Alone at Night Read online

  East Genesee Street was lit by Christmas neons, and slushy now with a wet snow. NOEL chimed out from the bank’s tower, and Cloward could see people in the streets rushing to church, to Boyson’s, to The Mohawk Hotel Bar, to their homes and their relatives’ homes.

  Since leaving Brinkenhoff, he had felt as though he had been erased from life. He existed, but there was no life he was involved in himself; he was simply involved in other people’s, as he encountered them, and not missed at the end of the encounter. He thought of last night at the Algonquin with Guy, the long torture of sitting there while Guy talked endlessly about Priscilla. Cloward had never even met this woman, never would, now she had run out on Guy, but he knew it was not the last time he would hear about her, just as last night was not the first time. The stories were the same. Guy repeated them, as though each time they were every bit as fascinating to Cloward, as they were to Guy. Hours dragged by. Cloward tried every tack to keep himself interested, and to believe he was a part of this man’s life. Cloward asked questions about her, suggested answers to Guy’s questions to himself, listened, listened, but each tack was futile. He was not even in the room; Guy was talking to himself: “My Cilly” this, “My Cilly” that… just as he talked about his work, with the same selfish force that believed Cloward had no life but through Guy Gilbert.

  Cloward and Guy Gilbert had first met, a few weeks after Cloward had sent his recipe for Brinkenhoff Bouillabaisse, to the New York Journal Times Cooking Contest. Brinkenhoff Penitentiary began easing its regime at the time Cloward was sent there. There was a new warden, a more permissive attitude toward correction.

  Cloward was assigned to the kitchen, a fact that irked him in the beginning. It was where the dullards were put to work. He borrowed cookbooks from the library. If he kept within the penitentiary budget, the warden permitted some innovations and experimentations with the food. Cloward had set out to impress the warden. He had perfected a soup made from fish and vegetables, copying the word “bouillabaisse” from a book which described a similar dish. When he read in the newspaper about the contest, he was sure he could seduce some outside interest to supplement the warden’s interest in him.

  He was not surprised when the newspaper’s editor saw a story possibility in Brinkenhoff Bouillabaisse. Guy Gilbert, a reporter of human interest pieces, was sent to interview Cloward. Gilbert wanted to do a study of the Brinkenhoff correction system as well.

  So it began, with Cloward believing he could use Gilbert.

  When Gilbert helped him with his parole, Cloward congratulated himself. He accepted Guy’s offer for work… Only in the past three days, since he was out of Brinkenhoff, did he realize Guy was using him, as a buffer against an immense loneliness, and as a sounding board.

  The scene on East Genesee aggravated Cloward’s feeling of anonymity. Next to the Cayuta Trust was The Clark Building. Eight years ago, on a hot afternoon in July, he had gone there with Laura Leydecker, to look at apartments. They were to be married at Second Presbyterian Church that September—never mind what Kenneth Leydecker thought of it any more. They had kept their bargain, waited one year.

  Buzzy Cloward was nineteen that summer. He had gone through crazy years of wild-and-nervous carrying on. In those years, Slater Burr still owned the building where Buzzy lived, and Milton Cloward more than once spoke to Slater of Buzzy’s wildness.

  “If you speak to him,” he would tell Slater Burr, “I think he’d listen to you. Tell him he’ll never get nowhere, rate he’s going.”

  And Slater Burr in those days, big and full of fun, easygoing and always warm with Buzzy, would take the boy aside and say in a stern voice: “Your father wants me to speak to you, Cloward.”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Well, I’m going to do just that!” still stern… Then, with a wink, “Hello, Buzz!” and he would pound Buzzy’s back, chuckle and be off.

  Buzzy Cloward in those days had been The One at Industrial High, which was not the same as being The One at Cayuta High, where college was the next step, and where girls of Laura Leydecker’s class strolled through the halls with neat young men in jackets and ties, discussing This and That, not at all self-consciously.

