I riffled through the pages and saw the black marks everywhere.
“Do you recognize it?”
“No. It sounds familiar—sounds like maybe somewhere in the last century.”
“It is. It’s Henry Clay, delivered in 1850.”
“And the rest? All Clay?”
“No—bits and pieces, some Daniel Webster, some Jefferson, and, God help me, a swatch from Lincoln’s Second Inaugural. I don’t know how that got past. I guess because there were thousands of them. Thank Christ we caught it in time—after all the quiz troubles and Van Doren and all.”
“It doesn’t sound like the prose style of a boy.”
“I don’t know how it happened. And it might have gone through if we hadn’t got the postcard.”
“Postcard?”
“Picture postcard, picture of the Empire State Building.”
“Who sent it?”
“Anonymous.”
“Where was it mailed from?”
“New York.”
“Let me see it.”
“It’s under lock and key in case there’s any trouble. You don’t want to make trouble, do you?”
“What is it you want?”
“I want you to forget the whole thing. We’ll just drop the whole thing and forget it—if you will.”
“It’s not a thing easy to forget.”
“Hell, I mean just keep your lip buttoned—don’t give us any trouble. It’s been a bad year. Election year anybody will dig up anything.”
I closed the rich blue covers and handed it back to him. “I won’t give you any trouble.”
His teeth showed like matched pearls. “I knew it. I told them. I looked you up. You have a good record—good family.”
“Will you go away now?”
“You’ve got to know I understand how you feel.”
“Thank you. And I know how you feel. What you can cover up doesn’t exist.”
“I don’t want to go away leaving you angry. Public relations is my line. We could work something out. Scholarship or like that—something dignified.”
“Has sin gone on strike for a wage raise? No, just go away now—please!”
“We’ll work something out.”
“I’m sure you will.”
I let him out and sat down again and turned out the light and sat listening to my house. It thudded like a heart, and maybe it was my heart and a rustling old house. I thought to go to the cabinet and take the talisman in my hand—had stood up to get it.
I heard a crunching sound and a whinny like a frightened colt, and quick steps in the hall and silence. My shoes squidged on the stairs. I went in to Ellen’s room and switched on the light. She was balled up under a sheet, her head under her pillow. When I tried to lift the pillow she clung to it and I had to yank it away. A line of blood ran from the corner of her mouth.
“I slipped in the bathroom.”
“I see. Are you badly hurt?”
“I don’t think so.”
“In other words, it’s none of my business.”
“I didn’t want him to go to jail.”
Allen was sitting on the edge of his bed, naked except for jockey shorts. His eyes—they made me think of a mouse in a corner, ready at last to fight a broom.
“The stinking sneak!”
“Did you hear it all?”
“I heard what that stinking sneak did.”
“Did you hear what you did?”
The driven mouse attacked. “Who cares? Everybody does it. It’s the way the cooky crumbles.”
“You believe that?”
“Don’t you read the papers? Everybody right up to the top—just read the papers. You get to feeling holy, just read the papers. I bet you took some in your time, because they all do. I’m not going to take the rap for everybody. I don’t care about anything. Except that stinking sneak.”
Mary awakens slowly, but she was awake. Perhaps she hadn’t been asleep. She was in Ellen’s room, sitting on the edge of the bed. The street light made her plain enough with shadows of leaves moving on her face. She was a rock, a great granite rock set in a tide race. It was true. She was tough as a boot, unmoving, unyielding, and safe.
“Will you be coming to bed, Ethan?”
So she had been listening too.
“Not now, my darling dear.”
“Are you going out again?”
“Yes—to walk.”
“You need your sleep. It’s still raining. Do you have to go?”
“Yes. There’s a place. I have to go there.”
“Take your raincoat. You forgot it before.”
“Yes, my darling.”
I didn’t kiss her then. I couldn’t with the balled and covered figure beside her. But I touched her shoulder and I touched her face and she was tough as a boot.
I went to the bathroom for a moment for a package of razor blades.
I was in the hall, reaching in the closet for a raincoat as Mary wished, when I heard a scuffle and a scramble and a rush and Ellen flung herself at me, grunting and snuffling. She buried her bleeding nose against my breast and pinned my elbows down with encircling arms. And her whole little body shook.
I took her by the forelock and pulled her head up under the hall night light.
“Take me with you.”
“Silly, I can’t. But if you’ll come in the kitchen, I’ll wash your face.”
“Take me with you. You’re not coming back.”
“What do you mean, skookum? Of course I’m coming back. I’m always coming back. You go up to bed and rest. Then you’ll feel better.”
“You won’t take me?”
“Where I’m going they wouldn’t let you in. Do you want to stand outside in your nightgown?”
“You can’t.”
She grappled me again and her hands caressed and stroked my arms, my sides, dug her balled fists into my side pockets so that I was afraid she might find the razor blades. She was always a caressing girl, a stroking girl, and a surprising girl. Suddenly she released me and stood back with her head raised and her eyes level and without tears. I kissed her dirty little cheek and felt the dried blood against my mouth. And then I turned to the door.
“Don’t you want your stick?”
“No, Ellen. Not tonight. Go to bed, darling. Go to bed.”
I ran away fast. I guess I ran away from her and from Mary. I could hear Mary coming down the stairs with measured steps.
Chapter twenty-two
The tide was on the rise. I waded into the warm bay water and clambered into the Place. A slow ground swell moved in and out of the entrance, flowed through my trousers. The fat billfold in my hip pocket swelled against my hip and then grew thinner under my weight as it water-soaked. The summer sea was crowded with little jellyfish the size of gooseberries, dangling their tendrils and their nettle cells. As they washed in against my legs and belly I felt them sting like small bitter fires, and the slow wave breathed in and out of the Place. The rain was only a thin mist now and it accumulated all the stars and town lamps and spread them evenly—a dark, pewter-colored sheen. I could see the third rock, but from the Place it did not line up with the point over the sunken keel of the Belle-Adair. A stronger wave lifted my legs and made them feel free and separate from me, and an eager wind sprang from nowhere and drove the mist like sheep. Then I could see a star—late rising, too late rising over the edge. Some kind of craft came chugging in, a craft with sail, by the slow, solemn sound of her engine. I saw her mast light over the toothy tumble of the breakwater but her red and green were below my range of sight.