3 Day Terror (6 page)

Then what both Cass and Chad were afraid would happen, did happen — happened above Chad’s protests and with Tim Ottley’s pale-faced, overpolite encouragement.

“Of course we want to hear the joke,” Ottley had said.

“It has to do with God,” Beggsom drawled, “and with a young feller like yourself, and as I’m to swear it now, it’s a true story I was witness to, back in the hills in the middle twenties, when you was only a gleam in your daddy’s eye.”

“Papa,” Cass attempted, “maybe Tim would rather just talk with — ”

But Ottley said again “No, let’s hear it, Mr. Beggsom.”

John Beggsom crossed and recrossed his legs, took a deep breath, and then said: “Happened at one of these here back-brush holyings. Old parson was preaching like a cow in heat, and the congregation was rolling around, yipping and kicking up straw. Parson got done and said ‘twas the hour for testifying, and after a coupla folks got up and told what the Lord done for ‘em, the parson called on a countryside cripple to rise up and say what the Lord done for him.

“Well, sir — ” Beggsom drew another deep breath and rubbed his cheek — ”Brother Fink, ‘at was the cripple’s name, was one of these paralytics, like yourself, with his limbs all twisted like snakes coiling around one ‘nother, going every which way. When the parson asked him to rise up and testify, Brother Fink rose, jerking and knocking like a new Ford on an old country road, trying to get his chin a bare inch from his chest, and trying to coordinate his lagging limbs. Everybody at the holying got quiet to see what he’d have to say and hear him testify.” Beggsom straightened himself in the wicker chair.

“ ‘Well, sir — ’ Brother Fink paused a bit, eyeing his audience, and then he began to shrill — ’You wants to know what the Lord done for me, he begins. Well, I’ll tell you. He jest blamed near ruint me!’ “

Beggsom leaned back in the wicker chair, rocking it on two legs and laughing uproariously. Cass looked across at Tim Ottley. His leps trembled in a desperate attempt to smile, but his face was ashen, and unforgiving.

Then Chad announced simply, “You’ll have to leave now, Beggsom.”

Oblivious to anything he might have done wrong, for John Beggsom was as insensitive as an old snapping-turtle, his weathered, red-nosed face lost its smile wrinkles, and his eyes, of the dull clearness of cooling lard, wondered.

“What’d I do?” he asked his daughter, for no matter how old Beggsom hated Chad, he always tried to be amiable when he called on them, to
show
Chad, for his “little girl.”

Chad said, “Just go!”

And Cass — witness to the mute injury that spread across the ignorant, time-worn face, alert to the blow at her father’s stubborn pride, now shattered and crushed — rushed to his defense.

“Don’t you dare talk to Papa that way!”

As a result of what followed then, it was Tim Ottley who left, pushing the rubber wheels of his chair with fierce determination toward the car where the Negro driver waited, protesting that he really did have someone else to see in the same county, and swearing it honest to God didn’t matter at all, that he knew it was just a joke; that he hated to be the cause of a fight; that he’d sure enough keep in touch, and when, hey, were they gonna be down Mobile way; stop in; don’t forget, bye, and look, don’t think about it another minute, hear?

• • •

Constantly during the age-long summer, Chad made reference to those two incidents, and each time it was the springboard to another fight. With the curious false modesty that overcomes a man and woman who sleep in the same bed, but who no longer seek the adjacent flesh for comfort, or love, or lust, Jack began wearing pajama bottoms, instead of sleeping in the raw as he always had, and Cass wore simple cotton pajamas, instead of silk and nylon negligees. Mealtime was no longer a time for discussing the
Citizen,
for they rarely discussed anything anymore, and on weekend nights, they began to see a lot of bad movies.

It was a hot, boring summer of discontent, but then — miraculously, in the unrealized, creeping slow way the seasons change and are all at once just there — it was over. Suddenly it was the end of summer and the beginning of fall, and it was heralded in the high groan of ecstasy as Cass received him again, and at last; and things were new for it, and better, and back to normal. Anyway, she had thought they were; she had been sure, or she would never have attempted last night to tell him what she thought he should know — what folks were saying, and what she had been thinking, as well, about the editorials.

Then, the irony, coming like the quick snap of a wrist before the palm met the face — Delia Benjamin standing there before them in Porter Drugs’ beguiling and breathless with charm, the piquant aroma of some expensive perfume pervading the moment; and then, the slap in the face — as one gloved finger leaned on Jack’s sleeve, and the husky tone purred: “Chad, you’re doing a great job with the
Citizen.
I read two back issues in the car coming from Baldwin,” pausing, smiling, the finger slipped from his sleeve to fondle the infinitesimal gold lapel watch on her suit, “In all sincerity, Chad, I was
immensely
impressed. Particularly by the editorials.” Another pause; another smile, “Wonderful, Chad!”