  The One at Industrial High wore work pants and denim shirts, put Alka-Seltzer in ink wells to the wild guffaws of other unruly boys (all boys), went to shop drunk on beer, and started sawdust fights from the shavings on the school floor, careened through the halls shouting and whistling, swallowing wine by lockers, flunking and repeating, and off-hours, stealing hub caps from cars, running errands for the numbers men, seducing ‘older women’ (girls in their early twenties who worked at Stamford-Clyde-Leydecker Electric), hanging around the pool halls and bowling alley… restless, attention-seeking, handsome in a rash, merry-and-worthless way… And always, the underlying gloom and fear of After Graduation, of girls who were not like Selma, but different and better, of running an elevator, or working at S.C.L.E., or wasting.

  And sometimes, when he saw Slater Burr’s sports car flip up to the entranceway of The Burr Building, saw Slater hop out, rich looking and unharassed, as though in all the world there would be nothing a Slater Burr might think to wish for, were he allowed just one wish, Buzzy would watch him momentarily with wonder: what could it be like to be him?… And Slater would wave at him and call his name—he always did—and for a moment, just an inch of infinitesimal time, Buzzy Cloward would be a part of that world which was Slater’s, and he would feel the blood circulating gaily in his veins, feel some of the magic rubbing off on him, and a bounce to his step when he walked.

  In his last year at Industrial, on East Genesee Street, at an Armistice Day parade, he saw a girl in the doorway of the Ayres Building. He was with Ted Chayka, both high on beer, and he stopped to look at her. Her back was to him, and her shoulders were shaking, as though she were crying, and down her back, long soft brown hair, and she was wearing high heels and stockings.

  “That woman’s in trouble,” he told Ted.

  “It’s not a woman. It’s the Leydecker girl. She always wears those heels.”

  “She’s crying, isn’t she?”

  “C’mon, she’s balmy. I heard she was balmy.”

  But he left Ted, buoyed by beer and impulse, went up to her and asked what was the matter.

  “I have an earache.”

  “My name is Buzzy Cloward. I’m an earache specialist.”

  “You know who I am, don’t you, or you wouldn’t have come to make fun of me?”

  “No, I’m not making fun. I wanted to help you.” And it was funny how easy he found words which sounded solemn and sincere, for part of him was standing off enjoying his composure and ease. He was an actor. “What you need is to sit down some place, rest a minute.”

  “Not in Murray’s,” she said.

  He knew Murray’s; it was where the Cayuta High kids hung out. He never went there.

  “Tannemaker’s,” he said. “Do you want to have a coffee at Tannemaker’s?”

  She was not really pretty, but there was something winning about her. A vulnerability, and an intensity that seemed to know about it. Her hands were white as snow, fragile hands with long fingers, and a delicate look to her small, thin body as though she were made of porcelain. No make-up at all on her face, but these very clear green eyes, and lips a natural red… and tiny clean pearls at her neck.

  She said, in that slow and well-spoken way of hers, “I don’t think you’ve been drinking coffee,” with just the barest trace of a smile.

  “I will though, at Tannemaker’s.”

  “You don’t have to,” she said.

  “Your name is Laura, isn’t it?”

  “I suppose you’ve heard all about me.”

  “I’d like to.”

  How easy it was, and it never had been with a girl, except Selma, factory girls… not Kenneth Leydecker’s girl or her kind.

  In Tannemaker’s he drank another beer, while she had coffee. Again, he stood off at one side watching himself there in th
e booth with her—the actor. For the first time in his life he wanted to change. Not for her, exactly, but he grinned at her, and he talked to her and made her laugh. He did not mind her strangeness. It was there, he could not miss it—not a balmy strangeness as Ted Chayka had inferred, but the feeling she was not following all the conversation. She seemed preoccupied and sometimes he knew she was not listening to him, and when she did listen to him, she took what he was saying very literally.

  “I’ve had earaches myself,” he had said at one point. “They’re no fun.”

  “Fun?” said she.

  “I mean, they hurt.”

  “Oh, I see… In yours, was there an inflammation of the drumhead?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “I think I have myringitis right now.”

  “What’s that, for Pete’s sake?”

  “Inflammation of the drumhead,” she said.

  He saw her often after that, usually at Tannemaker’s in the beginning, and then, wherever they could manage. He was as odd to her as she was to him, but between them there was an imponderable rapport. She read poetry to him, and he, in turn, spoke words to her she had never believed were in the English language, and if he took her with a violence that showed his intense fury at her father, who called him “dirt”; she cried his name with trembling joy and spoke afterwards of his gentleness. They amazed one another, and there was that to bridge their differences.

