The Blunderer (11 page)

“I know exactly. I know all you're saying.” Walter stared down at the brown wood of the table. “I never told you that I intend to get a divorce from my wife very soon. Of course I'm not getting on with her. That's obvious to everyone who comes in the house. I want to get a divorce as soon as it can be arranged.” He did. But did he want to marry Ellie? He felt he couldn't definitely answer that yet, and it was that, he thought, that kept any more words from coming.

“When?” she asked.

“It's a question of a few weeks only. Then if we still like each other—still love each other—”

“I'll still love you in a few weeks. You see, it's you who's in doubt.” She lighted a cigarette. “I don't think you'd better see me again until you know for sure.”

“That I love you?”

“About the divorce.”

“All right,” Walter said.

“I love you too much—do you understand? I shouldn't even tell you that, should I? I love even being near you—geographically. And that's all I am now. But you'll never find me hanging around Marlborough Road.”

He stared down at his lighter.

“Do you mind if I go home now? I can't talk any more—about anything else.”

“All right,” Walter said. He looked around for the waiter to get the check.

The men were still whooping it up in the bar as they went out.

It was only 9:15 when Walter got home, but Clara was in bed, reading. Walter asked her how the evening at the Philpotts' had been.

“I didn't see them,” Clara said in the toneless voice she used at the start of a quarrel.

Walter looked at her. “You didn't go?”

“I saw your car in front of Ellie Briess's apartment tonight,” she said.

“So you even know where she lives now,” he said.

“I made it my business to find out.”

Walter knew she must have kept a patient watch, because he hadn't stayed more than five minutes at Ellie's apartment either time tonight. “What are you going to do about it? Why don't you divorce me for adultery?” Slowly he opened a fresh packet of cigarettes, but his heart was pounding with a kind of terror, because for the first time he was actually guilty of what she had accused him of.

“Because I think you'll get over it,” she said. She was lying back on the pillow, but her head and shoulders had that rigid look, and her mouth was drawn in a straight line. She looked suddenly years older to Walter. She lifted her arm to him. “Darling, come here,” she said in a voice made hideous to him by its pretence of affection.

He knew she wanted him to kiss her, to go even further. It had happened a couple of times before, since the hospital: cursing and accusing him by day, and at night trying to make it up, trying to bind him to her by making love to him. The one time Walter had responded he had felt a horrible compulsion in her lovemaking that revolted him.

“Shall we have this out now? I want to. I can't wait.”

“Have what out?”

“I'm getting a divorce, Clara. I'm not asking you this time, I'm telling you. And it's not because of Ellie, I'll tell you that, too.”

“Six weeks ago you said you loved me.”

“That was an error on my part.”

“Do you want another corpse on your hands?”

“I am not playing nursemaid to you for the rest of your life—for mine. If you won't agree to a divorce I'll go to Reno and get it.”

“Reno!” she scoffed.

Walter stared at her. She probably didn't believe him, he thought. That was too bad.

12

S
omewhere behind him, Ellie had aided and abetted him in it. Ellie was waiting not far away. The bus was lighted, and he could see the people getting off one by one, and there was Clara with something like a laprug over her arm, descending the steps. Walter approached her quickly.

“Clara?”

She did not look particularly surprised to see him.

“I have to talk to you,” he said. “We left the bedroom in such a mess.”

She murmured something that sounded reluctant, but she came with him.

He led her along the road. “Just a little farther, where we can talk in privacy,” he said.

They approached the dense thicket he had chosen.

“We shouldn't go too far away. The bus leaves in ten minutes,” Clara said, though not at all anxiously.

Walter sprang at her. He had both hands around her neck. He dragged her into the underbrush, but he had to exert all his strength because she had become strangely heavy, heavier even than a man, and she was clinging hard to the bushes with her hands. Walter tugged at her. He kept his hands on her throat so she could not cry out. Her throat began to feel hard and twisted, like a thick rope. He began to fear that he couldn't kill her. And then he realized she had stopped struggling. She was dead. He took his hands away from her ropy neck. He stood up and covered her with the laprug she had been carrying. Jeff was there, barking and prancing as merrily as ever, and when Walter stepped out of the woods, Jeff followed him.

