The Walnut Door Page 9

  THEY are driving, if you can call it that, down George Street. The inventor of the minicomputerized internal combustion engine fuel conservator is at the wheel of the stuttering camper, hanging on like a rodeo cowboy just out of the gate on a Brahma bull with nettles slapped onto his cojones. Macaboy is beside him, bracing himself against the dashboard. They are both wearing immaculate company coveralls. Frank is written in cursive letters over Okvent’s heart.

  “She called me early this morning,” Macaboy says. “The place had been torn apart. The guy had pried the door open and made himself at home.”

  “At home?”

  “Walked right in…. She accepted the price of the door right off. You’ll like her, Okkie. She’s got a certain something vague about her that you’d like. This indefinite quality. The off look in the eye that so many Irish drinkers have, you know? Aren’t Vikings and Celts kissing cousins?”

  “But you said you want me to go home right away?”

  “We’ll carry the door up—and then there wouldn’t be anything else for you to do, old Oks.”

  They are at a red light at Church Street The camper is in repose, but it still rattles like a kettle coming to a boil. “Why do you remain in the nineteenth century?” Finn asks. “You are so intelligent The universe”—he makes a whole watery song of the word, dipping low under the surface on the first syllable, yüüniverse—“is waiting, Macaboy.”

  “If I had charge of the universe,” Macaboy says, “I’d bend the time warp right back on itself. I’d dick around awhile, faster than the speed of light, and then, yes—I might just stop time. Somewhere back there where the basics lived. Wood, stone, wool, cotton, oxygen, wheat, coal, water. Water in a lake so dear you can see the bottom thirty feet down.”

  Okvent shakes his head with suicidal gloom. “You can’t stop it.”

  “Meanwhile I’ll just work with wood, thanks, Okkie.”

  * * *

  —

  MACABOY is amazed how friendly Mzz Quinlan has decided to be.

  They have just carried the door up into the hallway outside her apartment.

  “Let me see it,” she says. She is wearing a thin tee shirt. She has a bra on. She puts her hands on her hips. “Oh, it’s a work of art,” she says. She really seems to mean it. “Did your company actually make this? I’m impressed.”

  “This is Frank,” Macaboy says.

  “Hi,” she said. “Am I glad to see you guys!”

  “Guid day,” Okvent says. Macaboy knows this chick has a fast ear, and he fully expects her to ask, with that wood-hasp voice she sometimes uses, if they really christen boy-children Frank in the Land of the Midnight Sun.

  But she just says, “A good day after a bad night.”

  “You insured?” Macaboy asks. “What did they take?”

  “That’s the scary part,” she says. “Not a bloody thing. I can’t find my picture album, but I must have stuck it away somewhere. Who’d want that?”

  “The place a mess?”

  Macaboy sees a ripple go across her face. “No,” she says. “Nothing was touched. Oh, yeah,” she says, “one of my plant jars got broken. The lights were on. Music going—James Taylor: you think that says anything?”

  “Sounds kind of bizarre,” Macaboy says. “It’s usually your run-of-the-mill druggies looking for a quick hock.”

  “That should really help,” she says, nodding at the solid walnut door lying on its long side, propped against the wall.

  “Like I said, the company wants you to feel safe.” He sees her eyes whip over to his. “And you will,” he says, cool.

  * * *

  —

  OKVENT has left. Macaboy digs a spirit level and a flexible tape measure out of his tool box, and after a few passes with the level—his lips are pressed together, he exudes expertise as if it were a natural issue of his working flesh—he explains what he has to do. The casing is slightly skewed. The jambs are almost plumb, but the sill sags on one side and the heading has a swoop in it. He has to cut the door down to fit exactly this slightly crooked doorcase. He has left five-eighths of an inch of overage on each dimension. He will have to do the trimming with planes. The mortise for the lock has already been cut, but he will have to fit a new strike plate and set in new hinges. This is all finicky work. It will take several hours. He may have to work on into the evening. He wouldn’t want to leave her overnight with no door. Right?

  “I’ll fix some supper,” she says.

