The Walnut Door Read online

  “Looks like the proverbial sheeit hit the proverbial fayan.”

  A male voice. Right behind her.

  In a reflex of terror her hands rose, perhaps to protect her face; the nightgown flew up flaglike. She turned, holding the fabric high, as if she were hiding nakedness.

  A strange man was standing in the doorway to her bedroom, grinning.

  * * *

  —

  SHE had not recognized him at first, because he was not in his Safe-T Securit-E Syst-M coveralls but in jeans and a blue work shirt

  “Oh, it’s you,” she said, enormously relieved. Then, with realization, more sharply: “How’d you get in here?”

  He readied in the breast pocket of the work shirt and pulled out two delicate tools of a sort she had never seen. “I picked the lock,” he said. “Those Framingham knob locks—easy to get into as a bitch in heat.” He put the rake and pressure wrench back.

  “My chain!”

  “I told you last time, those chains just psych people out They’re nothing, nothing.” This time a hand went into a rear pocket of his jeans and came out with a compact, rugged hand wire cutter. “Don’t worry,” he said, the other hand going into still another pocket, “I brought an extra,” and he pulled out a spare chain with its doorcase plate. “I’ll put it on for you.”

  “You’re just a fucking crook, aren’t you?”

  “Hey, the line between legit and illegit is very fine, in this world. Look. I’m good at what I do. I don’t have to take a key into my shop to copy it. I only need to have it in my hands for three seconds. See, what I do, I press it hard on the inside of my left wrist, and that makes a print of the cuts in the key. It stays there an amazing length of time. Try it sometime. I can mosey back to the shop, figure the code from my wrist, and cut a blank. Then I have your key. I’ve developed these skills. You say I’m a crook. I say I’m a craftsman. I admit that covers some ground, if you think of the meanings of the word ‘craft.’ Huh?”

  “You have one hell of a nerve breaking and entering on a woman at eleven o’clock at night”

  “Thing is, I have a present for you,” he said. “Last time you made it extremely difficult for me to deliver a cadeau. This one’s bigger than the other was. I wanted to make sure it got into the premises.”

  She half-turned and dropped the nightgown on the pile of castoffs. Looking away from him she said, “Thank you for the what did you call it? The plant? I’ve never seen one just like that. What did you mean, about the Greeks?”

  “Pothos—he’s this young guy with wings. Look up what he’s interested in. Why should I tell you?” She kicked at the heap on the floor, rounding it up. “Know something, that plant would have got me in here real easy last time,” he said, “without me even breaking the chain. All I had to do was talk to you through the crack, with the chain on, see, the way we did, then when you say, ‘Go away,’ I put the plant down, like I did, and then pretend to leave. But I wait a few seconds and tiptoe back and hide beside the door. Pretty soon curiosity gets the best of you and you take the chain off and open the door and reach down for the little glass jar, and THEN!” Macaboy raised his hands with the fingers curved into grizzly-bear claws and he let out a two-ton growl. Elaine staggered backward and got her feet caught in her scrap heap and almost fell.

  “Damn you,” she said.

  “Aren’t you interested in your present?”

  “Look, I’m trying to get rid of stuff.”

  “That’s not very nice. When a gentleman—”

  “That lousy door you sold me, with all that talk about the satin texture of walnut—it’s not worth—not worth cheese, is it?”

  “I could give you a better lock.” His face has cheerfulness dabbed all over it as if written in icing on a birthday cake.

  “You said I’d be safe as a church.”

  “The Stanloc people have come out with one that has cuts on the keys that are beveled at different angles—you just cannot copy the keys. Mean bugger to pick, too. I would definitely recommend a Stanloc.”

  * * *

  —

  HE sat on a fat DR cushion on the floor, she was in her rocker. His present was between them—a dwarf orange tree.

  “My mom used to make marmalade from the little oranges on one of those,” he said. “After it bears, you want to cut it way back and let it rest several weeks. Then you start feeding it again—acid plant food.”

  “My mother couldn’t stand cooking.”