• • •

Cass could feel her husband stir beside her in the big bed. Often in the sleepy beginning of morning Chad turned toward her, the red hair rumpled, eyes not yet fully open, hands reaching for her, touching her fondly in the soft and secret places, murmuring drowsily before he turned back to the big, short, second sleep of morning; but now he only flattened out on his stomach, stuck his arms up under the pillow, sighed and was still again.

“I’m sick of you!” he had said last night.

Cass ran her hand along her pajama bottoms, from the waist to the stomach, down to where her legs began, to the part of her Chad called Mrs. Mine.”

“He’s fed up, Mrs. M.,” she said to herself. “He’s had us.”

And it depressed her all the more to know that in three days she would be thirty.

O
UT
where U.S. 11 crossed State 1, a quarter of a mile from Bastrop, there was a drop in the land, where for a few acres a miniature valley ran, which was embraced by Judas trees and cedars, black gums and maples, and which was hard to see from the road. It was called the Dip, and that morning some minutes after seven, it was the only place where Delia Benjamin was sure she could be alone. One of the things she missed about New York was the fact that you could take a solitary walk there without being considered lonely, troubled, or eccentric, even if you were all three; and that it wouldn’t matter the time of day or night.

That and the myriad other facets of big-city life that created the blessed state of anonymity, Dee missed even more than she had imagined she would, but the one thing she missed most, which she had been too perceptive to underestimate, was Maury’s presence.

In the pocket of her silk dress was the letter she had written him last night, the kind of letter she would ordinarily have ripped to shreds immediately after writing — long pages of sordid and depressing confessions and recantations — a pitiful attempt to reconstruct something that had been dilapidated to begin with — their “relationship,” as Dr. Mannerheim would put it, but to Dee, simply, the awful mess of their marriage, and its nerve-naked aftermath.

There was a smell of burning brush in the air, goldenrod lit the wiregrass, and there was little sound except for the crunch of acorns underfoot, or the distant rumble of tobacco loads up on the road, bound for market under faded quilts. Dee fingered the corners of the thick envelope and thought that she was a far cry from analysts’ couches, Miltown and what Maury called get-it-out-of-our-system-nightcaps, but here, she thought, was where the roots wept; here, was the beginning of it all.

And she had not wanted to come back. That afternoon a week ago, when she had sat at the tiny square table in the rear of the cocktail lounge at the Gotham, sickened already by the fact that he was late, when he was
always
on time, she had still clung to the hope he would not say something like: “Dee, I think it’ll do you good,” when she had said, after he apologized (offering no excuse — God, Maury!), seated himself and ordered the familiar J. & B. — neat, “I’ve been thinking, Maury — ” she had watched his eyes closely — ”that I’ll leave town — ” no flicker of emotion — “that I’ll go back to Bastrop — ” still none — ”for good!” A frown had creased his forehead — for only a second. And then, the sentencing. For she had thought of his reaction to the news as a sentence: “you, Deel, my darling, beautiful, neurotic, ex, are condemned to life in Bastrop.” Then, the conditioned reflex of the psychiatrist’s failure, made her think: A sentence, Delia? Like Judge Benjamin sentenced people? Is Maury, the father, punishing you again for being naughty?

“What are you smiling at?” Maury had asked, watching her.

“I’m thinking of Pavlov’s dog.”

“Oh, conditioned reflexes and all, ah?”

“No,” she had said, “I’m thinking of the poor goddam dog. I bet there’s not a soul around who even remembers his name.”

“Identifying again, ah darling?” Maury licked a pretzel. “The search for immortality,” he sighed, “the fear of death. Deel, Deel, it’ll be lonesome without you.”

It was that easy for him. Or was it?

Last night as Dee had set at the desk in the living room, ancestral portraits staring at her from every angle in the room, the antique highboy stopping in the corner near where the grandfather clock chimed the quarter-hour — past midnight — she had thought she must have misinterpreted that meeting. She had tried to relive it through Maury’s eyes; to imagine how
he
had felt, he who had begged her once never to leave him. “Never, no matter what I say or how I act, Deel, never even if I tell you to go. Promise to stay. Say it!”

And while she had shouted back at her mother, “No, Mama, I’m not coming to bed for a while. Now hush, and don’t worry,” she had remembered that side to Maury — that everything had to be said. He always called it his compulsion.