  * * *

  —

  FIRST he removes the old strike plate and cuts tight-fitting plugs for the holes in the jamb and glues them in. These two people are getting acquainted. He thinks: You could slice the caution around here with a butter knife. At their last encounter she came on like an employer—“sonny,” “Eddie boy.” He put the entire genera of female architects and Bennington women down. She as much as said the day would never come when she would order a new door; he made bright eyes at her when he wobbled the old knob. She has the great advantage over him of having been wrong. There is, besides, a deeper rift—between his tightly calibrated constant turbine energy and her sparky, sputtering, stubborn way of being there and then disappearing, flaring and going dark.

  Reasons for dropping out of Reed College. Disillusionment Vietnam. Ego dilution. Deep-seated toxic reactions. “The Movement seemed like a better education than Sociology 24.”

  “You must meet my friend Ruth Greenhelge. She’s here in New Haven now. She was a real peppercorn in college. You two might have something in common.” Implying that “we two” might not?

  “What’s she doing now?”

  “Balling a professor of linguistics. A specialist in logic.”

  Macaboy’s right hand hovers like a helicopter over his next operation. “That was all long ago,” he curtly says.

  * * *

  —

  “QUINLAN,” he says. “That has to be Irish from way back.”

  “You use my last name, and I use your first name,” she says.

  “My name is Macaboy. You’d think that was Irish, too, but it’s not, it was French. Maquisbois. They went to Nova Scotia. My mother’s side, we’re old, old New Englanders—you know, black hats, silver shoe buckles, election—the whole mare’s nest.”

  “Elaine,” she says, giving him permission just by saying it.

  “You micks tell such incredibly beautiful lies. I mean like Cuchulain, the Fenians, Deirdre, all that. ‘Dream-dimmed eyes.’ Joyce alone would have been enough. But, Jesus, take those ancient titles. The Book of the Dun Cow. The Yellow Book of Lecan. The Speckled Book. It’s all there, the whole Irish earthy simplicity bit! Even the names of the poets, you can’t believe them: Teig Og O’Higgins, Eochy O’Hussey. Hey, have you read Mary Lavin’s stories?”

  “No, but I’ve heard of her. I’ve just been reading Flannery O’Connor.”

  “You Irish elevate suffering to the level of honor and loyalty and respect for the marriage bond. It’s like pain is the highest decency.”

  He can see the hot specks coming forward out of the sockets. “Life is painful for poor people,” she scornfully says. “It takes courage.”

  “Yeah, I know,” he says, mollifying. “I’ve always wished for that particular kind of courage. But my parents didn’t find it convenient to be poor. I gather yours didn’t either.”

  * * *

  —

  HE sharpens the blade of a long wooden jack plane. He wedges the door, on one side, into a metal bracket he brought along, which holds the wooden leaf upright; he has carefully padded the metal of the brace with old toweling wherever it touches the wood. He has taken measurements in the doorcase a dozen times. He bends to his work. His eyes brim over with the perfection of what he is doing.

  She drags her rocker out into the hall and sits to watch him. She does not dare to rock, for fear of causing his eyes to swerve
from their strict lines of aim.

  He runs a shot of the plane the whole length of the outer side. He bends down and picks up the shaving and holds it high for her to see. It is an exquisite helix, several feet long, and seems alive.

  * * *

  —

  “WHAT did you say her name was—that firecracker from Bennington who’s here now?”

  “Greenhelge. Ruth Greenhelge.”

  “I heard her rave once. I was always there at those meetings.”

  “But I thought you went to Reed. Isn’t that in Oregon?”

  “I got around.”

  * * *

  —

  “IT’S true my father wasn’t poor,” she says. She is still burning from that little reminder of his. “He was a contractor. He worked hard for every cent he earned.”

  “The well-known Protestant work ethic.”

  She doesn’t laugh. “But the family memory of poverty was always there. Our Quinlans came over in 1832 in a stinking ship’s hold with six hundred other immigrants—you know? Cholera broke out on the way over, and when they got to the Narrows, the quarantine people went on board, and they threw every single thing those people owned overboard, just except what they had on their backs, threw away their clothes, bedding, keepsakes—not that they had that much. The Quinlans started over here from scratch.”

