The Walnut Door Page 13

  * * *

  —

  THIS time she answers.

  “Where have you been? I’ve been trying to reach you all day.”

  “I have a job.”

  “A job? What doing?”

  “Lampson. Mean anything?”

  “Those crazy six-shooters—you? You’re contributing to crime in the streets, you know that, don’t you?”

  “Yep, and pulling a paycheck.”

  “Hey, what’s all this about a croaker that lived in your house?”

  “Oh, God, Eddie, I was the last person he spoke to before he died.”

  Chapter 22

  OFF its hinges, on its side, the door seems like a wounded creature.

  Macaboy is installing a Stanloc. The door is out in the hall, set up in the metal work-brace. He is cutting a mortise for the new deadbolt above that of the present knob lock. It is Saturday morning. It is still hot. He has his shirt off. He is taking his time—he has all day; all night, too, for that matter. He has paused now, with chisel and mallet in hand, and they are speaking in low voices, leaning toward each other, their faces close together above the walnut leaf. Fear, like eyewash, has made her pupils glisten. He is so happy, he is on the edge of yodeling.

  “You had Syndicate downstairs?”

  “I sure didn’t know any of that. He had this respectable cover, salesman for pest sprays—for gardens, you know, and house plants? He was supposed to be looking out for me while the Calovattos are away. Now I wonder about them—a Sicilian connection?”

  Macaboy makes goggle eyes. He aligns the chisel. His taps with the mallet are gingerly, the bites of the straight chisel tooth are skin-thin.

  She tells how the police kept her downtown, questioning her, till after midnight. One of the pair that drove her down was a fatherly old poop who was in the army of blueshirts in her apartment the night it was broken into. He asked a lot of questions in the squad car, apparently just out of curiosity—wanted to know about the victim, said he’d arrested him as a numbers bagman eight or nine years back. Elaine says this was the first she’d heard of Plentagger’s record; it scared her almost more than the murder itself. It dawned on her then why the ski masks on the hottest day of June: this was not a five-buck mugging.

  Macaboy watches her face for aspects of the story he has read in the album. Yes, he sees the spark of stubbornness in the eyes. The afterlife of trust. Innocence, or its later counterfeit The mouth is soft, it has the expressive mobility of a small child’s mouth; the underlip pushes forward now and then to remind that this small child was an only child. He sees the contradictions, the stacked kindling. He thinks of this woman as a lamination of sheets of developed film: the incomplete person grinning on her father’s shoulders beams through the sensitive face of the good-looking woman on the Philadelphia steps who looks with level gaze through the face of this morning’s anxious murder witness.

  The cops wanted her to try to remember the colors of the knitted ski caps. Pukey colors of what kind of a colorblind manufacturer. How could a sane knitter design those awful naked-larva golds and rotten-apple russets and pond-scum greens to fly down over the purity of a Vermont snowfall? The running men had featureless heads that reminded Elaine, she says, of when her mother used to mend socks over a darning egg.

  “I admire your courage.”

  “Courage! I was spastic with fear.”

  “You did what you could to help him. Courage is a mutant of fear. That was one of the things that turned me off in the Movement. So many of the big talkers were cowards because they’d never learned how to be afraid.”

  “Were you ever afraid?”

  “I don’t mean anxiety. I mean fear of real danger.”

  “Were you ever afraid? You seem kind of oblivious to me.”

  “I’ve never been tested. I don’t really know. I was pretty scared in Chicago in ‘sixty-eight. But not so much afraid of the cops—they split my head, that was bad—but my fear was more abstract: fear of the future, maybe. I don’t really know about myself yet.”

  * * *

  —

  “MY father drank quite a lot,” she says. “He wasn’t an alcoholic, just Irish.”

  “You use the past tense.”

  “He died three years ago. After he died I began to turn into him.”

  “You don’t drink that much.”

