All These Condemned Read online

  And then, astonishing myself, I rolled over and ground my eyes into the pillow and cried with the muted helplessness of a sick child. It astonished me, because I had not thought there was even that much left.

  I went to sleep thinking of how Wilma would look were she dead.

  Noel was up and gone when I awakened. Most of them had finished breakfast and were down by the water. I had slept long, but there had been no rest. It has been like that for some time now. Sleep so heavy that I awaken in the same position. Dreamless sleep. A little death. But I get no rest from it. And I wonder about the significance of that. The doctor said it could be related to my physical condition. I think it a part of the death wish. There are other indications.

  Back in the happy days Noel used to tell me that I made a fetish of orderliness. That was true. The yellow pencils aligned and needle-pointed. The soldierly columns of the figures with their inevitable totals. The gray steel files and the little colored signal tabs. The April report. The stock listing. Staples and the creamy gleam of the file folder, and the appointment pad with each day bisected by the scalpel of the clock. My world was in order. Even to the socks placed just so, and the shoes containing their trees, and the clean scalp and the close shave and the morning moment of elimination. I was clean and I put my heels down with firmness when I walked and I conversed with rhythmic logic, in confidence-inspiring cadence. I was clean and my wife was clean and my life was clean, and I could shut my eyes and reach into any part of my life and put my hand on what I wanted, and I could look through all my prisms into the clean future and see the etched extension of the selected path.

  Now I know where nothing is. Even the little business details. I throw the papers in a drawer. Sometimes I crumple them first. I wear shirts too long. I am often able to smell the odors of my own body. I do not walk as I did before.

  It is odd, because back in that other life I was aware that there were men who became obsessed with a woman, with the living body of a particular woman. I thought of such men as being closer to the animals, of being more elemental in their heats and furies. I was a cool man. People did not tell off-color jokes in my presence. I had an austerity. And a dignity.

  Now I am obsessed, and now I know that it is the type of man that I am that is most often subject to this warm disaster. The man who seems somehow to have skipped childhood, to have been born solemn, the boy who leads scholastically and in nothing else, who corrects papers, is inclined to preach, who has thought dimly of the ministry, who becomes an accountant or a teller or a teacher or an actuary. Such coolness subconsciously seeks warmth. The spirit seeks the body. The ice looks for flame.

  Now I sleep in heaviness, and seek disorder and demand cruelty. In debasement I seek an ever deeper pit, a continually increasing darkness. A death wish. For the final function of flame is to consume entirely. I can see myself and what is happening and I do not care. I am nothing but function. And through function I look for death.

  The day was warm. They swam. I pulled the water skis behind the runabout for a long time. I kept score and made decisions when they played croquet. They were drunk. Paul was the worst. When they did not like a decision, they ignored what I said. Wilma had changed to a rose-colored denim sunsuit for the game. I watched her body as she would walk, as she would bend and strike the ball, as she would turn from the waist to watch someone else play. Once when I stood too close she swung the mallet back and hit the side of my knee, wood against bone. It was painful. She apologized profusely. Everyone knew she had done it on purpose. They were silent. I felt their contempt and it washed over me and I liked it. Then they forgot. After a time the pain went away. I stood close again, but she had a knowing look and she did not strike me again. Because she knew I wanted her to.

  It was later, much later, that I realized that I had not seen Noel for a long time. A boat was gone. I found Wilma and I asked her if she had seen Noel. She said that Steve Winsan had taken her out in one of the boats a long time ago. I realized then how Winsan had thought he had selected a weapon. It made me want to laugh.

  I sat alone and watched the lake. No boat moved. I thought of the other man I had once been. A man who, perhaps, would have tried to kill Winsan. But Noel was a girl I had once known. She could do as she pleased. I could warn her about Winsan, as I would warn any pleasant stranger I saw getting too close to him. I pictured him seducing her. I made vivid pictures in my mind, trying to summon some fragment of anger, some morsel of regret, some pinch of pain. And there was nothing.

  I was there a long time. Finally I saw the boat coming. It had come from behind a distant island. It was dusk. I wanted to know, out of objective curiosity, so I went down the steps and out onto the dock, and when the boat stopped its noise I asked in a quiet voice where they had been. Her answer was coarse, unlike her, and unmistakable. So I knew. Even in semidarkness Winsan had the uneasy look of guilt. I walked away before I laughed in his face. I heard him hush her. It meant nothing to me. So one more thing had been taken from me. And I had moved one step closer to death.

  They swam that night. They were all there, except Paul, and all quite high again. Noel, in her new freedom, laughed too much and with an odd note in her voice. I did not wish to swim. I sat on the dock to be near them. They decided to swim without suits. Steve went up to turn off the lights. Moments later, playfully, he turned them back on for a second, freezing all of them there in a blinding whiteness against the night. Noel was in the act of stepping out of her suit. Then her slimness was gone, fading slowly on the back of my eyes. It gave me a strange feeling. It is difficult to describe. Very much like that feeling you have when you are starting out on a trip and you slow your car because you are certain you have forgotten something. You think, but you cannot remember what it was. And then you shrug and push down on the gas pedal and tell yourself that it was nothing important, nothing that cannot be replaced wherever you are going.