  Macaboy is working now on the end grain with a metal block plane. He stands a moment with the plane poised away from the wood. “Yeah,” he says, “I read about a thing like that, those immigrants, in Redburn. That book made me understand President Kennedy for the first time. I mean, that drive.”

  “I wish I had some of it,” she says.

  “No,” Macaboy says, “you’re lucky if you’ve been spared it.”

  * * *

  —

  “I WORKED one summer in a corset factory,” he says. “Sorting garments in the company laundry. At the end of the summer, the girls in the office threw a farewell party for me, and they gave me some stuff out of the company line as a going-away present. One thing they gave me—a pink bra with a soupçon of padding in it. We lived in Avon, see, and I knew this girl in East Hartford. It was pretty weird, she was my father’s boss’s daughter. She had an ass like a Mixmaster, but she could use a little falsification up front. So the night after the farewell party I took the bra to her as a giftie, and while she was unwrapping it she said, like it was something as casual as it’s a nice evening, a bit dewy, she says, ‘Hey, they fired your old man today.’ Some big outfit had taken over the company. Not a word of advance warning. My Pop was about to be fifty. I felt like she’d rapped me in the jewels. So casual. Like, Thanks for the falsies, your father’s a washout, old buddy.”

  * * *

  —

  “WOULD you mind—besides the lock—putting one of those, uh, chains on the door?”

  “Not at all. Glad to.”

  * * *

  —

  “I’M sorry what I said last time about Bennington chicks all being like Mondrians. That was stupid.”

  “No. You were perfectly right,” she says. “Hard edges. I kind of liked it.”

  His face is turned away. “You’re not,” he says. “You’re more of a Cézanne.”

  “Is that supposed to be good?” He can hear a particle of eagerness on the edge of suspicion. “Sounds pretty dull, old hat. It’s kitchy. I think I liked the other better.”

  “There’s a haze on the landscape,” he says.

  * * *

  —

  “THIS is a knob lock I’m going to install,” he says. “The one advantage is, it opens fast from the inside. I notice this house doesn’t have fire escapes—illegal as hell, huh? But with this lock, you can really zip out of here.”

  “I hadn’t even noticed about the fire escapes.”

  * * *

  —

  “I WAS surprised you knew so much about Wooster Square.”

  “Oh, that’s just company policy.”

  “I adore this square. Mixtures make the strongest unities. I was in Venice once”—he nods, almost as if he has heard her say this before—“when my father gave me this trip as a graduation present And Piazza San Marco—I don’t mean to say Wooster Square is that good—but the mixture is what makes them both, you know? The church itself, then the Campanile, the Library, the Loggia, the Moors’ clock tower—those funny figures hammering out the hours.”

  “Yeah,” Macaboy says, “and St. Theodore stepping on a crocodile.”

  “What do you mean? Where is that?”

  “On top of one of those two columns. You know, in the approach—the Piazzetta.”

  “Mr. Macaboy, you are one weird locksmith.”

  “I don’t know about that,” he says, ocular energy pouring along a ruler’s-edge line toward her, “but one thing I do know: this door’s going to really freak you out, it’s going to be so good.”

  “What kind of pizza do you like?”

  “Anchovies and green peppers. Nothing else.”

  “Be right back.”

  Chapter 13

  ELAINE tucked her feet up under her on the rocker. She had the receiver of the phone jammed between her chin and her left shoulder, and as she talked she inspected her fingernails as if favorable signs were engraved on them.

  “He didn’t get finished until after midnight.”

  “What are you preparing me for?”

  “No, nothing like that. He worked straight through, Greenie, from two in the afternoon till like twelve thirty at night. With just time out to scarf a pizza.”

  “He can eat, huh?”

  “And with this fierce concentration. I thought the damn wood would burst into flames.”

  “You sound pretty hepped up.”

  “Wasn’t a damn thing to get hepped up about. I don’t think he even saw me. Know what he did when he was finished?”

  “I’m holding my breath.”

  “Asked for my vacuum cleaner. Honest to Pete.”

  “Hey, what are his rates? I could use some of that.”

  “He talked like something on tape while he was concentrating. He has this stereo head. He’s done the most amazing reading, Greenie. I mean, for a total dropout. We got onto my ancestors, and he talked for ten minutes about Irish labor laying the railroad tracks here in the East —the routes, where the lumber for the ties came from, the mills that made the rails, he had it all down.”

