The Walnut Door Read online

  “Arden couldn’t get at me when I was in there. So often when my father was angry my mother played the piano.”

  * * *

  —

  “I’LL put this Swedish in the refrigerator. You’ll be hungry later.”

  “How long is this going on?”

  “I’ll bring you some supper tonight.”

  “But be fair, will you? I don’t know what the ransom is.”

  Chapter 28

  WHEN she was thirteen and her family lived on Oak Street in Shaker Heights, a clan of raccoons staged a fête champêtre in the Quinlan back yard every night. They overturned the garbage cans and spread a hoity picnic, and every morning the yard looked like the fields of Woodstock after the music was over. Her mother gave Elaine the job of cleaning up. Elaine was at the beginning of a turn toward the Negative Principle; she struck; her mother, in a moment of exhaustion, offered her a quarter a morning—and Elaine knew she was on her way to winning. The raccoons drove her father batty. Why did they choose his yard? They didn’t upset the neighbors’ trash. They were true B & E artists. There was simply nothing he could do to protect the garbage cans—weights, locks, imprecations, dog repellents, a hinged wooden enclosure. They feasted in his teeth. He bought a Havahart Trap and baited it with peanut butter. The very first morning a baby raccoon smiled its tricky innocence through the wire mesh. Both Mrs. Quinlan and Elaine wept. In a rage of forced compassion her father opened the trap, and the fat brown behind bounced away, trailing its striped bush, looking like the rear view of a frontier hat on a jaunty boy’s head. “It’s a God damn juvenile court around here,” her father said. “Right back out on the street.”

  The coffee cups were on the kitchen table. Her bed was a night-mare’s-nest, still unmade. Lint gathered like coiled smoke in corners. She knew she should clean up. She had heard Justy rattling her garbage can in the hallway where Macaboy had put it, and this had brought the raccoons to mind. She sat rocking. She blamed herself for more than her laziness. She blamed herself for her self. How could she sit here smiling at her father’s explosions? Like a passing puff of breeze a thought briefly stirred the leaves in her mind: She had much to confess. Her mortal sin, sloth, was simply a disguise under which all that was wrong in her lay dormant. For two days she had done nothing but loaf, and she was exhausted. It would have been so much easier if she had been afraid of Macaboy. Then she would have been canny, adrenaline would have given her speed, in desperation she would have tied sheets together and climbed out of her window. Instead she sat there thinking with half-hearted horniness of his glistening chest and arms when he had been shirtless the other day, installing the Stanloc. His strong hands played around her. Rock, rock, the masturbatory motion. She hadn’t the energy to invest in an orgasm. There was no joy in her lust. Nor any guilt. She was bogged down in Middlemarch. Self-righteous Casaubon was too much for her. She was tired of all of her music. Her calathea in one of the cookie jars was brownish, but she could not stir to water it. The game shows on the tube made her want to throw up. She had no appetite. It was too much bother to be angry.

  She dragged herself to her bed. She lay on her back, her eyes closed over a watery mind. Thoughts drifted there with barely effective swimming movements, like those of jellyfish.

  * * *

  —

  MOVING toward light, she was aware of rapidity. She broke the surface and knew that the pace was in her heart. It flew. She expected fear but felt instead an air-conditioned excitement. Rivers of Coca-Cola ran through her veins. Had she just experienced—how? in a dream?—the rapture of the deeps? She thought: Whatever this is, I have to give way to it, I have to let it happen to me. It was at first an airiness, the body active in it—beautiful long ground strokes all the way to the base line, easy and relaxed, an awareness that the game was expressing itself through her; she was not the athlete but the instrument. The coolness in her yielded to a trembling flush. This was the first joy she had felt in months—perhaps ever—at least since childhood. Light-years away from any chemical high she had ever felt. Ride it! Ride it! Her heart was still pounding. She realized that she was in tears. Her weeping gave her the purest pleasure. Light was dispersed through the welling water in her eyes into its primary colors. At the place where blue and yellow fused there was a green of newest growth—Maytime. All the yearning of all the months was geysering out of her. She put her fingers to her eyelids to feel the tears, as if she could only trust a second sense to inform her of her good fortune, to confirm it. Something like a stream of milk, still warm from its source—it could only have been air—washed her throat and vitals. It was evidently not a dream, or the product of a dream. The good feeling seemed rooted in her. It clung. She tried to call up some skepticism, but it was stormed away by the speed of her pulse.