  “Mom would put up tomatoes, watermelon pickles. The great thing was mince pie at Thanksgiving, I used to help dice the suet, all that. When she deep-fried doughnuts, she’d cook the holes for me.”

  “We ate in restaurants three-quarters of the time. Or frozen TV dinners.”

  Elaine felt that their sentences were flying past each other, never meeting in the space between them. She knew that when strangers are trying to find each other, the talk goes round sooner or later to mothers, but here, talking to this Eddie person, the essential surrender in that kind of talk—the willingness, or even the urge, to let down defenses and become childlike—was lacking. It was a matter of trust. How could she trust anyone who kept grinding out such flawless cheeriness? The only people she’d encountered who had Macaboy’s sort of impervious, unshakable good nature were Jesus freaks. It was true that his smiles didn’t seem as automated as theirs always did; he seemed to smile because he felt good. Perhaps the trouble was that she couldn’t associate that good feeling, if it was indeed real, with herself. It was something separate; he was in a bottle of his own joy. Sometimes Greg had seemed this way, transiently, on chemicals. Macaboy was not druggy; the pupils of his eyes were as clear as a polar wind. What was he on?

  “Look, begin at the beginning, would you?”

  “Beginning? What beginning?”

  “Of you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean tell me. Start at the beginning.”

  * * *

  —

  HE leaned back on his hands. “I was born Theodore Edmund Macaboy in Avon, Connecticut, on September twenty-third—”

  “Hey! Would you mind saying that name again?”

  “It’s the only name I have, I don’t like to wear it out. O.K., Theodore Edmund Macaboy.”

  “Oh, man. I thought that’s what you said. Oh, man. What a con artist!”

  “How’s that?”

  “T. E. M.?”

  “My initials. So?”

  “ ‘Our company wants you to feel safe.’ Oh, brother.”

  “Huh?”

  “Yeah, your initials. Exactly. There’s no company, is there? Safe-T Securit-E Syst-M.—T. E. M. It’s just you, isn’t it?”

  Macaboy burst out laughing. “There is a company. I’m incorporated under the laws of the State of Connecticut, sometimes called the Land of Steady Habits.”

  “But what about that other guy? In the company outfit? That Swede you said was named Frank?”

  “You don’t miss a trick, do you?”

  “Oh, Jesus H. Croust, I’ve been missing plenty tricks. Oooh. ‘We’ll send this young fellow named Eddie. Handsome type. Ponytail.’ ”

  Macaboy was loving this, showing a lot of teeth. “The dispatcher didn’t lie to you, did he? He was a good-looker, wasn’t he?”

  “What about the Swede? Do you have other guys working for you?”

  “No, he’s a mad computer genius. It’s just a uniform, for when I need help, like delivering a door. I get someone like…like Frank to help me, and he wears the monkey suit.”

  “Then you made it? Yourself?”

  “The door? Sure.”

  “It’s so beautiful. I sit here staring at it.”

  Chapter 18

  ONCE there was a windstorm. They were still living in Avon. It was a baby twister, in May, when ill-met frigid and torrid
airs of a late New England spring did a dance together down off the traprock ridge and uprooted six fifty-foot Austrian pines that were his father’s favorites. His father decided to try to right them and keep them alive. He rigged a block and tackle to the big oak and put two neighbor men and little Eddie and his weak older brother Arden on the fall of the tackle with him. The memory of his father’s gritted teeth stays with Macaboy to this day. The lips pulled back. Great pain of trying. The effort of the Elect. Hideous joy of physical labor. Love of the trees and rage at the God of funnel winds. Teeth that could bite! Power in the huge arms and in the jaws. He dreams those teeth sometimes.

  * * *

  —

  ON the platform at the railroad station the family was seeing Arden off, when Arden went away to Loomis for the first time. Before the train pulled in Arden put a paper clip on the track. The conductor lifted Arden up, as if he were no heavier than a chicken, onto the metal steps of the railroad car. Then Arden in his ridiculous huge fur hat waved out the train window to them. Runnels of water shone down on either side of his enormous nose. The tears made Eddie feel ashamed. Then the train pulled out and all that was left was the print of the clip on the steel of the rail.