And there was Ellie, waiting for him on the road exactly where she had said she would be. Walter nodded to her as a sign it was all over, and Ellie smiled with relief. Ellie took his arm and looked up at him with admiration. Ellie was just about to say something to him, when there was an explosion right in front of them, like a bomb or a car wreck, and a cloud of gray smoke blotted out everything.

“The bridge is out!” Walter said. “We can't go any farther!”

But Ellie kept on going. He tried to hold her back. She went on without him.

Walter found himself face downward, trying to push himself up with his arms. He turned his groggy, ringing head. Was that Ellie lying there? He stared until Clara's dark head and small face came dimly into focus. She was lying with her face towards him.

“What were you dreaming?” she asked in a calm, alert voice, as if she had been awake for minutes.

Walter felt transparent. “Nothing. A bad dream.”

“About what?”

“About—I don't remember.” He sank down on the bed again, and turned his head from her. Had he talked out loud? He lay rigid, waiting for her to say something else, and when she didn't, listened for the faint sound of her breathing that would mean she was asleep. He didn't hear that, either. He felt a drop of sweat run down the groove in the small of his back. He gripped the cool wood of the bedstead and twisted it in his sweaty hands.

13

H
e called Ellie from the Three Brothers Tavern. “Are you alone?” he asked. She didn't sound as if she were alone.

“No, I've got a friend here,” she said softly.

“Pete?”

“No, a girl.”

Walter imagined her standing at the telephone in the hall, her back turned to the doorless living-room. “I wanted to tell you that I'm going to Reno next Saturday. I'll be gone six weeks. It's the only way I can get it.” He waited, but she said nothing at all. Walter smiled. “How are you, darling?”

“I'm all right.”

“Do you ever think of me?”

“Yes.”

“I love you.” Walter said.

They listened to each other's silence.

“If you still feel that way in a couple of months, I'll be here.”

“I will,” he said, and hung up.

Clara met him at the front door. “Did you hear what happened? I've had a wreck. My car is ruined!”

Walter dropped his briefcase on the hall table. He looked at her trembling body. He saw no sign of any injury. He put his arm around her shoulder and guided her towards the sofa in the living-room. It was the first time he had touched her in days.

She told him a truck had hit her, backing out of a side road in some woods near Oyster Bay. She hadn't been going more than twenty-five miles an hour, but she hadn't seen the truck for the trees, and the truck hadn't made a sound because it had been coasting backwards down a slope.

“The car's insured,” Walter said. He was pouring a drink for her. “Just how bad is it?”

“The whole front end is smashed. It nearly turned me over!” She jerked her hand away from Jeff's solicitous kisses, then reached down and patted him nervously.

Walter handed her the brandy. “Drink this. It'll calm you down.”

“I don't want to be calmed down!” she cried and got up. She ran upstairs, holding a Kleenex to her nose.

Walter fixed an iceless Scotch and soda for himself. His own hand was shaking as he lifted it. He could imagine the impact on Clara. She had always prided herself on never having had an accident. Walter carried his drink upstairs. Clara was in the bedroom, half reclining on the bed, still weeping.

“Everybody runs into an accident once,” he said. “You shouldn't let it throw you. The Philpotts can let you have a car with a driver, can't they? You probably shouldn't drive for a few days.”

“You don't have to pretend you care how I feel! Why don't you just stay out this evening and go to see Ellie?You don't have to come home to a woman you hate!”

Walter set his teeth and went out again, downstairs. He knew Clara thought he was with Ellie every evening he spent away from the house. He ought to move now, he thought. But the real truth was, he was afraid Clara would do something like set the house on fire and burn herself up in it. He wouldn't put that past her at all. So he was guarding her, he supposed. And becoming as jittery as she in the process.