  “What about the door?”

  “Oh, Greenie, you should see it. The grain is—I don’t know—like taffeta.”

  “Come again?”

  “It’s natural color. He rubbed on some stuff, Skandia Oil, two coats—applications, I guess you’d call them. It just glows. He left the oil for me to put more on.”

  “Sounds like the old backrub routine.”

  “You should hear the sound it makes when it clunks shut…. Oh, hey, by the way. He said he’d heard you make a speech once at some rally.”

  “Oh? What did he say?”

  “Nothing, really. He just picked up on your name.”

  “My name? How did that come up?”

  “I don’t know—he was talking about his political phase, and I said you’d been very into all that at Bennington, he ought to meet you. That was all.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Macaboy. Eddie Macaboy.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  * * *

  —

  HER back itched. She flicked on her little Sony tube. Out of the crackling snow came Harry Reasoner, looking her right in the fizz. He seemed to be trying to comfort her. And yet. Our bombs were guided by laser beams so they would hit the power plant but not the dam three hundred feet away. The cloudburst dumped on the Black Hills and crested in Rapid City—hundreds of autos, flushed out of town, were strewn over
the railroad tracks. Body count at Anloc: 114. A curly-haired blond youth walked out of the ocean at Key West, in cutoff jeans and a tee shirt, with a rusty knife on his belt and a cheap compass in his pocket; he couldn’t remember his name, his family, where he was from, how he got where he was, wherever that was. “It’s like”—he was frowning, the effort showed—“it’s like a wall in my mind.” There was a place between her shoulder blades that Elaine could not reach to scratch.

  * * *

  —

  SHE sat looking at the door and feeling its reproach. The very precision of the carpentry seemed a reminder of her vagueness. She felt like thumbing her nose at the damn door. She was a useless person. Her days rubbed her raw. She felt that she was decent, she honored her promises, she was sensitive to others’ feelings. Lot of good any of that did. An image of her hardworking, gentle father crossed her mind. He was leaning down over her, saying, “Nice going, Lainie.” His praise was like a warm bath. Personnel directors humiliated her; she was sick of being told that her education had aimed too high. She had tried everything but Yale. No one wanted her. It was hard for her to get moving. Mornings were difficult How could she possibly have thrown away two years on a man who was disintegrating? The walnut was well cured, Macaboy had said, it was just about warp-proof, but it might swell in a long stretch of wet weather, in which case he’d gladly come and plane down any sticking places. Those manic goo-goo eyes! She never wanted to see him again. She didn’t want to be a bluish hill in an Impressionist painting. To face the fact, she had never felt so unsafe in all her life.

  Chapter 14

  MACABOY, at the lockeyist bench, cutting some keys for a cylinder job on Bradley Street, is hit by a downward pull in his gut that has to do with his father. His mother’s letter is on the television set. Macaboy thinks of all the years when he was so snotty to both parents. His father always maintained a correct stance, always said: I love you if you need money we’re crazy about your girl it’s up to you keep in touch your mother sends love with mine…all those proper formal mouthings that drove Macaboy up the wall and across the ceiling. You don’t feel anything! It’s all out of some horrible manual. But the years went bang bang bang and then one time—he remembers exactly when it was, he was visiting Stanford, getting ready for a demonstration against some Dow Chemical recruiters which was going to involve red oil paint on stone, very hard to remove—when out of the blue he felt as if he had received a weak, weak signal, like one of those radio impulses the astronomers pick up that hint of intelligent life on a distant planet: it was some kind of psychic telegraphy from the old man which took the form of a spasm of self-doubt. But he did nothing about it. He sloshed the red paint on the granite wall. Bang bang bang more years. Then, just a month or so ago—before this letter, thank God—he was going through some old junk and came across a picture of his father in college, and he shuddered. The cold wind of time bit him. He had a foretaste of mourning. He sensed a coming year when he would no longer look anything like his own Reed pictures. He made a move adulterated by both pity and self-pity. He called up. He apologized for all the shit. I admire you and I’m sorry. He knew he had been bound to make the move. He felt so lucky to have made it before his mother’s letter came.