  * * *

  —

  SHE was calmer, though her throat was still tight with joy. She thought of the motions of his hands.

  * * *

  —

  WITHIN a few minutes of her watering it, the calathea showed its gratitude, lifting its prodigal greens and yellows and reds and whites for her view. But it was the moss at the base of the jar that fascinated her. She held the jar in the afternoon light in the window. This was the green she had seen in that passing moment of brimming. She guessed she had never looked closely at moss—she had seen it always as a conglomerate texture, a velvet. Now she peered at its individuals. She began to feel her heart move again with a faster rhythm. All those incredibly delicate tufted stems lifting their tiny sexual organs to each other; some with pregnant capsules of spores on slender necks. For a second she thought she could feel in her cupped hands the excitation of the many lives.

  Chapter 29

  BALANCING a loaded tray on the tips of the fingers of his right hand, he squirts his left pointer at the doorbell button. This time he hears her come running. He turns the lock button. The door swings open. She gasps. “My God,” she says, “what happened to you?”

  Macaboy, grinning, does a parade-ground about-face, to show the back of his head; then he does another, and says, “Had my ears moved.”

  “Your ponytail—what a weird haircut! What have you done—joined the Marines?”

  “I did it for you,” he says.

  “For me?”

  “You thought I looked freaky.”

  “I did?”

  “You gave me that impression.”

  She ignores this. Standing on tiptoes, she cases what’s on the tray. “What did you bring? I’m famished.”

  “Spaghetti marinara. Manicotti. Melanzano alla parmigiana. Ensalata mista. From Leon’s. I had to bribe them to let me take it out. For you, only the best.”

  * * *

  —

  HER eyes are different.

  Having set the food on the stove and in the oven to heat, he casually checks the refrigerator. No trace of that big, gooey Swedish. While he is cooling his nose, she says, “I’m low on groceries. Would you get me some junk in the morning? Here’s a list.”

  All written down. Eggs. Mayo. O.J. A whole shopping cartful of etceteras. Quite a list.

  Macaboy looks at her eyes. Something high-octane in her metabolism. He decides to take his foot off the accelerator; sees a sharp curve ahead with narrow shoulders.

  “Actually,” he says, “I had my hair cut for business reasons. If you played the game of associations, the average person’s response to ‘security’ would be ‘crewcut’—right? If you gave ‘ponytail’ you’d get something like ‘addict,’ huh?—next step is straight to ‘burglar.’ I couldn’t afford that image.”

  * * *

  —

  SHE is an eating machine. Her face is flushed. She looks like Botticelli’s Madonna of the Pomegranate with marinara sauce on her chin. She has both fists firing comestibles at lips which glisten with olive oil.

  “In the end it’s mental,” he’s saying. “
There’s no lock that can’t be broken. You take a heavy padlock, tempered steel. You can’t make a dent on it with a hacksaw. No use trying a blowtorch on it. O.K., so what’s to do? You spray it with Freon, the stuff they use in air conditioners—you freeze the steel. Then whammo, with a sledge hammer. A thousand pieces. Literally. It like explodes.”

  She stops stoking. But it is only to salt the salad.

  “These petty crooks don’t pick locks. You wanted to install the Stanloc—it’s pick-resistant. But believe me, Elaine, nobody picks a lock, except private dicks on the tube—and me. No, it’s all breaking and entering. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, it’s a little pane of glass gets broken, and in. But who wants to live in a house without windows?”

  She puts her fork down. Her eyes—ouch, the arrow turns, turns, turns. “What’s wrong, Macaboy?” she says.

  “My father’s dying. My mother called this aft.”

  “Eddie.”

  He can’t believe the emotion. Her tenderness has leaped straight out of her gluttony. He turns his head, face away, afraid he will blubber.

