pull any capers big enough to start a manhunt. We lived, in the meantime, on the fruits of others’ hip pockets, and bided our time.
Now, during lunch at a deli three days before the big masquerade ball, it had come to me what costume I wanted to wear. Doris made fun of it, of course; one of the things I loved most about her was her unceasing war against the banal, the obvious, the trite. I had come from a family for whom banality was a philosophic concept, and it was by now impossible for me to change this style within myself, but I appreciated Doris’s position and took a real pleasure in the way she punctured every cliché I launched.
On the other hand, I had still inherited a taste for the apparent, and was not about to give it up. The Lucifer suit, for instance; I thought of it, Doris punctured the triteness of the conception, I took pleasure in her barbed attack, and afterward I would take a different kind of pleasure in going right ahead and wearing the Lucifer suit.
I would call myself, generally, amiable. Yes, amiable. In my dealings with the world except for the single instance of my immediate family, toward whom I was implacably determined upon revenge — my normal, almost my only, reaction was of amiability.
Now, having reaffirmed our love for one another, we went ahead and finished our lunch. We left the deli, I jostled a stranger, and we walked four blocks to the costume shop I’d noticed earlier. With money from the stranger’s wallet I put a deposit on a really stunning Satan outfit, tail and pitchfork and all. To Doris, I then said, “Well? Is there anything here you want? I might as well put a deposit for both costumes at once.” The stranger had apparently been well-to-do; in any case, he carried a goodly amount of cash on his person.
“I’m sure you will,” I said.
But by Saturday afternoon, when I went out to the costumer’s to pick up the suit, the idea had not as yet occurred to her. “I’ll have something by the time you get back,” she swore.
“Oh, yes, you will,” I said disbelievingly. “You’ll wind up going in an old sheet. The ghost of Christmas past.”