  “I don’t mean that. I don’t mean I turned into a man, either—I never wanted to kiss my elbow. I mean that what happens so often—you know, when a child loses the parent of the opposite sex, the child becomes more and more like that parent in the months after the death: that happened to me. I grew into his unpredictability. I couldn’t take anything seriously, a big mix of generosity and self-interest, a lot of horse-laughs, smartass answers, keep ’em guessing.” The look in her eye now wavers, drifts into that of the believing kid on the hungover man’s shoulders. “He collected restaurant menus. It only counted if he had actually eaten something in a place. Or maybe a drink would count, a gin would count. He papered the walls of our downstairs game room with them. He’d glue them on the wall and varnish over them. Everyone who went down there had to take a tour of the eateries of the civilized world with him. He’d point out how prices had gone up and up. He’d grab a person by the arm and he’d say, ‘Look at this one! Imperial Hotel. I got me an R-and-R leave from Okinawa after the surrender. We went to these mixed baths, you know, the Slope women right in there with nothing on—.’ And he’d take off on a wild story right in front of mother.”

  She breaks it God, she’s crying. Macaboy bends intently over his chiseling.

  “I don’t want to ever die!” she says with great passion.

  Macaboy’s hand is shaking. He makes a bad cut. “Shit,” he says.

  She apparently thinks this is aimed at her weakness. “I’m sorry,” she says.

  “No,” he says. “My hand slipped.”

  * * *

  —

  “HE looked up at me,” she says, “and he was calm, right? Like he was thinking of taking a nap after lunch. And he said, ‘Get Merle.’ You know something? I was jealous of her. This guy showed up at my door one night, practically exposing himself, in his bathrobe, he was a reptile, turned me all the way off—something really male-hormone and sexy about him, though. His pretext was, he wanted me to cut the volume on my stereo. But about the jealousy, it wasn’t connected with him at all. It was the way he said it ‘Get Merle out here.’ I wanted to be that important to someone—anyone—man or woman. It was like she and she alone could keep him awake from that nap. That made me so jealous. I guess she didn’t get there in time.”

  “He was a gone goose anyway.”

  “I delayed. I got rattled. I was the reason she didn’t get there on time.”

  “Look, Mzz Quinlan, that’s kook talk.”

  * * *

  —

  MACABOY inserts the lock assembly in the mortise to see how it fits. Not too bad. He had been afraid for a minute there that he’d lost his touch. He breaks out whistling. A slice of Salome. John the Baptist is locked up in Herod’s cistern; Salomé is warming up for the veil number. Herod: “Salome, Salome, tanz für mich, ich bitte dich.” Macaboy is so wound up he makes Richard Strauss sound like Johann Strauss dressed up as a cardinal bird.

  * * *

  —

  “THE police kept asking me, did the perpetrators see me? Did they get a good look at me? That question scared me when I thought about it. I lay awake all night, and that question started me imagining things. I couldn’t tell if they saw me. It was all a blur. They ran past me. I dodged up on this porch. I could see the eyeholes in those sick ski masks. But would they actually have noticed me? I mean I even tried to imagine killing someone, then two seconds later, running away, would I take a close gander at a witness? I think I was a blur to them.”

  “The Stanloc will prot
ect you,” Macaboy cheerfully says.

  “Now that the guy is dead,” Elaine says, “I’ve forgiven him for the way he leered at me. First you forgive, when a person is dead, and then you very quickly forget. I forgave my father—for the way he drank, for everything. Then I began to forget things about him—that was quick, too. Was it because I’d begun to absorb those things into me?”

  Macaboy shrugs.

  “No, Eddie,” she says, “don’t be so trivial. This is important to me. It’s the afterlife. This thing on the sidewalk the other day really started me thinking about my father living in me.”

  “You going to take up the bottle?”

  She looks as if she is about to be furious, but then she starts to laugh. Macaboy joins in, and the laughter runs beyond its evident cause. They laugh till they cry.