All right, Maur, she thought, all right, there’s more, buckets more, darling. Is that it? You want to hear everything? Will
that
do it? Because something is going to have to!

As quietly as she could, she had gone upstairs to her room, lifted the pigskin suitcase onto the folding luggage rack, at the foot of the canopied bed, and from under the slips and bras and panties, taken out the fifth of J. & B. she had packed. A nightcap with Maur, she had thought, like old times; prepare the patient for surgery; it is the hour of the guts, and I’m going to spill mine.

She was carrying the bottle by the neck when she collided with Flo Benjamin in the hallway. Her mother was wrapped in a faded pink robe over the gray nightie — hair in a net, lips pursed, her bridgework back in her room in a tumbler of water.

“Liquor, Delia?” she said.

“Mama, I’m going to have one nightcap. Puts me to sleep, Mama.”

“I’m sick about it, Delia. A daughter of mine drinking alone at midnight. Gaw, Delia, I’m just sick in bed about it!”

“Mama, don’t be silly,” Dee passed by her, starting down the spiral staircase with its Chinese Chippendale woodwork. “Don’t worry so. It’s not necessary.”

Mrs. Benjamin had whined: “It was meetin’ Chad like that, so sudden ‘n all. Now it’s driving you to sit up till morning, drinking. Gaw, Delia, don’t let him do that to you hear?”

As Delia rounded the corner on the way to the kitchen she heard her mother call: “He’s not half so well thought of as you may think, Delia. More than one say he’s a Nigraw-lover. He’s not worth sittin’ up past dawn swillin’ whiskey over. You listen to your mother.”

In the kitchen, as Dee broke ice from the rubber tray, she remembered that evening in Paris, the day of her twenty-fifth birthday. Maur had wanted everything to be perfect; he had made arrangements way in advance. She had read in a travel guide of Laperouse, a restaurant on the Quai Voltaire, and Maur had made reservations there — but they had driven up and down every crazy, twisting street on the Left Bank, because Maur had wanted to surprise her, and he had given only the address to the taxi driver, and the old man could not understand his French. So hours from the time they left the hotel — Dee, dressed in net and satin, frshly made up and beautiful — the cab had reached the restaurant, and, perspiring from the heat, dust-blown and exhausted, they had made their entrance. The second surprise Maur had planned was a room all to themselves — instead of eating in the elegance and excitement of the main dining room, they were to be cooped up in a tiny cubicle alone and suffocating. And on the winding staircase that led to it, Dee broke a heel and turned an ankle. When they were finally back to the hotel — Dee forcing rage back — Maury made the nightcaps in the room — made them the way he always did — one small, melting cube, to one tall glass of whiskey and soda. And Dee had sat across from him on the big iron bed and thought: Your drinks are the same way you are, limp and feckless; thought it so indignantly and vindictively that when she got to her feet and snapped: “I need more ice!” Maur had looked up at her and answered quietly, “I know what you mean, Deel, I know what you’re telling me.”

Even as he was saying it, the boy appeared at the door with the cable. The judge was dead. He had been buried that same day.

• • •

Carrying her drink from the kitchen back to the living room, Dee made a mental note: Juan les Pins, summer ‘52, the English squash player. And another: Florence, same summer, the man — Emile? Emilio? — from the Pitti Palace. All right, Maur — everything will be spelled out in capital letters for you. Will that help? As she sat down at the rosewood desk with the Scotch in one hand and a ball point pen in the other, she believed it would help, the way the heart-lonely and, tired-past-midnight, is slow to perceive what next morning it knows is ridiculous.

Still, Dee had reread the letter an hour ago, sealed it, and carried it with her on the walk; perhaps merely to make certain that Flo Benjamin would not have access to it, before it was burned or torn up and destroyed; and perhaps because for some little hour Dee wanted to believe she carried in the pocket of her dress an answer to Maury and to her, that would make it all right again in some swift and sudden metamorphosis — the way it used to happen when, injured at play, she ran to the judge for the magic promise: “We’ll make it all better, Dee-Dee, we’ll make it all right again.”

The sun was rising higher in the sky over Bastrop now, and off in the distance a red fox struck out for the brown hills. Dee found a log near a black gum, sat and fished in her bucket bag for a cigarette. She tapped it on her long red nail, and thought of the way Maur would have had a match lit by now, would have reached his long arm across to give her the flame. Then suddenly from behind her she felt an arm extended, saw a silver identification bracelet on a thin white wrist, and a flame flickering from a bullet-shaped lighter.

“It’s nice to see you again,” a voice said.