  * * *

  —

  EDDIE begged to go and watch his father play basketball at the Grange. “Not on your life. A school night, son.” He was in first grade. He resorted to a strategy of shuttling back and forth between his mother and father. Toward some exceptional requests she was more lenient, toward others, he. Sometimes Eddie was forced to make one parent feel more cruel than the other for a time, then to reverse the pressure. This cross-whipping usually worked. At last he heard his mother say to his father, “One late night wouldn’t be the end of the world, would it?” A mild answer: “Whatever you think.” Getting his way was so often an anticlimax. And so he went. Father’s face, as his Keds heavily slapped the shiny boards with their painted circles and keys and zones of magic, wore a haggard, lost, and pleading look, and his eyes were puzzled and liquid with what seemed to be a fear of murder, his wrists flapped, his fingers were like grasshopper legs, and his random hands were unable to grasp the bouncing sphere, which seemed alive and angry and energetic, and always got away. Why, he looked like Arden! Father! Father! Afterward, Eddie was drawn by a kind of suction into the locker room, and he grew light-headed in the stink of dark armpits and rubbery wet socks, and then he was suddenly melted down in his own sweat to nothing but a pair of eyes staring at these huge beasts ripping off jock straps until he was nearly blinded by what had always, until then, been denied in the Macaboy household: nakedness. He was totally unprepared for what he saw at the base of each broad and web-printed belly: a wig of unnaturally tangled hair, out of which hung a great, limp, yellowy, bodiless turtle neck and head. That would not have been so bad in itself, because he himself owned a little unwigged model of such a thing, but behind and below each of these he saw swinging like a nanny goat’s huge milk sac a great dependent wrinkled bag containing two olives—no, bigger, bigger—two plums, two loaves, two footballs, two blimps. These monstrosities swayed and slapped as the deep-voiced statues strode glistening to the showers. He could not tell which was his father. Eddie breathed steam, and his heart pounded with the wildest joy he had ever known.

  * * *

  —

  HE sees a croquet court laid out on the lawn in the shade of the massive poplars his grandfather planted along the driveway after the old boy had taken a trip to France and had been stunned by all the leagues of pollarded allées there. Arden stooped over his mallet, awkward and cross. His poor shot deflected off a wicket, and his blue-striped ball ran to within two feet of Eddie’s yellow-striped one. Taking his time, Eddie easily tagged Arden’s. Then Eddie nestled his ball against Arden’s and held his own down with his bare left foot. With a surge of sweet revenge for all the injuries sickly Arden had done him, he wound up, as if swinging a lumberjack’s maul. The mallet head whooshed down. He felt a knife-cut in his instep. The shriek that ripped from his throat was of pain—but also of delight at seeing Arden’s ball fly down the lawn into the clump of prickly raspberry canes. At once their mother materialized above him, as he hopped up and down on one foot. He still remembers what she said then—not a defense of Arden, not a comfort for his own injury, not, as so often would have been her way, a citation of a rule, but a flash of cunning, sharp in her eyes and glacial on her tongue. “The best tactic, son, in this situation, would have been—look!—tap the opponent’s ball to a place just beyond the wicket he’s trying to go through. Then it takes him at least two shots, maybe three, to get back in position and through. Do you see?” At that Eddie’s foot really began to hurt. Arden threw down his mallet and stalked away from the game. The picture in Macaboy’s mind is of the look of surprise on his mother’s face.

  * * *

  —

  “WORK” was the mystery. His father drove off each weekday morning. It was said he was “going to work.” In winter the snow tires left their print on the plowed white planes of the driveway: the tracks of the provider making off to hunt for meat. The hunter wore a striped necktie. It was often after dark when the car pushed its cones of light back along the driveway, and his father stamped in from the garage, his chin blue from the day’s silent growth of beard. He came home from “work” short of speech. Deep seams like razor cuts ran down on either side of the mouth. There were shadows under the owlbrows.

