“Gee, you could fool anybody, Stan. You talk just like a gentleman.”
He stared down at her, suddenly sober. “Thanks.”
“Why, I could see that Cadillac as plain as could be for a minute there. Red and black, with real leather upholstery and your initials on the door.” She touched his arm. It had gone stiff as a board. “Stan?”
“Yeah.”
“What the heck, we wouldn’t know what to do with a Cadillac if we had one. We’d have to pay the license and insurance and gas and oil, and then we’d have to find a place to park it — well, it just wouldn’t be worth the trouble, as far as I’m concerned, and I’m not just shooting the breeze either. I mean it.”
“Sure. Sure you do, Muriel.” He was touched by her loyalty, but at the same time it nagged at him; it reminded him that he didn’t deserve it and that he would have to try harder to deserve it in the future. The future, he thought. When he was younger, the future always seemed to him like a bright and beribboned box full of gifts. Now it loomed in front of him, dark gray and impenetrable, like a leaden wall.
He picked out a tie from the bureau drawer, dark gray to match the wall.
“Stan? Take me with you?”
“No, Muriel. I’m sorry.”
“Will you be back in time to go to your job Monday night?”
“I’ll be back.” He’d had the job, as night watchman for an electrical appliance warehouse on Figueroa Street, for only a week. The work was dull and lonely, but he made it more interesting for himself by imagining the place was going to be robbed any night now and visualizing how he would foil the robbers, with a flying tackle or a rabbit punch from behind, or a short, powerful left hook, or simply by outwitting them in a very clever way which he hadn’t figured out yet. Having outthought, or outfought, the robbers, he would go on to receive his reward from the president of the appliance firm. The rewards varied from money or some shares in the company to a large bronze plaque inscribed with his name and a description of his deed of valor: To Stanley Elliott Fielding, Who, Above and Beyond the Call of Duty, Did Resist the Onslaught of Seven Masked and Desperate Criminals...
It was all fantasy, and he knew it. But it helped to pass the time and ease the tension he felt whenever he was alone.
Muriel helped him on with his jacket. “There. You look real nice, Stan. Nobody’d ever take you for a night watchman.”
“Thank you.”
“Where will you stay when you get there, Stan?”
“I haven’t decided.”
“I should know how to get in touch with you in case something comes up about your job. I suppose I could call Daisy’s house if it was real important.”
“No, don’t,” he said quickly. “I may not even be going to Daisy’s house.”
“But you said before you...”
“Listen. Remember the young man I told you about who paid my fine? Steve Pinata. His office is on East Opal Street. If anything urgent should come up, leave a message for me with Pinata.”
She went with him to the door, clinging to his arm. “Remember what you promised, Stan, about laying off the liquor and behaving yourself in general.”
“Of course.”
“I wish I was going along.”
“Next time.”
He kissed her good-bye before he opened the door because of Miss Wittenburg, the old lady who lived across the hall. Miss Wittenburg kept the door of her apartment wide open all day and sat just inside it, with her spectacles on and a newspaper across her knee. Sometimes she read the paper in silence; at other times she became quite voluble, addressing her comments to her younger sister, who’d been gone for a year.
“There they are now, Rosemary,” Miss Wittenburg said in her strong New England accent. “He appears to be groomed for the street. Good riddance, I say. I’m glad you agree. Did you notice the deplorable condition in which he left the bathroom again? All that wetness. Wet, wet, wet everywhere... I am surprised at you, Rosemary, making such a vulgar remark. Father would turn over in his grave to hear such a thing fall from your lips.”
“Go inside and lock the door,” Fielding said to Muriel. “And keep it locked.”
“All right.”
“And don’t worry about me. I’ll be home tomorrow night, or Monday at the latest.”
“Whispering,” said Miss Wittenburg, “is a mark of poor breeding.”
“Stan, please take care of yourself, won’t you?”
“I will. I promise.”
“Do you love me?”
“You know I do, Muriel.”
“Whispering,” Miss Wittenburg repeated, “is not only a mark of poor breeding, but I have it on very good authority that it is going to be declared illegal in all states west of the Mississippi. The penalties, I understand, will be very severe.”
Fielding raised his voice. “Good-bye, Rosemary. Good-bye, Miss Wittenburg.”
“Pay no attention, Rosemary. What effrontery the man has, addressing you by your first name. Next thing he’ll be trying to — oh, it makes me shudder even to think of it.” She, too, raised her voice. “Good manners compel me to respond to your greeting, Mr. Whisper, but I do so with grave misgivings. Good-bye.”
“Oh Lord,” Fielding said, and began to laugh. Muriel laughed with him, while Miss Wittenburg described to Rosemary certain legislation which was about to go into effect in seventeen states prohibiting laughter, mockery, and fornication.
“Keep your door locked, Muriel.”
“She’s just a harmless old lady.”
“There’s no such thing as a harmless old lady.”
“Wait. Stan, you forgot your toothbrush.”
“I’ll pick one up in San Félice. Good-bye, love.”
“Good-bye, Stan. And good luck.”
After he’d gone, Muriel locked herself in the apartment and, standing by the window, cried quietly and efficiently for five minutes. Then, red-eyed but calm, she dragged out from under the bed Fielding’s battered rawhide suitcase.
11
Memories are crowding in on me so hard and fast that I can barely breathe...
The Neighborhood Clinic was housed in an old adobe building off State Street near the middle of town. A great many of Pinata’s clients had been in and out of its vast oak doors, and over the years Pinata had come to know the director, Charles Alston, quite well. Alston was neither a doctor nor a trained social worker. He was a retired insurance executive, a widower, who devoted most of his time and energy to the solution of other people’s problems. To keep the clinic operating, he persuaded doctors and laymen to donate their services, fought city and county officials for funds, plagued the local newspaper for free publicity, addressed women’s clubs and political rallies and church groups, and bearded the Lions in their den and the Rotarians and Knights of Columbus in theirs.
Whenever and wherever there was any group to be enlightened, Alston could be found doing the enlightening, shooting statistics at his audience with the speed of a machine gun. This rapid delivery was essentiaclass="underline" it kept his listeners from examining the facts and figures too closely, an effect that Alston found highly desirable, since he frequently made up his own statistics. He had no qualms about doing this, believing that it was a legitimate part of his war on ignorance. “Did you know,” he would cry out, pointing the finger of doom, “that one in seven of you good, unsuspecting, innocent people out there will spend some time in a mental institution?” If the audience appeared listless and unimpressionable, he changed this figure to one in five or even one in three. “Prevention is the answer. Prevention. We at the Clinic may not be able to solve everyone’s problems. What we hope to do is to keep them small enough to be manageable.”