  They swam and shouted with the daring self-conscious boisterousness of people who mistake silliness for boldness.

  I got up and went silently, quickly, breathlessly to the very end of the dock and my eyes were used to the night and I could see the white body of Wilma, almost luminous in the water, in the faint starlight, and I wondered if she could see me outlined against the stars. I could not reach her throat. But …

  Seven

  (MAVIS DOCKERTY—AFTERWARD)

  IT WAS THE MOST DREADFUL THING that ever happened. She was the most wonderful woman in the world. No one else understood her. They didn’t know what she was like. None of them. The way they acted, they might as well have laughed or something. Like they were glad. Like nothing had happened at all.

  I scraped my hip getting up on the dock and for a minute I couldn’t find where I left my robe. I knew the lights would go on. Honest, I was terrified. I don’t mean of the lights on me, but just of its being so dark and not finding things, that feeling of things coming after you out of the night. But I found it and I just pulled the belt tight when the lights went on. Those lights can make you go blind, when you’ve been in the dark. When I could see I found my suit and wadded it up and wrapped it in my towel. It had to be some kind of dreadful joke or something, but I guess all the time, deep in my heart, I knew that something had happened to her and she was dead. I knew it because that was my luck, because that was the way things always are for me and always will be. If a wonderful thing happens, I know it will go bad for me. The way I used to think Paul was wonderful before he started making my life a hell with his insane jealousy.

  Right when we’d been having such fun, this had to happen to Wilma, the best friend I’ve ever had on earth or ever will have. I thought of her, floating around under that black water, and the tears came right up. They were wrenched right up out of me, thinking of her like that. It was worse, even, than when my sister died so sudden. They didn’t even know she was real sick. She went to bed with a headache and in the morning she was right there dead. It’s like Wilma said once. We’ve both had hardship
s and that’s why we’re so much alike. It is funny, being so much alike that we could almost wear the same clothes. Hers were just a little bit loose around the hips and bust on me. But then, she’s older. You got to expect that a little when you’re older. But she isn’t fat. Just firm. And honest, you’d have thought she was younger than I am that day we were giggling around and I was trying on her clothes that time.

  It’s like I said, I’ll never have a better, truer friend in all the world.

  I stood there like my heart was going to break and pretty soon Paul had to come down and start ordering people around. It’s like he gets some kind of a big boot out of that. They went out in a boat with Randy holding a light and the three of them, Paul, Steve, and Gil, started diving for her, as if that would do any good. It had been too long and I knew she was down there and I knew she was dead. I said it over a lot of times. Dead, dead, dead. I couldn’t make it fit Wilma. She was the most alive person.

  The sirens came and the people who know about such things came and they made Paul stop all that silly diving business. By the time there were a lot of boats there all going around in circles dragging things and trying to hook onto her, I just couldn’t stand it any more. Anyway, I was getting cold. Crying like that cuts down your resistance, I guess. I went to the wonderful room she had given us and when I walked in it made me remember how she had been, so sweet, when she had shown it to Paul and me, and it started the big tears all over again. I had got down to little tears, but it brought the big ones on again. I just dropped across my bed like some kind of a dishrag and the tears made me sort of roll back and forth and for a time it was like I stood beside the bed and watched myself rolling back and forth in agony.

  It took a long time to work the tears back down to little ones. Then I went over and looked at myself in the mirror. My hair was a mess. I opened the robe and looked at my hip where I’d scraped it getting out of the water. My skin is very sensitive. Everything makes a bruise. There were three little parallel scratches, like a cat had done it, and a big bruise was getting dark all around the scratches. I even wished for a minute that it was much worse, so I’d have some kind of a scar on my body to remember by, but that was silly because I certainly wouldn’t ever forget it. Or her.

  I was the only one she really liked. Out of the whole bunch of them. They never knew her. Gosh, what was I before I met her? Just a nothing. Just a dumb girl. She taught me how to be myself. I used to dream all the time. Real crazy stuff. Ever since I was a kid. Always pretending things. I used to have regular parties with my dolls. Little dishes and real food, but I had to eat it all myself. I used to play by myself a lot. I guess I started pretending because I didn’t like the way things were. I mean that neighborhood, with every single house just alike, and six kids so I never did get to have a room of my own. If they’d known I was going to do better than any of them, maybe they would have given me a room of my own. Look at that bum Harriet married. He looked good in uniform, but after he took it off, he was just another bum. I used to pretend so much that I’d forget to do things I was supposed to do. I’d walk to the store and then have to walk all the way back and find out again what I was supposed to get. We never had a phone. So they used to be at me all the time. Mary this. Mary that. None of them can order me around any more. But there’s just four of us now, and the old man. I knew all the time that I was going to have a wonderful life. Better than the others. ’Way better.

  I got out of there just as soon as I could, believe me. I got out of business school one day and the next day I had a job and an apartment of my own. Not really an apartment. More like two furnished rooms, and sharing the bath with three other girls who just took hours and hours in there in the morning until I was almost frantic every morning.