  Then he gets his head together and says, “I have to go up to Avon tomorrow. Okvent said I could use his camper. I’ll do your shopping first. Will you mind an evening without me coming?”

  “Of course not,” she says, putting her hand on his. This is the first time they have touched. “You have to go.”

  Chapter 30

  HIS father’s face is in profile. Strange: Macaboy can see every thread of the plaid cotton collar below the chin, and the khaki fisherman’s hat above is so sharply in focus that he can see the wavering golden net of reflected sun-ripples on the shiny green underside of the duckbill visor—but the features in between are blurred. He knows there must be a big nose. He can hear his mother say it, part proud, part mocking, “It takes three generations for a Macaboy nose to ripen to its full glory.” He is a little uneasy, remembering: Was “nose” a code word? But the nose is vague; Macaboy can see right through it. There is a hot place where the eye belongs, and a spiderweb, perhaps, of an outdoor man’s wrinkles around the eye. Pressing his eyelids shut for a moment, trying to realize the half face, Macaboy tells himself that he hardly knew his father. But he sees where they were standing that day: on a bank of the Farmington River, near the railroad trestle. It was May. They were fishing for shiners. Macaboy was fourteen. His father was chewing his sentences all to pieces, and Eddie couldn’t make head or tail of what he was trying to say. But in time the fragments began to make a pattern. “Men and women…different gidgets…you may have noticed.” A gesture of the left hand—the right hand was occupied with the rod—as if holding a half grapefruit, applied first to the left chest, then to the right. “No one told me anything when I was your age. There was this thing that happened to me. At night there’d be this dream…about these gidgets—you know?…Wake up sticky…Scared me, Eddie-boy. For months, there, I was convinced I’d picked up a social disease…trip to Hartford…pay toilet. I had no one to talk to. Hardly knew my own father. Thought I ought to…to warn you.” There on the riverbank enormous bubbles of joy and fear rode in Macaboy’s throat, globes of croaking laughter struggling to get out O glory, glory, hallelujah! His father was trying to tell him about sex. It was only five years too late. All the lurid details, up to and including putting it into sheep, into a grasping hand, into human mouths and bumholes, as well as into snatches—wet dreams, too—had been imparted to Macaboy when he was nine by his classmate Bemsley Caul, and a few months later Bem’s older brother Hart, who was nineteen and had, according to Bem, put it into all those places and plenty of others, had taken to his bed, his left ball swollen up to the size of a dime-store tin globe of the world. Bem had taken Eddie to see the impressive mound of the sheet at Hart’s groin, and Eddie had sworn a private vow never to put it anywhere at all. But Hart’s marvel had turned out to be just a cruel case of the mumps. Macaboy and his father caught no fish that day. When the ordeal was over, they started home. They were halfway across the railway trestle when the four-fifteen whistled, close in. They climbed out to the side of the trestlework and hung on to the railings at the ends of the ties, and Macaboy felt wildly exultant He was positive, as the train thundered past and the shaking of the trestle went to nine on the Richter scale, that his father was going to drop off and drown and float away like a log to Long Island Sound.

  * * *

  —

  THE body was made in order to receive covering. The body is covered at all times. In the bath—he is four? five?—the washcloth floats over parts of the body. “Lie back, darling. I won’t get soap in your eyes.” Rough towel—all covered now.

  * * *

  —

  “LOOK the other way, dear.”

  HE was walking somewhere on a dirt road with Arden. Arden was holding his hand. Arden took him into a field, among tassels at Eddie’s eye level which swayed and made a feathery film against the blue sky. Arden stripped one of the tassels and put half a dozen unripe kernels into Eddie’s mouth, and he said, “Chew ’em. Don’t swallow, Ed-boy. Just chew.” The wheat became a kind of chewing gum. Sweetness came forth slowly from it. Arden took Eddie’s hand again. They walked in the dust, both chewing. Eddie looked up at his brother’s pale face and watched the sharp chin working under the huge nose. Arden looked so much like Father it was scary.