  At nineteen Buzzy Cloward was the first high school graduate the Cloward family had ever had. He was a manager of Woolworth’s on Grant Street, earning $60 a week. He had a light suit and two dark ones in his closet, loafers, and thirteen neckties. He had stood up to the President of Leydecker Electric, and told him he intended to marry his daughter. He had been threatened by Leydecker, lectured by him, begged, pleaded with, scorned by him, and ultimately Leydecker had bargained. They were to wait a year.

  It was a year which left Laura and Buzzy exalted and doped on the excitement they were able to create in one another. Marriage, with its license for all the more unfathomable-to-them opening of their senses and sensuous explorations, seemed to be the millennium. Laura was afraid she would die before that September, or that Buzzy would, or that the whole world would just blow up. The actor waited, patiently, pleased with himself and half-hating the actor, because he did love her, and told himself that over and over, watching for the change in Kenneth Laydecker’s eyes, for the moment Leydecker would believe it, for the acceptance from him.

  That day when they went to The Clark Building, there was still no change in her father.

  Before they left the house, Buzzy said to him: “We’re apartment hunting this afternoon, sir.”

  “I know what you’re hunting, young man. Not apartments.”

  The superintendent was busy placing Fourth of July banners on the face of the building. He gave Buzzy the key to 4-F (furnished; $52 a month) and they both took the four flights by twos, by now both geared to Opportunity’s magical and unpredictable way of presenting itself… Afterwards, Laura said, “I think sometimes it’s all an illusion. ‘All is illusion till the morning bars, Slip from the levels of the Eastern Gate. Night is too young, O friend! day is too near!’… Don’t you feel that way, darling?”

  “I only worry about your father,” Buzzy had answered. It was funny how the mind remembered little details, sounds and smells, so that it could summon them to life with the moment: and in prison, for Donald Cloward, that moment she said that, and he answered her, he was walking down the stairs of The Clark Building, and the tin guard on one step was loose, the stairway dark, smelling of lixivium and coffee perking somewhere, and from the street below a bus groaned. He remembered he had thought: This place is a worse hole than the place I live in now. He had thought of the spacious rooms in the Leydecker house on Highland Hill, the rugs and stuffed chairs and gold mirrors, room after room. And there was a roach on the stairway which he stepped over, so as not to kill. Not yet, Leydecker; if I give you time, you’ll come my way.

  “Don’t worry about my father,” Laura Leydecker had said. “He’s resigned to it now… Oh, I do love this place—our first home, never mind it’s tacky, I do love this place!”

  Then, the glare of the sun as they reached the street; their eyes squinting in the new brightness, and the smell of paint on the clothes of the superintendent, as they returned the key. He was carrying a red, white, and blue puff-banner.

  “Took your time about it,” he said; he had winked.

  “It was not a nasty tone of voice, I didn’t think,” Laura had said as they walked away from there. Then: “It was very good for me that time. Was it for you?”

  It was another victory; God, he had given Leydecker a pounding!

  But, “Yes, very good, Laura,” and he took her hand possessively.

  Donald Cloward walked away from the window. He sat down on the hide-a-bed, and lit a cigarette.

  In a moment he would feel the hands on his shoulders again. He shut his eyes. He could smell August, taste whiskey, and in the darkness he tried to see whose hands those were on him there in the night.

  six

  He had never been to The Kantogee Country Club before that night, the 30th of August.

  The club was set on Cayuta Hill, high up over Blood Neck Point, at the lake. It was a low-hung, rambling structure, with a red star attached to its roof. Selma’s crowd, and others in Cayuta, called it “The Kremlin.”

  Kenneth Leydecker had suggested the evening—his first amiable move—and he had driven them there in his Chrysler. On the way, it seemed to go well, though Laura was very nervous, and Leydecker quiet, until the car approached the hill.

  “The points of those stars are symbols, Donald,” Leydecker said then. “Symbols, all four. They represent Character, Community Spirit, Culture, and Christianity.”