  But I was out of that mean little house in that street I grew up on, and I certainly wasn’t going back, not after changing my name to Mavis. I left Mary Gort right back on that street where she belonged. I told them if they wanted to see me they had to come to my place. I wasn’t going back there, and the only one who ever did come more than once or twice was Mom, and she came regularly until she died.

  I really worked hard at my job because I couldn’t afford to lose it. I got sort of control over the pretending and dreaming during working time, but afterward I would really let myself go. For a time there I was spending all my money on Oriental stuff for one of my rooms. I bought a kimono with a dragon on it. There was incense and I’d sit cross-legged and read that book of Chinese poems until my legs went to sleep. I finally gave it up. I can’t remember why. Oh, yes, I do. It was on account of the Affair. I think of it as having a capital A. I thought it was all so wonderful, and then that funny little woman came and called me all those names and told me to leave her husband alone. The next time I saw him he was all changed. He’d been glamorous and all of a sudden he was just a sort of funny-looking man. It all went poof. That can happen from doing too much dreaming. Like Wilma said, you don’t see things the way they really are.

  Anyway, he was the only man in my life before my marriage, because nobody in his sane mind would count that Beecher boy back in the neighborhood and the day his family was away. That was only like kids do all the time.

  I fell hard for Paul. All the girls were after him and I was the one who got him. We used to talk in the girls’ room about how he looked like Randolph Scott, sort of. That seems funny now. Just a couple of weeks ago a woman said that to me again. I’d almost forgotten it. I can’t see it. He looks like Paul Dockerty and that’s all he looks like. Nobody in his sane mind would say he looks like anybody else.

  After I got married and we came back to New York, I guess I thought I was happy. Wilma said I only thought I was, because the proof of it was that I’d kept right on dreaming silly stuff. She said that if I was genuinely happy I would be so contented with what I was that I wouldn’t have to pretend I was somebody else. Anyway, he used to laugh at me. He doesn’t any more. Like we would be walking somewhere and I would pretend we were rich South Americans who had fled to New York to escape a revolution and then I would say something with an accent and he would laugh at me. Sometimes he would try to play my games, but he would always spoil them. That’s because he has to be a big wheel all the time.

  When he took the better job I thought it would just mean living a little better and saving a lot more, because he has always been one for saving. But then Wilma started being nice to me. At first I couldn’t hardly believe it. What did she see in me? A woman like that. But being alone, not having much to do with Paul working all day, I got so I saw a lot of her. She would talk to me. I’ll never forget some of the things she would say to me.

  “I don’t believe Paul wants you to express yourself, Mavis. He seems to have a Victorian concept of womanhood. You have a distinct personality, and it is up to you to express it and not be satisfied with being a satellite of your husband with your whole world revolving around him.”

  That made a lot of sense. He’d been keeping me shut up. I began to express myself, all right. And we began to have a decent standard of living.

  “That figure of yours is a deadly weapon, Mavis. You must use it as such. You must display it properly, give it good care, use it as a weapon, both offensive and defensive.”

  And that made it easier to get the nice things I wanted Paul to buy me. It was a lot better game than all that pretending.

  “I hope you don’t mind, dear, if I do some intensive work on you. I want to correct your way of speaking and your voice level. And the way you walk, and the way you get in and out of chairs. And I’m going to introduce you to a really fine beautician.”

  I didn’t mind. It didn’t hurt my feelings. A girl should improve herself, and I’d been sort of blind to myself. I saw right away how I could be improved a lot.

  “Mavis, dear, a lot of your ideas are so dreadfully provincial. There’s more to you than someone’s sodden, dull little housewife. Your instinct was right about children. They would be the final trap, of cours
e. But you still have a soap-opera attitude toward unfaithfulness. Darling, it isn’t a tragedy. It’s entertainment. Of course, some people, like poor dear Randy, get too terribly morbid about it. I wish you could be more Continental in your attitude. Goodness, the bloom must be off your marriage by this time. A lover would give you more self-confidence. Make you feel much more alive.”

  I sort of agreed with her, but it scared me a little. It sounded as if it would make things so complicated. And anyway, it is a sort of private matter, and I was seeing so much of Wilma whenever I could, whenever she wasn’t busy, that it just didn’t seem as if I had time to make an arrangement like that. Enough men liked me, but I didn’t think much of them. I decided it couldn’t be so sort of cold-blooded with me, the way it was with her. Maybe in that way we were a little different. It would just have to sort of happen, and when it did happen I was going to let it happen, because, like she said, who wants to be provincial and sodden?

  Paul would make a big gloomy fuss about going to her parties. He’s just dull. He doesn’t like all those interesting people, writers and poets and musicians and people who are out in the real live world, not shut up in a dreary office over in Jersey. He can’t ever get interested in anything outside himself. Like when those people brought all those drums to her party, the kind you beat on with your hands, and we danced. He acted like it was something disgusting. Like Wilma says, he has a typical Rotarian-type mind.