  * * *

  —

  SUNDAY was the day when people drove around. Arden and he were on the porch playing the car game. Arden got traffic out from town, that Sunday, Eddie the cars driving in. They bet marbles. They knew the models cold. Sample values: Falcon, Comet, one glassy; Lark, Tempest, two glassies; Biscayne, Belvedere, one onyx; Star Chief, Le-Sabre, two onyxes; New Yorker, Super 88, one biggie; Continental, Imperial, one cat’s eye; any classic (Auburn, Cord, Packard, Duesenberg, etc.), two cat’s-eyes; Stutz Bearcat (a man in Farmington owned one and drove past a couple of times a month), five onyxes or a steelie….

  A silver bullet shot past with bass utterances of exhaust. Eddie started up from his chair. “A Jag!” he shouted. “My God, Ard, I got an XKE!”

  “Shit,” Arden said. “Just because it was streamlined—”

  “I know what I’m talking about.”

  “That was a lousy Sting Ray.”

  “Come on, Arden. How can you say that? It had those sort of underwater headlights. Much lower and longer than a Corvette.”

  Arden stood up and moved threateningly toward Eddie.

  “Cheater!” Eddie shouted, loud enough for faraway ears.

  Arden’s upper teeth looked like a cowcatcher on a railroad engine. “Take it back,” he said. “Say it was a Sting Ray.”

  “You can’t make me lie,” Eddie said.

  Blizzard-pale, Arden reached down into Eddie’s box of marbles and picked up a handful and threw them across the porch.

  The rolling and bouncing sounds of marbles on wood had just begun when Eddie lowered his head, charged, and butted Arden in the stomach. Arden fell with a groan straight out of a Jonathan Edwards sermon. Eddie piled on.

  “See here.” Pop’s voice.

  Two words were enough. The boys untangled and stood up.

  “Him and his goddam George Washington act,” Arden said.

  “Watch your cusswords, son,” Pop said. “All right. Let’s be seated. Now. Who’s the plaintiff here?”

  And so, as usual, they found themselves pitted in a trial. Due process would never persuade Arden that a Corvette was a Ferrari, but it hewed out a rough justice that Eddie could appreciate. Arden was sentenced to pick up the marbles.

  Arden was on his hands and knees paying his debt to society with flashing eyes when Mom appeared in the porch doorway. “You sit there as a judge,” she said to her husband, her eyes mirrors of her older son’s, “and let these boys gamble on the Sabbath. No wonder they lose control.”

  * * *

  —
/>   THE bus let him out in front of Sewall’s Pharmacy. He was a Lower Middler, and he had earned a long weekend. He was carrying his brown leather suitcase, in which he had packed home clothes: wool shirt, two sweaters, his L. L. Bean hiking boots. It was November. The elm trees on Route 44 were bare, their angular upper branches sharp Gothic writing against a blue paper sky. He ran up the front steps of the house. The fanlights over the green front door sparkled in the afternoon light His mother came running into the hall and threw her arms around him. Over her shoulder in her grasp he faced the octavo Audubon of the white-headed eagle, Haliaeetus leucocephalus, with its claws cruelly sunk into the fat white underflank of a huge fish; he felt his mother’s fingernails fluttering at the back of his neck. He pulled away and bolted down the hall to the door at the far right end, in which his father just then appeared. They hugged each other; Eddie held tight. The two men went into the study, leaving Eddie’s mother standing alone in the hall; he was aware of her sweeping past the den door into the dining room and kitchen across the way. A fire was crackling in the study fireplace.

  “Saw a buck and a doe and a fawn,” Pop said, “right in the Hydes’ orchard last evening. They came right in behind the houses for the windfalls.”

  “Sounds promising.”

  Eddie, who hated guns, was going to hunt with a bow and arrow. Pop had promised to hold his fire, whenever they saw a buck, until Eddie got off two arrows. Eddie had a fast draw from the quiver.

  Pop moved over to his desk, picked up a pipe, bent down to light a pitchpine taper in the fire, and then stood sucking up a storm of blue smoke, his thick mouth like that of a horse lipping a sugar lump. He had on a hunter’s red flannel shirt, and his khaki pants were tucked into old leather puttees that had belonged to his father in the First World War.