  * * *

  —

  ON the mantel Elaine keeps a little clock with a polished petrified-wood face—it speaks of time in two ways, about minutes and ages. As its hour hand follows the course of the sun over the city, stands up to noon and then begins the decline, the intensity in this pair, which makes them alternately as raucous as crows and as subdued and slow-motioned as starfish, remains undiminished. There are repeated bursts of father in Elaine; Macaboy stretches out two hours’ normal routine into something almost motherly in its scope of patience and care. Elaine serves up sprigs of uncooked cauliflower, radishes cut into flowers, a bouquet of tongue-stinging cress, wedges of raw turnip, and some steamed brown rice—cold, but who cares? They drink beer together in friendship. With her talk of death and a continuum, Elaine has spread a kind of canopy of gravity over them, and they are so snug under it that they can laugh off anything. Macaboy explains the new lock to her. He holds the shell of it in his hands with great care, as if it were made of some substance infinitely delicate—wasp-nest paper, dried moth wings. But he talks of its steely power of denial. “Stanloc offered ten thousand bucks to anyone who could pick this baby. Guys from all over the world tried it. One copper, who boasted he could pick anything, up to and including the Queen of Sheba’s vagina, worked on it two days and nights and then fainted. Most of your so-called pick-proof locks are a laugh: I saw a man pick one once that they had put out all this Madison Avenue wordage about its unpickability—he did it with a pipe cleaner! Not this Stanloc.” He holds it up in front of his face, revolves it in his fingertips. “This is human safety.” His gaze caresses the mechanism. He explains it to Elaine—she leans forward, intently watching—that she must operate it on each departure and entry; from the outside with a key, from within by turning this elliptical knob. His fingertip is on the knob, and it strikes him that he is at this moment printing on it the unique whorls of his right index finger; he is hit hard by the miraculousness of earth life. Forty billion unique patterns on the tips of fingers and thumbs in motion on earth at this instant of leaving his one smudged mark on Elaine’s Stanloc. What are they all doing? Plucking harps, cleaning fish, adjusting the controls of atomic reactors; tracing partners’ profiles from forehead to chin. In Macaboy’s thoracic cavity the fist-sized muscle grasps and grasps and grasps. He sees the down on the cheek that is not more than ten inches away from his eyes, his lips. “I’ve got to get to work,” he suddenly says, starting up from the straight chair. His movements are firm. He tests the seating. The tolerances are fine. As his sinews control splendid objects the flow between these two parties becomes wordless but is even more volatile than before. The lock is in place. He hangs the door. He tests the result and is excited. It is late in the day, and he insists he must leave. As the gap between door and frame narrows on his departure, the energy from his eyes funnels in toward hers like a draft Then the door is closed.

  Chapter 23

  THE wind of that last look was still blowing on her face when she woke on Sunday morning. Her sleep had taken her to the floor of the sea, into such calm darkness as she had never swum through. She rolled out of bed, stood, raised her arms, and stretched, reaching for the summit of light so luxuriously that every muscle in her body seemed to yawn. Each mean chore she had let go since her first day of work now seemed a snap. She stripped her bed, made it with clean sheets, bundled her soiled clothes into a green canvas duffel bag, showered, put on a robe, fixed coffee and toast, started a Joni Mitchell record, ate, mopped the kitchen floor, dusted the Henrys and all else, emptied the wastebaskets, vacuumed the living room and bedroom floors—and all the while picked up energy, as if completions were honey and milk. She had dreaded these tasks, thinking herself lazy, resentful of anything smacking of charwoman’s work, unwilling to be a servant even to herself; she was a little afraid she was becoming the sort of slophead who, through the perversity of her freedom, would very soon have cockroaches in her kitchen drawers. Not at all: her broom had wings. She was Clean Clara.

  She thought of the motions of Eddie Macaboy’s hands. She saw in memory the two hands displaying the works of the lock, one hand cocked on its forearm to make a shelf, the deft fingers of the other giving the heavy item balance but also constantly playing, dancing, so that the metal itself began to seem to tremble and almost snort. “This is human safety.” He was like a worshiper at an icon. He sat there and looked at you and waited, she thought, for you to say what you’ve been trying to say for years.

  She was through with her housework by noon. She thought: I’ll go to the laundromat, then I’ll buy the Sunday Times and come back and read and do the puzzle. And maybe. Maybe there’ll be a phone call.

  She brushed her hair with a hundred strokes. She decided to put on her plum-colored corduroys. With a navy-blue tee shirt. Then, feeling Sundayish, she tied a silk scarf at her throat, French-workman style. She changed handbags, transferring wallet and cigarettes and Kleenex and odds and ends to her Pakistani velvet shoulder bag embroidered in gold, which she had bought in Paris. She picked up the duffel bag of laundry and started for the door.