  Buzzy smiled to himself, remembering another way it had been put; he had heard it many times:

  Character meaning born rich and look down

  Community Spirit meaning pay low wages, own the town,

  Culture meaning buy nice clothes, drink good booze,

  Christianity meaning for God’s sake, keep out Jews!

  But sour grapes was not a part of Buzzy Cloward’s mood that night. He said simply, “That’s very interesting, sir.”

  “‘The desire of the moth for the star,” Laura said dreamily, “‘Of the night for the morrow, the devotion to something afar.’”

  “I don’t know where you get all those thoughts, Laura,” said Buzzy. “Do you, Mr. Leydecker?”

  “That particular thought came from Shelley,” Leydecker said. “All Laura’s thoughts come from books. Laura reads all the time; too much of the time. I’d hoped she’d go on to college, and get some direction, learn to channel her intellectual capacities.”

  Laura said, “I have the oddest feeling of fluctuation in my ankle.”

  “You do?” Buzzy said.

  “Yes… Look at all the crowds of cars. There must be 100 people here.”

  “Saturday night,” said Leydecker. “You haven’t been here in a long, long, time, Laura.”

  “I never enjoy myself here.”

  “We’ll have a good time, Laura,” Buzzy said. “Is your ankle hurting you?”

  “It doesn’t hurt… I don’t read all the time either.”

  “I’m reading John Steinbeck’s Sweet Thursday right now,” Buzzy lied. Selma had it out from the Ayres Lending Library.

  Mr. Leydecker pulled in at the parking area. Buzzy saw Slater Burr’s Jaguar and said, “Slater Burr’s here.”

  “Are you an admirer of Slater Burr, Donald?” said Leydecker.

  “Oh yes, we’re good friends.”

  “It doesn’t surprise me.”

  “Sir?”

  “I said, it doesn’t surprise me.”

  Laura said, “I wish we weren’t here. I would much rather have gone to a motion picture.”

  “Well, we’re here,” Leydecker said.

  Bu
zzy had rented a white dinner jacket from De Lucca’s on South Street, worn the trousers to his navy blue suit, with a navy blue tie and white shirt; black shoes, bought especially for the occasion. Kenneth Leydecker never looked at his daughter’s fiancé, without Buzzy’s knowing instantly something in particular was wrong. Everything in general was wrong about the prospective son-in-law of Kenneth Leydecker, but each time they came face-to-face, there was the particular, always new… always clear in the beady eyes behind the bold-edged rimless glasses.

  Leydecker said, “An ordinary suit would have done, Donald.”

  This conversation, while Laura was in the Ladies, to look at her ankle.

  “Everyone is wearing white coats, sir. I thought—”

  “Not with navy trousers from a navy suit.”

  Then Leydecker said, “What are you drinking, Donald?”

  “Oh—” and for a moment he could think only of beer; he drank nothing but beer.

  “Ginger ale and whiskey, I would guess,” Leydecker said. “I believe that’s what you people like.”

  “My people don’t drink,” Cloward lied; Selma always ordered rye and ginger ale. How did Leydecker know that?

  “I don’t mean your family. Your kind. Your class, Donald. I don’t have to mince words with you. The people here tonight, yes, look around—these people are not your people.”

  “I know some of them.”

  “Slater Burr, perhaps, yes. Like finds like, no matter.”

  “I don’t understand. You mean, because Mr. Burr was poor once, and I’m… not rich either.”

  “You’re not poor, hmm?”

  “No, sir. And I finished high school.”

  “You don’t see anything else similar about Mr. Burr and you?”

  “What?” said Buzzy. “What do you want me to see?”

  “Take a good look at Mrs. Burr. Does she seem very beautiful, or gay, very popular? She’s over there, at the table near the door. Look at her.”

  Buzzy had never seen her so dressed-up. She seemed ill-at-ease in the gown, and the inevitable cigarette hanging from her lips was out of place. She wore a large leather-strap wrist watch on her arm that seemed out of place as well. She was by herself, watching the dancers in the center of the room, with a certain bored air, as though she were wasting her time and resentful of the fact. But Buzzy had always liked her; he had never thought she was any different from anyone else—richer, and not as well-dressed as women with her money, but he had never pondered it.