Claudia came into the room. “Are you and Mrs. Stackhouse ready for your dinner, Mr. Stackhouse?”

That wasn't the way she usually announced dinner. Walter knew she had heard Clara shouting upstairs. “Yes, Claudia. I'll go and call her.”

14

T
he front door chime sounded while they were at breakfast. Claudia was in the kitchen. Walter got up. It was a telegram for Clara. He had a feeling it was from her mother.

Clara read it quickly. “My mother's dying,” she said, “This is from the doctor.”

Walter picked up the telegram. Her mother had had another stroke and was not expected to live more than thirty-six hours. “You'd better catch a plane,” he said.

Clara pushed her chair back and stood up. “You know I won't fly.”

Walter knew. Clara was afraid of flying. “But you're going, at least.” Walter followed her into the hall. She had to leave the house very early that morning in order to be somewhere by nine o'clock.

“Of course. I've got to settle some financial matters that she's been neglecting all these years,” Clara said in an annoyed voice. She collected some papers from the hall table and put them into the cardboard folder she always carried.

“Too bad your car's laid up,” Walter said.

“Yes. It makes the whole thing more expensive.”

Walter smiled a little. “Do you want to take my car?”

“You'll need it.”

“Only today and tomorrow. By Saturday I won't need it.” Walter was flying to Nevada on Saturday morning.

“You keep your car,” she said.

Walter drew on his cigarette. “What time do you think you'll leave?”

“Late this afternoon. There's some business in the office I have to take care of, mother or not.”

“I'll try to call you,” Walter said. “What time can I get you in?”

“What for?”

“To find out when you're leaving! Maybe I can help you in some way!” he said impatiently. He was vexed with himself. Why in hell should he help her?

“Well, if you must, call me around twelve.” She glanced out of the window as the big Packard of the Philpotts came into view. “There's Roger. I've got to go. Claudia! Would you lay out some things on the bed for me to pack? My gray dress and the green suit. I'll be back around three or four.” Then she was gone.

Walter called Clara at twelve in her office. Clara said she had decided to go by bus, and that she would be leaving from the 34th Street terminal at 5:30.

“
Bus
!” Walter said. “You'll get exhausted, Clara. It'll take you hours.”

“It's only five hours to Harrisburg. The trains don't fit my schedule. I've got to go, Walter. I have a lunch in Locust Valley at twelve-thirty. Good-bye.”

Walter put the telephone down angrily. He loosened his collar and heard the button give and hop twice on the cork floor. He'd be there to see her off, he supposed, but he rebelled against doing her that courtesy. He really wanted to find out some things that he had planned to ask her before Saturday. What she was going to do with the house, for instance. The house was hers, of course. And why should he care what she did, anyway? Was there ever a woman better able to take care of herself?

He slid his tie up to close his collar, and dragged a comb through his hair. Then he rang for Joan. He had some letters to send out. Joan didn't answer, and Walter realized suddenly that it was her lunch hour. He started to do the letters himself, and then Joan came in, carrying two paper bags.

“I brought you some lunch,” she said, “because I don't think you'd eat anything if I didn't. It's my good deed for today.”

“Well, thanks,” Walter said, surprised. It wasn't like Joan to do anything as personal as this for him. He reached in his pocket. “Let me pay you for it.”

“No, it's my treat.” She pulled out a sandwich and a container of coffee and put them on his desk. “Mr. Stackhouse, I don't know what's happened around here—between you and Mr. Cross, but I just wanted to say, if you're thinking of leaving or going into another office, I hope you can arrange for me to stay on with you. The salary wouldn't matter.”

It touched Walter to the point of self-consciousness. The office had agreed too readily to his taking a six-week leave. Walter imagined that Cross was going to inform him sometime during those six weeks that he needn't come back at all. Cross had implied that he knew that he and Jensen planned to leave the firm, and Cross had also told him, yesterday, that he was not satisfied with his work. “There might be a change,” Walter said. “In fact I hope there is. If I don't come back, Joan, I'll keep in touch with you.”