  Chapter 19

  SHE rose into the new day in motion, her bed a launching pad. She was not quite sure what had set the g’s pushing at her. She felt the thrust. She would get out. She would leave her stuff on the floor. She could part with the damned door. The only questions: How far? Where to land? She walked to the Arrow bus terminal at Whitney and Grove and stood among the waiting passengers, studying schedules. Storrs? Pittsfield? Albany? Service to All Race Tracks. Uhn-uh. No appeal. She went to the Greyhound office on Church Street. There, at the schedule rack, with all dreams of connections anchored in cold print, she could visualize a city on a golden plain, a pall of smoke over steel mills, purple Teton majesties, a north wind chopping Lake Michigan, the whiteness of Telegraph Hill, the sun seen from Mallory Pier at Key West plunging into the sea with a green flash at the very end, dewy spider-webs early in the morning on a still hedge by a white house in—would it be Avon, Connecticut? No! No! No! No! A woman wanting to buy a ticket jostled her. Elaine flew into a fury at her. “Quit pushing!”

  * * *

  —

  SHE tried to explain to Bottsy. Bottsy’s room was in worse disorder than ever. She was struggling with a draft of the chapter about Pyotr Alekseyevich’s second visit to America. There were scraps of this tired Kropotkin all over the floor. Bottsy had put on weight. She was too glad to see Elaine, she hugged until the greeting had begun to turn into something else. Elaine, trying to understand what was happening to herself by explaining it, said the impulse to run away came whenever she felt threatened by repetition in her life. She didn’t want to go through the same pattern of moves over and over. Echoes gave her the willies.

  “But this guy sounds different from Greg,” Bottsy said.

  “Something about him when he first spoke to me, he was standing there in the doorway to my bedroom—”

  “Not that he sounds all that cool,” Bottsy said.

  “He’d walked straight through a locked door. With a chain on it.”

  Bottsy sniffed. “He sounds like kind of a lump to me.”

  Elaine started to cry. Bottsy took her in her arms. Elaine began to feel the balls of the thick hands rubbing, rubbing, the blunt fingers pressing. “Let go of me,” she said, striking out with both elbows. “What is this—a massage parlor?”

  * * *

  —

  THE first time she ran away she was about twelve. Being an only child was like being in solitary confinement. She had clung to cutout paper dolls far too long, just to have other kid
s around to talk to, to confide in, to laugh with, to challenge, to pick on, and to tear up and throw away when they annoyed her. Endless imaginary conversations, in which she took all parts. She would sit on her bed, with the cutouts arrayed around her. There were usually father and mother dolls, too. The parents fought. One of her paper older sisters, Amy, a prissy, do-goody twerp—different patterns represented Amy from time to time, but Elaine always used a gray crayon to dot the goop’s face with pimples-was always patching up false peace between the father and mother. One time the parents were arguing—dangerously, Elaine realized—about her. The mother wanted to sell her into a dressmaker’s sweatshop; the father threatened to kill the mother with an andiron. He was holding it over his head, ready to strike. Simpering Amy entered the room, grabbed the andiron from behind just in time, and began to tell the father Elaine’s innermost secrets. The father listened with his mouth sprung like a moron’s. When Amy had finished her (truthful) recital, the father said, “Elaine is a disgusting toad.” Elaine began to sob on the bed. She tore up Amy, ripped the mother to shreds, pulled the father’s head off, then stuck it back on with Scotch Tape. Burning with shame, still crying, she jumped off the bed, got a Qantas airline bag her Uncle Pat had given her, packed it with a sweat shirt, a toothbrush, a copy of Sixth Form at Mallory Towers, which she was reading just then, and the shiny-throated cutout of her father, and flew down through the house and out the back door. She ran and ran, out toward the town dump. Near dark she climbed in under some chokeberry bushes. It began to drizzle. Her indignation thinned out and bled into fear. The misty night air glowed with the orangey nimbus of the town. She crashed out of the bushy tangle and began to run again. Orangutans grasped at her from the murk. At last the joy of asphalt jarred her leg bones. She reached home at about ten o’clock. The reception was delirious, especially her mother’s; her father poured himself a bourbon. Her mother’s happy tears made her wish she had stayed away longer. Her father dialed the police and, clinking the ice in his glass, told them she’d been found.